Enjoy the Silence?
by Jonathan on December 13th, 2009
Sorry about the gap, but I’ve been driving and train-taking and dining my way across northeastern France, taking photos, asking questions and generally laying the groundwork for Untitled Jenner Project 3.
I’ll be making a couple of make-up posts in a little, but in the meantime, there’s a surprisingly direct and lengthy interview with me on Falcata Times. Brace yourself: you have been warned.
Audio: Interview on Irish Radio
by Jonathan on December 1st, 2009
Last week, I was on Moncrieff! – not literally on Sean Moncrieff, but on his popular afternoon show on Irish talk radio.
Sean Moncrieff: The work of a pathologist is often characterized as somewhat ‘glamorous’, yet this is a person who, on a daily basis, cuts up dead bodies – who would do such a thing? Well, Jonathan Hayes, for one. He’s a novelist and has worked as a forensic pathologist in the U.S. for over twenty years…
Out and Down in Paris
by Jonathan on November 28th, 2009
I’m in Paris now, trying to catch my breath and working on the next Jenner book. I’ll be here for a few days, taking photos and making notes of locations, and having a much needed visit to Alain, my barber, who’ll transform me from a bushy-bearded Charles Darwin clone to something more highly-evolved, almost metrosexual.
Alain, who bills himself as the last Master Barber in Paris, entertains me immensely – he has such a finely drawn sense of himself. The first time I went there, we talked about what I wanted, and then he did exactly what he thought best. When he’d finished, he stepped back, looked at me critically, then pronounced it “Nettement mieux!” – clearly better. And he was right.
His tiny barbershop/barbering museum on rue St. Claude, a narrow, gallery-filled side street in the Third Arrondissement, is worth a visit by anyone in need of a haircut or – his specialty – un rasage à l’ancienne – a traditional shave. You’ll need an appointment.
It’s noon on Saturday, grey skies, soft light, quiet, other than the distant toll of church bells. My apartment here is in the Marais, the part of medieval Paris left standing when Baron Haussman radically reconfigured the city in the 1800’s. It’s a lovely part of the city, narrow streets lined by beautiful old buildings – it’s particularly wonderful at night, when the tourist herds have thinned. The Marais is also the heart of Jewish Paris, with so many temples and delis and black-hatted Orthodox jews that if it weren’t for the macarons and Paris-Brests in neat rows in the patisserie windows, I’d think I was in Brooklyn.
An unexpected advantage of living in the Marais is that the place actually is quiet on the weekends – Jewish businesses here shut down by sunset on Fridays, and remain closed through Saturday. Even though this is also the heart of gay Paris, Friday and Saturday nights are blissfully tranquil. Of course, there’s a flip side to that: the shops are closed, which means a slightly longer trek when I’m feeling lazy and hungry…
And, speaking of lazy, I’m lazy today. I get the worst jetlag, and am doing the worst thing for it: it’s almost 1PM and I’m still in bed. I should be out, finding breakfast and taking photographs, but I’m happy to be warm and cozy, and to look at the grey world outside from the comfort of my bed.
To make up for that, I’m going to post a couple of photos I took on my last visit. Here’s the Place des Vosges, one of the most elegant squares in Paris, built as the Place Royale in 1605. The layout is precise and symmetric, with a bosquet of lindens framing neatly defined lawns that are punctuated with tonsured firs and fountains – Nature well and truly tamed, in the grand Enlightenment tradition. It’s very difficult to capture in a photo, since the square works best as a three-dimensional experience, the shifting perspectives as you walk past the straight lines of lindens articulating an elegant aesthetics of geometry.
Here, even the dullest streets are pretty.
Bed. Bed is good.
My Life in Blood – a gallery
by Jonathan on November 23rd, 2009
I have a long article about blood in the UK newspaper the Independent today. It’s a bit of a curious thing, hopscotching around the place, covering how I became a forensic pathologist, the Cuban white and black magic I saw in Miami, realism in crime fiction, the meaning of blood in different religions, blood spatter forensics and vampire movies.
Since I don’t know how they’ve illustrated it, I thought I’d add a few photos to support the story. I gathered these from around the internet when I first started working on them, and have lost the links – if they’re yours, please let me know so I can credit you.
I’ve tried to do it in sequence to correspond to the story. Obviously, if you’re squeamish, you probably shouldn’t look at this post. Although, really, if you’re squeamish, what are you doing on my blog?
In Israel, a ZAKA operative wipes blood after an attack:
A Durer portrait of Christ suffering:
A Cranach crucifixion – Christ’s blood anointing the faithful…
A devout Filipino being crucified on Good Friday:
Shi’a Muslims marking the Day of Ashura; others sacrifice by donating blood.
An nganga, a cauldron filled with mystically significant metal, wood and leather objects, and blood, and, here, a human skull. For practitioners of palo mayombe, the dark form of the syncretic Caribbean religion of santeria, the nganga is the ritual equivalent of an altar.
Technicians clean up an nganga discovered in New York City, ritual markings on the wall. In Miami, when we encountered santeria or brujeria (palo) artefacts, the cops would scoff at them, but most would refuse to touch them.
Oh, Shiny Metal Beast – I love you so!
by Jonathan on November 20th, 2009
I’ve had the visual elements for this lying in the post hopper for almost a year. It was going to be a post about how easily we anthropomorphize things, how we can feel pity for inanimate objects. Or, at least, how I can.
It was triggered by this rather perverse battle between a tiny robot and a big robot, or rather by how moved I was at the plight of this little manikin made of metal strips and cogs, continuing to fight the good fight while hopelessly outmatched. Click on the image for heart-breaking little-robot-on-big-robot action…
I felt similarly stricken at the loss of the Phoenix Rover, the space explorer probe, when it shut down last year with the approach of Martian winter; after five months of glorious data collection, it would be encased in carbon dioxide ice for a year – pretty much certain death. The demise of the Rover was all the more painful because I’d been following its blogs on Gizmodo – thank God I’d not become addicted to its Twitter feed! Click on the photo below to link to its farewell message.
Finally, to bring it all home, Spike Jonze’s fantastic Ikea ad:
Ah, yes… “masterful” indeed.
by Jonathan on November 20th, 2009
I’m posting this review from an English newspaper because I loved the “masterfully”.
I’ll be using the word frequently in my internal narration of my day – “Here is Jonathan Hayes masterfully pouring milk on his Frosties”, “Here is Jonathan Hayes masterfully looking for his pants”, “Here is Jonathan Hayes masterfully freeing the several feet of toilet paper trailing from his shoe”, that sort of thing.
Here is Jonathan Hayes masterfully blogging despite being still 90% asleep…
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The Right Direction
by Jonathan on November 19th, 2009
Things are going well for A Hard Death in the UK. Yesterday, I got an excited email from my agent to let me know that the book is on the UK Bookscan Top 20 Fiction Heat Seekers list, bumping shoulders with work by some really strong authors. I’m amused to see that I actually beat out the Master, James Ellroy; I’m sure it won’t last long, but if I ever meet him, I’ll be sure to let him know.
Next Monday, I have a feature article in the Independent, a British broadsheet newspaper. It’s a peculiar piece, about my experience with blood, covering everything from how I became a forensic pathologist to my feelings about the Twilight series; we’ll see if that affects sales at all. I’ll be sure to post it here when the piece goes online.
I’ve been meaning to record a podcast, some thoughts and a brief reading from A Hard Death, but there seem to be a thousand and one things that need attention at any second – the penalty of living a disorganized life, I fear. I’ll get to it this week, or die trying. Or a reasonable facismile thereof.
And this just in…
by Jonathan on November 13th, 2009
The prize for First Review of A Hard Death goes to… The Daily Mail! Our heartiest congratulations to them, and my thanks for a great review.
I’m flattered that the critic focuses on Jenner as an emotional character (let’s face it – Jenner’s a bit of a trainwreck). I’m also intrigued that he or she cites the book’s refreshing lack of gore – violence was pretty much the only thing American critics had against Precious Blood.
I have to say that the “too violent” critique didn’t worry me. I don’t want to shock or offend, but I realized, as I was writing A Hard Death, that I write violent. Which isn’t surprising – just as breaking eggs is an unfortunate but necessary step in the omelet-making process, if you’re writing murder…
I didn’t think Precious Blood was particularly violent; rather, the violence was explicit and realistic, but never gratuitous. A Hard Death moves faster, and has a signifcantly higher body count than Precious Blood; it’s plenty violent.
It’ll be interesting to see what other critics think… In the meantime, click here to read the Mail review yourself:
A Technical Note: Airboats
by Jonathan on November 12th, 2009
British readers may be unfamiliar with airboats, which, as far as I know, don’t exist in the U.K.
The airboat is a shallow draft boat, powered by an aircraft engine and propeller in a mesh safety cage. Because they use air movement, rather than an underwater propeller, airboats can travel in very shallow water, and even over more solid terrain (for short distances). They’re very popular in the Everglades, which is essentially a vast, extremely shallow river hidden by marsh grass; the first time I rode in an airboat was to get to the scene of a remote airplane crash in a part of the Glades not easily reached by traditional boats.
I found this photo on a web page from the Airboat Association of Florida, a tribute to a man named John F. Schneider. Mr. Schneider was apparently devoted to airboating in the Glades; these photos make it easy to see why. Airboats skim across the surface of the water – they feel incredibly fast, in part because of the roar of the engine behind your head. If you find yourself in Florida, you owe yourself at least one airboat ride.
An anniversary…
by Jonathan on November 12th, 2009
I’ve been so busy with life and the U.K. release of A HARD DEATH that I hadn’t noticed that the anniversary of the US edition of PRECIOUS BLOOD was upon me.
By way of commemoration, here is a series of relevant images:
Altdorfer, “The Martyrdom of St. Florian” (1515)
Caravaggio, “St. Katherine” (1599) – I’m fascinated by the whole “spoked wheel” thing. In Raphael’s portrait of St. Katherine from the early 1500’s, the spoked wheel has the smooth, mall-ready finish of something from Pottery Barn. We know she was tortured with a “spoked wheel”, but what the hell is a “spoked wheel”? I don’t believe either Raphael or Caravaggio have a clearer sense of it then than we do today. Notice that the wheel is broken…
Caravaggio, “The Martyrdom of St. Andrew” (1610)
Francesco del Cossa, “St. Lucy” (1470)
I love the demure way Lucy holds her eyeballs on that little lorgnette thing…
A Big Deal in Lille
by Jonathan on November 1st, 2009
One of the fun things I did this spring/early summer was lecture at the 46th International Meeting of Francophone Legal Medicine. I was invited over by Professor Didier Gosset, the Chief Medical Examiner in Lille, in Northern France.
Didier and his team, including Professor Valéry Hedouin, and Dr. Anne Bécart, forensic odontologist, took great care of me. They put me up at the beautiful Hospice Gantois, an exquisite hotel built in the 1400’s as a hospital. The building has been renovated in an elegantly modern way (I’m a sucker for the combination of clean modern design and old spaces; one of my favourite hotels, the Wheatleigh, near Lenox, Massachusetts, where Calvin Tsao and Zack McKown did a beautiful job renovating a faux Italian palazzo in the Berkshires – I completely stole their bathroom design ideas for my loft in NYC).
My room had a view out over a small park that reminded me of the courtyard gardens in Ico, the brilliant videogame created by Fumito Ueda, about which more here; Ueda is one of the inspirations for Jun Saito, one of Jenner’s closest friends.
The conference was a fascinating glimpse into the differences – and similarities – between the way the French practice forensic pathology, and the way we do it in New York. I spoke for two hours on gunshot wounds; I lectured in French, which was fun for me and doubtless arduous for the audience. Still, we all survived, probably because my lectures are so heavily illustrated – I showed more than 300 images.
They didn’t guillotine me afterwards, so overall I think it went fairly well. After I’d lectured, I relaxed a little – I got to catch up with old acquaintances and make new friends. We had a great dinner at l’Huitriere, a superb Art Deco Michelin-starred seafood restaurant tucked behind a traditional fish merchant’s.
It was a wonderful experience – I even got a Bronze Medal from the city of Lille for my participation. I wasn’t in Lille long enough to really get to know it, but it’s a lovely city, with handsome old rowhouses with Flemish-style red and brown brick, and an elegant city center; I’ll certainly be back. As a returning Bronze Medalist, I have no doubt that they’ll let me ride the buses and subways for free.
What I did during my 11 month blogvacation…
by Jonathan on October 28th, 2009
Well, a lot of stuff, really.
Mostly I’ve been working on A Hard Death; that’s now done, with Random House putting out the English edition on November 5 of this year, and Harper Collins still figuring out the US release date, Droemer the German date, etc.
I wrote it mostly here in New York, and a bit in my place in Paris. The whole experience was delayed a little because I fell in love, which was great, but also tumultuous – in the end, a short ride in a fast machine. I emerged from it a little scalded but better for the experience.
My renovation in Paris is nearing the end. And so am I! It’s been a ridiculous experience. I can’t really justify it, either as an expense or as an investment, but it’s really pretty perfect, the ideal place to chill, read, write.
I stripped down the old fireplace, and rebuilt it in a more modern way; you can see it more clearly here:
I left the floors raw, without finish or oil; I really like how they look. We’ll see how well they hold up…
My bed is insanely comfortable; since the place is so tiny, I decided I would spare no expense in fitting it out. I have a Swedish mattress, topped with a goose down feather bed, linen sheets and a linen and silk coverlet. Please believe me: when I say “insanely comfortable”, I mean just that.
I designed a small desk, and had it built in padauk wood, a beautiful African hardwood that darkens over time. I don’t like the proportions of the desk; when I’ve adjusted it a bit, I’ll post a photo. I’ve also got two chairs, very plain.
I know it’ll probably be too spare for some people – there will be art work going up, but not a lot: I’m going for a “luxury monastic cell” look. Essentially, it’s a more austere version of the bedroom in my loft in New York, where my original design brief was “a TB sanatorium near Prague in the 1930’s”.
And I think I’m getting there…
OK! There you go – an actual real post with content – including photos and at two (find ‘em!) links! I’m making my way back!
Saints be praised! It’s a miracle! Et cetera!
The Blog That Time Forgot
by Jonathan on October 6th, 2009
Well, yes. I have been a little quiet lately: I blame Facebook, plus the nextbook. But I’m back now. I’m not 100% sure I can remember how this works, but I’ll fumble along.
I’ve finished A Hard Death; the book comes out in the UK on November 5, but we’re still working out the US release date. The feeling at Harper was that Precious Blood rather got lost in the onslaught of “Big Books” that come out in the autumn – yer Koontzes and Kings, yer Browns and Balzacs – so though the book could be ready for release in the fall, it’ll more likely appear in winter instead.
Anyway, more about that later. I’ll post some goofy thing about what I’ve been doing for the last 11 months – mostly finishing the renovation of my tiny place in Paris, writing A Hard Death, and keeping the world safe from evil from a secret New York City location (actually a giant bathysphere somewhere below the icy surfaces of the East River, but don’t tell anyone).
OK. I’ll be in touch!
It feels weird to be back, but kinda good…
Guest Blogging
by Jonathan on November 3rd, 2008
Just popping my head in to mention that I’m currently ignoring my own blog (and very effectively too, I might add) so that I can guest-blog on Lee Lofland’s excellent cops and forensics site for writers and mystery fans, the Graveyard Shift. I’m going to be doing this on the first Monday of every month, until Lee gets sick of me.
My first blog entry is up today; it’s a gloss on the forensic value of tattoos.
Bouchercon II – A Virgin No More
by Jonathan on October 18th, 2008
As Bouchercon went on, I could feel myself wearing out. At home, I’m frequently woken during the night by my two cats (one inherited from my ex-girlfriend, the other acquired when my ex-girlfriend insisted the first needed company. Ever since, the two have waged a full-on yakuza-style feud, the violence unrelenting, the body count high. Actually, I am the body count, my chest leaped on every night at 4AM by a 20 pound cat with claws of honed stee – mine is a truly Promethean existence.), but for some reason, I slept badly every night I was in Baltimore. Adrenaline, I suspect.
Saturday was my birthday, and a pretty fun and hectic birthday it was too. I spent a slightly sluggish morning, drifting groggily through the halls, and was pleased to find that many of the attendees were in a worse way than me. Some had rolled back into the hotel well after 5AM, but were pressed back into action before 9AM, sore of head, furred of tongue and possessed of photographs of themselves chugging down champagne bottles in seamy-looking bars, and of the police cruisers dispatched to greet them (reflection of the City of Baltimore’s devotion to literature). I realized that being tired because I’d slept poorly was a pretty damn feeble excuse – while they’d been out on epically worthwhile Bukowskian benders, the stuff of writerly legend, while I’d stayed home and played the Princess and the Pea like a wuss.
At 11:30AM, Brian Lindemuth was the ringmaster for the Serial Killer panel, with Mark Billingham, Michelle Gagnon, Alan Jacobson and myself roaring and batting at his questions with our paws. We went back and forth on the realism question, on whether or not the motive of a serial killer could ever be really understood, discussed some prominent real and fictional serial killers, and debated Hannibal Lecter’s underwear choices (full credit to Brian for keeping the discourse snappy with carefully crafted questions, including the occasional curveball).
Afterwards, I signed books in the uh, book-signing room. Through a pleasant accident of alphabetical coincidence, I found myself next to Christa Faust, a strikingly pretty, compact blonde whose preference for sleeveless tops won her the Most Visibly Tatooed Author at Bouchercon 2008 award. She’d also be a shoo-in for the Most Direct Conversationalist award – I knew her as a wildy popular author of hard-boiled fiction for Hard Case Crime, but was pleased to discover that she was a professional dominatrix specializing in bondage and foot worship within two minutes of striking up conversation (Englishmen are always delighted to learn things like that, trust me.) Since the first friend I made when I moved to New York City was the infamous photographer Eric Kroll (warning – if you have a delicate constitution or are easily offended, do not click on that link), it wasn’t surprising that we had friends in common. With a funny, smart and beautiful companion, my minutes in the signing room blasted by, and I was soon sprung to find Alafair for a bite of lunch.
In the afternoon, I visited the book stores, but couldn’t find a copy of the book I’d been looking for (James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss, since successfully located). I milled around the halls a bit, repeatedly bumping into Jonny Santlofer – a man who’d hold impromptu court on a lily pad, if that’s all that was available – and finally decided I’d be better off back in bed. A nap later, I swung by the bar, where the New York branch of the Mystery Writers of America was holding a get-together, chatted with Meredith Cole for a while (admiring the scarf she’d whipped together, which had the cover of her upcoming book printed on it – true Williamsburg hipster crafting!), then with Joanna Powell and Sharyn Rosenblum from Harper Collins, spotted Tasha Alexander and, I think, Danielle Emrich and their posse plotting malfeasance in the lobby, then Alafair summoned me to dinner.
Harry Hunsicker and Margery Flax had hastily assembled a small group; superior logistical technique resulted in a minivan magically appearing to whisk us away to dinner at Oceanaire, a sleek modern seafood restaurant where one could freely eat crabcakes without risking the food poisoning that had gutted the Bouchercon ranks. It was a fun group of people – Margery, Harry and his wonderfully stylish wife Allison, Alafair, her friend McKenna Jordan from Houston’s Murder by the Book, Tim Maleeny, Dan Hale, Charlaine Harris and her agent Joshua Bilmes.
Not only was it fun, it was raucous fun: the rendition of “Happy Birthday” I endured on the way to the restaurant had the sort of bracing ferocity one only encounters once in a lifetime, if one is lucky. Alas, they nailed me with it again when my Baked Alaska arrived, and quite possibly once more on the way home, although by then I’d packed my ears with a prophylactic paste of birthday candle wax and meringue. When my hearing finally returned, Margery was telling a blood-curdling story of dancing the Hustle in a New York City bank in the early 1970’s – apparently that kind of behaviour, like leisure suits and snorting cocaine, was acceptable back then. O tempora, o mores!
I’m a huge fan of True Blood, the bodice-ripping Southern Gothic vampire series on HBO that Alan Ball has created from Charlaine’s Sookie Stackhouse series. It was a real treat to meet her, and to hear that she’s a huge fan of the show, too. Of course, how could she not be? – the week of Bouchercon, it was announced that all seven of Charlaine’s Sookie books had bounced onto the New York Times bestseller list. She was supersweet (and probably continues to be), and had all sorts of choice gossip about the show.
By the way, about the show: on various groups, I’ve heard people complain about the explicit sex and violence in the TV show. WTF??? That’s like being outraged to discover bacon or chocolate in your dinner! Sex and violence are the spice of premium cable! It can’t all be Wheel of Fortune and Everybody Loves Raymond…
Back at the hotel, I was flagging again. I said hi and bye to a few people, then watched Jonny Santlofer holding court again in the corner of the lobby, this time sprawled on a banquette, showing off his expensive and curious footwear to Dan Conaway and Megan Abbott,the foxy Wednesday Addams of Crime Fiction. They were fading fast too, and so I left before I had to carry them up to their rooms.
On my way back to my room, my Bouchercon visit effectively finished, I passed the electronic podium in the Sheraton lobby that showcases the best that Baltimore has to offer. I realized I hadn’t taken a single photo at the festival, so I did:
Then I went to bed, after offering a little prayer that I’d survive another trip on I-95 with Alafair at the wheel.
Poison Dart
by Jonathan on October 17th, 2008
A slight diversion from my Bouchercon coverage…
The other day I watched the video for the song “Poison Dart” by London post-grime, post-dubstep musician the Bug (click here):
That record has never sounded better than when Kode 9 dropped it this summer in his set at the Winter Garden, down in the Financial Center. Hearing “Poison Dart” unleashed into the high arches of the atrium triggered the kind of transcendence I’ve felt all too rarely in recent years. Everything was perfect for me that night – Kode 9 was just killing on the turntables, the Brooklyn-based ragga MC rocked it, the projections were stunning, and everyone danced about the palm trees, hands in the air, waving them like they just didn’t care. Around the margins of the marble floors, bewildered tourists and bankers drifted in and out, ambling past Godiva Chocolates to suddenly find themselves in the middle of a riotous dancefloor where a DJ was blasting music they’d never heard before (and probably never will again) – and blasting it loud. I managed to get a few photos off despite energetic interference from the impressively polite security staff.
It’s weird for me – still! – to be at the Winter Garden. My strongest memories of the place are from the night of September 12, 2001, walking in single file through the dark and the dust, the metal uprights bent and twisted, the glass blown out, the palm trees knocked about, everything covered in dust. The dust was extraordinary, thick and velvety, tamped down into a footpath on the route to Ground Zero; I remember thinking this is what Pompei must have been like. A bit.
In the flashlight, the smell of burning, the heat, the all-embracing unrealness of the experience, I was overwhelmed, and as I traipsed along, I spewed out a series of vigorous obscenities. Someone up front asked what we all did, and I said I was an M.E., and then the man in front of me said he was a priest; I apologized for my foul mouth, but he told me he understood.
In the above photo, the light at top is outside, over Ground Zero. I have avoided that dismal pit as much as I can since the ceremonies that marked the end of the recovery dig, sometime in the summer of 2002. I visited once, stuck my head in to look sometime in 2003, but when I go to the World Financial Center, I take routes that avoid the site.
It’s really only this year that I’ve felt OK with going back to the Winter Garden. It’s astonishing how perfect it is now, like some high end shopping center in a rich neighbourhood in Asia, all shining marble and gilt and glass. It’s like nothing ever happened. I sit there, I listen, I dance a bit. Life has moved on, and, I suppose, because I can go there, and listen, and dance a bit, I have moved on too. So I go and I hear Kode 9, and I dance a bit, and I take photos, and I can feel happy in this place which I associate with the cruelest, most desperate time of my life, and I don’t understand how that can work. I don’t feel “normal” again, and yet… I act as if I am.
I took my tripod to photograph Ground Zero. At the Ulrich Schnauss concert, I’d climbed the amphitheater steps to escape the crowd, and at the top had been astonished to find myself face to face with the hole. The superslick finishes of the World Financial Center make it feel like being on the observation deck at an airport. The glass, the metal, the cranes, the lights – it could have been a vista from any superheated Asian economy, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Bangkok, any of them in the middle of a glitzy building boom.
Only there was no building going on. Seven years on and it’s still a hole in the ground, concrete foundations enmired in an endless polemical grapple of money and politics. Everyone gets their say, and nothing gets done. At some level, I wish we could just fill it in with earth, bury it in forgetful grass, make some beautiful park with hills and trees where we could just be; not remember, not make money, feel the absence, respect the loss, just be.
But this is some of the most valuable real estate on earth, so that’s not going to happen. And I distrust my sentiment – I’m sure that some of me feels that to rebuild there, to put up something soaring and financial, to do that is to ask to be attacked again. And some craven corner of my soul quails at the thought.
It hurts to see it still there, still empty, this huge void in the heart of the city, aching and empty while the surgeons squabble about what to do next. Ground Zero, annihilated and annihilating:
Last night, cutting across Union Square, the wind picked up, and I could feel the chill, and I remembered how I welcomed it back then, when we let go of that hideous, dazzling Indian summer of 2001, and the city grew dark and cool, and the adrenaline passed and we finally began to accept the truth and to mourn in earnest.
Bouchercon
by Jonathan on October 16th, 2008
Well, I’m back from Bouchercon, the annual crime fiction festival, this year held in Baltimore and run by Ruth Jordan of Crimespree Magazine and Judy Bobalik. It was my first Bouchercon, but I felt not so much “virginal” as (whatever the single word adjective you’d use to describe someone arriving in the Big City for the first time, and feeling a bit disoriented and lost amid all the bustling crowds). It was a bit bewildering, but there was a tremendous sense of community, and everyone was super nice – like, Midwestern-level nice.
I arrived Thursday afternoon, and was ecstatic to get there, at least in part because I drove down with Alafair Burke; Alafair is, to be frank, certifiably psychotic at the wheel, her need for speed almost carnal in its urgency. The combination of high speed daredevil manoeuvres (at one point, she drove under a semi just so she could slam us up the ramp of an empty car transporter trailer, shooting us up about 20 feet high, hurtling through the air to land squarely 8 inches in front of the black Tahoe that had irritated Alafair by dawdling in front of her for a good two minutes). (Seriously.)
I checked into the Sheraton, which was actually not bad for a chain hotel – the common areas had all the elegance of a feed auction in Topeka <tm a joke I made at the time>, but the rooms were pleasantly modern in their style, and the bathrooms were quite handsome. Unusually inoffensive for a chain hotel! Of course, the widescreen LG TV was set to Standard Definition, with the images all stretched to fill out the screen space, something I HATE! If your signal isn’t in widescreen, set your set to Academy Ratio, darnit all to heck!
I checked in with my publicist, Harper’s wonderful Heather Drucker, then milled about a bit with Alafair, but I was exhausted, so when she and her coterie headed out to dinner, I disappeared to bed. Roomservice steak, serviceable, some awful TV vampire movie with that blonde sweater girl from that Star Trek spin-off. Jeri Ryan? Something like that.
Friday morning at the crack of dawn (8:30AM), I joined authors John French (Baltimore PD Crime Lab), ex-cop Lee Lofland, all around force for good Cody McFadyen and Gwen Freeman, pinch-hitting for Sheila Lowe (both Sheila, a hand-writing analyst and forensic artist Brenda Robertson Stewart were felled by food poisoning, an epidemic of which shot through the assembled ranks like melted butter through a loosely-packed Jumbo Bag of popcorn) to discuss the way forensics in movies, TV and books relates to the real world. (In brief, many forensics folks hate how fake it is, I personally like it because it often captures the spirit of what we do, and it makes us look absurdly glamorous – and hey, what’s not to like about that? I’ve written about it a few times, most recently in a blog for the Baltimore Sun, and previously for New York magazine. And I actually believe what I said!)
Despite the obscene hour, a good time was probably had by everybody – it was too early to make rigorous judgements like that. It was good to finally meet Lee, whose blog, the Graveyard Shift, is a fantastic resource for all things police and forensics-related; Lee’s book on police procedure is aimed at writers, and is a goldmine for, uh, writers. I’m going to try to persuade him to let me make the occasional guest post on the Graveyard Shift.
The rest of the day was a bit of a blur. I saw a bit of various assembled friends; people seemed to accumulate in the lobby as overflow from the overcrowded restaurant, and then move on to other places. I saw quite a lot of Tasha Alexander (that blonde hair is like a flag), J.D. Rhoades, Jonny Santlofer, Megan Abbott, Dan Conaway, Joe Konrath, Meredith Cole, Michael Koryta, Sean Chercover, Mark Billingham, Michelle Gagnon, Sarah Weinman, Tim Maleeny – y’know, I’m going to stop now. It’s going to KILL me to add in the URL’s to everyone I’ve just listed! I saw lots of great writers, in short.
There’s a really interesting (at least to a newbie) and palpable hierarchy to the event. Well, not so much a hierarchy as a finely-pitched sense of celebrity, an awareness of superstar success. Lee Child just has to lean against a door frame in his elegantly lanky way to trigger waves of psychic attraction; he becomes more apparent simply by standing still. And Harlan Coben strides affably through the halls, his smooth dome poking above the heads of the crowd like an iceberg in a flat sea; even if you didn’t know what they looked like, it’d be easy to spot the million dollar-plus advance crowd.
That probably sounds bitchy, but I really don’t mean it that way – one of the hallmarks of Bouchercon (based on my huge experience of the thing) is the friendliness of the participants, and the willingness of authors to stop and chat. I never once saw either Child or Coben not talking and smiling with fans or with other writers. It felt good to belong to that brother/sisterhood (to the extent that a novice author can consider her- or himself as belonging to that community).
In the evening, I went to the Harper dinner at Cinghale, a slightly swank modern Italian restaurant. I got to meet (breathlessly!) the amazingly cool Val McDermid ; I cornered her and told her about how worried I’d been when some critics found Precious Blood gory, and then how relieved I’d been when I read The Mermaids Singing, her first – Crumbs! And people said my book was gory! She was supernice, in line with the conference’s Nice Mega-authors theme. As was Laura Lippman, who I’m sure I terrified with my fanboy ravings about The Wire, created by her husband David Simon and Ed Burns.
I had a fun table, including Billingham, and it was great to finally dine with the notorious Otto Penzler, New York City icon and King of the Mysterious Bookshop. He would’ve been an entertaining enough companion on the mystery chatter front alone, but that he should be an informed and opinionated foodie was just gravy…
After dinner, hmmm… I took a taxi back to the hotel with Otto, Tasha, Andy Gross and Jonny Santlofer, then we milled around for a while before making our way to the Reacher’s Creatures party for Lee Child. I was fading fast by that time, and went home to crash not long after 1AM.
Now I’m fatigued from all that writin’ and linkin’; I’ll finish the rest of Bouchercon tomorrow…
Back in New York City!
by Jonathan on September 28th, 2008
OK, I had some great momentum there for, like, a week, then I died off. I have excuses! I was in Paris for a couple of weeks, working on my book and overseeing the renovation of my tiny apartment – unfortunately more of the latter than the former, but the apartment is where I shall be writing most of the next three Jenner books, as well as my headquarters for staking a claim as a key journalist on matters of French food and travel…
But I’m back, and I’m incredibly happy to be in NYC now that the cool weather has returned. Today it’s positively English out – drizzly and grey, although an unfortunate 75 degrees. Still! We have the promise of gorgeous, crisp, clear autumn days ahead – October is absolutely my favourite month in the city, with fewer tourists, cool air, and all the assorted cultural crap that the season foists upon us annually. (A side note, I’m devastated to be missing Pina Bausch at BAM – I shall be in Paris for December, and Pina makes her biennial return just when I’ll be away, damn it all to heck… If you’ve not seen her work before, GO! Tanztheater Wuppertal perform, well, dance theater, which is to my mind, eye and ear infinitely more interesting and satisfying than either of the former alone. Stunningly beautiful stuff, although the loss of Jan Minarik has leeched away some of the whimsy.)
Anyway. Speaking of cultural crap, I saw My Bloody Valentine last week, and was completely blown away. I last saw them in 1992, with Dinosaur Junior and um, Screaming Trees, I think, and they were great then, but loud, so loud. And they were loud at Roseland, too: even with my high quality ear plugs, my ears were buzzing for 24 hours after the show.
It was truly a maximalist assault – the songs are a wall of stroked noise, blasted at high volume so you can hear the overtones and semitones develop in the auditorium. That makes them sound less than beautiful, which is unfair: this is exquisite music. But at its base is this dense roar of noise, something they ultimately reveal with their perennial closing song, “You Made Me Realize”. The original song is about 3 1/2 minutes long, but live, they play the first verse and chorus, then they peel back the melody and harmony, and just let the noise roar, a deafening squall of white noise that lasts for – literally – 20 minutes, the band leaning into the sound, the drummer pounding away. Seriously, a humongous roar of sound, 20 minutes of howling. Your brain struggles to organize it – you start to hear voices welling up inside the sound, waves of chanting and droning, but mostly it’s about the physicality, the sheer mass of noise pounding you.
What makes it harder is that light is blasted into the audience at maximum intensity, strobes and spots, impossibly bright, blindingly bright. There’s a vague feeling of short-circuiting inside you, your body and brain kind of melting under the pressure. It feels great, intensely great.
All in all, a fantastic night, even more fantastic than I’ve made it sound!
A quieter moment:
A louder moment:
Hi Summer. Bye Summer.
by Jonathan on August 26th, 2008
It feels like summer is finally ending. The heat in NYC has eased a bit in the last week or so; sure, we’re still in the 80’s, but the low 80’s most days, and the humidity is just about manageable. This week, I caught a fantastic event at Damrosch Park: the Éthiopiques concert featuring Mahmoud Ahmed, Getatchew Merkurya and Alemayehu Eshete, playing with the Either/Orchestra and the Ex.
It really was a perfect evening. I avoided the hassle of crossing Manhattan during rush hour by taking the number 6 to 59th Street and then walking across the park: dusk is my favourite time of day in Central Park.
I had a solo picnic dinner by the pond on the south end. It’s quiet and shady there, although the breeze wafting down from Central Park South tends to carry faint, distracting notes of horse manure. I watched a couple of guys fishing for bass in the pond, which to me seems a lose/lose prospect – Central Park bass sounds even less tasty than East River whitefish (NYC insider joke alert!). I had grilled chicken and flabread, pomegranate juice and pistachio Turkish delight for dessert – hardly wot and injera, but a vague attempt to be less-Eurocentric.
Then over to Damrosch for the concert. It was an unrestrainedly beautiful evening, a fistful of great musicians and several thousand New Yorkers of all stripes – hipsters, young families, rastas, Lincoln Center types, jazz hounds and Ethiopians galore. The sax player Getatchew Merkurya really stood out for me, although much of the crowd love went to vocalist Mahmoud Ahmed (who admittedly rocked it very hard indeed, putting the lie to the idea that you should slow down after you hit 65). Just a great, great night, and probably my last outdoor concert this year. Bah!
Here’s Ahmed onstage – the tiny figure in white, under the violet, violet sky.
By the way, I can’t recommend checking out the Éthiopiques records highly enough; it’s a series of French reissues of jazzy Ethiopian pop from the 60’s and 70’s. My personal favourites are both instrumental sets: Éthiopiques Vol. 4: Ethio Jazz et Musique Instrumentale, 1969 – 1974 and Éthiopiques Vol. 14: Negus of Ethiopian Sax, which is a collection of cuts by Getatchew Merkurya. I do realize that these sound hopelessly obscure – and that certainly accounts for their appeal in some hipster circles – but this is wonderfully vital music, at once exotic and familiar, and definitely worth checking out. These records are like the soundtrack to some psychedelic secret agent movie set in the Middle East in 1971. Which is, in the words of my former employer, a good thing…
Start waving goodbye to Uncanny Valley
by Jonathan on August 21st, 2008
Have a look at this video:
No, seriously, I mean it. Watch this video before going on.
I came across it on Gizmodo , the tech/gadget-obsessed website. The woman talking in the interview is acting for the camera. Or, rather, some of her is: you’re hearing her voice, and you’re seeing her body and her hair, but her face is computer-generated. The video was rendered using special software; she posed for 35 facial shots before a pair of digital cameras, and then her expressions for the entire interview were rendered by a computer.
Of course, on Gizmodo, all of the readers insisted that they could tell that her face was synthetic, but that’s largely because the title for the item was something like “Emily Is Computer-generated – Can You Tell?” The fact is, it’s a pretty astonishing likeness. The animation is smooth, the features moving in a coordinated, natural way, the facial expressions elegant and real.
In computer graphics, there’s a notion referred to as the “Uncanny Valley”. You can play a video game with hokey 8-bit graphics, a Super Mario Brothers game, for example. The characters are pixelated little creatures, but even so, you can relate to them as human.
However, as the graphics improve, and as characters look more and more human, something strange happens. When we see a computer graphic image of a person that is very realistic, but not quite accurate, it has a slightly eerie effect, as alienating as a life-like waxwork. We resist the emotional connection, and feel slightly disturbed. The “Uncanny Valley” is that vaguely upsetting distance between something real and its very realistic copy.
The video was made by a company that specializes in generating life-like faces for computer graphic characters in movies and videogames, but the technology is very impressive, and will only get better. We’ve all seen video clips or TV commercials in which dead actors or musicians are composited into present day situations, but one has to wonder what the implications of this new software are. It would obviously be easy to turn a video of a man’s retirement speech into a confession of murder. It’s only a question of time before faked videos will show up – you’ve probably seen doctored pornographic images of celebrities having sex, some of which look impressively real. It’ll be interesting to see what happens as these videos begin to proliferate.
In forensics, the switch over to digital photography has been a challenge because of the liability of digital files to tampering. For example, when a dead person is found with severe facial injuries, a medical examiner friend uses Photoshop to conceal the wounds to produce a “cleaned-up” photograph of the victim to show the family for identification. Obviously, viewing images of a severely injured son or husband is devastating, and what my friend does is genuinely kind to the family.
However, in demonstrating how easy it is to add and to subtract wounds, she’s risking compromising the integrity of her evidence (and an identification is indeed part of the evidence on the case). How do we know, the defense attorney will say, that she didn’t Photoshop in this gunshot wound of the chest here?
Sure, that’s pretty over the top, and she can forestall that by keeping the original and by making it clear in the record that she has retouched the photo for identification purposes, but I suspect it’s only a question of time before we see that sort of defense argument. In NYC, where we have only this year moved up to digital, we have a digital watermarking system that will flag any photograph where the image has been altered, even if it’s something so trivial as rotating the image from the horizontal to the vertical. In truth, it’s a bit of a pain in the ass, but if it helps us to defend the integrity of our work, I’m all for it.
One of the things I like about forensic work is its realness. I examine the victim, I document the injuries, I open the body and explore the wound pathways – the definition of “autopsy” is “seeing with one’s own eyes”. If I look at a body before me, I can be confident in my analysis and conclusions – there’s no Uncanny Valley in Forensic Pathology.
At least not yet: there is a growing fascination with the “Virtual Autopsy” – an examination done exclusively through imaging technology like MRI’s. I’ve seen enough errors made in diagnoses from CT and MRI scans that I’m very wary of that technology – call me old-fashioned, but I’ve got every intention of remaining autoptic…