A Place for Everything

by Jonathan on September 27th, 2010

Normally when I find appealing images while crawling around the web, I dump them onto my Facebook page, but they don’t always fit. Case in point: this photograph, which is so tall and slim that it completely baffles the system.

No real reason for this, other than that it’s an amusing sight. I can’t remember where I found it – on Random Pictures, maybe.

Live, in Person!

by Jonathan on September 19th, 2010

I’m a terrible blogger, with an unprofessional blog – case in point: my thriller writer friends’ blogs all have ample coverage of their upcoming appearances. I appear, but I never wake the town and tell the people that I’m appearing.

That all changes now!

Some upcoming appearances:

September 24 – 26, 2010: The Writers’ Police Academy, Jamestown NC: I’ll be giving a lecture on forensic pathology for writers. And hopefully, at some point, gettting tased.

October 14 – 17, 2010: Bouchercon by the Bay, San Francisco, CA: I’m on serial killer panel on Saturday morning, plus walking around looking dazed for the rest of the session.

February 21-26, 2011 American Academy of Forensic Sciences, Chicago, IL: I shall be lecturing on suicide. This is a professional meeting, so you pretty much have to get through years of training, experience and accreditation. Although I’ve never noticed them checking IDs.

March 24 – 27, 2011: Left Coast Crime, Santa Fe, NM.

April-May, 2011: I’ll be doing a West Coast tour for A Hard Death. This will likely kick off with an event at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, with a couple of local readings, then a reading in Naples, FL (the inspiration for the fictional town of Port Fontaine), and then probably San Diego, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle.

May 19 – 21, 2011, Crimefest, Bristol, UK.

July 6 – 9, 2011, Thrillerfest, New York, NY.

I’ll do my best to update this info as it, uh, evolves. Or devolves, as the case may be.

9/11 Garage Mix

by Jonathan on September 10th, 2010

I’m always (still!) surprised by how much the 9/11 anniversary affects me. Each year I mean to have big plans, and end up holing up at home with TV and cats and music. I suppose it’s good at some level to feel it so intensely; I suppose I always feel it, just a bit more honestly this day.

There’s not much to say about it – it was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. We worked hard, and it was important work, and it hurt, from day 1 to… whenever we stopped. I remember that after a couple of days, someone put up a DAY 02 sign on the wall, and each day some mystery mortuary elf would update the number; the sign disappeared after day 99.

When we had a lull, I’d play music, which was always a challenge – matching the energy, the personnel, the mood. After we suspended operations in July of 2002, I made this compilation tape to reflect some of the stuff I’d played for people. It’s a bit all over the musical map, but it works – for me, at least, probably held together by the glue of sentiment. I burned a few CD’s at the time, but who listens to CD’s any more? So tonight I mixed the collection into a quasi-seamless MP3, suitable for playing on your iPod, or PC, or ignoring completely.

Here’s the tracklist:

1. The James Gang, “Ashes, The Rain”

2. Fatboy Slim, “Right Here, Right Now”

3. St. Germain, “Rose Rouge”

4. Looper, “Mondo ’77″

5. New Order, “Crystal”

6. Royksopp, “Sparks”

7. Goldfrapp, “Lovely Head”

8. Royksopp, “A Higher Place”

9. Swans, “Can’t Find My Way Home”

As I say, it’s all over the place musically, but I do love these songs. The James Gang opener is a bit maudlin, but I don’t think the mix is as a whole. I only played “Ashes, The Rain” once, if I remember: I include it here mostly because the string line at the end is used as the basis for Fatboy Slim’s “Right Here, Right Now”. The mix does end soft, and sad, though.

You can download it here.

A Carter Burwell song no more…

by Jonathan on February 10th, 2010

My dear friend the lovely Christine Joly de Lotbinière tells me that not only is today (a blizzard in New York City) the perfect day to stay home from work, it’s also the perfect day to blog. And I can’t disagree with her.

Because of the weather, I’ve been thinking of the music of the prodigiously talented Carter Burwell, whose scores you’ve doubtless heard many times.

First up, his wonderful “She Began to Lie”, from the otherwise forgettable John Travolta thriller THE GENERAL’S DAUGHTER . It’s an interesting song, most frequently covered as “Sea Lion Woman” (most recently by Feist), but probably most famous for Nina Simone’s racing, passionate cover, “See Line Woman”. The song’s meaning is somewhat obscure; Burwell is probably closest to the true title, the song lyric a litany of lies a woman tells – I think Simone’s version specifically has the woman as a prostitute (as did all Simone songs, haha, I joke). But I’ve also heard it’s a corruption of an underground railway route, “C-Line”, from the days of slavery. (The “Rock Island Line”, subject of a stomping, slapback rockabilly song by the great Johnny Cash, was also an underground railway line.)

Anyway, when Feist sings:

Sea lion woman, sea lion

She drink coffee, sea lion

She drink tea, sea lion

And rooster crows, sea lion

Sea lion woman

Dressed in red

Smile at the man

Stab him in his back

I’m thinking “Yeah, Feist, maybe… But wouldn’t it work better as ‘she lying woman’?” You can hear Christine and Katherine Shipp sing the original on the fantastic Rounder release A Treasury of Library of Congress Field Recordings ; recorded in the late 1930′s, the song was already old, maybe a work song. It sounds like Burwell sampled that recording for the vocal here, and did the arrangement. But it’s a fantastic arrangement, the skipping beat, the way the banjo is processed (the ghostly backwards banjo at the beginning, the eerie reverb), and the mournful harmonica. Burwell also remixed the song, but the straight version is the one you want…

Sorry about the video, btw – it’s got some tiresome British vocal loop underneath it to convey some sort of political/artistic message.

Stop the presses! I just learned that it’s not Burwell who gets credit for the song, but Greg Hale Jones! My apologies to Mr. Jones – since I’ve already gassed on at length, I’m going to post it here anyway. I’m assuming Mr. Burwell had some say in what was included. The good news is that, while the song is album-only on the General’s Daughter soundtrack, you can buy a 2:39 minute version on Mr. Jones’s EP Now There is a Tree of Ghosts. (That title, by the way, probably refers to one of my favourite records of all time, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne, which also builds arrangements around samples of traditional singers.) Buying the General’s Daughter soundtrack will get you the 5:20 minute original, plus the shorter, more electronic remix. And hopefully a chunk of change for Mr. Jones.

This next one definitely is a Carter Burwell song, “Bella’s Lullaby” from the Twilight films. I don’t think the films are wildly good, but I enjoy pop cultural phenomena – I saw the first one opening weekend, on a long distance date with a girl who watched it in a cinema in Colorado while I watched in Manhattan. I particularly like the intro to the theme; it reminds me a little of Philip Glass’s lovely score for The Secret Agent.

Finally, one of Burwell’s best-known compositions, his theme from Miller’s Crossing, here used as the score to a beautiful trailer for The Last Guardian by visionary game designer Fumito Ueda, whose Ico kept me sane in the difficult months after 9/11. I had the thrill of meeting Mr. Ueda in Tokyo a few years back, and got to play an early build of Shadow of the Colossus , a huge thing for me. Ueda’s games are characterized by lyrical emotionality; they are elegantly sensual games, shot through with an elegiac undercurrent – everything feels a little sad.

I think this was recorded live at the unveiling of Ueda’s latest project at the E3 games convention in the summer of 2009 – turn up the volume, as it’s quiet…

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…

Moncrieff/Hayes

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:

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…