Money — Barnaby Napier

Money follows the excessive, self-destructive life of Americanized British director John Self as he navigates a chaotic, hedonistic world of 1980s consumer capitalism, using money as the omnipresent force driving his unravelling film project and personal life.

“I cleaned my teeth, combed my rug, clipped my nails, bathed my eyes, gargled, showered, shaved, changed – and still looked like shit. Jesus, I’m so fat these days. I tell you, I appal myself in the tub and on the can.”
Filth style protagonist. Englishman in New York on business
“Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I’m always smoking another cigarette.”
“‘Selina. She’s fucking someone else”
Girlfriend?
“Ten minutes later I came out of that can on all fours, a pale and very penitent crocodile,”
Gross man
“Like many girls (I reckon), and especially those of the small, supple, swervy, bendy, bed-smart variety, Selina lives her life in hardened fear of assault, molestation and rape. The world has ravished her often enough in the past,”
“Selina lives her life in hardened fear of assault, molestation and rape. The world has ravished her often enough in the past,”
“a girl like Selina, whose appearance, after many hours at the mirror, is a fifty-fifty compromise between the primly juvenile and the grossly provocative.”
“she goes around the place looking like a nude magazine.”
“She is either twenty-nine or thirty-one”
“now, in 1981,”
“Making lots of money – it’s not that hard, you know. It’s overestimated. Making lots of money is a breeze.”
“I’ve hit women. Yes, I know, I know: it isn’t cool.”
“After a while, hitting women is like rolling off a log. But I suppose I’d better stop. I suppose I’d better kick it, one of these days”
“Speaking as an Englishman, one of the pluses of New York is that it makes you feel surprisingly well educated and upper class.”
“You’ll have the final cut, John.”
Hes a movie director
“I don’t think Selina Street is fucking Alec Llewellyn.”
Back in London - worried
“The old barmaid in her brown condom, she might have been last night’s sister. That’s my life: repetition, repetition.”
Strip bars and drink
“I held her hand and listened to myself talking crap for an hour and a half.”
“My head is a city, and various pains have now taken up residence in various parts of my face. A gum-and-bone ache has launched a cooperative on my upper west side.”
“I didn’t feel too great this morning, true. A ninety-minute visit to Pepper’s Burger World, on the other hand, soon sorted that lot out. I had four Wallies, three Blastfurters, and an American Way, plus a nine-pack of beer. I’m a bit full and sleepy, perhaps, but apart from that I’m ready for anything.”
Glutton
“When I was a kid, growing up in Trenton, New Jersey, and later on the streets of Pimlico,”
“There’s only one rule in street and bar fights: maximum violence, instantly. Don’t pussyfoot, don’t wait for the war to escalate.”
“That madman, that real madman, that accredited devo crazoid, he checked in again, three times, four times, son of a bitch.”
Mad man calling him saying John ruined his life
“I am a pornography addict, for instance, with a three-mag-a-week and at-least-one-movie habit to sustain.”
“I love giving money away. If you were here now, I’d probably slip you some cash, twenty, thirty, maybe more.”
“Next I bought a joint, a popper, a phial of cocaine and a plug of opium from a fat spade in Times Square and snuffed it all up in a gogo bar toilet.”
“Some people get sleepy when they drink a lot, but not us. When we drink a lot, we want to go out and do things”
“I’ve got to grow up. It’s time.”
Flies back to London
“‘COME ON, John, what’s it feel like? You’re one of the top commercial directors in the country, you’re only thirty-five, you’re about to make your first feature,”
“You’re one of the top commercial directors in the country,”
John
“He wasn’t expecting me, someone of his own kind.”
Bruiser
“I’m the new kind, the kind who has money but can never use it for anything but ugliness.”
“There’s a Father, a Mother, a Son and a Mistress. The Mistress is shared by Father and Son. She was Father’s first, but then Son muscled in there too.”
Story of the movie hes making
“As I climbed upright and started brushing the wet shards from my suit I saw that my father was watching me through the vent of the red curtains.”
movie based on his life
“I like to think of my West London flat as a kind of playboy pad.”
“all my hobbies are pornographic in tendency. The element of lone gratification is bluntly stressed. Fast food, sex shows, space games, slot machines, video nasties, nude mags, drink, pubs, fighting, television, handjobs.”
“I reached the glass preserve of Carburton, Linex & Self.”
His company
“You should see how much money we pay each other, how little work we do, and how thick and talentless many of us are.”
“C. L. & S. is an advertising agency which produces its own television commercials. Sounds easy. You try it. I myself was the key figure in all this, with my controversial TV ads for smoking, drinking, junk food and nude magazines.”
“You know, the thing I want more than anything else – you could call it my dream in life – is to make lots of money.”
“Not yielding, that’s the thing. To strive, to seek, to butch it out – it’s all a question of willpower. Thus midday discovered me with a second scotch in my hand, a Pakki nightie round my waist, and a half-naked sex-stewardess straddling my thighs.”
“New York is full of heart-stopping girls with potent colouring, vanilla teeth, and these big tits they all seem to be issued with as a matter of course. There must be a catch. (There is. Most of them are mad. It pays you to remember this.)”
“Today is my birthday. I am thirty-five years old.”
“I long to burst out of the world of money and into – into what? Into the world of thought and fascination.”
“It made me hungover instead. It did. I kept incredulously ordering more drinks, in a doomed bid to stave off this conclusion. That’s why I had so many.”
“the parched coral of my tongue”
“money makes you innocent when it’s been there all along.”
“After a depressing visit to the mirror or an unkind word from a girlfriend or an incredulous stare in the street, I say to myself: ‘Well. Shakespeare looked like shit.’ It works wonders.”
“All you’ll get from John Self is smalltalk, flattery and squealed demands for more drink.”
“I consumed three Waistwatchers, two Seckburgers, an American Way and a double order of Tuckleberry Pie.”
Pig
“If there’s one thing I think I’m sure of, it’s the fact that I must marry Selina. I’m pretty sure about this, I think. Yes, it is time I settled down, grew up. There’s no choice really: not settling down and not growing up are killing me.”
Knows he should grow up
“I returned to my flat and packed a case and started going back to America.”
ALway back and forth
Struggling a bit with lack of plot. Sure, hes making a movie, but thats a complete sidenote to the real meat of the book. Which is his pigish debauchery
“He sounded as though he’d been expecting my call. He sounded pleased. That evening a large envelope was brought to my room. It contained a platinum US Approach card, a brick of travellers’ cheques, and a cash-facility authorization at a Fifth Avenue bank for a thousand dollars a day, if needed.”
Fielding money maker
“I don’t blame America. I blame my father, who shipped me out here soon after my mother died. I blame my mother.”
“Martina’s terrace had a lot of flowers on it, in pots and tubs and wall-brackets, big ones, small ones, red ones, blue ones, supervised by corpulent bees, their shields as rich and shiny as dark pebbles in running water.”
I like the book but prefer plot to descriptive scenes
“I thought numbly, Christ, what a goodlooking guy.”
His co producer, Fieding Goodney. Always calling him Slick
“Good Money, a screenplay by Doris Arthur based on an original idea by John Self.”
“All of a sudden, and without really thinking, it seems quite natural to be travelling first class.”
Did he pull out of the movie because of the script doris wrote?
“My readings and coordinates are still out there among the jetslime and earphones and weather gods of Atlantic space. Time is travelling. Night and day are moving past me in the wrong direction. I am falling behind. I must catch up, get a hold, make sure my grip is tight.”
Great way to say jetlagged
“I tell you, this Martin Amis, he lives like a student.”
Martin amis writing about martin amis doing a rewrite of their movie script
Put himself in the book as a writer that rewrites their screenplay
“So then I tried to rape her. In all honesty I have to confess that it wasn’t a very distinguished effort. I’m new at this and generally out of shape.”
Gross guy
“‘It isn’t yours,’ she said. ‘And I can prove it.’”
Selina pregnant with Ossie Twain
“‘You haven’t got shit, have you, and how much do you earn? It’s immoral. Push out some cash. Buy stuff. Consume, for Christ’s sake.’”
Consumerism
“While fighting, you really want to make it exquisitely clear to your opponent that he is doing the losing. As in all sports, good morale and correct attitude are crucial”
“I’m staying in shape for Martina. This is the new-deal me. This is my metamorphosis.”
Got together with Martina and got healthy and into a normal couple routine with her
“Money, she’s taught me that money is just something you use.”
Book theme
“Selina now tightening the belt of her sheer negligée (and gazing down disclaimingly – even she won’t forgive me), and Martina fixed in the frame of the doorway, in a suit of light-grey worsted,”
Selina pulled him back intothe world of debauchery
“‘Who’s paying for all this?’ ‘You are.’ ‘Oh, what have you done?’ He looked at me drolly. Something jagged lisped in his mouth as he said, in explanation, ‘I’m forty-five, Slick.’”
Weird as hell ending? All of a sudden he has no money and eeryone is trying to catch him and he cant useany credit cards and he tries to fly back to london and the airline goes bust. So random I assumed it was a dream sequence
“There was no money here. I could tell. There was only red money, minus money.”
All of a sudden nobody has any money
“You signed a lot of documents. My guess is that you signed them all twice. Once under Co-signatory, once under Self. It was your name. The company you formed wasn’t Goodney & Self. It was Self & Self. It was Self. The hotels, the plane tickets, the limousines, the wage bill, the studio rental. You were paying. It was you. It was you.’”
“Martin was right. I’m the last to know as usual, but my lawyers have finally established who was tabbing the whole psychodrama, from cab fares to lab fees, from soup to nuts. Me. Muggins here. Fuck! Why didn’t I look at all the stuff he made me sign?”
He got scammed, bit of a lazy twist in my opinion
“money, it isn’t worth anything if you haven’t got your health.”
“or isn’t really hers, tell the kid. Tell the kid soon. Do it. If you’re a girl, then you are your mum and your mum is you. If you’re a boy, then you are your dad and your dad is you.”