Vale book club

Well, I think that the original book club is now on permanent hiatus, with a couple of its critical members out of the jurisdiction and the remaining organisers faitly unmotivated at this point; in another sense, the rock upon which it's foundered has been Orlando, but really, I think it had pretty much done its dash by then anyway. By way of a rundown (I may have missed one or two, but I think this is all of them):

• Democracy by Joan Didion (March 2006 - at Cassie's)
  
• Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (April 2006 - ? I missed this one)
  
• The Red and the Black by Stendhal (May 2006 - at Rue Bebelon's)
  
• The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh (June 2006 - at Andrew B's?)
  
• The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham (July 2006 - at the North Fitzroy Star)
  
• The Magus by John Fowles (September 2006 - ?)
  
• In Cold Blood and short stories by Truman Capote (November 2006 - the Star, again) [I didn't manage to read this one]
  
• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (January 2007 - at Ash's)
  
• The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster (August 2007 - at the Ath)
  
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (December 2007 - at Gluttony on Smith St)
  
• The Witches and short stories by Roald Dahl (January 2008 - at Tamara's)

(and there was the long weekend away in April of this year, though there was no official book selection for that one)

(it's characteristic that three out of the four people whose places I can remember having been venues have since moved - in fact, come to think of it, all four of them might've...in one case, no less than three times)

Members from the outset were Wei (as initial convenor), Cassie, Andrew B, Kai, David and Ash, with Tamara coming on board from the Stendhal and Julian F a bit later (Midwich Cuckoos, maybe). Also involved initially was Sarah O'B, before she went overseas, and various others came along to the first couple of meetings, too.

Well, it was nice while it lasted...but then again, there's no shortage of other things to do (or occasions for book-readin') at the moment!

The Cardigans - Emmerdale

Their first, I think - very early on, at any rate (the one with "Rise & Shine" and "Sick & Tired"). Nice, if on the slight side.

Brideshead Revisited

So it was a Saturday night, and we went to see Brideshead Revisited en masse. In the words of the email invitation Tamara and I had sent out (this part mostly written by her):

Why? Because it's Brideshead - because we were "in search of love in those days, and ... went full of curiosity" - because of the magnificent Emma Thompson - because it's billed as "a story of forbidden love and the loss of innocence", which isn't quite how we remember it and we ache to know more - because of lots of pretty young things we haven't seen in much else but rather like the look of - because of the clothes and houses and accents and scenery - because it will be utterly infuriating if anyone sees it before we do. (Also, we thought it would be fun to go see this one with a gang of others. Tamara is in favour of going in costume and Howard has made indefinite promises to appear in tweed.)

Watching it, I was struck more than once by the realisation of how many layers there are to my relationship with Waugh's novel; much of the back story is here and here (and, in a different way, here), but given that I've still only read it once, and was left more with an impression of the book's effect than any real sense of its details at that, perhaps it's not surprising that so many layers have built up around 'Brideshead Revisited' in my mind...my idea of it has been able to develop without being constrained overly much by the minutiae and particulars of the thing itself.

I wonder, too, how that relates to my reaction to the film; it pretty much hit the spot as far as its emotional register went - like the book (or at least my abiding impressions of the book), it's nostalgic, wistful (indeed, sad), and strangely charmed, while also possessing a certain intensity of vision which is oddly harmonious with the general haze covering its proceedings - but left me conflicted in several of its other aspects (the way in which it deals with Catholicism, for example)...though I wonder to what extent I'd simply glossed over those other aspects in my reading/recollection of the novel.

Though a bit obvious in places, overall it's a well-made film, helped by some suitable-looking leads (though of the minor characters, Blanche, for one, was way different from how I'd always imagined) and a willingness to remain reasonably faithful to the spirit of the source material, if not always to its letter (I felt that it worked fine on its own terms - it made sense, albeit with more of a focus on the romantic melodrama element than I remember from Waugh's version). It left me very ambivalent for reasons which I haven't quite nailed down, but may (as I sketched out before) be somehow related to the fuzziness of my sense of the book (and to its significance to me); still, it got me a bit.

(w/ Tamara and, in approximate order of arrival, Buffy (a friend of TV's), Kelly, Rob & Laura, Kathleen, Nicolette, Jaani, Sid & Maansi, David & Justine, trang & Arthur, Bec and Kim - making it a complete disconnect from the "Endgame" troupe of the night before, incidentally)

"Endgame" @ Fitzroy Theatre Space (Eleventh Hour Theatre)

This was my first exposure to Beckett, either on stage or on the page, and it left an impression. Four characters - Hamm, Clov, Nagg and Nell - enacting (playing out) what does indeed seem to be an extended dying fall, the setting a derelict house in some unspecified but almost certainly ruined landscape, the themes existential, and staged with a strong sense of the grotesque. At times the language takes on genuinely Shakespearean cadences, albeit considerably contemporised; at others, the back-and-forth reminded me of the exchanges in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead; it's perfectly pitched and paced, bleakly funny and occasionally hinting at the profound.

This was an impressive production, too - there's a strong thread to it, from the opening violin strains in pitch dark through the use of the traverse stage in the tiny (60-seat) theatre, and the actors were strikingly good (particularly Peter Houghton as Hamm).

(w/ Ruth, Emrys, Vegjie, Sunny and Keith)

Haruki Murakami - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Murakami's memoir of his career as a long-distance runner; a bit of a bagatelle, but not one to which I resented giving the few hours that reading it required.

Carson McCullers - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Oh my, this was very, very good. It made me feel all sad and stirred-up inside, particularly the first half (all the going on about fascism in the later parts was fine, I suppose, but seemed to me almost beside the point considering what had come before).

The inside front page of my secondhand Penguin edition quotes Graham Greene as saying that "Miss McCullers and perhaps Mr Faulkner are the only writers since the death of D. H. Lawrence with an original poetic sensibility" and I reckon that phrase - 'an original poetic sensibility' - gets it just right. It's one of those books where, trying to pin down what it is that I like so much about it, all I can come up with is 'there's just something about it'...there's craft in it, but more than that, it's the overall style and sensibility, both intangible but woven into every line, which distinguishes The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and gives it its impact.

In many ways, Singer stands at the centre of the book, but it's the characters over whom he exerts his strange fascination - Biff Brannon, Jake Blount, Doctor Copeland, and most of all Mick Kelly - who most touch and linger, which may be precisely the point. Only the truly specific can be universal, I've heard it said; be that as it may, just such a path is taken by McCullers here, and to wonderful effect. I've taken it a bit to heart.

Zoolander

Yeah! But I don't think I'll need to watch this again for a while.

Batman Begins

Plans are afoot to finally watch The Dark Knight (assuming we make it out to IMAX before its run ends), so I thought I should at last watch the first Nolan Batman.

It's very good - dark, complex and epic, but none of those to a ridiculous or implausible degree (within the parameters of this genre of film, anyway)...and it hews to generic conventions sufficiently closely (and uses them sufficiently well) that the rather significant digressions from those conventions don't undermine its dramatic impact. Great cast, too, well-used, from Christian Bale down (naturally, I got a kick out of Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon). A good one!

Julie O'Hara Quintet @ the Spiegeltent, Sunday 19 October

O'Hara has a nice voice and gave the appearance of greatly enjoying what she was about, and though she tends more towards the lounge/polite end of the vocal jazz spectrum than is my preference, it was done well and I enjoyed it.

(w/ Ruth and Sunny)

Alien3 & Alien Resurrection

Also rewatches; each (and 3 in particular) is a significant notch below the first two, but they're pretty okay anyway. Resurrection, naturally, benefits from having Jeunet at the helm, and Ron Perlman (not to mention Winona Ryder) running around doing his thing.

The Duchess

Far too by-the-numbers for its own good, but surprisingly well made for all that (and much better than the trailer makes it look).

(w/ Steph)

"Book of Longing" @ Arts Centre, Friday 17 October

Poems written by Leonard Cohen and set to music by Philip Glass; performed by an ensemble including Glass himself..."Book of Longing" promised much, but didn't quite work, the 'Cohen' elements not cohering especially well with the 'Glass' ones. The instrumental aspects were more successful than the vocal - distinctively Glassian but with hints and shades of the songwriter's style - but the singers, while fine (one of the male singers in particular had a beautiful voice), were much in the mould of past vocalists who have recorded with the composer, and their voices weren't of the kind that lends itself to Cohen's murky, often overtly sensual verse. I enjoyed it, but it wasn't all I'd hoped for.

(w/ Ruth)

Shaun Tan - Tales from Outer Suburbia & The Red Tree

Delightful...I'll recur to these, and to Tales in particular, I'm sure.

The Magnetic Fields - i

There could be no mistaking this for anything other than a Magnetic Fields album; compared to 69 Love Songs, though, it palls. There are some pretty moments, but not enough, and too many songs that come and go without leaving any impression (though closer "It's Only Time" is really lovely).

David Mitchell - number9dream

Whee! number9dream is a real trip - one thing about Mitchell, he sure can write. Sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, chapter after chapter, it's all effortlessly readable, no matter which new voice he may have adopted at the time (taken as a whole, too, it's impressively different from Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green, both of them seriously accomplished novels and great reads in their own right); Eiji Miyake is a tremendously engaging main character and narrator, and it's his development as much as his voice which provides the thread holding it all together amidst the crazy flights of fancy (some of which turn out to be not so fanciful after all - or do they?) and nightmarish excursions into the Tokyo underworld (Kafkaesque, with a heavy dose of Blue Velvet - although, and there's no getting away from it, the most obvious reference point is really Murakami). Mitchell's a real talent, and I can't wait to read more of his stuff.

Joan As Police Woman - To Survive & live @ East Brunswick Club, Friday 10 October

I have to say, Joan As Police Woman hasn't really taken with me - I like her stuff well enough, both Real Life and To Survive, but it doesn't particularly strike a chord. Seeing her live gave me a bit more of an insight, drawing out both the melodic and the rhythmic aspects of her music, but even so, I can't say I'm especially a fan - it's okay, and for me, not much more.

(w/ Michelle)

The Princess Bride

(Again. It doesn't particularly pall.)

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

It didn't take my breath away this (third?) time; I suppose that so much of it hinges on the final scene, and when you know it's coming, it's not the same. But it's still really, really good (I'd forgotten how actually exciting the fight scenes are, too).

"Look!" and "Klippen/Klippen" @ NGV Australia

Just a 'for note' - too lazy to write about these in any detail. Not much in "Look!" really caught me; the sculptures/soundscapes in "Klippen/Klippen" were appealing, but I'm not wired for the kind of thing that they are.

(w/ Michelle, taking advantage of 'art after dark' hours a while back)

Jules and Jim

This really is just a sheerly delightful film, particularly the first half, which is nigh on perfect; but it deepens and really sticks in the latter part, as things become increasingly occluded and the relationship between Jules, Jim and Catherine become ever more entangled. It's a carefully crafted ode to the ephemeral, a film primarily of spirit rather than intellect or heart, and I liked it very much.

Days of Being Wild

Vivid and blurry, like all Wong Kar-wai films. I'm not sure I've ever seen Leslie Cheung in anything before - at any rate, not in anything in which I've taken notice of him (saving Ashes of Time) - but he's great in this, sulky, drowsy, languidly dangerous, little-boy attractive; Maggie Cheung, younger, I think, than I've ever seen her before, is soft-edged and vulnerable; and the others caught, directly or elliptically, in his orbit are almost as memorable. For me, the pleasures of Days of Being Wild aren't as immediate as those of some of his others, but it's still magnificent and would certainly repay watching.

Also, a propos not of this one in particular, but certainly of its director, here's a nice poem in the latest Believer - kind of a hipster poem (I mean, come on, "I run into Damon and Naomi in the street"?), right down to the multiplying layers of self-consciousness about what it's doing and saying (ie, aimin' to have its cake and eat it with the towers of hipster culture it constructs), but still, very nice for all that, and I think successful in what it aims for.

* * *

"Galactic" by Joshua Clover

And the neighbors are playing a recorded muezzin into the courtyard
And the people upstairs are having a party and laughing out the window
And the women are arriving in sparkly silver shoes
And the style I am told yesterday in London is called Galactic
And it was over last month says Bigna tan and beautiful with Romansch accent
And I am feeling very global about all of this we talk Borges translations
And catch up on the very latest fashions and is that not paradise?
And home again the next day I run into Damon and Naomi in the street
Stopping over en route to a wedding in Morocco it doesn't even feel coincidental
And we discuss Japanese noise bands and later I go to the leftist bar with wifi
Near the bookstore and the blue clouds and is that not paradise?
And thinking is a feeling too but one that cannot come to rest in another
And I am in love with everybody which is miserable and lasts
Five minutes amidst this great muchness of things I go down
To the noodle shop to act out scenes from a Wong Kar Wai movie
In my head about which the sweet-faced counterman probably has no idea
Though he gives me some knowing looks and we are waiting together
In the noodle steam and in the tamarind and lemongrass steam
For an international letter with a key folded inside or for love to return
And in walks a sexy boy with scarred lip and We Are The Power T-shirt
And he is tremendously real just as abstract ideas are real and the absence
Of beloveds is real and the incomparable Faye Wong having of late
Moved to Beijing from the real world of the movies is still exactly as real
As the steam in the noodle shop is real and how is this not paradise?
If love is for the one if love is a redoubt against the many it is useless to me
It is some holiday and my friends are scattered like confetti on the earth.

* * *

One of the things I like about the poem, see, is the way that it captures something of the cinematic/real nature of so much 'modern' experience ('post-modern', natch) - and the way that it double-codes 'scenes from a Wong Kar Wai movie', because, you know, when one watches a scene from a Wong Kar-wai movie, it is indeed 'a scene from a Wong Kar-wai' movie, but it's also real - you know, real...

The Wind Will Carry Us

Extremely slow, but strangely enthralling. I want to watch it again, though not in any particular hurry.

(w/ Ruth)

She & Him - Volume One

At first I wanted to listen to this because it's Zooey Deschanel's record, and they don't come much cooler than her. Then, I wanted to listen to it because I heard "Sentimental Heart" on a mix cd and it was simply great. But what's made me listen to the album over and over since I got it is the pitch-perfect invocation of 60s girl group and soul-infused pop that Deschanel and M. Ward have conjured on it, complete with the requisite country and easy listening strands - sweet and warm, and at once artful and sincere, it's a slight record but a very pleasing one, with only a couple of weak tracks which one barely notices.

"Art Collection by 30 Japanese Artists"

As billed, a collection of modern and pop Japanese art, so I probably shouldn't have been surprised by the preponderance of manga and/or Warhol-styled stuff, but, neither being particularly my bent, and the rest of it also being fairly uninteresting, there wasn't much to entice me. The most vivid exception was the three paintings by Tamaho Togasaki, geometric urban-scapes which were much to my taste (see here http://www.celeste-world.net/paint/oil_06.html).

(@ Collingwood Gallery - part of the Fringe Festival; w/ Michelle)

Toni Childs @ the Corner, Wednesday 1 October

Curiosity killed the cat; nothing so drastic here, but it really was curiosity more than anything else that led me to go to this one. I quite enjoyed the part of the show that I saw - the first few songs from near the front, and the rest from a more comfortable vantage point at the back of the room - but, while I responded to Childs' energy and zest for what she was doing, the music was a bit middle of the road for me, and I was kinda tired too.

(Support was Jess McAvoy, who I've seen before and didn't particularly interest me.)

(w/ Kevin)

Jolie Holland - Springtime Can Kill You

Wicked album name, to start with, and seasonally apposite (although not yet particularly this year, happily). Springtime Can Kill You is a modest-seeming record but a real grower; a deliciously warm folk-soul-country-am radio pop hybrid, Holland's pleasantly scratchy voice complements the transistor radio feel of the music, all smooth flows and gentle swells...and when I listen to it attentively, it leaves me with a small lump in my throat. A grower, and a keeper.

Stalker

At 2 1/2 hours long and slow-moving at that, not one for the faint-hearted. Still, as Kevin put it (in reference to Tarkovsky), 'being "slow" is no more a criticism than being "fast" is praise - it's what you do in the time that counts. Well, as to that, there's something hypnotic about Stalker, and a kind of massive naturalistic beauty to many of its scenes, and for those reasons alone it's worthwhile, though I have to say that the metaphysics left me a bit cold.

(watched Mon 29th; for personal reasons, this one needs an asterisk beside its name)

Fallen Angels

Very much a companion piece to Chungking Express - late night diners, alienated gangsters, air stewardesses ungraspable, tinned pineapple with significant expiry dates - though moodier and without the other's giddy lightness, and splashily violent in bursts. The film's kinetic editing and camerawork coupled with blurry slower-paced interludes and downbeat, contemplative voiceovers put me in mind of the two Godards I've seen lately (Bande à part and Alphaville), but what it mostly is, is pure Wong Kar-wai (albeit less luscious and drenched in colour than his pre-Blueberry latter-day films).

Goldfrapp @ the Palais, Friday 26 September

Sometimes seeing a song done live changes the way one hears it from then on, and so it was with "Utopia", when Goldfrapp did it early in their set a couple of Fridays ago (it was second up, following fellow Felt Mountain cut "Paper Bag") - uncharacteristically to say the least, I think there were actually tears in my eyes as Alison sang the song's first, skyscraping notes, her startlingly strong, clear voice sending the syllables upwards with the reach of her arms, and there were many small refashionings all the way through. (Another, later in the set, was "Number 1", which I'd never before realised was such an anthem, nor for that matter such a simply great song.)

The focus was on Seventh Tree, of course, but they also did a satisfying number of the best tracks from Black Cherry and Supernature, the cuts from all of their albums flowing well in the live setting (violin, harp, guitars, keyboard and programming, drums, and miscellaneous). Indeed, all of their moves really come to life in concert, both the lush pop songs and ballads, and the more dance-edged numbers; Alison herself was naturally the focus, and she compelled the gaze, gestures and movements completely in sync with the songs, but the tightness of the backing band and the strength of the songs themselves were also clear, and likewise the consistency of the outfit's back catalogue, making me realise how much time I've spent listening to their music since Felt Mountain first came out (I have an early memory of listening to it on headphones in the Bourke Street HMV), and how steadily in the years since then. It was a great show, put on by a pretty great band.

Support was Pikelet, who were (as people have been telling me lately) quirky, eclectically poppy and rather good; my favourite was the first one with the accordion.

(w/ Michelle - in the second row, no less)