Jolie Holland & Samantha Parton - Wildflower Blues

A low key 'reunion' between two of the Be Good Tanyas' founding members, vocals split evenly between them. Much as I love Jolie Holland, my favourite is actually one of Parton's - the bluesy, swaying, low-lit title track.

Battle of the Sexes

Lightweight but not a bad way to spend a couple of hours. Things I liked included: they didn't make Bobby Riggs the villain exactly (but they did include some extremely hissable men); Emma Stone was quite convincingly de-prettified to make her portrayal more realistic. Things I didn't like included: it's kind of middle of the road in nearly all of its choices, story, visual and tone-wise.

(w/ Rob, Laura, Jade and Duc)

Wind River

Much as I enjoy Jeremy Renner in basically whatever he turns up in, what persuaded me to watch what looked to be a pretty grim movie judging by premise and notices was seeing that it was written (and directed) by Taylor Sheridan, who also did the screenplays for Sicario and Hell or High Water, both of which were excellent.

It's another contemporary American frontier - Wyoming this time, snowy even in spring and stalked by mountain lions and predators of the human kind as well as the living ghosts of the native American reservation where the action takes place. There's something nicely straightforward about Sheridan's approach to characters; he's not afraid to give them traits that could be trite (Renner's hunter is stoic and has suffered a loss of his own; Elizabeth Olsen's FBI agent is green and unfamiliar with the territory but tough), and the way they speak, often in complete sentences that verge on the declamatory, can risk feeling a touch stagey, but in the end it comes down to how they act - not just those two (both of whom are very persuasive presences throughout), but the several others who also play important parts - and that aspect is particularly satisfying. And the bursts of emotion and violence - often surprising, and with more impact as a result - find their mark. It all adds up to something quite good.

Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit - The Nashville Sound

High quality, but I wonder whether it's all just a tad too much on the surface? I guess time will tell.

(Southeastern, Something More Than Free)

Fiona Apple - The Idler Wheel ...

I've always been much more of a one for music than lyrics, and maybe that's why The Idler Wheel ... just kind of washes over me. It's an album that I've been aware of for a long time, but despite several listens recently, haven't been able to penetrate.

Saint Etienne - Home Counties

I don't know, I guess Saint Etienne are objectively somewhat distinctive, but probably not to an extent that explains why, in my mind, they're practically a genre unto themselves - that's probably just as much due to how long I've been listening to them and (related) how long they've now been making music which has remained reliably (a) at least quite good and (b) Saint Etienne-sounding. And here we are: Home Counties, which boasts an impressive number of choruses (of which songs "Whyteleafe" is my favourite) and continues to sound kind of non-specifically nostalgic without condemning itself to period piece kitsch. Nice.

"Jim Dine: A Life in Print" (NGV)

There's a nice line in one of the piece descriptions for this exhibition about how Dine looked for the noble in the everyday, or something to that effect, and I think that captures much of what I liked about this selection of his prints, both his recurring subjects (tools, skulls, dressing gowns; the hearts seemed like a different type of subject, even though he works and reworks them in a similar way to those others) and some of those that appear less frequently, including two of my favourites in "Blue Crommelynck Gate" (1982) and "The Pine in a Storm of Aquatint" (1978), the latter of which really smacked me between the eyes with its grandeur.

I hadn't come across Dine before. He was part of the New York avant garde of the 50s and 60s - some of these prints bear traces of the happenings that he was involved with - and remains active today.

Alvvays - Antisocialites

Funny how these kinds of thin upper register voices often work so well with energetic indie pop, just like here. From Toronto, Alvvays dash enjoyably along from start to finish with a healthy dose of crash and sugar that variously recalls Talulah Gosh, the Concretes, Cults and even the lighter end of Blonde Redhead's spectrum. Highlights: "In Undertow", "Dreams Tonite", "Lollipop (Ode to Jim)". A solid 7 1/2, verging on 8, out of 10 for me - good not great, but the best moments are pretty fantastic.

Black Rider (Malthouse)

This was fun: created by Tom Waits and William S Burroughs and bearing a definite Weimar/Brecht/Weill influence (German expressionistic staging, marionette-style performance and makeup, music from all over the shop, much foregrounding of the Theatre nature of what's on stage) and with a bit of an American streak thrown in for good measure. Good songs, good singing, good staging, and the devil - as played by Meow Meow - gets her due.

(w/ Tamara)

The Beatles - Abbey Road

Enjoyably rocky. One of those gaps (until now obviously) in my knowledge of the classics!

David Bowie - Scary Monsters

Most days, "Ashes To Ashes" is my favourite Bowie song (nearly all of the other days, it's "Heroes"), but Scary Monsters hasn't left much of an impression over quite a while of listening to it. All a bit clangy.

Zadie Smith - Changing My Mind

Really quite wonderful, and rang with considerably more resonance even than last time I reckon, thanks to both my current focus and the closer reading that I gave it this time round. I think the only literary essayists who I enjoy as much as Smith are Siri Hustvedt and George Saunders.

It's a mark of how good she is, I think, that I worked my way attentively through all of her pieces about literature despite having read none of the books or particularly deeply into any of the authors that she takes as her subject in successive essays: Their Eyes Were Watching God, E M Forster, Middlemarch, Barthes/Nabokov, Kafka, Joseph O'Neill's Netherland vs Tom McCarthy's Remainder, DFW's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

And amongst the many insights, this one stuck with me, literally from a footnote to another thought: "there is a style that believes writing should mimic the quick pace, the ease and fluidity of reading (or even of speech). And then there is a style that believes reading should mimic the obstruction and slow struggle of writing. Raymond Carver would be on that first axis. Nabokov is way out on the second. Joyce is even further."

The National - Sleep Well Beast

Well on the one hand, ho hum, another terrific National album, but on the other hand, records this good shouldn't be taken for granted! Sleep Well Beast is just a touch more frayed than the ones that've come before it, layered with a handful more fracturing little programmed details, but it's well of a piece with their usual metier.

I generally most like the rockier ones, though then there's the slow build of "Empire Line", and also "Carin at the Liquor Store", which is an A-grade classic National piano ballad, complete with mopily resigned lyrics about not even caring about being blamed, it's a foregone conclusion, plus I do also particularly like "Dark Side of the Storm" and its Lynchian mood too, so actually maybe I just like nearly all of the songs on here, which after all is entirely typical for this band.

Weyes Blood - Front Row Seat to Earth

I'm liking this - crystalline but a touch unstable, 60s/70s singer songwriter-touched pop epics, with a fair dose of the same era's folk spookiness. My favourites are the most expansive: "Diary", "Do You Need My Love", "Seven Words".

Angels in America pts 1 & 2 (National Theatre live)

Quite the intense experience, and impressively funny as well. Andrew Garfield is great. I don't think I had a favourite scene, but the one scene - across its 8 hours or what have you across the two consecutive Tuesdays on which we watched it - during which that thought flitted across my mind was the one where Prior and Harper meet for the first time 'in person' (it's actually their second encounter, counting the previous one on 'the threshold of revelation'), which I think was because they're the two most sympathetic dreamers of the play.

Also, I now better understand the bits of "Fialta" (from Bobcat) which are concerned with the play. Such as:

Stadbakken was going to be given the most expansive part in the play, the part of the dying Prior. And Indira was the angel, of course. Sands had made wings. If I hadn't loved Sands before the wings, I would have now, for they were made of the feathers and down of creatures that had to be imaginary - white and brown and long. Picture her in the dewy morning coming off the hill to wrestle down a figment, tear off its feathers, later affixing them with glue to bent clothes hangers and panty hose straps, and there you have Sands and everything about her.

Sands and Groovy played the parts of Louie and Joe, respectively, two gay men. Their interpretations of men were hilarious - strangely deep throated and spliced through with their ideas of gayness, which were like streams of joy running through.

I played a luminous, heartbroken, and uptight woman whom Joe had abandoned. I took her husband's rejection of her quite seriously, tried to imagine exactly how it would feel as I swished in my housecoat along the floor of the commons.

And (although re-reading it now, I realise that, deliberately or otherwise - both are plausible, and if the former, it adds another layer to the narrator's flawed memories of his time with Sands - the line about perfectibility is misattributed to Sands as Louis, when it's actually Joe who delivers it):

And then the play began. Reuben narrated to Stadbakken what came before: love, disappointment, the crude beautiful drama of sex, Sands and Groovy vamping at love, Sands carrying on like a girl making fun of a boy making fun of a girl, with a painted mustache. She was so ridiculous and beautiful, I thought I might die. Beyond the play, the day darkened. The backdrop was the icy arms of trees, the lift of starlings against the falling sun, the day dying. When Indira's part came, we had to shout for her. She was in Utopia, arguing on her cell. She hung up the phone and came in. She began to cry as she delivered her line, which gave her part a weird veracity: "Heaven is a city much like San Francisco - more beautiful because imperilled." We carried on for a few seconds, but then realized she actually was crying, standing there.

"What's the matter?" Sands asked.

"My father, he's sick. They just told me. I have to leave tomorrow."

"Oh no!" Groovy said. And we all murmured. I looked over at Reuben. What will you do now, Reuben? What display now? What will spill out of you now? He stood so still, as the heartbroken always do, and then he went to her. He touched her wing, the safest, least intrusive part.

"Let's continue," Indira said.

And so we did.

"Since you believe the world is perfectible you find it always unsatisfying." This was Sands, as Louis. And then she kissed Groovy, as Joe. They kissed, as men kiss. I staggered inwardly. And the play wound through its tragedies easily until Stadbakken's final, deathbed lines. "You are all fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: more life." Behind his head thousands of bird took flight. He raised his arms, though dying. He loved the play, you could tell. The wind howled. And then he stood up to go hug Indira.

(w/ Cass and trang)

Ali's Wedding

Nice, with quite a few laughs. It felt a touch thin to me, but then again, maybe that's a bit how it is with rom-coms, including/even those focusing on a migrant community.

(w/ Erandathie)

Colum McCann - Letters to a Young Writer

Terrifically wise, useful and encouraging. It turns out that I had read (and really liked) a substantial series of extracts from it a while back (here), from which I particularly liked the idea of writing towards what you want to know. One theme is a focus on language, and the value and rewards of following it. I liked this one, daring raids on the inarticulate and all:

A SECRET HEARING

"No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself." - Virginia Woolf

Often, in the midst of a novel or a story, you'll be surprised to realize that you have little or no idea where you are going. You're operating on the fumes of the language and the vague feeling that what you are doing will eventually have texture and depth. It's a deep-sea dive without very much training or equipment, but suddenly, a few feet down, you hit upon a word or an image and you realize with a start that this is the path you were meant to take. You don't know why. You don't know where. You don't even know how. It is a form of astounded hearing, a secret listening. You have made a daring raid on the inarticulate. This feeling has its own energy. You have to follow it. You'd be a fool if you didn't at least pursue the sentence in whatever direction it is taking you.

It's like solving a perplexing question in deep-sea physics: Why was I allowed to come to such a depth? There is a moment when the solution is so simple and evident that you wonder why you hadn't come upon it before: when, like Archimedes, you notice the bathwater suddenly rise. You know what you have found, what you've been seeking for years.

The simplicity of it is stunning simply because it seemed so difficult in the beginning. Now it is there. It has appeared. Somehow the inarticulate has been ransacked. It exists because writing is about trying to achieve a fundamental truth that everybody knows is there, but nobody has quite yet located.

Follow it.

mother!

There was a point during mother! when I remembered that not only did Aronofsky direct Black Swan (whose sheer getting-under-the-skin power[*] was the biggest reason I went and saw this new one on its first night of release, despite knowing nothing about it except having gotten a vague sense that it might be intense) and Requiem for a Dream (which pretty much pulverised me when I saw it back in high school), but also the craziness that was The Fountain. Little did I know that mother! was just hitting its straps at that stage, and about to get even wilder and more off the hook.

It was the bit with the baby that made it undeniable not only that the film is allegory writ as large as Aronofsky can manage - he both wrote and directed - but that the subject is not primarily artistic creation but rather Creation per se, at which point everything, both in retrospect and from then on, becomes very biblical (making Noah another interesting reference point).

The whole tenor of the film is heavy and unsettling, in the sense (among others) of being destabilising, and the visceral imagery around the house and the people in it, are part of that. There genuinely is something of the claustrophobic trappedness of a nightmare to it. It's undeniably forceful - and maybe also a bit blunt, in that once you know what it is, it really is quite direct and overt, rather than operating at a more sinuous or subterranean level. But that's in the nature of what it is, I think, rather than a failing as such, and it also makes more sense of the characterisation of not only Lawrence's and Bardem's characters (who are otherwise a bit oblique, if understood in more traditionally psychological terms) - never named except, meaningfully, in the end credits - but also those of the others who enter their house, especially Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer (wonderful) and their two sons.

***

[*] Over time, I've come to think of it as one of that very small number of films that I'm not sure I could say I particularly liked but which has a lingering effect that puts it in the vicinity of greatness. Melancholia is the other that I always think of in those terms.

God Help The Girl original motion picture soundtrack

So the chronology went: first there was the God Help The Girl album in 2009 (which has grown on me over the years since), and then Stuart Murdoch and cohorts went ahead and made a film out of it in 2014, of which this is the soundtrack, featuring a fair number of the songs from the original album but re-recorded by the cast - notably Emily Browning, who sings lead on most - plus various incidental snippets and a few other full songs, including The Life Pursuit's "Dress Up In You" (Belle and Sebastian themselves).

And actually it's all quite charming, carried a fair way by the tunes and a bit further by the general mood. Browning isn't the strongest singer but she can carry a melody and inject a bit of feeling into the mix, so basically mission accomplished in this context. I also liked flipping through the cd booklet, thinking that the other girl actor looked like Gilly from Game of Thrones, and then finding out that yes it is in fact her (Hannah Murray).

Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

Didn't fully live up to the promise of its premise: secret Manhattan office of girl superheroes protecting the world against the massed forces of evil and supported by a middle management-filled bureaucracy comes under attack. And that's despite my not knowing before that the attack would turn out to come from a splinter group of other female superheroes, or that one of the main defenders would be a cyborg (mechanical arm; otherwise human), or that the chapters would tend to be somewhere in the vicinity of 3-5 pages in length and full of unabashed action! But, still, quite the enjoyable read for all of the reasons above, with some degree of emotional sophistication and a prose style that hits some interesting notes into the bargain.

Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan - Sunday at Devil Dirt

I didn't really get into the first collaboration album between these two, but this one's a step forward. Interesting to read that Campbell was the main songwriter, as she gives Lanegan the lion's share of the lead vocals; he's much the stronger singer, but her waifish accents and harmonies work well with the lower register of Lanegan's voice. Not quite my cup of tea, but not bad.

I Am Not Your Negro

Well, now I see why everyone's been talking about this. Very good - strong, clear and nuanced. Also: actors, witnesses, and the idea of a thin but real line between them.

Post-screening discussion between Nayuka Gorrie and Khoa Do: illuminating, especially the audience comments/questions.

(w/ Kevin)

It

Who knows what combination of content, zeitgeist and promotional onslaught led to it, but it's been hard to avoid It recently, and after I saw the trailer and its nostalgic-drenched eighties mood palette and then saw it was running at 100% on rotten tomatoes based on early reviews, it seemed worth a watch.

So anyway my main thoughts:

• I reckon that It would be pretty comfortably the film with the most jump scares that I've ever seen. Somewhat relatedly, it gives us a very good look at all of its horrors from very early on - not much left to the imagination. Maybe that's why it wasn't actually all that frightening, despite the visceral charge of the (many) scenes where some version of the scary clown judders its way ferociously towards some imperilled child or other.
• Having said that, it certainly puts its cards on the table early, getting a small child into a dark basement basically within the first two minutes and then much worse not too long after that.
• Also, it is long! Well more than two hours.
• The best thing about it is the evocation of that state (of mind) of childhood into adolescence. The comparisons to Stand By Me weren't totally misplaced. The kid actors were all pretty good.
• Its view of adulthood is seriously dark. The film does a good job in having the interactions with parents (and the older teenagers) be actually very disturbing.
• I do think that the way the second 'chapter' turns out will make a big difference to how I (retrospectively) assess the quality of this first one. At certain points, this It started to feel a little bit linearly 'one scene, then the next, then the next', and the interesting themes about fear, innocence and coming of age were only partly explored; an adult return could certainly deepen the treatment of all of those. And it'll be interesting to see what the mood of the 27 years on one is - hopefully a strong contrast to the bright colours and hopefulness of this one.

(w/ Julian)

Godzilla

Again, the often eerie, dream-like visuals stood out (like the parachutist hazily against the clouds, followed by the shock of the planes falling out of the sky). (last time)

Miranda Lambert - The Weight of These Wings

Pretty nice. Has that interesting quality where even the best and most immediate songs don't have obviously enormous hooks or singalong choruses, but nearly all of the songs - across a double album no less - are enjoyable to listen to.

[Edit 11/9: After a couple more days of fairly solid listening, The Weight of These Wings merits an upgrade to 'really very good'. I reckon my 'first couple of play-throughs' reaction above was overly coloured by my expectations given Lambert's huge mainstream popularity and origins on a tv talent show, and the way that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, while listenable, didn't demand any kind of continued listening after its initial few spins. But more listening has brought home the sturdiness and high quality of these songs, and Lambert's performance of them, as well as how well sustained that is across its more than 90 minutes run time. 

Whether it's the faintly Unforgettable Fire / Joshua Tree ballads-invoking airiness of opener "Runnin' Just In Case" or the matched atmosphere of other three bookends "Use My Heart", "Tin Man" and "I've Got Wheels" (although a record like Wrecking Ball is a better reference point for those three) and the various other mid-tempoish numbers throughout ("Getaway Driver" and "Tomboy" maybe stand out the most, but impressively, none of them are entirely generic), the numerous enjoyable variations on up-tempo countryish roots, rock and pop (the electric guitar punctuation that shows up on cuts like "Highway Vagabond" and "Vice" is especially welcome, and is the pop-inflected upsurge - taking its cues more from All That You Can't Leave Behind, which, by the way, seems to have become a bit of a minor touchstone for me somewhere along the way there - of "Keeper of the Flame"), or one of the relatively few straight-ahead country moments (most notably, "To Learn Her"), this is good stuff through and through.]

Gene Wolfe - The Shadow of the Torturer

What a powerful piece of imaginative fiction. It's really something, the way it generates this kind of fascinating undertow beneath the surface action, and I reckon I've only scratched the surface in understanding it (a couple of relatively discrete things from the internet: Dorcas is the 'Cas' who the old boatman was looking for; the picture of the 'warrior' on the desolate landscape is actually a photo of a man standing on the moon - and no doubt many more layers when you consider how the subsequent books develop).

London Grammar - Truth Is A Beautiful Thing

Pretty but insubstantial. You can see what they're going for, and the singer's voice is quite something, but the songs and arrangements are mostly too bland to get there (honourable exceptions: "Big Picture", the last couple of minutes of "Hell To The Liars" and "Bones of Ribbon" - the one whose early morning hearing led me to listen to the album - where they get something a bit more dynamic going; also, opener "Rooting For You").

Southern Family (various)

A different side of the country genre from what I usually get exposed to - 12 artists, only a couple of whom I'd heard of before, with one song each, unified by their southernness and by the producer, Dave Cobb, behind the record. My guess is that a lot of it's close to 'contemporary country' of the type that you might actually hear on the radio if you lived in the USA; my favourites are Miranda Lambert's gentle "Sweet By And By" and the bluesy take on "You Are My Sunshine" by Morgane and Chris Stapleton. Also nice, in quite a classic kind of way, is Brandy Clark's "I Cried", and the Jason Isbell one is good too. Plus, I enjoyed learning that Waylon Jennings has a son named Shooter Jennings.

Walter Tevis - Mockingbird

Dystopian sci-fi (written in 1980; set a few centuries in the future) in which the degraded state of humanity has much to do with its illiteracy, together with a turning away from all kinds of things that are generally valued in a humanistic conception of the world - curiosity, pursuit of new knowledge and experiences, social relations, love - that is now maintained through a regimen of drugs, behaviours and ideologies inculcated by robots that were programmed many generations ago. Poor lonely Spofforth.

(pressed on me by Rob)

The Best of Buffy Sainte-Marie

One of those names that recurs, and it's been stuck firmly in my head since Neko Case's The Tigers Have Spoken and its inclusion of what turns out to be a faithfully joyous cover of "Soulful Shade of Blue".

A Canadian folkie who was most active at a time (the 60s - indeed this best of came out in 1970, even though she's continued making music and other forms of art to today) when there were one or two others also going around, she's very listenable, with a bunch of good songs, a singing style that has a bit of personality but isn't overly precious or laboured, and lyrics - like on "Universal Soldier" - that sometimes punch through to good effect.

Anohni - Hopelessness

Hasn't much grabbed me; somehow the beats and electronic elements don't sit well with Anohni's always remarkable voice (they can be a bit abrasive, and the contrast doesn't work), and aren't that interesting in their own right, although the way that some of the individual songs come together is, especially in the more tender back third of the album.

(previously: I Am A Bird Now, and many other appearances on compilations and what have you, recording under her former name)

Princess Mononoke

Excitement, complexity and visual spectacle in spades. Also, I was amused that, somewhere from the depths of my primary and early secondary school education, I still recognised 'inoshishi' as the Japanese word for boar!

(last time)

The Best Australian Stories 2015 edited by Amanda Lohrey

I suspect that when I read short stories, I'm seeking something quite specific for which I haven't yet found the words. Maybe my expectations are unrealistic, or even a touch immature, but whatever it is that I'm looking for, it's something vividly new, a version of that axe for the frozen sea - something to split open the world and make it somehow afresh (which I think the puzzling, brilliant stories in American Innovations do - they're still rattling around in my brain), which maybe ought tilt my tastes more towards the experimental.

There are some hints of that in this collection, little submerged lightning flashes, but mostly I found myself enjoying these stories and admiring how well observed and put-together they are without any really striking me as if from the blue. Still, having said that, there is some seriously good writing in here; my favourites are the ones by Goldie Goldbloom, John A Scott, Melissa Beit, Jo Lennan and Jennifer Down.

(2016)

The Score (Potter)

Ran out of time last time so popped back in this afternoon. Of those that I didn't get to on the previous pass, I really liked Helen Grogan's "Inside Small Dance (choreography for this exterior interior space)", black ribbon suspended over mirror subject to partly choreographed air flow, and Mia Salsjo's architecturally (Havana) inspired "Modes of Translation" piece (violins can be so evocative en masse!).

Game of Thrones season 7

The first season that I've watched week by week - at this stage, any other approach seems doomed to run into spoilers - which obviously made for a different viewing experience. Plus, at this stage in the show's run (and mythology), every little thing seems, and usually is, freighted with significance, making for closer viewing than past seasons have called for. (Speaking of which, normally I'm aggressively indifferent to the idea that this blog is written for anyone other than myself but, obviously, if anyone is reading this who might care to avoid spoilers from the series, they should probably stop reading now.)

By the start of season 7, the show had already gathered so much story that, pretty much no matter what, it was going to make for compelling viewing. And, unsurprisingly, the major through-line of the season is a big consolidation of characters, settings and plots, which brings plenty of pleasures as characters are brought face to face with each other - sometimes for the first time, sometimes in reunions following lots of action and development since last meetings - and the narrative streamlines.

But that also creates some difficulties, with the plotting starting to creak a little: literally everyone who you'd expect to still be alive until near the end, still is (and then some), with lots of sometimes implausible last minute rescues, and there are definitely some developments that don't, well, develop, or land, with the resonance that they ought to because of the rush. The second-last episode, which plays out the quintessential fantasy trope of a fellowship of heroes by scooping up nearly all of the loose fighting types on Westeros (Jon, Jorah, Tormund, Gendry, Beric, Thoros and the Hound) and sending them north of the wall together on a quest, epitomises this - it would have been much better with more space to breathe.

On the upside, though, the dragons (finally unleased on a battlefield) are suitably destructive, the little scene where Arya and Brienne spar is one of the most exciting of the whole series despite the absence of life and death stakes, the season finale is overall quite satisfying, and really the whole of season 7 is basically set up for the next and final season, for which I have high hopes, not least because there is a huge amount of built-up investment and associative and emotional capital associated with pretty much everyone who's still around - and have even come round to accepting that the Jon + Daenerys (+ everyone else) team-up to beat the White Walkers arc doesn't necessarily have to be uninteresting, depending on what else they do with it ... after all there's no rule, including internally to the logic of the show (or books, to the extent they're still relevant), that says that all conventions of the genre must be subverted.

(1-6, 6 again)

Spirited Away

What a brilliant film! Seeing it on a big screen really highlights how wonderfully detailed and just generally beautiful-looking it is. A treat for the eyes and the imagination, and great to revisit it after so many years.