Sickbed re-reading. (previously)
Saturday, June 28, 2025
Dylan Marlowe - Mid-Twenties Crisis
Basically, there's the ones that anthem it up with emo-lite electric guitars and they're mostly my favourites (especially "Heaven's Sake" and "Hungover in a Deer Stand", the latter a genuinely excellent song I think), the more country-rock radio-ish ones that are mostly a bit too generic-sounding and in some cases offputtingly unironically down-home for me (although "Heart Brakes" is good), and the slower ones (all boring).
A Complete Unknown
I don't know, should it have been a surprise that the soundtrack and the songs were such a large part of why this was so engaging? James Mangold has form with musical films - Walk the Line was strikingly watchable - and this one's got Chalamet front and centre. Bob Dylan means something to me, but not in a way that I'm protective about - a good starting orientation for a movie about him (it focuses on the few years at the start of his career, but in a way that implicitly makes an argument about who he is at large). Anyhow I don't think A Complete Unknown is anything special but I liked it - for its subject, its music, its central performance, and the garnish of Edward Norton as Pete Seeger and Elle Fanning as Sylvie.
Friday, June 27, 2025
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
A slept-on classic it isn't, but it's winning enough even on a rewatch. (previously)
Jennifer's Body
Yes it's a bit messy but the core of what Jennifer's Body has to say about gender and power is clear enough, and the black comedy / high school fizz take it a fair way.
Predator: Killer of Killers
The funnest part of this is the different historical settings, and it being animated worked well enough. The way it brought them all together at the end was kind of predictable and lacked a real epic feel though.
Saturday, May 31, 2025
Jess Hill - "Losing It: Can We Stop Violence against Women and Children?" (Quarterly Essay 97)
Thoughts while reading this:
- Hill is strong on not focusing only on 'gendered drivers' (in the language of the National Plan) vs other more proximate factors like the impact of child maltreatment and trauma, mental health disorders, alcohol and gambling, and upfront about the historical context behind the hard-won focus on primary prevention and a feminist perspective. At times it feels like it's getting a bit close to a straw person but her argument is that the balance is wrong - and, implicitly, that it has suited governments to maintain this since it was put in place in the first overdue wave of reform from 2008 onwards.
- A lot on child and adolescent sexual violence and abuse - within intimate partner relationships, directed towards siblings and caregivers, and in other contexts. Evidenced by ACMS and otherwise.
- Rates of domestic, family and sexual violence not falling. Hill questions the dominant view that this is being driven by increased reporting. Another question that comes up: could this be driven by the social and technological trends that she points out elsewhere (alienation of boys, access to harmful material online, manosphere), ie a current going against whatever positive effect primary prevention and early intervention efforts are having?
See What You Made Me Do remains one of the most stunning non-fiction books I've ever read. And for all the contention around the bomb that Hill threw last year with her public criticisms of Australia's approach on primary prevention it's hard to see her as anything other than an enormous force for good on this topic.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
I liked the more off-the-wall visuals, the little horror elements, and Benedict Cumberbatch but as a movie this is a bit of a mess, and noticeably not at all stand-alone from the 'MCU'.
Sunday, May 18, 2025
Esther Rose - Want
Andor seasons 1 & 2 / Rogue One
Andor lived up to the reviews - staying focused the whole way through on the perils and costs of resistance in the face of tyranny, spies and soldiers, with a grittiness and grasp of the dramatic that make the action-y sequences to which it periodically builds up almost a surprise and the more exciting for it, without becoming the point.
Star Wars has never been personally important to me, but I only needed the general cultural awareness of it that we all have to fill in the blanks with Andor. And, of course, I've seen Rogue One before; on this rewatch, post-series, it naturally gains resonance from knowing Cassian's back story and indeed the whole back story of the rebellion leading up to the movie's events, but also suffers by comparison to the longer-form story-telling that's retrospectively proceeded the events that it depicts itself (Jyn's rise to heroism feels abrupt when compared to the Cassian's tortuous road).
Monday, April 21, 2025
Geelong Art Gallery
The John Norman Mann Bequest
A bequest directed to contemporary art, with a particular focus on First Nations practices and works by non-Indigenous artists inspired by the natural world. Some real highlights across these rooms.
Below: Judy Watson - "standing stone, kangaroo grass, bush string" (2020) & Angelina Ngal - "Bush plum Dreaming" (2010)
"Modern Lives - Prints by Australian Women Artists 1900s-1950s"
Saturday, April 19, 2025
Helen DeWitt - The Last Samurai
This really is an unusual, and unusually good, novel. Everyone in it feels like a character in a book - Ludo and Sibylla most of all - but The Last Samurai as a whole feels somehow true, in a way that doesn't require the reader to fully agree with what it's saying about the potential for human learning and development in a society less bounded that ours (which I'm not sure I do), while bringing to life both the ideas and the characters who populate its story.
The humour is welcome and often unexpected, the pathos likewise - and the way those two are sometimes combined. The fizzing formal shifts and interventions - capital letter toddler-speak interruptions, intermittent streams of consciousness, extended excursions into language pedagogy across multiple languages - feel apt and not overly determined. It's like DeWitt has written something that's more or less a conventional novel but just molded in ways that make it actually very unconventional, and very enjoyable and thought-provoking. Whether it will linger in a more profound way, emotionally or otherwise, I'm not sure - but reading it was a different experience and a fluent one, which itself is pretty rare.
On at the Counihan Gallery
Three installations each by Australia-based artists with Asian cultural heritages who identify as queer.
Also: "Yellow Paint" - Mark du Poitiers
MJ Lenderman - Manning Fireworks
This is great! It comes in a package that maybe lends itself to being dismissed - another guy wielding an electric guitar, indie folk rock styles, and a wry, nasally dry singing-songwriting voice. But all the songs are good, the electric guitar is good, there are surprises, and in moments it reaches something even better.
"David EOY 2024"
Mostly breezily indie-sounding pop and crunchy guitars, plus quirks. My favourites - "Rip Off" (Momma), "Cheapskate" (Dune Rats), "Oysters in my Pocket" (Royel Otis), "Like I Say (I runaway)" (Nilüfer Yanya), "May Ninth" (Khruangbin).
Wednesday, April 16, 2025
Rebecca Solnit - Recollections of My Non-Existence
I suppose by definition any memoir by Rebecca Solnit would be Solnit-esque. What that means in Recollections of My Non-Existence - which I of course enjoyed very much - is that we get the personal perspective combined with the philosophical and social concerns that animate all of the writing ... but somehow without a great deal of psychological interiority. Which is not exactly a criticism in this case but more a feature. I do think that much of the pleasure I got from this one was possible because I'm already in some deep with her writing and work.
Station Eleven
Thursday, February 13, 2025
Queensland Art Gallery
On was the 11th annual Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art; I was pretty piecemeal in how I took it in given this was a bit of a snatched visit, but I liked Katsuko Ishigaki's Okinawa paintings with their US military bases, vivid blurriness and willingness to highlight the elements of their own inner composition, and Mit Jai Inn's installations which made good use of the central hall.
Also "Suburban Sublime: Australian Photography" which was smallish and overall not as engaging as its theme seemed likely to be, but it did remind me that Bill Henson's work, for all its over familiarity and the overly familiar discourse about its subjects and surfaces (admittedly a discourse that does continue to become more complex over time), really does have a whoosh to it - a reminder I get nearly every time I see any of it.
Marisha Pessl - Darkly
The concept is fun, the execution solid enough without rising to any great heights.
Monday, January 13, 2025
"Yayoi Kusama" (NGV International)
In a way Yayoi Kusama has crept up on me over the years. I've liked her quite a lot for a long time now, including some memorable encounters - the pumpkins on Naoshima, the illuminated ladder to infinity at the NGV (and in Our Magic Hour) - but I don't think I've ever really focused on her art as a body of work. I suspect a large part of that's been because both the surfaces of the art (the dots!) and the persona of the artist loom so large, making it difficult to properly see the works themselves, in their own right and as a whole.
Things I was struck by in this large survey:
- The correspondence with Georgia O'Keeffe
- The obsessive, repetitive work from early on
- The dots also being from early on
- The pumpkins, in a good way
- 'Self-obliteration'
- The darkened celestial mirror rooms have maybe always been my favourites, eg "Chandelier of Grief" (2016) below
Thursday, January 09, 2025
"Current: Brian Robinson" & Sculpture Park, McClelland Gallery
Been a while since I made it out here and this visit was mostly for the sculpture park. Those that most stood out tended to be the most monumental, and a couple for their whimsy. I might be wrong but my impression is that the artists represented in the park are notably un-diverse, seeming to lean heavily towards older white men.
Tuesday, January 07, 2025
R. F. Kuang - Babel
At the very least, Babel is interesting in multiple ways - an undisguised and undisguisedly angry polemic on the harms of colonialism wrapped up with an interrogation of the role of language and translation in empire and cross-border understanding, and of strategies of social change (including the necessity or otherwise of violence, and the toll that it takes), and delivered through a mostly pretty gripping alternative-historical fantasy story.
It's repetitive, didactic, heavy-handed and more - yet these scan more as texture than as flaws, part and parcel of the particular thing that Babel is, and even admirable as indications of the novel's willingness to depart from some conventional markers of literary quality and tastefulness. There's not a lot else like it that I've read.
Mission: Impossible 1-8
I've watched all of these before except #3; taken as a whole they sure are entertaining.
Sunday, January 05, 2025
Moana 2
The first one is my favourite of the Disney animations I've seen - relatively unproblematic (a low bar) with an engaging lead character (relatedly) and good music. The sequel is just fine, nothing more, and mainly because of the built-up goodwill from the first. I would've liked to've seen more of Matangi who actually seemed like a character, as well as having the best song.
(w/ R, L, J & H)
"An Insatiable Appetite for Pictorial Adventure: William Blamire Young" & "five letters cinque lettere: Filomena Coppola" (Mildura Arts Centre)
Supposedly Blamire Young is known as the master of Australian watercolour but I didn't get much from him. I could see the technical proficiency but some of his work seemed almost to be trying to create oil painting-like effects, to which I basically felt, what was the point.
I liked the Coppola exhibition, which was about the experiences of post WWII Italian migrants to the Sunraysia region, its title and theme coming from the five letters of the English alphabet that aren't in the Italian alphabet: j, k, w, x and y.