100 favourite songs: #86: "Today" - Smashing Pumpkins

The main thing with “Today” is that it’s basically a perfect power-pop song, bittersweet and singalongable (turns out that I still know all the words, after all this time). In high school, to the extent that I did the grunge thing, I was more of a Pearl Jam boy than a Pumpkins or a Nirvana one (though naturally I had the holy documents, Nirvana and Mellon Collie and Siamese Dream, anyway), but even then “Today” made my nerves tingle and caused some nameless want to swell inside me; in the time since then, Siamese Dream has become a bit of a touchstone record for me — I only listen to it at very long intervals, but every time I do it seems to be somehow a key moment, crystallising or exemplifying a particular point in my life while recalling and referring back to the past. I listen to “Today” on its own more frequently (and sometimes other individual songs, usually some combination of “Disarm”, “Soma” and “Mayonaise”), and while it partakes of that reification of the album in my mind, it also bears with it its own set of associations and it’s a rare day when I don’t enjoy turning it up loud and being swept along…

"Meeting a Dream: Albert Tucker in Paris 1948-1952" & other exhibitions @ Heide Museum of Modern Art

"Meeting a Dream: Albert Tucker in Paris 1948-1952", "Imagine...The Creativity Shaping Our Culture", "Living in Landscape: Heide and Houses by McGlashan and Everist" & "It Ain't Necessarily So...Mike Brown and the Imitation Realists"

McClelland gallery was yesterday, and this was today (the former, along with today's sunshine and the desire to be outdoors for it, probably providing some of the trigger for my suggesting Heide as today's outing) - first visit since it was reopened (not that I've ever been a regular - given that, in relative terms, it's pretty much in my backyard, I've always felt that I should go a lot more than I actually do) and it has to be said, the sheet metal cows are still the best thing about Heide.

Reunion with them aside, the rest of what was on offer was a pleasant enough way to spend an afternoon, but none too inspiring for me. I quite liked the Tuckers, but felt that I would have been much more drawn to their murky browns, maroons, nocturnal blues and occasional lamp-lit splashes of colour and general demi-mondismes in high school than I could be now; also, they were kind of samey. The pieces in the "Imagine" space were variously put on by ten current Australian artists, with no particular unifying theme, and while they're an interesting cross-section, none particularly grabbed me (though a brief animation showing a couple of stick finger protagonists making their way through some iconic works of Australian art - a Nolan "Kelly", "Picnic at Hanging Rock" (complete with the Saints' "I'm Stranded" as soundtrack and re-enactment of dialogue), "Blue Poles" - appealed). The architecture one wasn't really my thing, especially given that I'm not really up with the whole 'major significance of the Heide I and II houses' story, though it was kinda cool to be able to wander through the house; and similarly (though in a different way) the Mike Brown, which was all collages and counter-culture and you know, blah blah blah (significant and interesting at the time - probably so, I'll believe what they tell me. But particularly engaging now? No).

"Painting for Joy: New Japanese Painting in 1990s" & "Louise Weaver: Taking a Chance on Love - Selected Works 1990-2006" @ McClelland Gallery

trang picked up on the "Painting for Joy" exhibition, highlighting works in painting by more or less contemporary Japanese artists, and invited me in part because some of Yoshitomo Nara's work is showing there ('there' being the McClelland Gallery out in Langwarrin, which I now know to be somewhere in the Frankston direction). And I liked looking at the Naras - five all up, all rather characteristic, including the "Little Red Riding Hood" that has been reproduced quite a lot - but my favourites were two others, neither of whose artists I'd heard of before.

The highlight for me was definitely Takanobu Kobayashi's "Gate", which put me very much in mind (the turn of phrase is deliberate) of Magritte. There's a simplicity and a sense of space to it, but it's also very much framed - it's a perspective as immediately and subjectively present and constructed, flat with intimations of depth. The gate in the foreground which dominates the painting proves, on closer inspection, to be mounted on castor wheels and hence presumably movable; moreover, it's distinctly sky-like in appearance, and not only that, but its cloud hues appear to extend to the thin grey strip at the bottom of the picture which we had previously been presuming was the ground. Then there's the matter of the 'trees' in the background - and the unaccountable regular poles (trunks?) with which they are intersheaved. All in all, it's a kind of pictorial representation of how I feel that I see the world, not least in its slightly disorienting dream-likeness.

The other which particularly appealed was Makoto Aida's "Pavement of Yukiko Okada", a series of panels arranged four by four and each a variation on the same general theme - a face or a tree, depending on which panel one looks at and how one looks. Each has a different colour scheme and character and hints suggestively at meaning (both individually and taken as a whole, each all at once in that familiar hermeneutic circle) - it's quite abstract but also quite conventionally aesthetically pleasing which made me think of the European impressionist style (while also, no doubt influenced by the context in which I was viewing it, seeing cherry blossoms and other 'Asian' motifs in its patterns).

(I was also drawn to the Op Art-type "Jungle Gym" pieces by Nobuhiko Nukata - reminded me of Bridget Riley, though I like what I've seen of her's more.)

Also had a look at the Louise Weaver, since it was on in the same building. It seemed to be a career-spanning retrospective of sorts, and her thing is basically the creation of new forms and effects through crocheting and stitching onto and over existing 'canvasses' of various kinds - some quite large and installation-like, others more intimate. I was much more drawn to the neat textural effects she had achieved with relatively restrained stitching on to paper, coupled with linedrawings, etc, and the cute, similarly restrained ones she'd done with black-and-white wildlife photography of animals (especially the bear one), than to the larger-scale monochromatic ones.

And also walked through the gardens to look at the sculptures scattered about - especially liked "homespace", an almost pitch dark shed with many little lights set into its ceiling and a reflective surface below, so that walking on it produced a giddy sense of wavering depthlessness and being somehow above the stars.

Gina Czarnecki - "Spine 1.2" @ Union Lane

The Saturday night before last, 10.30pm-ish (after drinks), sliding towards the Queen Street bus stop for the last bus, took a short cut down Union Lane (connecting Bourke Street Mall and Little Collins, sorta near Royal Arcade) and was confronted by a tumbling swirl of lights, projected on to a screen high overhead, revolving over and over; turned out that I'd come in halfway through, and the initial stages involved an increasingly rapid tumble of brightly glowing human figures falling in a stream from the top to the bottom, become more and more dense in that stream and eventually all coalescing in the circular swirl which was my introduction to the work (screen dimensions very approximately five metres (height) by one metre (horizontal width), lowest point maybe six metres above the ground.

So anyway, it was quite hypnotic and a little beautiful, and just right for my state of mind at the time. We're not talking transcendence or perfect moments here, but still, it fit.

(Artist, title and its nature as part of a series titled "Laneway Commissions 2006" gleaned from a small plaque mounted at the Little Collins end of the lane.)

Reading list

The piles of books 'to be read' arranged around my room have been out of control for some time. Here are all the ones (fiction only) I've been able to round up, vaguely in the order that I think I might eventually read them:
• The Magus - John Fowles
• Mason & Dixon - Thomas Pynchon
• A First Omnibus - Ivy Compton-Burnett
• The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
• Real People - Alison Lurie
• Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard - Kiran Desai
• Tales of the Jazz Age - F Scott Fitzgerald
• Birthday Stories selected and introduced by Haruki Murakami
• The Mill on the Floss - George Eliot
• The Waves - Virginia Woolf
• Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
• The Bark Tree - Raymond Queneau
• Strait is the Gate - André Gide

Also, three that I'm really keen to read but haven't yet accumulated:
• What I Loved - Siri Hustvedt
• The Accidental - Ali Smith
• Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl

Also-also, now that he's been installed as the bookmakers' favourite for the Booker after the announcement of the long list last week and all, something by David Mitchell (turns out that I had heard of one of his books before after all - Cloud Atlas); read some bits and pieces of two of his earlier novels while killing time on Brunswick St before brunch this morning, and they looked alright.

Plus, The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard, which is next up for the ACs' book club (happily, the only one on this round's short list that I really wanted to do).

And, as of last weekend, am the proud owner of the Oxford complete works of Shakespeare...but I won't be reading that one cover to cover any time soon!

Anton Chekhov - The Kiss

Months and months ago, I got to talking books with Lev and he gave a strong (especially for him) recommendation to Chekhov; I wondered how much of that was attributable to the Russian heritage, but filed it away anyway (as is my wont when people talk up music or, especially, books/writers) and after a while someone else lent me the pocket Penguin 70 years volume which includes two of his stories, "The Kiss" and "A Visit to Friends".

A'course I knew of Chekhov's reputation as one of the great short story writers, but I had a feeling I'd read him in fits and bursts in the past without his stuff having made much of an impression - and, having read these two, I still feel much the same. They're finely etched and good on the details - the writing gives a sense of real craft - but the stories don't do a great deal for me...another instancing, maybe, of a telescoping of my tastes in literature.

Annie - Anniemal

I don't think there's much I need to say about this album, except that it's ace. I'd already heard what I now reckon to be the four best songs on it - "My Heartbeat" (which I knew, and will continue to think of, simply as "Heartbeat"), "Chewing Gum", "Anniemal" and "Come Together" - but had only previously been able to really listen to the first of those over and over (ie, because I had it on mp3, whereas the others were just repeated appearers on last.fm), but it's all really rather good, Annie's thin voice and simple beats transformed (well, absorbed into and by) her - or (I'm not sure) her songwriters' - knack for the unobtrusively vivid hook and a crisp, lean pop sound making for a delicious whole.[*]

* * *

[*] I was actually wondering about the constituents of her fanbase a while back. Kelly mentioned that the audience at the show Annie played in Melbourne was disproportionately 'macho' (w/ something of a goth turnout, too!), which is rather troubling (although, somehow, I wasn't wholly surprised upon hearing that review) - although very possibly Annie's one of those artists whose live show attendees aren't necessarily representative of her fanbase as a whole...related question: just how large (and wide) is that 'fanbase', anyway?

100 favourite songs: #87: "Nothing Natural" - Lush

… a near-perfect fusion of the always closely aligned dream-pop and shoegazer streams. - 10/04

…said I with my ‘pocket music critic’ hat on, but when I took Lush to heart, it was with no such critical inclinations at play; rather, it was an instinctive response to the spangly yet oddly downbeat rush their music provides. If you hear them on the radio nowadays, or see them on a compilation cd, it’s probably by means of something off their second (middle) or third (last) lps — “Single Girl”, “500 (Shake Baby Shake)”, “Hypocrite” — and while all those songs are pretty fab, I don’t think they can touch the band’s Spooky days, when they were giving that glorious unmistakable ethereal 4ad sound its sweetest and perhaps most gossamer expression, all sparkling, shimmering, crashing guitars and swirling, reverberating walls of sound and vocals seemingly only lightly tethered to anything at all, and never more so than on “Nothing Natural”, which in addition to all of the above has an urgency and a momentum and, too, a breeziness along with which one can’t help but be swept along…

100 favourite songs: #88: "If I Give You A Smile" - Whistler

One from the tail end of high school, and incontrovertibly a summer song — a lot of my earlier comments about Beth Orton are applicable here, too — and a song which, in retrospect, set the tone for a lot that was to come afterwards for me. It’s a harmonica-tinged folk-infused yearn, clear-eyed and sun-dappled, and it may have been the song which first showed me just how effectively wistful it was possible for a song to be without the slightest hint of bombast or melodrama, either musically or lyrically — its tale of a relationship seemingly near its end is keenly observed and initially has an air of resignation (“when we’re scared we’ve made compromises we can’t continue to make, and you’ve just about fooled me and I’ve just about fooled you…”) but, gradually, builds to an end that is hopeful and even almost rousing without anything seeming to have actually changed…everything about it is just perfectly balanced.

100 favourite songs: #89: "Way To Blue" / "Day Is Done" - Nick Drake

Two songs rather than just the one, but for me “Way To Blue” and “Day Is Done” have always been a pair, coming back to back on Five Leaves Left, the sombre stateliness of the one serving as an ideal prelude to the lightly-sketched melancholy of the other, which itself has the air of an epilogue; together, they form more than the sum of their parts…

* * *

Years ago, I used to occasionally awake filled with a sense of overwhelming melancholy more intense than any I’ve known before or since. It took the form of a diffuse yet intense yearning, a feeling that I’d been touched by something while I was asleep, something inarticulable which involved, maybe, having been adrift on distant oceans (or amidst the clouds), and having visited shores pristine and uncharted, or standing atop a great mountain and looking out and across forever, or something similarly ineffable. That’s the imagery that I tended to be left with, but the overwhelming sense was one of bittersweet loss — of having dreamt, felt, experienced something beautiful and magical which had but recently fled, but of its always being ungraspable and completely impossible in waking life, even as its traces remained upon me for those precious ephemeral moments between sleep and wakefulness. I felt it, those mornings, as an almost physical pain, an indescribable pang, and, it has to be said, it could make me feel like crying — but at the same time, I wanted the feeling to linger, to remain wrapped in it aching, to continue to believe in everything it so intangibly yet so keenly seemed to hint of.

Well, once, one such morning awakening was, it seemed, scored, softly, at its faintest edges, by these two songs, “Way To Blue” and “Day Is Done”, and that sense of all-encompassing melancholy was all about them, and they’ve never been the same since.

* * *

[Interjection: I know, I know - all of the above is totally and embarrassingly overwritten…but that's what happens when you try to express something that (I'm convinced) is plain inexpressible.]

100 favourite songs: #90: "Simple Things" - Belle and Sebastian

The merest of bagatelles, this — not even two minutes long and minor even at that length. But it’s touched with something — you can’t put your finger on it, but if you understand then you know it’s there…it’s something about the prettiness and aptness of its winsome strum n jangle, the gentle, unassuming lilt of the verse, the plaintive hopefulness of its delicate build, the perfectly conjured air of wistfulness…it all just fits. If a sigh were set to music, this is how it would sound.

100 favourite songs: #91: "Daybreaker" - Beth Orton (Four Tet remix)

For me, there are two artists whose music, more than any others’, always invokes that sweet old summer sadness — the feeling that everything is intangibly possible but always just out of reach which I associate so strongly with the dreaminess of my late-teenage years. Powderfinger and Beth Orton are the two: in terms of Powderfinger, it’s Internationalist, the Two Hands version of “These Days”, and Odyssey Number 5, a trio of records which carries stronger associations for me than any other, all mixed up as associations (and expecially those from that time of my life) tend to be; and when it comes to Beth Orton, it’s all about Trailer Park and, especially, Central Reservation (and, especially especially, “Stolen Car” and “Central Reservation” itself)…music that made me feel something hazy and rich and inexpressible at the time, and which is now laden both with something of that original effect and with the wistful nostalgia with which I recall that first reception and all that came with it.

So it’s more than a little strange that my favourite of Orton's songs should not only be from her third album, Daybreaker (which I heard well after the time at which Orton’s music was possessed of that kind of heightenedness for me, and found ‘objectively’ underwhelming into the bargain), but be a remix no less. But there it is — and it’s true, ringing, chiming and insistent, the Four Tet cut-up of “Daybreaker” is my favourite Beth track.

The thing with Four Tet remixes is that, while he very much does songs over in his own style and adorns them in the clicks, shimmers and edges that are unmistakeably his, he also always retains the integrity and the sense of the original — indeed, keeps those elements at the centre of his refashioning. And so it is here that Orton’s voice, that thorny soulful croon, is the focal point of Hebden’s “Daybreaker”, and the melody is the thread about which everything else is woven — but it’s the little twists and flourishes that he adds which really make the track…and in the commingling of the various resonances of Orton's and Hebden’s music, it takes me somewhere both familiar and new.

Thom Yorke - The Eraser

The thing about the record, really, is that it just sounds exactly like a Thom Yorke album. As far as the Radiohead back catalogue goes, its closest cognate is probably Amnesiac, but really it's most recognisably that indie-rock/electronic thing that you can't help but identify with latter-day Radiohead (and, by extension, Yorke). It has its moments - the weary coda to "Analyse" is an early 'moment' - and the sound is still both new and familiar, but it's just not really where I'm at right now, and probably --

* * *

Scratch all of the above. What I really want to say goes something like this: responses to music are subjective, after all. The Eraser is a good album but I don't love it. I'm not sure if I could ever have loved it. But I don't really know what I meant by that 'ever'. It's probably not a meaningful statement - not a meaningful hypothetical, I mean.

* * *

Also, in general, I'm lacking some essential lightness right now. As they sometimes do, the words are coming out all weird.

Niobe - White Hats

Different from most of what's out there, and almost always interesting to listen to, but ultimately lacks whatever it is that really sets certain music apart from the common run and causes it to linger in what might be called the mind's ear (to coin a possibly somewhat unfortunate phrase). Heard bits of it playing in a record store and my attention was caught; interrogation of the store clerk produced the cd case, from which I learnt that the album's on Tomlab (which was a plus); and decided to take a chance and bring it home. It's a fractured, inchoate mix of styles - Tomlab-styled electro-pop, jazz gestures, old school funk, flashes of torch and, maybe most perceptibly, a distinct lounge sensibility. The voice in which 'Niobe' sings has been reminding me of someone for weeks now, but it's only writing these notes just now that I've been able to place it - the resemblance is to Feist (and that only because the cd's sitting on my desk right now), though Niobe's perhaps a bit more forthright, with shades of Nellie McKay, and in fact the musical style isn't a world removed from those two, either, though much more on the 'electronic' side. So this quirkiness is all well and good, but I find that the tunes aren't there - and, in the case of White Hats, there isn't enough else to make up for the lack.

David Guterson - Snow Falling on Cedars

I started reading this mainly because I wanted something easy and involving - any kind of insight or emotional payoff would have been a nice bonus. In the event, the novel made me want to keep reading it in order to find out what happened at the end, but I found the writing a bit clunky and I was annoyed by the way the novel kept shifting from one character's point of view to another - I'm always very alive to that aspect of writing. (Really there's no good reason for my irritation on that account, but I can't help it...that's how I responded.) All up, for mine, Snow Falling on Cedars is just okay but nothing special.

Candy original soundtrack

This soundtrack has made me want to watch a film that I didn't previously have the slightest interest in seeing. Initially, a few things caught my eye about the tracklist; from most to least interesting:
• a recording of Pärt's "Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten" done by the Bournemouth Sinfonietta, an ensemble whose name I knew but couldn't place
• two versions of Tim Buckley's great "Song to the Siren", one by Buckley himself and the other by a pair whose names were unfamiliar to me, Paul Charlier and Paula Arundell
• a song - the "wedding theme" - by Johnette Napolitano, who I thought was the lead singer from 4 Non Blondes but turns out to be from Concrete Blonde (damnit, they have more in common than just the word 'Blonde' in their names!)

As to those, the reading of the "Cantus" here is more hesitant, less ineluctably sweeping, its various instrumental lines more distinct (and the bells more pronounced) than the recording with which I'm most familiar, the one from the Tabula Rasa cd put down by Dennis Russell Davies and the Stuttgart State Orchestra. But it works. The Charlier/Arundell "Song to the Siren" (I presume that the music was done by Charlier, who's the composer of the score to the film, and the vocals by Arundell), which opens the soundtrack, seemingly owes much more to the version done by Robin Guthrie and Liz Fraser under the 'This Mortal Coil' moniker than to Buckley's original, and has a gloomy, broody prettiness which sets the tone for the soundtrack as a whole; Buckley's is a live version and its simplicity, done by him, is as affecting as always. And the Napolitano is a muted, plaintive, somehow bruised thing which is rather lovely.

Elsewhere, the music's in a similar vein to those four tracks - listening to it really makes me feel as if I have a sense for the film already, despite not having seen any trailers, etc and having only the vaguest idea as to what it's about. I'm sure that it'll be a downer, but I think I should watch it.

Haruki Murakami - Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

In the past, I've much preferred Murakami's longer form writing - that is, his novels - to his short stories, and indeed I was almost halfway through this career-spanning collection before I felt myself really respond to anything in it (that said, it finishes on a high - the last four stories are all really good, and there are some others in the second half, including "Tony Takitani", which are touched by that familiar Murakami magic). In general, I think that he's an author who benefits from having some space in which to develop his ideas and worlds - in the briefer medium, his stories tend to come across as a bit obvious and their off-the-wallness not really justified, rather than occupying that happy space between the ordinary and the extraordinary in which his novels seem to dwell. I don't know whether this is a case of me holding an author up to a higher standard than usual because I've so loved his work in the past, or whether it's that very prior familiarity which is causing me to fill in at least some of the gaps in the craft of these stories in order to imbue them with the spirit of which I know he's capable, but in either case the end result is that I was left only partially satisfied by the stories here. That said, of course, he still writes - quite literally - like a dream, and even if I think these are down on his usual standard, I flew through them once I got started.

The Tempest @ the Playhouse, Arts Centre

I'm pretty sure that The Tempest was my first exposure to Shakespeare. We read parts of it in grade 6 and it left an impression on me which penetrated, I'm convinced, beyond the idea of 'reading Shakespeare' to something of the magic lying beneath it. I don't recall which part or parts I read, but I do remember how the words made me feel.

So it was an auspicious beginning for the Bard and I. Notwithstanding that, though, and notwithstanding a succession of other Shakespeare throughout school - as far as I can remember, The Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet in year 9, Macbeth and maybe Richard III in year 10, King Lear in year 11 and then Hamlet in year 12, I think - and various exposures (though not as many as you'd think if you'd never been a Melbourne Uni English student) at uni, I've never been one to truly love his work. There are people of my age who genuinely have a feel for Shakespeare and unequivocally believe his greatness; I am not one of them.

But, to state the obvious, it's Shakespeare (and if there were some way of 'double capitalising' that name, I would) and so we all know him anyway, and his plays are fundamental to our experience of literature, art and life, whether or not we're aware of it at any particular time and whatever the 'intrinsic' merits or qualities they may possess, or once have possessed...so when I was looking at the Bell program for this year, I thought that it might be good to check some of it out and earmarked The Tempest as particularly likely to be rewarding; saw their Romeo and Juliet but then, feeling overrun by everything, gave up on organising for The Tempest; happily, Swee Leng had her act together (so to speak), so I caught it with her last Friday, along with a friend of hers, one Rob S (some very young-seeming uni friends of the latter also being around but elsewhere, having student rushed it on the night).

And it turned out to be good - better, I think, than the company's staging of Romeo and Juliet (although these kinds of comparisons are always to a certain extent a matter of apples and oranges). Set design was impressive - an appropriately enchanted forest, replete with obscured doors and hatches - and took on different characters throughout as the play required with some effective use of lighting and shadow effects (the way that the whole backdrop flickered when magic was being done was especially neat). Costumes generally quite thematically consistent - Caliban as a tall, angular British punk rocker in a white suit, complete with mohawk, somehow made sense, but was the exception rather than the rule in needing to have sense made of it - and relatively undistracting. Interesting choice to have the songs - as done by a (female) Ariel - rather Enya-esque (needless to say, with my long experience of ethereal female-voiced music, I could come up with more accurate comparisons - but that wouldn't be the point), and I wasn't sure about the reason for seemingly sending it up during the wedding scene...

I hadn't seen John Bell himself act before, so it was good to see him as Prospero - a fitting role. Freya Stafford as Miranda was about right, though I thought that Stephen Phillips as Ferdinand was a bit too much the footy player (but maybe that kind of swagger is more suited to the role than the lanugishings of a more expiring, sensitive romantic type). The rest of the cast good, also - most notably, those playing Caliban and Ariel. And the humour came through well, too.

The pacing seemed a bit off at the end - in particular, the ending seemed to begin quite early and then just keep on going, and there wasn't really a strong sense of climax at any stage - but, not being particularly familiar with the play, I don't know whether that was attributable to the play-text itself or to this particular staging. Anyway, I enjoyed it a lot and was interested to notice how thought-provoking it was - regardless (as above) of the extent to which this was due to 'the play itself' as opposed to its subsequent endless reproductions and reifications...

A Tale of Two Sisters

I'm not particularly a wimp about horror films, but nor am I especially a fan - to a pretty large extent, I just don't see the point of them (I know, I know - the wrong kind of question to be asking ). Anyway, consequently I don't see that many example of the genre - which maybe accounts for why I can't recall having ever felt genuine creeped out-related chills down my spine because of a film before A Tale of Two Sisters (which works the trick not once but several times)...unnervedness yes, and sometimes the shock and jump in my seat induced by a sudden appearance or apparition, but not honest to goodness chills.

I became aware of A Tale of Two Sisters a little while back, probably last year or the year before - whenever it showed at MIFF, anyway. The promotional picture - two doll-like Asian girls against a Laura Ashley background - caught my eye, as did the blurb, and those impressions stayed with me sufficiently that I rented it last weekend. The upshot, anyway, is that it's very good - I didn't really know anything about the film, so I didn't have any inkling as to the direction that the creepiness would come from, with the result that I was on edge the whole time and, as the film went on, increasingly uneasy about the darkened room in which I was watching it. The sets are lush and deeply coloured, and menacing, and the acting is high quality, keeping the viewer unsure about what is happening at any point - has a spooky, increasingly suffocating atmosphere, some outright frightening moments, a couple of genuine twists and a satisfying (as far as the conventions of the genre go) ending, that last pushing it in a direction which is both new and in line with what has gone before.

Alexander

The critics canned Alexander, but while I thought that it was a failure, I really feel that its failure is both noble and interesting, born of a failure to fully realise an overly grand ambition rather than any failure of imagination. I don't know if it's quite accurate to call it a revisioning of Alexander's life and person - is there even an accepted account of either? But it's characterised by a resistance to and incredulity towards any simple narrative of his feats or account of his personality - this is made perfectly clear both in the structure of the film, which is cut up by flashbacks, flashforwards and revisitings at several points (an interesting example is the way that it initially seems to be presenting a standard "rise to greatness" narrative culminating in Alexander's famous victory over the Persians at Gaugamel, before immediately going back and by filling in the gaps in the chronology leading up to that triumph - Alexander's exile by his father Philip, etc - problematises the status of what it had just presented as a straightforward received account), and in the comments of the framing narrator, the old Ptolemy, at the end. So far so good.

In a similar vein but maybe more overtly 'revisionistic' are the depictions of Alexander's homosexuality and the distinctly enlightened nature of his tyranny (the former is clear, albeit never made 100% explicit...and what's with Hephaiston's eyeliner?...and the latter comes through in Farrell's (and, perhaps more germanely, Stone's) Alexander's sensitivity and especially his wish to unify all of the races and tribes that he conquers for some kind of pan-utopian reason rather than from the simple desire for conquest or power...and then, shading from that, the psychologising of his character, and particularly the way his personality and actions are depicted as flowing from his troubled relationships with his mother and father. All of that is interesting, but I didn't feel that the pieces quite came together - while it looks and to a large extent feels right (the battle scenes and the council ones work), I just wasn't convinced (which is, natch, part of the function of what I was talking about in the first paragraph), and while Farrell was good, he lacked the necessary stature to make it all work.

I don't know if it's even possible for a film to have it 'both ways', so to speak - all I can say is that Alexander falls short (and this is the director's cut that I saw, too)...but I admire it nonetheless.

100 favourite songs: #92: "Under The Milky Way" - The Church

… a shimmering, subtly layered, guitar-driven number which builds and then peters out, and builds again, and peters again, often all within the space of a single line, and is graced by an almost naff (but absolutely perfect) racing keyboard bridge which appears only once, midway through. It’s wonderfully, mysteriously evocative, and completely majestic in a fashion which derives much of its power from its sustained restraint, and there’s a real sense of yearning to Kilbey’s vocals, and of wonder, too, as he sings those enigmatic words: “Wish I knew what you were looking for,/Might have known what you would find…” - 21/11/02

I always think of this song and “Wide Open Road” as a pair and, like that other, I kind of feel like “Under The Milky Way” will never go away — that it’ll never cease to affect me at least in some measure in the way that it did when I took it most intensely to heart. Unsurprisingly, given its lyrical content (and the musical bed on which those vocals lie), I think of “Under The Milky Way” as one of the soundtracks to that time when I used to go for broody night-time walks around suburbia, gravitating to the open, grassy space of the green, where I’d sit or stand on a hill or a slope, looking up at the stars and clouds going around and past above me…

In its understated way, this song is a classic — there’s a magic to it which I can’t locate in any of the song’s constituent elements but which is all the more undeniable for that elusiveness.

100 favourite songs: #93: "Wide Open Road" - The Triffids

Hauntingly simple in its sparse use of keyboards, clean, ringing guitars, and just the one, repeated drum fill, it has an epic majesty which is entirely suited to the semi-mythical Australia of The Triffids’ vision; no other song has so perfectly captured the sense of vast, uncharted expanses which characterises the Australia of our collective imagination. - 8/9/02

I’ve been pretty into the Triffids at various time in the past, and there are still some days when I think that Born Sandy Devotional is probably the best Australian album I know. Their palette is broad, but “Wide Open Road” is the one that everyone knows, and with good reason — it’s a genuine nation-defining anthem, resonant and powerful in its simplicity. Songwriter David McComb knew how to wield a symbol and a mythology, and the music is fit to match, haunted, spacious and rich without being adorned any more than necessary, and the result is something at once distinctively Australian and unquestionably universal.

100 favourite songs: #94: "Ghost World" - Aimee Mann

… how perfectly Mann's typically bitter-sweet tune captures that … sense of alienation, of hanging around and watching summers waste away. -8/5/05

I decided a while back that Bachelor No 2 is, these days, my single favourite album; and while there are better songs on the record, I’m not sure if there are any (with the possible exception of “Save Me”) which affect me as “Ghost World” can.

It starts unceremoniously, a perfunctory chug of the guitar and then straight into it:

“Finals blew, I barely knew my graduation speech,/ With college out of reach, if I don’t find a job it’s down to dad and Myrtle Beach…”

Sulky, spiky, and tart but sweet at the same time (I’ve thought before that if Mann’s music had a flavour, it would be citrus), with a quiet sadness underneath it, not only is it what she does best, but it’s perfectly suited to the mood of this song…and leads seamlessly into the chorus, which has a hint of the soaring to it but, aptly, only gets partway there:

”…so I’m bailing this town — or tearing it down — or probably more like hanging around…”

The first two lines of the next verse deepen the sense of drifting, disengaged summer alienation…

”Everyone I know is acting weird or way too cool,/They hang out by the pool,/So I just read a lot and ride my bike around the school…”

…but it’s the third line which is the first really magic Aimee Mann moment in the song, as her drowsy, disaffected backing vocals float in, accentuating and counterpointing, and wrapping the words in another layer of wistfulness.

”…cause I’m bailing this town — or tearing it down — or probably more like hanging around…”

…and then the bridge, musically flowing smoothly from what's gone before but lyrically unexpected, crisp, emphatic, with just a hint of yearning to its tone:

”…and all that I need now is someone with the brains and the know-how to tell me what I want, anyhow…”

A pause, then:

”12th of June, a gibbous moon,/Was this the longest day? I’ll walk down to the bay and jump off of the dock and watch the summer waste away…”

…a return to the verse, and it does feel like a return — the first three phrases a bit more restrained, a bit more tentative…and then the second glorious Aimee moment of the song, coming at the corresponding point in this verse to that in the earlier, everything dropping away for a fraction of a moment before the drums and the guitar push things forward again and there’s a new fluency and poignancy to Mann’s singing as her narrator quite literally immerses herself in this bittersweet, tremblingly poised ‘freedom’ and once again we feel that sense of almost-soaring.

”…then I’m bailing this town — or tearing it down — or probably more like hanging around…probably more like hanging around…so tell me what I want…”

…fade out, on three and a half minutes of the most perfectly pitched evocation of late-teenage (and beyond) anomie you could ever hope to hear.

(And see also here.)

100 favourite songs: #95: "Helpless" - Neil Young

Why this song, and not any number of other Neil Young songs in a similar vein? For mine, there’s just something a bit special about it, something in the shivering tenderness with which its tentative threads of vocals and instrumentation are all woven together, in the stuttering way that it slides in and its weary stumbling plaintivity thereafter, in the way that the line “throwing shadows on our eyes” makes me feel.

Girls Aloud - Chemistry

Despite the immediacy of the songs on this album, it took me a few listens for them all to sink in - probably because I spend most of my time listening to music which is very different from the glossy chart-oriented pop of Chemistry (and so have conditioned myself to respond more immediately to music which is, 'objectively', less immediate, maybe?). Anyway, once I'd got my ear in, I enjoyed this album heaps - there's nothing on it to touch the sheer hyper genius of "Biology", but it's solid throughout and there are details to savour everywhere. All up, it comes across as of-the-moment without being gimmicky or too obtrusively 'up to date', and the backwards-looking moments (the Pretenders influence is made explicit with the final track, a faithful cover of "I'll Stand By You") are well-weighted. (Incidentally, speaking of 'influence', I do have a vague sense of the provenance of the group - oh no, manufactured! - but it doesn't seem to have affected my response to the music...)

I don't know if they even play live, but if they do, and if they ever come to Australia, I really think that I would go and see them, and with every expectation of having a great time.

Françoiz Breut - Une saison volée

Another that I've had for ages but never got round to noting here (there's still a backlog pile of between a dozen and twenty other cds/records, depending on how far back one draws the line, in a similar position). Anyway, I like the album, and would've done even had I not seen her show a while back, but it's a bit more uneven than Vingt à trente mille jours and on the whole less swooningly captivating, although it certainly has its moments.

Belle and Sebastian - "The Blues Are Still Blue" EP

Not to be too dismissive or anything, but for me, all that really needs to be said about this ep is that it's latter-day Belle and Sebastian. A couple of songs from The Life Pursuit - "The Blues Are Still Blue" and "Funny Little Frog" - and a handful of others; it's all quite tuneful and pleasant, and it's almost completely forgettable. Maybe in ten years' time I'll be able to come back and listen to all these now-recent B&S records and appreciate them a bit more - but it's not happening just now.

One Kiss Can Lead To Another: Girl Group Sounds, Lost & Found

To start with the way it looks:

Lavishly presented in packaging done up to look like a vintage hatbox: cake-tin cylindrical in shape (diameter of about 25cm, maybe 10cm high); slightly diagonal black and white candy stripes running down the side; large curly pink writing across the flat black lid, which fits snugly on the box but is also decorated and held in place by a drawstring. Inside, luscious black foam inlay housing extensive book-form colour liner notes, photos and all (and with the single word 'diary' on the front, along with a rendering of a keyhole), and four cd cases, each decorated differently to resemble a compact (complete with mirror).

As to the music, well, it's wonderful, of course. This is part of what the sticker on the plastic wrap on the outside says, and it's a pretty accurate indication of the music itself:

"The Should-Have-Been Hits From When The Girls Ruled The Airwaves!"
4 CDs of '60s Girl-Pop Heaven - the First Boxed Set of Its Kind
120 Songs You Just Gotta Hear
Plus a Spectacular 200-Page Book With Fetching Photos, Essays, Track Commentary & Artists' Reflections

* * *

Anyway, I've had this for months and, what with my utter lack of time for leisurely discovery of music, it doesn't look like I'll get anywhere near absorbing all of the music here any time soon. Lots of familiar names - Shangri-Las, Ellie Greenwich, Ronettes, Velvelettes, Chiffons, Shirelles, Dusty, Carole, etc, etc - sometimes with familiar songs and sometimes not, all bursting with that sound. Lovely.

Fowler's Modern English Usage (revised 3rd edition by R W Burchfield)

Okay, this is kind of sad, but it bears recording...

Every six months, a voucher arrives in the mail from Reader's Feast, to the value of 10% of the total amount I spent there over the preceding six-month period. I always try to put it towards a luxury - something that I couldn't normally justify buying (or, at any rate, buying new, as opposed to secondhand) but the owning of which would make me happy.

That's not the sad bit.

The sad bit is that this year my luxury was a copy of the latest edition of Fowler's, a guide (well, really the guide) to the correct usage of the English language, arranged alphabetically by word, phrase or fragment (prefix, suffix, etc) in pithy dictionary (though sometimes quite discursive and even, in places, notably opinionated) style. I first became aware of Fowler's during my time on the Review, and particularly while I was editing, when it was frequently used to settle disputes, and it was recalled to my mind the other day by a conversation in the office about why the correct phrase was "two-year sentence" and not "two-years sentence" or "two-years' sentence". Words, expression and language have always been important to me, but I've never been much of a grammarian (being of the cast of thought which much prefers descriptive to prescriptive grammar) or, for the most part, a real stickler for correct usage; still, I am happy to have a copy of Fowler's to hand, and it's the sort of reference book that I could well end up reading - with varying degrees of attention - basically cover to cover.

Mervyn Peake - Titus Groan [incomplete]

I started re-reading this after watching the mini-series, but then became distracted and have been preoccupied lately, and I think the moment has passed for now. But I wrote the below a while back, between said mini-series and the beginning of the re-read:

* * *

I don't know if it's quite accurate to say that the Gormenghast trilogy, taken collectively, was a personal watershed, but I can't doubt how deeply the series has marked me. I think that I must have come to it in the later years of high school - I remember picking it up in Box Hill library on spec, knowing nothing of its putative status as a classic of imaginative literature, and tumbling headlong into its dark, convoluted, endless ramifying visions. The reverberations spread. For years, the online alias I favoured was 'Fuchsia'; my email address incorporated 'Steerpike'. I wrote the passages in which Fuchsia and Keda met their ends by falling on my bedroom wall - the one because it so perfectly encapsulated and crystallised the tragedy of its subject and the other because its lyricism left me astonished - and indeed, the idea of writing directly on my walls was probably born of the books themselves. The books spoke to me.

100 favourite songs: #96: "I Know I Know I Know" - Tegan and Sara

It's just the most irresistibly (and why would you want to resist it?) goshdarned gorgeous thing - totally cute (love their voices and the way that every note of the music is just right) and shamelessly sweet and über-melodic (in a 'takes you over almost without you realising' kind of way) and all that stuff ("Stick your hands inside of my pockets,/Keep them warm while I'm still here..."...it's all in the way that it's sung)...it makes me happy. If there was any justice, this would've been a number one hit on pop charts all over the world. - 29/9/05

Because I didn't hear a cuter or more catchy song all year, nor one that was more liable to make me feel happy in a slightly light-headed, silly kinda way. (And for another reason that we don't need to go into here...) - 16/1/06

When I’d finished what was more or less the first cut of this list, I looked it over and thought (amongst other things, of which more to follow later, obviously) that surely “I Know I Know I Know” couldn’t be one of my hundred favourite songs — it just didn’t make sense. But pop music isn’t supposed to make sense, and the thing about the feelings induced by the best pop songs is that, even as you know that they’re not going to last, you still wholeheartedly believe that they will.

Above all else, this is a gorgeous, uplifting song, but I always listen to it with a pang of wistfulness, too. Sometimes a song just comes at the right time.

100 favourite songs: #97: "Lovefool" - The Cardigans

What can I say? … one that somehow never went away, and one that I’ve never been ashamed of loving despite its uber-pop stylings. One of those songs that I will always turn up when I hear it on the radio, it’s absolutely perfect for what it is … - 1/04

…somehow never went away, and, in a way, feels as if it’s always been there. The Romeo + Juliet soundtrack was, as it seems to have been for so many other people, a key landmark along my road to falling in love with pop music, and “Lovefool” played its part and then some.

Things I especially love about this song:
* the opening bars and the way those rhythmic bleeps underpin the whole thing from start to finish
* the first line and its delivery, at once coyly languid and totally deadpan: “Dear I fear we’re facing a problem…”
* the chorus, of course
* the backing vocals
* the whimsical-resigned trail-off of its closer: “I can’t care 'bout anything but you…”

I’ve said it many times before, but Scandinavian pop really does make the world a better place, damnit. In that regard, this is where it all started for me, and it’s still a straight-up joy after all this time…shimmer, stomp, sparkle, and a shiver to Nina Persson’s voice — I don’t know how it could be any better.

Frank Warren - Post Secret

And (since all of these last few entries seem to have a name attached at their start) this one came from Jade T. I stumbled across the blog quite a while back, before it became a genuine cultural phenomenon I think (or, at least, before I was aware that it had become a genuine cultural phenomenon), and enjoyed it at the time; the premise - soliciting the anonymous revelation of secrets by postcard, decorated to taste, to be published for all to see - still appeals to me, both in terms of the 'communal art' aspect and as far as the 'anonymous disclosure of secrets' goes, tho' then as now it's only the first of those which actually attracts me as far as my own potential actions go.

So it's neat to be able to leaf through this handsome volume and revisit/rediscover. It's in the nature of the exercise, I suppose, that a lot of the postcards make one feel just a little bit grimy to read them - these are, after all, other people's secrets, even if they've chosen to reveal them to the world. Despite obviously being an extremely critical person, I have a real tendency to idealise others (and, I suspect, myself) - which doesn't always mean seeing the best or the most exalted in them (although it probably often does), but does mean that I tend to like to gloss over the nitty-gritty, mundane things which ground us all in our factical real lives (and, quite possibly, hence - while I'm casting all these aspersions on myself - a large part of my attraction to phenomenological and 'postmodern'-type lines of thought, and folks like Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Sartre, Derrida, Lacan, etc, though I haven't thought this through enough to be able to justify that 'hence'), and in large measure it's those things that I'd rather ignore about people, or pretend don't exist, which are on full display in this book. So, no doubt there's plenty to be said about the cultural significance of the project and all, but evidently one of the more immediate effects it has is to get the spectator thinking about themselves...

Anyway, to come back to the point on which I started that last paragraph - most of the postcards reveal unhappiness and/or dissatisfaction of one kind or another...I suppose that these are the kinds of things that people keep secret. The mode of expression reminds me rather of open diary (back in the day, that is - I've no idea what kind of beast OD is nowadays), though it's perhaps a bit more creative and less overtly self-absorbed...that same kind of matter-of-factness coupled with the desire to emote, to solicit, to reach out without quite knowing what it is in oneself that's missing. I generally prefer the funny ones, or the more abstract, artistic ones (my favourite in the book is a simple, colour spectrum type thing - you know, sort of blurry-edged horizontal bars shading into each other, from yellow through oranges to pinks, with the words "I feel lighter" written on its left-hand side)...I also like the way that the book can function as a kind of tarot deck equivalent, or magic 8-ball - open it to a random page and divine the answer to your question, or meaning in general, from whatever you find there...

Everlasting Regret

Steph asked me if I wanted to see this, screening at MIFF, and, as usual, I was happy to drift along. Follows (in the words of the festival guide blurb) a troubled anti-heroine through the upheavals of the recent history of Shanghai, from the 1940s through to today, and has a kind of wistful elusiveness that worked the trick on me. The early scenes paint a picture of Shanghai in nostalgic hues, all hazy soft edges and luscious bleeding colours Wong Kar-wai comes inevitably to mind), men in nice suits and women in pretty dresses, Western jazz music in the air, and they're my favourite - but the subsequent slide through successive epochs has the flavour of a whole (albeit composed of distinct parts), and it's involving despite the distanced way in which it is shot, given focus by the trajectory of Qiyao (played by an actress who's apparently a hugely successful pop star under the name 'Sammi') and her lifelong friends, Lili and Cheng (one of the best things about the film is the way the dynamic develops and shifts as between the three of them), along with the lovers with whom she becomes entangled, the nationalist powerbroker Officer Li, the rich man's sensitive son Ming, and the young drifter Kela.

It's about the people as much as it is about the city, and it's shot with a heavy focus on faces and bodies, and as far as the broader settings go, it virtually never moves beyond interiors - there are no panoramic city shots, only rooms filled with mirrors and the detritus of domestic and social life. (The look of the film is a real strength - it's uniformly gorgeously shot.) I found the melodrama rather overdone - I haven't seen so many tears and tantrums in a film for as long as I can recall - but the ending is quite affecting in its restraint. I'm not familiar with Shanghainese history, but the backdrop is the takeover of government by the Communist party and the various black market, nouveau capitalist and so on machinations that ensue, but all of it is only really sketched in, even when it's in the foreground as far as plot goes; moreover, the chronology of the events of the film itself is quite confusing and difficult to follow, which isn't helped by the film's tendency to make large leaps in its narrative without really filling in what has happened in between.

So a bit of a mixed response all up, especially once I try to make sense of it, but overall I definitely liked Everlasting Regret - somehow, it just has a feel to it which has caused it to linger.

100 favourite songs: #98: "Faster" - Manic Street Preachers

Time was when I was a lot angrier than I am nowadays, but I liked a good anthem just as much then as I do now, which may go some way to explaining why, after all these years, The Holy Bible still stands up so well for me. It was the Manics’ last with Richey James on board, and their one true masterpiece, and I think that it must be the angriest and the blackest album that I’ve ever heard; there was a time, brief but stormy, when it was pretty much all I listened to, slouching around uni or at home, and even now, I can perfectly understand how it gained that hold on me.

Really, the whole album is basically the same thing over and over — grinding riffs, sneering, ragged vocals, lines that don’t scan and are all the better for it, one magnificent call to arms after another — and the quality of its songs is consistently high, but two in particular have always stood out: “Ifwhiteamerica…” and “Faster”. The former is distinguished by having the most compulsive verse/chorus/bridge on the album, and being one of the most immediately memorable and obviously tuneful. “Faster”, by contrast, is in many ways a relatively weak song, but it has two things going for it, along with all the other virtues of The Holy Bible as a whole, which make it a favourite of mine: the raging, spiralling, stabbing blast of its opening salvo and first verse, and the three seconds of sheer bile and genius conjoined in which JDB throws out all notions of scansion and simply spits out the words “I know I believe in nothing but it is my nothing”. Utterly undeniable.

100 favourite songs: #99: "Alison" - Elvis Costello

It’s a great song, is all, and timelessly so. Clear-sighted, caustic, hopelessly romantic; seething, articulate and heartfelt, and a classic melody into the bargain.

100 favourite songs: #100: "Sand" - OP8

Came across this on Rage one night, and was captivated. I’m fascinated by Americana — by the myth of the wide open expanses ’cross which solitary figures travel, searching for themselves — and this song perfectly captures that windy, desolate dream-landscape … - 9/4/04

OP8 was a joint project of members of Giant Sand and Lisa Germano, and this duet, scuttling and sighing, feels like every mysterious nocturnal Old West chance encounter you ever imagined, campfire, hauntings, tumbleweed and all (it’s actually an old Nancy and Lee number, I think). For me, the shadow-edged spag-western dynamics of “Sand” summon a swirl of images and associations which I can’t quite grasp even when they arise in my mind, never mind articulate them in words — but they have something to do with drifting, and solitude, and endless uncharted new frontiers with the horizon always before one, and the unnameable magic that seems to inhere in all of that…it’s a song that works in the space between imagination and allusion, and it’s mighty fine at that.

Truman Capote - Summer Crossing

And, speaking of appropriate giver/book combinations, this one was from Tamara. I don't know much about Capote, my previous exposure having been basically limited to Breakfast at Tiffany's and the recent film, but Summer Crossing is apparently a newly-discovered first novel of his. I didn't really know what to expect, and was quietly delighted (a delight which was quiet even by the standards of those usually offered in the immediate moment of reading literature, but a delight nonetheless) to find an elegantly drawn portrait of sparkling, doomed youth in the 1940s - though the milieu's not quite the same, at times I felt almost as if I were reading Fitzgerald.

Possibly I've only imported this thought because of my knowledge that Summer Crossing was a first novel, but it does feel a bit rough around the edges in places - a sentence or an image falls in a place that strikes a subtly wrong note, or a shift to a different character's point of view jars, or the pacing seems to have momentarily skipped a beat (most notably in the last 15-20 pages or so) - but it's probably revealing that the figures of speech which have come naturally to mind in describing this novel are musical...

The writing is, for the most part, light and clean, and if it occasionally tips into over-floweriness, every one of those slight miscalculations is balanced by a moment of genuine lyricism; as far as the latter goes, this passage was the first in the novel that touched me a little (it really needs the context, but anyway):

...Whereas Peter had cared exceedingly. All their childhood she'd helped her friend build, drafty though it was, a sandcastle of protection. Such castles should deteriorate of natural and happy processes. That for Peter his should still exist was simply extraordinary. Grady, though she still had use for their file of privately humorous references, for the sad anecdotes and tender coinages they shared, wanted no part of the castle: that applauded hour, the golden moment Peter had promised, did he not know that it was now?

...a passage which takes on greater resonance in light of the novel's ending, too.

Anyway, this doesn't feel like a book to which I'll return, but it does have something - an air, an atmosphere - that I very much associate with The Great Gatsby, this sense that I can never put into words but which I feel has something to do with bright, glittering lights, beautiful people poised fragilely, and intimations of shadows at the edges...

Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle

This was from David (inscription: "Finally, I get you a book") and, of all the people who are at all likely to be giving me books, he is/was, in retrospect (that is, having read Cat's Cradle), by far the most likely to've given me this one, I reckon.

Reminded me of nothing so much as a less dense Pynchon (who, incidentally, has a new book in the works - much excitement...must get round to finally reading Mason & Dixon some time soon) - that same sense of screwball alarums wrapped up in textual puzzles and enigmas and inextricability,[*] of a cynical vision touched by an unsettling and sometimes shocking but nonetheless humane (or at least human) humour, of an author (text) engaged in mapping out and showing us How The World Is, of a voice and narrative that is at once smart (in the sense of both 'clever/intelligent' and 'wise-cracking'), acerbic and clear-sighted, all seeming more to unspool (or 'ramify', or something) than simply to develop or go forward.

Also, it's funny and acute and maybe a little bit wise, and it's about the end of the world.

* * *

[*] Consider the framing device - the "tentative tangling of tendrils" in which the narrator offers his Bokononist warning about lies. (Never mind the opening epigraph, renewing the old problem of the Cretan - "Nothing in this book is true".) Accept for a moment that the narrator 'really' is a Bokononist; in this case, there's no reason to think that anything else he recounts in the book is true. But, he tells us, something useful can be founded on lies, and that's surely how we must take Cat's Cradle. Is Vonnegut a Bokononist? It's probably as good a term as any.

"The world is the case": Dustin Long - Icelander

...or, as the philosophical investigators Wible and Pacheco also describe their activities, the case is the world, indeed.

Now, after a second reading in close succession to [from?] the first, I feel that I've come closer to 'solving' Icelander than I was immediately after the first time through (eg, I'm pretty sure that it's Hubert Jorgen who is responsible for all the footnotes, and that he was indeed in cahoots with the mysterious Surt...is/was Magnus really Surt? Yes. No. Maybe.), but that's still not particularly close. Deliberately enigmatic, confounding, unresolved, the text's stocks in trade are uncertainty, misunderstanding, simulacra and forgery, failure of meaning ("I -- no" / "I know") and paranoia; unreliable intertexts abound along with self/meta-referentiality (the throwaway Wittgenstein pastiche above, the coroner named Barthes, the victim named MacGuffin, the copy of Tristram Shandy lying around, &c, &c), and while there's a denouement of sorts (complete with the hoariest old detective fiction cliches, the gathering of the major protagonists in the parlour, ready to hear the explanation for all that has gone before), it doesn't at all function in the way that, on its surface, it might seem to.

The comparisons made by the blurb-writers to The Crying of Lot 49 and Nabokov are spot-on - as to that latter, Pale Fire in particular is much in the same vein - and, rather than seeming merely derivative, Icelander achieves a pleasing synthesis of many of the best aspects of those two and the various streams which come with them. In fact, the one thing that holds me back from believing Icelander to be genuinely touched by greatness is that it wears those influences too much on its sleeve - the centrality of the disputed play texts seems a direct nod to Lot 49 (and even if it isn't, the in-that-case-unintentional is rather too marked), while the manner in which the footnotes are used is very similar to that in the Nabokov...

But, that said, Long is very recognisably a writer of the now (although I didn't realise this until I'd got the book home and started reading it, it's on McSweeney's, and that fits) - he doesn't have the ever-ramfiying erudition of a Pynchon or the elegant classicism of a Nabokov (or, at least, he doesn't have them on display in his writing), and I get the impression that he's much more in line with the likes of JSF and Dave Eggers...but unlike, say, Everything Is Illuminated or AHWOSG, the way in which Icelander invokes and engages with its theoretical/conceptual terrain convinces me (whereas I must confess that I often found while reading both of those former two, and the Foer in particular, that I was thinking thoughts along the lines of "yeah, yeah, I've read the same secondary sources explaining the theory you're gesturing at as you - and I bet I understood it better than you, too" (gosh I can be an unattractive person sometimes!)). Then again, while both JSF and Eggers are capable of writing genuinely affecting passages and wholes, Long doesn't even try - that's not what Icelander's all about, and maybe it couldn't possibly be.

What it shares with Lot 49, Pale Fire (which, I ought interject, I've never read in full), Everything Is Illuminated and AHWOSG is the characteristic of being very, very funny, laced with a fine sense of the absurd, and a structure and sensibility which make that humour intrinsic and essential to the novel as a whole. Whether the humour is linguistic, riddle or joke-based, satirical, slapstick, some combination of the above, or something else altogether, one always feels that it's integral to the whole.

And likewise with all the other little details from which Icelander is constructed - and there are so many such details to savour, from the quirks in writing style to the eccentricities of the characters to the weird left turns in the narrative...and the whole time there's a strange sense of familiarity to it all, whether people are being abducted by the Refurserkir, fox-shirted spirit warriors who are able to summon an absence from which to appear (so that a sure sign that they are nearby is precisely when one hears and senses nothing, which is just like the sound that the Refurserkir don't make), or there is skaldic karaoke in the offing (traditional epic Icelandic heroic ballads done in beer halls), or people are musing about the semiotic significance of a dog's bark or the relationship between cause, effect, and being (ineptly) followed by the subject of one's own (circuitous) investigation.

So, Icelander is excellent - offhand, I'd say that it's my favourite book that I've read this year so far.

100 favourite songs

Ahem.

Songs that I have definitely thought of as my Favourite Song Ever at some point, more or less in order: "#1 Crush" (Garbage); "Lightning Crashes" (Live); "Spark" (Tori Amos); "Creep" (Radiohead); "Wish You Were Here" (Pink Floyd); "Paranoid Android" (Radiohead); "Love Will Tear Us Apart" (Joy Division); "Lorelei" (Cocteau Twins); "Lazy Line Painter Jane" (Belle and Sebastian).

Anyway, it won't surprise anyone when I say that I've always been a very listy person, and music has always lent itself to that pursuit. Some years ago, inspired by triple j's annual hottest 100 countdowns (oh, those were the days!), I started keeping a list of my favourite 100 songs, updating it sporadically; all part of the personal canon-building...there are periods when the list doesn't seem particularly meaningful any more, for whatever reason, but I'm glad to know that it's still there somewhere on the hard drive.

So I was thinking that now might be a good time to revisit that list, and to make something of a project out of writing about each of the resultant current 100 faves ("current 100 faves of all time", natch). I've noticed before that reading something I've written in the past about music or literature that I really like will often remind me of the reasons for that liking in the first place (especialy the handful that I've turned out for epinions over the years), and hopefully the writeups of songs to follow will serve that purpose in the future. Often, I'll have written about them before, and in some cases many times, so there's likely to be a bit of self-quotation and self-referencing going on; also, given the strongly associative nature of many of these favourite songs, stay posted for a likely going-out-the-window of the frequently avowed and always only approximately adhered-to "no extraneous/revealing references to personal life" rule for extemporanea...

Don't Come Knocking

I actually considered watching this yesterday, mainly because what I knew of its subject matter seemed likely to be appropriate to the day/'occasion', but the timings weren't right; if I'd known that the main character was named Howard, I might well have made an effort to reorganise things so that I did experience it on Saturday; in any case, though, I caught it this afternoon, having found myself in Carlton with a couple of hours to spare.

What I (thought I) knew about Don't Come Knocking before I saw it was this: it's the new Wim Wenders, it's a western of sorts (complete with music by T Bone Burnett), and its story involves an aging movie star riding off the set of his current film and returning to his old home town where he is confronted with the possibility of making peace with some old demons, most particularly in the form of his family (I'd also picked up the identities of the main members of the cast). As it turns out, while he (Howard) does indeed first ride, then drive, back to his mother's, she is no longer on the old ranch but now lives in small town Nevada - and from there he spins on to Montana, where his son (with whom he's had no contact, and of whose existence he may not have known - I wasn't sure) and the mother of that child, an old flame, live...but, that minor detail aside, what I was expecting was largely what I got...storywise, it has some obvious similarities to Broken Flowers, and while its underlying concerns are quite different, it shares with that film a distinctive flavour and poetry that I can only describe as 'cinematic'.

The film looks great - the myth of the American west has always loomed large for me, and this has only increased with my falling into the music which goes with those imaginative landscapes over the last 18 months or so, and Wenders doesn't stint on the panoramic vistas and the sudden, striking beauty (whether widescreen or more intimate). The casting and actors are a continuing highlight here: I'm not familiar with Sam Shepard (though the name is very familiar), but he holds it all together as the rugged, weatherbeaten cowboy at the centre of things and is unobtrusively good; the iconic status of Eva Marie Saint as his mother (I had no idea that she was even still alive, never mind acting) works for the part and she acquits herself well; Gabriel Mann (another unfamiliar figure), as Earl, Howard's skinny, angry, rock 'n' country music-singing son, is very impressive; Jessica Lange does another turn as the woman from the past knocked around by life, now aged but getting by, and does so with aplomb; and Sarah Polley fits right in in a context which I would never have thought would work for her...also, there's Fairuza Balk, her character seemingly transplanted straight from all the 90s alterna-chick roles that I knew her for back in the day, but also making it work; and Tim Roth in a queer turn as the company man sent to bring Howard back, far short of villainy nor rendered with any particular sympathetic features and nonetheless interesting.

Some nice cinematographic/directorial touches, too - the western elements, say (the stunning opening; the circling effect of the cameras at times; the ironic but still somehow genuinely appropriate modern tumbleweed-surrogate of the cardboard box blowing through the street), and some of the lighting (the glow which often surrounds Sky, Sarah Polley's character, for example) - and there are some killer sequences (the confrontation between Earl and his mother, Doreen (Lange), is fiercely affecting, and the quasi-montage depicting Howard's night on the sofa in the street is excellent, too - and there are others), as well as a well-pitched and uplifting ending. Overall, I think that Don't Come Knocking has its own particular rhythm, and one really needs to allow it to operate on its own terms for the film to work - it certainly won't be for everyone. But, evidently, it worked for me, and while I can't quite pin down how it works, I thought the film very rich and, by its end, satisfying in a way which feels rather profound.

* * *

Post-script: I thought I recognised the voice of the female vocalist on the theme song which plays during the film, but couldn't work it out - surprised and pleased to learn from the closing credits that it was Andrea Corr (the male vocalist being Bono, who I would've expected to be more distinctive but hadn't rung any bells at all at the time).

Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner

First things first: I definitely felt a bit of (internal) resistance towards the idea of reading this book. It happened to be the first selection for the MS AC book club, and based on the blurb and the first two or three chapters, I decided that it was very likely to be utterly well-meaning, worthy, politely liberal middle class-friendly, and dull - the kind of book that people who read a dozen books a year would take to heart and treasure. Moreover, the main story (as disclosed by said blurb) is one of those which I find particularly tedious (unless done exceptionally well or in a sufficiently interesting and original manner) - the 'character does wrong and then seeks (and, inevitably in these kinds of novels, finds) redemption' narrative. Do I sound like just a wee bit of a snob? Well, then - there's not really anything I can say to that, except that, I guess, in some ways these distinctions are what I'm all about, and besides, if I'm unlikely to enjoy a book, then I'm unlikely to enjoy it, however putatively 'unworthy' the reasons for that likelihood.

So anyhow, it's probably unsurprising (for reasons of chicken and egg etc if for no others) that my expectations of The Kite Runner were largely met. I didn't find it difficult to read, but I also never - with one important caveat - really felt engaged by the novel...I think that it's a very good (in the positive sense of well-written and well done, rather than just particularly typical) example of its kind, but evidently not good enough to reach a reader like myself who isn't drawn to that 'kind'. The characters convince, the story has momentum, the settings are interesting - and I felt that I'd learned a bit about Afghan culture along the way - but in the end there just wasn't enough of anything to it, any intangible sparkle, to make me feel that it had been worth my time reading the novel. The one caveat, which I mentioned earlier, and which went some way towards making reading the novel a worthwhile experience for me, is that the last 30 or so pages do pack a genuine emotional punch, suggesting that I'd been more involved in what had gone before than I'd realised...but that, though something, just wasn't enough for me. If I kept different company, I would probably be able to recommend The Kite Runner quite highly to many of my hypothetical acquaintances, but as it is, well...

"Casual Exhibit 06: Dom + Jen" @ Addix Cafe Bar

I bumped into Jenny W on the bus a couple of weeks ago and she mentioned that she and a friend were having a 'once off' exhibition evening showcasing some of their work in the near future; I made politely interested noises (well, I was politely interested) and glanced at the follow-up mass email that she sent a bit later, and that's probably where it would've rested had I not then run into her again last Thursday, the night before the exhibit (during which run-in something she said caused me to put the pieces together and realise that her co-exhibitor was in fact the very same Dom K with whose orbit my own briefly intersected a few years back). So anyway, with that encounter to freshen my recollection, I swung by for a while on Friday night after dinner and was quite impressed - taken as a whole, it was a bit all over the shop, as it was comprised of their separate work (ie, not collaborative) and both displayed in a variety of mediums and styles, but I thought that the works of each showed a bit of talent, and the event seemed to be going off well during the time that I was there.

Current soundtracks

Music of the moment is, in many respects, all of a piece. In particular, we're talking Neil Young (mostly On The Beach but also lots of After The Gold Rush), Wilco (especially Kicking Television and Summerteeth), and that pair of great late 90s R.E.M. records, New Adventures In Hi-Fi and Up (their best two albums, I reckon), as well as, to a lesser extent, bits of Gram and Emmylou (together and separately),[*] the Sundays and Big Star. (Also, "Elevator Love Letter", "Hold On, Hold On" and "There Is An End".)

It's not necessarily that I've been listening to all of those particularly much (though in most cases I have been), but more that it's the music which just feels as if it's drifting in the air around me right now.

* * *

[*] Speaking of whom, this is a good article with whose subject-matter I identified a bit.

Philip Pullman - The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass

Still ace. (See previously.)

Actually, following a link from bookslut, I noticed that a film version of Northern Lights ('The Golden Compass' overseas, apparently) is in the works. Early signs are good - it's being handled by New Line (the crew behind, amongst other things, the Lord of the Rings adaptation), and Tom Stoppard produced the first cut of the screenplay - and it's tentatively slated for early 2007, which seems rather optimistic given that the public announcement of the casting of Lyra was only a few days ago but is a bit exciting nonetheless.

I ♥ Huckabees

I think that I got this pretty much right the first time - it's a wonderful patchwork of colours, ideas and human drama (not to mention a great source of conceptual shorthand for signifying various facets of existence and everything.

(Was inspired to rewatch by Icelander, with which I think Huckabees has a fair bit in common - not least in the prominence that both accord to a pair of existential/philosophical detectives - though Long's novel is more open-ended and unresolved, which may or may not be the particular prerogative of literature.)

Wah-Wah

Arrived at Nova after work; I was wanting to see Don't Come Knocking, the new Wim Wenders (well, actually what I most want to watch at the moment is the new Pirates of the Caribbean, but that wasn't really on the cards), but both Swee Leng and Wei were keen on Wah-Wah so I allowed myself to be overruled. Took said overruling in good grace, though - of course! - not least because I could hardly begrudge the chance to see Emily Watson and Gabriel Byrne on screen together.

Had had a couple of capsule reviews from people who'd seen the film before - one gave me the impression that it was good but kind of a downer, the other was along the lines (his words, not mine) that it was a film that you'd take your grandmother to. In the event, I think that the latter was closer to the mark, though I could see where the first comment was coming from too. I liked Wah-Wah - its account of latter-day colonial British mores (Swaziland in 1969 as it moved towards independence from imperial rule) is funny, squirm-worthy and, if frequently biting, also essentially fond or at least ultimately merciful, I think. In many ways, it's a film which doesn't go anywhere in particular - and my antipathy towards coming of age tales remains as strong as ever - but there's a pleasing, subtle flavour of loss and nostalgia to it, and some interesting stuff going on with camera work etc, and in the end it's quietly moving, too. Glad I saw it.

Dustin Long - Icelander

Just a placeholding entry, this - browsing in Metropolis the other day, picked Icelander up and was intrigued by the blurb:

A Nabokovian goof on Agatha Christie; a madcap mystery in the deceptive tradition of The Crying of Lot 49; The Third Policeman meets The Da Vinci Code. Icelander is the debut novel from a brilliant new mind, an intricate, giddy romp steeped equally in Nordic lore and pulpy intrigue. When Shirley MacGuffin is found murdered one day prior to the annual town celebration in remembrance of Our Heroine's mother--the legendary crime-stopper and evil-thwarter Emily Bean--everyone expects Our Heroine to follow in her mother's footsteps and solve the case. She, however, has no interet in inheriting the family business, or being chased through steam-tunnels, or listening to skaldic karaoke, or fleeing the inhuman Refurserkir, or-- But Evil has no interest in her lack of interest, and thus: adventure ensues.

and the opening paragraph:

Our Heroine woke to the sound of snowflakes, plaughtting against the window, perfect stellar dendrites that shattered as they crashed against the glass. Through a too-dry throat she groaned at them--some Adamic word of banishing--but it was fruitless, and the snow's frigid spirit managed nonetheless to translate itself across the pane. From there it pressed on through blankets, quilts, and sheets to possess Our Heroine buried nude beneath. She shivered, let a yawn well through her body, and as she stretched herself out among the farthest reaches of bed, she felt the acids built up in her limbs; she felt how far she could stretch without touching anything at all.

and some other passages that my eye fell upon as I flipped, such as this (which I later learned, upon reading the whole novel, was an exchange between Our Heroine and the philosophical investigators Mr Wible and Mr Pacheco):

"Noted. And as long as we're being amiable, I do like the mustache, Pacheco. The grey Fu Manchu thing works for you. It does a lot for your image as a mystery metaphysician. Goes well with the trench coat."
"Your valueless flattery is not enought to distract us from our purpose."
"Duly noted. But, as pleasant as this all has been, I should really be going now."
"Of course. And in opposition to my partner, I appreciate your appreciation of my moustache. It took me quite a while to grow it out."
"Well, it was worth it. It looks good."
"The Image is the mask of Substance, but sometimes the two can become transposed."
"Okay. I'll see you guys later, then."
"Indeed you shall. Indeed you shall."

So I took it home, and finished reading it a few days ago, and have been delighted to find that Icelander lives up to all that was promised by those initial impression. But I started re-reading the book straight away, and am amidst that right now, so more thoughts to follow.

Helium - Pirate Prude

Fuzzy sharp-edged crashing waves of guitar noise with Mary Timony's reedy voice weaving uncertain skeins through and around, all things fiery, lo-fi and epic; melodies like falling tears in a hard autumn rain. On this record, at least (1994; Matador), Helium make music something like the way a cross between Siamese Dream-era Pumpkins (and especially songs like "Today", "Hummer" and "Mayonaise") and Mira would sound (maybe with a bit of Throwing Muses tossed in for good measure). For basically as long as I've liked 'alternative' music, I've been wired to respond to this kind of stuff - and, as far as that goes, Pirate Prude is pretty damn great. Four long songs and two shorter ones, all excellent.

Dorothy Parker, still

[7/9/17: this entry rehoused elsewhere. Not actually so revealing in terms of autobiography, but very much so in terms of sensibility!]

Philip Pullman - Northern Lights

Splashed out a little while back and bought myself the box set of the trilogy. I just read these last year (which was the first time), but some books lend themselves to earlier re-reading than most, and Pullman's literate fantasy cycle - supposedly written for children, and I can imagine the books having a huge impact on receptive ones, but of course we know better than to be misled by those kinds of 'supposedlies' - seemingly falls into that category.

This time round, there was less urgency to my reading - less haste to plow through and find out what would happen next, what strange wonder would emerge from the next casket to be opened - and I was better able to appreciate the craft and the elegance of the novel...the way it sets up a cascading series of uncertainties and realignments in its opening chapters, the deft way in which leaps from setting to setting are handled and foreboding inklings of future possibilities are introduced, the lyricism and grandeur of its key descriptive and imaginative passages. A'course, I have been reading it through the prism of the book's being primarily written for children (or, perhaps more accurately, that nebulous class of person which only seems to exist for the purpose of the marketing of books, 'young adults'), and made corresponding allowances, but it's darn good on any terms and remains so on a second reading.

Thoughts on first reading here, and also on The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, both probably soon to also be re-devoured.

Renaissance

Pretty good, this. Not good in a Sin City push-you-back-into-your-seat-with-its-sheer-force kinda way, but good nonetheless. Noirish animation, almost all in black and white, graphic novel sensibility without overplaying its hand either visually or 'philosophically' (had a couple of 'uh-oh' moments but the film always pulled back from the brink), story perhaps a bit predictable but, y'know, these moves and twists are, in a way, wired into us and so we respond to them anyway, whether because of their immanent properties or out of familiarity...

Raise The Red Lantern

As befits a film with the word 'red' in its title, Raise The Red Lantern is drenched in colour - reds, yes, and associated oranges, but also notably deep, rich blues (though sometimes almost garishly so, leading me to wonder about the quality of the transfer to the dvd) shaded with black. It's drenched, too, in what I can only describe as a sombre hue - a heaviness and sense of abject constrainedness that Asian directors (here, Zhang Yimou) seem so often to do so well; it's a beautiful and unshakeable film and its suffocating gilded-cage atmosphere is part of that effect. (Beauty as an effect? Well, never let it be said that I'm one to shy away from large claims or assumptions...)

For basically as long as I can remember, I've had the sense that, at some point far in the past, I saw this film, or at least bits of it, and probably Farewell My Concubine too (for some reason I always think of the two together), and had retained - or thought I'd retained - a profound sense of slow, stultifying sadness.[*] Having watched it last night (Friday), I don't think that I'd seen it before - though I'm still not sure, and after all, often it's the memory of how something felt that lingers rather than the memory of the thing itself - but it does have a certain iconic quality (even) on its own terms, a kind of intrinsic statuesquerie. This is augmented by some of the choices made - the way that the master is always occluded, say, as if his identity is irrelevant (as opposed to his symbolic tole), or the striking opening vignette in which Songliang. And as events go forward, things take on a genuinely tragic air.

I have to say, it impressed me more than I liked it - but then I don't know if 'liking' is really a meaningful category or type of response for a film such as this in the first place. There's something in Raise The Red Lantern that I'm not sure I've seen before in a film - something powerful and strange and, I suspect, unshakeable.

* * *

[*] Actually, it was the fact of this coming up in conversation with Steph a while ago which resulted in this viewing - a while later, she'd made a gift of the dvd to me (one of those occasion-less gifts which are always the more appreciated for their lack of a pretext).