"Hokusai" (NGV International)

I came for the Prussian blue and wistful impressions of the floating world, I stayed - for three hours, actually running out of time to see the last few sections when the gallery closed - for the much wider palette (colour-literal and emotionally figurative) across this large and wonderful exhibition.

The ones from the 'Thirty-six views of Mt Fuji' were the highlight, each different in perspective and making space for the natural and the human world (the idea of them existing in harmony is a bit of a theme). One of the unexpected delights is the way that Hokusai's eye extends to a sympathetic and often joyful depiction of the people, tiny, who appear in his landscapes, like in this one, showing a group of travellers awed by an enormous tree:

This one, "Reflection in Lake Misaka in Kai Province", is a bit of an outlier in how it explicitly plays with representation, depicting a winter reflection in a summer scene, with the reflection itself off-set from where it ought naturalistically to appear.

The waterfalls weren't quite as dynamic but I did like this one, another that experiments a bit with perspective:

The bridges were also attractive, taking in a wide variety - different types of bridges, close up and more distant. And there's something inherently captivating about a bridge - the span and yearn, the point of passage and transition, and connection.

And my fancy was tickled by the story behind this illustration: a Chinese poet who was sent to Japan to subdue the country with his poetry, meets the Japanese god of poetry disguised as a fisherman, engages in a poetry and dancing contest, and is duly impressed by being told that in Japan the frogs and nightingales also write poetry.

(w/ Yee Fui)

Rivka Galchen - American Innovations

Just finished re-reading American Innovations - a slow and careful read, in part for its many pleasures but also in an attempt to work out what it is that makes it so great, or even just why I like it so much.

I found myself back in the kitchen, still not making spaghetti, and wearing a T-shirt. Not the one I had woken up in, but still a T-shirt that would be best described as pajamas and that I wasn’t feeling too good or masculine or flat-chested in, either. Giotto? It was 11:22 a.m. Making lemon chicken for that man would have been a better way to spend my time, I thought. Or garlic chicken. Whichever. I felt as if there were some important responsibility that I was neglecting so wholly that I couldn’t even admit to myself that it was there. Was I really taking that man’s delivery order so seriously?

Well, I have some ideas on both fronts, but for all of the artfulness that's gone into these stories, I can't help still feeling that there's a fair amount of flat-out magic going on too. Everything is unstable, haunted, and Galchen has so many ways of jolting and destabilising the reader - with an unexpected backhanded observation, a startlingly original and beautiful image or phrase, a left turn from one sentence to another, a weird juxtaposition. Her perspective is somehow sideways of the world, yet also very much intersecting with it.

I had recently heard someone use the word “poleaxed.” That word made me think back to those years in Kentucky as a child—I don’t know why, that was the thought. I was a fancy citified woman now, and so my life could have properly sized disasters, ones in the comedy-of-manners way of things, rather than in the losing-a-limb-to-a-tractor-blade way of things; that was another thought. If there was no blood on the floor, then it wasn’t a tragedy. That was what “urban” meant. Could mean. Poleaxed. I had also once come across a phrase about a book “lying like a poleaxed wildebeest in the middle of my life.” It was my life that was lying in the middle of my life like that, like a poleaxed wildebeest.

I still particularly like the gentle "Wild Berry Blue" and the wilder "The Entire Northern Side Was Covered With Fire", as I did last time, and the precise brilliance of "The Lost Order" and the title story also struck me. Everything feels connected in the end, although the connections are rarely straightforwardly metaphorical or anywhere near the surface - they force the reader to fill in the gaps, but within the architecture of tacit associations and meanings that sustain the story as written, which is a lot of their peculiar brilliance, I think.

Eventually—the sun was still high—I walked out to the gyro place. Those bells jangled in a mediocre way when I entered. That soda fountain was there, also the smell of fresh-cut onions. I didn't recognize any of the patrons. I still haven't seen my father again. Nor have I seen Eddy. It's only been twenty-two weeks or so, though. And the other morning I thought there was string cheese in the refrigerator, and then there it was, actually there. Maybe it's wrong of me, but I do hope that nobody buys this building for a long time. I have the sense that ghosts like to return to the same places. I, anyhow, like to do that. And there is something about the bones of this place; it really is easier to dream here.

John Denver - 16 Biggest Hits

John Denver is one of those artists who's always kind of in the air, but he's been especially prominent lately, showing up in critical scenes in Free Fire (twice, including the song that I now know is called "Annie's Song"), Okja ("Annie's Song" again) and, today, Logan Lucky ("Take Me Home, Country Roads", with which I have possibly stronger associations than is really healthy), so it seemed a good time to check out a best of.

The biggest ones are those two, plus "Leaving On A Jet Plane" (which I remember from my childhood, and also from the cast's rendition on Armageddon), but it's all quite nice (the others that maybe I already knew, maybe I didn't, but stick the most sweetly, are "Back Home Again" and "Sunshine On My Shoulders".

Father John Misty - I Love You, Honeybear

I had to overcome two obstacles to wind up rather liking this: the excessively a.m. radio sound of the instrumentation and arrangements, and my prejudices about 'Father John Misty' himself, who I thought (in no small part due to the beard) was probably one of those irritating hipster bro types aiming to have his cake and eat it (sensitiveness and knowing irony). But in the end, whether or not the second of those in particular is a fair cop, I can forgive a fair bit for genuinely good tunes and there are plenty of them here. So I still feel conflicted, but I also kind of want to keep listening to I Love You, Honeybear.

"Buddha's Smile" & miscellaneous @ NGV International

Lunch break visit today. I liked the "Buddha's Smile" exhibition and learned a bit about the different Buddhas and associated traditions along the way. It runs the gamut from very old to entirely contemporary, sometimes in juxtaposition (but not forcedly). I enjoyed Takashi Murakami's "Daruma the great" (2009) which seemed kind of reverent while also definitely having a sense of humour; also, in very different vein, was a bit fascinated by the little Japanese Zushi (portable Buddhist shrines) and the Tibetan prayer accoutrements (the prayer wheel especially, from 18th/19th century).

Also Tim Johnson's "Imitating Art" (2005), set above a very different type of Buddha piece.

* * *

Other bits and pieces:

• The NGV has been good at installing pieces in the large central ground floor space that are both crowd pleasers and interesting to spend time with, and the current, Michael Lin's "Federation" (2017) is no exception. It brought a smile to my face and I lingered with it.
• The pair of Go Watanabe video projections, "Emo" (2004) and "Landscape" (2006-07), were eye-catching and effective in close-up too. "Landscape" reminded me of the Seventeen Seconds and Faith covers, with its slowly panning and super close-up shot of the face of the animated figure who recites (Japanese) phrases about what she is seeking in a partner in "Emo".
• Wandered through that first room of 20th century international, and along with old favourites like the untitled Rothko red, the blue Soulages, and Michael Andrews' dissolute party scene "All Night Long", was a new (to me) realist painting that was so precise - including its composition - that it has an almost metaphysical (in the general, not specifically the artistic, sense) feel, William Delafield Cook's "An Australian house" (1977).

Logan Lucky

West Virginia NASCAR heist; Stephen Soderbergh; Channing Tatum and Adam Driver (unlikely as brothers; both good), Daniel Craig (bleached blonde - I originally typed that as 'bond' - explosives expert who needs to be broken out of and back into jail to do his part; menacing but never really dangerously and a lot of fun to watch) and sundries (including a small and winsome turn from Katherine Waterston, a slightly larger and maybe equally pleasing one from Hilary Swank, a pretty convincing take on hillbilly womanhood from Katie Holmes, and a very convincing one from Riley Keough, who has been popping up here and there). Moves quickly but never too quickly, and sticks the landing with its ending.

Fumio Sasaki - Goodbye, Things

Subtitle: 'The New Japanese Minimalism'.

I've been noticing a few tendencies towards minimalism in myself for a while now. I'd guess the reasons are a mix of aesthetic (I like the look), ethical (a desire to consume less), practical (less stuff to cart around when I move house!), and psychological (a preference for the sense of space, clarity, and maybe resultant sense of control or freedom?), and it's a mindset shift from the days of collecting as many books, cds and so on as possible, and more generally generating/curating/defaulting to a certain messiness that I probably associated with romantic bohemianism during those impressionable teenage years.

Which makes this book entirely timely and very enjoyable, with sections on 'why minimalism', why we accumulate so much in the first place, tips for saying goodbye to things (eg, 20. Let go of the idea of 'someday', 33. Discard any possessions that you can't discuss with passion, 35. If you can't remember how many presents you've given, don't worry about the gifts you've gotten) and going further along the minimalist journey (eg, 13. The desire to discard and the desire to possess are flip sides of the same coin), and ways that people might change along the way. It's nicely modest in tone[*] and it seems like the author genuinely has gone through the change from 'maximalist' to minimalist and benefited as he describes.

It did inspire me a bit to go even further than I already have in getting rid of possessions, although I suspect I'll run into a lower limit. It's one thing - for example - to have whittled my cd collection from the 1000+ that I previously had done to the most 'essential' 250 or so, but it would be qualitatively different again in terms of a minimalist mindset to actually get rid of all of my cds (though never say never). Clothes would be another frontier for me - I can just about imagine myself with only a skeleton wardrobe ... but it takes a fair bit of imagination at this stage!

* * *

[*] Don't know how much of this is the Japanese voice in translation versus my own projections versus actual thing, but there were the occasional sentences that reminded me of Murakami, eg:

After what I've been through, I think saying goodbye to your things is more than an exercise in tidying up. I think it's an exercise in thinking about true happiness.

Maybe that sounds grandiose. But I seriously think it's true.

"Best MIFF Shorts"

Seven altogether, and - impressively - all good.

Lost Property Office
The Rabbit Hunt
Mrs McCutcheon
The World In Your Window
Let’s See How Fast This Baby Will Go
Fry Day
The Burden

Sentimental favourite for me: "Mrs McCutcheon", in which a ten year old boy who prefers to wear dresses and seems to be tending towards identifying as female becomes friends with another, Indigenous boy rendered an outsider by his skin, done with a sense of drama and style that owes more than a bit to the John Hughes-styled 80s teen film aesthetic and even ends with a school dance.

The one that I suspect will linger: "Fry Day", set on the evening of Ted Bundy's execution and following the 16 year old girl who sets up to take photographs of the crowds who flock to a local public event around the execution and the parallel darker aspects of human nature that she encounters. Maybe "The Rabbit Hunt" too, which is a documentary and has a forcefulness that does feel real. The whimsical existential animated grimness of "The Burden" was also amusing, though maybe a bit thin.

(w/ Kevin)

The Score (Potter Museum)

Variations on the idea of translation between forms, all but a few involving music (I think all of the exceptions instead involved dance). There were a few actual scores as 'punctuation' throughout the exhibition, including some beautiful illustrated Catholic sheets from the 13th, 14th, 15th century and a bunch of 'graphic notation' scores in which composers - including Ligeti - attempted to push beyong traditional notation to represent music in new and different ways.

I suppose it's in the nature of the exhibition's theme that a lot of the pieces were highly conceptual, in their various translations between music and language, colour etc, some of which struck me as interesting in concept but not deep in effect or execution. Exceptions included Danae Valenza's "Phonologies" ("a generic love-letter template ... has been translated and recorded in seven different languages ... These recordings were exposed to spectral analysis and processed as data through a computer program to create musical scores ... The seven tracks that result from this multi staged process of translation are played through a speaker stack that functions like a musical Tower of Babel, the original meaning lost, but in its place a whole host of new refrains") and John Nixon's "Colour-Music Music Composition" (paintings that can be played like a musical score, each element functioning as a cue for musical action - for example, a square is a violin and a triangle is a wine glass).

I also especially liked Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack's mid 20th century wooden 'colour chord stringed sound boxes', relating colour, music and movement - the Bauhaus school, which he attended and where he studied under Kandinsky and Klee, is a definite influence.

(I ran out of time and didn't get to see the top floor properly on this visit.)

Martha Wainwright - Come Home To Mama & Goodnight City

One from 2012, the other from 2016. Neither has really struck me, though I prefer Goodnight City, which leans more into the torchier side of Wainwright's repertoire (Come Home To Mama has a couple of nice moments but is mostly too cacophonous and dissonant, without a balancing payoff, for me).

In This Corner of the World (MIFF)

Anime set in and near Hiroshima during WWII, so no prizes for guessing some of the themes and plot happenings. As it turns out, In This Corner of the World is very nice - the animation is wonderfully painterly, and the overall tone surprisingly poetic as well as attentive to the details of its young protagonist's life and those of the people around her, achieving a smooth blend of the imaginative and the realistic.

(w/ Kevin)

"The Collective - Minnie" (No Vacancy)

Textures and floating crosses (photographs and three or so oil paintings). Kind of dreamy, especially the blue ones.

Jen Cloher - Jen Cloher

One of the two most striking things about this album is how basic it sounds, in the best way: for the most part it's just guitar, voice, drums, with a rock and roll chug and dynamism that reminds me a little of Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (it has that same combination of groundedness and space; of electric ring and organic core), and plain lyrics that cut to the quick and seem genuinely to chronicle Cloher's lifestyle and concerns.

The other thing is the record's sheer quality, somehow still coming as something of a pleasant surprise despite how much I've enjoyed Cloher's previous albums (Dead Wood Falls; Hidden Hands; In Blood Memory), not to mention having seen her play live more than once, back in those days when I actually saw live music. There's a whole stack of frankly great songs here - too many to pick favourites, though it was the menacing crunch of "Great Australian Bite" that first drew me in.

Emily Witt - Future Sex

To some degree, the chapter titles tell the story: Expectations, Internet Dating, Orgasmic Meditation, Internet Porn, Live Webcams, Polyamory, Burning Man, Birth Control and Reproduction, and Future Sex. Witt is a sharp observer and, at her best, a terrifically crisp writer, and the insight and nuance that she brings to sketching out the aspects of modern global western well-to-do youngish person-ness with which I'm (very) familiar both helped to orient me and inclined me to trust that her descriptions of contemporarily future-oriented facets and approaches to relationships, desire and sex that in many cases stretch well beyond my - and most people's! - experience were also on point.

The perspective is definitely female, but in a way that's inclusive and open. It's an inherently interesting topic, and her starting - and end - point of questioning the mismatch between the still prevalent assumption that monogamous love is the ultimate aim and the actual dating etc experience of increasing numbers of thirty-somethings today is intriguing; although this is generally more tacit than explicit, she's good on locating her personal reportage in broader social and technological currents.

Robert Poynton - Do Improvise

This was less good than I'd hoped, partly because it's more heavily slanted towards organisational application than in one's personal and creative lives and partly because - for all of the emphasis on improvisation as a practice rather than something that can usefully just be read and thought about - its suggestions seemed rather obvious and general (notice more, let go, use everything; see everything as an offer), even if the orientation they bespeak is no doubt a helpful one. Still, some handy prompts for me, and an easy read. The improv games were my favourite bit - I can see how they would be fun and useful. 

The Party (MIFF)

It was the cast that convinced me to see this one (directed by Sally Potter); Kristin Scott Thomas is at the centre of things (and she is always pretty good), but Emily Mortimer, Cillian Murphy and Patricia Clarkson are all reliably delightful, and the prospect of seeing them all in a satire of modern English mores - in a political context no less (the occasion is a dinner party celebrating Thomas's character's appointment as shadow health minister) - was appealing. And it was fun - a thoroughly minor bagatelle, but a sharp-toothed one that doesn't outstay its welcome (at 71 minutes) and has welcome elements of farce as well as a piggy-backed elegance arising from the choice to shoot in black and white. Clarkson definitely the MVP, all articulately waspish cynicism wrapped around genuine solicitude.

By The Time It Gets Dark (MIFF)

The only thing that the director Anocha Suwichakornpong, who attended this screening, wanted to say to the audience before the film was to maybe not try to make all the pieces fit together, as many people had found the attempt frustrating. Not that her injunction was likely to stop anyone from making the attempt, but certainly going with the flow and attempting to absorb the piece more as a whole, by internalising and intuiting its poetic logic rather than seeking to 'understand' it analytically, was the more rewarding way to engage with what turned out to be a quite visually beautiful, thoughtfully spiritual and interestingly elusive account of historical (1976) and contemporary Thai society as well as the impossibilities of historical and personal-memorial representation, with all kinds of little cul de sacs, reverie-interludes and multi-dimensional layers and ellipses. If perhaps too cryptic for easy summary, it nonetheless satisfied.



(w/ trang)

Brian K Vaughan & Fiona Staples - Saga volumes 1-7

Got on a mini graphic novel kick a few weeks ago and have caught up on where Saga is up to. I have to say that, while in terms of the form, Sandman is far and away my favourite, Saga might be the most joy-inducing.

With a terrific cast of characters who evolve and deepen across the volumes, and with what feels like the right amount of deaths and new additions along the way, it's also (more generally) immensely imaginative in its action and settings, serious-minded in how it takes on its themes (and strongly on the side of right in pushing its messages of tolerance and diversity), and gleeful in its willingness to exploit the comic form as far as possible in service of what it's doing.

There've been plenty of twists and turns so far, including a volume or two's worth of somewhat slowed-down family-building, with the latest volume ending darkly but seemingly with the promise of a swing towards an endgame of sorts. Really good stuff.

(last time: vols 1-3)

Yourself and Yours (MIFF)

Matter-of-factly enigmatic; the lack of resolution about whether there are, in fact, any women apart from Min-jung, and even what it would mean to answer that question, is consistent with the film's overall spirit and perspective on relationships and what makes them work.

Some of the distinctive tone comes from the choice to shoot most of the scenes statically, giving the conversations - nearly all one on one dialogues - ample space and focus, while lending the whole thing a phenomenologically observational feel; it also accentuates the instability introduced by the (at least) two intrusions of imagined encounters between Young-soo and Min-jung. The Korean-ness probably also adds another layer, including in making Min-jung (and/or doppelgangers) impossible to get a fix on. Liked this one a lot, and the director, Hong Sang-soo, seems like one to watch out for.

A River Below (MIFF)

Thought-provoking documentary looking at the events surrounding the making of a video of local fishermen killing and butchering a pink dolphin along the Amazon in Brazil and using its meat to catch the in-demand piracatinga catfish which led to a ban on piracatinga fishing, including the role played by tv celebrity conservationist Richard Rasmussen and the effects on the community involved as well as more widely; there was also a parallel thread about a biologist attempting to raise awareness about the dangerously high mercury levels in another lucrative species of fish that is popular in Colombia.

It made me think about the ethics of activism for social change, and about the wider forces creating the dependencies and necessities leading to this type of resource use and what it means for those who don't have any meaningful choice about how to earn an income to subsist within the systems established by corporate and market drivers.

(w/ Jade, plus Cass was volunteering for this session)

Hostages (MIFF)

All the signifiers were there - especially in fashion and hairstyle, not to mention the Beatles and rock and roll as a subversive force behind the Iron Curtain - and this film worked for me primarily as a period piece, albeit a tense one, as a group of young art school intellectuals attempts to escape Soviet Georgia, 1983, for the west, with bloody results. Based on real events. The scenes highlighting their innocence and naivete add something to it, as does the closing note about the ban on international travel being lifted in 1991, too late for nearly all of the unsuccessful party.

(w/ Hayley)

A Ghost Story OST

Apt; it sounds like I remember from the film.

24 Frames (MIFF)

My first Kiarostami, and his last. Twenty-four 'frames' - presumably so called because the camera is completely still for each - and each 4 1/2 minutes in length. The premise is that each started from a still image - generally a photograph - and the film-maker then imagined what might have happened before or after that image was taken.

Nearly all take animals as their subjects, and while some have little micro-narratives (will the cow get up and walk away before the tide comes in?) in ways that were surely intentional - and, at times, ever so slightly edge towards the sentimentalising, though who can say how much that's my own fault as a viewer in importing anthropocentric readings into the animals' behaviour? - basically not much happens in most of these, calling for a contemplative approach to looking at what's framed on screen, and to absorbing the repeated motifs across the scenes (snow, waves coming into shore, a fence of some kind in the foreground, latticed/hatched windows, a human vehicle passing through the scene in the background).

Most are black and white, some have music - often, amusingly, with a romantic tinge - and while it certainly required attentiveness, I thought it was worth it.

(w/ trang, and also Kevin)

Wild Nothing - Life of Pause

Bland. Unfortunately, they left the melodies at home with this one.

Good Time (MIFF)

Convincingly scuzzy (including Robert Pattinson!) criminality and desperation, accentuated by the graininess and near-constant shooting in close up.

(w/ Julian)

Laura Marling - Once I Was An Eagle

As much as I like the edgily strummy songs that make up about half of Once I Was An Eagle (and most of its front half), I have to admit that I prefer the ones where Marling's guitar is augmented by percussion and other - always understated - touches, as on cuts like the verging-on-tribal "Master Hunter", the more lightly lilting "Where Can I Go?" and "Once" (both brushed by organ), and especially "Pray For Me", its undulations rising and chiming in maybe the record's brightest moment. Anyway, as a whole, this is a very good album, with all kinds of depths.

(I Speak Because I Can)

The World's Greatest Ballads

Number of discs: 3

Number of times I felt I needed to listen all the way through to tell whether I'd like the individual songs: 1 (given the genre)

Number of songs that I now know the name and artist of, having been vaguely familiar with them before: 2 ("Bleeding Love" by Leona Lewis and "Wherever You Will Go" by The Calling, both pretty good melodies)

Number of songs I didn't know before but have enjoyed listening to: 5 ("If I Were A Boy" by Beyonce, "Empire State of Mind Pt II" by Alicia Keys, "Red" by Daniel Merriweather, "Everytime" by Britney Spears, "Because" by Jessica Mauboy)

Number of songs that I already knew and unabashedly liked: 8 ("Because of You" by Kelly Clarkson, "Complicated" by Avril Lavigne, "Un-Break My Heart" by Toni Braxton, "Here With Me" by Dido, "Time After Time" by Cyndi Lauper, "I Will Always Love You" by Dolly Parton, "Buses and Trains" by Bachelor Girl, "Perfect Day" by Lou Reed (although that last seems very out of place))

Number of songs that I already knew and somewhat abashedly liked: 1 ("Drops of Jupiter")

Number of songs for which liking seems almost beside the point, but if it was the point, I would definitely like them (and which are all back to back on this compilation): 3 (the Eric Carmen version of "All By Myself", the Harry Nilsson version of "Without You" and the Jennifer Rush version of "The Power of Love")

The Endless (MIFF)

Strange happenings when two brothers return to what they believe to be a 'UFO death cult' and discover time loops and other repetition as things get distinctly eldritch. It kept me interested but didn't quite nail either the character-driven drama or a consistently spooky mood (it got closer on the latter front).

(w/ Julian)

"The blank page" (mix cd)

A mix of almost entirely instrumental pieces (in the one or two instances when voice appears, Yoko Kanno & The Seatbelts' "Space Lion" and, I think, Julianna Barwick's "Look Into Your Own Mind", it does so more as an instrument amongst others than as the focal point and/or carrier of any intelligible lyrics) with a lean towards ambience and repetition of the kind that seeks emotional impact, spiritual force and transcendence, drawing on contemporary classical (Max Richter, Johann Johannsson, Vladmir Martynov as done by Kronos Quartet), post-rock/shoegaze (Barwick, Stars of the Lid), and miscellaneous eccentrics mostly with a bit of a jazzy streak (Kanno, Boxhead Ensemble, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Ry Cooder & V.M. Bhatt) plus a Richard Strauss song. Pretty much spot on - the type of music that I like, but haven't explored in that much depth, and for which introductions via a sampling rather than full records is probably the best way in.

(from Julian, for writing purposes)

The Big Sick

Thoroughly charming, contemporary and involving, even though I was pretty sure I knew how it was going to end.

(w/ Erandathie)

A Ghost Story

I wondered beforehand whether I might've built this one up too much in anticipation, but I needn't have worried; after all, A Ghost Story is, indeed, all that.

The conceit works, Casey Affleck's white-sheeted ghost never seemingly like a simple metaphor or stand-in for anything in particular, nor (in whatever sense) like it's possessed - haha - of any straightforward subjectivity, but rather inhabiting a kind of in-between space. (Even the language that's most readily available for describing a movie about a ghost is revealing.)

The choice to shoot it in a squareish ratio (4:3) with rounded corners adds to the unmooring effect, while the soundtrack provides some graceful emotional navigational points, both overtly diegetic - especially the use of Dark Rooms' "I Get Overwhelmed", which had already wound its way under my skin from its use in the trailer - and more atmospherically, especially in a film that's very light on for dialogue (except for a jarring extended monologue about the meaninglessness of existence delivered by Will Oldham around midway through ... was he meant to be super annoying maybe?).

I liked the way that the cutting created elisions in time to suggest that the ghost experiences time differently from those alive - a suggestion which makes a different kind of sense come the film's final circle. It also brings even more into focus the long, still shots which, even in their own right, would already have forced a kind of contemplation of the screen in a way that I'm more used to doing with video art than movies - most memorably, the several minutes in which Rooney Mara joylessly eats a pie (possibly thankfully, the shot of paint literally drying is much briefer). And I also liked the little motif of notes left in cracks (or under stones, as the case may be), to pass in time.

So yes, A Ghost Story is very good. I do think that ghosts are having a cultural moment just now and this film really nails many of the best things about that.

Dunkirk

A somewhat different kind of film from Christopher Nolan, albeit still marked by some of his preoccupations - most notably, the passage of time and how it affects action and people.

The focus is intense, and punishing; characters have no back story and little in the way of arcs, and what's on screen feels more like a series of actions than any kind of plot or narrative. It also literally gave me a headache, compounded no doubt by the massive imax format presentation (fully utilised by Nolan so that, disorientingly, the picture was square or even maybe portrait-dimensioned rather than the usual cinematic landscape - put to use throughout, but to especially sheer effect during the aerial combat scenes); the constantly throbbing, occasionally snapping and cracking score didn't help either on that front.

A powerful and, I think, successful film, its use of spectacle in service to the experience of war that it aims to evoke, but I don't think I'd watch it again and it falls into the 'easier to admire than love' category for me.

(w/ Andreas and Adam)

Ghost in the Shell

It may not have been wholly original, but I still enjoyed the way the future city of Ghost in the Shell was visualised. Beyond that, though, unfortunately there wasn't much going on here - doubly disappointing given that several of the key roles were filled by actors capable of plenty (apart from Scarlett, there were also Juliette Binoche, Pilou Asbaek and Takeshi Kitano). Basically uninteresting.

Rebecca Lee - Bobcat and other stories

So much did I like and admire this collection on my two previous passes-through that it's no surprise that it not only holds up, but maybe even improves, on a third read.

This time I noticed how much desire is a through-line in these stories, the way that landscapes and worlds tend to rise behind (and as if from) people when they're looked at, Lee's unafraidness of posing a poetic image or sharply-edged observation about people quite straightforwardly and explicitly, and perhaps similarly her willingness to plant what seems to be an obvious plot turn early in a story and later follow through with that exact development (in a way that nonetheless feels profound), and the humour in many of the little insightful asides:

"You can have both those thoughts at the same time," I said. "You can feel very critical of a man even as you're sleeping with him," I said. David Booth laughed a little at this, a gesture that was enough to keep me interested in him for another few years.

I was struck again by how wonderful her sentences are, for the most part in their simplicity (There was a tropical storm on its way that evening, and it was already quite windy, and the girls' hair, all curly and brown, was flying around in the shifty air.) and sometimes in extended, wending yet still unfailingly clean lines:

It's true there are large turning structures - Ferris wheels - that will carry people high into the air above the ocean, that is true, and then around the next corner there are funhouses, those are great, and then there are just ordinary playgrounds on every corner, and there are things not even for children that are for children, like church spires that look like weather vanes, and there is one downtown that actually spins, a little spinning cross, an image that would live in the child's mind maybe forever, gathering ideas to it, spinning madly but also stable there, and in tonight's wind it wouldn't even be a cross, it would be distorted into maybe a little question mark, and standing for all the children in town as a kind of fervent lasting joyful little thing they always know.

As of now, my favourites are the first two, "Bobcat" and "The Banks of the Vistula", which both seem to me like basically perfect short stories. And this time it seemed clearer in "Fialta" that when the narrator left Fialta, that was the end with Sands, not the beginning, and somehow, that even though that wasn't why he felt hardly any grief at all at the time, lying on the hay as the cows watched on, remembering human love, still, perhaps it never could have been any other way (how can I blame her, being what she was and Fialta being what it is?).

(first impression; second impression)

CDs - a last shakeout for now

Okay, this really is the end of it (surely) - the final squeeze of my collection for now. Two excellent but maybe not truly essential albums by artists who are certainly essential, and three others for which the calculus of personal associations and meaning and present day enjoyment doesn't quite make keeping them necessary. (earlier this month: 1, 2, 3)

The Sixth Sense

I can't remember whether I already knew the twist when I first watched this film, however many years ago (it wouldn't have been too long after it was released), but inevitably that was uppermost in my mind on this long-delayed second viewing, brought on by my current interest in ghosts - in which vein, the solution of listening to what they have to say was resonant. This is a good movie; there's a reason why it's become so much a part of the culture.

"Greater Together" (ACCA)

It turns out I wasn't in the right kind of mode to really engage with this today, so it may be one for a return visit, as today only two penetrated, and even then really on the level of their monumentality: Bik Van der Pol's "Letters to the Land" and Goldin + Senneby's "Standard Length of a Miracle" (dominated by the installed oak tree at its centre, although the piece itself is in fact part performative and not simply static). In a little trace, too, I noticed that one of the people with whom artist Celine Condorelli is in conversation in the book that's part of her 'reading room' installation is Avery Gordon, whose Ghostly Matters impressed me recently.

"Fast Fashion: The dark side of fashion" (RMIT Gallery)

About the very detrimental effects of 'fast fashion', particularly for the (primarily developing world) labour force and the environment, and more generally the global textile chain associated with clothing production, sale and discarding.

The Beguiled

As lushly beautiful a film as any that Coppola has made, which is saying something; despite the 1860s, Civil War-era Virginia setting, the one to which it most harks back is The Virgin Suicides. A mistiness hangs over everything, from the forest of the opening scene to the many still shots of the grand southern house and gardens in which all of the rest of the action takes place (lending extra weight to the intrusion of Colin Farrell's wounded soldier's presence and the interactions with other outsiders at the ornate gate, as well as the slow zoom-in past his body and the tied blue ribbon that closes the film), and the atmosphere is charged and intense with a heaviness that is almost gothic by around the mid section - an air that's added to by the (deliberate, I'm sure) unreadability of all of the adult principals (Farrell, Kidman, Dunst; Elle Fanning also sound).

It's not just a mood piece, but rather turns out to be interestingly difficult to parse in terms of what it has to say about its characters' motivations, choices and limitations, with the characters' actions and the turns of the plot emerging in a way that seems straightforward but is, at the same time, somewhat cryptic in that very simplicity, making it hard to know how we should feel about it all. Coppola is, along with Wong Kar Wai, comfortably the most iconic film director active today for me, and The Beguiled is an intriguing addition to her catalogue.

(w/ Kelly)

Haley Reinhart - Listen Up!

A rather middling pop album, leaning a touch soul and jazz-wards, which has a bit of personality but doesn't capture the flair of those Idol performances still living on via youtube, with the lack probably being equal parts songwriting and translation of Reinhart's vocals on to record.

Frankenstein (Lally Katz; Theatreworks)

An enjoyable blast, chopped up into a series of mini-scenes telling the familiar tale refracted through a lens that includes 80s music, talking animals, significant camp and an expressively sympathetic monster.

(w/ Jon)

Okja

Well the super-pig is pretty great. And so is this whole film, both somewhat despite and thanks to how pointedly polemical it is (those scenes at the end in the factory farm are brutal).

Directed by Bong Joon-ho, also responsible for the memorable Snowpiercer (and The Host, which I still haven't seen) and while he does have a pretty unique vision, I realised earlier today that the style isn't a million miles away from Jeunet's (still high praise after all these years).

Pratchett

Another large part of my history being set free as part of the current divesting of objects (see, e.g.).

Baby Driver

Tremendous fun, from the get go where it throws its cards on the table with an actually exciting car chase (a rarity in my books); the larger-than-life cinema-romantic flourishes are a nice touch, and Jon Hamm gives good deranged, with all of the principals sharp in their roles (and, importantly, all looking the part) even though some of the characters are pretty thin and their decisions sometimes implausible. And of course the drive (ha ha) provided by the music doesn't hurt. Oh and I never realised that it was the same director (Edgar Wright) behind Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, and Scott Pilgrim! All of his films that I've seen, including this one, sure have a pep to them.

"The Fifth Estate: Politics and Public Policy" (Wheeler Centre)

Geoff Gallop and Peter Hartcher in conversation with Sally Warhaft. Quite interesting. I liked their answers to her question about naming a 'perfect policy' (Hartcher: NDIS, GST; Gallop: safe injecting clinic in Kings Cross, Sydney). Also reminded me how in some ways particular my own perspective on 'politics and public policy' is (through the lens of the public service).

CDs - a final whittle (for now)

A last few as part of the huge cull I've been doing, bringing the total that has gone out the door over the past fortnight or so to about 850.

(the other rounds: 1, 2)

Kate Atkinson - A God in Ruins

There are both similarities and differences when compared to Life After Life, to which A God in Ruins is a 'companion' piece rather than a sequel as such, although it does take up a version of Teddy Todd's life and flesh it out forwards through time from his return from the POW camp at the end of the ultimate story from Life After Life, with Ursula slipping in and out, many others from the previous book in the margins (including Teddy's aunt Izzie in a crucial framing role), and Sylvie and Nancy prominent, along with two new generations through Viola, Bertie and Sunny.

I liked the way it represented time and consciousness, slipping easily between time horizons - past and future - and between points of view within the spaces of paragraphs and lines. More than a formal trick, it felt true - a reflection of how lives, histories and worlds really are experienced, and consonant with Atkinson's perspective on all of the above. And I think it added to, rather than detracting from, the emotional effects - quiet and more dramatic - of the little sadnesses and incompletenesses, as well as the moments of kindness and connection, of all of the characters' lives - including the final formal turn when the 'last flight' in 1944 is revisited at the end. Atkinson has always been a writer who could make me feel both happy and sad at once, who seemed able to capture something of what it is to be anything at all, and her gift has only matured over time.

Noises Off (MTC)

A farce about the staging of a farce whose production turns into farce. Cleverly structured, deceptively straightforward in its humour, and handsomely mounted - enjoyable.

(w/ Laura F)

CDs - the big cull

Last week I did an initial cull of my cds - the easy ones, once I'd gotten used to the idea of discarding any at all after so long collecting them - which turned out to be pretty much an even 200 albums (including compilations and a few eps), plus a heap more singles, samplers and old IMP mix cds.

Anyway, having got the ball rolling - and, probably more to the point, having got into the right frame of mind - over the last few days I've cut a lot more deeply, with another 620 or so more now going out the door, again plus singles and miscellaneous. It feels not so much like the end of an era, as catching up to something that passed some time ago now. For the record (albums etc only):

The Lone Bellow - Then Came The Morning

The Lone Bellow know their lane - buildingly anthemic, impassionedly harmonies-filled rock with a country/folk flavour - and when they're in it, they're convincing. The difficulty is that, after several in a row, as makes up more or less the first half of Then Came The Morning (amongst which I reckon "Marietta" is probably my favourite), it starts to sound just a little bit familiar, and they're not as compelling when they explore a slightly broader musical range. Even still, this is good.

(The Lone Bellow)

Goldfrapp - Silver Eye

A steady record, but a bit familiar-feeling by Goldfrapp's standards; best is the second-last track, "Moon in Your Mouth". Also, not a propos of anything but the cover art makes me think of the terrifying monster from Lev Grossman's The Magicians.

Okkervil River - Away

A different type of Okkervil River album, heavy on the 'conversational, raggedly pretty and sad' end of the band's repertoire and completely lacking in any electric guitar storminess. It's not bad for what it is, but I miss the rock bits (the livelier "Judey On A Street", dead in the middle of the album, is a welcome change-up, even though it's more than 7 minutes of build-up with no release).

The Panics - Hole in Your Pocket

I came to this Melbourne-from-Perth band via their cover of "Wide Open Road" and that turns out to be fitting, as Hole in Your Pocket is nine tracks of expansive, contemporarily Australian-feeling rock-pop that does feel like it has a bit of the Triffids' DNA in it. Didn't set my world on fire, but a solid record.

CDs

In days gone by, my musical tastes and collection were an important part of how I defined myself, so even lightly culling my cd collection is no small decision, but yesterday I made a start - the first time, in many years of accumulating, that the collection is shrinking rather than growing.

Reasons, all relevant but from least to most important: (1) they take up space and are a pain to move, and I neither physically play nor display them (no space, or at least not enough space to prioritise cds), so they've just been sitting in boxes for years, lugged from rental to rental, all 10 archive boxes worth; (2) it's all on my computer/ipod nowadays, and plus thanks to the iTunes store, public libraries and more, my music 'collection' extends beyond the actual cds I own anyway; and (3) I guess these days my musical taste, or at least its expression through a collection, just isn't that big a part of my identity any more (wow).

Unlike books, which I'm always trying to whittle from my shelves, and for which I've developed a decent rubric about what merits hanging on to, I wasn't that sure where to draw the line and so I've wound up getting rid of really just the lowest-hanging fruit for now. Maybe a bolder scour is in the future; the really large move would be to get rid of the majority of the remaining ones and maybe only hold on to a hundred or so (maybe 200...) that have particular significance, but I'm not sure I'll ever get that far - mainly, at this stage, because I like the insurance of still having the physical copies in case something catastrophic ever happens to my hard drive rather than because I'm sentimental about the majority of them as physical artifacts - but who knows?

Anyway, for posterity:

The Great Wall

Splashy and colourful, with a few nice flourishes from Zhang Yimou. Pity that the story-telling is so pedestrian.

"John Young: None Living Knows" (Arc One) / "John Beaton: Wabi/Sabi" (fortyfivedownstairs)

The John Young paintings didn't make a huge impression (although they had a certain dreaminess) but John Beaton's photographs captured something - I liked both the ones from around Asia and Europe (especially the Hakone photos, which had the charge of recognition for me) and the Yosemite ones.

Adrian Tomine - Sleepwalk and other stories

These ones didn't quite grab me, although Tomine is highly touted; their slices of urban alienation and the struggle to be happy are deftly sketched but, with a handful of exceptions, not substantial enough to resonate (the overall air is more than a tad Clowes-ian).

Ted Chiang - Stories of Your Life and Others

Extremely elegant idea-driven science fiction. Turns out I'd read several of these before - "Story of Your Life" after seeing Arrival, but longer ago also "Division by Zero" (a mathematician proves that arithmetic as a formal system is inconsistent, with an existential cost for her and a human one with her husband), "Hell Is the Absence of God" (what loving God would mean in a world in which His existence was incontrovertibly manifest, visitations of angels, souls visibly departing for Heaven or Hell upon death, even glimpses of Hell itself through regular turning transparent of the ground) and "Liking What You See: A Documentary" (a scientific procedure is developed which can prevent people from perceiving or responding to physical appearance and beauty) - but all of them, both previously read and new, reward careful attention.

Mariko and Jillian Tamaki - This One Summer

A fairly lovely 'one summer' story, main characters and inseparable summer cottage friends Rose and Windy both on the verge of teenagehood, although there are hints that Rose's additional 18 months of age are beginning to tell. The adult characters are rendered with some sophistication too, the town's older teens less so. There are plenty of little details to savour, some quite subtle - one recurring one that I enjoyed was the attentiveness to sound throughout - but the highlight is Jillian Tamaki's illustration work (they're cousins, writer and artist), dark blue on white and evocative.

Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse - Dark Night of the Soul

I can't work out just what it is that's missing from this one - a multi-party collaboration from 2009/2010 with quite the line-up (Wayne Coyne, Frank Black, Iggy Pop, Julian Casablancas, Nina Persson and more). Most of the individual songs seem quite good, and the genre spectrum is broad in a post-millennial indie-rocky kind of way while held together particularly by Mark Linkous's musical sensibility, yet - at least for me - it's never all that exciting. Just one of those things.

triple j's Like A Version 10

A predictably mixed bag, and probably particularly given that I'm not particularly up with what triple j plays these days, so many of the tracks are by artists I don't know performing songs whose originals I haven't heard.

Best: First Aid Kit with a woodsy country-folk tune (at least in their doing) called "Love Interruption" (originally Jack White), one James Vincent McMorrow falsettoing up Lana Del Rey's "West Coast", a band called Saskwatch's version of a song called "Let Her Go" (Jagwar Ma), and Asgeir on a moody pop number called "Stolen Dance" (Milky Chance).

Also: Illy's "Ausmusic Month Medley" contrives to fuse "Tomorrow", "To Her Door", "My Happiness", "The Nosebleed Section" and "On Top" by Flume and it's surprisingly good.

A Dangerous Method

This time, I was particularly struck by the way that A Dangerous Method registers primarily as a film about psychoanalysis, rather than as either a romance between Jung and Sabina Spielrein (plus domestic element added by his relationship with his wife and their children) or a drama of conflict between Jung and his father-figure Freud, both of which are depicted in enough detail to have allowed them to take such a focus in a different film - an effect that Cronenberg achieves through a very formal and intellectual, even chilly, approach, which feels apt given the subject and period. Also - Vincent Cassel is enjoyable as the wolfish hedonist Otto Gross.

(last time)

Avery Gordon - Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

Some of my favourite passages below, dutifully typed out in the course of a read-through seeking poetic ways of thinking about hauntings; Gordon's approach is politically-minded but also lends itself readily to individual and personal experience. 

Via close readings of psychoanalysis ("sociology needs a way of grappling with what it represses, haunting, and psychoanalysis needs a way of grappling with what it represses, society") by way of Sabina Spielrein (familiar to me from A Dangerous Method), Luisa Valenzuela's He Who Searches and Toni Morrison's Beloved, with quality time spent with Freud (especially "The Uncanny"), Benjamin, Barthes ("Camera Lucida") and Raymond Williams along the way.  

***

If haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities, the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place. The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life. The ghost or the apparition is one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us, in its own way, of course. The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition. (8)

… the method here involves producing case studies of haunting and adjudicating their consequences. What kind of case is a case of a ghost? It is a case of haunting, a story about what happens when we admit the ghost - that special instance of the merging of the visible and the invisible, the dead and the living, the past and the present - into the making of worldly relations and into the making of our accounts of the world. … It is often a case of inarticulate experiences, of symptoms and screen memories, of spiralling affects, of more than one story at a time, of the traffic in domains of experience that are anything but transparent and referential ... (24)

… uncanny experiences are “qualities of feeling” … haunting experiences. There is something there and you “feel” it strongly. It has a shape, an electric empiricity, but the evidence is barely visible, or highly symbolised. [Something familiar] has transmuted into an unsettling spectre. … We are haunted by somethings we have been involved in, even if they appear foreign, alien, far away, doubly other. (50-51)

… the ghost imports a charged strangeness into the place or sphere it is haunting, thus unsettling the … lines that delimit a zone of activity or knowledge. … the ghost is primarily a symptom of what is missing. It gives notice not only to itself but also to what it represents. What it represents is usually a loss, sometimes of life, sometimes of a path not taken. … the ghost is alive, so to speak. We are in relation to it and it has designs on us such that we must reckon with it graciously, attempting to offer it a hospitable memory out of a concern for justice. (63-64)

… the ghost is a living force. It may reside elsewhere in an otherworldly domain but it is never intrinsically Other. It has a life world … of its own. And it carries this life world with all its sweet things, its nastiness, and its yearnings into ours as it makes its haunting entry, making itself a phenomenological reality. There is no question that when a ghost haunts, that haunting is real. The ghost has an agency on the people it is haunting and we can call that agency desire, motivation or standpoint. And so its desires must be broached and we have to talk to it. The ghost’s desire, even if it is nothing more than a potent and conjectural fiction, must be recognised …[but] haunting makes its only social meaning in contact with the living’s time of the now … the need of the dead to be remembered and accommodated … is inseparable from the needs of the living. In other words, the ghost is nothing without you. (179)

… the ghost cannot be simply tracked back to an individual loss or trauma. The ghost has its own desires … the force of the ghost’s desire is not just negative … [The ghost is] pregnant with unfulfilled possibility, with the something to be done that the wavering present is demanding. This something to be done is not a return to the past but a reckoning with its repression in the present, a reckoning with that which we have lost, but never had. (183)

Profane illumination … the immense forces of ‘atmosphere’ concealed in everyday things … the emphasis on phenomenal forms, or habitual relation to them, and their capacity, upon a certain kind of contact, to shatter habit … crossroads where ghostly signals flash … until that one day when they become animated by the immense forces of atmosphere concealed in them. These illuminations can be frightening and threatening … the profane illumination is a discerning moment. … when thought presses close to its object, as if through touching, smelling, tasting, it wanted to transform itself. The profane illumination captures the medium by which we have a different kind of access to the density of experience … [it] captures just that experience of the ghostly matter … [it] is a kind of conjuring that initiates because it is telling us something important we had not known; because it is leading us somewhere, or elsewhere. (204-205, quoting Benjamin and Adorno)

To experience a profane illumination is to experience the sensate quality of a knowledge meaningfully affecting you. … a way of encountering the ghostly presence, the lingering past, the luminous presence of the seemingly invisible … when you know in a way you did not know before, then you have been notified of your involvement. You are already involved, implicated, in one way or another, and this is why, if you don’t banish it, or kill it, or reduce it to something you can already manage, when it appears to you, the ghost will inaugurate the necessity of doing something about it. (205-206)