Song list

I still listen to most of my music on an ipod so itunes keeps track. Fifty most listened to:

	Jan ‘16	Jan ‘15	Jan ‘14	Jan ‘13		Plays
1	1	1	1	1	Different Worlds - Brittany Cairns	224
2	-	-	-	-	Happy & Sad - Kacey Musgraves	209
=3	3	3	3	-	100 Million Little Bombs - Buddy Miller	156
=3	-	-	-	-	Runnin’ Just In Case - Miranda Lambert	156
5	16	-	-	-	Vez Primera - Carla Morrison	153
6	2	2	2	2	This World Can Make You Happy - Amaya Laucirica	152
=7	7	8	9	-	Useless Desires - Patty Griffin	150
=7	4	4	6	43	State of Grace - Taylor Swift	150
9	-	-	-	-	Loner - Margo Price	146
=10	-	-	-	-	The Mother We Share - CHVRCHES	140
=10	14	-	-	-	Learn To Say No - Lydia Loveless	140
12	-	-	-	-	Don’t Pass Me By - Laura Marling	139
=13	-	-	-	-	Summer Pillow - Kasey Chambers	138
=13	-	-	-	-	Sweet By And By - Miranda Lambert	138
15	-	-	-	-	Pay No Mind - Beach House	137
16	6	7	7	5	23 - Blonde Redhead	136
=17	5	5	5	4	New Year - Beach House	133
=17	-	-	-	-	Heartache Is An Uphill Climb - Tift Merritt	133
=19	8	6	4	3	It Must Come Through - Jen Cloher & The Endless Sea	131
=19	-	-	-	-	Slow Burn - Kacey Musgraves	131
21	14	15	17	37	No Bad News - Patty Griffin	127
22	11	10	10	-	Starry Skies - Laura Cantrell	125
23	-	-	-	-	Vice - Miranda Lambert	124
24	10	15	14	15	Slow Show - The National	123
25	-	-	-	-	Bad Reputation - Haley Bonar	122
26	-	-	-	-	Dirty Dream Number Two - Belle and Sebastian	115
=27	13	12	12	8	Aeroplane - The Everybodyfields	111
=27	12	11	8	6	Out Loud - Mindy Smith	111
29	21	19	29	-	Red - Taylor Swift	109
=30	26	23	23	-	Manchester - Kishi Bashi	108
=30	23	25	36	-	From This Moment On - Shania Twain	108
=32	18	15	20	-	Don’t Tell Me - Buddy Miller	106
=32	26	28	36	-	Wild Old Dog - Patty Griffin	106
=34	18	13	13	7	Coming Home To Me - Patty Griffin feat Julie Miller	105
=34	-	-	-	-	Burn The Witch - Radiohead	105
=34	24	25	-	-	Afraid of Nothing - Sharon Van Etten	105
=37	17	14	14	-	Sweet Talk - Jessie Ware	104
=37	-	-	-	-	Nonbeliever - Lucy Dacus	104
=37	26	37	45	29	Bloodbuzz Ohio - The National	104
40	-	-	-	-	Best Years of My Life - Pistol Annies	104
41	36	45	49	29	Let’s Get Out Of This Country - Camera Obscura	101
42	18	15	16	11	Godspell - The Cardigans	100
=43	-	-	-	-	Drunk in LA - Beach House	99
=43	22	20	26	-	You Keep Me Hangin’ On - Janelle Arthur	99
=43	41	34	36	-	Don’t Let Me Die In Florida - Patty Griffin	99
=43	29	28	29	-	I Couldn’t Be Your Friend - Tegan and Sara	99
47	32	25	26	19	The Bleeding Heart Show - The New Pornographers	98
=48	39	45	-	-	Abducted - Cults	97
=48	36	35	29	17	I Got Nothing - Dum Dum Girls	97
=48	32	28	26	-	I Don’t Ever Give Up - Patty Griffin	97

Jorge Luis Borges - Fictions (trans. Andrew Hurley)

Some of these stories, perhaps many, I've read before; it's hard to be sure because all have a slippery familiarity, so that to read them is to feel as if you're retracing the outlines of maps that you already, somehow, knew. "The Garden of Forking Paths", "The Lottery in Babylon", "The Library of Babel", "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", "Funes, His Memory"; even the titles are redolent with associations. It's a surprise to find so much story in some of these (it's not always so clear how much plot there is) - investigations, searches, journeys, knife fights. But it's the captivating quality of the ideas and how they're woven through which makes them stick. I think my favourite might be "The South", which also seems one of the most straightforwardly symbolic and allegorical - to such an extent that I'm troubled by the sense that there is a deeper layer below I haven't yet plumbed...

Three playlists

At the end of last year I distributed my usual end-of-year mix (for 2018) as a spotify playlist, and I've received three playlists in return, at least two - I'm not sure about the third - in similar vein as soundtracks of the previous year.

David's is the most familiar, in terms of artists and sounds, though taught me what a lot of acts whose names I've seen in dispatches actually sound like, of which my favourites are Jay Som ("Pirouette") and Frankie Cosmos ("Young"). Also, now I now what Weezer's cover of "Africa" is like, though I could've exactly guessed without hearing it, as it turns out.

Rob's skews largely towards Australian and independentish pop, and of ten songs, the only artist I'd even heard of before was Amy Shark ("All Loved Up" turns out to be pretty nice). Favourites: the rootsy burst of joy of "Don't Be Hiding" by Middle Kids and the catchy "Groceries" by Mallrat. All very listenable.

Julian's - in which he spared me "most but not all of the abrasive" - ranges widely as usual across prog, folk, power-pop, ambientish, glum singer-songwriter and dissonant pop from decades past. Of the ones I most like, two are from closest to my genre wheelhouses in Sam Hunt, David Kilgour and the Heavy Eight's "Maintrunk Country Road Song" and Tommy Keene's "Underworld"; there's also Paul Buchanan's gentle "Mid Air" and The Body's sinister, screamily industrial "Nothing Stirs".

Capernaum

The story and characters are engaging enough that the milieu - the streets and slums of extreme-poverty Beirut - acquires a sense of realness, including the context of the horrors of people-selling and exploitation being depicted, especially as the effects are felt by children, some very young. Very worthwhile.

(w/ Hayley)

"Frida Kahlo, her photos" & "Gothic Beauty: Victorian notions of love, loss and spirituality" (Bendigo Art Gallery)

The Frida Kahlo photos were photos from her collection, only a few of which she took herself, although some have her marks on them, notably kiss-shaped lipstick imprints on a couple of her lovers'.

The Gothic exhibition was good. I was generally most drawn to the more contemporary pieces with a clear connection to the style's Victorian origins.

Jane Burton - "It is midnight, Dr.__#4" (2016)

Kate Just - "Inward gathering" (2010)

Tracey Moffatt - "Invocations #5" (2000)

(w/ Erandathie, Nic and Simon)

On the Basis of Sex

Nicely made if maybe a touch hagiographic account of RBG's earlier career, culminating in her successful arguing of her first gender discrimination case. There's something a bit routine about how the film is put together (I also gather it's a bit fast and loose with some of the details, the better for dramatic tension), but it still made me feel a bit inspired and moved, so I guess it was a success!

(w/ R)

Mitski @ Corner Hotel, Thursday 7 February

Nice show. Most of her songs are about three minutes long, so in a bit over an hour she got through basically the whole of Be the Cowboy and Puberty 2, plus a fair lot from Bury Me at Makeout Creek (which I haven't listened to but now feel I should) and elsewhere. Mitski herself was instrument-less but performed throughout with physical movements that were much of a piece with the expressivity of her songs; there was a lot of crowd singing along, which I thought was a testament to her ability to capture slices of twenty-something experience in her music. The songs came through well live, with the ones that are good on record basically being the same live; it didn't really shed new light on any songs in particular, though I was struck anew by how much of an anthem "A Pearl" is.

(w/ R)

"Mirka Mora: Pas de deux - Drawings and Dolls" (Heide)

Charming. From her home and studio; conceived as being in honour of her 90th birthday but has ended up as more of a tribute following her death mid last year.

(w/ R)

Rachel B Glaser - Paulina & Fran

Unsurprisingly, there are some marvels of sentences and paragraphs - surprising, cutting and darkly funny - throughout this novel of two art school friends and their discontents, including into adulthood; sneakily, Glaser also manages some feeling along the way. Paulina & Fran is slippery and operates differently than the typical novel working in this terrain, particularly in relation to character, but even allowing for that, it remains a bit insubstantial. Still, interesting; I'd read more of hers.

(Pee on Water)

The Good Place season 3

More in a similar vein. I enjoyed this third season plenty, but not quite as much as the first two - maybe partly because some of the novelty's worn off and also because I watched most of it week-by-week as new episodes were released, rather than in the concentrated way more common for tv nowadays?

NGVA

Quick repeat visits to some of the Ken Unsworth pieces (still enjoyable but not madly so [*]), the Polly Borland exhibition (likewise) and the Rigg Design Prize shortlist comprising ten interiors responding to the theme of domestic living. My favourite: "Take it Outside" (Amber Road studio).

(w/ Jon)

"Escher x nendo: Between Two Worlds" (NGV International)

It was always going to be enjoyable to see a whole bunch of Escher prints (including linocuts, woodcuts and lithographs) and drawings at once but what made this exhibition particularly enjoyable was the installation and design by nendo, with its repeated black and white motif of the house throughout.

"Castrovalva, Abruzzi" (1930) - I liked a lot of the landscapes from around this period, many exaggerating perspective in ways that only became apparent with time

"Still Life with Mirror" (1934) - the famous optical illusion and impossible drawings were all here, but the charm of this one was the match of the most well-known others

"Three Spheres II" (1946)

"Reptiles" (1943) - it's nice he also has a playful side

Not pictured but intriguing: the early geometric abstraction of "Clouds above the coast" (1919-20).

(w/ R)

Lorrie Moore - Birds of America

Snippy conversations, unhappy marriages, disappointing dinner parties, animal infestations; death and its debris. Compared to the earlier stories in Self Help (published 1985), these are denser, richer and more sprawling, with longer stories to tell and less reliant on the sharpness of the lens chosen through which to tell them - although also maybe just a yard less sheerly enjoyable. Best in show is "Dance in America", I think, or is that just that it's amongst the most concise and immediate?

(along the way)

Kusama: Infinity

Interestingly straightforward and low-key biographical approach to documenting Kusama's colourful art and life. It draws a link between her mental health challenges and her art without offering a particularly strong perspective on its exact nature (though there's something there in the way her art appears to be seeking an expression of the experience of being overwhelmed), and takes a similarly lightly suggestive approach to the question of how she became the person and artist that she ultimately did (there are interesting hints from her childhood and family background, including of some kind of trauma experienced in a field of flowers). Also interesting were the bits about the struggles Kusama faced in the white male dominated art world of the 1960s, including - the documentary argues - having her ideas ripped off by more established peers, and the curious relationship she had with Joseph Cornell.

(w/ Kim)

Stranger Things 2

I was always going to watch this after racing through the first season.

Robyn - Honey

Pretty good but hasn't caught fire for me. Maybe it's a bit more subtle? I like the first two songs a lot - "Missing U" and "Human Being" - and the others all blur together.

ABBA - ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits

It certainly seems, from the vantage of 2019, that ABBA's style of pop music deserves to be called timeless. Growing up in the 90s, for me they were the quintessential cheesy, slickly insubstantial pop group, but tastes and perspectives change and listening to this greatest hits now it's striking how terrific it is, and how direct a line can be drawn from them to all kinds of more recent pop; basically the only difference between many of ABBA's songs and the best moments of a band like Girls Aloud, say, is the production (and even that's not so different a lot of the time). 

Lucy Dacus - Historian

I'm not sure whether this is a lazy comparison but Historian reminds me of Are We There - there's a similar grasp of dynamics apparent in its electric guitar-girded rock and sinuously direct songwriting, and it's also very good. Dacus has a knack for creating songs that build and resolve in a range of different ways (she doesn't mind a bit of soft-loud but is far from limited to it), including a deft touch for using varied instrumentation to generate interest and drive. A lot of these songs are excellent, but the particular stand-outs are "Addictions", "Nonbeliever", "Timefighter" and "Next of Kin".

Stranger Things season 1

What a joy - along with the eighties-on-blast aesthetic and ringing of the childhood-nostalgia bell (all that bicycle-riding!) and tapping into later-adolescence high school iconography, the show commits early to its 'monster' and 'more things in heaven and earth' elements and is the better for it. It's exactly the right amount of actually dark and creepy. The Stephen King call-out is deserved. Bonus: Winona Ryder hasn't looked this good in years. 

Eighth Grade

Eighth Grade is ace. It's funny and involving, staying very close to its protagonist Kayla's experience, with the blaring soundtrack coming across like the sound of Kayla's own emotions as they rise and threaten to overwhelm her at times of excitement, stress and uncertainty - all of which are plentiful. Of course the audience is going to root for the quiet girl who doesn't fit in, but there are some nice touches in her characterisation to reinforce that, especially the way she determinedly tries to push through her fears and go after what she wants, giving her meaningful agency despite all the teenage confusion and anxiety. The plot isn't much more than one thing happening after another; the film pitches deliberately very contemporary in highlighting the central role of phones and social media in (teenage) life today, and it's totally convincing in how it draws its school-aged characters and how they speak and interact.

(w/ Erandathie)

Gregory Maguire - Wicked

An iconic book for me, which I haven't read for years. It's still good.

(last time)

Geelong Gallery

Bits and pieces in this small-medium sized regional gallery. The major temporary showing is "There is no there - Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano", two video works including the one giving the exhibition its title (performers interpreting single images from contemporary newspapers and inspired by the 'living newspapers' of a 1920s/30s state-aligned Soviet theatre troupe called the Blue Blouse collective; 2015).

(w/ R)

"The Garden of Forking Paths: Mira Gojak and Takehito Koganezawa" (Buxton Contemporary)

A well-matched pair of artists, neither of whose work I'd seen before. Gojak's were especially appealing, in their uses of blue - including references to Yves Klein - and otherwise.

"Herd of unending blue" (1998) 

"Consolation" (2006) and "Mountain" (2018) 

Various 

Takehito Koganezawa - "Paint it black and erase" (2010)

(w/ Penelope)

The Favourite

Wryly askew in perspective and affect, and pointed in its focus on the dynamics between its central three characters. Enjoyable and rather bleak. Emma Stone is a perfect charming monster; Rachel Weisz and Olivia Colman pitch perfect too. (I also liked Nicholas Hoult as the foppish, nasty Harley.)

(w/ Andreas and Peter B)

2018 cd: "Everything that goes up must come down"

1. Rocket Man – Little Big Town
Restoration: The Songs of Elton John and Bernie Taupin (Island; 2018)

2. Happy & Sad – Kacey Musgraves
Golden Hour (MCA Nashville; 2018)

3. Loner – Margo Price
All American Made (Third Man; 2017)

4. Pay No Mind – Beach House
7 (Sub Pop; 2018)

5. Summer Pillow – Kasey Chambers
Dragonfly (Warner; 2017)

6. When the Stars Come Out – Chris Stapleton
Traveller (Mercury Nashville; 2015)

7. Oracle of the Maritimes – Neko Case
Hell-On (Anti-; 2018)

8. All of Our Time – Amaya Laucirica
Rituals (Kasumuen; 2018)

9. Why Didn’t You Stop Me? – Mitski
Be the Cowboy (Dead Oceans; 2018)

10. Best Years of My Life – Pistol Annies
Interstate Gospel (RCA Nashville; 2018)

I read one of those year-end lists on slate.com and it used my two favourite albums of 2018, Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour and Mitski’s Be the Cowboy, as examples of a supposed pivot towards earnestness in pop music, connecting that up with the general unpleasantness that for many has suffused 2018 (US politics, related social trends etc). I don’t know whether that’s a real thing but earnestness beats irony and detachment nearly every time, so we can only hope.

(on spotify)

Vice

Has some fun elements and enjoyable to watch, but at times the gimmicks distract without adding anything and the movie becomes boring. (By contrast, they added immensely to The Big Short.) Maybe all the structural and story-telling flourishes will lead to the events being depicted sticking with me - but with such recent, well-known history, is that really necessary? I was left feeling the film would have been better if it had played it straighter as a satire with elements of a character drama - especially given the strength of Christian Bale's performance as Cheney and Amy Adams' (my fave!) as his wife Lynne, with Steve Carell as Rumsfeld and Sam Rockwell as W also top notch.

(w/ R)

Widows

The panoramic commentary on gender, race, class, power and corruption isn't profound enough to carry the movie on its own, but coupled with how involving its heist/crime strand is, those dimensions make Widows quite satisfying.

(w/ Andreas)

Rachel Cusk - Transit

There are a bunch of reasons why Transit is a much more page-turning read than Outline. It's definitely partly that there are more genuine interpersonal interactions (not to mention instances of actual dialogue), together with a greater semblance of an actual plot and narrative tension (via the building works, the horrible basement neighbours, Faye's relationship with her sons, and the hints of one or more romances). And I think it's also because Faye becomes more visible, which happens in a variety of ways, including through the reader learning more about her past, her perceptions of the world being more explicitly called into doubt, and the judgements other characters make about her (even if those judgements aren't always clear).

Like Outline, Transit encourages hermenuetic reading. Themes are woven through, often explicitly, but then developed only quite obliquely - most notably, fate, and, somewhat but not wholly separately, the relationships between parents and children - and are integral to the book. But I think it's the narrator's character and experience that are Transit's main subject. There are specific little flickers and echoes from the earlier book - Faye's encounter with her ex-boyfriend Gerard who now "seemed somehow to have been filled in. In those days he was a sketch, an outline; I had wanted him to be more than he was", the large glass shopfront in Toronto that Gerard describes sounding very much like the cafe facade outside Faye's apartment in Athens, the black angel on its plinth in the neighbours' garden recalling the white glazed terracotta woman with her arms raised as if in benediction in the centre of Clelia's apartment, another chair tips over without obvious significance, another character comments on the way Faye always wears dark colours - but the deeper continuity is in Faye's worldview and its many absences.

In Faye's encounters, there is a recurring sense of people's characters being shaped and subsumed by others' desires and expectations:

• the pairing of the estate agent's understanding of himself as "a figure conjured out of the red mist of [his clients'] desire, an object, so to speak, of transference" frequently walked past by those same clients later without the slightest sign of recognition with Faye's subsequent encounter with him in the street when she carefully acknowledges him only for the agent to himself glance blankly at her (Faye's remark that "whatever we might wish to believe about ourselves, we are only the result of how others have treated us" is characteristically able to be applied to Faye herself); 
• the builder's comment that "he felt his clients sometimes forgot that he was a person: instead he became, in a sense, an extension of their own will"; 
• Amanda's recounting of her own lost years ("Sleeping with a man she would very often have this feeling, that she was merely the animus for a pre-existing framework, that she was invisible and that everything he did and said to her he was in fact doing and saying to someone else, someone who wasn't there, someone who may or may not even have existed. This feeling, that she was the invisible witness to someone else's solitude - a kind of ghost - nearly drove her mad for a while."); 
• Faye's observation about her student Jane, which resonates with the wider project of these books: "I recalled her remarks about the draining nature of students and thought how often people betrayed themselves by what they noticed about others". 

And the book is carefully constructed to elaborate on the implications; more than one child is there to observe the adults around them or be made subject to their flaws ("I said it must be interesting to be able to see people without them seeing you. It seemed to me that children were often treated in the same way, as witnesses whose presence was somehow not taken into account"), there is building going on all over the place, Faye herself remains largely an outline albeit increasingly shaded in.

Repetitions build up, sometimes only once and in other cases multiply - musical instruments, dogs (somewhat like in Joy Williams' stories, as agents, objects and manifestations of cosmic forces and ripples), people not starting things because they know if they do they won't be able to stop. There are pointed lacunae, some of whose obscured parts (e.g. what Faye reads at the writer's festival) are later hinted at (i.e. Oliver being moved to tears by the description of a woman's pain he heard in that reading), and there's a thread relating to Faye's love life - a seemingly abortive flirtation with the chair of her writer's festival panel, the downstairs neighbours' accusation about her having had a man upstairs one night (its truth impossible to know), the date she goes on with an unnamed man (we learn his biological parents named him John, but not the name he now goes by) and the hint of heat and intensity near its end ("A flooding feeling of relief passed violently through me, as if I were the passenger in a car that had finally swerved away from a sharp drop"), the revelation (in the context of Outline's and Transit's overwhelming detachment, it arrives as a relevation) that Faye is blushing when she admits that she is going to the opera with a man (possibly the same one - she says only that she met him on the street).

Like in Outline, there's a shocking outbreak of violence near the end, albeit relayed in recollection through conversation; in Transit, it's between the narrator's two sons and thereby much closer to home while in Outline, it was one of Faye's students' beating of her dog. And there's a remarkable final scene - Lawrence's dinner party - lit with memorable images (Eloise's son tearing her dress and revealing her breasts in her bra, "the row of weeping, incandescent children", the teenaged Henrietta's descent into tears over her biological father, Eloise's own crying) and built around an array of disastrous or merely imperfect parent and child relationships and interactions, continuing the book's kaleidoscope of fractured, non-nuclear and non-biological family units.

But the real climax, such as it is, arrives in the book's long final paragraph, which doesn't resolve the build-up of below-the-surface pressures that are literalised throughout Outline - two separate sets of tree roots press up with enough force to break concrete pavement slabs, and the malignancy of the downstairs neighbours ("there was something in the basement, something that took the form of two people, though I would hesitate to give their names to it. It was more of a force, a power of elemental negativity that seemed somehow related to the power to create. Their hatred of me was so pure, I said, that it almost passed back again into love. They were, in a way, like parents, crouched malevolently in the psyche of the house like Beckett's Nagg and Nell in their dustbins. My sons call them the trolls, I said") - but conveys an ambiguous sense of forward motion:

Through the windows a strange subterranean light was rising, barely distinguishable from darkness. I felt change far beneath me, moving deep beneath the surface of things, like the plates of the earth blindly moving in their black traces. I found my bag and my car keys and silently let myself out of the house.

Nick Drnaso - Sabrina

I think this one will stick with me. It says a lot with seemingly so little.

A gift from Sarah M and Ben.

"Ken Unsworth: Truly, Madly" & "Polly Borland: Polyverse" (NGV Australia)

Ken Unsworth

Likeable stuff, including the movement and sound aspects.

Polly Borland

I most liked the woven tapestries - e.g. "Scream" (2018) below. Plenty to chew on in general though, beyond - but consistent with - that blue Nick Cave one.

(w/ trang)

Sorry to Bother You

Takes on (American) capitalism, class issues and racism at a furious pace and with a prevailing air of near-surrealism which finally tips with a dramatic twist which sets up the film's third act. Scathing, funny, discomfiting, excellent.

(w/ Erandathie)

Tony Molina - Kill the Lights

Ten songs, 15 minutes, yet each feels complete; the music is that jangly guitar-pop that now sounds timeless, flowing still today from its sources in the 1960s.

"Julian Opie" (NGV)

Fun exhibition! The one below is "Sara dancing (Sparkly top)" and it's better when animated.

(w/ R)

Cold War

Gorgeous black and white, nearly square aspect ratio love story, saturated in music and post-WWII European - and especially Polish - circumstances. More than the story, it was the beauty of the imagery and cinematography that pierced, but then again all those parts can't really be separated.

(w/ R)

"Love" @ Immigration Museum

Artifacts and accounts of love of many types, an Australian love-themed soundtrack playing and the voices of lovers telling their stories in your ears through the exhibition app. In partnership with Heide, meaning it included a pair of Nolans in which his affair with Sunday Reed is entwined with the relationship between Sunday and John Reed, "Rosa Mutabilis" (1945), showing the heart garden, and "Arabian Tree" (1943).

(w/ R)

Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot - The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics, and in Life

A re-read. This time, in the interests of retention, I've written down one key reminder (in some cases, a couple) from each chapter:

1. Counting. Ask how the thing being counted has been defined. Also remember that information/data-collection is probably not perfect.
2. Size. Ask whether the number is a big number in its context. A useful hack is to take the number and divide it by something human to put it in proportion - e.g. for a government expenditure, divide it by the affected population and/or convert it to a daily/weekly/annual cost.
3. Chance. Clusters will form by chance rather than being perfectly evenly distributed - e.g. a higher than usual cluster of cancer incidence may well just be chance.
4. Up and Down. Numbers will naturally go up and down over time - i.e. regress to the mean - so we should look at a longer timeframe when identifying trends and attributing causation (e.g. traffic accident rates before/after speed cameras installed).
5. Averages. It's important to have a sense of the distribution making up an average. Extremes at either end have a large effect (e.g. mean wealth). Consider whether mean, median or mode is most useful, and what group you're interested in. Average is not the same as typical.
6. Performance. Measures of performance only capture the thing being measured (not the whole picture) and may be gamed. One approach is looking only for those so far out of line that a real problem is indicated.
7. Risk. To understand how worried we should be by a percentage increase in the risk of something, we have to know the baseline. It might be that the baseline is so low that even an apparently large percentage increase would make little practical difference.
8. Sampling. Is the sample large enough that it could plausibly represent the total population? What biases might exist in the sample? Small biases can lead to large errors when samples are extrapolated to whole populations; check the confidence interval (the range within which there's a 95 percent chance the real answer is).
9. Data. Collecting good data is difficult. 
10. Shock figures. Outliers exist in most distributions, and will often explain an extreme data point (i.e. rather than concluding that a whole paradigm of accepted knowledge needs to change). Extremes should be treated with healthy scepticism - we should expect a higher standard of proof before accepting them.
11. Comparison. When comparing groups, make sure they are like-for-like in all relevant ways. Composite indicators (which bundle together multiple measures) are especially tricky.
12. Causation. Always ask whether it is only correlation and not causation - e.g. girls do better in single-sex schools but this is probably explained by single-sex school students being higher SES and single-sex schools being selective. The more plausible something sounds, the more likely we are to mistake correlation for causation.

(last time)

SMILF

Despite the truly awful title (the S stands for 'single'), a quality short-run - eight episode - show which quickly broadens beyond single mother experience to take on inter-connected issues of class and parental impact while staying satisfyingly funny, crude, good-hearted and on-point.

Rachel Cusk - Outline

There's something nagging about the narration in Outline, a sense of something constantly withheld, where the withholding is happening in a way that's structural to how the almost-unnamed narrator - her name appears only right near the end - experiences her world. Its mode sometimes reminded me of Deborah Levy's brilliant Hot Milk, but Hot Milk is all undertows and the heat of fierce, flickering emotion and dangerous ambiguity, while Outline generates a stifling sense of blockage, as if between surface and interior lies a layer so heavy and still as to be virtually impenetrable.

Then a young woman, whose name, according to my diagram, was Sylvia, began to speak, having glanced around the room apparently to ascertain that no one else was going to take the initiative. Her small, resigned smile made it clear that she often found herself in this position.

The narrator is sharply, forensically observant; facets of surfaces accumulate, and there are times when language and world merge, as below, the 'surprisingly' itself appearing surprisingly in an otherwise typically plain sentence.

I could imagine her in the monasticism of a practice room, her fingers flying surprisingly across the black and white keys.

Themes of identity, stories and other types of meaning-making recur, and the barest details of the narrator's life emerge: a divorce, a connection to Athens (where the book's two days take place), hints of an unsatisfying relationship with her sons. You spend a whole book in her head, privy to her highly nuanced, specific responses to the people and places around her, yet by book's end I felt I hardly knew her at all.

He paid the bill, waving away my offers of money after a brief but observable hesitation, and we stood to leave.

Even after two consecutive reads, I can't say why Outline is so intriguing, so seemingly lingering. It's not the mystery as such, and it's certainly not the plot (which is basically non-existent). Some of it, I think, lies in the human drama associated with the many slices of people's lives that make up the book's scenes, each with different levels of closeness to an actual narrative of the person's life; and, maybe, the contrast to the narrator's own opacity, a blankness that seems incongruous with the intimacy that her proximity ought to bring. I like phenomenological fiction, after all, and here there's a phenomenology at once baffling and curiously familiar.

I closed my eyes and tried to summon up my feelings for my neighbour. When I opened them again Elena was still looking at me, waiting. I said that I had become so unused to thinking about things in terms of whether I liked them or whether I didn't that I couldn't answer her question. My neighbour was merely a perfectly good example of something about which I could only feel absolute ambivalence.

Ladies in Black

Slathers on the period (1959) details and Australianisms ("strewth", "hooroo", and much more), soft pedals the racism and sexism which are in no small part its subject, and steers directly into fantasies of harmony and easily-swallowed 'progress' by its ending after limply indicating the possibility that they might not be realised - yet it's also quite charming, and sly in its depiction of Australian masculinity in particular, while its positive depiction of immigration can only be welcomed.

(w/ Erandathie and Ru)

BlacKkKlansman

Both entertaining and righteously direct, providing and using the pleasures of story to sharply deliver its message about historical and present-day racism.

Pistol Annies - Interstate Gospel

Pistol Annies are a country supergroup comprising Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley, and great fun with it. Favourites: "Best Years of My Life", "5 Acres of Turnips", "Leavers Lullaby", "This Too Shall Pass". There are times when the music sounds somehow familiar, but here, that isn't a bad thing.

Night Is Short, Walk On Girl

Zany, colourful, surrealist romp. The sophists' dance was a highlight, so too the big musical numbers forming part of the guerilla theatre staging. Seemingly in pursuit of fun over most anything else, and creative in story structure and animation - overall quite excellent.

(w/ Kevin, part of Japanese Film Festival)

Will Gompertz - What Are You Looking At?

Fun whisk through the history of modern art, organised chronologically by 'isms'.

Sharp Objects

Amy Adams, Patricia Clarkson, southern atmosphere ('Wind Gap, Missouri'), a present-day murder investigation against a backdrop of unresolved past death and damage. Sinks its claws in from the start and doesn't let go, all the way through to the end of the closing credits of the finale. 

George Saunders - Lincoln in the Bardo

What an astonishing work of fiction. I bounced off Lincoln the first time I tried to read it, a few months back (even after discovering how amazing Tenth of December is), bogging down in the first 20 pages in the description of the Lincolns' party, but if I'd pressed on just a few more pages to reach the scene in which Hans Vollman and Roger Bevins III meet the newly arrived Willie Lincoln, with its mixture of comedy, feeling and interesting exposition, I wouldn't have looked back. From then on, the novel - if that's the right word for it - races forward, its chamber of voices entwining in increasingly powerful and moving ways, maintaining both a simplicity of vision and construction (including in how it deals with the voices of the African American slaves) and a rewarding complexity across its many threads. Emotionally forceful, intellectually questing, morally rigorous; marvellous and humane.

Rhiannon Giddens - 'Sisters Present' @ Symphony Space, NYC, Sunday 18 November

Final show in a four-gig residency; the 'sisters' being Allison Russell (vocals, banjo), Amythyst Kiah (vocals, guitar, banjo), Toshi Reagon (guitar, electric guitar) and Lalenja Harrington (vocals and spoken word - also, Giddens's actual sister), all women of colour (notably: a large majority of the audience, however, was white) and all very proficient. A lot of the set was drawn from songs that Giddens, Russell and Kiah have written for a forthcoming Smithsonian Folkways record, and it sounds a barnstormer. The songs ranged across folk, soul, blues, gospel and rock and roll; live, Giddens is an electrifying singer and an endearingly intent-seeming musician. 

Whitney Museum, NYC

The big attraction that's just opened at the Whitney - in a cool new(ish) building no less - is "Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again", so, not so exciting for me; I've dutifully seen plenty of Warhol over the years, not least the big exhibition at the NGV a couple of years ago (indeed, twice). Still, I took a quick turn through. (Also on were a Mary Corse survey and an exhibition exploring the relationship between programming and art; neither made an impression.)

But the main event for me was the smallish selection (maybe 80 or 90 pieces) from the permanent collection, organised under the theme "Where We Are" (1900 to 1960). My previous visit to the Whitney, in early '09, I called the part of its collection then on display "smallish but exquisitely selected" and it was the same again this time - a very high standard, several times punching through even the tidal wave of great art in which I've been immersed lately.

The star of the show was Edward Hopper's "A Woman in the Sun" (1961), a painting that for me has always been mostly about the light, and which I think of often. It was mesmerising. There were a bunch of other Hoppers on view too, most notably "Early Sunday Morning" (1930).

Also on offer, an outstanding O'Keeffe ("Music, Pink and Blue No. 2", 1918) and an equally outstanding Rothko ("Four Darks in Red", 1958), both of which were sharp reminders of why I love those artists in the first place.

Other highlights:

Thomas Hart Benson - "Poker Night (From A Streetcar Named Desire)" (1948)

Archibald Motley Jr - "Gettin' Religion" (1948)

Jasper Johns - "Three Flags" (1958)

Henry Koerner - "Mirror of Life" (1946)

My Fair Lady on Broadway (Lincoln Center Theater)

It was fun to see a big bright Broadway musical, and I've always been a bit intrigued by My Fair Lady because of the Pygmalion connection, but what put it over the top for me was the prospect of seeing a grown-up Lauren Ambrose as Eliza Doolittle. So it was disappointing to learn, a couple of days before, that she's recently been replaced by someone else. It was enjoyable anyway, but in the end, nothing all that memorable.

The Ferryman on Broadway (Bernard B Jacobs Theatre)

Now this is main stage theatre done well. It's a lavish production - a cast of more than 20, half of them children, not to mention an actual baby, a live rabbit, and, particularly plot-relevant, a live goose into the bargain. Written by Jez Butterworth, directed by Sam Mendes, a uniformly strong cast (including Paddy Considine and Justin Edwards, who reminded me of someone and who I've just learned was Ben on The Thick of It), a more or less single but versatile set which at times holds virtually the entirely cast (maybe even the whole cast by the climax) - the Carney family's kitchen and the staircase upstairs.

It's set in 1981, in the heart of the Troubles, and the drama and the weft of it come equally from the political and the familial tensions - tensions which are drawn out and overlaid over the play's three hours, before resolving satisfyingly explosively and quickly at its end. The 'meat' of the play would already have been enough to make it extremely good - Quinn's relationships with his wife Mary and widowed sister-in-law Caitlin, the reverberations when his brother Seamus's body is found in the bog ten years after he disappeared, the multiple layers of the IRA's influence, the subplot and counterpoint of Tom Kettle (his proposal scene was one of the most moving). But it's the mythic resonances, most obviously through the passage from Virgil's Aeneid which gives the play its name, not to mention via the role played by Aunt Maggie Far Away (and especially the monologue when she, oracle-like, tells Aunt Patricia's backstory), which make it really a bit special.