"Olympia: Photographs by Polixeni Papapetrou" & "Petrina Hicks: Bleached Gothic" (NGV Australia)

These photos by Polixeni Papapetrou of her daughter, from very young to early adulthood, are wonderful. The 'Alice' (and other Lewis Carroll) ones I like, unsurprisingly, including the trompe l'oeil painted backdrops, so too the 'Haunted Country' and 'Games of Consequence' ones, both interestingly shadowy but not overly heavy or dark. And the 'Eden' series, revelling in colour, proved a treat near the end.

"Olympia as Lewis Carroll's Alice dreaming by the riverbank" (2003) - I wondered whether the figures in the background are intended to appear Aboriginal Australian, in a series of painted backdrops otherwise heavily shaped by Tenniel's illustrations 

 "The Wimmera 1864 #1" (2006) - unavoidably recalling Picnic at Hanging Rock though without any overt sinister elements

"Dreams are like water" (2008) 

"Heart" (2016)

The Petrina Hicks pieces were intriguing - at first blush coolly holding their mysteries both on the surface and at one remove, and on closer inspection showing themselves to be warmly humanistic.

"Shenae and Jade" (2005) on the large dividing wall; I was also drawn to "The beauty of history" (2010) in the background, green drapes around white statue

The two close-up videos were compelling and somehow not abject or at least not scanning that way to me - this one was "Gloss" (2011) (the other was the butterfly on the open mouth)

(w/ Jade)

Jessica Jones season 1

Probably both Krysten Ritter and the positive reviews were necessary but not sufficient, but together they finally got me watching now that netflix has come into my life. And it's good stuff - a bit darker than I expected, and more lavish with the body count, and really steers into the central metaphor of male control and abuse. Economical in its use of characters almost to a fault - the fault being when it seems the pieces fit together too well - and the 'abilities' (ie super-powers) aspect functions well, although the coincidence of so many 'gifted' people stumbling across each other as required by the plot sometimes strains credulity. The plot is twisty and there's just the right amount of it, the characters are engaging and undergoing both revelation and development as the series progresses, there are a few unnerving and even properly uncanny moments, and as mentioned just before, the themes are strong and well handled.

"KAWS: Companionship in the Age of Loneliness" (NGV International)

"Gone" (2019)

"Born to Bend" (2013)

"Man's Best Friend" (2014)

"What Girls Are Made Of" (Spiegeltent)

The true story of early 90s indie band Darlingheart's not-quite-rise to fame as told and sung by then-17 year old now 40-something frontwoman Cora Bissett. Good-natured, energetically performed (including by the three other musician / channelers of many other characters) with enjoyable 90s colour and music, and the impressions of Radiohead and Blur - both of whom they supported back in the day - were fun. Not substantial at all though, the aspects to do with her parents and daughter notwithstanding, albeit with an extra layer thanks to its being all true.

(w/ R and Lisa)

Felice Brothers @ Corner Hotel, Friday 11 October

Very good show, many songs with a family resemblance to the only Felice Brothers song I really know, "Forever Green", and enjoyably more rock-y live and also garnished and sometimes led with plenty of piano accordion.

(w/ Julian)

"Civilization" (NGV Australia)

"Many civilisations populate the earth today and many have in the past, but it is clear that a single, planetary civilisation is slowly evolving."

Olivier Christinat - "Figurations II" (2016) (it's people coming down on an elevator)

'Civilization' is a broad theme for an exhibition, and maybe especially one of contemporary photography, but this show was convincing, helped by the thematic organisation which struck the balance between being meaningfully specific and sufficiently rich in association: 'flow', 'hive', 'rupture' etc. The pieces leaned towards the evidently composed, and many used repetition as part of their effect. These two, Candida Hofer's "Augustiner Chorherrenstift Sankt Florian III 2014" (2014) and Ahmad Zamroni's "Muslims pray at a mosque during the Friday noon prayer in Jakarta" (2007), struck me as a matched pair:

Others:

Thomas Struth - "Pergamon Museum 1, Berlin 2001" (2001)

Graham Miller - "Alice" (2005)

Taloi Havini and Stuart Miller - "Sami and the Panguna mine" (2009) - PNG conflict and copper mining

Michael Wolf - "Tokyo Compression #80" (2010)

Irene Kung - "Torre Velasca" (2010), though I liked her "IAC Gehry NY" from the same The Invisible City series even more

Also Richard Misrach's "Untitled (November 9, 2013, 9:49am)"  (2013) from his On the Beach series.

Sally Rugg - How Powerful We Are

I already suspected Sally Rugg was a pretty great human being and reading How Powerful We Are, her account of the campaign for same sex marriage, has reinforced that plenty. It's hugely clear, readable and interesting, with just the right balance between campaign, social movement and personal, political and social/human context. 

Particularly interesting for me were the sections about the Yes campaign's strategy and its consequences - the decision that the goal was maximising the total proportion of yes votes (rather than, for example, aiming for every electorate to return a vote greater than 50% or progressing a positive narrative around LGBTIQ rights) and therefore on getting out the vote and mobilising '1s' and '2s' rather than seeking to win the votes, or change the minds, of '3s' let alone '4s'. Admirably, Rugg is very clear on the costs of this decision and the harm caused - to causes and to people - in pursuing that objective in such a focused way.

I also liked the bits on the more tactical dimensions of activism and advocacy - the importance of a clear theory of change, the competing frames used by the two opposing campaigns (children vs modern families) and the importance and difficulty of avoiding fighting the issue on your opponent's terms (however tempting to rebut misinformation, such as about Safe Schools, rates of abuse/harm to children of queer parents, transgender identity and sexuality and so much more - "facts bounce off frames"), the relentless positivity and non-threatening messaging and delivery through predominantly white, middle to upper class and heterosexual or passing speakers (another choice whose consequences in terms of exclusion of intersectional and even more marginalised experiences she is explicit about), her description of the spectrum of collaboration with the media,[*] a two by two with level of central control on one axis and level of disruptiveness on the other, the creation of a 'hero's journey' narrative in which the hero is members of the social movement being generated and not the campaigners who are mobilising and coordinating.

It's also important and compelling - though not always easy reading - in how it highlights the harm caused by the whole national 'discussion' about the worth and belonging of LGBTIQ people, including in youth and adult suicide and self-harm, as well as the internal conflict, bullying and exclusion that is surely endemic to every set of progressive movements but especially acute when the stakes were as high and public as they were over the period that Rugg's book covers.

Anyway all in all a really terrific book for a whole range of reasons. Intensely practical as well as principled, not to mention passionate and quite inspiring.

[*] Breaking the law / whistleblowing, exclusives, strong media releases, deliberately disrupting the media in a way they'll like, Streisand effect, media hoaxes, fake news.

Buddy & Julie Miller - Breakdown on 20th Ave South

Predictably good but low-key. The melody of "Everything is Your Fault" reminds me of Pollyanna's "Brittle Then Broken".

"Killing the Planet is Against My Religion - Tejopala Rawls" (Federation Wharf)

Climate activism, Buddhism, etc. Comedy, part of Fringe.

(w/ R, Angela + her mum)

Weyes Blood - Titanic Rising

Titanic Rising is enormous. Maybe it's apt, given the title and also the music itself, that the album's immensity took a while to impress itself on me - it took quite a few listens for me to get it, despite expecting to like it after 2017's Front Row Seat to Earth. The lushness was a barrier, but in the way of these things, once the flip had occurred, it became part of the attraction.

The first four songs - "A Lot's Gonna Change", "Andromeda", "Everyday" and "Something to Believe" - are all relatively conventional pop songs, at least by Mering's woodsy standards, but after the mid-album instrumental title track, the tenor shifts subtly deeper, with "Movies", "Mirror Forever" and "Wild Time" all seeming somehow more waterily below-the-surface than the opening run; then there's the gentle "Picture Me Better" and another instrumental, "Nearer to Thee", to end.

These songs sound like soundtracks to a movie; listening to them reminds me why that's a quality I've so often sought in music.

N K Jemisin - The Obelisk Gate

Deeper and wider, and similarly good. (The Fifth Season)

NGV Australia

Jenny Watson - "The Inner Stable" (1986), its dreaminess and emotional content much clearer when actually in its presence

Callum Morton - "Gas and Fuel" (2002), complete with repeated calls of "help me, please"

Peter Purves Smith - "The Pond" (1940), the surrealism subtle but effective

(w/ R & L)

Downton Abbey

Never watched the tv series, found myself watching the movie. Provokingly gentle, and I found the sheer privilege, conservatism, deference to authority and low stakes hard to ignore.

(w/ Erandathie)

Rachel Cusk - Kudos

These novels of Cusk's are so mysterious and bewitching in their effect that I have little idea whether my more muted response to Kudos - the last in the trilogy following Outline and Transit - is due to the properties of the book itself or where I've been at while reading it.

The similarities to its predecessors are far more pronounced than any differences, and in Kudos too there are repetitions, some - like dogs and musical instruments - carrying over from Transit, and others - like precocious children and people distressed by and sensitive to lies - new as far as I can tell. Also new is the spectre of Brexit, and a greater explicitness in the prominence of story and metaphor, the female experience (although, flipping back through Outline to verify that impression, nearly the first page I opened to had someone recounting a dream where she and her friends all began menstruating profusely at the opera to the horror and disgust of the passing men ...), and the disappointments of marriage and the disappointments between parents and children.

I've read some reviews arguing that Faye is more visible - more tangible - in Kudos than in the two earlier books, but I didn't particularly find that. For me, Transit was the peak of this puzzling and quite great sequence; Kudos is the first to feel a tiny bit over-determined in its language, imagery and faint through-lines. Still, for large sections I was enthralled, and all in all found plenty to grapple with - at times in that way of grappling with the text's own elusiveness, and in other places directly with the ideas that it poses in overt terms.

Derry Girls seasons 1 and 2

Very charming and full of heart, also very funny and very 90s in its soundtrack.

The Australian Dream

Its story and message are compelling - focused on Adam Goodes and concertina-ing out to contextualise his story and experience in Australia's historical and present day racism. The presentation was less so (not bad, but not as compelling) - the weaving through of the talking heads was generally effective, especially because many of them were not just after the fact commentators but actors in their own right (eg Michael O'Loughlin, Eddie McGuire, Andrew Bolt), but the reenactments sapped some of the interest for me and the overall narrative didn't quite punch through. Still it was worth watching.

(w/ R)

"Fall of the Prince: Louise Milligan" (MWF)

Louise Milligan in conversation with Martin McKenzie-Murray about her investigation of George Pell and book about same. She was very impressive and the session worthwhile.

(w/ R)

Golden Shield (Anchuli Felicia King, MTC)

Engaging, interesting and multi-faceted. For me, the strongest element was the play's treatment of its theme of translation - staged through the figure of the narrator-translator himself (a constant observer and interpolater, making literal the idea that translation is a character in its own right), the acts of translation (interpreting) involved between Chinese and American actors and institutions, the multi-vocal and multi-perspectival presentation of many of the scenes, and the links made between intercultural and interpersonal translation, communication, and speech.

Also interesting but less satisfyingly developed, including in their interconnections, were the personal stories (both those of the central sisters Julie and Eva, and the dissident and his wife, were more sketched than fully fleshed out and a bit told rather than showed) and the social and political implications of China's state surveillance system as played out through the 'great firewall of China' and the Communist Party's centralised/decentralised apparatus to monitor and crack down on dissenting voices, and as writ large theatrically via the large screen projections of the action on stage.

Some aspects of the writing weren't as tight as they could have been - the little sister's 'breakthrough' that sets up the case seemed elementary, the erroneous implication that a 400% increase in speed is the same as being four times faster, the leading questions during examination in chief (the last being most forgivable). But overall Golden Shield was very good - high quality and intriguingly layered, and making good use of the theatrical form alongside its prestige-televisual elements.

(w R)

Two Brunswick galleries

"Morganna Magee: Teenage Wildlife" (Counihan Gallery)

Documentary-style photos of three teenage girls - all related to each other - who have become teen mothers in country Australia (Victoria I think). Good, and made better by the accompanying text contextualising them.

"Daisy and her mother" (2016)

"Cinta Vidal: Urban" and "Chris Leib: Primate Directive" (Beinart Gallery)

I liked the city ones with their sidelong perspectives, especially the Asian ones (eg Hong Kong), maybe because they tended to be a bit busier. The primate ones weren't my style - too garishly pop/kitsch.

(w/ R)

Deborah Levy - Swimming Home

Swimming Home reminded me of both The White Hotel and The Magus, though it's much leaner than either; what it has in common with them is how much it seems to be about what's below the surface, driven by the unconscious. From its opening scene - which turns out later to be pivotal (as one might expect - but not in the way one might assume) as well as slipperily elided - it feels unstable, troubling, on the verge of sinister, in the way that desires and drives in the psychoanalytic sense can be when glimpsed. Hot Milk is the more sophisticated and deeper book, but this one (from 2011) has its way too. Kitty Finch, Joe Jacobs, his daughter Nina et al.

N K Jemisin - The Fifth Season

Excellent. An interesting and well-realised world whose underlying elements are similar enough to ours that its metaphors and literalised themes - especially relating to structural oppression, power and responsibility, social change, and humanity's relationship to the natural environment - punch hard. The three female protagonists whose stories weave through before gradually and satisfyingly linking - 'Essun' (or 'you'), Damaya and Syenite - all have enough depth to convince and their stories are each equally compelling, while each contributing to layering and unfurling the Stillness's culture, history and geology (a future-world version of ours?). I liked the casual social progressiveness of parts of its society too - one character is incidentally transgender, and polyamory features without being remarkable, not to mention its general pleasing non-whiteness.

QAG / GOMA

From visits on consecutive days.

QAG

William Delafield Cook's "A Haystack" (1982), its near-photo realism combining with the unusually close perspective to defamiliarise the subject. In another layer, it turns out the artist has also been inspired by encounters with ancient Greek temples.

Billy Benn Perrurle - "Artyetyerre - Harts Range" (2008).

GOMA

I liked the Ben Quilty exhibition. There's a gestural forcefulness even to his earlier paintings which deepens into something really interesting over time, through the Afghanistan war, the 'last supper' ones, and examinations of the violence and ghosts of Australia's settler history. By the end I was sold on the multi-panel Rorschach paintings too, with the technique adding more than just interest and an element of the spectacular to generate some real resonance.

"Rorschach after von Guerard" (2008)

"Farewell virginity" (2015) and "Joe Burger" (2006)

I wasn't in the mood for crowds so only had a quick look through the Margaret Olley exhibition, but saw enough to get a feel for why she's so popular - very appealing.

Sometimes art has something that enables it to transcend elements that ought to consign it to banality. An example: Anne Wallace's "Passing the River at Woogaroo Reach" (2015).

Daniel Crooks' "Phantom Ride" (2015). I've liked Crooks' spliced videos each time I've encountered them. This one has two channels, one facing forwards and the other backwards, as you ride along a succession of tram and train tracks through metro and regional Australia.

"White Night Reimagined"

Consolidated this year across Carlton Gardens, Treasury Gardens and Birrarung Marr (we visited the latter two). Not any real sense of discovery, let alone danger, but perfectly pleasant.

(w/ Hayley)

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

In the end I thought this was really very good. Nowadays a new Tarantino film is cause for mixed expectations but actually Once Upon a Time in Hollywood strikes me as being somewhere near the upper echelon of his films.[*]

The dynamic between DiCaprio's fading Western movie actor Rick Dalton and Pitt's stuntman/offsider Cliff Booth is charming and their perambulations through 1969 Los Angeles are drawn with a texture and warmth that goes beyond mere pastiche; it's a movie version of LA for sure, just as are the threads following Margot Robbie's Sharon Tate and her social circle, but that's all actually of a piece with the film's interest in old school notions of heroes and villains, and cinema's role in creating and sustaining those notions, as well as with how we now look back on and interpret the 1960s and especially the late period when the Manson family and murders came to signify a darkness which was then said to have always been there.

However much he intended this - and I'm inclined to give him credit for self-awareness about it, if not necessarily for any particular clarity in political or social critique - he depicts a Man (that would be Cliff Booth) who lives by an old-fashioned code of honour and could be, depending on how you look at it, a heroic figure by the end. I think there are enough clues in the film to point to this being a critical perspective, or at least not an uncritically approving perspective, and in this respect the director's signature over the top violence comes to be not gratuitous after all, if its purpose is to punctuate the deep flaws within that hero (or anti-hero) figure ... the Western genre itself having played no small part in creating it. I don't think the nasty way in which the hippie antagonists of that lifestyle are depicted takes away from the rottenness of that 'hero' archetype and the beliefs that sustain it - which in turn raises interesting questions about the film's implied perspective on the Hollywood elite who move through its action and ultimately emerge unscathed and even better off than when they started, with Dalton's symbolic invitation into the new Hollywood represented by the house next door occupied by Tate and previously Polanski.

Also, it being Tarantino - it's impossible to escape his directorial presence - there are plenty of baubles and delights along the way: the dry humour, the precocious eight year old method actor, various 'blink and you'd miss it' cameos, the sure hand with keeping things interesting even when not much is happening.

So, sure, probably genuinely 'problematic' in any number of ways - I haven't dug much into the commentary but I'm not totally convinced that it fails Tate or should be criticised for its treatment of women by not giving her a voice (I think in this case it's artistically defensible) - but all round pretty impressive.

***

[*] Given we're talking about Tarantino, it would almost seem remiss to not attempt a listing:

1. Kill Bill vol 1
2. Pulp Fiction
3. Inglourious Basterds (which has improved in my mind over time because of the forcefulness of its central meta-cinematic metaphor, the having of which it has in common with OUATIH as well as its historical-revisionistic plotting and possible justification for its gruesome violence, but might drop down a bit if I rewatched it)
4. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (?)
5. Jackie Brown
6. Reservoir Dogs
7. Kill Bill vol 2
8. Django Unchained
9. The Hateful Eight (bottom by a long way)

And having made that list, it's apparent how actually consistently high quality his films have been, with every single one of them except The Hateful Eight and maybe Django Unchained (the most recent two before OUATIH) being at least very good.

Thom Yorke - Anima

A swirling, often tender effort from the person who's possibly more thoroughly colonised my musical brain than any other. Highlights are "Twist", "Dawn Chorus" (like "Treefingers" but with words and an epic build) and the lingering, burnt-out soul of "Axe".

Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschappeler - The Decision Book: Fifty Models for Strategic Thinking

Not that good. A bunch I already knew, and nearly all of the others struck me as either unconvincing or of limited value - many of them more ideas or very loose frameworks than genuine 'models for strategic thinking'.

My Dearworthy Darling (Malthouse)

Written by Alison Croggon who is obviously an outstanding theatre critic (with The Rabble), but my expectations weren't too high given the huge difference between criticism and creation. It didn't quite land for me, whether due to my own lack of knowledge of the subject-matters, themes, and possibly theatrical sources she was tapping or otherwise, though it did convince in its rendition of the subjective immensity of its central character's experience and the political-feminist argument of the text, while blunt, didn't feel over-determined; the religious-mystical elements were the bits I struggled with.

(w/ Hayley and Cass)

Children of the Sea

There's definitely something about anime - I'm always very conscious of the form when I watch it, and I seem disproportionately likely to have some kind of strong associations running through my mind (at the time or after) when I do.

This one was fairly lovely, the relatively detailed and naturalistic drawing of the urban scenes throwing the fluidity and sense of wonder of the aquatic and oceanic ones into sharper relief - although the animation wasn't quite up to the task of some of the galactic stuff near the end (some of which reminded me of Hilma af Klint, which is admittedly something). I liked the sense of mystery, the uncertainty about what was really happening, and the way it combined the personal and intimate with the ultimately cosmic.

(w/ trang - and looking to be my solitary MIFF visit this year)

Psychedelic Porn Crumpets - And Now For The Whatchamacallit

Pretty fun. Modern psychedelic pop-rock harking back to the genre's heyday in some ways. (A gift from Rob.)

Scarlett Thomas - Dragon's Green

Happened across this in the library - my old literary crush Scarlett Thomas has written a young adult fantasy novel. It's quite fun and has a bit of fizz, but is less good than I expected it would be given Thomas's thoughtfulness about story and how good she is in other genres.

"Turning Points: Contemporary Photography from China" (NGV International)

The most striking feature of this small-medium size exhibition is how many of the photos are directly engaged with the relationship between past and present, whether by comparison to ancient culture or in highlighting changes over a single lifetime or generation - with that also being the most prominent means of political commentary.

Wang Qingsong - "Preincarnation" (2002)

Yang Yongliang - "Eclipse" (2008) - the 'mountains' are digital collages of modern Shanghai city buildings and construction sites

Wang Fen - "On the wall: Guangzhou (4)" (2002) - not as direct as the others I was thinking of, but working with similar dynamics in relation to change and 'progress', and as it happens my favourite, not least because to me it seems to take the form of a question.

"Shea Kirk: Vantages" + other pieces, Centre for Contemporary Photography

Shea Kirk's portraits were strong, black and white and many of the subjects photographed in a way suggestive of queerness and/or gender fluidity/non-binarism.

"Dale Robertson (left and right view)" (2019)

Of the others, Michelle Tran's photos were my favourite, especially this one:

"Madison and Shauna" (2019)

(w/ R + L & Carmel)

Lauren Groff - Florida

Florida has hung alluringly before me since it came out last year, the combination of "Ghosts and Empties" (the lead story in this collection) and Fates and Furies making me pretty sure I'd like it - and I do.

For a collection of 11 stories originally published over several years, there are some striking recurrences - storms, snakes, and the state of Florida itself, that last emerging as state of mind and state of being almost as synecdoche for the wider world, not to mention recurrences of situations, the most notable being flawed women who have chosen to isolate themselves in settings which prove inhospitable and depictions of what arises from the discomfort they then face. This obsessiveness is a strength, not a limitation - it adds to the sense that all of the stories are being told through the lens of a distinct vision, coupled with the general atmosphere of teeming, barely contained threat coexisting with the everyday difficulties experienced by her protagonists.

You can't read Lauren Groff without noticing the language, especially at a sentence level. At times it slips into being too ornate; that seems to have been the major obstacle to at least a couple of people I know's enjoyment of Fates and Furies (although, in that novel, it becomes apparent by the end that the overt 'literariness' of the register in which it's written is part of the point). But Florida shows how controlled she is as a writer, the stories mostly moving forward in clean, punchy sentences and paragraphs, and while she's unafraid to try out new formulations, which sometimes leads to a brief false note, the flourishes are more frequently present illuminating new ways of seeing the things she's writing about.

I also like how much of a sense of story there is to most of the pieces, with some stretching across an entire lifetime, either proportionately in time or with one or two large leaps - there's a confidence to the way Groff both immerses us in her characters' minds and pulls us forward through large pieces of plot, often littered with seemingly incidental events and observations that add a lot to the whole. I'm not sure I have favourites; in some ways they all run together a bit. But all told, Florida is quite something.

Gangs of New York

Rewatch. (last time)

Solaris (Malthouse)

There's a lot to like about this adaptation - I'm not sure whether it's been framed as an adaptation of the original novel, Tarkovsky's 1972 film version or the 2002 Soderbergh take through which I first came to Solaris - including its convincingness in immersing the audience in its space station setting via set, sound (often bouncing from all around), stage lighting and projection and the way it escalates the emotional stakes as it goes. It doesn't completely hit its emotional marks, nor does it achieve the immensity and sublimity of last year's Melancholia staging, but nonetheless, very good.

(w/ Hayley, Cass and Kim)

Rocketman

I figured that if nothing else, at least the music would be good. Rocketman makes an effort to bring some colour and zing to its telling, and does a reasonable job at giving a sense of the person who became the outsized star, but ultimately the story - musical prodigy who was always a bit different hits it big and runs into trouble with drugs and predatory music industry people and finally makes peace with who he is - just isn't especially compelling.

(w/ Erandathie)

Bruce Springsteen - Western Stars

The man's nearly 70, so if anyone deserves to record a mellow modern country album, call it 'Western Stars', load it up with songs with names like "The Wayfarer" and "Chasin' Wild Horses" (both good songs btw), and put a whole lot of strings on it, it's him. Even better, it's good - high points coming deep into its gradual burn at tracks 10 and 11, "Stones" (the "those are only the lies you told me" song) and "There Goes My Miracle", which is maybe actually too simple, but such an earworm of an anthem that it doesn't matter. At times his vocals remind me of Eddie Vedder, at others Nick Cave, but also, he sounds the way you'd expect Bruce Springsteen to sound at 70 (69 actually).

Wake in Fright (Malthouse)

Adapted (and directed) by Declan Greene into a one-woman - the woman is Zahra Newman - show that starts with the uncanny spectacle of a bear (suit) adorned in 'Lead Council of NSW' hat and t-shirt stumbling unhealthily across stage, transitions into Newman directly addressing the audience and telling a story about encountering racism while talking about the lead poisoning of children in Broken Hill, and then slips into the suffocating story of Wake in Fright itself, deliberately anachronistically rendered with its 60s setting preserved (as evident in the references to pounds and shillings) but the music, projections and some of the acting choices - eg Newman's use of Usain Bolt's thunderbolt gesture - calling attention to the play's contemporary staging, as well as aspects of the direction which highlight black-coded imagery, adding another layer to the critique of toxic white Australian masculine culture. It's quite a tour de force.

(w/ R and Cass)

Zadie Smith - Feel Free

Sometimes it feels like I'm always reading Zadie Smith (like - incompletely - here, here and here).

More than any other writer, I think of her as having been a companion throughout my reading life from the time when I could (generously) be called an adult, dating back to White Teeth's publication in 2000, and while her novels have never been right at the top of the heap of my favourites (although NW has become better and better in my memory of it), I find her varied short non-fiction hugely nourishing for my spirit.

Feel Free collects pieces originally published from 2010 to 2017, possibly including a few which appear for the first time in it, and so is a sequel of sorts to Changing My Mind. I'd read and enjoyed at least a couple of these before, including her riffs on Joni Mitchell, Anomalisa (*) and dance lessons for writers; and I'm skimmed or skipped a few, where their subjects didn't quickly draw me in (but I expect that I'll return to them over time).

Throughout there are so many delights - insights articulately carefully and aptly, often in a way that's marvellously illuminating. The ones that made the strongest impression on me:

• "Generation Why?" - on Facebook, The Social Network, identity, and the way software reduces humans and 'locks us in'
• "Killing Orson Welles at Midnight" - on Christian Marclay's "The Clock" and, inevitably, fiction, cinema and time
• "Getting In and Out" - on Get Out, blackness, being biracial, engaging with the question of artists depicting suffering that is not theirs, and what she calls '[t]he real fantasy ... that we can get out of each other's way, mark a clean cut between black and white, a final cathartic separation between us and them'.
• "The Bathroom" - about family. 'It's only years later, in that retrospective swirl, that you work out who was hurt, in what way, and how badly.'
• "Man Versus Corpse" - art, reality, nature, perspective, death
• "Love in the Gardens" - a particularly charming account of two times and places in Rome whose real heart is Smith's relationship with her deceased father

In general, I liked the pieces she's written taking pop culture works that I'm familiar with as a jumping-off point, and those mining questions about the nature of being human and alive today, and am less drawn to the ones that are more explicitly engaged with contemporary politics and the state of society (where she is maybe a bit less original in her thinking).

Rhiannon Giddens with Francesco Turrisi - There Is No Other

Interesting, wide-ranging and well-crafted, like everything Giddens does. This one hasn't really grabbed me as a whole, though the closing "He Will See You Through" is stunning.

Joan Baez - Baez Sings Dylan

It's striking how sweetly melodic these are - recorded in the 60s, so from the earlier part of Dylan's career. As much country as folk.

John Wick & John Wick: Chapter 2

These have made a surprisingly large and positive impression on the cultural landscape - enough to overcome my usual boredom about movies which are 99% about action and cause me to watch them. And they are good! Keanu is convincing, so are the many other enjoyable actors who bob up (I especially like John Leguizamo), and the action scenes are basically non-stop but in a way where most of the non-direct action bits involve build-up and also flesh out the sense of an intriguing larger world within which this is all taking place (unlike say The Raid, another often held up as an exemplar of its type).

"Indies & Idols" (Australian Chamber Orchestra, Hamer Hall)

An enjoyable program mixing pieces by three Polish modernist composers - Witold Lutoslawski, "Overture for Strings" (1947), Krzysztof Penderecki, a short piece in Baroque style (1964) and "String Quartet No 1" (1960) and Karol Szymanowski, "String Quarter No 2" (1927) - with compositions by three contemporary composers in Bryce Dessner ("Reponse Lutoslawski"), Sufjan Stevens ("Suite from Run Rabbit Run", by way of arrangement by Michael Atkinson) and Jonny Greenwood ("Suite from There Will Be Blood" - the only ones I'd heard before). My favourites were Dessner's and the sprightly Sufjan translations, but all were - in some ways surprisingly - enjoyable.

(w/ Hayley)

Storm Boy (MTC)

Nice set (including the projections), I liked the puppets (penguins, snake, pelicans), and the performances were fine. But the play itself is gentle to a fault - very ho-hum.

(w/ Erandathie and trang)

Fleabag seasons 1 & 2

Tremendously appealing and emotionally pungent, and darker and deeper than I'd expected. Season 2 in particular is a marvel; the moment when the priest notices her asides to 'us' is electric, and the way the show develops the significance of those performatively conspiratorial comments to camera over the rest of the season, including in illustrating her development across the two seasons, is remarkably clever and at times uncanny. The stakes feel high, and real, especially in their flirtation. There are laughs too, and by the end mercy for all its main characters as well. I had a lot of feelings while watching Fleabag, and admired it very much it.

Assorted thoughts:

• Straight after seeing it, I expected my defining image of her character - and her monstrousness - to be the scene where she gigglingly sneaks up with a knife on her drip of a boyfriend in the shower. That by the end it's been replaced by not one but several others is a testament to the show's depth and its layering of her character and our understanding of it.
• So many of the people in her life are just terrible. Olivia Colman as her mother-in-law to be is particularly something.
• Her relationship with her sister Claire is right up there with the very best bits of the show.

Meg Wolitzer - The Female Persuasion

One of those well put together novels that feels just a bit too well put together. It starts off as a campus coming of age story (making me think of The Idiot) before sharpening, not too many pages in, into being also about feminism at the levels of the personal and the political - and, as the novel's cast and plot expand, its transmission across generations and the attendant conflicts - and eventually kaleidoscoping further outwards to encompass sections told from the perspective of not just Greer but also her high school boyfriend Cory, her best friend Zee, the second wave feminist icon she encounters Faith Frank, and the venture capitalist Emmett Shrader to whom Faith is connected.

Through it all, it remains interesting - persuasive in its depictions of characters and situations (and arcs), and dovetailed in a way that doesn't feel too neat although it veers very close. Yet it never felt in any way surprising, either at the level of story (I guessed the plot-turning death early; all the main characters ended up somewhere more or less linearly predictable given where they started) or how it worked up its themes (although I did like the way it tied Greer's coming into her own self and voice with her betrayal of Zee, and the way it patterned a couple of at least arguably more noble - or differently so - paths in Zee's and Cory's as part of Greer's own progression). 

Sharon Van Etten @ Hamer Hall, Arts Centre, Tuesday 11 June

Very nice show, built mostly around Remind Me Tomorrow, opening with "Jupiter 4" (exceedingly gothy including in the red and white lighting and smoke and pulsatingly exciting, the band having aptly walked on stage to another reference point in Portishead), then going straight into the clatter of "Comeback Kid" and then the stomp of "No One's Easy To Love".

All the Remind Me Tomorrow songs punched through, with the most new light for me shed on "Memorial Day", which I hadn't realised before is another on the goth/dream-pop spectrum (though more in the 'early Cocteau Twins' vein), and she dug way back for a handful of older songs - I would've enjoyed more, but time is fleeting - including "Serpents" from Tramp and a charmingly laid back "One Day" from all the way back to Epic.

Support act: BATTS - great voice, so-so songs, sweet cover of Gillian Welch's "Everything Is Free".

(w/ R)

Tess Lea - Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts

A timely read, and frequently enjoyable and illuminating, though I found myself skimming after a while - an anthropologist's perspective on the policy-makers, program managers and public health practitioners involved in the NT's Indigenous health system, the human and social dimensions of the systems of the state, the 'magical' quality of the policy process (in the sense of the qualities attributed to various rituals and artefacts of the process - workshops, inductions, strategic policy statements, etc), and its self-perpetuating nature in its framing of problems and interventions at the interface with Aboriginal communities, experiences and health outcomes. 

Art Gallery of Ballarat

Some highlights and notables across various exhibitions and the permanent collection:

Nana Ohnesorge's series "No Picnic at Ngannelong", commenting on the absence of Aboriginal people from Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock, set on a site of deep traditional significance.

As part of "Becoming Modern: Australian women artists 1920-1950": a pencil self-portrait by Thea Proctor (undated), curiously striking; a Margaret Preston "Jug of Flowers" (1929); Marjorie Woolcock's "All set to go" (circa 1950).

Naomi Hobson's "Wild Lagoon" (2019), inspired by the Cape York landscape of the artist's family and culture, combining motifs referring to Indigenous art with elements more reminiscent of western abstraction.

Claudia Moodoonuthi's "My Vegemite Family" 1 and 2 (2018), not to mention her redesign of the Vegemite label.

Marlene Gilson's "Black Swamp - Lake Wendouree" (2018) - a Ballarat setting. I've been seeing her work everywhere lately; here's an article contextualising.

Two Eugene von Guerard landscapes; I've encountered him in the NGV, and elsewhere I think, and despite what superficially appears to be quite generic subjects, they tend to draw the eye. It might be partly the brightness and detail, and maybe some unusual composition (e.g. unusual use or disregard of the rule of thirds).

It reflects well on the gallery how much of the work being displayed was created by Indigenous artists by the way.

(w/ R)

Game of Thrones season 8

[spoilers]

At last it's over, although 'at last' may not be the right phrase given how rapidly - relative to what come before it - the last two seasons often seemed to chew through their plots.

Having spent so much time watching this show, not to mention consuming often quite detailed online commentary about it, it's hard to distil my feelings about this last season and its ending, but basically it was satisfying enough for me. I liked that the defeat of the Night King wasn't the climax, that nor was an 'all the good guys team up and beat Cersei' scenario, and that Jon Snow didn't end up the ruler of the Seven Kingdoms (or even King in the North), and I also liked where most of the characters' arcs ended up. Dany's is obviously the most difficult, and I can see how it would have been a fine balance over several seasons to lay some groundwork for where she ends up without it seemingly overly foreshadowed as an inevitability, but I don't think there was enough spadework done there and particularly given the extra degree of difficulty involved in portraying a '(strong) woman descends into madness' arc; for me the way that turn is depicted is the weakest part of this last season and how the show ends.

All up I do think Game of Thrones has been pretty great basically all the way through, even if some of the story-telling and characterisation has been rickety as it's attempted to bring things towards its close. One of the best and most notorious things about it has been the way it's subverted various types of expectation, and with the benefit of seeing how it's now played out as a whole, I don't think it's fair to criticise the show for not having held more left turns or - in particular - killing off more of its main (and, especially, sympathetic) characters through its mid to late section until right near the end. Much of its 'subversiveness' has always been in relation to familiar notions of good triumphing over evil by virtue of nobility, and associated fantasy and general story-telling archetypes, while highlighting the role that power, manipulation/scheming, pragmatism and a willingness to act immorally, and chance and circumstance all play in people's lives and ultimate fates - and I don't think the ending is especially inconsistent with those structuring themes that have tun through the show ... I don't think the show's relatively amoral worldview requires it to give its sympathetic characters unhappy endings.

Two good articles criticising the way it ends: on its shift from sociological to psychological storytelling, and on the type of experience - including of terror and horror - that the show provided in its earlier seasons.

The other thing for me is that I'm not that demanding a viewer when it comes to extended epic-type storytelling. I'm willing to overlook plenty of flaws for something that looks and feels great, and at the episode and technical level, season 8 did all the way through, just like the show as a whole, with many (many) characters, scenes and plot through-lines to linger.

Previously: seasons 1 (and again), 2, 3, 4 and 5, then 1-6, 6 again, then 7 (and maybe 7 again but unrecorded?).

Tarjei Vesaas - The Ice Palace

A young, white forehead boring through the darkness. An eleven-year-old girl. Siss.

The opening sentence summons Steerpike for me, from the Gormenghast novels, Peake's references to his high forehead suggesting the sheer force of his will. But Siss, the primary presence in the remarkable The Ice Palace, is a very different character; equally important, while mostly absent, is her friend Unn. The intensity between them, and especially in Unn's room the one time they meet after school, trembles with the sense of all that's so vitally important and so unspeakable (including because so ungraspable, even in thought) for a certain type of child, perhaps a certain type of person.

The Ice Palace is deceptively simple, with its plain sentences and short sections, most following Siss - a notable exception is Unn's visit to the frozen waterfall which gives the book its title - and usually from her point of view. But what about the way it feels as though other perspectives and potential meanings and worlds are always thronging all around her, thrumming in complicated interaction with her own knotted internality and the way it seizes on certain symbols (the idea of the gift)? What about the strange intrusion of 'the bird' about two-thirds through, with its steel claws drawing a slanting stripe between two peaks in no time at all? What about the dream of snow-covered bridges, only the most explicit fall into poetry in a novel that operates throughout in a poetic register? (In translation from Nynorsk, one of the two officially sanctioned Norwegian languages, 1963.) What about the way it never reveals some of its most central mysteries - who is the other about whom Unn avoids thinking, and why does she fear she won't go to heaven? - in order to preserve its deeper architecture?

Most magically of all, in the end, it turns out to be as much about kindness, hope and the human spirit as it is about anything else.

Patty Griffin - Patty Griffin

The significance of Griffin choosing to make this album self-titled, this deep into a career of ten diverse and uniformly excellent albums (eleven including the equally excellent live document A Kiss in Time) and at the age of 55, is impossible to ignore, and adds to the sense one might already have from the music that Patty Griffin is something of a summation - a distillation - of where she has come to in all that time.

It's simpler and quieter, and more closely tied to the version of folk she's developed over her career than 2015's Servant of Love, and the gentleness is befitting. It doesn't have as many obvious song highlights as many of her previous records, but the musicality is at the same high standard as ever.

"Darren Sylvester: Carve a Future, Devour Everything, Become Something" & "Rosslynd Piggott: I Sense You But I Cannot See You" (NGVA)

I can't remember the last exhibition I visited that was as sheerly pleasurable as Darren Sylvester's (maybe the Del Kathryn Barton which was installed in the same space if I remember right), spanning photography, various forms of installation and sculpture, video, and music (the latter, stronger on texture and mood than melody but very strong on those indeed, echoing throughout the gallery and setting the tone for the visual pieces).

"Broken Model" (2016) 

"Listen to me" (2012) 

"IKEA sunrise" (2018)

"Our future was ours" (2005)

Also, "You should let go of a dying relationship" (2006), Sylvester's recreation and syncing of the music videos for "Heroes" and "Wuthering Heights", marvellous.

And it was two from two for today's NGVA visit, with Rosslynd Piggott's large retrospective also resonating. Hers seems the kind of body of work that offers many keys to its own understanding, but for me, one was certainly the appearance in her "100 glasses" (1991-92) piece, which is what it sounds like, of "Marcel" and "Virginia" side by side, as in Proust and Woolf, as in the quintessential modernist explorers of subjective consciousness and experience.

"Nature morte - eggs" & "Nature morte - eggs 2" (1990-91)

Throughout her four-decade spanning work: glasses, water, blues, dreamy mistiness - although my favourites seem to cluster from the late 80s through to mid 90s.

"Italy" (1988)

"Upside-down landscape" (1989), like a sprightly little Tanguy escapee

"Pour slowly into me" (1996)

Julia Jacklin - Crushing

There's three different types of song across Julia Jacklin's Crushing, more or less. There's the muffled, moody, not-quite-ballads at the top ("Body"), anchored at track 4 ("Don't Know How To Keep Loving You") and nearly at the end ("Turn Me Down") - all ace. There's the indie-rocky ones ("Head Alone", "Pressure to Party" and "You Were Right"), which as a set are my favourites. And there's the other ones, which are a bit quieter and don't make much of an impression. Altogether, though, very good.

Avengers: Endgame

For me, Endgame stuck the landing. The culmination of a 22-film run, most of which I've seen (many recently), it does everything it could reasonably have been expected to, moving through its two and a half hours with clean lines and a neat structure which succeeds in making its resolutions to many of its major characters' arcs feel natural and satisfying.

I guess this series, or franchise, must be unique in the history of cinema in terms of the way its films have fit together (as opposed to the Bond series, with its single through-line of its main character, or the Star Wars films, which seem to have developed with a more linear spine accompanied by tangential proliferations). Moment to moment, too, it continues to be enjoyable.

Spider Man: Into The Spider-Verse

While this one is on-theme with my recent superhero movie watching catch-up, it didn't seem an essential watch - Film Crit Hulk's enthusiastic spruiking of it persuaded me. Animatedly enjoyable as it is, and as much as I recognise what he says about its merits, perhaps - again - I'm butting up against the limits of the genre's intrinsic appeal to me, despite how much of it I've watched over time.

Burning

Burning has stayed with me, as I'd thought it might. It didn't impress me as vividly on a second viewing, which I think was mostly because an analytical part of my brain was ticking over trying to pull it apart - and what figure out what made it so powerful - this time. But still, very good.

(w/ R)

A Simple Favour

Quite twisty, quite fun, and Anna Kendrick is pretty much as enjoyable as always (although maybe slightly too broad in her comedy here), but in the end all a bit insubstantial.

Marvel Cinematic Universe catchup and refresh

As a bit of an indulgence, I've been watching/rewatching some of these to fill in the gaps. An interesting experience to have connections and resonances emerge, or be fleshed out, after so much out-of-sequence exposure along the way.

Having recently watched the first Captain America film, and in general developed a bit more investment in the principals and more familiarity with their personalities and their multi-movie character arcs, The Avengers was a notch more enjoyable than last time, when I was missing a fair bit of context.

Iron Man 3 was a first watch. Thoughts prompted included: particularly in an age of Elon Musk et al, the character of Iron Man is far from unproblematic; the extent to which Jarvis comes off as an actual character is quite impressive (and adds more weight to the developments of the later Age of Ultron); it tackles the PTSD head on and I liked that aspect; it wraps up his story quite neatly (though of course we, and by then the studio too, know/knew there was plenty to come).

Ant-Man, as promised, was more of a goof, a fun and fast-moving heist movie. Paul Rudd is really quite charming.

Like The Avengers but more so, Captain America: Civil War made much more sense with the benefit of now having several more of these under my belt. This one particularly, but also the others I've been watching or rewatching, brought home how much of a balancing act each film walks between standing alone and being a satisfying part of the wider 'MCU', as well as the extent to which many of them tip in the latter direction.

The Guardians of the Galaxy movies seemed skippable in terms of rewatches but I figured I might as well flesh out my attachment to the characters (on this watch, volume 2 in particular puts a lot of work into all its principals, significantly building on the first one). And they turned out to be an apt lead-in to Thor: Ragnarok by way of space adventures, which I'm going to say is probably my favourite of the lot (its only real competitor being Black Panther, which is still fresh enough in my mind that I've skipped it in this refreshing) - a winner in terms of pace, tone, humour and style, as well as super enjoyable characters and about the right amount of advancing of the longer arcs.

Spider-Man: Homecoming was neat, getting the stakes right and doing a good job with the 'high school important / adult world important' thing, as well as using the big previous Avengers events as worldbuilding context. Tony Stark also becomes increasingly more enjoyable the more films I see him in.

On the back of all that, Infinity War landed with more weight this time, mostly because all the threads it pulls together were fresh in my mind but also because there was more depth in my understanding of the (many) characters. Also, Thanos is an intriguingly philosophical, melancholy, and at times almost sympathetic sociopath of a big bad.

And, most recently, Ant-Man and the Wasp - another fun entry.

Centre for Contemporary Photography

Quick CCP visit. Not much jumped out at me apart from Guy Grabowsky's "Reflex" (2018).