NGV Australia

Ron Mueck's "Mass" in a different setting. And a portraits exhibition that I thought I'd be up for but wasn't, although I liked the way it led with the relationship between portrait and land and Country. 

Polixeni Papapetrou - "Magma Man" (2012)

Charlie's Angels

This Charlie's Angels has some zip and a welcome - needed, really - female lens courtesy of writer/director/actor Elizabeth Banks. Kristen Stewart is the highlight as she usually is, but in this case via her comic touch.

Morgan Wade - Reckless

Personable of-the-moment country. Nothing on it gets near brightly anthemic first track "Wilder Days".

Angel Olsen - Big Time

There's a comfort and expansiveness here that envelopes the entire record, continuing Angel Olsen's great run - Burn Your Fire For No Witness, My Woman, All Mirrors and now this one. The warmth of Big Time's first section, leading off with "All The Good Times" and "Big Time", sets a tone and reminds me of Margo Price in its contemporary folk-tinged country, in that way of idiosyncratic personal reference points. And threads of that continue as things get moodier, reaching a mid-album high point with "All The Flowers" which is like an escapee from Roberta Flack's 60s/70s catalogue and "Right Now". All through, in a slow burning way, it's excellent.

Minari

A quiet, beautiful film. Korean migrants in Arkansas, family, farming, faith. Perfectly weighted.

Beach House - Once Twice Melody

Is there such a thing as too lush when it comes to a Beach House album? Once Twice Melody suggests the answer is 'yes'. There's a lot of music here and despite repeated listens it all tends to blur.

Patricia Lockwood - No One Is Talking About This

It's no easy thing to write fiction in the mode of our very online existences today, but No One Is Talking About This does it as well as anything else I've read - the fragmentary style in which the banal comes to seem aphoristic, the sense of life lived through endless filters and memes, with the personal and the political both in play (including frequent references to the dictator, ie Trump) yet always struggling for purchase against the tidal waves of content and knowingness that make up Lockwood's 'Portal'. Part one is immersive, funny, convincing and human.

How part two - in which real life makes itself unavoidably felt, with the diagnosis and then unexpected survival and birth of the narrator's sister's baby with Proteus syndrome - rubs up against that is the core of the novel, and an unexpected one by the time it arrives halfway in. I found the sections just after the diagnosis very moving, and so too those when the baby arrives and is treasured despite (because) everyone know her life expectancy can be measured in weeks or months rather than years. Each part works on its own; whether - or how - they work together is more of an open question but I think the effect is cumulative. This is a novel about being human today, and the nature of connection as well as grief, with a form that reflects the segment of life that it's about. 

Maria Gainza - Portrait of an Unknown Lady

The unknown lady is, of course, the narrator - with shades of Cusk to her - who we meet checking into a hotel under a false name, just as much as the mysterious and totemic art forger Renee in search of whose story she goes in her dissolute way. Doesn't have the same remarkable quality as Optic Nerve, but does have some of the same pleasures - the sentences, the slipperiness, the combination of clarity with opacity.

Sharon Van Etten - We've Been Going About This All Wrong

I don't know, has Sharon Van Etten ever been more lush and more epic than she is here? 

She's written stunning album openers before, but "Darkness Fades" is right up there, reminiscent of the Cranberries - and rounded off in similar spacious dream-pop style at the end by "Far Away". Also on We've Been Going About This All Wrong are two of her hookiest earworms so far - if not the two hookiest - in "Headspace" ('baby don't turn your back on me') and "Mistakes" ('even when I make a mistake ... it's much better than that') and a bunch of deeper cuts that more than hold their own. 

There's texture and clarity throughout, all confirming that SVE is possibly the best, and definitely my favourite, of the current crop of excellent singer-songwriters drawing from what used to be called 'indie' and before that 'alternative'.

Miranda Lambert - Palomino

Palomino feels like a throwback to an earlier phase of Lambert's career - a more straight-up country-rock-pop record than either Wildcard or The Weight of These Wings, but benefiting from the refinement of her songwriting that's happened over the years. It's not one of my favourite of hers, and not many songs stand out - the brightest is probably the produced-up version of "Waxahachee" from last year's Marfa Tapes - but still good.

Ocean's Eleven, Ocean's Twelve & Ocean's Thirteen / The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum & Jason Bourne

A pair of 2000s series, both of which I'd mostly if not entirely watched before, both featuring Matt Damon prominently and also Vincent Cassel as a murderous bad guy. Best watched with critical brain disengaged.

The Beths - Auckland, New Zealand, 2020

Sounds the way you'd expect a live Beths album to sound.

Laura Stevenson - Laura Stevenson

From 2021, so-so.

Kate

I guess it's progress of sorts that a film featuring a woman as an action hero, without making a big thing of her gender, can be as predictable as Kate turns out to be.

Under the Silver Lake

I was primed to like Under the Silver Lake and willing to work at it if needed, thanks to how great It Follows was, and the way that earlier film so completely nailed style, mood and (sly) thematic substance. In the event, there were bits of it I liked - the sinisterly glossy atmosphere, the twinned depiction of Andrew Garfield's character's anomie and shagginess of the story, the bursts of humour, the way it was all coiled around a thesis about the experience of emptiness of the current generation of youngish people amidst the ahistorical detritus of contemporary culture. But I'm not yet convinced, relatively fresh from watching it, that what it had to offer was worth the absence of most of the more conventional pleasures of movies.

Jane Smiley - A Thousand Acres

Just a great read.

Last time - over a decade ago - I think I was more caught up in the grand human drama and emotions of it, and while that still tugged at me, on this read it was Ginny's and Rose's childhood trauma and the way it's both paradigm and operating cause for the broader setting and events of the novel that I found most striking.

Big Thief - Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You

A cracking record, all 80 minutes of it. Covers heaps of ground - many of my favourite moments are the most 'yee-haw' songs which are in the territory of Wussy - and is interesting, accessible and good the whole way through.

Cat Power - Covers

Not the most memorable.

Two recent NGV trips

First one, with R, was to see QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection, and we only got halfway through the exhibition, which covers the entire 3rd floor. The breadth of the theme - particularly given the approach of exploring the collection through a queer perspective rather than attempting a survey of queer art - made for all kinds of pieces.

Second one, with Hayley, was mainly to see Bark Ladies: Eleven Artists from Yirrkala - which was pretty wonderful to spend some time in while marvelling at the work done directly on to bark, and the formal innovations made by these contemporary women artists in the context of culture. Also a visit to the NGVA permanent collection where I had my first somewhat meaningful art encounter in quite a while, being struck by the paint-ness of this one:

Julie Irving - "Shifting" (1989), including detail

Barbara Trapido - The Travelling Hornplayer

Fluently criss-crossing characters and plots with a great sense of life-ness, joy and sadness mingled in a way that reminds me of those early - and some of the latter day - Kate Atkinson novels.

1917

I was engaged while I was watching it, but I doubt it will stay with me.

Julia Galef - The Scout Mindset

Scout mindset = aiming to see things as they are, not as you wish they were. I've admired Julia Galef's way of engaging online for a long time so I was interested to read her entry in the genre. It has plenty of good reminders and some neat practical tips. A couple that come to mind - hold your identity lightly, and try the ideological Turing test (describing opposing arguments in a way that its adherents or maybe neutral observers can't tell that you disagree with them). 

Hannah Kent - Burial Rites

Stark and beautiful. The sense of setting is strong - geographic (bitter northern Iceland), period (19th century) and character-wise (in line with the associated struggle to survive) - and doesn't get in the way of the story being told. It's involving at the level of character and plot - although we know going in that it will end with Agnes's death - and the reinterpretation of the events surrounding Iceland's last execution is gracefully done.

Mitski - Laurel Hell

Despite significantly upping the synth-pop vibes compared to the outstanding Puberty 2 and even more outstanding Be the Cowboy, Laurel Hell comes across as low-key. It's good though, sustaining a sulking mood and sharp perspective across both its quieter songs and the brighter ones like "Working for the Knife" and "The Only Heartbreaker".

Bleachers - Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night

There are only two pretty good songs here - "Chinatown" and "Stop Making This Hurt". "Chinatown" features Bruce Springsteen, but the whole record basically unsuccessfully attempts to channel him - starting from the album cover. 

Daniel Abraham - The Dagger and the Coin series

Neatly put together high fantasy series which appears as if its author knew where he was going with it from the beginning. The main characters - Cithrin, Geder, Marcus, and first Dawson then Clara Kalliam - are given plenty of time and, apart from Marcus, mostly avoid fantasy stereotype. And the big picture is put together nicely - the world-building of course, but also the way finance is used to wield power. It's not quite as vivid as the very best of its kind - which, in this category, probably means A Song of Ice and Fire before it lost its way - but that's mostly a reminder of how rare that 'very best' is.

The Dragon's Path, The King's Blood, The Tyrant's Law, The Widow's House, The Spider's War

NGV International (permanent collection)

What I think of as the pictorial part of the NGV's 19th century European collection isn't one that I'd usually spend much time in, but it does hold many of the paintings that have been there the longest for me, going back to whenever it was that I first began visiting the NGV. And the other day, visiting, I found my attention caught in the large room that's been set up in a 'salon' arrangement for a while now, with dozens of paintings covering the four walls.

The one that gave me pause - for the first time - was Jules Bastien-Lange's "October" (1878). It's closer to my usual tastes than most else of what was in the room, particularly the way the fields and horizon in the background are done.

The ones that are most quintessentially part of the NGV for me - and I know for many others - are all large format and all, to me, suspiciously allegorical, sentimental or both. But they have a directness and a force that makes them memorable.

August Friedrich Albrecht Schenck - "Anguish" (c. 1878)

Lucy Kemp-Welch - "Horses bathing in the sea" (1900)

Briton Riviere - "A Roman holiday" (1881)

St George Hare - "The victory of faith" (c1890-1891)

Jules Lefebvre - "The grasshopper" (1872)

And three other discoveries from this latest visit - probably I've seen them all before but they've never registered:

William Quiller Orchardson - "The first cloud" (1887) - not sure what's going on here but I like the expression the man's face and the staging of the scene in general

Walter Sickert - "The Rise of Lazarus" (1928-29)

Keeley Halswelle - "Green-robed senators" (c. 1880)

Flag Day: Original Soundtrack

When eminently good and tasteful musicians come together, the results can sometimes be eminently tasteful and underwhelming. In this case, where the musicians are Eddie Vedder, Glen Hansard and Cat Power what emerges is instead a pretty charmful folk-rock-pop record with each of those three distinctive voices coming through clearly. 

Chan Marshall does what she does well, and in more organic vein than the glossily orchestrated albums she's been releasing more or less since The Greatest - particular grace notes are the patented simplicity of "I Think of Angels" and the "fuck y'all" refrain of "I Am A Map". 

Eddie Vedder's wordless "Rather Be Home" is fairly lovely in its own right, and all the more so for summoning some of Ten's most atmospheric moments all those years past. Indeed, Vedder's gentle folk-inflected contributions are a consistent highlight, bringing to the fore impulses that have been there all along, across Ten, Vs, Vitalogy and so on; "I'll Be Waiting" reminds me of those latter day Robert Plant records. Also there's a faithful cover of R.E.M.'s "Drive". 

Best of all is Hansard and Vedder's stately duet "Tender Mercies", though - surprisingly, maybe - the two on which Vedder's daughter Olivia sings, "My Father's Daughter" and "There's A Girl" are up there too.

Dune

I made the effort to see this in a cinema despite the current circumstances because it seemed likely to be very good and worth seeing on a big screen - Villeneuve has an unignorable track record with science fiction via Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 and more generally (ie Sicario). And maybe anticipation was my enemy here, because while I thought it was good, it didn't completely immerse me or have the depth that I'd hoped for. On the other hand, it was persuasive in both its showier and smaller moments, and in its overall conception, and while its themes - environmental exploitation, colonialism, the hero's journey, and perhaps family - may be familiar, they're also cleanly drawn and married to a satisfying sense of heft. Chalamet good as always. As I said to someone recently, I've seen him in a few things now but it always feels at first thought like I've only seen him in Call Me By Your Name.

Olivia Rodrigo - Sour

Some dynamic, memorable songs - mostly front-ended ("Traitor", "Drivers License", "Deja Vu", "Good 4 U") - and some others without that same zest.

Spencer

Heavy and at times heavy-handed, Spencer isn't a conventional film but it succeeds in depicting a version of Diana's suffocating experience of being of the royal family. It was the combination of Kristen Stewart and director Pablo Larrain's previous Jackie that got me to watch it. For me, the happy ending, with Diana and her children breaking free, would have felt unearned were it not for my (and everyone's knowledge) of how the real Diana's story ended - which turns it instead into a sad ending, or at the very least bittersweet one, and not of the type to romanticise. (Also - neat jazz soundtrack courtesy of Jonny Greenwood.)

(w/ trang)

Valerie June - The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers

This is indeed a dreamy album, countryish, soulish, indieish music with a dream-pop swirl. High grade stuff. 

Ted Lasso seasons 1 & 2

Properly feel good tv. 

N K Jemisin - The City We Became

Sturdy concept, well executed. There are lots of ways this could've gone wrong, with so many characters in play and the main ones standing in for cities or boroughs, but Jemisin's up to the task.

Brandi Carlile - In These Silent Days

Brandi Carlile was big for me last year, and I didn't even get round to properly listening to the album of hers that was actually released in 2021, In These Silent Days. It's classic singer-songwriter fare, right down to Carlile's willingness to write seemingly simple melodies, put them right upfront, and trust in those melodies to be enough for the songs to work - which they do. Putting aside the production, many of the songs on In These Silent Days could have been written and recorded in the 1970s, including some of its best - especially "You and Me on the Rock". This is an excellent record all round - more low-key than By The Way, I Forgive You but comparably good.

The Witcher seasons 1 & 2

Somehow, in a show that knowingly and expansively - giddily even - traffics in the ridiculous, on this second pass I once again got stuck on the fact that The Witcher expects us to take it seriously while brandishing a main character named 'Yennefer of Vengerberg'. Of course, one of the show's charms is that it in fact only expects us to take it seriously in certain ways - as a fantasy, in a world with all the trimmings and filled with epic doings and dark portent - without being all humourless about it.

Season 2 is at once more streamlined (because it's a single timeline in which the characters and major pieces of action regularly intersect) and more sprawling (because it broadens its scope and the ramifications of its characters' actions and 'destinies') than season 1. It also has more emoting by Henry Cavill's Geralt of Rivia in about 5 minutes in the first episode than in the entirety of the previous season.

Basically this just continues to be a fun show, tuned pretty well to one segment of what I enjoy for escapism, and with enough going on across its various dimensions to not be distractingly or egregiously offensive in any way.

Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall, Spectre & No Time To Die

The Daniel Craig Bond films. 

I'd previously seen Skyfall (which I remembered as good, with my impressions dominated to an outsized extent by the house) and Spectre (of which I had no memories at all).

I'd also gathered from general pop culture consumption that Casino Royale was regarded as very good and Quantum of Solace as very bad.

What I took from watching all five of these in sequence over a few weeks is that they do basically all fit together - not in that perfectly crafted 'aha' way that some series do, but in a way that even when the seams show, by the end it feels like there's enough stitched-together integrity that it satisfies, including on the emotional level.

There's tons of action (QoS includes chases by foot, car, boat and plane), some memorable supporting characters (and some less so) among whom Eva Green's Vesper Lynd earns the heavy narrative and emotional weight her character is made to bear across films 2, 3, 4 and 5, dapper Dave Bautista's villain is enjoyable, and Ana de Armas' cameo also stands out, and some artful touches throughout in script, direction and cinematography. 

David Epstein - Range

Challenges the assumption that early specialisation is key to success, arguing instead from a range of perspectives that 'range' is commonly the more fruitful path. 

Aimee Mann - Queens of the Summer Hotel

Pleasant but not very melodically striking.

"2021 (Harness Your Hopes)"

Mix cd from David. Favourites - apart from Soccer Mommy's "circle the drain" and Mitski's "The Only Heartbreaker", which I already knew - are Pete Yorn's "Elizabeth Taylor" and Foxygen's "Shuggie", also Warren Zevon's "Lawyers, Guns and Money".

Kate Atkinson - Transcription

Kate Atkinson is a terrific writer and always readable, and it's no surprise that her take on a spy novel - and her third World War II novel after the truly superlative Life After Life and the also impressive A God in Ruins - is a page turner, even without the major plot misdirection(s) and twist(s) that land in its second half. I didn't quite love Transcription - I thought it was missing that indefinable quality of 'about life-ness' that my favourites of hers have - but liked it plenty.

Moana

A good one.

"Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion" + more @ Heide

Margel Hinder - "Construction" (1954) & "Gemini" (1955) - I most liked these ones but the wooden ones spoke to me a bit too

Anish Kapoor - "Untitled" (1993) & "In the Presence of Form II" (1993)

(w/ R, J & H and Carmel)

2021: "All those little pieces"

This year's soundtrack - on spotify. 

1. Highwomen - The Highwomen

The Highwomen (Elektra, 2019)

2. Hot & Heavy - Lucy Dacus

Home Video (Matador, 2021)

3. Robber - The Weather Station

Ignorance (Fat Possum, 2021)

4. Every Time I Hear That Song - Brandi Carlile

By The Way, I Forgive You (Elektra, 2018)

5. Keeps Me Running - Esther Rose

How Many Times (Father/Daughter, 2021)

6. Nightflyer - Allison Russell

Outside Child (Fantasy, 2021)

7. Kokomo, IN - Japanese Breakfast

Jubilee (Dead Oceans, 2021)

8. Hard Drive - Cassandra Jenkins

An Overview on Phenomenal Nature (Ba Da Bing!, 2021)

9. Bloodshot - Julien Baker

Little Oblivions (Matador, 2021)

10. Errors in the History of God - Biffy Clyro

The Myth of the Happily Ever After (Warner, 2021)

11. Searching for the Truth - Katie Pruitt

Expectations (Rounder, 2020)

12. Harmonia's Dream - The War on Drugs

I Don't Live Here Anymore (Atlantic, 2021)

13. I'm Through - Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit

Georgia Blue (Southeastern, 2021)

14. Go Your Way - Robert Plant and Alison Krauss

Raise the Roof (Rounder, 2021)

Brandi Carlile - as a member of the Highwomen as well as via By The Way, I Forgive You - and Julien Baker have been the biggest artists of my 2021, both more or less on constant rotation throughout a year in which I listened to a lot of music. Ignorance has been there all year too, though it was only recently that I learned "Robber" was a metaphor for capitalism, making it even better. Every song on this playlist, and the albums they came from, has sunk in deep, but amongst them, "Hard Drive" stands out as a genuinely magical, hypnotically entrancing and - if I can claim this for what's still in the end just a pop song - ultimately healing moment in a year where such was very needed.

Samanta Schweblin - Little Eyes

Schweblin's ability to unnerve is on display from the very first of Little Eyes' short chapters, as a teen girl works out how to communicate with her 'kentuki' only for things to go horribly wrong now that the robotically controlled stuffed toy's user ('dweller'), anonymous behind the internet somewhere in the world, can reach more directly into the 'keeper' 's life. 

The book never returns to that first vignette; it's structured with a combination of similar stand-alones and chapters forming parts of longer narratives, all showing different ways in which the kentuki technology is either used for malign and harmful purposes or, despite initial promise, is unable to offer real liberation from the material and spiritual impoverishment of the physical world and - in Schweblin's telling - the darkness of human nature. It's inventive and propulsive, and to the very end I wasn't expecting that every single thread would end badly - it's a slippery, layered book that has a strong, dark vision but doesn't at any point feel gratuitous. It's powerful.

(also - Fever Dream, which increasingly feels like an out-an-out modern classic)

Lee Lai - Stone Fruit

I thought this was good - its truthful messiness translated into a story that appears simple on its surface while containing depths.

(see here)

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss - Raise the Roof

I don't know what it is about these latter day Robert Plant records that strikes such a chord with me; maybe it's something about the combination of the British folk + rock and roll elements, plus the eclectic other sources that find their ways into the mix. Where it started was Raising Sand, which has turned out to be one of those albums that just hasn't gone away, years on, and Raise the Roof is the first time that he and Krauss have returned to collaborating. It's not as great as the first one, but it's good still; favourites are the really quite folksy "Go Your Way" (Plant on mournful lead vocals) and "It Don't Bother Me" (Krauss over the top of a forceful thrum), also a jaunty version of "Can't Let Go".

Lesley Chow - You're History

The project is feminist, with its close readings of key records by popular but - Chow contends - still underrated female pop artists. At the same time, it's about taking the music and sounds of pop music, and their effects on the listener, seriously, and challenging the assumptions about what constitutes 'quality' music (eg the literary lyrics of Bob Dylan) that tend to prevail in music writing and among 'educated' music listeners. I skimmed the chapters on most of the artists I didn't already know, while enjoying the overview essays and many of the individual chapters; artists including Kate Bush, TLC, Neneh Cherry, Taylor Swift, Shakespears Sister and more.

Rick and Morty season 5

I've lost the thread of this a bit in watching it at pretty long intervals, but Rick and Morty has become one of those shows with enough comforting familiarity - plus it has the fizzy feeling of creativity, even if I'm not always sure what it's in aid of or how it all fits together - to be watchable anyway.

Natasha Brown - Assembly

So good. This tightly condensed slice of fiction sent a shiver through me.

Army of the Dead

Zack Snyder netflix zombie heist movie.

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit - Georgia Blue

Isbell and friends covering songs by Georgia artists, including some utterly iconic ones - "It's A Man's, Man's, Man's World", "Midnight Train to Georgia" (both sung by Brittney Spencer), "I've Been Loving You Too Long" (a bold one to take on that Isbell treats with sincerity and his own style), a celebratory rave-up version of "Cross Bones Style" sung by Amanda Shires, two R.E.M. bookends ("Nightswimming" complete with Bela Fleck on banjo and "Driver 8"), all of which work well. 

My favourites are an epic version of what was already an epic song in Brandi Carlile's version of "Kid Fears", complete with backing vocals from Julien Baker (thereby bringing together probably the two most important artists of my 2021 with a big song from my pretty distant past), and Isbell's take on a yearning Vic Chesnutt song called "I'm Through" - plus probably that "Cross Bones Style" take.

It all hangs together surprisingly very well - something about the quality of the songs and of the covering artists, and maybe the way that a lot of the songs/artists being covered have seeped into the contemporary americana-plus sound of Isbell and co, so that covers in those styles end up being apt, and completing a circle of sorts.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner - Fleishman Is In Trouble

It's tempting to be a bit snobby about this book, to dismiss it for its readability and (on the surface) familiar themes and perspectival shifts for contemporary literary fiction (re: the perspectival shifts, an obvious reference point is Fates and Furies; another, that came out in the same year as Fleishman, is Trust Exercise). And I do think there's something to that response, which I felt in myself the whole time I was reading it. 

At the same time though, there is real penetration and insight in it - especially in the way that Libby emerges as the most interesting character as Toby recedes a little and Rachel has also come to the forefront. Fleishman has something real to say about marriage, women's experience and modern society, as well as about identity and individual and social psychology and the gaps in people's understanding of each other, and much of it lands properly in the novel's later stages, with the 'reveal' of Rachel's side of events and, in parallel, with the shift in understanding on Libby's part and shading in of her life. The twists are twists and shifts in perspective, not in plot exactly, and they're pretty strongly signalled - which is a good thing in this case.

Just how well it works depends - and how much credit to give the book - depends on how seriously one takes the metafictional gesture near the end when Libby is revealed as not only the narrator, which we've known all along, but also the possible 'author' of the very book we've been reading ... which in turn brings into play all the unreliabilities that we might expect from her character, telling the story of these characters, based on the evidence of the text itself. The more seriously we take that, the better the book becomes - and it's impossible to know (aptly?) how seriously that should be.

Courtney Barnett - Things Take Time, Take Time

Courtney Barnett's got an x-factor - her previous stuff makes that clear - but this album doesn't.

Other Worlds Than These edited by John Joseph Adams

An anthology including both 'portal fantasies', a la through the wardrobe into Narnia, and 'parallel worlds' stories inspired by quantum physics. Consistent high quality across the collection is impressive. 

MVP is Kelly Link's "Magic For Beginners", an exceptionally well crafted long story that's about stories in a way that's meaningful, fresh and emotionally resonant - not to mention magical, with a strong undercurrent of threat and the sinister. (good analysis here)

There are a lot of clever stories here, many of them unpredictable and satisfying in their reversals and landings, and it was nice how many of them ended with versions of a happy ending (or at least not a specifically dark one). Over and above that, a few that felt to me like they had some of the real stuff: Seanan McGuire, "Crystal Halloway and the Forgotten Passage"; Pat Cadigan, "Nothing Personal" (one of the only ones that made me wish I could read more about its characters, weary detective Ruby Tsang and interdimensional interloper Rafe Pasco); Joyce Carol Oates, "The Rose Wall"; Paul Melko, "Ten Sigmas" (not actually that profound but just so well done with its repeated splitting-offs to follow diminishing numbers of possible selves as their probabilities diminish through the choices they make in attempting to save the girl), Yoon Ha Le, "Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain".

Into the Inferno

Werner Herzog and volcanos, though the Cambridge volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer who functions as guide is just as important a figure in the documentary. Vanuatu, Antarctica, Ethiopia, Iceland, North Korea, and back to Vanuatu.

Lydia Loveless - Daughter

Middling, especially when (inevitably) compared to the heights she's reached before.

Biffy Clyro - The Myth of the Happily Ever After

A real roaring rock album, and as close to hardcore as I'm likely to get; reminds me of Cave In. Every song's an anthem and a bunch of them hit particularly hard. Special mentions to "DumDum", "A Hunger in Your Haunt", "Errors in the History of God" (the 'we are trolls' song) and "Haru Urara".

Aaron Lee Tasjan - Tasjan! Tasjan! Tasjan!

Not especially notable singer-songwriter fare with retro overground 60s/70s folk stylings. "Up All Night" is good though.

"A Miracle Constantly Repeated: Patricia Piccinini"

Taking advantage of the reopening of the Flinders Street Station ballroom and the corridors and rooms connecting to it, an installation of around 20 of Piccinini's distinctive works, some of them substantial ie occupying entire rooms.

It's good, of course - the art, the setting, and the interaction between them. A bit of a sentimental streak running through several of the pieces that I hadn't noticed in Piccinini before but in retrospect is pretty clear - and also not necessarily at odds with the ideas that she's working with, including the relationships between humans and the worlds we live in (ecological, technological, scientific, familial).

The descriptions and explanations provided by Piccinini (audio tour or in writing via app) were illuminating too.

"Sapling"

"No Fear of Depths" - the child is modelled on Piccinini's daughter

"Celestial Field"

"La Brava", in the foreground of the actual ballroom

(w/ R, J & H)

Strong Female Lead

This really brought back that time in Australia's political and social history and brought home again how appalling the treatment of Julia Gillard in public - and private - discourse was.

Tori Amos - Ocean to Ocean

I enjoyed checking back in with Tori after so many years, and there are some pleasures here - "Addition of Light Divided", "Speaking With Trees", "Spies", the general reminder of how great she is and how large a part of my life those first half dozen albums of hers have been.

Taylor Swift - Red (Taylor's Version)

When it comes to Taylor Swift, Red is the big one for me. This re-recording is overall a bit more organic sounding - which means a touch less shimmer and production, which takes the tiniest bit of sparkle from tracks like "State of Grace" and "Red" (though of course I'm biased towards the versions I've come to know so well) but gives a subtly new, more grounded dimension to others like "I Knew You Were Trouble", 'We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" and "Holy Ground". Also interesting hearing the changes in Swift's voice in the nine years since its original release.

Also included is a generous selection of Red-era songs which I'm not enough of a completist to spend a lot of time with, but I enjoyed "Better Man" (an original not a Pearl Jam cover) and the 10 minute version of "All Too Well" (although I think the more concise original cut does a better job in conveying the song's drama, with its clearer and more conventional builds and peaks).

The War on Drugs - I Don't Live Here Anymore

I Don't Live Here Anymore is a marginally cleaner-sounding and more concise version of the War on Drugs, but really only marginally. If not quite so epic as Lost in the Dream and A Deeper Understanding, it's still plenty widescreen, and good.

Pistol Annies - Hell of a Holiday

Pistol Annies have released a Christmas album and somehow it's a natural fit; nothing groundbreaking but a good time.

Faye Webster - I Know I'm Funny haha

Woozy country 'n' lounge sounds.

Lauren Groff - Matrix

There's a mystical quality to Matrix which is apt given its surface subject - the life and works of visionary 12th century abbess Marie (in England, though born in France), from being sent to the abbey as prioress at the age of 17 by Queen Eleanor of Aquitane to her death many decades later, having overseen the abbey's growth and flourishing over that time, often in defiance of both Rome and the crown. 

But that mystical quality, of mystery, ellipsis and sliding truths, arises more from the combination of style and setting that Groff produces, in an impressive departure from the thoroughly contemporary mode of Fates and Furies and her short stories - the novel sustains a third person present tense voice in which Groff's characteristic flights of language are part of the structure, at once defamiliarising and evocative, for rendering an alien historical and cultural setting legible,[*] and more to the point the vision (of another kind) that it creates of a female-centred society, kept apart from the rest of the world and constructed as an extension of Marie's own will and self, and the associated - chewy - ideas it therefore puts into play, around female-ness, power, and the construction and costs of the uses of both.

I found it very easy to become lost within Matrix. I never knew exactly where it was going - although her late-in-life realisation about her own pride was a mild disappointment in its familiarity - but it has a strong sense of story and Marie's inner life is clearly depicted. I imagine there are plenty of anachronisms in its depiction of its historical period, but that seems besides the point given the nature of the act of imagination that the novel enacts. It feels a bit like a fable - aphoristic maybe - and it's unafraid of nuance; I wondered whether there would be a reckoning for how Marie treat Avice and her pregnancy, and the novel is explicit about the ecological cost of the various massive engineering projects that the nuns complete in consolidating their power. I also found it pretty moving, especially Marie's relationships with the various significant women in her life (Eleanor and Wulfhild in particular).

[*] A possible compare and contrast, and a book that it slightly reminded me of, is The Buried Giant - although Matrix's setting is in fact several centuries more recent, being the time of the Middle Ages, the Crusades, Richard the Lionheart vs the post-Arthurian Dark Ages)

Ursula K Le Guin - The Lathe of Heaven

A man finds that some of his dreams - those he calls 'effective' - are changing the world, not in small ways but comprehensively, by rewriting the entire course of history (human at the very least, seemingly planetary also, and very possibly beyond even that if the iterating appearances of the aliens are anything to go by - although the strange insight they appear to possess into this effective dreaming is a wrinkle suggesting a different character to their subjectivity) to create a new present-day, with no one other than Orr himself being aware of the replacement. The novel moves through its scenario and its ideas and implications without any unnecessary texture, as Orr's treating psych Haber discovers what is happening and seeks to use the phenomenon to better the world, and successive attempts succeed or fail to lesser or sometimes very much greater extents. It's an older style of sci fi I suppose, and it's effective.

Brit Bennett - The Vanishing Half

The Vanishing Half never stumbles as it moves back and forth between decades and points of view, beginning with a seemingly external omniscient perspective that centres twins Desiree and Stella - or, at least, their absence - and opening out as it goes, and ultimately organised more around Desiree's daughter Jude more than any other individual, as well as the effects of racism, trauma and male violence. 

I'd avoided it because the kick-off premise - two twins leading separate lives, one passing as white, the other living as Black - seemed too pat. But Bennett brings it to life and does much more with it besides.

The Beths - Jump Rope Gazers

Jangle, fuzz and melody, that old trio. From NZ, which figures. Best is the title track which is probably the purest pop song on here.

Vika & Linda - The Wait

One word that comes to mind to describe The Wait is 'convincing'. The songs are written by a cast of well known Australian songwriters - Kasey Chambers, Bernard Fanning, Glenn Richards, Mick Thomas, Paul Kelly and more - and span genres, but in the execution they're all Vika & Linda's and it's pretty glorious, from stirring opener "Raise Your Hand" all the way onwards.

S.G. Goodman - Old Time Feeling

Not bad but there's a lot of this type of thing going around. Title track is quite a blast.

Katie Pruitt - Expectations

This is a good one - brightly anthemic songwriter stuff with a familiar combination of rock, electrified folk, grown up pop and countryish sounds, but done with a verve and sense of feeling that sets it apart. The high points - "Wishful Thinking", "My Mind's A Ship (That's Going Down)", the Haim-ish title track, "Loving Her") are much higher than the rest but it never drags, more fades a bit into the background at times at worst.

29/10: With continued listening this one has kept getting better. Two things in parallel and reinforcing each other - the more subtle melodies and pleasures of the less obvious songs emerging, and paying attention to the simple but moving lyrics, which dwell heavily on feelings of being on the outside while growing up and later coming into one's own (and coming out) and finding love (of self and with others), adding greater weight to the culmination of penultimate track "Loving Her".

Lilly Hiatt - Walking Proof

A nice clean electric guitar sound and a few good hooks but in the end nothing remarkable.

Lord Huron - Long Lost

A fair bit of Fleet Foxes, smaller amounts of Roy Orbison and Calexico (and, on "Twenty Long Years", a sizeable dash of the National), let's go with that. It's an agreeable, croony confection.

Charles Yu - Interior Chinatown

It's funny, it's political and it's got heart. 

What looks like a gimmick - being written in the form of a tv/film script - turns out not to be a gimmick at all, but instead a case of form serving content, as Interior Chinatown smoothly blurs the tv series in which Willis Wu performs and the 'real world' he lives in, which is in turn in service to the novel's wider points about the performativity and constructedness of racial identity and roles in America. And all of those formal and structural gambits somehow contrive to at least not obscure, and often illuminate, the human-ness of the stories that Yu is telling. 

It's a breeze to read, and clearly deliberately so, and unabashed in being obvious about what it's saying about the (American) world and the experience of being an Asian male within it, as well as its prescriptions, and at the same time sophisticated and rich in insight. Quite an achievement. (Little wonder about this; its universality of appeal is striking.)

Siri Hustvedt - Memories of the Future

Hustvedt's great themes are consciousness and identity, along with art, and over this latter part of her novel-writing career (The Summer Without Men, The Blazing World, this one), the female experience and patriarchy have been equally to the fore; the blurb copy on my edition declaring her the 21st century's Virginia Woolf feels only mildly hyperbolic, if at all.

In its staging as a book being written by a woman with many similarities to the 'actual' Hustvedt, looking back on her younger days in 1970s NYC and littered with multiple intertexts including the diary and novel-in-progress of that younger self, Memories of the Future actively invites reading through the lens of both what one might imagine one knows of Siri Hustvedt, the author, and one's own experiences - and, subsidiarily, the intersection between those two, ie one's own experiences of Hustvedt's previous writing. For me, that goes back at least 15 or so years (but maybe, unwittingly, longer) and takes in a couple of gigantic milestones in What I Loved and The Sorrows of an American (*) as part of an ongoing engagement. 

And in some ways Memories of the Future feels like a culmination of her novels to date - not because it's her best, but in the way that it draws together so many threads that have run through her writing/life specifically from the vantage at which she's now arrived ... making it all the more impressive that it's so compelling in its own right, and that it finds a way to end in a way that conveys a leaping forward into the future. 

The prose is as good as ever, with the sections containing the big set pieces suffused with a sense of build-up and portent (especially the assault in her apartment and the dinner party scene that culminates in her outburst) and the threads of mystery and female-ness across the multiple layers of texts meaty and satisfying; especially good is the representation of multiple types of meaningful female relationships (mother-child, sister-sister, friends-in-twenties, induction into the mysteries of collective older feminine experience via Lucy and the witches). Whatever it is that Hustvedt has been tapping into and deepening for so long, it's still there.

Wussy - Attica

What a rush! Noisy electric guitar-based rock with multiple vocalists - Lisa Walker (she) and Chuck Cleaver (he), alternating between and within songs - and a heavily strummed countryish streak that's to the fore on songs like "Halloween" and "Gene, I Dream" and sits comfortably alongside the rockier surgers like "Rainbows & Butterflies" and "To The Lightning" which call to mind bands like ... Trail of Dead. The odd airier songs work well too, landing with emphasis along with their lilt - I'm thinking of "North Sea Girls" and closer "Beautiful" ("I'm not the monster that I once was..."). And then of course there's "Teenage Wasteland" at the top. I'd never heard of Wussy before Julian's playlist a few weeks back; they're very impressive.

Sarah Jarosz - World On The Ground

Warmly mingled roots; a bit of folk, a bit of country, a bit of bluegrass, a tiny jazz sway. I like it.

Lucy Dacus - Home Video

Seems like Lucy Dacus might be in it for the long haul; this is a low-key excellent singer-songwriter record that feels in conversation with the listener. I like Historian more but Home Video is different and, if anything, more easeful-feeling while equally grounded in observational detail and personal story-telling.

Neil Gaiman - American Gods

Great high concept and the commitment to story-telling pulls it through. Baggy and manifestly imperfect but engaging even in its digressions and cul de sacs.

Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda - Monstress - Vol 4: The Chosen & Vol 5: Warchild

It's the usual problem, reading serial graphic novels at long intervals and in short bursts, and Monstress is at least as complex and difficult to keep track of as any. Good though.

Natalie Imbruglia - Firebird

I don't hold it against her that, on this album, Imbruglia sometimes sounds like Taylor Swift - never more than on opening track "Build It Better" - because almost who doesn't these days? But Firebird reaches no great heights.

Emmylou Harris and the Nash Ramblers - Ramble in Music City

Newly released 1990 concert; music city = Nashville. Harris is so pristine both live and on record that there's often little difference except in the textures and nuances. Much good stuff.

Kacey Musgraves - star-crossed

At this point, Musgraves has found a real sweet spot of contemporary, pop-swirled cosmic-ish country-ish. Her previous one, 2018's Golden Hour, turned out to be a massive one for me - probably the last album to've entered my personal pantheon - and while star-crossed isn't at that level, its best moments, heavily front loaded, especially "good wife" and "justified", are striking.

Big Red Machine - How Long Do You Think It's Gonna Last?

Given who's involved - Aaron Dessner and Justin Vernon, and a fair smattering of their talented friends including Sharon Van Etten, Fleet Foxes, Taylor Swift and more - you'd think this would be good, but instead it's boring, ultra mainstream-indie easy listening where they neglected to bring any good songs.

"To Howard, From Julian 2021" (playlist)

These days they are most definitely playlists and no longer mix cds - not even virtual ones.

This one's particularly good. First to land was "Teenage Wasteland" by Wussy, from 2014 but gesturing at the 90s with its mix of fuzz and melody, and urgency and resignation, plus a title and anthemic compactness that puts it in a lineage of teenage experience-referencing classics eg "Teenage Kicks", "Teen Age Riot" (the latter compact even at 7 minutes).

Other favourites: "Some Small Hope" by Virginia Astley, "Small Talk" by Scritti Politti, "London" by Benjamin Clementine (which at first I thought was too fey but changed my mind about after more listens).

Was it deliberate that the lyrics of the last three songs all prominently feature foreign cities? London, Vegas ("Meet Me In My Dream" by Marc Almond), Winnipeg ("One Great City" by the Weakerthans). Sign of the times, maybe.

Michelle Branch - The Spirit Room

20th anniversary of this debut album. I'd never heard more than "Everywhere" and the acoustic version of "Sweet Misery" that DP put on a mix cd once so it's nice to encounter such a jam-packed record of high quality pop-rock soarers even if such a long time after the fact.

Ballboy - A Guide for the Daylight Hours

Long known to me via the version of their song "I Lost You, But I Found Country Music" recorded by lead singer Gordon McIntyre with Laura Cantrell, but without any other context. This 2002 album turns out to be a bit of a charmer, albeit very much of a certain slice of its time - an indie pop record from Scotland at the turn of the millennium, and only just (but nonetheless) on the right side of overly precious, with some good tunes dialled up by melodically noisy fm-radio style instrumentation into low-key epics.

Lake Street Dive - Obviously

Not easily categorisable but partaking of plenty of familiar sounds, Obviously only really hits its strides on a few songs near the middle, but it's easy listening.

Liz Phair - Soberish

It sounds like Liz Phair, plenty of years on, but Soberish is undistinguished. 

Vika & Linda - 'Akilotoa: Anthology - 1994-2006

Warm, characterful and frequently singalong. Many quickly lovable discoveries.

Loki season 1

A colourful and pretty fun MCU product - the charm of Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson goes a long way.

"Becoming You: An incomplete guide" (Immigration Museum)

71 snippets of coming of age stories told by diverse Australians. Enjoyable.

(w/ Siobhan)

"French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston" (NGV)

It wasn't one of my first loves, but I came to love impressionism some time back. It's the artists' interest in rendering their experience of the world (phenomenologically) and their resultant interest in light, form and perception, and it's the way this has frequently beautiful results. To the extent that I'm drawn to their subjects - landscapes, famously - it's because they lend themselves to such treatments and because my own experiences of them arrive similarly in an immediate perceptual sense, making for that always-to-be-cherished sensation of recognition writ large when the same appears in art.

This exhibition is a roll call of big names, centred on the most canonical of the impressionists - Pissarro, who I used to find overly decorative but no longer, Renoir, about whom I'm always a bit ambivalent because of how verging on saccharine he can be but whose paintings' out and out beauty are self-evident, and Monet (especially Monet, in every sense) - and with a proportionately lesser representation of those less in that core stream but still somehow part of it (Cezanne, Degas, even and maybe a bit incongruously a Van Gogh), plus some important early influences and predecessors.

Some of these I saw when visiting the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston what was only three years ago but feels much longer. Then as now, the gathering of Monets was stunning.

Eugene Louis Boudin - 'Fashionable Figures on the Beach' (1865)

Paul Cezanne - 'Fruit and a jug on a table' (c 1890-94)

Camille Pissarro - 'Two Peasant Women in a Meadow (Le Pre)' (1893)

Monet - 'Meadow with Poplars' (1875)

Monet - 'Seacoast at Trouville' (1881) - I like the Japanese feel of this one

Monet - 'Road at La Cavee, Pourville' (1882)

Monet - 'Grainstack (snow effect)' (1891)

Monet - 'Water lillies' (1905)

Japanese Breakfast - Jubilee

Bright, indie-ish tunes that spin through shoegazey, twee and electro pop elements if these kinds of genre descriptions mean anything these days. Highlights are "Be Sweet" (R accurately observed this is a highly motivational song) and the sugar-charming "Kokomo, IN".

Natalie Zina Walschots - Hench

Zippy and fun and also pretty hard-nosed. It's not as razor-focused as say The Other Black Girl but nor is it difficult to see what Hench has on its mind when it comes to capitalism, celebrity, patriarchy, state violence, and the ills of the contemporary world - funnelled through the lens of an alternate universe populated by villains and superheroes plus of course their henches and kicks.

C Pam Zhang - How Much of These Hills Is Gold

Here's the section that made me really certain that I was reading something 100% worth my time - good in isolation, and far better in the context of the associations that, by page 42, the novel has already set up to resonate when activated here.

They've nearly reached the foot of the mountains, one week later, when the rib in the sky thickens. Wolf moon, rarest kind. Bright enough that after sunset and star rise comes moonrise. Silver pries their eyes awake. The blades of grass, the bristles of Nellie's mane, the creases of their clothes - illuminated.

Across the grass, an even brighter glow.

Like two still sleeping they rise from their blankets and walk. Their hands brush. Did Sam reach across? Or is it a coincidence of strides grown similar thanks to Sam's new height?

The light comes from a tiger skull.

It's pristine. The snarl untouched. Chance didn't place this skull; the beast didn't die here. No other bones surround it. The empty sockets face East and North. Follow its gaze, and Lucy sees the very end of the mountains, where the wagon trail curves to the plains.

"It's -" Lucy says, heart quickening.

"A sign," Sam says.

Most times Lucy can't read Sam's dark eyes. Tonight the moonlight has pierced Sam through, made Sam's thoughts clear as the blades of grass. Together they stand as if at a threshold, remembering the tiger Ma drew in the doorway of each new house. Ma's tiger like no other tiger Lucy has seen, a set of eight lines suggesting the beast only if you squinted. A cipher. Ma drew her tiger as protection against what might come. Singing, Lao hu, lao hu.

Ma drew her tiger in each new home.

Song shivers through Lucy's head as she touches the skull's intact teeth. A threat, or else a grin. What was the last word of the song? A call to the tiger: Lai.

"What makes a home a home?" Lucy says. 

Sam faces the mountains and roars.

In some ways, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is deceptive. There's a surface flashiness to it, in the present-tense, image-rich argot through which it's narrated (to start with, by Lucy, age 12) and the self-reflexive myth-making it wears on its sleeve, mega-buffalo and tigers roaming late Gold Rush California and refracted through the prism of its Chinese-American experience. And then there's the apparent simplicity of its high concept - the two lost sisters with their Chinese parentage, seeking opportunity in an America whose frontiers are still seemingly untamed, but already haunted by the ghosts of western 'progress'. But in truth those elements are strengths, and wrapped together by the control that Zhang exerts over her material so that the symbols and motifs operate as plot as well as theme. It's very satisfying, and very good.

Natalia Lafourcade - Un Canto por Mexico, Vol 2

A lot of music comes heavily pre-contextualised, by the superstructure, personal expectations, and everything in between - especially after a lifetime spent listening to a great deal of music of certain types. By contrast, while for me the music on this record summons plenty of associations, I have next to nil exposure to its underlying sources - the traditional Mexican songs that Lafourcade contemporises to wonderful effect - so it arrives as something of a revelation, and absent ready reference points, which makes it only the more enjoyable, which it is, very.

Robert Finley - Sharecropper's Son

This record has a roar to it. I can't really assess the the authenticity of its blues and soul lines but it has the ring of truth to me.