Tuesday, July 19, 2022

Live music archive

A long time ago I made a 'Note' on facebook to keep track of gigs I'd been to, which I then dutifully kept on updating even as both my live music attendance and my use of facebook both dwindled over time. Moving it here now and who know, one day I might even go to another gig ever.
(Also, a previous archive here up to 2009)
Not sure if maybe I missed one or two during this period when I wasn't updating ... a fallow period anyway so actually probably not.
2004 and earlier (incomplete)
Pretty Girls Make Graves + Love of Diagrams (November 2004)
Belle and Sebastian + Architecture in Helsinki (23/7/04)
Radiohead (26/4/04)
Tujiko Noriko (18/2/04)
Interpol (7/8/03)
Goo Goo Dolls, Tea Party, Billy Idol + others @ M-One festival (2002)
Beth Orton, Alex Lloyd, Spiderbait, Nine Inch Nails, Red Hot Chili Peppers + others @ Big Day Out (January 2000)
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Sunday, July 17, 2022

Everything Everywhere All At Once

Everything Everywhere All At Once has a high-gloss and high-energy zaniness that's rare; along with the many deliberate thematic touchstone film references that it throws in along the way (The Matrix and In The Mood for Love or really any Wong Kar Wai film to name two), I thought of both Being John Malkovich and Love Exposure early on. At the same time, it has proper narrative momentum and a sense of about-ness that's grounded in the Asian-American and family dynamics with which it leads, and the broader themes of generational despair and personal life choices, regrets and acceptances into which it opens, along with all the crazy. 

In its deployment of what turns out to be a Chekhov's butt plug-shaped auditing award it has surely one of the silliest and funniest fight scene pivots ever filmed, and in its use of martial arts - and of Michelle Yeoh - it has a sincere affection and respect for those aspects of its sources. Not to mention the gift of committed, wily acting from all concerned. The movie takes on big themes, and in some respects predictable ones given its foundational multiversal premise, but stays idiosyncratically specific enough to launch itself towards an earned universality - rather than collapsing into generality. Glad I made the effort to watch this one.

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Kacey Musgraves - Same Trailer Different Park

First major label album - as I'm learning from Her Country, there were several self-released ones before it - and it shows Musgraves was great from the beginning, writing songs that sound like rainbows and land like truth, whether mid tempo like "Merry Go 'Round", faster like "Follow Your Arrow" or ballad-leaning like "It Is What It Is". It does help to be reading at the same time about how she got to this point, and the even greater heights she's reached since.

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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)

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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.

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Wednesday, July 06, 2022

Morgan Wade - Reckless

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

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