Theory Trading Cards created by David Gauntlett

Chris T showed me his set of these a couple of years ago, with the comment that I would like them, and he was dead right. I didn't look particularly closely at the time, but I recently bought my own deck and have am delighted by the set (I've always had a bit of a thing for cards...one day I really will learn how to use that tarot deck that I was given years ago). Loosely mimicking the various trading card games going around, it advertises itself as a "21 card set featuring the most important social and cultural theorists of our time" - Foucault, Deleuze, Butler, Derrida, de Beauvoir, Adorno, Althusser, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Freud, and others. There's a headshot of each, and 'strengths', 'weaknesses' and 'special skills', as well as some more discursive detail on the flip side (Pierre Bourdieu, for example --> Strengths: Analysed class in intelligent new way. Weaknesses: For a people's hero, not very accessible. Special skills: Thoughtful, politically engaged sociology). Great fun. Also, why did no one ever tell me that I share a birthday with Derrida (v. exciting!) and Benjamin - 15 July, both of them?

Marie Antoinette

See previously, really - it's just as lovely on a second viewing, with the added pleasure of being able to anticipate favourite scenes and moments. Also, having listened so much to the soundtrack in recent days, the music served as a real connecting thread and it was nice to hear (and place) all of the songs in the context of the particular scenes in which they appear.

It came at a cost, though - I had a lot of trouble sleeping last night,[*] in part because of the images running through my mind and in part because first "Tommib Help Buss" (the dreamy, melancholy soundtrack to the morning after the birthday party) and then "Keen On Boys" were stuck in my head. Needless to say, a price worth paying.

* * *

[*] Sunday night - it's Monday night as I write this.

Spellbound

A pleasant way to spend an hour and a half or so. Spends its first section introducing its eight main protagonists one by one (all between 12 and 14 y.o., I think, and from all over the US), so that when the documentary moved to the national final of the spelling bee itself (249 kids in all, I think), I'd already decided which ones I was going for and which I really didn't want to win. Sadly, the one I was barracking for (Angela - the child of Mexican immigrants whose father doesn't even speak English) was the second of them to go; my next favourite, the taciturn misfit Ted had been the first to go. It's a very low-key documentary, but rather charming, and there is a certain drama to watching both the eight to whom we've been introduced and various others squirming on stage, feeling their way through words that they don't know/haven't studied and reacting as the ding of the bell indicates that they've got one wrong and have been eliminated. I don't know why Spellbound appealed to me, or to the many others who've apparently appreciated its charms, but there it is.

Nicole Krauss - Man Walks into a Room

In her debut Man Walks into a Room, Krauss's writing has, at its best, a kind of limpid quality which befits the subject of this rather cool, thoughtful, elliptically precise novel - the tale of a man who loses all of his memories from after the age of 12 and then begins to reconstruct his life (a wife, an apartment, friends, belongings, losses, none of which he can recall). It's quite episodic, which I admire when done well (as it largely is here), and again this structural/stylistic gambit is apt to the subject matter, creating a sense of a series of meditative, carefully impressionistic vignettes rather than a more conventional narrative - which, to me, invokes the perceptual and experiential streams constituting consciousness (also, the image of the mind as an undisturbed glassy lake).

And the ending. Ah, the ending. The History of Love had one of the most purely affecting endings I've ever read, and while the closing pages of Man Walks into a Room don't quite knit in the same way (at least for me), the brief epilogue has an elegiac poignancy which left me with a twist in my stomach and a slight catch in my throat.

I think that one of the reasons why I like Krauss's novels is that she writes a lot of sentences which are like the kinds of sentences that I try to write, and she puts them together in ways that I try to put them together. While I liked Man Walks into a Room, though, I found it perhaps too cool, too distant - it's not a cold book, but nor does it have the same warmth and generosity as The History of Love, and in the end it's not quite emotionally satisfying...it's very much a first novel, albeit in some ways quite a brilliant one. I find it much easier to admire than to love.

Music of 2006

The tracklist to a cd of the music that I listened to most in 2006 and/or most strongly associate with the year. Very, very approximately, the first five are from the first half of the year and the last five are from the second half, with "The King Of Carrot Flowers Pt. One" in the middle as a kind of hinge track. For me, it was very much a year for songs rather than for albums, and I've written about many of these before - text where I haven't, or have something to add (in those cases, it was newly written on Christmas Day for the cd of these songs which is being distributed to musically-minded friends and acquaintances).

1. There Is An End - The Greenhornes (featuring Holly Golightly)
If there's one song which has soundtracked my year, this is it. ... it's just stayed with me all through the year as I've listened to it over and over, and it continues to make more and more sense. [*]

2. Hold On, Hold On - Neko Case [*]

3. Handshake Drugs (live) - Wilco
It feels as if Wilco were everywhere for me in 2006 (the same was true of '05, and probably '04 as well), and somewhere along the line they became one of my favourite bands; their live (double) album, Kicking Television, not to put too fine a point on it, kicks ass, and this version of "Handshake Drugs" is one of its many highlights.

4. Sylvie - Saint Etienne
Like all the best Saint Etienne songs, "Sylvie" sounds like ice cream and raindrops and dainty nostalgia, all at once.

5. Cupcake - Nellie McKay
Smart, sassy and, on "Cupcake", positively delirious - it's no wonder that I'm basically in love with Nellie McKay, and I find this song a particular delight. Also, if you're paying attention to the lyrics (always worth doing with this precocious songwriter), it waves the flag for gay marriage into the bargain, too! [*]

6. The King Of Carrot Flowers Pt. One - Neutral Milk Hotel
This album, when I finally listened to it earlier this year, basically blew my mind for a period of several weeks. I've deliberately avoided thinking too much about how/why it had and has such an effect on me - In The Aeroplane Over The Sea just feels like one of those records that should be left to stand, astonishing, on its own terms. [*] [**]

7. Elevator Love Letter - Stars
I was at a house party a while back, and I couldn't really hear the music from where I was standing - but for a while, the beginning of every song which played on the stereo sounded as if it was this one.

8. Black Cab - Jens Lekman
Oh Jens, so morose. Don't you just want to hug him? And anyone who quotes both the Smiths and Belle and Sebastian in the one song is alright in my books.

9. Talulah Gosh - Talulah Gosh
The whole thing is a gem, but the moment that best encapsulates Talulah Gosh's theme song is the unobtrusive emphasis with which frontwoman Amelia Fletcher enunciates the key word in the line 'now she is a pop star'. The song just makes me think 'yay!', and so does the band.

10. Your Kisses Are Wasted On Me - The Pipettes
The Pipettes are fabulous, and "Your Kisses Are Wasted On Me" is their most skyscrapingly glorious Pop! moment to date. Swoonfully great.

11. Thursday - Asobi Seksu
Widescreen fm radio glory, shimmering and throwing out light in all directions the whole time and then catching fire outright as it hits its climax. ... post-millennial starstruck shoegazer sparkle ...

(2005)

"Lost in Translation": Music from the motion picture

I realised when writing about the Marie Antoinette soundtrack that I hadn't yet noted this one.

So, what to say? Well, to start with, it's totally lovely - starry-eyed and broody and dreamlike, just like the film. Two unimpeachable classics in "Sometimes" and "Just Like Honey", new Kevin Shields which feels immediately as if he never went away (even if they're not the sonic odysseys comprising Loveless or the same chaotic beauty as the jagged slices on Isn't Anything), and some other incidental and song-type stuff which all coalesces into exactly the kind of downbeat mood confection that Lost in Translation requires, is, and depends on (though I could have done without the Phoenix and Happy End tracks in the middle). And it is also wonderful on its own terms.

Heavenly - Sarah Records 7"s

Three early 7"s, along with flipsides: "I Fell In Love Last Night", "Our Love Is Heavenly" and "So Little Deserve". Heavenly were the next incarnation of Talulah Gosh, and the music is a logical progression - a bit cleaner and less crashy, and with slightly more sophisticated songwriting, but still as sweet as ever.

(Here)

Paul Kelly with Uncle Bill - Smoke

Another Paul Kelly bluegrass record. This one's not as good as Foggy Highway (it actually came before that other), but there's nothing wrong with it at all.

Things We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty edited by John Brockman

Bite-sized ruminations by a bunch of folks (mostly scientists - names include Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, and others) about, as title suggests, things they believe but cannot prove. Interesting, and because the individual entries are so short, all extremely accessible. They tackle the big questions, so there's a lot about (intelligent) life elsewhere in the universe, objective reality, religious experience and God, the distinction between humans and animals, the nature of consciousness, the importance of language, the limitations and possibilities of science, the nature of the universe (and reality, time, etc), human nature, evolution and design, and human society - all rather mind-expanding, the ones on subjects that I've studied/thought about as much as those on areas more or less completely new to me.

My favourite is the piece by Donald F Hoffman:

I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. Spacetime, matter, and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being.

The world of our daily experience - the world of tables, chairs, stars, and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels, and sounds - is a species-specific user interface between ourselves and a realm far more complex, whose essential character is conscious.

It is unlikely that the contents of our interface in any way resemble that realm; indeed, the usefulness of an interface requires, in general, that they do not. ...

Hoffman goes on to elaborate these initial claims, and to me they seem intuitively and almost self-evidently correct (a big second step, but that is how it seems to me). The implication is that, as he suggests: "What we lose in this process are physical objects that exist independent of any observer. there is no sun or moon, unless a conscious mind observes them; both are constructs of consciousness, icons in a species-specific user interface." Most of this isn't particularly new to me - Husserl led me down this particular phenomenological garden path years ago. But the metaphor (which is actually quite literal) of the interface is new, and it's most apt.

Scarlett Thomas - PopCo

Very enjoyable, this. A few months ago, I somehow ended up at Thomas's website (by way of either an interesting writeup or a rave review - possibly both at once) and was intrigued enough to put her on that mental 'watch' list that we all carry around; spotted PopCo at the library the other day and finished it yesterday with a rush. It's got a brilliant first chapter, establishing the setting and the distinctive voice of the narrator, the eccentric Alice Butler (who is the best thing about the book). Written in the present tense, like the rest of the novel, it reminds me of the Hélèna Villovitch story in the "Translation" Meanjin which made such an impression on me with its spiky, somehow airy accretion of details and offhandedly commented-upon impressions. The whole novel continues in much that same vein; moreover, it's totally hip and very contemporary, but never distractingly or irritatingly so (and I am particularly sensitive to that kind of stuff!).

The various threads are woven together interestingly, even if the ending suffers slightly from a sense of being overly neat. Two main threads - Alice's adventures as a 'creative' at one of the world's largest toy manufacturing companies along with a handful of others at a corporate retreat to which they've been assigned for the purpose of coming up with a new product which will crack the difficult 'teenage girl' market, and the mysterious necklace given to her by her father which supposedly contains the key to a hitherto unbroken code revealing the location of a hundreds of years old cache of pirate treasure (the latter of which involves her earlier life being related in episodes throughout the main narrative, which go a long way towards fleshing out her present-day character). Strong anti-corporate message comes through - no surprise that Thomas words up No Logo in the acknowledgements. Will definitely be reading more of her stuff.

By the way, is it just me, or is 'Scarlett Thomas' a great name?

The West Wing seasons 1 & 2

Everything I know about tv, I learned from my friends. Sid lent me the box set of season 1, and I flew through it once I'd got going (and likewise with season 2). Trying to break down why I like the show, I've decided that it has a lot to do with the fantasy it offers - a liberal president surrounded by a staff of brilliant, idealistic yet hard-headed types making decisions motivated by a concern for social justice and left-wing principles rather than political expediency and abhorrent values. Also (in a rather different vein) the idea that such a small group of advisors - Leo, Toby, Josh, Sam and CJ - could exert such influence over national policy. It's very well-written - even though most episodes follow the same basic structure, it doesn't come anywhere near feeling formulaic, perhaps in part because of the number of continuing story arcs developing over multiple episodes (and, indeed, multiple seasons - season 2, like season 1, ends with a cliffhanger, argh).

Josh and CJ are my favourite characters (though I also like Ainslie Hayes and Joey Lucas, who both add some nice sparkle); I find myself wondering whether I would be able to keep up with all of them were I a member of the White House staff, and the answer is a fairly unequivocal 'no'. The show runs through one issue after another, and handles them all sensitively and seemingly realistically. Alright, I'm hooked.

Beirut - Gulag Orkestar

I more or less owe this one to Kelly - she pointed it out when it was playing at Ici a while back (at which time I thought that Beirut sounded a lot better than I'd imagined), and then set me up with a copy further down the line. And hey, it's really, really good.

I can take the back story or leave it - by which I mean that I don't really care about the process by which the guy behind Beirut arrived at this sound, or how young he is, or even (gasp) the broader implications of his appropriations. What I am interested by is how good the music on Gulag Orkestar is, reeling back and forth, rising and falling in waves of accordion, horns and some of the most lachrimose singing this side of Stephin Merritt and Jens Lekman ("Scenic World", incidentally, could totally have been done by either of the above). My favourites are the sun and shadows prettiness of "Postcards From Italy" and the merry-go-round lament "Mount Wroclai (Idle Days)", but it's the way the album holds together as a whole, cacophonously in places but always with an overriding sense of direction and vision, which makes it. I'm not in ecstasies over this album, but I like it a lot.

The Knife - Silent Shout

Despite having listened to Silent Shout a fair bit over the last few weeks, I'm still totally conflicted as to how I feel about the record. Part of the trick, for me at least, is hearing the album as a pop record rather than, as I initially was, as a goth-tinged, vaguely song-oriented brand of techno - taken on those terms, I'm much better able to appreciate the pulsating movement, evocative, ominous, chilly, of tracks like "Silent Shout" itself, "Neverland", "We Share Our Mother's Health" and "Marble House". But still, I'm not completely sold.

Stephen King - Everything's Eventual

Suffocating in yesterday's heat (today is even worse), I made a quick trip to the library and picked up an armful of books including this one. It's one of King's periodic collections of short stories, and I don't think it's amongst his best (not that I can claim exhaustive familiarity with the oeuvre) but it's effective enough and did cause me to feel slightly nervous wandering around downstairs in the dark later last night.

Inga Clendinnen - The History Question: Who Owns the Past? (Quarterly Essay issue 23, 2006)

Read this a while back. Enjoyed it and found it a very lucid and readable account of a commonsense and in many ways appealing position, albeit one that runs completely contrary to a number of strong intuitions and beliefs of my own. Rebuttal and criticism would involve a fair bit of thought and no small amount of theoretical sophistication. But it's hot and I am lazy, so I'll leave it at this: ahem, I think that, in this essay, Clendinnen is engaged, intelligent, clear-headed - and wrong.

Spring cleaning

In the way of these things, I accumulate a lot of music. Usually, I get around to listening to it all properly in the end but, in the interests of clearing the decks, here are several that have been lying around for ages (with more probably to come in the near future as I dig them up):

• The Fire Show - Above The Volcano Of Flowers & saint the fire show
• Edan - Beauty and the Beat
• Tujiko Noriko - Blurred In My Mirror
• Destroyer - This Night
• Seu Jorge - "The Life Aquatic" studio sessions (yeah, these are the Portuguese Bowie covers)
• Big Star - Third/Sister Lovers
• Brian Wilson - Smile
• Coldplay - X & Y
• New Order - Get Ready
• P D Q Bach - Oedipus Tex & other choral calamities
• Talvin Singh - OK

It's not that I haven't listened to them - I have, and generally several times - but rather that I haven't done so in a way (or they haven't struck me in a way) which has inspired me to say anything about the music.

Marie Antoinette original motion picture soundtrack

This is a great collection, both on its own terms and in its relationship to the film it soundtracks; it's one of those soundtracks whose constituent pieces seem continually to be echoing and referring to each other, and so it has the unity so necessary to records of this kind. Disc 1 contains most of the 'songs' - energetic post-punk and new-wave pop for the most part - while disc 2 is more contemplative and weighted towards the ambient, moody soundscapes of Aphex Twin, Air, Squarepusher, etc.

Part of the reason it works so well is that, while the music is essentially contemporary, it's also in a certain way unmoored from its own historical referents by the fact that the most recognisable of it was contemporary some 20 or 30 years ago (rather than right now), so that when it appears in the setting of a 'historical' film set in the 18th century, there's a sort of doubling - a ghostly mirroring - of the effect of strange familiarity. That is, if the music were thoroughly and recognisably of the post-millennial moment (or a more bowerbird-esque cherrypick of the history of popular music à la Moulin Rouge), transposed to 18th century Versailles, the effect could have ranged from jarring and thoroughly incongruous through to hyper-real and totally Up To Date, but the effect which is in fact wrought by the choice of New Order, Adam & the Ants, the Cure and so on - a distinctly backwards looking but nonetheless revisionistic reinvention - would probably not have been possible. The refractive effect of the 'period' songs is, too, augmented by the dreaminess of the instrumental and downbeat electronic works and their intersheaving with a couple of 'classical' extracts.

As to specifics, the string part grafted on to the beginning of Siouxsie & the Banshees' "Hong Kong Garden", which opens the record, followed by the pell-mell of the song itself, sets the mood; the opening bars of "What Ever Happened" vividly bring back the scene they track, as does "Ceremony" (which I've listened to most, even though it's not new to me); the appearance of "Plainsong" in the film caused an intake of breath on my part when it crashed in (and reminded me of the grandeur and majesty of the song); and the nicest of the new songs (which, though new, very much partake of the same mood and aesthetic) are Windsor for the Derby's "The Melody of a Fallen Tree", the Radio Dept's "Keen On Boys" (which I thought was JAMC when I heard it in the film) and Squarepusher's "Tommib Help Buss" (echoing the track on the Lost In Translation soundtrack).

This is basically the only thing I've listened to over the last few days; evidently I need to watch Marie Antoinette again, and soon.

Philip Pullman - The Ruby in the Smoke

Before the His Dark Materials series[*], Pullman wrote a number of books, including a series of Victorian mystery adventures. I only found out about these a couple of days ago, but The Ruby in the Smoke is the first in that series, and it's a cracking tale full of plucky heroes and heroines. Not as dense as the His Dark Materials books (though I've seen the other three in the bookstore, and they're certainly thicker than this one!) but it reads very well and moves along at a rapid clip; nice, sly sense of humour, too, and a reasonably satisfying sense of grittiness and real danger.

* * *

[*] Last reading (and prior) here.

"Michael Riley: Sights Unseen" @ Monash Gallery of Art

Browsing through The Age on Saturday, saw a picture of a cow standing in the sky and looked closer. It was an image from an exhibition of photography by Michael Riley, a contemporary indigenous artist, and since I wasn't doing anything that afternoon and it was a nice day, I decided to drive out to the Monash Gallery of Art in Wheeler's Hill, where it was showing.

The exhibition comprises several series, the most striking of which is the 'Cloud' series from which the cow image comes. That one is made up of ten large digitally manipulated photos, each depicting something in the foreground, apparently suspended in the air, against a very bright blue sky: as far as I can remember, the back of a stone angel, a bird, a bible, a bright red boomerang, a detail of the bird's wing, the angel's wing, a feather, a cow, a locust. The various items obviously comment on each other in various ways - connections and juxtapositions between Christianity, Aboriginal culture and their intersections in Australia especially (different symbols of spirituality and religion, the various iconographies of flight and connectedness with the land and otherwise) - and the images are strikingly lush and their colours very Australian.

(w/ Laura)

Happy Feet

Good, and in a different way from what I'd expected. Strong environmental message and a subsidiary one about the dangers of unthinking acquiescence to authority (including of the religious variety), along with the usual line about being oneself and the power of one individual to make a difference; interspersed with the straight animation are some very striking sequences for a film of this kind - spectacular vistas (almost worthy of Lord of the Rings) and extremely dramatic scenes done with no hint of irony (the males protecting their eggs against the winter, the expedition struggling into the storm). Oddly paced, but maybe that comes of being a bit unformulaic.

(w/ family)