St Jeromes Laneway Festival, Sunday 26 February

I was looking forward to this, not least because it'd be the first out and out rock show that I'd been to in ages - more than a year, I think (the last one that I can remember was Pretty Girls Make Graves/Les Savy Fav in late '04 - or, I suppose, St Jeromes itself in early '05). Also, last year's festival was a nice day out - good music, relaxed atmosphere, and filled with friendly people who were there for the music (lots of familiar faces scattered through the crowd).

There was a similar vibe this year, though the festival's grown larger with the addition of a second stage and the presence of more international acts (more acts full stop) - the crowd was friendly and largely free of attitude, and there was a good buzz happening throughout the day and into the evening (showered in the morning but the rain had stopped by the time we arrived and weather turned out fine). I went with Penny, and we hooked up with Nenad and Pia in the afternoon, but again there were heaps of other people from around the traps and we met plenty of already familiar others, friends of friends, and random strangers (sadly, we didn't get to talk to the guy who looked like Elijah Wood who seemed to be everywhere we were during the day, but - for me at least - this was partially made up for by meeting a pal of Penny's who was a dead ringer for Kirsten Dunst).

We got there fairly early and so were able to catch the first band, Temper Temper. I hadn't heard of them before, but I liked their style - a take on that current kind of New York by way of England in the 80s post-punk/modern rock and done with panache and some good chops.

Next up were Pretty Girls Make Graves, the biggest drawcard for me. The set was split between cuts from The New Romance and the forthcoming Élan Vital, and I think Penny got it right when she said that the band seemed to enjoy playing the new songs more. While I don't think I could ever tire of hearing them belt out stuff from The New Romance (and wouldn't have minded hearing some Good Health or PGMG stuff, though the recentish substitution of keyboardist Leona Marrs for one of the guitarists, Nathan Thelen, might've made that difficult), it was "The Nocturnal House" and "Selling The Wind" which really stood out as highlights, Zollo's repeated calls of "magnetic" on the former and the accordion base of the latter ringing out clarion clear down the lane.

As far as I can remember, the set went something like this (very approximately): "Blue Lights", "Chemical, Chemical", "The Nocturnal House", "The New Romance", "Pyrite Pedestal", "The Grandmother Wolf", "Pictures Of A Night Scene", "Selling The Wind", "This Is Our Emergency", "All Medicated Geniuses"...it was a good show but, as was the case last time they came down, I was surprised by how few people seemed to know their stuff (something also reflected in their early positioning in the festival set list) - I mean, they're only probably the best rock band in the world at the moment! (Well, maybe apart from Radiohead, who are in a bit of a different category - not necessarily higher, but definitely different.)

Then Wolf and Cub, another band which was completely new to me (though I've heard the name a bit recently, especially since they signed to 4ad). Turns out that their thing is a fairly heavy, psychedelic stoner-rock jam type thing (reminded me a bit of Kyuss), and even though that's completely not my thing, I enjoyed the set, though the best moments for me came when they broke into a more garagey rock n roll groove, riffs and a backbeat.

Faker played next - yet another who I didn't know anything about. Apparently they've had quite a lot of airplay, though, and the crowd was getting into them plenty. The singer was a scrawny ball of energy, hurling himself around stage (also hanging off it and scaling a wall beside it), intoning his lyrics in that Echo & the Bunnymen-styled Britpop/post-punk manner so popular nowadays, and the music draws on similar influences. One or two of the songs sounded vaguely familiar, as if I might have heard them on triple j or something, and they do a pretty good line in anthems; they seemed like a pretty solid outfit.

Sometimes it seems as if everyone with even a passing interest in music has seen Augie March except for me, so I was glad to see them play. The music wasn't carrying that well to where we were standing at that point, but it seemed pretty good (I've only ever listened to Sunset Studies, and even that one not all that closely) and I might try to check them out again some time.

In between some of those main stage acts, we'd gone into Lounge to check out Dane Tucquet and Holly Throsby, but the sound wasn't great and you needed to be very close in order to hear properly, so I didn't get much of a vibe on either, but I was keen to see New Buffalo, so we left halfway through Augie March in order to get inside early and grab a spot on the floor down the front (the staggering of the sets on the two stages was way out of synch by that time). Happily, she was able to overcome the crummy acoustics and murmur of conversation from the back of the room to deliver a really good set. She switched between keys and guitar from song to song, with help from a guy on either samples or guitar for a few of the numbers; it was mostly off The Last Beautiful Day (show closer was "I've Got You And You've Got Me", accompanied by rather too loud distorted electric guitar, à la the ep version) but "Four Seasons In One Day" got a big reaction from the crowd and there was at least one new song, which was good (as well as one or two others that I didn't recognise). Last time I saw her live, I was surprised by how strong her voice is, and it struck me again yesterday at the festival; also, how much she was able to rely on it with fairly minimal instrumentation...

The Broken Social Scene set was already well underway by the time we got out into the lane again, but I was pretty impressed by what I caught of it. I didn't get into You Forgot It In People anywhere near as much as other people seemed to, but songs like "Almost Crimes" and "Cause = Time" came through strongly, hitting the indie anthem buttons more strongly than they do on record (one of the newer ones, "Ibi Dreams Of Pavement", was also good); sadly, they started "Anthems For A Seventeen Year Old Girl" but pulled out after just a few lines after realising that the acoustics of the lane were basically destroying the song. Also, props to them for bringing a brass section!

Les Savy Fav are another of those bands that I think I don't really have the ear for - I've never listened to a full record of theirs, but have heard plenty of their songs and never been excited by what they do...the kind of jerky three-piece attack that they ply generally leaves me a bit cold, though once in a while I 'get' one a bit more than the rest. They know how to put on a good show, though, the big, balding, bearded singer getting up to all kinds of things on stage while bawling out the words, and also going on two separate excursions deep into the crowd (the girl standing next to me had a go at tickling his belly but he just put the microphone in her face for her to sing), exhorting people to sing along.

Then, for the second year running, I didn't stay for the Avalanches set (although, this time, I at least stuck around for the start of it) - by the time they got started, a decent sit-down dinner somewhere was looking pretty good (getting soft in my old age), so we headed off.

Anyway, although there wasn't any one band that really blew the top of my head off in the way that the Dears did last year, it was fun and hopefully they'll be able to keep the festival going in years to come (I heard that tickets sold out well in advance, which is a good sign)...

Sin City

I liked Sin City a lot the first time, on the big screen, and it was still good on dvd, but it loses a bit both in the transition and on the second viewing (much of the film's impact comes from not knowing what's coming next). Still good, though.

A new resolution

Read Proust next, damnit!

Stars - Set Yourself On Fire

Set Yourself On Fire would've needed to house something pretty special for any of its songs to top "Celebration Guns", and indeed there's nothing on it to match that plangent, sighing, gently scudding ode (I've likened it to "Anthems For A Seventeen Year Old Girl" before, and I still think the comparison apt), though "One More Night (Your Ex-Lover Remains Dead)" goes close; but what there is, is an unassuming and likeable collection of spacey, electro-inflected indie-pop (the others that I already knew - "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead", "Set Yourself On Fire" and "Ageless Beauty" - are still nice, too), mostly down-tempo, touched occasionally and lightly by some unintrusive chamber-pop elements...soft-edged fuzzed-out guitars and pretty singing (both girl and boy) galore - and after all, we like nothing better (ahem) than tuneful indie electro-pop boy/girl duets, right? The record's not especially memorable either in its component parts or as a whole, and the songcraft is a bit lacking in places (ie, a few songs meander without going anywhere), but all up it's pretty good for what it is.

Dusty Springfield - Dusty In Memphis

It's always weird to come to an iconic album after having heard a great deal about it, sometimes for years and years before actually listening to it - it can be damnably hard to get past all the mythology and hagiography, and the sheer aura of the thing, to try to have some kind of direct or true experience of the music, never mind the desire to know where it 'fits' in with everything else and why it's 'important' (and matters're unlikely to be improved be actively trying to achieve such a listening experience). In this case, though, I already knew two of the record's key tracks, "Son Of A Preacher Man" and "Breakfast In Bed", close to inside-out, which made a bit of a difference; then, too, and probably more importantly, there's something about Dusty's singing which seems to render all that stuff irrelevant and just cut directly to the heart of the matter.

"Son Of A Preacher Man" is one of her most famous songs, if not the most famous, especially since its use on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, and deservedly so, for it's glorious and life-affirmatory. But it's "Breakfast In Bed" that's my favourite - it's nigh on perfect, shivering with feeling and drama...in his liner notes, Elvis Costello suggests that "[t]his track may have the greatest vocal entrance of Dusty's career" and then goes on to pick out my favourite moment on the album - the swell of the way she sings the line "She's hurt you again, I can tell".

The other songs on the album are uniformly good - there doesn't even seem any point in picking out individual tracks. Through them all, it seems as if she's singing for all she's worth while also conveying every nuance and detail of the song's voice and what lies beneath it - there's a sensitivity and a grace to her singing which is remarkable and comes down, crystal clear, through the years, and the band and producers do their jobs, wreathing her voice in horns, strings and all the accoutrements and bathing the album in a warm, timeless glow.

Also, incidentally, I think I'm beginning to develop the ability to pick Carole King compositions...

Eileen Rose - Shine Like It Does

The other Eileen Rose album (her debut) and, like Long Shot Novena, I got it cheap, since apparently either no one's heard of her or no one likes her - which in either case is everyone else's loss, because she's really rather good. I guess that part of the reason for this relative lack of recognition is that the music she makes isn't particularly fashionable - gritty, rootsy singer-songwriter fare with a slight country twang - and she doesn't have any particular gimmicks except the ability to write a good song and sing it well...

So anyway, Shine Like It Does isn't quite as good as Long Shot Novena - it's not as fully-realised and the songs aren't as consistently strong, with a couple dragging a bit ("Silver Ladle" in particular is a major miscalculation) - but it's still a very solid album, with a somewhat lighter feel than that other. Its best songs are "Lincoln Park", which works in a simultaneous lyrical and musical reference to Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline", and two near the end which I already knew, the epic "Shining" and breezy "Trying To Lose You"; I also like "Lie To Me" and the opening pair of "Rose" and "Still In The Family".

Janet Evanovich - Visions of Sugar Plums, To The Nines & Ten Big Ones

Sugar Plums is a Stephanie Plum novel, but a bit different from the other books in the series. It's a holiday special - more of a novella than a novel, and with a slightly different feel owing to its Christmas setting and the consequential entry of some fantasy elements - although, that said, it does work in a small amount of plot development, picking up where Eight left off. By happy coincidence, it was sitting on shelf beside Nine when I made a flying visit to the library to pick up that latter, so I got to read it in sequence (not having bothered to find out where it fit before). Anyway, it's not as good as the other books in the series, but not too bad for all that. There's nothing wrong with Nine(s) and Ten, though, except that Ten wraps up a bit abruptly, as if Evanovich hadn't bothered to write a proper ending and instead just threw in Sally to save Stephanie on the basis that someone has to save her, and it's already been Ranger and Morelli in previous books...almost caught up with the series, after which normal transmission with reading and general use of my time will resume - I've developed the bad habit of just putting everything else aside and reading these back to back (they're so pacy, entertaining, and quick to read) - although then again, with the start of work coming up very fast, maybe not...

Open Your Eyes

I was reading an interview between Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan (full review of the book no doubt to follow at some later date, once I've finished it) - it's interesting and they have a lot of thoughtful and thought-provoking stuff to say about writing, literature, and all that stuff. Anyway, there's one point at which which the two agree that cinema is, in McEwan's words, "a very inferior, unsophisticated medium"; Smith agrees, on the grounds that "you get surfaces only"; and those rather absolute statements particularly interested me, not least because while I strongly share that intuition, it also makes me a bit uneasy.

Well, my thoughts were turned back to that question after watching Open Your Eyes. One area in which films may well have it over books is in rendering the blurry distinction between 'internal consciousness' and 'external world' - evidently a bit of an obsession of mine - in a way which is both convincing and phenomenologically accurate (the two obviously being closely related), whether that be along the reality/fantasy line, or waking life/dreams, or present experience/memory, or any of those experiential sets...and this aptness comes because cinema is a visual medium, and doesn't need to grapple with the level of linguistic mediation inherent in the novel form (or in any kind of writing). It'd be possible to argue that cinema ought not to be trusted for that very reason - that the ease with which its images and surfaces can be assimilated into our ordinary experience and average everyday understanding of the world serves to reinforce [insert undesirable things here] and prevent us from breaking clear to [insert desirable higher state of understanding here], etc - but the fact remains that it's a medium more apt to representing at least some aspects of seemingly unfiltered human experience (which is different from representing human consciousness or its workings).

Open Your Eyes is quite possibly the best illustration of this facility that I've yet come across (I've thought more highly of other films which do similar things - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for example, and maybe Broken Flowers - but I can't think of any that so adeptly and deliberately efface the lines between consciousness and world). The plot is much cleverness, and the execution is spot-on - visually spectacular (the opening scene's a stunner), creepy, unsettling, and genuinely dream-like. I thought that it was very good.

Okay, spoiler time - anyone reading this should stop if they haven't seen the film and might want to some day.

...

Lots to think about - the ending is open, but it's not a cheat, for there's plenty of evidence to point in any number of directions. The obvious way of reading it would be to take things at face value - to accept the sci-fi twist as genuine, and to see César's final jump as a true leap back into the external world of 150 years in the future, so that the voice telling him to open his eyes at the end would be that of an L.E. nurse in that future (particularly given that that voice is different from the one which murmurs the film in at its beginning)...I say 'obvious', but even that would be plenty head-spinning, and all the more impressive for the fact that there don't seem to be any obvious plot holes or contradictions ruining it. Another possibility, I guess, is that the whole thing is a dream - not in a 'and then he woke up' sort of way but rather in a nightmarish 'the L.E. stuff is true, but somehow it's gone wrong and he's being forced to repeat the sequence over and over' way (or 'the L.E. stuff isn't true, but he's been stuck in this kind of internal experiential loop by some other means - possibly psychosis'). Or there's the possibility that César is in Hell, where he's (also) forced to relive this distorted sequence over and over because of his sins while alive (notice the references to religion and God throughout) - which of course isn't mutually exclusive to any of those other possibilities except the first.

Nellie McKay - Get Away From Me

If there's a better single word than 'joyful' to describe how Nellie McKay's music makes me feel, I haven't thought of it yet - I love the quirky melodies, the independent mindedness, the weirdly undulating lyrical streams, the attitude and anger wrapped up in her wildly ricocheting, frequently foul-mouthed, off the wall singer-songwriter/vocal jazz/old-style pop/hip-hop/street poetry fusion.

Get Away From Me was the red-haired chanteuse's debut, released by Sony/Columbia in 2004, and as far as I'm aware it's still her only official long-playing record (I haven't been following the Pretty Little Head story, but I don't imagine that it's hit the stores in either version yet). It's a double album, although with a total running length of just over an hour, it would've easily fit on to a single disc; somehow, this seems in keeping with what McKay's doing rather than being an annoying affectation. Maybe it's because her music is, for all of its peculiar detours and modernisms, often recognisably rooted in the classic Tin Pan Alley style of songwriting, not least in the way that piano is the dominant (non-vocal) instrument.

So anyway, I think that the advance version of Pretty Little Head that's been floating around is the better album - it's probably marginally brighter and more sprightly than Get Away From Me as well as less diffuse, and its high points are higher. But Get Away From Me is damn good too, if not as striking or as focused as what was to come - it's just a joy to listen to, gleefully idiosyncratic, cheeky, colourful and fresh.

Grand Theft Parsons: Music from & inspired by the motion picture

There was no real reason to buy this cd except that I needed to hear Gillian Welch sing "Hickory Wind", but as far as reasons go, that's a pretty good one; to be honest, it's not as great as I'd anticipated, but she puts her usual understatedly gorgeous vocal in, and the echoey, windy humming in the background gives it a different complexion from both the original and Welch's usual metier, and all told I quite like it. The rest of the cd's made up of a couple of classics as done by Gram himself (including the Flying Burrito Brothers' version of "Wild Horses"), a bunch of covers of his songs by contemporary artists (most notably Wilco's "One Hundred Years From Now"), some soundtrack/score stuff composed by Richard G Mitchell in the americana style (with hints of a Morricone influence), and an odd assortment of other cuts (Primal Scream's "Movin' On Up" is a weird one - the only connection to Parsons that I can figure out is that it's a drug song - but presumably it makes more sense in the context of the film). All up, nice but not cosmically so.

Beach Boys - Smiley Smile / Wild Honey

Like, I imagine, a lot of people my age, my exposure to the Beach Boys has basically been limited to Pet Sounds and a handful of other radio singles, and I've never been super-enthused about them. While they have at least a handful of great songs up their sleeve - "You Still Believe In Me", "God Only Knows" and "Caroline No" spring to mind - and Pet Sounds is a rather lovely record, they just don't excite me as an overall proposition.

Listening to these two post-Pet Sounds albums hasn't done anything to change my mind - to my ears, they basically sound like inferior versions of that earlier classic, messy and comparatively unfocused (though scattered with a couple of genuine gems). One thing, though - hearing more Beach Boys has given me a clearer insight into how enormously influential they were on the subsequent development of pop music, both vocally and production-wise. The thing is, though, that unlike, say, the Velvet Underground, their stuff doesn't stand up for me in its own right today.

Neko Case - The Tigers Have Spoken

A live album and Case's most recent record (excluding Fox Confessor, which hasn't hit the stores yet). On the short side at just over half an hour in length, but good value nonetheless in that most of the songs on it can't be found elsewhere in her recorded output. It comprises 10 songs taken from two shows that she (with live backing band the Sadies) played in early 2004, plus a version of "Wayfaring Stranger" separately recorded 'semi-live', and, unsurprisingly, it's all excellent. Case is in fine voice, and the sound quality is top-notch - crystal clear and, to be frank, better than that on her early studio recordings...we knew this already, but it's nice to have it confirmed that the girl can really sing - her vocals sound just as good on The Tigers Have Spoken as they do on Blacklisted and Fox Confessor.

Opener "If You Knew", a Case original, is an early highlight, swaggering in and swinging forwards in much the same way that "Hold On, Hold On" does; also particularly excellent are her rollicking take on "The Train From Kansas City" (as in Berry/Greenwich --> Shangri-Las), a cover of a song called "Soulful Shade Of Blue" (written by Buffy Sainte-Marie; name rings a bell but I don't know why), and a resonating, haunted rendition of her own "Blacklisted", which made me think that Blacklisted is one of the few albums that I'd be interested to hear done live in its entirety. And, of course, it's neat to hear Case sing "Wayfaring Stranger" - one of those 'can't go wrong' propositions (although, thinking about other versions I know well, I reckon it's probably shaded by Emmylou's take on the traditional number...I'm also fond of 16 Horsepower's cut, but that's a slightly different kind of beast) - stretching out vocally across the familiar melody and employing a backing choir to ramp up the dynamics and really punch out the words "I'm going there to see my mother,/She says she'll meet me when I come,/I'm just a-going over Jordan,/I'm just a-going over home".

Janet Evanovich - Hot Six, Seven Up & Hard Eight

More proof that these books are addictive: the other night, I went out and bought Six (secondhand, admittedly, but the principle is the same) rather than simply waiting for it to come on shelf at any one of the numerous public libraries to which I have access. Self control bad, instant gratification oh so good.

Also, evidence that these books are a bad influence on me: today, strolling down Hoddle St around 1ish with the intention of getting lunch on Bridge Rd, not thinking about anything in particular but vaguely musing about the use of the first person voice in literature (in particular re: Murakami and The Great Gatsby) - ie, normal appropriate good thoughts for me to be having - when I went past Hungry Jacks and suddenly thought that maybe I should just eat there instead (justifying it by reflecting that it'd be an appropriate place to be reading the further adventures of Stephanie Plum), and so I did. Hella incongruous with most everything else about me and my lifestyle, but what can you do? Never let it be said that popular fiction can't be a powerful force.

So evidently I'm still enjoying these, and I still get at least a few laugh-out-louds per book. Things continue to move forward between Stephanie and both Morelli and Ranger, and the new characters are all good in their own ways (Habib and Mitchell are two of Evanovich's funniest bit part creations); running jokes, rather than getting old, often amuse more as Evanovich finds new inventive ways to, for example, get Stephanie handcuffed to various objects or have cars blown up in the bounty hunter's vicinity (usually though not always her own).

Josie and the Pussycats

Cute satire targeting the music industry and consumer culture in general; funny in places, but some of the jokes and self-referentiality get tired pretty quickly (or else weren't funny to begin with), and while I didn't resent or regret having given 100 minutes of my life to the film - it has its moments, and I do enjoy this bubblegum, cartoony, hyper-colourful type of thing - all up Josie and the Pussycats is rather too minor (I like my satire sharper and/or subtler).

Also, the whole time I was watching it, I was thinking that Josie (Rachel Leigh Cook) reminded me of someone I know (appearance-wise rather than personality-wise), but: (a) I couldn't work out who it was; and (b) I had a feeling that either (b-i) I don't like the real-life person very much, or (b-ii) I don't find the real-life person very attractive, or (b-iii) both. Strange...I wonder who I was being reminded of.

Walk The Line

Watching this film made me happy. Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon both very good (singing good, acting very good) - the first film I've really liked the former in, and I think the first I've really seen the latter in - and the relationship between Cash and June Carter makes a compelling thread holding the story together (I was a bit surprised that more wasn't made of "Ring Of Fire", though the song and its writing is fairly prominent). There isn't all that much to say about Walk The Line, really - there's nothing too unexpected in it, but one never feels that it's just going through the motions in hitting the high points of that storied career and life (at least up to the point of his marriage to June), and within its chosen parameters, it basically does everything right...y'know, it just felt real. Also, I got those little chills down the back of the neck during several of the musical numbers, which has to be a good sign. Plus, the music's great, natch (Cash's own stuff, as done by Phoenix + Witherspoon belting out several numbers + period soundtrack (Dylan et al) + extra stuff composed by T Bone Burnett).

Cynthia Ozick - The Puttermesser Papers

Plot-wise, it's an account of the extraordinary career, life, death and afterlife of Ruth Puttermesser, a lawyer/public servant.city mayor/anonymous retiree dedicated to the idea of a life of the mind Jew in New York City; it also has a golem, life imitating art, fantasy indistinguishable from reality; it's a parable concerning art, society, desire, the imagination and paradise; and it's formally quite experimental, being related in the form of five, chronologically-ordered but only loosely connected, extended chapters detailing key episodes in Puttermesser's life. Put like that, it sounds pretty good, doesn't it? Here's the thing, though: I felt the whole time I was reading the novel that I wasn't giving it the attention and concentration that it deserved - but the reason for that neglect on my part was that the novel itself doesn't do enough to demand or earn such care on the reader's part.

Ozick can certainly write, but her crisp, wry, liberally-dotted-with-excursions-into-the-fantastic style is weighed down by a recurring preciousness and the suffocating blanket of over-intellectualism. Obviously, I don't mind a bit of preciousness or intellectualism, least of all in literature, but it really goes too far in The Puttermesser Papers - it requires a level of erudition to comprehend which is, quite frankly, ridiculous. So these comments need to be qualified by the recognition that, very possibly, I'm just not learned enough to 'get' the novel...even so, though if it were more compelling, I would've been more willing to dig into its complexities and make a real effort to unravel them - but, while Puttermesser is a memorable creation, The Puttermesser Papers is too disjointed and all over the place, and basically too unsatisfying, for it to seem worth that effort (I noticed that every single chapter/novella in it has been previously published, suggesting that maybe a certain unity of vision is lacking from the 'novel' I've read and possibly explaining why its constituent parts don't seem particularly well-integrated with one another). As it is, while the novel isn't without its virtues, I was disappointed by this one (I'd read the first few pages in a book store and thought them promising enough to remember the title and track it down in a library later).

The Best of the Lemonheads: The Atlantic Years

The Lemonheads are one of those bands whose actual albums I'll probably never need to own - a best of is basically perfect for me. I associate their music inescapably with high school - "It's A Shame About Ray", "The Outdoor Type", "If I Could Talk I'd Tell You", and, of course, the ubiquitous "Mrs Robinson" (which I remember taping off the radio and listening to plenty...I wonder what happened to all those old tapes?). Fuzzy guitared power-pop in the classic 90s style - makes me all nostalgic!

Walk On By: Songs That Inspired Generations volume 1

Two cd set of songs from the documentary. Billed as "a listener's guide to the 20th Century's most influential songs", it's a pretty good selection of famous tunes from stage, screen and plain old recording studio. Mostly in their classic recordings (Ella Fitzgerald's "Night and Day", Bing Crosby's "White Christmas", the Platters' "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes", Billie Holliday's "Strange Fruit", Dionne Warwick's "Walk On By", etc, etc) but also includes a few less well-known versions of famous songs (Simply Red's surprisingly good rendition of "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye", Eva Cassidy's "Over The Rainbow", which is probably better than Judy Garland's, Tori Amos' take on "Smells Like Teen Spirit", Lucinda Williams' version of "Cold, Cold Heart", Gipsy Kings' "Hotel California").

Love and Other Catastrophes

[Para edited out 6/9/17]

I first watched Love and Other Catastrophes in the summer between high school and uni - a time which, if it was half as golden as I remember it as being, must have been golden indeed - and really liked it; it went a long way towards shaping my impressions of university life (which at that point were very vague indeed), and incidentally gave me something to look forward to. The film stayed with me, too - over the last six years, I've often found myself thinking of Frances O'Connor's character, running around campus from department to department, stuck amidst layers of red tape and university bureaucracy, or remembered her lying outside on a bench, singing along to "Shivers", or recalled Ari's habit of recording his thoughts on the tape recorder he carries with him, when finding myself playing out similar scenes in my own life.

So, with uni over for me at least for the time being (and more than likely forever), and the real world rushing up all too soon (coming up to two weeks away), it seemed a good time to watch the film again and see how it looks with the benefit of the passing of these last six years. First thing I noticed is that it was actually filmed at Melbourne Uni (I hadn't been sure that it was) - although it was made in '96, and campus looks a bit different now than it did then, there are still plenty of recognisable buildings and spots (South Lawn!) - which gives it an added piquancy...[a light edit here 6/9/17]...there were enough similarities for me to recognise plenty of consonances beyond those I'd retained from my first viewing (enjoyed the Kundera conversation at the party!) - and that's where the nostalgia began to creep in.

[Para edited out 6/9/17]

So evidently, in some important respects at least, the film itself is almost incidental [the idea of the film / the film 'itself']. But I guess there are reasons why it caught my attention in the first place and why I liked it again tonight, even personal associations aside, and you know, those reasons aren't so very hard to find...it's funny and sweet and smart, and it's about the search for love. Sometimes, at least, that's more than enough.

Kitchen Stories

The idea's interesting in a quirky kind of way - Swedish study into kitchen use habits of single men involves the installation of observers (sitting on high chairs in the corners of kitchens) recording all of the movements of said single men (in Norway) and living in a caravan just outside the subjects' houses (one observer per subject, natch). Study motivated by ideals of scientific purity, meaning that there's not supposed to be any interaction between observer and subject. Film focuses on one particular pairing and the relationship that develops between the two. I found it a bit of a slog, though. It's sweet-natured and has a little bit to say about seeing the world from the perspective of others, etc (and I wondered if there were some national stereotypes involving Sweden and Norway being activated as well), but the film was too lacking in 'hooks' for me to get into it at any point.