"I am prepared for amazing things to happen": Me and You and Everyone We Know

Offbeat, beguiling, sweet-- unflinchingly honest -- a definite personal vision, but in a way resistant to description or delineation (impressions and shades rather than manifestos and Messages).

Things among many others to savour: the goldfish sequence; the 'hand on fire' image (and its lead-up); the score; the general wispy poetic disconnectedness of the mood.

Decided to watch it after a random passer-by commented on my IMP page that Miranda July seemed to fit with my listed 'likes'. Effect queerly difficult to pin down - at once pronounced and ineffable. But I like it very much.

Dead Like Me season 1

Also on the cd from Michelle were the first two (possibly the only two) seasons of this show Dead Like Me. Herewith the relevant part of the thank you email I sent Michelle:

I'm most of the way through the first season of "Dead Like Me", which I'm finding tres amusant. It's a cute concept which I thought, having watched the pilot, might be at risk of being a bit twee and maybe sort of boring, but far from it - I like it muchly, and generally the way that about once every couple of episodes it throws in something of such remarkably (and deliberately) bad taste that I can't help but laugh (the mauling of the protester by the service station bear comes to mind). Mandy Patinkin good value too - totally dorky yet with tons of gravitas (though we far prefer him as Inigo Montoya, natch - which is why you set me up with this show, right?). Also, George kinda reminds me of you - had you picked up on that resemblance? (I bet you hadn't - or, even if you had, that you aren't admitting it.)

To fill in the blanks: the premise is set up in the pilot, in which Georgia Lass (she prefers "George"), archetypal 18 year old slacker with an attitude (though to call her an 'archetype' doesn't do justice to the depiction of her character - but it's in the ballpark), is killed by a flaming piece of debris (a toilet seat, actually) which falls from a Russian space station, whereupon she discovers that she is now undead - a 'grim reaper' whose job it is to usher the souls of the recently dead to their next destination (the show is coy about where this might actually be). There's a motley collection of others in the city (Chicago?) sharing her portfolio (which is something like 'intrusively traumatic deaths' - which in practice means dying by, eg, being crushed by a falling piano, being crushed by a falling man while you're walking down the church aisle having just been married, (grislily) fruit guillotine, and, of course, mauling by aforementioned bear for whose rights you are ironically protesting); they meet at Der Waffle Haus, where Rube, their nominal boss, hands out their assignments on yellow sticky tabs; they're visible to the living (but look different from their 'living' selves - which is how they appear to other undead) and need to find some source of income in order to get by.

It's not really a black comedy/drama, though it's amusingly morbid in its general sensibility. Sometimes the deaths take on genuine pathos (the small child who dies in the train accident at night in either the pilot or the second ep, I can't remember, the gentle schizophrenic man who falls for George and then literally falls, the pair of lovers visited by Mason) while sometimes they're played for laughs - it's never depressing (and I say this as one who does occasionally get quite seriously down about the idea; well, who doesn't?) in part because it's so irreverent and in part because of the promise of something beyond which it holds out. Apart from the sporadic outbreaks of bad taste mentioned above (Mason's strip-searching in the airport comes to mind and then the subsequent bursting of the drug-filled baggie he's smuggled in up his rectum) I also get into the out and out profanity which pops up all the time, often but by no means exclusively from George, and also George's general anti-everything attitude (no surprises there).

(40-minute episodes; tops acting; decent characterisation and some nice development (though not as much as one might hope); neat episode structures; extended story arcs; generally clever writing.)

Carla Bruni - No Promises

Sometimes our friends just come through for us. A couple of weeks ago, I was reading about this album online somewhere; I'd heard of Carla Bruni before and had a vague idea that she was one of those old-sounding new chaunteuse types; I initially shuddered at the idea of anyone setting poems by Yeats, Auden, and others to music and laying them down on an album; but the review, while acknowledging the substantial 'hmmm' factor associated with the concept, was glowing about the record itself, so I was intrigued to hear it, not least because it included readings of two poems each by Dorothy Parker and Emily Dickinson (two of my fave poet types, of course); and lo, without any presaging, a cd arrived in the mail from Michelle holding a whole bunch of stuff - including, most fortuitously, No Promises. So yes, it's pretty good - chanteuse-y stuff with expected lounge influences and also a folksy, adult-contemporary-alt-countryish flavour which I like. It's nice.

Wilco - Sky Blue Sky

So I've lived with this record for two or three weeks now, and I like it about as much now as I did after the first listen - which is to say, rather a lot. It really sounds like nothing so much as the new Wilco album, and so on the account of course I'm much into it; as far as their past stuff goes, the best 'hybrid' description is probably Being There meets A Ghost Is Born. They played, I reckon, about half of it at their show the other week, and the songs are the type to stick in the mind after just one or two listenings, and have that Wilco trick of getting particular lines (lyrical and otherwise) particularly embedded, and likely to pop up frequently and unexpectedly (I had the titular hook from 'Shake It Off" running around in my head at work the other day; the lines "the more I think about/The more I'm sure it's you" materialise a fair bit too; etc). That said, most of the best bits are the glorious electric guitar moments, obviously.

I always find it tricky to extract particular Wilco songs from their albums as my favourites, but at present I think I particularly like "You Are My Face", "Impossible Germany", "Side With The Seeds", "Hate It Here" and "Walken", though Sky Blue Sky really works particularly well as a whole (the bookends are important to that sense - "Either Way" and the first half of "You Are My Face" easing the listener in, and then "What Light" and "On and On and On" taking it out in mellow, thoughtful fashion. Anyhow, all round a very consistent set, and excellent with it.

Macbeth

The recent Australian one, transposing the play to a Melbourne gangland setting. I was predisposed towards liking the film, but actually found it a bit underwhelming - while the concept has possibilities, and those possibilities are realised to the extent that the moody, matt-and-shadow settings, garish costumes and foreboding score work well, this Macbeth struck me as fundamentally uninspired and unimaginative.

See, for me, while the film's good to look at, it fails to reconceptualise the subject-matter of the play in line with its altered setting - that's what I think is the underlying imaginative failure. A good example is the way the dialogue is delivered straight, in Australian accents - there's nothing wrong with that per se, but it's as if the makers of the film relied on the mere fact of difference/novelty to make this Macbeth watching, without any more (in fact, a further quibble here is that those lines aren't particularly well delivered - but that seems more a failure of execution than of conception).

Related to this are shortcomings in the way this revisioning represents its characters and the narrative as a whole. I don't mind unusual or new takes on either of these elements when it comes to Shakespeare and his canonical co - indeed, 'positively welcome' would be a better description than 'don't mind' - but it's disappointing when, as here, there doesn't seem to be any particular take at all.

Anyhow, I don't want to seem too negative about this film. I enjoyed watching it, and on one level it's well done. But it didn't satisfy me at all.

The Radio Dept - Pet Grief

What I'd expected, based on the two songs of theirs on the Marie Antoinette soundtrack - what would you call it, 'dream-indie-pop'? It's kind of wallpapery - pleasant and tasteful but not distinguished (the tunes not as striking as those on MA) - but nice.

Slow Down Tallahassee - "So Much For Love" cd single

Everything about this cd is just delightful. First, the music - a trio of two-and-a-half to three minute swatches of fuzzy, melodic girl-fronted indie pop, complete with oh-whoa-ohs, handclaps, keyboards and don't-look-now hooks around every corner. So the elements are all there, but in fact one of the most impressive things about the disc is the sturdiness and assuredness of both the songwriting and the execution...though of course being impressed is beside the point - the name of the game here is the music's immediate (and then continuing) effect which is, natch, where the delight comes in.

Over and above the music itself, though, is the aesthetic of the whole. The cd's a three-incher (ie, adorably tiny) and one of a limited run of 100 (mine's # 47); it came in the mail with a handwritten note from someone at the record company which puts it out (Cloudberry Records) - ending with the capitalised exhortation "don't stop indiepop!", no less - and a scissored-out scrap of a review of another band.

Here's what the band's myspace has to say (it's apt):

We met behind the bar of a seedy nightclub, serving endless drinks as Motown hits and disco classics stopped our hearts from giving in. Taking our inspiration from the paintings of Henry Darger, the writings of Dorothy Parker and Pablo Neruda, girl groups, playground gangs, paperback romances, tear-jerking pop and the burning ambition to write an album full of the greatest, most thoughtful pop hits that this country has ever seen, we formed a band and the fun began. JOIN OUR GANG, AND YOU WILL NEVER BE LONELY AGAIN.

* * *

Came across them through angels twenty, one of only two mp3-type blogs with which I more or less keep up (the other being motel de moka, which I secretly find rather inspiring).

Keating! @ the Comedy Theatre

I think that I almost certainly built this up too much in my mind beforehand, but it was still great. The best thing about it is the performance put in by Mike McLeish as Keating himself - the manic energy and posturing reminded me a little of Gob but with real charisma and, it seemed, genuine insight into his subject. Favourite songs probably the "the beginning is the end" one ("Gareth tell me more"), the "ruler of the land" reggae numbers, the Mabo bossa nova [?] and, of course, the Evans/Kernot love duet. Satisfying to have clear heroes (well, one hero really) to cheer and risible villains to hiss. Was glad of the way it ended, too - would've been a bit of a downer (pun unintended) without the closing rewriting of history (which also, of course, focuses all of our minds on the 'if only/what could have been?' question). All up, very pleasing!

(w/ Mehnaz, last Sunday afternoon following not one but two previous failed attempts on our parts to see it, tix having been sold out on both of those earlier occasions)

Nikka Costa - Everybody Got Their Something

Kicks off with "Like A Feather", the stripped-back funk of which is still both weird and cool six years on from when I must've first been hearing it on the radio, but the definite highlight of the album comes next - "So Have I For You", in which Costa channels Janis Joplin by means of a slidin' funk-soul-rock'n'roll meld, one of those that feels not so much like a hybrid as a reaching back to the original roots of the forms (albeit infused with a modern sensibility, much of which is imported by the glitzy production). The next couple, "Tug of War" and the title track, are good too, but she isn't able to sustain the quality over the whole record; still, all up it's well worth the listen...definitely a good 'un.

Everclear - Sparkle and Fade

I remember "Santa Monica" fondly - a neat tune and lyrics which make explicit the aspirational tenor of much of that kind of 90s post-grunge rock - and occasionally get out the triple j hottest 100 cd with the song on it, and have less distinct memories of "Heroin Girl" and "You Make Me Feel Like A Whore", but really it was more So Much For The Afterglow which provided the radio Everclear songs which aren't an entirely insignificant part of the soundtrack to my recollections of late high school, and that album would probably give me more than this one. Sparkle and Fade's okay, but it's nothing special and very uneven - a small handful of decent songs, and the rest all slur into each other.

Queen - Greatest Hits

There are lots of artists whose albums I feel no need to listen to, but for whom I'd quite like to own a best of; I mentioned in passing while talking to Kevin a while back that Queen are one such, and he kindly made a gift of this best of to me not long after. For me, the main point of having these collections is usually twofold - being able to listen to particular hit/famous songs whenever one feels like it, and getting a sort of high level overview of the artist's career - and it's more the first of those which is going on with Queen. Still, taken as a whole this 17-song set shows them to be a lot less overblown than I usually imagine them to be - or, perhaps more accurately, that the overblownness doesn't particularly get in the way of the songs. Most are familiar (endlessly familiar) from the radio - though I never realised that "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" is, in fact, the song of that name, nor that it was by Queen!

2007 Law Week Oration - "Does Australia Need a Bill of Rights?" (the Hon Michael McHugh)

This was quite interesting, but more by virtue of who was delivering it than the oration's actual content. Justice McHugh's approach was to enumerate instances of deficiencies in the existing protection of human rights in Australia (focusing on immigration and detention, racial discrimination, and counter-terrorism laws) and argue that the alternatives to a (constitutional) bill of rights - ordinary legislation, common law, implied constitutional rights - are inadequate; he spent some time on the related arguments that the Westminster system of responsible government, independent judiciary, etc provides the best guarantee of human rights, that a bill of rights would be inconsistent with parliamentary sovereignty, and that such an instrument would politicise the courts and diminish respect for the judiciary.

Conversation afterwards was lively. Shaun, Jarrod and I repaired to the Corkman for fish and chips, a drink, and a fairly solid argument (mostly me v SEG) about first a variation on the old capitalism v socialism thing, and then (more on point) the legitimacy of implied constitutional rights; I must admit, Shaun probably ended up having the better of the first of those, but I'd score the second (which took place on more equal terrain, I suppose) as a hard-fought draw.

Plenty of others at the oration, including (very much without limitation) Nicolette, Vegjie and Sunny, which is par for the course with these things.

Y Tu Mamá También

This really took me by surprise. Steph pressed it on me a while back, and I was sceptical - nothing I'd heard about it particularly suggested that I would enjoy the film. (Two teenage boys go on road trip with older woman; prospect of sex and self-discovery; set in Mexico; ho hum.) In fact, though, from the cheeky opening scene through the depiction of the trip up to its climax (so to speak), and then on to the film's subtle and affecting epilogue, it offers a genuine journey. It's one of those pieces of art which just has something about it - it doesn't seem especially profound, but then again, maybe it is, you know? (It's quite straightforward in a lot of ways, but is somehow at once poetically economical and thoroughly earthy.) In any case, I liked Y Tu Mamá También very much.

Kelly Clarkson - Breakaway

Glossy of-the-moment pop - a mix of big ballads and anthemic rockers. Good value, though the first six songs on the album are far better than the second. "Since U Been gone" is the certifiable classic, of course, but I've plenty of appreciation left over for "Behind These Hazel Eyes" and "Gone" in particular. Hooks galore and songs well sold by Clarkson.

Tatyana Tolstaya - The Slynx

Though it's not a Great novel, there's something of an air of greatness to The Slynx (and not just because Tolstaya is Leo Tolstoy's great grand-niece...naturally, being the kind of reader that I am, I've never read Tolstoy anyway). It's a savagely dystopian vision of post-apocalyptic Russia with a certain amount of contemporary (and satirical) resonance - though I suspect that resonance would've been greater if (a) the novel had been written, say, 40 years ago and/or (b) I were Russian or at any rate more familiar with the culture than I am - and it has a darkly imaginative power which is compelling and not a little unsettling. At times it reminded me of Orwell, at others of Bulgakov, and its grotesque elements are well woven into the whole. I'm not sure how I feel about the ending; it further muddles an already muddled everything. Nor am I really sure what it's saying. But there's a thread running through it - some ineffable thing which gives the novel its haunting, memorable character despite its other failings.

Things to remember: the mice, the Slynx itself, the books, the plagiarism, the decrees, Benedikt, the Oldeners, the Degenerators, the pushkin, the exclamation marks, the golubchiks.

M J Hyland - Carry Me Down

This is excellent - a terse, tense, almost incidentally evocative piece of writing. It's told through the eyes of eleven year old John Egan, who is intelligent, opaque, and disturbed, and the narrative takes on those hues of his character with a sustainedness and a plausibility which is extremely impressive. It's difficult to get a handle on, but it's also thoroughly gripping from the first paragraph - Hyland eschews simplistic 'explanations' (both explicit and, the which is more difficult, implicit) for her characters' actions and thoughts, or for the circumstances of their subsistence, and also avoids straightforward or obvious resolutions to any of the (sometimes familiar) event-structures she throws up; she embeds in the fabric of the novel the same commitments evident in its content; the characterisations and plot strands are deliberately incomplete, and this incompleteness serves an important function in the whole.

It's odd. The book that Carry Me Down most reminds me of is The Catcher in the Rye, which I didn't particularly enjoy when I read it, and the details of which are by now very unclear in my mind. But a trace of the way it made me feel has stayed with me, evidently, and been reactivated by Hyland's novel. I'm not sure what it is, really. But it seems to me that there's something quite remarkable about Carry Me Down, in its apparent simplicity and deeper, murkier currents, and most of all (and wrapped up with all of that) in the way it completely inhabits the mind/world of its central character and pulls the reader along, almost claustrophobically, with him all the way down.

Steven Carroll - The Gift of Speed

I read about The Gift of Speed when it came out (2004, apparently), but my interest in reading it was piqued by a review of Carroll's latest, The Time We Have Taken, in an Australian Book Review a couple of issues ago. In particular, it was this passage which made me sit up and take notice:

...something else is being attempted, something rare in Australian fiction. The Time We Have Taken is breathtakingly ambitious, a Proustian narrative, allusive, reflective, elegiac and concerned very little with events as turning points in themselves. Instead, the minutiae of daily life and the unstoppable flow of time are at the novel's centre. This becomes a moving celebration of the quotidian and of the terrible beauty of the moment that we cannot see until change has rendered it past.

I've not read the more recent book, but in those lines, the reviewer, Christina Hill, captures much of the nature of The Gift of Speed. The narrative takes as its historical bookends the arrival and departure of the West Indian cricket team on its famous 1960-61 tour of Australia, and the events of tour are woven through the novel amidst several other strands, most prominently that of the sixteen year old Michael, growing up in suburban Melbourne and furiously practising his bowling with the aspiration of reaching a perfect moment, a moment of grace. The short chapters are told from several alternating points of view (one - and only one, I think - is told from two), present tense third person except those of Michael's aging grandmother, which are presented in the first person; the style is quite lyrical and very Australian.

I must admit, I admired this novel - liked it, even - more than I enjoyed it. About a quarter of the way in, I distinctly heard in my mind, in tones of woe, the words "oh no, it's a coming of age novel!", and while that didn't turn out to be entirely accurate (and even to the extent that it is accurate, that aspect of the novel is well done - the relationship between Michael and Kathleen Marsden, for example, is sensitively and precisely portrayed), there's enough of that here to put me on my guard. More tellingly, there isn't much of a story to it - which is hardly a criticism (and perhaps especially when that doesn't seem to be what the author set out to do in the first place), but makes it that much more unlikely that I'll really get into a book, and while The Gift of Speed has a lot going for it, it doesn't have the extra kick that a To The Lighthouse, say, or an Invisible Cities has, to really push me past the lack of story and bring me to love it anyway. So, overall response definitely positive, and it's grand to read a good novel set in Melbourne (even if near half a century ago), but it hasn't inspired me.

Two videos - "TempBot" (dir Neill Blomkamp) and "The Country" (Billy Collins)

Two things recently sent to me without much or any explanation.

Jon from MS sent me a link to this video, completely sans comment (unless you count "cool short video", which I don't). It turned out to be called "TempBot", and to follow the travails of a robot temp in an office environment; I can't decide whether it's deceptively straightforward or deceptively subtle, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

And a few days later, Charlie, one from my open diary days (a long, long time ago), sent around this - an 'action poem' called "The Country" (subject line and entire content of accompanying message: Billy Collins is GOD. (Also: I'm not dead, just thought you all should know.)). It's a poem, set to animation; it begins "I wondered about you when you told me never to leave a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches just lying around the house because the mice might get into them and start a fire..." and then turns into a sweet, curiously profound-feeling parable of sorts. It's too lovely for words, and makes me feel warm and happy and somehow uplifted.

Frida Hyvönen - Until Death Comes

The cover says it all, really. Hyvönen's an eccentric with a piano, following her own meandering muse: her songs are wilful, simple, off-centre, self-enfolded, stop-start and surgingly tuneful (see: "You Never Got Me Right") and often out and out ballads (the one and a half minute-long "Valerie" is another highlight); her voice is soulful and honeyed but with that Scandinavian catch and chill; the music is like streaks of sunlight falling on winter sand...cool and profane, terse and poetic, it's finely wrought and immaculately executed, a reminder of the possibilities of music.

Tom Clancy - Clear and Present Danger

This is what I did on Saturday night: listened to Camera Obscura (Underachievers Please Try Harder), Saint Etienne (Finisterre), Philip Glass (The Photographer) and Godspeed You Black Emperor! (f#a#∞) while feeling a bit mopey and sort of disconnected for not particular reason and in the meantime writing a bit; started reading Clear and Present Danger to distract me from myself. Have duly finished it, and with a renewed appreciation of Clancy's ability as a craftsman and less insult done to my sensibilities by his politics than I'd expected.