"Educated folk singers want my soul / Jonathon Fisk still wants my soul": Spoon - They Want My Soul

Even with the benefit of perspective-lending distance, that run put together by Spoon from '01 to '07 - Girls Can Tell, Kill the Moonlight, Gimme Fiction, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga - was straight-up great, and there's not a lot more to be said about that. The next one was Transference, a step in a different and (deliberately) shakier direction, and it didn't sink in in the same way and besides came out back in 2010, so however you reckon it: Spoon, it's been too long.

Which makes They Want My Soul all the more welcome, because it is excellent. There's not another band, I don't think, with Spoon's ability to surprise me into a smile at their musical moves (the New Pornographers, maybe?), and on this record, they've still got it - the rhythm and soul and sonic attitude (Britt Daniel's Adam's apple strut so easy to visualise) that's marked their output since they hit their stride back more than a decade ago, together with some well-judged filligree by way of the odd Cure-y keyboard wash (the glassy groove of "Inside Out"'s a highlight) and even, on "Outlier", sparkly Spanish guitar - though it's maybe the raggedly straight ahead surges of "Rainy Taxi", "Do You" and the title track that are its greatest pleasures. What up!

Bryce Dessner - "St Carolyn by the Sea" / Jonny Greenwood - Suite from "There Will Be Blood" / Copenhagen Philharmonic / Andre de Ridder

Three substantial, engaging pieces by Bryce Dessner of the National fame, plus half a dozen shorter ones from Greenwood's score for There Will Be Blood - all recorded and released under DG's formidable imprimatur.

While the Greenwood pieces are top notch and suitably cinematic in sound, it's Dessner's compositions that really impress, bringing the apparatus of the symphony orchestra effectively to bear in a stylistically varied but integrated trio of pieces which also seamlessly incorporate (well, in two of the three) the Dessner brothers' electric guitars. It's music that captures the attention, and lingers after the fact - dramatic and powerful.

"The Sievers Project" (Centre for Contemporary Photography)

Six early career artists working mostly in photography in response to the photos of Wolfgang Sievers; Sievers' own pieces, luminous black and white studies of people and machines, stood out from the rest.

(w/ Jade)

Guardians of the Galaxy

Very enjoyable! Funny and fast moving.

(w/ David, Daniel L, Rob, Laura and some friends of David's)

"Italian Masterpieces" (NGV)

"from Spain's royal court, Museo del Prado"

Raced through this in about 45 minutes last weekend, dazed and light-headed. 16th to 18th century, and not art that I know much about, have seen a lot of, or particularly respond to (all of those being related to each other, obviously). Still, I quite enjoyed the exhibition, for the use of colour - including in evoking light - if nothing else, as well as adding something to my store of art knowledge, both historical and more generally in terms of visual education.

Election

I've seen most of this in bits and pieces before, but never all the way through. Not a kind film, but a good one.

Reservoir Dogs

Rewatched while eating dinner. The shock of the new that it must have carried back in '92 is long gone, but there's still something to it. Also, Steve Buscemi never fails to reward.

Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49

Some books loom very large, and The Crying of Lot 49 is one of them. On and off for the last few months, I've been feeling that it was about time for a re-read (looks like the last time was a full decade ago) - another in a long line of returns since that first discovery about halfway through uni - and then when Trang likened my current life situation to that of Oedipa Maas, I felt like I hardly had any further choice in the matter.

Over time, I've come to think of Lot 49 as the key that can unlock all of Pynchon's other novels - it's by far his most concise, as well as being the one in which his major themes and animating concerns are most explicit and clearly visible - and the combination of that personal frame with my familiarity with the novel caused me to be surprised by its difficulty, particularly through the first couple of chapters as I re-learned how to read its idiomatic prose. But it was a pleasurable difficulty, as it always has been with Pynchon and I - the complexities of syntax and meaning matched by the rewards of working through their circuitous layers.

And once I'd found my stride again, that old familiar tumble down the rabbit hole was well and truly on, and I was reminded of just how much it can seem to be the key not only to Pynchon's considerable canon, nor even only to the very large and rich stream of literature flowing from those sources, but indeed to the world at large, legible - or otherwise - in just the same way as Pierce's will and its ultimate inheritance. And of how it - The Crying of Lot 49 - really is one of the very few (countable on the fingers of one hand) books that to me seem like they actually capture in a meaningful sense an essential truth about the underlying nature of the world itself. It really is that profound, and that great.

[Edit 3/9: I meant to mention - somehow I never specifically registered before this reading that it starts with a letter (although of course I knew it in a plot sense), doubly meaningful in terms of things purloined and W.A.S.T.E.]

The Immigrant (MIFF)

Darius Khondji on cinematography so of course it looks amazing; I'm sure its palette is actually much wider than this, but the impression I've retained of its version of early 1920s New York is all browny-russet shadows, tinged with gold - though not romanticised, except to the extent that it seeks, I think, to render that time and place with a precise specificity. Marion Cotillard's good (she always is) as the titular Polish immigrant, and Joaquin Phoenix and Jeremy Renner are also effective though maybe a touch more showily; the film commits to dramatic truth through the straight road of character and actions and so there's the ever present risk of boring-ness, a prospect that it narrowly avoids but avoids nonetheless.

(w/ Daniel L and David)

Inception

What a brilliant piece of cinema this is - its vision powerful, its execution unerring, from the (at times literally) skyscraping heights of realised imagination to the uncanny, unnerving, unfinished shadows lurking just beneath consciousness for us all (personified in Mal) and all at such a vividly kinetic whirl. I just finished re-reading The Crying of Lot 49 (more on that later) - 'shall I project a world?' indeed.

(first time, second time)

Brandon Stanton - Humans of New York

Arrived in the post a little while back - from Wei (I think). I was sceptical but it's actually v pleasing. Oh New York. (web)

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Coolly elegant. Fits my image of a spy movie to a tee.

(last time)

The Unity of All Things

Classic MIFF experience really. The most challenging film I've seen in a while, taking in particle physics, much jargon, weirdly dubbed dialogue messing with the affect, a huge jaguar, slippage in time, adolescent homosexual twincest plus plenty of other strange psychosexual dynamics and more in a whole that felt like a more avant-garde, queerer, grainier and more difficult to understand Herzog film.

(w/ Trang and Meribah)

Snowpiercer

Very good - stylish, exciting, mordant, imaginative (including in how it uses its high concept of the endless train), high stakes (it's willing to kill off a significant number of its main cast at intervals throughout the story) and, at times, gruelling ... the fight scenes, and particularly the one with the axes, reminded me of the hammer fight in Oldboy in their viscerality - the director of which, incidentally, Park Chan-wook, produces here. It can't be a coincidence that William Hurt's character is named 'Gilliam', as the influence is writ large, including in the combination of the spectacular and the grotesque. (Speaking of grotesque, Tilda Swinton is memorable, as is Alison Pill's cameo.)

(w/ Rob and Laura - a cheeky Monday night outing)

Parks and Recreation season 5

Parks and Rec keeps on truckin', still good. (As an aside, about two thirds of the way through the season, I realised who Rashida Jones reminds me of - LP.) But in another news, as part of the current round of self-improvement, I was wondering whether tv is overall a force for good or bad in my life at the moment, and figured that switching off my tv and unplugging at the main might be no bad things - which I duly did after finishing this dvd set, and haven't yet turned it back on since.

(seasons 1-3, 4)

Sleater-Kinney - All Hands on the Bad One

By any measure - whether the record's release date (2000) or the time when I was really into this kind of music (probably about the same) - I'm more than a decade late on this one, though I remember liking the title track at the time; I bought it after hearing it playing in Goldmine Records on Nicholson St a few weeks back. Anyhow, it's pretty good, and it's not the kind of thing that I get super into nowadays.

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (MIFF)

Beautifully shot and tonally precise, even as it - deliberately, I think - evades any single frame through which to easily view and understand it. Kumiko, 29 years old in Tokyo and going nowhere, becomes convinced that the suitcase buried by Steve Buscemi in Fargo really exists and sets off to Minnesota in the dead of winter in search of it; the film's far less whimsical than that description makes it sound, though it balances an ambiguous dreaminess with what I thought was a pretty compelling depiction of mental illness (also, it feels impressively like a Coen brothers film in its own right). Played - well - by Rinko Kikuchi, aka the Japanese actress who shows up everywhere - see also Babel, The Brothers Bloom, Norwegian Wood (a pretty good trio).

(w/ Trang and Meribah)

Louise Doughty - Apple Tree Yard

A holiday read recommendation and it turned out to be fit for purpose, even though I ended up finishing it back home. It opens in a court room and sets up as a mystery/thriller while also exploring the psychological and social elements leading to the central crime, as doled out piece by piece by the narrator, 52 year old geneticist Yvonne Carmichael. I read it quickly and enjoyed it - but I don't think I'm looking for the things in literature that this genre offers, as well put together as Apple Tree Yard struck me as being - the plot unfolding in a way that played fair yet revealed a series of surprises as it went, the underlying elements of motivation and character fitting together plausibly, but ultimately the whole proving a good diversion and nothing more.

Balli Kaur Jaswal - Inheritance

Funny how things come in waves; like the last book I read, We Were Liars, Inheritance is haunted by mental illness and more literal ghosts - and just a couple of days ago, there was “The Effect”, too, on mental disorders - although it locates them in a very different setting, namely Singapore, 1970 to 1990, through the eyes of a Punjabi family undergoing traumatic change seemingly paralleling that of the young nation state itself.

Place comes to life; to a lesser extent time; there's a certain amount of telling rather than showing. The characters are cleanly drawn and easy to picture, including as they're coloured in further as time and events progress (Amrit and Harbeer in particular). And there's some nice writing and storytelling, even if both tend somewhat towards the simple and straightforward; all up, a nice novel.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Mainly I just wanted to switch off my brain for a while; mission accomplished. The film's confidence in the quality of its ape effects, evident in its liberal use of close-ups, is merited; the other effects are fine too.