Jolie Holland & Samantha Parton - Wildflower Blues

A low key 'reunion' between two of the Be Good Tanyas' founding members, vocals split evenly between them. Much as I love Jolie Holland, my favourite is actually one of Parton's - the bluesy, swaying, low-lit title track.

Battle of the Sexes

Lightweight but not a bad way to spend a couple of hours. Things I liked included: they didn't make Bobby Riggs the villain exactly (but they did include some extremely hissable men); Emma Stone was quite convincingly de-prettified to make her portrayal more realistic. Things I didn't like included: it's kind of middle of the road in nearly all of its choices, story, visual and tone-wise.

(w/ Rob, Laura, Jade and Duc)

Wind River

Much as I enjoy Jeremy Renner in basically whatever he turns up in, what persuaded me to watch what looked to be a pretty grim movie judging by premise and notices was seeing that it was written (and directed) by Taylor Sheridan, who also did the screenplays for Sicario and Hell or High Water, both of which were excellent.

It's another contemporary American frontier - Wyoming this time, snowy even in spring and stalked by mountain lions and predators of the human kind as well as the living ghosts of the native American reservation where the action takes place. There's something nicely straightforward about Sheridan's approach to characters; he's not afraid to give them traits that could be trite (Renner's hunter is stoic and has suffered a loss of his own; Elizabeth Olsen's FBI agent is green and unfamiliar with the territory but tough), and the way they speak, often in complete sentences that verge on the declamatory, can risk feeling a touch stagey, but in the end it comes down to how they act - not just those two (both of whom are very persuasive presences throughout), but the several others who also play important parts - and that aspect is particularly satisfying. And the bursts of emotion and violence - often surprising, and with more impact as a result - find their mark. It all adds up to something quite good.

Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit - The Nashville Sound

High quality, but I wonder whether it's all just a tad too much on the surface? I guess time will tell.

(Southeastern, Something More Than Free)

Fiona Apple - The Idler Wheel ...

I've always been much more of a one for music than lyrics, and maybe that's why The Idler Wheel ... just kind of washes over me. It's an album that I've been aware of for a long time, but despite several listens recently, haven't been able to penetrate.

Saint Etienne - Home Counties

I don't know, I guess Saint Etienne are objectively somewhat distinctive, but probably not to an extent that explains why, in my mind, they're practically a genre unto themselves - that's probably just as much due to how long I've been listening to them and (related) how long they've now been making music which has remained reliably (a) at least quite good and (b) Saint Etienne-sounding. And here we are: Home Counties, which boasts an impressive number of choruses (of which songs "Whyteleafe" is my favourite) and continues to sound kind of non-specifically nostalgic without condemning itself to period piece kitsch. Nice.

"Jim Dine: A Life in Print" (NGV)

There's a nice line in one of the piece descriptions for this exhibition about how Dine looked for the noble in the everyday, or something to that effect, and I think that captures much of what I liked about this selection of his prints, both his recurring subjects (tools, skulls, dressing gowns; the hearts seemed like a different type of subject, even though he works and reworks them in a similar way to those others) and some of those that appear less frequently, including two of my favourites in "Blue Crommelynck Gate" (1982) and "The Pine in a Storm of Aquatint" (1978), the latter of which really smacked me between the eyes with its grandeur.

I hadn't come across Dine before. He was part of the New York avant garde of the 50s and 60s - some of these prints bear traces of the happenings that he was involved with - and remains active today.

Alvvays - Antisocialites

Funny how these kinds of thin upper register voices often work so well with energetic indie pop, just like here. From Toronto, Alvvays dash enjoyably along from start to finish with a healthy dose of crash and sugar that variously recalls Talulah Gosh, the Concretes, Cults and even the lighter end of Blonde Redhead's spectrum. Highlights: "In Undertow", "Dreams Tonite", "Lollipop (Ode to Jim)". A solid 7 1/2, verging on 8, out of 10 for me - good not great, but the best moments are pretty fantastic.

Black Rider (Malthouse)

This was fun: created by Tom Waits and William S Burroughs and bearing a definite Weimar/Brecht/Weill influence (German expressionistic staging, marionette-style performance and makeup, music from all over the shop, much foregrounding of the Theatre nature of what's on stage) and with a bit of an American streak thrown in for good measure. Good songs, good singing, good staging, and the devil - as played by Meow Meow - gets her due.

(w/ Tamara)

The Beatles - Abbey Road

Enjoyably rocky. One of those gaps (until now obviously) in my knowledge of the classics!

David Bowie - Scary Monsters

Most days, "Ashes To Ashes" is my favourite Bowie song (nearly all of the other days, it's "Heroes"), but Scary Monsters hasn't left much of an impression over quite a while of listening to it. All a bit clangy.

Zadie Smith - Changing My Mind

Really quite wonderful, and rang with considerably more resonance even than last time I reckon, thanks to both my current focus and the closer reading that I gave it this time round. I think the only literary essayists who I enjoy as much as Smith are Siri Hustvedt and George Saunders.

It's a mark of how good she is, I think, that I worked my way attentively through all of her pieces about literature despite having read none of the books or particularly deeply into any of the authors that she takes as her subject in successive essays: Their Eyes Were Watching God, E M Forster, Middlemarch, Barthes/Nabokov, Kafka, Joseph O'Neill's Netherland vs Tom McCarthy's Remainder, DFW's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

And amongst the many insights, this one stuck with me, literally from a footnote to another thought: "there is a style that believes writing should mimic the quick pace, the ease and fluidity of reading (or even of speech). And then there is a style that believes reading should mimic the obstruction and slow struggle of writing. Raymond Carver would be on that first axis. Nabokov is way out on the second. Joyce is even further."

The National - Sleep Well Beast

Well on the one hand, ho hum, another terrific National album, but on the other hand, records this good shouldn't be taken for granted! Sleep Well Beast is just a touch more frayed than the ones that've come before it, layered with a handful more fracturing little programmed details, but it's well of a piece with their usual metier.

I generally most like the rockier ones, though then there's the slow build of "Empire Line", and also "Carin at the Liquor Store", which is an A-grade classic National piano ballad, complete with mopily resigned lyrics about not even caring about being blamed, it's a foregone conclusion, plus I do also particularly like "Dark Side of the Storm" and its Lynchian mood too, so actually maybe I just like nearly all of the songs on here, which after all is entirely typical for this band.

Weyes Blood - Front Row Seat to Earth

I'm liking this - crystalline but a touch unstable, 60s/70s singer songwriter-touched pop epics, with a fair dose of the same era's folk spookiness. My favourites are the most expansive: "Diary", "Do You Need My Love", "Seven Words".

Angels in America pts 1 & 2 (National Theatre live)

Quite the intense experience, and impressively funny as well. Andrew Garfield is great. I don't think I had a favourite scene, but the one scene - across its 8 hours or what have you across the two consecutive Tuesdays on which we watched it - during which that thought flitted across my mind was the one where Prior and Harper meet for the first time 'in person' (it's actually their second encounter, counting the previous one on 'the threshold of revelation'), which I think was because they're the two most sympathetic dreamers of the play.

Also, I now better understand the bits of "Fialta" (from Bobcat) which are concerned with the play. Such as:

Stadbakken was going to be given the most expansive part in the play, the part of the dying Prior. And Indira was the angel, of course. Sands had made wings. If I hadn't loved Sands before the wings, I would have now, for they were made of the feathers and down of creatures that had to be imaginary - white and brown and long. Picture her in the dewy morning coming off the hill to wrestle down a figment, tear off its feathers, later affixing them with glue to bent clothes hangers and panty hose straps, and there you have Sands and everything about her.

Sands and Groovy played the parts of Louie and Joe, respectively, two gay men. Their interpretations of men were hilarious - strangely deep throated and spliced through with their ideas of gayness, which were like streams of joy running through.

I played a luminous, heartbroken, and uptight woman whom Joe had abandoned. I took her husband's rejection of her quite seriously, tried to imagine exactly how it would feel as I swished in my housecoat along the floor of the commons.

And (although re-reading it now, I realise that, deliberately or otherwise - both are plausible, and if the former, it adds another layer to the narrator's flawed memories of his time with Sands - the line about perfectibility is misattributed to Sands as Louis, when it's actually Joe who delivers it):

And then the play began. Reuben narrated to Stadbakken what came before: love, disappointment, the crude beautiful drama of sex, Sands and Groovy vamping at love, Sands carrying on like a girl making fun of a boy making fun of a girl, with a painted mustache. She was so ridiculous and beautiful, I thought I might die. Beyond the play, the day darkened. The backdrop was the icy arms of trees, the lift of starlings against the falling sun, the day dying. When Indira's part came, we had to shout for her. She was in Utopia, arguing on her cell. She hung up the phone and came in. She began to cry as she delivered her line, which gave her part a weird veracity: "Heaven is a city much like San Francisco - more beautiful because imperilled." We carried on for a few seconds, but then realized she actually was crying, standing there.

"What's the matter?" Sands asked.

"My father, he's sick. They just told me. I have to leave tomorrow."

"Oh no!" Groovy said. And we all murmured. I looked over at Reuben. What will you do now, Reuben? What display now? What will spill out of you now? He stood so still, as the heartbroken always do, and then he went to her. He touched her wing, the safest, least intrusive part.

"Let's continue," Indira said.

And so we did.

"Since you believe the world is perfectible you find it always unsatisfying." This was Sands, as Louis. And then she kissed Groovy, as Joe. They kissed, as men kiss. I staggered inwardly. And the play wound through its tragedies easily until Stadbakken's final, deathbed lines. "You are all fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: more life." Behind his head thousands of bird took flight. He raised his arms, though dying. He loved the play, you could tell. The wind howled. And then he stood up to go hug Indira.

(w/ Cass and trang)

Ali's Wedding

Nice, with quite a few laughs. It felt a touch thin to me, but then again, maybe that's a bit how it is with rom-coms, including/even those focusing on a migrant community.

(w/ Erandathie)

Colum McCann - Letters to a Young Writer

Terrifically wise, useful and encouraging. It turns out that I had read (and really liked) a substantial series of extracts from it a while back (here), from which I particularly liked the idea of writing towards what you want to know. One theme is a focus on language, and the value and rewards of following it. I liked this one, daring raids on the inarticulate and all:

A SECRET HEARING

"No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself." - Virginia Woolf

Often, in the midst of a novel or a story, you'll be surprised to realize that you have little or no idea where you are going. You're operating on the fumes of the language and the vague feeling that what you are doing will eventually have texture and depth. It's a deep-sea dive without very much training or equipment, but suddenly, a few feet down, you hit upon a word or an image and you realize with a start that this is the path you were meant to take. You don't know why. You don't know where. You don't even know how. It is a form of astounded hearing, a secret listening. You have made a daring raid on the inarticulate. This feeling has its own energy. You have to follow it. You'd be a fool if you didn't at least pursue the sentence in whatever direction it is taking you.

It's like solving a perplexing question in deep-sea physics: Why was I allowed to come to such a depth? There is a moment when the solution is so simple and evident that you wonder why you hadn't come upon it before: when, like Archimedes, you notice the bathwater suddenly rise. You know what you have found, what you've been seeking for years.

The simplicity of it is stunning simply because it seemed so difficult in the beginning. Now it is there. It has appeared. Somehow the inarticulate has been ransacked. It exists because writing is about trying to achieve a fundamental truth that everybody knows is there, but nobody has quite yet located.

Follow it.

mother!

There was a point during mother! when I remembered that not only did Aronofsky direct Black Swan (whose sheer getting-under-the-skin power[*] was the biggest reason I went and saw this new one on its first night of release, despite knowing nothing about it except having gotten a vague sense that it might be intense) and Requiem for a Dream (which pretty much pulverised me when I saw it back in high school), but also the craziness that was The Fountain. Little did I know that mother! was just hitting its straps at that stage, and about to get even wilder and more off the hook.

It was the bit with the baby that made it undeniable not only that the film is allegory writ as large as Aronofsky can manage - he both wrote and directed - but that the subject is not primarily artistic creation but rather Creation per se, at which point everything, both in retrospect and from then on, becomes very biblical (making Noah another interesting reference point).

The whole tenor of the film is heavy and unsettling, in the sense (among others) of being destabilising, and the visceral imagery around the house and the people in it, are part of that. There genuinely is something of the claustrophobic trappedness of a nightmare to it. It's undeniably forceful - and maybe also a bit blunt, in that once you know what it is, it really is quite direct and overt, rather than operating at a more sinuous or subterranean level. But that's in the nature of what it is, I think, rather than a failing as such, and it also makes more sense of the characterisation of not only Lawrence's and Bardem's characters (who are otherwise a bit oblique, if understood in more traditionally psychological terms) - never named except, meaningfully, in the end credits - but also those of the others who enter their house, especially Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer (wonderful) and their two sons.

***

[*] Over time, I've come to think of it as one of that very small number of films that I'm not sure I could say I particularly liked but which has a lingering effect that puts it in the vicinity of greatness. Melancholia is the other that I always think of in those terms.

God Help The Girl original motion picture soundtrack

So the chronology went: first there was the God Help The Girl album in 2009 (which has grown on me over the years since), and then Stuart Murdoch and cohorts went ahead and made a film out of it in 2014, of which this is the soundtrack, featuring a fair number of the songs from the original album but re-recorded by the cast - notably Emily Browning, who sings lead on most - plus various incidental snippets and a few other full songs, including The Life Pursuit's "Dress Up In You" (Belle and Sebastian themselves).

And actually it's all quite charming, carried a fair way by the tunes and a bit further by the general mood. Browning isn't the strongest singer but she can carry a melody and inject a bit of feeling into the mix, so basically mission accomplished in this context. I also liked flipping through the cd booklet, thinking that the other girl actor looked like Gilly from Game of Thrones, and then finding out that yes it is in fact her (Hannah Murray).

Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

Didn't fully live up to the promise of its premise: secret Manhattan office of girl superheroes protecting the world against the massed forces of evil and supported by a middle management-filled bureaucracy comes under attack. And that's despite my not knowing before that the attack would turn out to come from a splinter group of other female superheroes, or that one of the main defenders would be a cyborg (mechanical arm; otherwise human), or that the chapters would tend to be somewhere in the vicinity of 3-5 pages in length and full of unabashed action! But, still, quite the enjoyable read for all of the reasons above, with some degree of emotional sophistication and a prose style that hits some interesting notes into the bargain.