Fiona Apple - Fetch the Bolt Cutters

Fetch the Bolt Cutters is one of those unusual albums that feels genuinely a bit sui generis. But one comparison does come to mind - it reminds me of nothing so much as Boys for Pele, in retrospect maybe Tori Amos's best album (although from the choirgirl hotel and to venus and back will always have my loyalty as my favourites). The similarity's there in some of the atmospherics (vocals sometimes, sprinklings of piano, and occasionally in its percussiveness) and the way little melodic and rhythmic elements and flourishes emerge at intervals from its overall texture, like small fragments of candy scattered and stuck to a carpet's heavy weave - but even more so in its uncompromising quality and air of individual seeking for a mode of expression through music.

It's also unusual in how excellent it is. It's impressive how sustained a record it is, considering its refusal to stick to normal pop song forms. If you squint, you can just about discern familiar outlines at the beginning - "I Want You To Love Me" kind of slides you in, "Shameika" is a cascade of surging verses, choruses and bridges, "Fetch the Bolt Cutters" has almost the build of an anthem - but it's all a bit off-kilter. Apple turns left where you expect her to turn right multiple times in each song, without ever losing the thread. The sequencing helps - in the context of the record's density as a whole, moments like "Rack of His", "Ladies" (which I think might be my favourite along with "Shameika") and "For Her", with their loping, intricate melodies, up-and-down hooks and jazzy touches, arrive as welcome song-length grace notes.

Prospect

Good indie sci-fi with strong Western elements, tapping the twinned senses of venturing through an alien world and exploring new frontiers - in a convincingly dangerous and beaten-down setting, where to prospect is to seek treasure in a more or less lawless environment and there's little choice but to rely on others who you can't trust, with all the risks that entails.

Sally Rooney - Normal People

I have a lot of feelings about Normal People, so it's not surprising that they don't all line up neatly with each other.

I flew through it, found much of it very recognisable (ok, relatable), admired Rooney's prose and all-round thought it was very good, yet at the same time I had a bit of a sense of 'is that all?' when it ended. It has a sense of verisimilitude which is impressive and emotionally engaging - Marianne and Connell both persuade, as does their relationship - and which is only possible through considerable insight and craft, including to render it all so apparently transparently.

My reservation is maybe that, as finely does as it is on its own terms, Normal People is too actually transparent - too simple - in its project (I mostly agree with this take); it shows us, precisely and sympathetically, two people acting and living in a mode that feels real, layered and entirely contemporary, and induces us to care about them. Maybe that's more than enough for fiction to achieve - yet still I found myself wondering, 'what of it?'.

In many respects I'd expect to be biased towards Normal People but my response - especially set against the general critical acclaim - does make me wonder whether other (unconscious) biases are kicking in in the opposite direction. Am I not taking it as seriously as literature because its main subject is youthful love? Is there a gendered element to my response? (As to the latter, it's got to be possible - but if so not in a straightforward way given that probably 90% of the contemporary fiction that I read and most like is written by women.) It's hard to say.

My overall reaction to it was very positive; maybe my expectations are playing a part too - an inevitable disappointment following how talked-about it, and Rooney, have been. Maybe I need a bit more distance to discover what its real quality is, what it really means to me.

Alison Bechdel - Fun Home

The question is always 'what does the form bring to the story being told?'. Reading Fun Home, I found myself noticing that, while the written narration was doing a lot of telling - describing in broad strokes Bechdel's family life growing up in small town Pennsylvania, and especially her father's influence and personality - the illustrations were doing plenty of showing, not just in the literal sense of depicting in pictures what was being described, but also in adding texture, subtext, tone and mood.

Cumulatively, it's unshowy but very effective, with the graphic memoir's several strands coming together neatly but without feeling forced - Bechdel's relationship with her father, her own sexuality as well as his (my one substantial quibble is the way it doesn't directly reckon with the possibility - likelihood maybe - that his closeted homosexuality extended to affairs with teenage boys ... although to have expected that of a memoir of this kind might be unfair), her parents' relationship, the interplay between inner and outer lives, the shapes of families and family relationships, the outsize role of fiction and literature in all of that in her own case. It's at the same time modest and deep.

Marlon James - Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Black Leopard, Red Wolf was an interesting reading experience for me. I had to slog through the first 60 pages or so; even though they were quite intriguing, the allusive language and stop-start nature of the narrative were a barrier - the latter created deliberately through the cascade of stories and story frames that wash through, overlapping and moving back and forth through time. Then it really took off and I was pulled through the next several hundred pages of mysteries, monsters, shape-shifters and general medieval-mystical African mayhem, before beginning to stall out towards the end.

In its rich texture, teeming imagination, unstable moral reference point and ready turns to darkness, it reminded me more of Perdido Street Station than anything else, even though its setting is very different. Maybe its strongest feature, along with the extent to which that imagination is fully realised, is its central character, Tracker, including his queerness and how that meaningfully infuses his personality and actions. I also liked his smart-assness and the threads of humour which surface from time to time amidst all the grim journeying, threatening, running and fighting.

Susanna Partsch - Paul Klee

One of Taschen's 'basics' series - if the current isolation continues, I suspect I'll be reading more art monographs over the next few months.

The context of Klee's life was interesting - the way his 1914 trip to Tunisia opened up his understanding of colour and abstraction, the period teaching at the Bauhaus, the impact of the Second World War in forcing him from Germany to his birth country of Switzerland and how his art was received in both countries (despite not himself being Jewish). But I got more out of the sections on his theories of art, which illuminated not only why he painted and drew as he did, but also - at least in some measure - why his art has the effect that it does on me (eg on this encounter in Lucerne). Not exactly in the same vein, but still, I was moved by "Separation in the Evening" (1922), above, after reading Partsch's description: "The title of this completely abstract watercolour conjures up the evening dusk. The horizon can still be seen, the sky has already turned lilac, there is only a thin strip of light shining upon the earth before it finally disappears."

"The Goldfish" (1925)

"Now we make the reality of visible things apparent and in doing so express the belief that, in relation to the world as a whole, the visible is only an isolated example and that other truths are latently in the majority. Things appear in their extended and manifold sense, often seemingly contradicting yesterday's experiences. The aim is to reveal the fundamental idea behind the coincidental." - Klee, 1920

"Ad Parnassum" (1932) - the seat of Apollo and the Muses

"Art does not reproduce what is visible, but what makes things visible. The nature of graphic art easily makes abstraction tempting, and rightly so. The imaginary character is both blurred and has a fairy-tale quality about it and at the same time expresses itself very precisely. The purer the graphic work, ie the greater the importance attached to the formal elements used in the graphic representation, the more inadequate the preparation for the realistic representation of visible things." - Klee, 1920

"Individualized Altimetry of Layers" (1930)

"Insula dulcamara" (1938) - incorporating the Latin words 'dulcis' (sweet) and 'amarus' (bitter), hence 'bittersweet island'

Shut Up and Sing

Fun documentary following the Dixie Chicks from 2003 to 2006, ie from public comment about being ashamed about then President George W Bush followed by banning from country radio and general pillorying through to release of "Not Ready to Make Nice" and Taking the Long Way. For me their music has been always there, one way or another, for the past decade or so and Shut Up and Sing - watch was inspired by seeing they have a new album coming out - made me like them even more (they come across as very likeable not to mention tough).

Grimes - Miss Anthropocene

Artist / art. On the one hand, relationship with Elon Musk. On the other, Visions and Art Angels were both so excellent!

And so is Miss Anthropocene, whatever the everything surrounding it. It's a tight record, with something textural - aesthetic maybe - binding its individual songs despite their range of styles.

I especially like "4Æm", as pulsingly urgent and viscerally exciting as anything she's done before, "New Gods" and, of course, spinning, glittery closer "Idoru".

Phish - The Story of the Ghost

I heard "Wading in the Velvet Sea" in a store a few weeks ago and glommed on to its spacey, anthemic vibe and I'm still liking it, but the rest of the album's all over the place and not particularly good.

Better Oblivion Community Center - Better Oblivion Community Center

Conor Oberst + Phoebe Bridgers. Mid-tempo rockish folk/pop with some excellent electric guitars and a bunch of good melodies.

Ben Lerner - The Topeka School

The Topeka School takes on, at a minimum, three very important and interesting topics, but none of which I would have started off assuming would draw me into a novel - language's loss of meaning in the face of its recent debasement in its public form, socio-economically privileged white masculinity (dealt with in a nuanced and often sympathetic way), and the challenges of raising children (especially boys) well amidst that.

In fact, it's remarkably successful in how it brings them all together, also weaving in a meaningful account of the operation of history at both a personal (familial) and social level, with its multiple generations of damaged individuals, all themselves shaped by macro forces of war, economics and the unconscious, and events and perspectives knitted together out of order.

I haven't landed on how I feel about the Darren Eberheart thread; I guess it illustrates the violence enacted by those same systems on those at the margins, while also rendering them especially susceptible to magical thinking and likely to become enmeshed in a cycle of violence themselves. It also develops real tension by its end, so that the closing pages which follow Adam and his family - with Natalia, after all - have genuine stakes. A very impressive novel.

Previously: Leaving the Atocha Station, which has stayed with me - including literally, in surviving the severe culling I've done over the last few years - and not just for its memorable first scene in the art gallery.

Shadow

Zhang Yimou's latest is practically gothic in its chiaroscuro palette and general moodiness. It's slow going for its first half - I read a review which describes that first half as basically a series of people walking into rooms and explaining how they're related to each other - and while the action, once it starts, is exciting enough, it didn't add up to a satisfying whole for me ... even with the philosophical aspects taken into account.

The National - I Am Easy To Find

A slow build even by the National's standards; I've noticed before that their albums often take me quite a while to really fall into. I'm not yet there with I Am Easy To Find but I'm sure, still, that it's a good one, and the introduction of female vocals and other more subtle mixings-up of their formula is welcome.

Soccer Mommy - Color Theory

Very enjoyable 90s-throwback sulky-sounding singer-songwriter alternative rock-pop record. I read her saying she was inspired by songs like "Torn", "If It Makes You Happy" (or maybe another Sheryl Crow song in similar vein) and "Complicated" and it shows, in a good way. Early faves: "Circle the Drain", "Yellow is the Color of Her Eyes".

John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum

'Si vis pacem, para bellum' - it's a faux-epic reference but, like everything surrounding it, is sold by the film's all-round tightness, like this 'third chapter''s predecessors. Kind of obvious to say this but Keanu is essential to the film working, which it does.

Susan Choi - Trust Exercise

I finished Trust Exercise a few days ago, and with that distance from its tricky, sinuous structure and its unexpected ending, my appreciation of it continues to increase. A novel that engages in the kinds of perspective shifts, reversals and ambiguities that this one does needs to earn those elements, and I think Trust Exercise does, through how well they're executed and how well they serve the book's concerns - about power, abuse, trauma and story-telling.

Each of the three sections is interesting - in its own right and as part of the whole - not only for how they contribute to the suspense of what will happen, or has happened, and the answers they provide to those questions, but also equally (if not more so) for what they reveal about the ways in which victims continue to be affected by abuse long after in their lives, and how this works through in the public or private narratives they construct to make sense of their experiences.

I think we're meant to take Claire's account as what 'really' happened; I also think it deliberately leaves unclear the details of that reality, which has the effect of highlighting that in some important ways it doesn't matter exactly what happened, because the outlines are enough that the enduring damage of the abuse at the stories' heart is showed to be inescapable regardless. It's a slippery interplay between specificity and overall theme, and doesn't leave much space for many of the conventional elements of characterisation and the ways they bring readers to recognise characters, let alone sympathise with them. Rather, Sarah, Karen and Claire (and, in a different way, David) are defined by the harm they've suffered and how they've tried to reckon with it - which itself is part of the point that Trust Exercise so sharply and (in its structure) originally makes.

Alice Munro - Runaway

A passing reference - Michelle de Kretser comparing Josephine Rowe's Here Until August to Munro's stories - created a little niggle which grew into a firm wish to re-read Runaway. It's one of those books that had grown in stature in my mind since I first read it, and it didn't disappoint on a revisit.

It's difficult to put into words why the stories in it are so good, but I think it's something to do with their plain-spokenness and directness, and how unforcedly taut they are, so that the characters and their motivations emerge with just the right (lifelike) combination of availability and oblique mystery, and the more dramatic elements of the plots work in service of the stories and what they're about, rather than dominating those stories. In their quiet way, they leave me feeling stirred-up.

She keeps on hoping for a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort.

Bendigo Art Gallery

Collection exhibitions: "Talismans for uncertain times" & "The Becoming"

Benjamin Armstrong - "Conjurer III" (2012)

Ilona Nelson - "In-Sanitarium" (2015)

Josh Muir: What's on your mind?

Short multimedia pieces reflecting on (Indigenous) identity.

From the collection

Belinda Fox - "Tilt I" (2018)

Miss Americana

I've liked Taylor Swift's music from quite a way back (though I haven't kept up with it lately) but this documentary made me like her, too. 

The Professor and the Madman

Two main problems for me:

1. I couldn't get past the associations I was bringing to watching Mel Gibson and Sean Penn (especially Gibson), who seem like two of the less agreeable men of Hollywood.
2. Much of the film's critical action wasn't anywhere near sufficiently showed or explained - most glaringly, why Natalie Dormer's character would fall in love with her husband's murderer (and I did not like the him teaching her how to read).

(w/ Kevin)