Derry Girls season 3

The show's humanistic heart shines through, as does its 90s heart. I didn't think this season was quite as funny as the ones before it, but it has a couple of particularly good episodes - the one about their mothers, and the last one - and it's certainly just as nice as those earlier seasons.

Strange World

Pretty good if somewhat muddled messages ('the farmer' possibly isn't the best stand-in for humanity's exploitation of our natural environment); pretty good diversity and representation; slightly better than pretty good animation via the imagining and realisation of the 'strange world' itself; slightly worse than pretty good story pacing. Having said that I don't really know where the Disney curve for grading ought to lie.

(w/ L)

"Playlist for Marissa R. Moss' book Her Country"

A proper canon of country music by women, available on spotify as lovingly listed in the book. Across 75 songs and 4 1/2 hours it doesn't falter, with many songs and artists that are part of my personal canon - older and more recent. 

The book already introduced me to the joys of Maren Morris and Mickey Guyton, and prompted me to go back and listen to Same Trailer, Different Park; beyond them, my favourite discoveries are "Harper Valley PTA" (Jeannie C Riley, 1968), "I'm Not Lisa" (Jessi Colter, 1975), "Faraway Look" (Yola, 2019), "Daddy Lessons" (Beyonce, 2018 - one I'd heard before but not paid proper attention to), "You Are My Home" (Amanda Shires, 2016), "You're Not Alone" (Our Native Daughters, 2019), "New Kind of Outlaw" (D'orjay The Singing Shaman, 2020).

Arcade Fire - We

Epic has always been the Arcade Fire's thing, but there's epic and there's quoting (melodically, lyrically or both) John Lennon's "Imagine" and U2's "One" in the same song - that would be "End of the Empire I-III", which I have to admit is listenable but is also just too much ... as is the album as a whole, although I do like "Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole)".

Black Country, New Road - Ants From Up There

The sound is less 'kitchen sink' than it at first appears; the anthems are unabashed and the melodies are clear. But there's also no denying the sideways slant of this outfit's take on (art-) rock. Some great stuff here.

Taylor Swift - Midnights

Taylor Swift albums always feel like they might be an Event, but this one's a bit indistinct.

Our Native Daughters - Songs of Our Native Daughters

This is one of those albums that comes along every once in a while and just feels like its own affair. Our Native Daughters is Rhiannon Giddens, Allison Russell, Amythyst Kiah and Leyla McCalla, all wielding banjos and, more to the point, all bringing their own voices and visions to a record that's unified by their collective talent and its links to the various roots of American music - in that respect, its closest predecessor is maybe Raising Sand, which turned out to be a classic, still getting better with time - and specifically Black music. So it ranges widely, encompasses several songs that don't sound much like anything else on the album (most of them, really), and yet feels all of a piece. All up, it's a bit remarkable.

House of the Dragon season 1

The stakes feel lower, given we already know what's going to happen some 200 years later, but this is still spectacle tv and it still feels like Game of Thrones, give or take.

Hokusai (Sarah E Thompson; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

I've seen a lot of the pieces in the book before, and many are still vivid in my memory from the NGV exhibition a few years back - there's a magic to Hokusai's work, through whatever combination of intrinsic qualities, art history-contextualised resonance and personal associations.

James McMurtry - The Horses and the Hounds

Real heartland rock. Guitar crunch, story-telling, a nice sense of humility.

Bullet Train

Flashy and fun. Brad Pitt anchors it. Underachieves slightly maybe, but not offensively.

American Hustle

Didn't land with the same impact as the first time round. But still, good.

Jessica Au - Cold Enough for Snow

This is a marvellous short novel, as controlled as its narrator, composed through careful use of language and precise observations; similes proliferate, sometimes multiple times in a sentence, while metaphors are all but non-existent; details are described in a way that's straightforward and cumulative.

In its combination of an intensely observant interiority with a psychology that is largely cloaked - including, perhaps, from itself - it reminds me of Rachel Cusk's Outline books (which I continue to love like few others, if love is the right word), but it has its own compelling specificity, some of which is particularly recognisable to me in terms of Asian-Australian experience. 

There's a sense of depths cautiously stepped around, in the narrator's interactions with her mother during their Japan trip, and in the way she navigates her own memories and past experiences. Like in many novels I admire, meaning is right there on the surface - in Cold Enough for Snow, especially in the recollections, stories and dreams that take up roughly equal space as the contemporaneous trip - and at the same time elusive and never over-determined.

The Weather Station - How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars

Kind of lovely, but too quietly tasteful for me. The only reason I kept trying with it was how brilliant Ignorance was.

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

So involving and richly imagined and realised.

(first time, a lot of years ago)

Julia Jacklin - Pre Pleasure

Neither fish nor fowl (rock/pop, electro/organic, melody/dynamics) and doesn't quite come together for mine though there's plenty of craft and personality evident. Maybe it's just that I liked the vibe of previous album Crushing more, most closely replicated here on the guitar-y, new wave revival-ish "I Was Neon".

Margo Cilker - Pohorylle

It was released this year, the production is warmly contemporary, she says "fuck" a bit - but the link back to older style country and roots is real. Not an outstanding record, but strong.

Muna - Muna

I don't think it's jaded of me to say that I've pretty much heard this all before; also relevant is that this isn't music primarily for me. Which isn't to say I don't like it - I do, it just has a familiar sound. "Silk Chiffon" especially flirts with the minor transcendence that this kind of electronically touched pop can attain.

Thor: Love and Thunder

More of the colourful vibes of Taika Waititi's previous Thor outing, and leans heavier into the goofy comedy while also trying to land some serious emotional moments - not always successfully doing the both. Diverting to watch but slipped by without leaving much of an impression.

Gone Girl

It hasn't aged that well from 2014, especially from a feminist perspective (which is hard to not adopt), but its high gloss nastiness and poison-pen take on (a) marriage still has fangs.