Wednesday - Rat Saw God

Proper rock that whines and crashes (and sometimes twangs), covers a bunch of ground and reminds me in glimpses of all kinds of outfits from the 90s through to the 2020s (in its vibe it's not a million miles away from Big Thief's Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe You) in ways that make it feel of a lineage without being derivative. "Bull Believer" especially is immense.

Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert

Once I remembered to actually pay attention to the songs and the music, and maybe got my ear back in for Dylan a bit, this turned out to have plenty to offer - the 'acoustic' and 'electric' halves equally. Not life-changing, but good. And a bit of a way back to some ways of listening to music that I've neglected more recently.

Tana French - The Searcher

Another page turner from Tana French, though a slower burn than her others that I've read. It's the combination of the mystery, the investigation, and the character interactions and setting that make it so readable. It's subtle, believable and drenched in rural Irish atmosphere.

Katie Pruitt - Mantras

Expectations was a real one and I still listen to it from time to time. Three years on, Mantras feels a tiny bit less distinctive, like some of the elements that made Pruitt such a stand-out have been sanded down for a glossier package - it's subtle but still. Despite that, it's a strong album, its airy sounding country-rock-pop going down easily and the songs themselves sturdy. 

The ones I like more tend to be those in which she leans into the electric guitar - especially "White Lies, White Jesus and You", also "Worst Case Scenario" even if (and honestly partly because) it sounds like it could've been part of the soundtrack of any given high school movie pretty much in the last 25 years.

Maggie Rogers - Don't Forget Me

"It Was Coming All Along" is a real charmer, one of the best songs I've heard in ages - sound, mood and melody in perfect marriage. The rest of Don't Forget Me isn't near that level, but it never drags and the overall Fleetwood Mac / Haim-y vibe is super pleasant.

Kacey Musgraves - Deeper Well

I like everything about Kacey Musgraves but this one's not all that distinctive and another step down from what was already the relative lull of star-crossed.

Rhiannon Giddens - You're the One

On this one, from last year, Giddens sounds notably like she's having fun, like there's joy underneath this music. It's good, like seemingly everything she touches.

3 Body Problem season 1

Pretty good - serious enough, spectacular enough, unpredictably plotty enough, human enough.

Lev Grossman - The Magicians

Was thinking I might re-read the series but got distracted after just this one.

(last time)

Kelly Link - Get in Trouble

Kelly Link has been a slow burn for me. When I first read her, I was misled by the genre elements and underestimated how attentively her stories need to be read. Now I've learned, taught particularly by "Magic for Beginners" and how it seems to show its hand while a whole deeper layer is playing out underneath and becomes apparent only when you really look closely. 

In Get in Trouble, there's destabilisation in every story. These stories are unpredictable, and demand that you follow them without knowing where they're going. Often, important aspects of plot, setting or character are introduced early in ways that are deliberately impossible to make sense of without the context that comes from reading on; more than one story found me flipping back to the beginning to work out just what had happened after I came to its end. The trick is often discerning the straightforward (but only straightforward once found) line of events or motivation that is craftily obscured beneath the fantastic detail. There's always an intimation of darkness and the possibility of horror - but the horror is rarely realised, or at least not in the ways that conventional narrative leads us to expect, and never in ways that fail to serve a larger thematic purpose.

"Two Houses" stood out; also "Valley of the Girls" (which I've read before); and, with more ambivalence on my part, "Light".

Reading about Get in Trouble also led me to this interview with Link - 

There’s a writer, Howard Waldrop, who says that all writers, no matter when they are setting their story, have a personal timeframe; often childhood or adolescence or a moment in life which was traumatic or emotionally full of wonder, and so, and often when they write they draw on this landscape, those feelings, that moment in time, in order to frame how people interact, even if they’re setting stuff in the future or the past. What you want is for something to feel lived in.

and -

... seeking out the work and genres which are pleasurable to you, and when you’re a writer and you’re drawing from those sources, one of things that entails is thinking closely about what’s drawing you.

Genre’s strength is that the patterns genre depends on are sturdy ones. Because of this, they have great staying power. Also because of this, the patterns are conservative. They tap into symbols and correlations that come out of cultural consensus. When writers organize stories around patterns, especially when there’s a death, or a danger, or a bad person, there will inevitably be a metaphor at work. 

George Saunders - Tenth of December

How much is it a matter of personal taste, and how much of actual quality, that my favourites on this go-around - "Victory Lap", "Puppy", "Home", "Tenth of December" - are all free, or near enough to, of the irreal aspects that are such a distinctive aspect of Saunders' writing? Especially when you add in that the one that got me most strongly this time, the title story, is also unusual in that none of its major characters are particularly small minded or blameworthily selfish.

Third time reading this as a collection (first, second), not counting the many encounters with individual stories outside that.

Logan

Wasn't as great on a second watch, but that's not surprising. 

(last time)

Allison Russell - The Returner

With a looser, funkier vibe and no diminishment in the poetry and craft, The Returner sparkles.

(Outside Child)

Bottoms

Fizzy and fun, and all these years on, I still like a good high school movie. But this one suffers a bit from not being clear on what it's actually for.

Shirley Le - Funny Ethnics

It's the specificity that makes Funny Ethnics stand out, and the stealth amidst its directness. The humour's welcome too. It presents as an unblinking depiction of second generation Vietnamese migrant working class life in western Sydney and I don't doubt its authenticity; it has the trappings of a coming of age story but there's something undisclosed - resistant - about its narrator Sylvia and a slipperiness to its narrative arc that gives the novel an unusual character.

Thầy Trọng, a monk from the temple near Pizza Hut on Chapel Road, used to come in for Scripture class at Yagoona Public School. One of the first things Thầy Trọng taught us was the prayer 'Nam mô A Di Đà Phật' (Glory to Buddha). Winston Tran had laughed at the monk's mustard robes and said, 'Phật sounds like fuck!' Thầy Trọng quit after that. The Buddhist class got mixed in with the No Religion class and we spent Scripture hour watching Pocahontas.

James Norbury - Big Panda and Tiny Dragon

Really quite nice Zen-ish meanderings.

Naomi Klein - Doppelganger

Much illumination about the present day and how we got here. I was struck by her explanation of the convergence of the 'wellness' influencer movement with far right authoritarianism ('diagonalism') through the lens of - among other things - a shared focus on the individual rather than collective or structural responsibilities or efficacy, as well as an associated willingness to treat others' lives as lesser and therefore expendable. 

The concept of the doppelganger at a societal level proves to have pretty good explanatory force, even if it sometimes felt like it was being stretched beyond its natural meaning to do so. I tend to find explanations of collective behaviour that are based on conscious or unconscious repudiation of intolerable knowledge - such as the projection of violent stereotypes on to Indigenous people and people of colour as a response to the awareness of the violence upon which colonial and white society continues to be founded - but Klein's argument for its operation is as compelling as any I've read.

Wish

The animation is pretty nice (a mix of hand drawn and CGI), I've developed an attachment to the main songs, and the story is functional enough.

(w/ L)

Crazy, Stupid, Love

I liked the way it focused most on the middle-aged married couple, and its niceness. Also Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in a La La Land preview.

NGV Triennial

From 1 1/2 floors of the Triennial a couple of weeks back. I guess I'd need to see the whole thing to comment informedly but the bits I did see, while frequently enjoyable, struck me as skewed towards the accessible more than the challenging. 

Fernando Laposse - Conflict avocados project (2023) - including a room-spanning tapestry, 40-minute documentary film, and other artifacts, about the way avocado farming in Mexico - where half of the world's avocados are produced - has caused environmental, cultural and other destruction, and the story of Cheran, an Indigenous community that revolted and is now self-governing

Megacities - Tokyo, Delhi, Shanghai, Lagos, Sao Paulo, Cairo, Dhaka, Mexico City, Seoul, Jakarta, each photographed by one resident; projected by city and theme on multiple screens

Six fine Tracey Emin gouaches (2014)

Jeff Wall - "Untangling" (2006), which I've seen more than once before but which landed with renewed forced on this viewing (the lightbox glowed, far more brightly than above)

Malerie Marder - "Untitled" (2001) and Anne Zahalka - "Sunday, 2:09pm" (1995) - part of a tremendous quartet along one wall, along with one each from Gregory Crewdson and Alex Prager, under the theme of 'Narrative' (which also included the Jeff Wall one)

Derek Henderson - "Kohaihai Road, North Beach, West Coast. 10-30am, 9th February 2004" (2004)