Mona Awad - Bunny

This is the type of novel I'm always seeking out, in more than one way - as readable lit-fic with a distinctive voice, an edge and a willingness to depart from 'realism' and the literal, and as a sharp-toothed campus-outsider satire (Heathers is mentioned). When it came to Bunny, I was there for all of that, and for the directness and (seeming) lack of subtlety about the central, somewhat gory metaphors - and appreciated the way it pays off the early doubts that it creates about its narrator Samantha's mental state and reliability (and whether she's in fact a sympathetic character), in a way that also makes a virtue of the lack of explanation for just how the Bunnies are working the magic that creates their 'Drafts'. Let's say schizophrenia's in play, let's say Ava isn't real, let's say (maybe more speculatively but seems implied) that Bunny the text is Samantha's in-text thesis; in that case, where's the line between the real and what's not?

Patty Griffin - Crown of Roses

A bit of an oblique one, and without any true stand-outs, but Griffin's voice is as strong and clear as ever - figuratively, though no longer vocally.

Joy Williams - Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 Stories of Azrael

It's metaphysical, and sideways even when it seems direct; the directness comes in at least three forms, namely direct appearances from Azrael (usually in conversation with the Devil, and these are the funnest), direct examples or discussions of the passage and prospects of souls after this life (and in this period of history), and those that are both.

(Ninety-Nine Stories of God)

Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein - The Mushroom Tapes

A woman killed some family members with poisonous mushrooms in a meal she cooked, somewhere in regional Victoria - to great public fascination. That's pretty much literally all I knew about the matter, having avoided nearly all the detail and discussion at the time. So for me this was a readable more-or-less introduction to the events and the surrounding public discussion, in three safe-feeling sets of hands, and probably about as much insight - at about the level of 'certainty' - as I wanted and would've trusted.

Julien Baker & Torres - Send a Prayer My Way

It's nice, nothing more. Not really meaning to damn by faint praise - there are some good songs here and the whole album's charismatic to listen to. But when I hold this up against the quality and power of Little Oblivions or the upper echelon of the indieish country-rock genre that this collab falls into, it's not at that level. I still like it though.

2025: "Don't be a stranger"

1. Don't Let The Bastards Get You Down - Margo Price
Hard Headed Woman (Lorna Vista, 2025)

2. Hungover in a Deer Stand - Dylan Marlowe
Mid-Twenties Crisis (Sony, 2024)

3. Wristwatch - MJ Lenderman
Manning Fireworks (Anti-, 2024)

4. Am I Okay? - Megan Moroney
Am I Okay? (Sony, 2024)

5. Ankles - Lucy Dacus
Forever is a Feeling (Geffen, 2025)

6. Afterlife - Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory
Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory (Jagjaguwar, 2025)

7. No One Knows Us - Brandi Carlile
Returning to Myself (Interscope, 2025)

8. Golden - HUNTR/X
KPop Demon Hunters OST (Republic, 2025)

9. Glum - Hayley Williams
Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party (Post Atlantic, 2025)

10. Euro-Country - CMAT
Euro-Country (CMATBABY, 2025)

I didn't listen to music very intently in 2025, so it's no surprise that existing favourites and familiar sounds are most of this, led by Sharon Van Etten and Brandi Carlile - garlanded by the late-arriving breath of fresh air that is CMAT. In general - country vibes, pop gloss, pretty melodies, drama and feels.

(spotify)

KPop Demon Hunters

The soundtrack was already thoroughly embedded and now I've finally actually watched the thing, I have the rest of the pieces to see why it's been such a phenomenon. We could do far worse in terms of product to take over the world's attention.

CMAT - Euro-Country

What a trio this album starts off with - the title track with its curling melodies, whoops and ululations, the almost (or maybe actually) OTT Celtic-country crooner "When A Good Man Cries", and the Kraut-rock-ish - and also "Common People"-ish - "The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station" whose motorwayish sound is appropriate given the lyrics. The whole thing's a joy - music as art in several senses, individual expression far from the least of those, and in a way that bridges.

Hayley Williams - Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party

I don't know why so many acts remind me of Metric, specifically Metric circa Fantasies and Synthetica - how much is anything truly distinctive about them and how much them just coming along at the right time for me. But they come to mind again across the excellent Ego Death ... - as do Garbage, and plenty of other more contemporary pop acts. This album's a smorgasbord of styles, with a pretty consistent energy and attitude - although across 20 tracks the first half's a lot stronger than the second. It's high gloss and so it sounds like the hooks and tunes should be more immediate than they are, but many of the songs here are growers - even the big anthems - while being filled with fun details.

Kathleen Edwards - Billionaire

Honestly not all that dissimilar to the one before it - Total Freedom - and if the pleasures here are more in familiarity than in new ground, well they're still pleasures. And what a swing for the rafters that title song is, "if this feeling were currency, I would be a billionaire ...".

Lucy Dacus - Forever Is A Feeling

For mine, Forever Is A Feeling doesn't have many of the obvious high points that appeared in her previous albums - show-stopper "Ankles" and maybe the title track aside - but it reaffirms the feeling I had after listening to 2021's Home Video, which is that Dacus has got the real stuff, and doesn't need the vivid emotional pyrotechnics or big anthems that are clearly also in her kit bag in order to deliver, with elegance, heart and craft.

Margo Price - Hard-Headed Woman

Here Price takes a turn back towards hardcore country and the honky-tonk sound that was more prominent in her first couple of records (Midwest Farmer's Daughter; All American Made) than the more recent two, and what do you know, while it's not quite as fully in my personal sweet spot as what she's done before, it's just as good as each of those previous ones.

Alex G - Headlights

 I like the vibe here - a torch-y heartland rock sound. But it hasn't really hit home somehow.

Brandi Carlile - Returning to Myself

Sturdily, reliably excellent - more quality from Carlile. She's hit a vein these last several years and continues to produce songs that are as enduring as they tend to be immediate, many with the feel of classics. My favourite, I think, is a bit atypical - the late-album mid-tempo drama of "No One Knows Us". Although it's also hard to go past the stormingly anthemic and unmistakeably Brandi Carlile "Human".

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

There's a nice touch to each of these, and if they're pretty big and glossy, well that feels a natural continuation of the style that Rian Johnson brought to his earlier puzzle-boxes (The Brothers Bloom remains close to my heart). Just like the original Knives Out and Glass Onion (which I seem to have missed on this blog but remember enjoying), there's pleasure from the neat, overtly plotted murder-mystery structure, the equally overt social commentary, Daniel Craig's wonderful Benoit Blanc, and a bunch of charismatic others. Probably there's diminishing returns a bit though.

The Witcher season 4

I've always thought there's been a bit of a dynamic with this show around just how seriously it actually takes itself, but maybe that's a bit inherent in the genre and the limitations of tv show budget ... but then there's episode 5 in this season where they do everyone's back-story in a row complete with movie-musical interlude. This season is three parallel storylines following Geralt, Yennefer and Ciri with only one intersection and it remains more-or-less convincing - rarely viscerally, morally or narratively exciting, but never a drag nor jarring to enjoy.

(1&2; 3)

Slow Horses season 5

Maybe a bit of a dip in quality but the built-up goodwill keeps you watching.

(1-3; 4)

Thunderbolts*

Even when they're a bit different, as this one is, there's almost always also a sameyness to these movies. Florence Pugh is fun though.

Someone Like Me edited by Clem Bastow and Jo Case

I found Someone Like Me illuminating and enjoyable (the latter in the sense of the interesting perspectives and overall quality of writing across this collection) - a kaleidoscope of experiences of autism written by women and gender-diverse people. Most came to a realisation - and diagnosis - later in life, reflecting how understanding has advanced in recent years, and reading these pieces repeatedly made me think about what it is to be a 'self', or 'typical', and how the concept of neurodiversity compares with other, older paradigms for understanding identity, behaviour and difference.

"The Playground Project" (Incinerator Gallery)

The history of playgrounds. A topic I've found a bit interesting in the past - even before becoming a parent - especially interventions by artists.

(w/ R, J, H)

Sarah Jarosz - Polaroid Lovers

Nice but too sleekly polished. A handful of more memorable songs.

Valerie June - Owls, Omens, and Oracles

Across a roving, at times meandering, at times rousingly joyous, and even occasionally frankly dull 14 songs, June's voice is always clear and true-feeling, making the whole thing well worthwhile. There's something embracing about this music, something warmly, idiosyncratically, insistently human.

(last one: The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers, 2021)

Frances Hardinge - Unraveller

Another good one, curses and all, and filled with strong images and an overall sense of imagination.

Haim - I quit

It could be (probably is?) an illusion but I quit feels like it breathes 'we're doing what we want to', roaming in mellow, tuneful vein across 90s/00s sounds. The Sheryl Crow-ism of "Down to be wrong" stands out and there's plenty of other likeable moments. 

Sharon Van Etten - Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory

In which Van Etten leans into the gothy, post-punk strands that have been there at least since Remind Me Tomorrow and goes vibier and more atmospheric, and at the same time (in moments) brighter and clearer, to produce a record that breaks new ground for her. 

Music has a much different place in my life now than in my younger days - but SVE is probably the one artist who I've really come to in the last 10 or so years (actually a bit more than that) whose music has hit me with something approaching the intensity of that very different, earlier time of life. And while this one hasn't shook me as much as that remarkable Are We There - Remind Me Tomorrow - We've Been Going About This All Wrong run, it feels of a piece with them and shares in their power.

Nilüfer Yanya - My Method Actor

Some bright moments of slightly off kilter pop - "Like I Say (I runaway)" and "Call It Love" are both keepers - but the whole doesn't stay.

Black Bag

The cast helps a fair bit and Soderbergh does seem to have a bit of a touch. The spy vs spy + domestic affairs stuff holds the attention and never becomes more ridiculous than it inherently is, though overall it feels minor.

Frances Hardinge - The Lie Tree

The atmosphere is strong - just spooky enough, science and its margins, convincingly Victorian and with a terrific, spiky, sympathetic but not at all a Mary Sue main character in Faith and a deft feminism, including in its final stage reveals and resolutions. A book that reminded me how it feels to read purely for pleasure - including for the quality of its craft.

Tenet

Tenet ... the story mechanics are hard to follow, the emotional core's difficult to find (indeed it's split, between Kat and her child (and Sator), and the Protagonist and Neil) and once it's found it lands more intellectually than in a way that's actually felt ... and the sound mixing doesn't help. There's still something to it, as there is with all Nolan's films but I still think it doesn't quite work. (first watch)

The Great season 3

If anything, even better than the first two seasons. The Great has a mode all of its own and it's fizzingly irreverent, profane and sharp-toothed without ever being fundamentally mean, to its principals or in its worldview - for all of the many flaws of its large cast of characters and the society they participate in, you always feels the show kind of loves them. Once in its rhythms, it's absorbing.

Solvej Balle - On the Calculation of Volume (Book I)

In its accretion of everyday detail, this intriguing first volume works with the idea of the infraordinary, which I've been drawn to since first encounter - and puts the technique to a new and apt use, as its narrator lives and re-lives the same day over and over, the eighteenth of November. 

The concept has an inherent interest - what are the rules, how will the protagonist's engagement with their stuck-ness evolve, where is the narrative tension? And here it's coupled with some meaningful reflection on the nature of all of our lives in time - our isolation and (inevitable) solipsism amidst the relationships and ties we have with others, our relationship to the world and our consumption of it (coming to see herself as a monster for the way that things she consumes are removed forever, and her partner as a ghost - ever repeating the same day from her point of view - who inhabits her own life).

I liked it, maybe not enough to continue reading - but maybe.

"The Veil" (Buxton Contemporary)

Works by six artists, exhibition themed around liminal spaces in the world, particularly through portals to the spirit world. Most impactful for me were Hayley Millar Baker's three black & white video pieces, each overtly grounded in Aboriginal femininity and working on me as portals in another sense, drawing me into their worlds and into reflection on my self.

from "Nyctinasty", 2021

from "The Umbra", 2023 - an encounter between two young women, night-time

"French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston" (NGV International)

I remember some of these from my visit a few years back and, more particularly, from the NGV's own exhibition of French impressionism from the MFA Boston as recently as 2021. 

This current exhibition at the NGV gives a lot of emphasis to the close-to-contemporary influences on French impressionism, along with some earlier as well as more representative works from all the expected figures. In this context, the 'almost-too-much' of Renoir sometimes tipped into too much and somehow the effect of the many Monets was more muted than usual while still providing many of the highlights - though maybe that was my frame of mind? 

Most of the highlights were those I'd seen previously - along with several of the Monets, Cezanne's 'Fruit and a jug on a table' (c 1890-94) was once again a particular standout.

"Black In-Justice: Incarceration and Resilience" (Heide Museum of Modern Art)

The first section is focused on the systemic drivers of the over-incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and the second on art that enacts and celebrates the strengths of culture and peoples including art by people with experience of imprisonment. Plus a third focused on Pentridge and The Torch program. Collectively lands with plenty of power.

Melissa Bell - "The Murray River" (2024)

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

It wasn't long ago that I refreshed on the whole series, and - as it's increasingly foreshadowed as it's gone on - that's just as well because this 'final' instalment goes heavy on trying to tie together everything that's gone before. And you know, it's basically good entertainment even though it does feel weighed down both by the cumulative amount of story that it's trying to smooth out in some kind of thematically and narratively satisfying way, and by a prevailing air of thudding seriousness. The action's tense - both the fights and the big set pieces - and the characters (major and minor) pretty much all have some level of charisma and likeability. So.

Megan Moroney - Am I Okay?

The title song's a killer, first up on the album, fizzily euphoric with just an undercurrent of melancholy. There are some other good moments here too, and if the glossy country-ish sound isn't that distinctive, well there's a reason why I like it so much.

Ellen van Neerven - Personal Score

Personal Score feels all of a piece, unified by the way van Neerven writes the connections between Country, their own story and the other through-lines of sport (football ie soccer), identity, culture and colonisation. They're a wonderful writer, in this form as in their short fiction and poetry, which has struck me whenever I encountered it - and memorable in person also. It's an illuminating and engaging book, filled with ideas, passages and connections that I want to retain.

The Old Guard 2

The first one was good, this one isn't. Leans too much on the first and its desire to set up for a third. I like how strongly it centres female characters though.

Steven Erikson - The God Is Not Willing

Sickbed re-reading. (previously)

Dylan Marlowe - Mid-Twenties Crisis

Basically, there's the ones that anthem it up with emo-lite electric guitars and they're mostly my favourites (especially "Heaven's Sake" and "Hungover in a Deer Stand", the latter a genuinely excellent song I think), the more country-rock radio-ish ones that are mostly a bit too generic-sounding and in some cases offputtingly unironically down-home for me (although "Heart Brakes" is good), and the slower ones (all boring).

A Complete Unknown

I don't know, should it have been a surprise that the soundtrack and the songs were such a large part of why this was so engaging? James Mangold has form with musical films - Walk the Line was strikingly watchable - and this one's got Chalamet front and centre. Bob Dylan means something to me, but not in a way that I'm protective about - a good starting orientation for a movie about him (it focuses on the few years at the start of his career, but in a way that implicitly makes an argument about who he is at large). Anyhow I don't think A Complete Unknown is anything special but I liked it - for its subject, its music, its central performance, and the garnish of Edward Norton as Pete Seeger and Elle Fanning as Sylvie.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

A slept-on classic it isn't, but it's winning enough even on a rewatch. (previously)

Jennifer's Body

Yes it's a bit messy but the core of what Jennifer's Body has to say about gender and power is clear enough, and the black comedy / high school fizz take it a fair way.

Black Hawk Down

Remains as tense and gritty as ever, for all its obviously problematic elements.

Predator: Killer of Killers

The funnest part of this is the different historical settings, and it being animated worked well enough. The way it brought them all together at the end was kind of predictable and lacked a real epic feel though.

Jess Hill - "Losing It: Can We Stop Violence against Women and Children?" (Quarterly Essay 97)

Thoughts while reading this:

• Hill is strong on not focusing only on 'gendered drivers' (in the language of the National Plan) vs other more proximate factors like the impact of child maltreatment and trauma, mental health disorders, alcohol and gambling, and upfront about the historical context behind the hard-won focus on primary prevention and a feminist perspective. At times it feels like it's getting a bit close to a straw person but her argument is that the balance is wrong - and, implicitly, that it has suited governments to maintain this since it was put in place in the first overdue wave of reform from 2008 onwards.
• A lot on child and adolescent sexual violence and abuse - within intimate partner relationships, directed towards siblings and caregivers, and in other contexts. Evidenced by ACMS and otherwise.
• Rates of domestic, family and sexual violence not falling. Hill questions the dominant view that this is being driven by increased reporting. Another question that comes up: could this be driven by the social and technological trends that she points out elsewhere (alienation of boys, access to harmful material online, manosphere), ie a current going against whatever positive effect primary prevention and early intervention efforts are having?

See What You Made Me Do remains one of the most stunning non-fiction books I've ever read. And for all the contention around the bomb that Hill threw last year with her public criticisms of Australia's approach on primary prevention it's hard to see her as anything other than an enormous force for good on this topic.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

I liked the more off-the-wall visuals, the little horror elements, and Benedict Cumberbatch but as a movie this is a bit of a mess, and noticeably not at all stand-alone from the 'MCU'.

Esther Rose - Want

Want is a sweetheart of an album, carrying a good part of the charm that made How Many Times in particular such a winner (especially on early highlight "Had To" with its tuneful verse/chorus, surprising bridge and rapidly climbing guitar solo) and adding rockier, noisier elements that produce some of its best moments in songs like "Ketamine", "Rescue You", "New Bad" and "The Clown". There's something endearingly slightly unpolished about the whole affair - it feels easy to imagine these as a set of songs written by someone you might know ... which is in the record's favour, not to its detriment.

Andor seasons 1 & 2 / Rogue One

Andor lived up to the reviews - staying focused the whole way through on the perils and costs of resistance in the face of tyranny, spies and soldiers, with a grittiness and grasp of the dramatic that make the action-y sequences to which it periodically builds up almost a surprise and the more exciting for it, without becoming the point. 

Star Wars has never been personally important to me, but I only needed the general cultural awareness of it that we all have to fill in the blanks with Andor. And, of course, I've seen Rogue One before; on this rewatch, post-series, it naturally gains resonance from knowing Cassian's back story and indeed the whole back story of the rebellion leading up to the movie's events, but also suffers by comparison to the longer-form story-telling that's retrospectively proceeded the events that it depicts itself (Jyn's rise to heroism feels abrupt when compared to the Cassian's tortuous road).

Geelong Art Gallery

The John Norman Mann Bequest

A bequest directed to contemporary art, with a particular focus on First Nations practices and works by non-Indigenous artists inspired by the natural world. Some real highlights across these rooms.

Below: Judy Watson - "standing stone, kangaroo grass, bush string" (2020) & Angelina Ngal - "Bush plum Dreaming" (2010)

Also (possibly from the general permanent collection, I'm not sure): Cricket Saleh - "This too shall pass" (2018):

"Yvonne Audette - Observation and Experience"

"Moving squares" (1959)

"Modern Lives - Prints by Australian Women Artists 1900s-1950s"

Ethleen Palmer - "Honeyeater" (1935)

Helen DeWitt - The Last Samurai

This really is an unusual, and unusually good, novel. Everyone in it feels like a character in a book - Ludo and Sibylla most of all - but The Last Samurai as a whole feels somehow true, in a way that doesn't require the reader to fully agree with what it's saying about the potential for human learning and development in a society less bounded that ours (which I'm not sure I do), while bringing to life both the ideas and the characters who populate its story. 

The humour is welcome and often unexpected, the pathos likewise - and the way those two are sometimes combined. The fizzing formal shifts and interventions - capital letter toddler-speak interruptions, intermittent streams of consciousness, extended excursions into language pedagogy across multiple languages - feel apt and not overly determined. It's like DeWitt has written something that's more or less a conventional novel but just molded in ways that make it actually very unconventional, and very enjoyable and thought-provoking. Whether it will linger in a more profound way, emotionally or otherwise, I'm not sure - but reading it was a different experience and a fluent one, which itself is pretty rare.

On at the Counihan Gallery

Three installations each by Australia-based artists with Asian cultural heritages who identify as queer. 

From "Fairy Tales from the Celestial Garden" - Jayanto Tan

From "Put Your Head on my Shoulder" - Andrew Chan

Also: "Yellow Paint" - Mark du Poitiers

MJ Lenderman - Manning Fireworks

This is great! It comes in a package that maybe lends itself to being dismissed - another guy wielding an electric guitar, indie folk rock styles, and a wry, nasally dry singing-songwriting voice. But all the songs are good, the electric guitar is good, there are surprises, and in moments it reaches something even better.

"David EOY 2024"

Mostly breezily indie-sounding pop and crunchy guitars, plus quirks. My favourites - "Rip Off" (Momma), "Cheapskate" (Dune Rats), "Oysters in my Pocket" (Royel Otis), "Like I Say (I runaway)" (Nilüfer Yanya), "May Ninth" (Khruangbin).

Rebecca Solnit - Recollections of My Non-Existence

I suppose by definition any memoir by Rebecca Solnit would be Solnit-esque. What that means in Recollections of My Non-Existence - which I of course enjoyed very much - is that we get the personal perspective combined with the philosophical and social concerns that animate all of the writing ... but somehow without a great deal of psychological interiority. Which is not exactly a criticism in this case but more a feature. I do think that much of the pleasure I got from this one was possible because I'm already in some deep with her writing and work.

Encanto

High quality, with a lot of that due to the songs - music and lyrics - which add depth.

Station Eleven

Impressive how much this series is infused with the same mood as the book, while genuinely adapting (not just transposing) it for the tv format with some significant departures from the source that have the effect of putting the two - book and show - in a conversation that results in a new whole. Station Eleven the book clearly tapped into something, and so too the show - something mythic.

Rebel Ridge

 Tight modern Western.

Queensland Art Gallery

On was the 11th annual Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art; I was pretty piecemeal in how I took it in given this was a bit of a snatched visit, but I liked Katsuko Ishigaki's Okinawa paintings with their US military bases, vivid blurriness and willingness to highlight the elements of their own inner composition, and Mit Jai Inn's installations which made good use of the central hall.

"View of Henoko-Oura Bay from Sedake Hill" (2023-24)

Also "Suburban Sublime: Australian Photography" which was smallish and overall not as engaging as its theme seemed likely to be, but it did remind me that Bill Henson's work, for all its over familiarity and the overly familiar discourse about its subjects and surfaces (admittedly a discourse that does continue to become more complex over time), really does have a whoosh to it - a reminder I get nearly every time I see any of it.

"Untitled #76" (1985-86)

Marisha Pessl - Darkly

The concept is fun, the execution solid enough without rising to any great heights.

"Yayoi Kusama" (NGV International)

In a way Yayoi Kusama has crept up on me over the years. I've liked her quite a lot for a long time now, including some memorable encounters - the pumpkins on Naoshima, the illuminated ladder to infinity at the NGV (and in Our Magic Hour) - but I don't think I've ever really focused on her art as a body of work. I suspect a large part of that's been because both the surfaces of the art (the dots!) and the persona of the artist loom so large, making it difficult to properly see the works themselves, in their own right and as a whole.

Things I was struck by in this large survey:

• The correspondence with Georgia O'Keeffe
• The obsessive, repetitive work from early on
• The dots also being from early on
• The pumpkins, in a good way
• 'Self-obliteration'
• The darkened celestial mirror rooms have maybe always been my favourites, eg "Chandelier of Grief" (2016) below

(w/ Jade)

"Current: Brian Robinson" & Sculpture Park, McClelland Gallery

Been a while since I made it out here and this visit was mostly for the sculpture park. Those that most stood out tended to be the most monumental, and a couple for their whimsy. I might be wrong but my impression is that the artists represented in the park are notably un-diverse, seeming to lean heavily towards older white men.

Dean Collis - "Rex Australis: The king is dead, long live the king", 2012

Andrew Rogers - "The winding path, the search for truth", 2010 and (in background) "Gaia", 2014

Sebastian di Mauro - "Snuffle", 2002-03

Peter Blizzard - "Halo moon shrine", 2005

Roman Liebach - "Wharf spears", 2005

John Kelly - "Alien", 2006

R. F. Kuang - Babel

At the very least, Babel is interesting in multiple ways - an undisguised and undisguisedly angry polemic on the harms of colonialism wrapped up with an interrogation of the role of language and translation in empire and cross-border understanding, and of strategies of social change (including the necessity or otherwise of violence, and the toll that it takes), and delivered through a mostly pretty gripping alternative-historical fantasy story. 

It's repetitive, didactic, heavy-handed and more - yet these scan more as texture than as flaws, part and parcel of the particular thing that Babel is, and even admirable as indications of the novel's willingness to depart from some conventional markers of literary quality and tastefulness. There's not a lot else like it that I've read.

Gladiator II

In the shadow of the original, almost by design. 

Mission: Impossible 1-8

I've watched all of these before except #3; taken as a whole they sure are entertaining. 

Moana 2

The first one is my favourite of the Disney animations I've seen - relatively unproblematic (a low bar) with an engaging lead character (relatedly) and good music. The sequel is just fine, nothing more, and mainly because of the built-up goodwill from the first. I would've liked to've seen more of Matangi who actually seemed like a character, as well as having the best song.

(w/ R, L, J & H)

"An Insatiable Appetite for Pictorial Adventure: William Blamire Young" & "five letters cinque lettere: Filomena Coppola" (Mildura Arts Centre)

Supposedly Blamire Young is known as the master of Australian watercolour but I didn't get much from him. I could see the technical proficiency but some of his work seemed almost to be trying to create oil painting-like effects, to which I basically felt, what was the point.

I liked the Coppola exhibition, which was about the experiences of post WWII Italian migrants to the Sunraysia region, its title and theme coming from the five letters of the English alphabet that aren't in the Italian alphabet: j, k, w, x and y.

2024: "Like it's some kind of excuse"

1. Rewind - Rosali
Bite Down (Merge, 2024)

2. White Lies, White Jesus and You - Katie Pruitt
Mantras (Rounder, 2024)

3. Fish - Angie McMahon
Light, Dark, Light Again (Gracie Music, 2023)

4. I'm Not Crying, You're Crying - English Teacher
This Could Be Texas (Island, 2024)

5. It Was Coming All Along - Maggie Rogers
Don't Forget Me (Debay Sounds / Capitol, 2024)

6. The Hurtin' Kind - Orville Peck (feat. Midland)
Stampede (Warner, 2024)

7. Clams Casino - Cassandra Jenkins
My Light, My Destroyer (Dead Oceans, 2024)

8. Empires Never Know - Jessica Pratt
Here in the Pitch (Mexican Summer, 2024)

9. Floating on a Moment - Beth Gibbons
Lives Outgrown (Domino, 2024)

10. Good Luck, Babe! - Chappell Roan
single (Island, 2024)

11. North Country - Gillian Welch & David Rawlings
Woodland (Acony, 2024)

12. Run - Miranda Lambert
Postcards from Texas (Republic / Big Loud, 2024)

13. Right Back to It - Waxahatchee (feat. MJ Lenderman)
Tigers Blood (Anti-, 2024)

A lot of great songs this year, though no albums that I really took to heart - closest was Lives Outgrown. "It Was Coming All Along" is a pretty perfect rock-pop song that calls back to the late 90s / early 2000s golden age for that genre; "Fish" runs deep and for me is thoroughly associated with a certain stream of Australian music / lit / experience that includes the likes of Holly Throsby and Jennifer Down. Katie Pruitt was back with another crisply longing collection and Cassandra Jenkins with a rockier, catchier one; I continue to mostly only like rather than love Waxahatchee's take on Americana but "Right Back to It" kept on calling to me across the year. 

(on spotify)

Emily St John Mandel - Station Eleven

I suppose all novels about the end of the world are also about something else; what makes Station Eleven different is that, if anything, it's more about that other stuff - the meanings and relationships of art, society, family (birth types and otherwise) and selfhood - while also being about the aftermath of an apocalyptic pandemic. It's so well written, sentences, scenes and structure. This is the second time I've read it (first time here) and having since read Sea of Tranquility it's clear the two are of a piece.

Lev Grossman - The Bright Sword

The other knights came to life for me just as much as Collum despite having much less page time - Bedivere, Dinadan, Palomides, to a lesser extent Dagonet and Constantine. And the others, who get no or only limited point of view sections - Nimue, Guinevere and Arthur (Morgan and Lancelot less so). Just as importantly, The Bright Sword's Britain comes to life too - its conflicts, tribes, histories and magics. I guess there aren't many stories (or sets of stories) that lend themselves as readily to retelling and reimagining as King Arthur's - I wonder why that is? Grossman's version works.

Jennifer Down - Bodies of Light

There's something convincing about Jennifer Down's writing - across the many of her short stories that I've read (and which might be her strongest form, or at least my favourite of hers), that lovely debut novel Our Magic Hour and now Bodies of Light. I don't know exactly how she achieves it, but everything she writes feels like it comes from a place of knowing - not direct lived experience necessarily, but a meaningful emotional or psychological understanding nonetheless. 

Completely unshowy but with a style that's recognisable (at the level of both sentences and set pieces and motifs), Down is a wonderful writer - which is just as well given the heaviness of her subject here, and how many ways a novel like this could have gone wrong (but Bodies of Light never does) in depicting the sheer level of trauma experienced by its central character and its lifelong effects. I read the first few pages on a train and found it so affecting that I nearly had to stop reading - and it doesn't let up from there. 

It's not trauma porn, and neither does it descend into anything adjacent to inspiration porn; Maggie / Josie / Holly is rendered with empathy and complexity and the structural forces shaping her life - the broken 'care' system for children, the institutions and cultures that enable abuses of power and sexual violence, the damage done by misogynistic mindsets and beliefs about women and mothers - laid out with righteous anger. The whole novel is brutal, intimate, compelling, moving. 

The Fall Guy

The unquestionable charisma of Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt (the latter a touch dimmed compared to usual) can only take you so far. The Fall Guy doesn't take itself too seriously, it's got some fun actors in secondary roles, and it's self aware - although not with any particular coherence - but it's not as fun as it should be.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves

I'd had the impression this was quite well reviewed, but if that's true, expectations must have been very low. Although, thinking about it, it's hard to say how the movie could've been actually good - what tone that would have required, if nothing else.

In The Loop

Holds up over time I reckon.

(previously)