T Coraghessan Boyle - The Road To Wellville

My second reading of this mostly fictional tale of John Harvey Kellogg's health sanitarium at Battle Creek, Michigan, set in the early 1900s and revolving around Kellogg himself (depicted as a quack, in all his eccentric, evangelical, colon-obsessed glory), the wealthy, credulous guests of his sanitarium (some of whom come to distinctly unhealthy ends during their tenures), and the entrepreneurs, shysters and conmen seeking to make it in the breakfast food and/or medical business in the town, and I'm still somewhat at a loss as to what it is about the novel that appeals to me...it's a comic novel, but the comedy is not of the sort to provoke laughter, nor, generally, even a wry smile (nor yet of that very black kind which I often enjoy); it's a novel overflowing with colourful characters, but it never persuades (nor, I think, seeks to persuade) one to invest anything emotionally in those characters; it's a well-told tale, but it isn't, in the end, seemingly about anything (although there is something of a cautionary flavour to it).

But appeal to me it does (just as does the film, although my liking of that latter is less unfathomable given that it's more obviously absurd - in the more everyday, rather than Camusian, sense - than this book, on which it's based). Perhaps it's that sense of absurdity - of the ridiculous mixed up with the mildly grotesque, and all played out in a setting which is entirely 'realistic' - coupled with the novel's Dickensian flavour/flair which gives the book its appeal, too.

John Collier - Fancies and Goodnights

The best single word to describe Collier's stories, written between the 1930s and 1950s, is, I think, 'fantastic'. Collier's stock in trade is the unfamiliar and the bizarre - recurring figures and themes include devils and angels, the Devil himself (usually in his guise as arch-tempter), journeys to hell, unhappy marriages, partner-swapping (intentional and otherwise), murders of all kinds, super-natural (and often malevolent) animals, and unconventional, obsessive loves - and his work is suffused by a sense of the surreal.

Some of the stories start with a portrait of normality before an element of the absurd or the unfamiliar violently intrudes, while others commence from an obviously fantastic premise and then unwind further and further from that starting point, but both 'species' have real narrative momentum, giving them a sort of 'if-I-first-suspend-my-disbelief' plausibility and, incidentally, making them very easy to read. The pleasure to be derived from Collier's stories is also enhanced by the cool (in the sense of 'detached and critical'), sardonic, satirical narrative voice in which they're related, and the sly - and sometimes laugh-out-loud - humour which often makes itself apparent along the way.

The stories are quite short - they average about eight or nine pages in length, and this edition of Fancies and Goodnights contains fifty-odd - yet never seem to stint on context or detail, and usually turn on an unexpected (yet almost always, in retrospect, entirely appropriate) twist. In Collier's world, unpleasant and morally corrupt characters often (but don't always) get their just deserts; on the other hand, sometimes perfectly unobjectionable people come to horrible ends. In some stories, love triumphs; in others, it is (quite literally) trampled upon and beaten to death. Sometimes the Devil can be cheated; in other instances, the final scene sees the central character going straight to Hell. And the cumulative effect of these fractured reflections of the everyday is mildly unsettling, and dislocatory, to say the least.

Some favourites: "Gavin O'Leary", which follows an ambitious flea who pursues a screen idol to Hollywood, suffers many tribulations, and finally finds true, mutually parasitic love; "Fallen Star", in which the designs of an "elderly, fat and most unprepossessing" devil on a young she-angel are foiled when the devil permits himself to be psychoanalysed by the she-angel's human lover; "Season of Mists", wherein a strangely insubstantial cad finds that his deceitful double life has unexpected repercussions in terms of Other-ness; "Evening Primrose", depicting a clandestine, intensely class-conscious society which exists in the shadows of department stores and enforces its social rules with terrifying harshness; and "Great Possibilities", a wry, uncharacteristically gentle meditation on compulsion (in the form of pyromania), memory and renewal. Really, though, there are so many others which are just as good, and in which the sting is just as sharp. In a foreword, Ray Bradbury professes surprise that Collier's name is not better known, and, having had this first taste of his abilities, I can only agree.

John Birmingham/Ryan Vella - He Died With A Felafel In His Hand

The whole graphic novel thing has largely passed me by, even though in many ways I'm exactly the type who ought to be right into them, and this '10th anniversary comic edition' of Birmingham's supposedly iconic book was no exception in leaving me distinctly underwhelmed; this despite my impression that the comic format is probably quite appropriate to the novel itself (which I admittedly haven't read in its original form). Kind of funny in places, but I didn't feel that I got anything out of it.

"Grotesque: The Diabolical and Fantastic in Art" @ NGV International

A free exhibition, and a jolly way to pass an hour or so. Satyrs, witches, devils and so on; many variations on the monstrous/taboo and much allegory were the flavour of the collection. Goya was the name that got me through the door, and I liked the line drawings of his that were on display; less exciting were the Picassos and the William Blake watercolours. Of the rest, I particularly liked the whimsical, abstracted 'glove' series of Max Klinger (which reminded me very much of Edward Gorey's stuff), the fluid renditions of scenes from Goethe's Faust by Eugene Delacroix (curated under 'Romanticism', and I can see why), and Louise Hearman's dark charcoal works (the eyes, the eyes).

Kill Bill: Vol 1 - Original Soundtrack

Inspired partly by last Sunday's Morricone-fest, and partly by having had what I now know (in a twist which would be embarrassing if I were ever embarrassed about these kinds of things) to be the melody from Zamfir's "The Lonely Shepherd" floating around in my head for the few days before that, I picked this CD up on my way home from aforementioned Sunday gig.

The most immediately striking thing about it is how evocative the individual pieces are - nearly all are, in my mind, closely tied to their accompanying scenes from the film (a network of ties which is, of course, strengthened by the visual impact of the film itself). More generally, the soundtrack seems very well suited to the film; it's similarly a patchwork of vivid, disparate elements - a pastiche, woven from quotations, puns and all that good stuff - and is similarly colourful and dynamic (all tres Tarantino); relatedly, it shares the film's trait of being immediately engaging yet retaining its charms on subsequent exposures.

The music is great in its own right, too. The Morricone elements are there, of course, and the j-pop is fab, but there are bits and pieces of sundry other styles (I'm reluctant to say 'genres') thrown into the mix, and somehow the soundtrack works as a dramatic whole, almost because - rather than in spite - of its remarkable diversity.

Shena Mackay - The Laughing Academy

Another collection of short stories about life and Everything (though subtly done), edged by a hint of darkness and a strong scent of mortality. Well-written and acutely observed, and goes to a few interesting places, but it didn't leave much of an impression on me; this may be one of those which can only be properly appreciated by someone who's experienced more disappointment in their life than I yet have.

Caleb Carr - Killing Time

I read The Alienist a few years back, and enjoyed it at the time, so I was interested to come across Killing Time in the library and note that it seemed to be an entry in the sci-fi genre - not quite what I'd gathered Carr's metier to be. As it turns out, Killing Time doesn't, despite its portentous major theme - "information is not knowledge"/"mundus vult decipi" ("the world wants to be deceived") - really engage with those ideas, and it's neither a 'hard' sci-fi novel nor a particularly deft or original spin on the cyberpunk thing. Rather, it's an entertaining, engagingly-written, basically popular audience-oriented bit of futuristic writing - it's comprised of short chapters punctuated by constant action and several set pieces which just scream 'Hollywood', while its characters are, if not quite stereotypes, then at least very archetypal - which happens to have a bit to say about (dis)information, mediation and society in contemporary, internet-connected society. Not a bad read, but not, I didn't think, a particularly good book.

"A Fistful of Morricone" @ Victorian Arts Centre Lawn

Spent a very pleasant afternoon in the sun, then lengthening shadows, today, soaking up some Morricone-themed music and vibes. The centrepiece act was the aptly-named Ennio Morricone Experience, a five-piece who've made a name for themselves around Melbourne with their live recreations of classic themes and songs from Morricone scores. I've been meaning to check them out for a while, and a lazy Sunday afternoon seemed like a suitable time to finally do so.

Anyway, they didn't disappoint. The music was all from the spag-western scores with which Morricone made his name (I don't know if the outfit always focus exclusively on the genre in their performances), complete with live whistling, trumpets, assorted sound effects, re-enactments of famous scenes, much villainous laughter and a good time for all. I'm not actually particularly familiar with the Morricone oeuvre, but I'm too much of a pop culture tragic for themes such as those from "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly" and "A Fistful of Dollars" not to be inextricably woven into the patterns of my musical landscape, and I've always responded to the grandeur and the mythos (old west americana styled as open plains/endless skies/merciless sun/solitary wanderers/shootouts in border towns/vengeance and old testament morality/love & death & money/etc) that they evoke, and so all of the music felt familiar and resonant, even if I'd never heard it before.

The EME was also joined on stage at various times by a David Thrussell, who did some vox and also spun a few movie-type records in the gaps, and by a comedy outfit named the Four Noels who got some audience participation going in enacting a spaghetti western (with the audience providing various dialogue and crowd scene sound effects as cued by the performers (eg, 'scared hubbub')).

All in all, it was v.g.

Terry Brooks - The Sword of Shannara

I must have read this at some point back in the day, but it didn't leave any real impression on me. Picked it up (again?) on my last excursion to the library (Pines not City nor university) and found that the book is really quite poorly written and uninteresting (I was under the impression that it was regarded as some kind of classic, but perhaps it holds that status by virtue of being early rather than great...).

The Cat's Meow

All told, quite delicious. Reminded me a lot of Gosford Park - glittery, sharp, surface-obsessed society types (for whom I feel a considerable amount of sympathy, which is as much a reflection of my own predispositions as it is a sign of the film-makers' craft) gather in self-contained early twentieth century period setting, converse wittily and cuttingly, score points and strike sparks off one another, and eventually find one of their number dead - and I liked it almost as much.

Excellent turns from all concerned, aided by some really good script-writing and characterisation, and plenty of shades and nuances without sight of the big picture being lost...it feels like a whole other world, all wealth and power and artifice and excess, but there's a fragility to proceedings which is tied into the human side of the movie; "W.R." and Marion in particular emerge as multi-faceted, complex figures impelled by circumstance and all kinds of necessities, and in the end it's the cynical Elinor, perhaps the most self-conscious as well as, despite her sardonic exterior, the most humane of the ensemble, who encapsulates what it's really all about as she recounts her melancholy recurring dream, bringing out the sadness - the hollowness - just beneath the surface of the bright stage.

Frailty

I remember this film getting pretty good reviews when it was first released, and, without sharing that critical enthusiasm, I can see why it was so well-received. It's a neat little piece, and it generally plays its ideas out quite well. Wasn't so sure about the ending, although it certainly had the effect of causing me to re-evaluate the film (albeit in a thematic rather than plot-based fashion), because it seemed to undercut much of the message of what had gone before. The kids acted their roles well, and Matthew McConaughey also did a good job, though Bill Paxton (whose child the film is, I think) had a touch of overacting going at a couple of points. And the whole did have a fairly unsettling vibe to it, somewhat like that created by a Shyamalan film, although it had more pretensions to weightiness, I think, than anything done by that latter.

Princess Blade

Obviously I found the premise of Princess Blade nigh on irresistible - sword-wielding girl assassin in post-apocalyptic setting (with promised trimmings of cyberpunk - and it's a Japanese film, of course) - but I'd probably have enjoyed it much more if I'd just stumbled across it by accident one night (a la Wizard of Darkness, which I still think is near-perfect on its own very particular terms), as opposed to actively seeking it out and anticipating it. It's not that I didn't enjoy the film - but, knowing in advance that it had all the right elements, I ended up finding it a bit by-the-numbers in the viewing. That said, I did enjoy watching it - liked the usual stylisation and melodrama, and also enjoyed the exaggerated artificiality of much of the cinematography...

Isobel Campbell - Amorino

Of course, I didn't in any sense need to own Amorino. But given that I'm the type of Belle and Sebastian fan who enjoys the Isobel Campbell moments, and that "Amorino" the song has been getting plenty of spins around here since I heard it on the radio a few months ago, and that there's always a place in my heart for sweet, melancholy pop music, it was probably inevitable that the album would end up in my hands sooner or later.

And yes, it's rather good, even if not the sort of record to set one's world on fire. It comes on all film-soundtracky (in the French mode) - breezy, drifting love songs and faintly melancholy playground lullabies, woven from gentle Isobel's breathy, little-girl vocals and the sort of lightly jazzy, chamber-pop instrumentation that we always knew a solo Isobel album would be full of...tis sincerely romantic and yet still understatedly hip; gently engaging, quietly pretty, rather fey, and tres charmant.

Will Self - The Quantity Theory of Insanity

Now this one was an unexpected treat. Picked it up from the library because it had an interesting title and the critics' comments on the back cover made it sound good, but didn't have any expectations that it would turn out to be actually any good.

I didn't know what to expect when I began reading the first story in the collection, "The North London Book of the Dead", but it didn't take long for the charms of Self's writing to make themselves apparent. His style is laconic, conversational, even insouciant, and laden with quirky and evocative (albeit not always particularly subtle) imagery (in the opening paragraph: "Cancer tore through her body as if it were late for an important meeting with a lot of other successful diseases") and his subject could perhaps be summarised as 'the bizarre/everyday (= insanity)'.

These stories are rather black, often funny, and really quite strange: an anthropologist devotes himself to the study of an Amazon tribe notable for its banality and boringness; a hitherto only moderately successful academic has the stunning insight that the overall level of sanity in the world is stable, so that an increase in sanity in any given grouping must cause a decrease elsewhere (an thesis which proves to be empirically provable, leading to much craziness, so to speak); and, in that first story, it turns out that everyone in London who dies is simply then relocated to a different part of the city, where they continue their existence amongst the community of the dead (who are, in all other respects, as remarkably dull and sedate as the living)...

The strangeness, though, is the filter through which Self views modern society, and it renders trenchant his implicit social commentary (insanity is a recurring theme - apart from the title story, it's central to two of the other pieces in the collection). Although I don't get the sense that there's really any kind of program to Self's critique - his purpose is to hold a mirror up to modern existence as he sees it, rather than to advocate any positive alternative - the book is certainly satire, and effective satire at that.

I was rather taken, too, with some of the ideas running through the final story, "Waiting" (even though I thought that it was probably one of the weaker pieces of writing in the collection), in particular (from a speech delivered by a character who is peripheral in a narrative sense but thematically central):

To sum up: The existence of the possibility of the destruction of the world by men themselves, in a number of different forms - nuclear war, ecological disaster, man-made pandemics - means that although in a sense we live in a time that is more acutely aware than ever before of the possibility of some form of the Apocalypse, nonetheless that Apocalypse is no longer in any sense evidence of the immanent; it is merely imminent. In the past, the ending of an era, of even a century, was viewed with great fear and a spontaneous move towards salvation in one form of [sic] another, a move that can only be understood solidly in the context of the Judaeo-Christian cultural dialectic. The end of this current era will, I believe, be met with at worst indifference and at best with some quite good television retrospectives.

It's a suitable note on which to end this peculiar, rather brilliant collection of discontents.

Cyann & Ben - Spring

Spotted this in Missing Link at the same time that I got Experimental Jet Set and swooped on it; I've had Spring for a while in mp3 format, and have been quite captivated by the band's dreamy, delicately deep oceanics, so it's good to own the real thing (this might also be an apt catalyst for finding out a bit more about Gooom).

Sonic Youth - Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star

I haven't listened to much Sonic Youth beyond Daydream Nation (just NYC Ghosts & Flowers and a scattered assortment of singles etc), but Daydream Nation is, of course, wonderful and the rest of their stuff tends to be good value, so I picked up Experimental Jet Set as much on the strength of that track record as because of the record's killer single, "Bull in the Heather".

The album turned out to be pretty good, too. Less sprawling and epic than Daydream Nation, and perhaps a half-step closer to the mainstream (all things being relative), Experimental Jet Set generally doesn't rock as hard as that earlier masterpiece, and its quieter moments tend to be more pop-oriented than atmospheric-ambient, but it retains that characteristic grinding, fuzzy-yet-spacious Sonic Youth feel, and there's still plenty of interesting stuff going on. A really good record.

Underworld

I actually saw this one when it was screening in the cinemas, at about this time last year, but since the dvd was lying around the house and I was feeling too drained to do anything more demanding, I decided to rewatch the film - and responded to it in more or less exactly the same way as the first time around. On the one hand, the vampire thing and the decadence thing continue to do it for me; moreover, the class aspect is a neat device and still plays well, and the film's overall aesthetic remains compelling on a second viewing (even if the whole dark dark thing is a bit over-familiar these days). But, on the flip side, it's still, despite having a few nice ideas and genuine style going for it (not to mention its invocation of a couple of my past(ish) fixations), ultimately missing that intangible spark which could have made it a really good film.

Stephen R Donaldson - The Runes Of The Earth

I first read this late last year, and was slightly disappointed. I felt that it was a bit by-the-numbers, and that Donaldson was taking too much for granted in the way in which he developed both narrative and character (particularly the latter). The Covenant books are quite uniquely inwardly-focused for works of epic fantasy, and, in the past, one of their most compelling features has been the psychological leverage that this has generated in playing out the familiar inner voyage/external quest narrative-parallel, as experienced by both Covenant himself (qua 'Unbeliever') and Linden Avery. In Runes, by contrast, Linden appears as almost a fully-fledged 'power' - there isn't the sense that every step she takes is won at great personal cost, as there was in the first two series - and consequently her progression is less gripping (less compulsory, as Donaldson might have put it).

For me, Runes also lacked the sense of wonder - of discovery, and uncharted shores, and other worldliness, and all of that inexpressible stuff which is really the whole reason that I read fantasy at all - which characterises all of the previous Covenant books; nor did I feel that there was a qualitative deepening of the Land's mythology, as there had been in the Second Chronicles when compared to the First. On top of that, the book seemed a bit clumsy in its haste to reintroduce nearly all of the Land's significant groupings - the Haruchai, the Ramen, the Ranyhyn, the ur-viles, the waynhim (the giants being present on the margins but not yet having made an actual appearance and the Elohim seemingly assuming a greater significance)...

All of that said, aforementioned disappointment was probably at least partly treaceable to two, related factors. First, my expectations were very high, the book being not only new Donaldson but, even better, new Covenant (ie, a new book in my favourite genre - fantasy - written by my favourite author in that genre, returning to my favourite series in said genre...little wonder I was excited!). And, second, due to that first, I raced through the book in a couple of days, wanting to know what would happen, despite being really too tired to be absorbing it properly. And despite all of that, of course I still really, really liked Runes - how could I not?

I knew that I'd want to read it again soon, so I hung on to my copy (which I'd got from the local library) and did indeed re-read it over the past week, three weeks or so since the first encounter, which has given me a somewhat different perspective on Donaldson's return to the Land. On this pass, I read the book more carefully, and consequently better appreciated the inherent richness of Donaldson's imagination and manner of envisioning and portraying worlds and characters, and was reminded more of why I liked the Covenant series so much in the first place. I still don't think that Runes is up to the standard of the six that preceded it, but it makes more sense to me now, particularly if it proves to be a transitional work leading into a (four-part) "Last Chronicles" which eventually does prove richer and deeper than its first volume is in isolation.

Needless to say, I'm keenly awaiting the second book in these Last Chronicles, and while I've already integrated Runes into my mental Covenant/Land-scape, I wouldn't be surprised if I end up reading it a couple more times before that second instalment does come out...

Skyscraper Magazine presents [Technology]

From time to time, I pick up a cheap sampler or compilation CD on which I recognise one or two artists in the interests of exposing myself to new music. Obviously, this is a bit hit-and-miss, but I see it as an investment akin to occasionally buying handfuls of cheap vinyl on spec and regard wading through a fair amount of banal/unlistenable stuff as the price to be paid for the occasional worthwhile discovery - and, after all, being able to listen to entirely new music is intrinsically rewarding, even if the music itself isn't always any good, or apt to my tastes.

The latest of these was put together by Skyscraper Magazine, the which I'd never heard of, and took the form of a collection of remixes of songs by independent artists - some of the remixes were done by the original artists, and others by entirely new interpreters. I picked it up because it included tracks by Les Savy Fav and the Murder City Devils (two artists which I know more by reputation than in fact, despite having seen about half of an LSV gig in the course of checking out Pretty Girls Make Graves late last year); as it turned out, those two were the only two original artists/remixers on the whole CD that I'd even heard of (bar Jimmy Tamborello aka Dntel).

Due to this near-complete unfamiliarity, I was initially responding to each of the cuts as a piece of music in its own right, rather than by reference to my knowledge of the original, or either of the artists concerned, and this has made for interesting listening.

The first two tracks - Sean Richey remixing Bent Leg Fatima's "Cup and Saucer" (obscurely, Richey's liner notes reference Foucault) and Jon Finley and Joe Dennis' take on The Party of Helicopters' "Circling the Drain/Lost in the Desert" - are highlights for me at this point; the former is built on a propulsive hip-hop beat, underlaid by drifting, almost ethereal vocal samples; the latter is a My Bloody Valentine-esque 'swathes of guitar' style number. Also tops is the raucous, energetic remix of Your Adversary's "AeroBending" done by Sultan Subraman, which I don't really have the electronic music vocabulary to describe (though the grrl punk-rock vocals which cut in at the end as a kind of vocal bridge are a nice touch).

Elsewhere, there's some nice lap-pop (somewhat a la Postal Service), a bit of more ordinary-sounding dj mixing, and, as is de rigeur for CDs given over to experimental music, some outright craziness (though relatively little of that last). Overall, despite the presence of a small handful of uninteresting/downright tedious cuts, definitely a good pick-up.

Anita Desai - In Custody

This is another of those books that's left me in two minds. There's no doubt that Desai has a talent for evoking setting - while I've never been to India, her version of it felt real and was fully, almost tangibly realised - and her characters are believable and lively. Moreover, her themes are interesting, and interestingly developed - the major threads are the tradition/progress tension (as played out in the decline of Urdu/Nur, the under-funding of the humanities, the attempts to mechanically record Nur's recitals, and so on) and the importance of literature, but there are other, often related strands (the role of the family and the position of women in society, particularly in India, and the nature of life as an academic, come to mind).

I think that, to a pretty large extent, Desai intended these themes to crystallise - and, in the case of the tradition v progress theme, to reach a kind of partial resolution - in the final chapter, and consequently a great deal hinged on that final chapter, and particularly on the closing few paragraphs. Unfortunately, however, the closing didn't entirely convince me. I felt that Desai hadn't really 'earned' the right to end in the way she did - Deven's closing thoughts didn't strike me as either consistent with, or natural developments from, his thoughts and actions throughout - leaving the novel as a whole somewhat uneasily poised.

As a result, while I thought that In Custody was a good novel, it didn't really touch me deeply. Still, I'm glad I read it (it was actually a gift, which of course makes it more valuable) and would be interested to check out some more of Desai's work in the future.

The Cure - Boys Don't Cry

After some five or six years of liking the Cure (including one Disintegration-fueled period of about a year in which the liking was more or less an obsession), I finally got round to buying Boys Don't Cry yesterday; of course, it's fab. The tracks I already knew - "Boys Don't Cry", "10.15 Saturday Night", "Jumping Someone Else's Train" and "Killing An Arab" - are uniformly brilliant, and at this point, much as I love "Charlotte Sometimes", "Just Like Heaven", etc, I'm very much feeling this earlier, spikier end of the band's oeuvre.

In many ways, this album's a bit of a one-off for them, and I can see why it's reckoned to be a classic of its kind - after Boys Don't Cry, the Cure successively took up minimal, gothy soundscapes, made some pretty idiosyncratic pop, and then spiralled into the magnificence of Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me and Disintegration and the joy of Wish (the less said about their post-Wish albums the better, although Bloodflowers does have its moments), but they never returned to the distinctively edgy, post-punk-while-still-a-bit-punk, pop-infused, bedsit-dancey aesthetic of their debut (well, actually Boys Don't Cry is a partial repackaging of their 'true' debut, titled Three Imaginary Boys - but who's counting?)...all in all, a pretty unique album, and a real gem.

"How am I not myself?": I ♥ Huckabees

So two of the key protagonists in this film are 'existential detectives', which of course immediately had me thinking Sartre and co - which then in turn shaped the way in which I tried to make sense of the Jaffes/Caterine dynamic and the various plights of Albert, Brad, Tommy and Dawn (and the concerns of the film as a whole). But thinking about I ♥ Huckabees afterwards, I realised that the Jaffes were existential detectives - and the film was an existential comedy - in the sense of being concerned with existence at large, rather than with 'existentialism' as a particular strand of Continental thought (despite the suggestive references to Others, 'pure being', etc), and having sorted that out in my head, the whole crazy concoction began to make a bit more sense.

Basically, I think that Huckabees pulls the same trick on us as viewers as do the Jaffes on Albert - it provokes us into stepping out of the framework of our ordinary perceptions of reality (or modes of consciousness). I don't think that all that stuff about whether 'everything is connected' or 'nothing is connected' should be taken too seriously...the pronouncements on those subjects in the film strike me as basically gobbledegook - fond caricatures of philosophical positions rather than attempts at rendering the positions themselves.

The thing is, though, that this fairly windy overt philosophising isn't supposed to represent the philosophy of the film itself (in so far as a film can be said to have a 'philosophy') - rather, it's the essential backdrop against which that 'actual philosophy' can subtly make itself apparent. While I don't feel that Huckabees really purports to provide any answers to the Big Questions, there definitely seemed to be a subtext to the effect that if one were to manage that kind of shift in one's perception of reality, this would be a Good Thing and likely to lead to being better able to deal with the petty irritants of life (not to mention the human drama) and just generally becoming productively reconciled to the Absurdity Of It All...

Of course, it'd be neglectful of me to fail to mention a whole other level on which Huckabees operates - that of comedy. It's a very funny film - or at least I found it so - and I reckon that the faintly absurd/Zen kind of way in which the humour works is an important part of the overall 'program' of the film (akin to the pseudo-philosophising). In the context of Huckabees, the amusing set pieces where Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin very visibly spy on their clients, scurry through lawns while cursing as they're sprayed by water sprinklers, and just generally intrude, are cut of the same cloth - or blanket, so to speak - as the scenes in which bits of people's faces detach and float around in the air; apart from being funny/surreal (two things with more in common than not), both types of scenes visualise a disjuncture in the perception of reality (for us as viewers as much as for Albert as character) and give the film a sense of absurdity which is appropriate to its underlying ideas about the nature of (modern) existence.

And that's not even getting into the importance of coincidences (meaningful and otherwise), the significance of the 'open spaces' theme, the seemingly cheap 'coincidence/hint of the unconscious' inherent in the resemblance between the Jaffes and Albert's parents, and the sheer joy of the sequences where Mark Wahlberg gets all shouty and vulnerable, Naomi Watts loses it (or finds it?) in a bonnet, and Jude Law vomits into his own hand...the more I think about this film, the more I realise how much there is to it (often in an extremely tangled, multi-layered way which I haven't yet properly come to grips with), and the more I like it - not only has it engaged me both intellectually and more viscerally, but it's also managed the trick of causing me to think that the two responses are somehow intimately related, and of making me wonder how everything fits together.

That's a pretty good trick.

Rick Moody - The Ice Storm

Have just finished The Ice Storm and been left a bit ambivalent, which is, in retrospect, fairly unsurprising. Coming across as a sort of Catcher in the Rye crossed with American Beauty (although of course in that sense it anticipates the latter), it's about America in the seventies, and suburbia, and the family life, sexual mores and consumer kitsch that resided therein, none of which are literary topics particularly dear to my heart; even worse, it uses the device of focusing on a troubled family as a microcosm for Society (obvious metaphors abound, and are even explicitly referred to in one passage) - the sort of premise that usually makes me run a mile when executed in this kind of literary-plausible vein (as opposed to, say, the brilliantly stylised, literary-implausible portrait in White Noise).

But while I didn't particularly enjoy the novel, and don't feel in any way inspired or enlightened by having read it, I nonetheless found that I'd finished it very quickly, and there's no denying that it does have a certain breezy charm - a cleverness - and the feel of a kind of honesty...

The narrative - the series of extended vignettes depicting the Hood family, New Canaan (a name and a half!) and, yes, the quiet rottenness of society (or at least that part of it which resided in Moody's chosen milieu) - seems to unravel, rather than following a more conventional path, and if the consequence is that the novel sometimes seems a little awkwardly paced in moving through its various arcs and crises, and its component sub-narratives not entirely synchronised, well, that's probably appropriate given its subject matter. It's littered (an appropriate word) with catalogue-style pop-cultural references that quickly grow tedious - which is, admittedly, probably their intended effect, but I couldn't help but feel that I was being hit over the head by the idea of cultural/moral exhaustion rather too obviously. And the characters? Well, I can't make up my mind as to whether they're rather subtly evoked or just poorly fleshed-out figures weighed down by their quasi-archetypal nature (rather more the latter, I think).

Ultimately, though, I think that the thing about The Ice Storm which really left me feeling unsatisfied was its lack of any kind of centre - no moral centre, no intellectual centre, no characters with whom I could genuinely empathise, no real sense of hope/redemption/any real way forward (except, perhaps, ambiguously and not entirely convincingly, in the closing paragraphs). Maybe, in a way which has nothing to do with my lack of personal exposure to key parties, fractured marriages or late Nixon-era America, Moody's canvas, and his vision of truth, are just too far removed from my own.

A design for life

The concept is simple (if somewhat prescriptive): here I keep track of my encounters with words, music, images (moving and otherwise) and associated pleasures, as they occur.

Things that will only be incidentally present in this chronicle: fancy writing; underlying themes; pretension; metafiction; etc.

Also: no self-examination; no personal revelations; no existential crises; no unnecessary sturm und drang; no catharsis.

Well, maybe a little catharsis, a la Aristotle.

We are, after all, writing about Art here.