St Jeromes Laneway Festival, Sunday 27 February

This festival, taking place in Caledonian Lane, was brought to my attention by Wei, and a motley assortment ended up coming along - apart from Wei herself, there was Irene, a friend of Wei's named James, and Keith...arriving later were Amy and current partner, and Felicity from AAR was also floating around.

I was excited about Architecture In Helsinki, who were first up, having thought that they were utterly fabulous when I caught them supporting Belle & Sebastian last year. Unfortunately, however, the acoustics of the lane really didn't suit their music, even though I was nice and close - so it was just a wee bit disappointing.

Next up were Gersey, whose recorded stuff - especially Hope Springs - I've been really into over the last couple of years, so I was again excited about seeing them. They did turn out to be good, rocking out a bit and picking the perfect set-closer, "The Beautiful Look City Today", although I got the sense that anything longer than 45 minutes would have started getting just a little bit repetitive (some of the subtleties of their delicate variations, build-ups and eventual crescendoes are lost in the live setting).

I didn't really catch much of Clare Bowditch's set, but it seemed pleasant enough, although the songs didn't come through in the way that they did in the more intimate setting of the Rob Roy, where I first saw her; after her was Ground Components, who I was also keen to see, and they put in a really good performance - anthemic and hard rocking, and both tight and engagingly ragged...I was impressed. For their first three (or four?) songs, the band were fronted by an mc named Macromantics, and she was good, too, working the crowd well and really building some energy.

I missed Art of Fighting, and wasn't especially inspired by Eskimo Joe (though they seem to have matured into a pretty solid pop-rock band, and there was certainly a lot of love for them in the crowd), but the best was left till last, as the Dears, about whom I've heard so much in recent times, put in the best set of the festival. I didn't actually have very high expectations, and really hung around because of a sense that I should give them a go rather than out of any real desire to see the band, bit they turned out to be fantastically loud, surprisingly noisy, powerfully guitar-driven rock band with a real grasp of rhythm, dynamics and melody and a talent for putting them together in compelling songs (not to mention a kick-ass live show). Will definitely need to check out that new record of theirs.

And that (since I was by now pretty tired, and so left before the Avalanches set, which I'll no doubt live to regret) was that.

Helen Fielding - Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason

Fun, needless to say - more of the same as the first book/film. Will doubtless see associated film sooner or later.

Constantine

So, I very much enjoyed this movie (which I saw with Sid), even if I haven't the faintest idea of what was going through the film-makers' minds when they made it. It's been a long time since I saw a film that was so ridiculous and OTT, and such a mish-mash of different styles and moods. On the one hand, Constantine seems to have pretensions to being a serious, 'cinematic' horror/fantasy flick (complete with genuine noir trimmings, an impressive hell, and actual demons), and yet it constantly undercuts itself with some truly dreadful touches (the caricatured Q-esque weapons/supplies expert and the advertising billboards carrying ridiculously unsubtle 'messages' for Constantine especially jarred, causing me to wonder if they were meant to be jokes) - possibly its origins as a comic book series are showing.

But while in some ways it's all a bit of a mess, Constantine is great fun to watch - the special effects are top-notch, the sets look great, the fights and action sequences are exciting and frequent, Keanu is perfect for the central role, Rachel Weisz is good as usual, and Peter Stormare makes a fantastic Lucifer...

Oh, and in a definite bonus, the angel Gabriel, who's probably my favourite character, is extremely attractive (especially when s/he first appears, in a suit)!

"...the color of television, tuned to a dead channel": William Gibson - Neuromancer

Really, it's high time that I read this book. I've read Gibson, of course, and bits and pieces of his fellow so-called 'cyberpunk' writers, along with a fair chunk of the academic commentary that has sprung up discussing the movement (I'm just now browsing through my old "Postmodernism" reader), but somehow I never got around to reading the book usually said to have been the key work in establishing it all - Neuromancer.

Happily, Neuromancer isn't in any sense a disappointment. Having read so much about it beforehand, and already being so aware of the key elements in its conceptual map/vocabulary - the invention of the concepts of 'cyberspace' and 'the matrix' and their concomitant 'consensual hallucination' (metaphors which would, of course, later be instantiated 'IRL' via the virtual reality and the increasingly all-pervasive internet), and the manner in which Gibson imagines this framework in order to visualise the inescapable mediation of reality in technological society, the decentring of the subject, and the problematisation of the human/machine distinction (cyborgs etc) - and having seen how these ideas have been taken up in mainstream pop culture, it would've been difficult for me to come to this book 'afresh', but of course that wouldn't have been the point anyway.

In any case, though, Neuromancer somehow still feels fresh and cool. While it's astonishingly and undeniably visionary, the novel is still fundamentally plot-driven, and it moves rapidly and punchily through its hyper-real kaleidoscope-landscape of images and surfaces with the anti-heroic (at best) Case always at its centre; and the characters, such as they are, are psychologically plausible given their starting points, in exactly the same way that this affectless, junkyard-mess of a world, is plausible given its starting points (indeed, the natures of the 'characters' follow inescapably from the nature of the world imagined by Gibson). Today - as, presumably, when it was first released - Neuromancer is exciting to read not only because of the head-spinning imagery, constant surge of ideas, and invention of a whole new way of understanding the world, but because it's a damn good story - colourful, fast-moving, action-filled and vivid.

Scout Niblett - I Conjure Series EP

This came out between Sweet Heart Fever and I Am, but it's very much more towards that latter in sound. Whereas SHF was about stark-pretty Appalachian-y folk/pop songs and was largely structured around voice and guitar, I Am took on a distinctly punk feel, with Scout's sound mostly stripped down to voice + drum kit, and I Conjure Series is quite far advanced down the road to that second full-length. To be honest, the ep is more 'interesting' than 'good' - SHF is definitely my favourite of her three records to date - but it certainly is interesting, and there's no doubt that the idiosyncratic Emma Louise is following a muse all of her own.

Voiceprint group of companies Midem 2001 Sampler

Another of those very cheap samplers (the Voiceprint group of companies being a collective of related record labels, according to their website), I picked this one up mainly because of its opener and closer - Aphex Twin's mighty "Come To Daddy" and an Eno/Jah Wobble collaboration from their album Spinners (I heard a song from that record on the radio a couple of years ago, and thought it was good at the time, but never followed it up) respectively. The Eno/Jah Wobble cut - "Steam" - is indeed good, but unfortunately the version of "Come To Daddy" turned out to be a remix...

Most of the rest of the music on the cd's pretty mediocre - much of it is haunted by the spectre of prog (a species of music for which I've never had much time, my Pink Floyd period notwithstanding), and there's also some generic electro, a bit of jaunty pop, and assorted other oddities including, inter alia, bad white-boy (I think) soul, Ziggy-esque glam rock, and (ahem) Leo Sayer (a live version of "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing", no less). Odd.

Josh Owen Band @ Cherry Bar

Was at Cherry en passant with Rob and David (Wei also being around elsewhere with other friends) and happened to catch the last couple of songs of a set put on by these guys. I didn't mind it - there was a bit of a John Butler Trio vibe to their music, and they seemed like a tight band who enjoyed what they were doing.

House of Flying Daggers

Went to see this one on the big screen yesterday with Myles (at his suggestion), and it was pretty good, though not great. Impossible to avoid comparisons with Hero and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, so here goes: more dramatic than either, edging towards (and, in the climax, falling into) melodrama; more visceral and less beautiful, both in its fight scenes and generally, than CTHD in particular (all things being relative); and (related to the foregoing) less elegiac and poetic than either (CTHD being pretty much the last word in that respect, at least in this genre, as far as I'm concerned).

But these aren't criticisms of Flying Daggers, even though their cumulative effect was to cause me to enjoy the film less than either of those other two - rather, they're reflections of a somewhat different emphasis. And, really, the similarities to those earlier films probably outweigh the differences. For one thing, Flying Daggers is easily as picturesque and sumptuously-shot as both; naturally, given that it's again directed by Zhang Yimou, it's particularly similar to Hero in this respect, for he's painting with the same palette of vibrant, striking colours and tints. There are a few stunning set pieces (Zhang Zi Yi's stylised dance in the echo game near the beginning and the battle scene amongst the bamboos come to mind), and the individual fight scenes will probably probably linger longer in the mind than those in Hero or Crouching Tiger. And I thought that the three leads were good, effectively evoking the intensely personal, internal conflicts faced by each of the characters while also embodying the grandiose, semi-mythical traits that the film's underlying logic required of them.

Where Flying Daggers fell down a bit for me, though, was in its pacing and, to a lesser extent, its plot. While I respond to these kinds of films more for their overall visual and emotional effect than on a structural/intellectual level, and certainly don't expect any particularly developed plot or narrative, Flying Daggers lost some of its fluency and sweep amidst the disruption of the stops and starts of the central romance between Jin and Mei. Still, as I said earlier, all up certainly an enjoyable film.

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

A rewatch at home on dvd (with trang) - always nice to revisit this old favourite, even if the initial magic has worn off with over-familiarity and the passing of time.

The Hon Murray Gleeson - The Rule of Law and the Constitution

This is the text of the 2000 Boyer Lectures given by the Chief Justice on ABC radio, and thus to a generalist audience (published in book form); unsurprisingly, then, he didn't say anything at all controversial, and nothing in these lectures was particularly new to me, though I did find them to be a very lucid, readable summary (as well one might expect given their author!). More interesting was one of the appendices - the text of a speech that Gleeson gave to the Australian Bar Association Conference in 2000 (in New York, for some reason) on the nature of 'judicial legitimacy'. In that speech, he writes of judicial power as held on trust, on a fiduciary basis, and gets into the importance of impartiality and a 'legalistic' approach to statutory interpretation. There's also an amusing semi-digression regarding the inappropriateness of characterising judges or opinions in terms of heroism, bravery or creativity, leading to the serious point that "[t]he quality that sustains judicial legitimacy is not bravery or creativity, but fidelity [to] the terms of the trust upon which judges are invested with authority" (including the utilisation of accepted methods of legal methodology, etc)...I also liked this throwaway line: "Twilight does not invalidate the distinction between night and day; and Wednesbury unreasonableness does not invalidate the difference between merits review and judicial review of administrative action."

"The Howard Sampler: 16 Feb 2005"

A quasi-mix cd from David; none of the one-off songs have particularly grabbed me, though all are pleasant enough. As to the 'artist samples': enjoying the Fiery Furnaces tracks (especially "Straight Street"), which figures given that cute, quirky pop is usually my thing, but aren't really excited by them and doubt that their music will age particularly well; don't mind Feist (never heard of them/her before!), but again not feeling any excitement; had my radio-based impression of the Kings of Leon as 'a bit blah' confirmed; liking all of the Tom Waits cuts, but not really in the right headspace to appreciate his stuff at present (I've never really been into him in the way that a lot of other people seem to be); and, finally, blown away by the brilliance of the Arcade Fire (looks like the hipsters got it right with this one)...more on that last in a separate entry at some point, since I was sufficiently inspired to rush out and buy the album.

Jeff Buckley & Gary Lucas - Songs To No One 1991-1992

I've never really been a Jeff Buckley fanboy - for me, Grace was a good album which contained a handful of great songs, and Sketches was an eminently listenable collection of odds and sorts which contained at least one great song (although somehow both records carry a lot of emotional freight for me, dating back to the more tumultuous times of a few years ago), and that was where it ended. While I like Jeff Buckley, I've never felt that he particularly spoke to or for me, or that his music or talent was in any sense transcendent (barring "Everybody Here Wants You", which I think is absolutely amazing, and his best song), and I haven't made any effort to track down the rest of his (mostly if not entirely posthumously released) recorded output.

Still, when I came across Songs To No One (which I hadn't previously heard of), I thought that it'd probably be worth the $5 asking price and brought it home. The record's a document of some of Buckley's pre-Grace collaborations with Gary Lucas, and contains early versions of "Mojo Pin" and "Grace" as well as a handful of other cuts from tapes, demos and live performances. It runs the gamut from harder rocking numbers like "Malign Fiesta (No Soul)" to the more ruminative, spectral end of Buckley's repertoire (best represented by the drifty, 11 and a half minute opener, "Hymne à l'Amour"), and it's a pleasant listen, though not particularly riveting for a casual fan like myself.

Alicia Keys - Songs In A Minor

I guess that I just haven't got the ear for this kind of stuff - call it 'pop-soul-r&b (lashings of hip-hop)', I suppose. It's all pleasant enough, and Keys has a great voice, but the songs themselves and the music in general just don't do it for me.

Collateral

One thing about this film - it certainly has style, of a muted, overcast, almost noirish kind. Difficult to put Collateral in a box; insofar as it's anything, it's a thriller, but that doesn't quite do it justice...It's not really a genre film (even though it has a disappointingly familiar chase finale, albeit with a terrific climactic scene and final line), and yet neither are Vincent or Max satisfyingly developed enough for it to qualify as a character drama. That said, the Vincent-Max dynamic is quite interesting, as are the resultant character arcs of each, and Tom Cruise is particularly good. On the flip side, though, the film is a bit sludgy and slow-moving at times, which isn't necessarily a bad thing where compensated for by atmosphere, ideas and/or characterisation, but the compensation is only partial here, I think. Still, a good film.

Kristin Hersh - The Grotto

What a rare pleasure is solo Kristin! I don't think that anyone else out there is doing anything quite like what she is - this kind of dark, poetic, harrowing/pretty, urgent/languid, oblique/confessional folk-pop - and The Grotto is every bit as special as was Hips and Makers. There's something very sinuous about the album's allusive (and, for that matter, elusive) progress, as Hersh charts her downbeat, fractured musical and mental landscapes, for the most part using only voice and acoustic guitar (occasionally, some ghostly piano and violin can also be heard), and the songs tend to blend into each other in a sort of narcotic, night-fog haze..there are melodies, yes, but no real verses or choruses - just fraught, dream-like vocal lines, often repeated and seeming to float up and down and around again.

Although I couldn't listen to it every day, this is one of those albums that really takes its listeners to another place - it's all rather stark, but it's beautiful at the same time.

Wilco - A.M.

This was the band's debut, and it sees them solidly working an upbeat, catchy country-rock groove - guitar-bass-drums and banjo, mandolin and pedal steel as appropriate. It's not as expansive and great as what was to come (which for me basically means Summerteeth, as I'm still not sold on YHF, and haven't yet listened to their other records), but it nonetheless has a charm of its own, and there are hints of the wonderful, sprawling-yet-tight, joyful-melancholic vibe that the band was later to perfect. Diggin' it.

whichbook.net

Just preserving this link, across which I came a while ago: http://www.whichbook.net/index.jsp.

Haunted

Given that this was quite literally a midnight movie, I didn't have high expectations, but I ended up quite enjoying it - it's an effective little haunted house mystery, even if its moves are, for the most part, telegraphed well in advance and the whole thing is something of a throwback in both conception and execution (without knowing in advance, I wouldn't have guessed that it was made in the 1990s).

Set in 1920s England, the film's shot in a style which feels quite old-fashioned (whether deliberately or otherwise) - most notably, the actors often appear more 'real' and clearly-defined than the blurry backdrops against which they're moving - and the special effects are quite risible, having a 'cutting edge, only thirty years ago' type vibe to them. Oddly, though, this adds to the effectiveness of the film, creating a spooky mood reminiscent of the times past when these kinds of ghost story - and perhaps of ghosts themselves - had their heyday ("Turn of the Screw" and all that).

Acting-wise, Aidan Quinn and Kate Beckinsale are both good (the former suitably haunted, the latter appropriately ambiguous and beguiling), and the rest of the cast do their jobs well. Hardly a classic, but still a neat bit of film-making, especially if the old-fashioned feel is in fact deliberate!

Interjection 1: Names, contexts

When I started this blog, I wanted to keep it focused on recording the various (pop) cultural experiences which I was to have, and to avoid it turning into any kind of confessional or diaristic-type thing. But maintaining a really rigorous distinction between culture/art and the personal was always going to be difficult, for of course art can't be separated from its context and one's personal experience of it, etc - and so naturally some personal/contextual details have crept in as I've gone along.

One such type of detail which I've hitherto deliberately left out has been the name(s) of relevant people, but that omission has distinctly impoverished these entries, and I've since repented of it. So, to make up for lost time: I saw I ♥ Huckabees with David, Michelle and Adrian H; the Morricone-themed gig was with Wei; the "Grotesque" exhibition was with David again (who also picked Blindness for me, possibly on the same day); John-Paul is the fan of The Ill-Made Mute; and the visit to the Immigration Museum was with Laura (who'd also given me In Custody a couple of months earlier)...and that's it, I think.

Raimond Gaita - "Breach of Trust: Truth, Morality and Politics" (Quarterly Essay issue 16)

This was an interesting read, and a surprisingly dense one despite its brevity (~ 20,000 words), anedoctal sections, and relatively unstructured form. There are a number of themes underlying the sub-headed parts ("The world as I found it", "From Kant to Kelly", "Love of country", "Through a glass darkly", "Torture", "Floating world"), but the connections are not always clear, and there are plenty of diversions along the way. Essentially, though, "Breach of Trust" is indeed concerned with the relationship between truth, morality and politics, and I think that some pretty clear themes and ideas emerge from Gaita's essay.

For one thing, Gaita consistently argues against a consequentialist view of ethics - he refuses to accept that ethical judgements can be made solely on the basis of consequence of actions - although at the same time he is at pains to distance himself from the charge of moral absolutism (he uses 'ethics' and 'morality' interchangeably). Gaita argues that "ethical considerations need not be understood merely as principles that regulate a practice whose essential nature is directed to other ends ... standards may be partly constitutive rather than merely regulative of an activity", but that contemporary society is estranged from its fundamental values, having in large measure lost the conceptual frameworks necessary to think of ethics in this fashion.

He goes on to argue that politicians will often be forced to choose between incommensurable, irreconcilable moral and political imperatives - for him, it is misguided to suggest that all such conflicts can be reduced to purely moral terms, for such a reduction relies on a (mistaken) view of morality as a set of rules or principles, serving a purpose, which can be creatively adapted to serve our (political) interests. Nonetheless, he contends (if I understand his argument correctly) that politics is not separable from morality - each must always inform and be answerable to the other, despite their complex relationship. Precisely how he thinks this would work in practice is something left hanging in the essay, I think, but the picture of the relationship between the two which he develops is sufficiently nuanced that I wouldn't be surprised if I'd missed a large part of it on my first reading.

Yet that's only really one thread of Gaita's argument in "Breach of Trust". Intertwined are also serious considerations of the nature of moral judgement (and the consideration that it need not entail blame - a counterintuitive position which I at first thought was absurd, but have since come to accept), the meaning, value and foundation of "patriotic loyalty and its corruptions" (and, relatedly, the questions surrounding notions of national pride and national shame), the importance of truth (and its relationship to lying and mendacity), and related digressions on topics relevant to the current Australian and global political landscape including the legitimacy of torture, the possibility of forming moral judgements about terrorists, and the continuing fallout from the (ill-founded but now factual) invasion of Iraq.

It's difficult for me to really articulate what I think of Gaita's arguments - or to form a coherent critique - for the simple reason that I don't think he himself articulates those arguments especially clearly in the first place. There's a lot going on in this essay, and while the constituent parts generally read well, it's often left to the reader to make some fairly large leaps of understanding and intuition in order to piece together a sense of how the whole hangs together. It would take more time than I'm currently willing to devote to disentangle all of the threads and work out how everything fits together - instead, lazily, I'll wait on the correspondence (and hopefully Gaita's response thereto) in the next QE to see what others have made of it.

Immigration Museum

Visited the Immigration Museum on Swanston Street yesterday, though the place was overrun by what seemed like hundreds of primary school kids on an excursion and there wasn't anywhere near enough time to absorb everything besides (indeed, we didn't make it beyond the permanent collection, and even then only saw parts of it). I was quite favourably impressed by what I saw (which included the 20 metre-odd replica ship through which we were able to walk - very nice) - it seems as if a real effort has been made to make the museum as engaging, interactive and relevant as possible. Spent a bit of time in the room documenting current immigration policy (from about the 1970s onwards), which of course was interesting, but I think that a fuller review of the museum will have to await my next, more prolonged visit.

Cecilia Dart-Thornton - The Ill-Made Mute

I've been aware of this one for a while due to a certain friend's constant championing of it, and expected that I would probably enjoy it - which I did, but with some substantial reservations.

I give Dart-Thornton credit for trying to do something new with the fantasy thing - she does succeed in imagining and presenting a rich, impressively original world in which to place her characters, and there are many nice touches to make even a fairly jaded reader of the genre like myself smile. But there are a few pretty serious problems with this book, as far as I'm concerned, which prevented me from really getting into it (and which will probably dissuade me from reading any further into the series)...

The most striking of these problems is how over-written the novel is. Descriptive writing is all very well, but description - and creative, profuse use of language - needs to be balanced with an understanding of when it's best merely to suggest, or to invoke, and The Ill-Made Mute contains far too much of the former and precious little of the latter; as a result, reading Dart-Thornton's prose can be very frustrating. A second, related problem is that there's no real sense of narrative to the book - the story follows a fairly standard 'quest for self-understanding/fulfilment' arc, occurring concurrently with a physical journey through perilous lands, but things just seem to happen one after the other, without any real feeling of progression, development or context. And third (this being related to that second), the novel isn't epic enough for my tastes - it all takes place at the micro level of Imrhien's adventures, with larger-scale happenings being only hinted at as taking place around the margins, and there's no 'sweep' to events.

Lucinda Williams - Sweet Old World

A good album, but not as amazing as Essence and Car Wheels, nor as fun as Lucinda Williams. Sweet Old World seems somehow less embroidered than those other records, holds fewer standout tunes and is less immediately appealing. As such, it stands or falls very much on the strength of its songs and their delivery, and while both are consistently strong, and while that 'Lucinda' sound is still there, and still pleasing to the ear, the album nonetheless occasionally drags a little - not a sensation I've experienced when listening to any of those other records...

Then again, maybe (the which would hardly be surprising given how heavily I've played her in recent times) I've just reached saturation point with Lucinda for the time being...

New Buffalo @ St Kilda Festival, Sunday 13 February

The vagaries of Festival day public transport meant that I arrived halfway through this (in any case all too brief) set, but I saw enough for my belief that New Buffalo is something special to be affirmed. Considering how gentle, wistful, wispy, dreamy, romantic &c The Last Beautiful Day is, I wouldn't have expected that New Buffalo's music would translate especially well to a sunny, exposed outdoor festival setting, but Seltmann proved to have an unexpectedly gutsy live singing voice and the arrangements were tweaked to give them a bit more of a dynamic, rock feel (on stage at various times, and in various configurations, were keys, drums and electric guitar) - very, very nice...and she finished off with the two best songs on The Last Beautiful Day - "I've Got You And You've Got Me" and "Recovery" - and it was all lovelygorgeous and happy and all that good stuff.

Lucinda Williams - Car Wheels On A Gravel Road

More wonderful Lucinda - possibly the best of the three to which I've so far listened. At first, the opening run - "Right in Time", "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road", "2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten" - overshadowed everything that came after it for me, with the rest of the record all seeming a bit 'samey' in its working of that mid-tempo country vibe, but Car Wheels has had plenty of spins in toto over the last week or so, having been on repeat for much of that time, and I like it more with each listen (as was the case with Essence, it took a while for the subtle variations in melody, rhythm and instrumentation to sink in, although the process with Car Wheels has taken place over a week, as opposed to the couple of years involved with Essence).

Dusty roads, dirty waystations and broken hearts; relaxed in feel, but it still yearns. This stuff really has gotten under my skin, in the best possible way.

Terry Pratchett - The Colour of Magic

A re-read, of course - I must have read it at least a half-dozen times before, and it's not even one of my favourite (or most read) Discworld novels...

Mark Ryden

Browsing in Metropolis today, I was flipping through a book called The Rise of Underground Art or something similar, and my eye was caught by some illustrations done by this guy - Mark Ryden. In their blending of the cute/kitsch with the threatening/surreal, his paintings remind me of Yoshitomo Nara's stuff - I really like it.

José Saramago - Blindness

Definitely an intriguing premise - an unspecified nation (we're led to believe that it's some kind of liberal democracy, even if there seems to be a great deal of deference to the state, in the form of "the Ministry") is swept by an epidemic of contagious blindness. There are a lot of directions in which a novel could go from that starting point, and Saramago chooses to draw out two (or perhaps three) of the most quintessential concerns of twentieth century literature - the tenuousness of individual freedom in the face of the might of the (always potentially coercive) state and the fragility of so-called 'civilised society', and the manners in which people adjust (or fail to adjust) to dramatic changes in their everyday existences.

It's grittily written, and Saramago doesn't shy away from taking moral positions (dealing honestly, for example, with the possibility that the only way to meet violence may be with violence). The characters are realistic - despite having titles rather than names ("the first blind man", "the doctor's wife", "the girl with dark glasses"), they come across as people (albeit people in a situation where names have lost much, if not all, of their importance) rather than as representatives or exemplars of 'types' - and while Saramago's vision of human nature is by no means rosy, it is, I think, guardedly optimistic.

In some ways pretty heavy going, Blindness isn't the kind of book that I'd normally enjoy (a friend picked it more or less randomly from the library), but I reckon it to be a really substantial, serious attempt at tackling its concerns, and I'm glad that I've read it.

10,000 Maniacs - Hope Chest: The Fredonia Recordings 1982-1983

This is pretty good - it's a document of the Maniacs' first two recordings, and as such captures them before they really hit their collective stride as tunesmiths, and while their many, varied influences were still coalescing. As a result, while the songs don't generally have the shimmering pop brilliance of those which would come on subsequent lps, they're often more interesting, and more edgy.

Library Records: 1998-2003

A two-disc compilation of material from a local label, specialising, it seems, in indie-pop of the gentle, quirky, 'vox (breathy and upper register for girls, laid-back for guys) + acoustic guitar and/or keys' variety (as well one might expect from the label's name). I wasn't previously familiar with any of the artists, but the liner notes namecheck the Lucksmiths and Architecture in Helsinki, which is pretty indicative of the overall vibe.

Disc one is made up of material from the 7" singles that have been released on the label, while disc two contains songs from the (full-length, I think) cds and various odds and sorts. I've really only listened to the first disc, which is generally quite pleasant without being at all memorable or exciting (although there are a couple of cool cuts from an outfit called Sleepy Township), and my impression of the second disc is largely similar.

Tales from the Australian Underground - Singles 1976-1989

As its title suggests, a collection of 'underground' singles from the late seventies through to the end of the eighties, crammed on to two cds. The acts range from a handful which are more or less familiar (the Triffids, the Birthday Party, Died Pretty, the Sunnyboys), to a few more whom I really only know by reputation (Radio Birdman, the Saints, the Scientists, Ed Kuepper), to a large majority of which I've never even heard before; the rather informative liner notes tell me that all of the songs on the two cds were originally 45rpm releases, and several of the cuts were the only releases ever put out by the band in question (one of my favourites, the Passengers' "Face With No Name", a kind of garage rock guitar sound meets girl group vox and melodies fusion, falls into that category).

Most of the songs, particularly on the first disc ("1976-1982"), are pretty short, with many clocking in at around two minutes or only a bit over, and, unsurprisingly, both discs are dominated by punk and post-punk sounds, although the latter half of the second disc also reflects a turn towards that kind of pub-oriented hard rock that Australian bands do so well (represented by outfits like the Mark of Cain and the Cosmic Psychos). The early, energetic, melodic punk-type stuff is really good (overseas sonic references which come to mind are acts like the Sex Pistols, the Undertones and the Only Ones), and there's a scattered handful of pretty fab pop moments, too (the Lighthouse Keepers' "Ocean Liner" comes to mind), as well as plenty of excellent, pretty much uncategorisable cuts (the Laughing Clowns' wonderfully unhinged "Sometimes (I Just Can't Live With Anyone)" is an obvious example). All up, a really great document, full of fantastic music.

"Gardenesque: A Celebration of Australian Gardening" @ State Library of Victoria

'Gardenesque' - it's a good word, aptly defined on the exhibition's first explanatory plaque as "a style of planting and design that distinguishes gardens as works of art, rather than as imitations of nature" (a parallel is also drawn with the notion of the 'picturesque'). The exhibition was pleasantly diverting, being comprised of various landscapes, botanical sketches, hand-drawn plans, old personal journals, gardening magazines, advertising posters ("Yates' Reliable Seeds"), books and assorted other art/material, stretching from the 1800s-1810s ("European Imagination") to 2000- ("Gardening in the Republican Manner"); in fact, in linking its treatment of gardening (broadly defined, it must be said - which was all to the better) so closely to historical developments and periods, the exhibition became as interesting for what it revealed/evoked of Australia's history as for what it had to say about its ostensible subject, gardening itself.

Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49

Just noting that I re-read this over the last fortnight or so, in the spaces between doing other things - and that if I were to pick one Favourite Book Ever, this would still probably be it.

Little Birdy - bigbiglove

When I first heard "Andy Warhol", I really liked it, and raced out to buy the band's debut EP as soon as it hit the stores. The EP as a whole was really good, too, being made up of four quality songs (although "Andy Warhol" had been re-recorded and horribly renamed as "I Should Of Known"). Somewhere along the line, though, I sort of lost interest in Little Birdy, and so didn't make any attempt to track down this LP when it was released, one or two further EPs/singles later.

A few months later, a copy of the album has fallen into my hands and I've remembered why I initially liked Little Birdy so much, although the level of my enthusiasm is a bit lower this time around. Quite simply, these guys write really good pop-rock songs - the hooks are memorable and plentiful, and there are enough twists to keep me interested. It's all quite dramatic (not least the striking vocals of Katy Steele), and never less than lively, and this creates a good dynamic when coupled with the sometimes surprising stately arrangements. Somewhat against my expectations, bigbiglove is a really good album.

Sheryl Crow - Tuesday Night Music Club

"Strong Enough" has long been one of my 'touchstone' songs - it's one of those which I tend to listen to a lot (usually late at night) when going through one of my emotional troughs. I like "Leaving Las Vegas", in all of its mid-paced, middle-of-the-road longing, almost as much. And "All I Wanna Do" is fun, even if it's one of the most overplayed songs of the last 15 years or so. It's a shame, then, that the album on which all three of those songs reside should be so underwhelming - opener "Run, Baby, Run" is pleasantly airy, and "Can't Cry Anymore" is okay, but the rest of the record is just bland.

Gillian Welch - Hell Among The Yearlings

As these things often go, I've been working my way backwards through Welch's discography. It all kicked off when I picked up Soul Journey on spec from the library, attracted by the pretty blue colour and childish line drawings on its cover and a vague sense that Welch was some kind of neo-folk type, and was promptly entranced, particularly by the wonderful top and tail of "Look At Miss Ohio" and "Wrecking Ball". Next was Time (The Revelator), which was less obviously warm and summery, and so took a bit longer to sink in, but has ultimately proved equally rewarding.

And now, Hell Among The Yearlings, another step back in time, both in terms of when it was recorded, and when it sounds like it was recorded. The folk and, in particular, bluegrass elements are more pronounced on this record, giving it more of an old-fashioned, almost rustic, feel, and consequently it's further away from my usual listening spectrum, making it a bit harder to get into. After about a week of having it on in the background of my days, though, it's really starting to make sense, and I get the feeling that I'll end up liking it just as much as her last two albums - the guitar/voice twang has a kind of pull to it that's hard to shake off...

Lucinda Williams - Lucinda Williams

Liking this one a lot. Released back in '89 on Rough Trade, it's more country and more upbeat than Essence (and, relatedly, in my books not as good as that latter, which I've really grown to love in recent times), but it has the same sense of gentle ache and longing to it ("Side Of The Road" comes to mind), while also housing several more rollicking, faster-paced numbers ("I Just Wanted To See You So Bad", "Changed The Locks", "Passionate Kisses"); the balance is well-struck, and neither aspect of Williams' song-writing pales by comparison to the other. Over the past year or so, I've been increasingly drawn to the intersections between folk, country, 'roots' and popular music, and Lucinda is becoming an important part of this seachange.

Haruki Murakami - A Wild Sheep Chase

Everyone seems to be talking about Murakami these days, but somehow I'd never really got much of an idea of what his writing was actually like, or what he wrote about - which sort of makes sense, because even now, having picked up this book at random (it was the only one of his on the library shelf) and read it with great enjoyment, I'm still somewhat at a loss as to how to describe it.

In its adoption of a quest/search narrative (with certain overtones of paranoia and failure of communication thrown into the mix), coupled with a willingness to make some fairly OTT excursions into the imaginative-fantastic, the immediate reference point for me is Pynchon, but this comparison only goes so far - the narrative of A Wild Sheep Chase is far more linear, and its style of writing in general far less dense (it's related in prose that is unfailingly clean - in the sense of 'clear and seemingly transparent', rather than 'free of the profane/colloquial'), and it's more obviously metaphysical (while less political), as well as more humanistic (albeit in a very particular way), than Pynchon's exercises in endlessly proliferating signifiers, sub-plots and characters.

On its own terms, then (really, the only way to take a book like this one), what to make of A Wild Sheep Chase? Well, as the title suggests, it's the tale of one man's search for a sheep, and the novel is entertaining and well-plotted in its progression towards its rather unexpected ending. But the quest narrative also functions as a framework within which Murakami is able to develop a subtle, nuanced picture of the individual in/and world, and I think that the Pynchon comparison is instructive here: whereas Pynchon's take on identity and meaning in contemporary society is shaped by his conception of the world as, basically, a Tristero system (so that 'identity' and 'meaning' must always be constructed from out of the chaotic collective diaspora of signs and broken connections that make up that system), Murakami orients his treatment of those same themes around the essential experiences of individual isolation and detachment (so that, for him, while 'identity' and 'meaning' are intrinsically meaningful in a way that Pynchon would baulk at, the starting point is that there will always be spaces between the individual and the world, including between individuals themselves).

Or, at least, that's what I think.

Truly, I haven't entirely got my head around this book yet - I think that I may need to read a bit more of Murakami's work before reappraising A Wild Sheep Chase (in a kind of example, I guess, of the so-called hermeneutic circle). But, that notwithstanding, this really is a marvellous novel - it's fluent and readable and fun, and yet also subtle and wistful and wise. Without ever trivialising the individual, it is, I think, profoundly allegorical - it's a fable, seeming to hint at some deep truth. And, in the end, its denouement proves the whole novel to have been a sustained flight of fancy. What more could one ask?

Roberta Flack - Softly With These Songs: The Best Of

Veers closer to easy listening than is usual for my tastes, but Flack's undeniably pleasant to listen to, and the melodies are nice, too; I much prefer the earlier, sparser (60s and 70s) stuff, which feels more restrained and just generally more timeless (and also has the advantage of being very familiar, all of the songs from that period being ones that I’ve heard many times before).

Gordon Gano - Hitting The Ground

There's nothing on here to match the energy and verve of the PJ Harvey version of the title track (the song which caught my attention when it hit the airwaves a couple of years back), and, taken as a whole, it's really a fairly undistinguished collection. The concept is promising: the songs were written by Gordon Gano (of the Violent Femmes) and performed by an assortment of mostly famous pop music figures - Polly Jean, Lou Reed, John Cale, Frank Black, They Might Be Giants, and others...Each of the artists places their mark on the song they're given (Lou Reed drawls and says 'bitch', John Cale comes over all 'Ian Curtis and piano', Frank Black does some unhinged screaming, etc), and the record covers a fair amount of stylistic ground; the problem, however, is that the song-writing isn't, apart from on "Hitting The Ground" itself, particularly good...