Amélie Nothomb - Fear and Trembling

This is definitely my favourite Nothomb yet - wicked sharp and very funny ("I was right in the middle of a mental defenestration when a new drama erupted"...hah! Although the sentence probably needs to be read in context...), and the lightness of her touch is as delightful as in Loving Sabotage and The Character of Rain, if not more so.

It seems that most if not all of Nothomb's books are quasi-autobiographical, and this one features 'Amelie-san' as an adult protagonist, completing a 12-month contract with a Japanese corporation, Yumimoto (a made-up name, she drily assures us) during which she commits various transgressions (including that of being too capable in her role), falls in love with her beautiful immediate superior (the dynamic there is just too fascinatingly perverse to be summarised), and spirals ever more bizarrely lower in the unforgiving employment foodchain, philosophically dealing with daily humiliation and the mysteries of the Japanese workplace culture. I can't quite pin down what it is that I particularly like about Fear and Trembling as compared to the other two, but I think that it has a lot to do with that lightness - it's so deftly written (right up to a perfectly judged ending), so wry and so wide-eyed, its worldview so subtly distorted, and the endless misfortunes that befall Amelie met with such unlikely-yet-completely-plausible equanimity on her part, that one can't help but fall under its spell.

Guy Gavriel Kay - A Song For Arbonne

Another that I've read several times before, and returned to for the same reason as Ophiuchi. Always a surprisingly engaging read - fantasy which convincingly balances the epic and the personal, and which I enjoy even though it's concerned with the fate of nations rather than of worlds.

John Varley - The Ophiuchi Hotline

Pulled this off my shelf to help while away the night-time hours, too late to do anything more 'productive' but still too early to sleep, my sleeping patterns being what they current are (ie, a wreck). The novel has some interesting ideas and pulls together neatly, but still feels somehow slight (which may be unfair to Varley, given that the book does seem very economical in its language and structure, but that's how I respond to it nonetheless), which is probably why it's never left much of an impression on previous readings - nor on this one, though it was slightly better than I recalled it as being. Then again, I've never really been one for sci-fi.

Amélie Nothomb - The Character of Rain

...aka "Métaphysique des Tubes" - and not, as it turns out, Nothomb's latest after all. Flew through it, as I did through Loving Sabotage - like that other, it's (a) extremely fluent and a pleasure to read; (b) short; and (c) somehow not entirely satisfying. Related by another quasi-omniscient child narrator, I think that the best way for me to give a flavour of the book is by giving a chronology of its events (going against all university-instilled instincts by scattering unattributed direct quotations willy-nilly):

God is born. She looks like a normal baby, and develops physically like one, but is both immobile and mute - completely inert, affectless and unresponsive to the world. Ingestion, digestion and excretion take place vegetatively, without her being aware of them. For these reasons, she is referred to as 'the Tube' at this stage in her development. At some time around the age of two, an inscrutable mental event occurs and God begins screaming in rage. The rage is born of being shaken from her state of perfect nullity, and realising that objects (toys) are independent of her, that she is not able to exercise her divine prerogative to name all things in the universe due to being incapable of forming coherent speech, and so on.

After some six months of being constantly enraged, God tastes white chocolate. Through the experience of pleasure caused by this, she is born as an individual [here, the narrative voice switches from third to first person], gains the capacity for memory, and ceases to be enraged. She proceeds to dole out spoken words over time for the gratification of her family, seeking the most appropriate words for her first utterances (she already seemingly has a fully-formed comprehension of language, both Japanese and French, in her mind). Much philosophical musing about the nature of language follows. There is a near-drowning in the sea, but she is rescued by a friend of her brother's and reveals some of her facility with language.

In the meantime, more is revealed about her family and nannies, and we learn that in Japan (where these events take place), children are treated as gods until the age of three. Carp appear in the story, she is repulsed by them and their tube-like nature, and, through a parental misunderstanding, is given three as pets and obliged to feed them. Shortly after turning three, overwhelmed by carp-related existential revulsion, she attempts suicide (unsuccessfully).

After that, nothing more happened.

So much for the story. There's a fair amount of philosophical filigree, but it's too vague to be taken seriously (though possibly I just haven't taken the time to really think it through), but the other key thing about The Character of Rain is the writing itself, which has an oblique economy and a pleasing hint of the poetic that unavoidably recalls Jeanette Winterson, although it's somehow both wispier and more matter-of-fact than the prose of that latter. I really don't know why I don't love these books as much as I feel I should - perhaps the swiftness with which I read them doesn't allow them to really sink in or something, or maybe I'm just not in the right headspace at present (I wouldn't be surprised if all the grappling with Derrida had temporarily taken away my ability to appreciate literature)...

Full Metal Jacket

Well, I'm no kind of film buff, so maybe that's why I'm not entirely sold on the idea of Kubrick as a great director. À propos, I haven't seen all his films, but of those that I have seen, Strangelove was fantastic, A Clockwork Orange was unpleasant but undeniably memorable (and also, I think, quite good, though I'm in no hurry to watch it again), but 2001 put me to sleep (though I admittedly didn't watch it - or, rather, attempt to watch it - in the most conducive of states) and I found The Shining, which I'd have expected to like, rather on the turgid side. In any case, the net result of all this is that I didn't go into Full Metal Jacket particularly expecting to be blown away, and in the event it did leave me fairly underwhelmed.

It's certainly very well made, and funny in places, but I didn't find much else to like about it. The first 'act', following the training of the recruits, is well-acted and interesting but doesn't seem to have any point (though its unsettling ending, in particular, would in a different film have lent itself to a fairly programmatic reading). And the second act, in Vietnam itself, is neat but also strikes me as pointless, right up to the anti-climactic ending (could it be that this is Kubrick's point? Maybe, but I kind of doubt it). I guess that I just don't respond to Kubrick's work - sometimes, I can admire it, but I'm not wired in a way to 'feel' it, and I don't watch films in a way which allows me to enjoy them unless I feel them. So that's that for Stanley Kubrick and I, at least for now.

Interjection 4: Lengths

Just as a side note, have been amused by the way in which the average length of these entries seems to be increasing of late, just as the essay-writing end of semester looms. As means of procrastination go, tis a minor one - but it all adds up, I guess...

Erotic Ghost Story

Pretty weird. Had I known in advance that 'erotic' in this instance translated to 'unimaginative soft porn', I probably wouldn't have bothered taping this; blissfully ignorant, though, that's exactly what I did, duly to be puzzled when I sat down to watch it later. There just doesn't seem to be any point to this film, and it bogs seriously down near the middle when the vixen-sisters take it in turns to (fairly unerotically, but quite explicitly and at great length) shag the scholar (though I was proud of my powers of attention when, looking around online afterwards trying to work out what on earth I'd just watched, I discovered that what I'd thought was a rather abrupt conclusion to one of the torrid encounters was in fact the result of sbs having deemed the remainder of the scene to be too explicit and summarily cut it before showing the film...which didn't prevent Erotic Ghost Story from being easily the most pornographic thing I've ever seen on television). The pointless sex and random nudity didn't bother me in themselves, of course, but there was just no pay-off whatsoever (though the silly horror elements were vaguely enjoyable) - I don't think that there was anything to 'get' about this one except for the mindless titillation, though there's probably the makings of a cult film there.

The Man Who Cried

Back when it was first released, I happened to pick up a promotional postcard for this film and stuck it on the back of my bedroom door for reasons which presently escape me but no doubt had something to do with the moody, black and white (tinged slightly brown to give the sense of an old photo) image of Christina Ricci which was its front. That was years ago but, due to the mounting of the card in my living space (amidst all the other cultural detritus littering my walls and shelves), the film has vaguely remained somewhere in my consciousness without my ever learning anything about it beyond the rest of its major cast (Johnny Depp, Cate Blanchett, John Turturro).

Anyhow, turns out to be an arthouse historical/personal-voyage narrative, following a displaced Russian Jew (Ricci) who is uprooted aged five or sixish (circa 1927 or so, from memory), voyages with scores of others (but without anyone she knows) to England, where she is renamed 'Suzie' on arrival and forced to forsake her native Yiddish for English, and ends up in Paris as a singer just before the shadow of war falls over the city, with only a coin and a photo of her father, gone to America long ago, by which to remember her family.

Enter broody resentful outsider (gypsy) Depp, glamorous, extroverted, insecure fellow emigre Blanchett, and arrogant but successful Italian opera singer Turturro...but the main event is Suzie's search for her origins, her place and her self. Thinking about it now, it's actually quite a brave move - and, I think, both truthful and apt in light of the film's logic - to portray a character engaged in such a search as so taciturn, and to give her so little dialogue.

I don't know, though. The Man Who Cried held my interest throughout and I found it quite satisfying, but it didn't really affect me (except for the pathos inherent in the figure of a lonely, bewildered, unhappy child), and overall, despite some nice images and imagery (the theme of music as a connecting thread always resonates, and the dual-character water/rebirth motif was well played), I didn't feel that it all quite came together.

Stephen King (as Richard Bachman) - The Running Man

I re-read this novella (and often another in the same volume, The Long Walk) from time to time; some of the original impact of the grimness and grime has been lost through these repeated readings but it's still a fast-paced, punchy way to kill a couple of hours.

Amélie Nothomb - Loving Sabotage

Amélie Nothomb came to my attention when I read something about her latest, Métaphysique des tubes (the title under which it was published in English translation, which was quite different, I think, escapes me just now)...if memory serves, the novel's narrated by a baby/very young child, and it sounded cute and whimsical and very French (though Nothomb's actually Belgian). I never got round to reading that one, but happened across Loving Sabotage the other day in Rowden White and thought it worth a try.

This one is related by the seven year old daughter of a diplomat, growing up in a diplomatic community in Peking in the seventies. It's delightfully solipsistic in the way she assumes herself to be the centre of the world:

Each morning, a slave arrived to do my hair.

She didn't know she was my slave. She thought she was Chinese. In truth, however, she had no nationality, since she was my slave.

Before Peking, I lived in Japan, where the best slaves were found. The quality of slaves in China left much to be desired.

imbued with a correspondingly distinctive perspective:

From the window of my new bedroom, China is hilariously ugly. I give the sky a condescending glance. I bounce up and down on the bed.

and wonderfully evokes the sort of pure imaginative world that one imagines only a child can inhabit:

A horse is that unique place where it is possible to lose all anchorage, all thought, all consciousness, all idea of tomorrow, where one is nothing more than an upward leap and a headlong charge.

A horse is access to the infinite, and riding is that moment of unity with the Mongols, the Tartars, the Saracens, the Sioux, and other mounted comrades who have lived to ride, to be.

Riding is the spirit that leaps from four hooves, and I know that my bicycle has four hooves and that it leaps and that it is a horse.

Describing one of Kate Atkinson's books, a reviewer once referred to the 'sprightly omniscience' with which it leapt from past to present and back again, and something similar is at play in Loving Sabotage - the narrator writes with the barbed innocence of childhood, but there is a subtly mediating 'grown-up' consciousness also at play, and the result (obviously) is glittering writing which just cries out to be quoted and re-cited. Nothomb's also particularly fond of a stylistic device which I tend to overuse myself (when writing elsewhere than here) - the emphatic closing single-sentence paragraph (a small sample, taken all out of context: "The unspeakable infamy of it all"; "From that moment on, I knew that the world of literature was rotten"; "For the second time I blessed Chinese Communism", and so on).

There are two major story-threads. First, the battles between the diplomats' children, in which the 'Allies' wage ongoing war on the East Germans ("[t]he average age of the combatants was approximately ten"), as regulated and absurd as 'adult warfare', replete with rules, customs, cunning strategies, shifts in power and the 'Secret Weapon', a vat filled by urine and Indian ink into which captured East Germans are lowered for purposes of torture. And second, the impossibly self-sufficient, unapproachable Elena, who, all of six years old, "lived her life as if it were perfectly sufficient to be the most beautiful little girl in the world, and to have such long hair", and with whom the narrator becomes absurdly infatuated, going to great lengths to win Elena's love, and finally, after a protracted campaign, committing a monumental act of self-sabotage. (Adults feature in all this only as more or less irrelevant phantom figures in "an advanced state of degeneration", to be vaguely pitied and patronised.) It's all rather acerbic, but it's so wide-eyed and somehow 'pure' that it also completely convinces.

I didn't actually like this book quite as much as the slightly breathless words above might suggest, but I do think that it's very, very good. Would be v. interested to read more of Nothomb's books.

Ghost World

Hey, wow - Ghost World is pretty near perfect. Funny and bittersweet and wistful and barbed, the film made me smile nearly the whole way through, but it also touched me, and I sighed at its ending. It's carried off with the lightest of touches, all vibrant colours and well-lit spaces, off-the-wall music and too-cool decor, caustic one-liners and sudden whimsy, but it's unsparingly clear-sighted and absolutely note-perfect in its evocation of that something which may as well be everything - the experience of subtle loneliness and quiet sadness which comes with being fundamentally at odds with the world, and more than that, the way we attempt to get by regardless. Tis a bit of a fantasy, and an open-ended, impossible-to-pin-down one at that, but it rings true, and somehow, at least tonight, this film really spoke to me. Wrestle though I may with these words, I can't express how wonderful Ghost World is - I simply adore it.

Cold Mountain

Hired this accidentally - video store about to close, not thinking straight, thought it was The Missing - but wasn't too disappointed when I realised my error. Didn't really know anything about this one, but the presence of Jude Law, Nicole Kidman and Renee Zellweger promised something at least watchable; turned out to be an old-fashioned romantic epic (set against the backdrop of the American Civil War, no less!), and rather a good one, though it didn't have quite the sweep and emotional punch to which it aspired (that said, it went pretty darn near).

Normally, these sorts of films live or die by their success on two scores - the performance of the leads, and the quality of the cinematography...Cold Mountain gets full points for that latter (it's absolutely sumptuous-looking), but Kidman and Law were, while convincing, not particularly scintillating (which didn't stop me from getting that emotional reflex-response shiver when the two were reunited in the snow - but of course I'm an easy mark for that kind of thing, studied/actual cynicism notwithstanding). Zellweger's performance, though, was a tonic and a treat, and there was a whole cavalcade of other familiar faces: Donald Sutherland; Jack White (who I thought looked familiar but couldn't place); Natalie Portman (who I thought was pretty but completely didn't recognise); and assorted other familiar character actors. More generally, the film as whole is both evocative and believable - and quite historical-feeling, as it ought to. Plus, liked the Appalachian-folk soundtrack (complete with a version of "Wayfaring Stranger") and now intend to check out some Alison Krauss.

Al Spicer - Rock: 100 Essential CDs: The Rough Guide

For the most part, this book is made up of really obvious, canonical selections (Pet Sounds, Psychocandy, Daydream Nation, Stone Roses, Forever Changes, London Calling, Remain in Light, Nevermind, etc, etc), not all of which I necessarily agree with, but I certainly can't dispute their widely-accepted status as classics - I reckon that a solid 70-odd of the 100 discs listed fall into that category. So, while it's fun to read about them, the limitations of space imposed by this pocket-sized book ensure that the text doesn't have much new to tell me.

Still, that same limitation of space seems to have inspired the compiler to restrict his selections to one album per artist, and there are some interesting ones there - in some cases, it's just a matter of picking one out of several recognised classics (Ziggy Stardust for Bowie, Revolver for the Beatles, Murmur for R.E.M. ...), but others selected from notable artists' back catalogues are pretty eccentric, most notably from my perspective the inclusion of the Cure's Mixed Up (which I admittedly haven't listened to, but I can't begin to fathom how it could've been selected over all of the proper Cure albums - there's no way that a record whose apparent high point is a Paul Oakenfold remix can be better than Disintegration, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, Pornography or any number of others) and the substitution of The Velvet Underground for the banana album. Also interested to see Hatful of Hollow get up for the Smiths - that's one a bit out of the box.

Also, the book claims that "Just" is 'a harrowing story of home invasion and rape on the fifteenth floor' - not a meaning I've ever gotten out of the song! And I was amused by the number of album descriptions in which the Velvet Underground were checked (conservatively, half a dozen, I'd say) - I guess that the number of ways in which a rock song can be described really is quite limited.

So, in other words, a bit of fluff, but an enjoyable one.

Intolerable Cruelty

A quality movie. Slick and sleek and often very funny (gotta love the way Wheezy Joe goes out); Clooney and Zeta Jones perfect (as is my wont these days, I liked the combination of opacity and attractiveness - which in this case was reflected in the set design, decor and aesthetic of the whole film...nicely done by the Coen brothers). Extremely, amusingly catty and rather cynical in a 'comedy of manners' kind of way, but the happy ending is still more satisfying than any other could have been.

Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Four Parts

Thinking that it might be nice to revisit this one before the movie hits screens, I started reading it in the gaps between doing other things and, as is ever the case with these old favourites, ended up zipping through it quite quickly. Good grief - startling how high a proportion of my reading is, in fact, re-reading (unless that's just a 'this year' thing...).

Resident Evil

This may seem an unlikely movie for me to have sought out, but in fact I've been intending to watch it for quite a while. It gained a hold over my mind because it seemed to represent the ultimate in mindless, flashy entertainment - and I use that description in a positive rather than pejorative sense. Alas, though, it wasn't particularly good, even when judged purely in those terms - sure, it's based on a video game (an important part of its appeal for me, given what I was looking for from it), but it didn't seem to gel at even a basic level...the action sequences - the raison d'etre of the film (at least on an 'artistic', as opposed to commercial, level) - just weren't all that exciting, the actors didn't make their characters breathe (paper-thin characterisation I expected, but this doesn't have to imply boring acting), and the sets weren't as cool as they ought to've been. Ah well, quel surprise, I suppose...

Garth Ennis/Steve Dillon - Preacher: Proud Americans

The next instalment - heavy on the retrospective 'background' stuff (John Custer and Cassidy both get parts of their backstories filled in) and not as engaging as the first two collections. By now, though, I've committed enough to this series that I know I'm going to finish it, particularly given how easy these are to read.

Juanillo de Alba - Spanish Classical Guitar

This came into my possession more randomly than most. trang had made me a gift of some vinyl which she'd picked up at an op shop, one of the pieces of which appeared to be Talking Heads' More Songs About Buildings And Food. Unfortunately, however, the record itself turned out not to correspond to the sleeve, and so I'm now the owner of a record of Spanish classical guitar (circa 1973) - uncharted waters for me. Still, it's music nonetheless, and the peculiar way in which it came to me tickled my fancy, so I gave the unexpected record a spin; 'classical' in this connexion basically seems to mean 'acoustic (solo)', and it's nice enough but I don't find it particularly interesting.

Gillian Welch - Revival

Simply gorgeous. It may just be the initial flush of enthusiasm talking, but I think that this is probably my favourite of Welch's (uniformly fantastic) albums. A lot of the words that I habitually overuse come to mind in describing Revival - gentle, ruminative, wistful, yearning...really, though, I can't put into words why I love this so much - I just do.

The Smiths - Hatful of Hollow

This was a pleasant surprise. I hadn't realised that the non-album compilations of Smiths material (singles and allsorts, released during their lifetime rather than retrospectively) contained different versions of the album tracks (this one, at least, houses Peel session recordings of several cuts from the band's self-titled debut as well as a couple of others). So, when I put Hatful of Hollow on, I listened through "William, It Was Really Nothing" (which was in the version I was familiar with through Singles) and was then first startled, then delighted to hear a much lighter, more bubbling version of "What Difference Does It Make?" than I was accustomed to, with more where that came from.

Indeed, the Peel recordings do tend to give fresh life to some of those early songs - I never really liked "Still Ill" or "Reel Around The Fountain" until I heard the versions on this record, but they now make much more sense to me. The wholly new songs are good, too, and it's nice to have the mournful grace of "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" on record, available to be listened to whenever I get in the mood (hopefully not too often in this my graceful age!); also, have had the swirling magnificence of "How Soon Is Now?" recalled to me by its presence on the disc.

Jay Rubin - Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words

I'd intended to hold off on reading this until I'd tracked down South of the Border, West of the Sun, Sputnik Sweetheart, After The Quake and The Elephant Vanishes (the remaining substantial books of Murakami's work which I've not yet read and which seem to be widely available in translation), but that was always going to be a difficult one to hold to once trang went and lent it to me...so, a compromise - I read it, but skipped over the bits concerning the books I'm not yet familiar with.

Anyway, as anticipated, I enjoyed it. Rubin, being a translator and fan of Murakami's rather than a professional literary critic or academic, writes clearly and straightforwardly, and reading the book did make me feel that I was sharing the thoughts of a fellow fan. The level of analysis isn't particularly deep, meaning that I'd already worked out most of what Rubin had to say for myself, but the book does a good job of canvassing important themes and motifs, and there were a few 'ah' moments, as certain comments of Rubin's (or, in some cases, Murakami's) illuminated my own readings of the books (the major thing being the emphasis on Murakami as a Japanese author, with corresponding concerns - which in retrospect is certainly an important aspect of his writing, but one which I'd tended to gloss over).

india.arie - Acoustic Soul

I'd been putting off listening to this - I didn't really anticipate that it'd be my thing, and so it had been shuffled again and again to the bottom of my 'current music' pile. (I'd spun it a couple of times in that period without it making much of an impression.) Today, though, I put it on again, actually giving the music some attention, and I knew that it was good when I found myself singing along on the second time through (the particular song being "Brown Skin"). 'Nu-soul' it may be, but it falls pleasantly on my ears - both the funkier numbers and the more mellow moments work well, making me feel sort of loose and liquid and relaxed...

The Waifs - Up All Night

Unassuming, harmonica 'n' harmony-laden acoustic folk-pop sung in unabashedly Australian accents - not spectacular, but nice.

"World Without End" @ ACMI

The program notes do a pretty good job of expressing the underlying theme of this exhibition, housed in a dark, cavernous space downstairs at ACMI: according to those notes, "World Without End" is concerned with 'how we perceive the world through an endless series of flows and flux: cycles of night and day, constantly changing weather patterns, crossings through natural and urban environments, currents of memory, emotion and reflection.' The individual pieces instantiate this broad theme in many different ways, and collectively the exhibition covers a lot of ground, doing so in a way which is almost unfailingly interesting - all sorts of cycles, flows and unified adumbrations are woven into (indeed, essentially constitute) the screened works, and despite the looseness of the exhibition's ostensible theme, there is a sort of unity to it. All in all, "World Without End" is really good.

My favourite was Daniel Crooks' "Train No. 1", in which a sort of 'time-slicing' technology is employed to create a fragmented, almost-unified perception of motion...very interesting! Also spent some time surrounded by the five parallel screens of the spectacular "History of a Day" (Simon Carroll & Martin Friedel), all scudding clouds and erupting volcanoes and windmills and bright city lights...Darren Almond's "A", tracking across Antarctic landscapes in three long pans, was another highlight - quite hypnotic, as were several of the other works - and the evocative, post-apocalyptic "Too Dark for Night" (Clare Langan), shot in desolate Namibia, also tapped into something in me. But there were lots of interesting ideas and striking images to be found outside of those few pieces, and I'd be tempted to return at some stage (given that we happened to visit on opening day, there'll be plenty of opportunities in the future).

John Fowles - A Maggot

Barring any mishaps, changes of heart or other unforeseen events, I'll write on this book for my Genre Interventions paper. The basic idea is to pick up on its self-reflexive engagement with genre etc to problematise Derrida's "Law of Genre" (so that, as usual, the 'primary' text will interrogate the 'secondary' as much as the secondary does the primary); having read A Maggot over the last couple of days, I think that there's enough in here to lend itself to that purpose. But I'll be writing enough in that vein about this book in the weeks to come; here, I mainly want to set down initial, 'pre-academic' thoughts on it based on my first reading.

I can't help but compare A Maggot to The French Lieutenant's Woman, the only other Fowles I've read, and a favourite of mine, and in this light it's somewhat disappointing. His themes in A Maggot are less closely connected to my own interests, and the structure within which they are presented, while probably bolder, is less immediately rewarding. There isn't the same sense of texture to A Maggot nor the same sense of engagement with its characters, both of which were significant to my affection for The French Lieutenant's Woman. And the detective/mystery story at its heart didn't actually interest me very much (I'm still in two minds as to whether it was meant to).

But, that said, I did enjoy A Maggot, and I admire it. Its metafictional and intertextual gestures are perhaps somewhat overfamiliar these days, but they're nonetheless still effective, and well done by Fowles, and although I found all the ideological stuff at the end to be a bit irritating, I think it 'fit' with the design of the book as a whole. So much for first impressions.

Cocteau Twins - "Violaine" single (cd 1)

I don't listen to post-Heaven or Las Vegas Cocteaus all that much, but that doesn't stop me from collecting their late-period singles whenever I come across them. This one's a typical slice of the luscious but samey-sounding Milk & Kisses cloth, the b-sides pleasant but undistinguished.

Garth Ennis/Steve Dillon - Preacher: Until the End of the World

The second collection of Preacher comics, and pretty much more of the same, although the mythos deepens (as one would hope). Still liking it.

Samuel Beckett - The Lost Ones

Another one that I skimmed fairly quickly for Genre Interventions; the subject's reading schedule and structure, when taken in conjunction with my other commitments, doesn't really permit of more leisurely enjoyment (or otherwise). I found it interesting, though somewhat discomfiting and distancing (not least because of Beckett's penchant for unpunctuated sentences). The topic for the class was that of how Beckett's work intersected with ideas of exhaustion of genre (and of literature and language) - interesting - and I was overall quite convinced by this reading of The Lost Ones. I'd like to revisit Beckett with a bit more attention when I have a chance.

Lucinda Williams - World Without Tears - Australian Tour Edition

A good album, but not speaking to me in the way that Car Wheels and Essence do. I've been listening to it for a couple of weeks now, and while the songwriting and delivery is confident and muscular, the record as a whole doesn't seem to have the indefinable spark that made her last two so great. In some ways, it feels like a bit of a consolidatory recording - it really firmly goes over the terrain that Lucinda had marked on Car Wheels and Essence, further refining and combining the musical ideas she developed on those earlier albums, but lacking any show-stopping individual songs (not that the brilliance of her records has ever really been about individual highlights) or strong sense of difference/distinction from what has come before.

Zoolander

Watched for the first time the other night and enjoyed. Sets itself as a send-up of the fashion world (and general contemporary cult of celebrity) but is of course complicit with its ostensible target and really is quite gentle in its humour. Cameos are fun (especially that of David Bowie) and enough funny bits to make this a couple of hours at the end of a tiring day well-spent.

Richard Hamblyn - The Invention of Clouds

Riding a city bus on the freeway a while back, I noticed a particularly interesting/enticing cloud formation, and thought that it might be a good idea to read a book about clouds (natural enough given how much of my time I've spent - and continue to spend - looking at clouds). So, the next time I was at the Pines library, I borrowed the only book which came up when I searched for 'clouds' on the catalogue - this one. Turned out to be a good read, too - and, in its focus on history rather than science, an accessible one.

The 'invention of clouds' referred to in the title is the classificatory system proposed by Luke Howard, a young London Quaker, in the early nineteenth century; the basic terminology introduced by Howard of 'Cirrus', 'Stratus, 'Cumulus', 'Nimbus', and their compound forms has endured down to our time. Hamblyn dwells on the significance of Howard's insistence that cloud types could indeed be identified and classified into broad families (rather than each being individual phenomena) and his insight that clouds were formed through modification and aggregation, accounting for the seemingly endless variety that we perceive. The book is oriented around Howard's life and ideas, but also fluently covers the major channels in previous and subsequent thought on clouds and the social and scientific context in which Howard's work came to fruition (it's fascinating to read the accounts of the popular public scientific lectures and the vogue for scientific societies of the time). Hambly paints with a broad, contextualising sweep - the French revolution looms in the background, Linnaeus and Lamarck play an important role, Goethe makes a personal appearance, figures like Keats, Darwin and John Constable are present at the margins of the narrative, and balloonists, explorers, amateur enthusiasts, publishers and out-and-out meteorologists all assume central stage at various points - and it all holds together rather pleasingly.

Arthur Conan Doyle - The Lost World

Re-read this for Genre Interventions. Not exactly a challenging read, but somehow it struck me as funnier this time round than the last time I read it (which was last year, I think, or maybe 03). I also wondered more about Doyle's attitude towards Professor Challenger - well, towards all of his characters, really, and what they get up to.

The Very Best of Country

I don't have enough perspective on this thing called 'country' to be certain, but this double cd seems like a good primer for the field, and could serve as a jumping-off point for any further explorations. The first disc is focused on more traditional, or at least older, 'country', populated by names which I know, even if I often haven't heard their music before - Hank Williams, Willie Nelson, Townes van Zandt, the Byrds, "Jolene", "Folsom Prison Blues"... And the second picks things up with a more contemporary/'alt-country' edge - Lucinda Williams, Ryan Adams, Whiskeytown, Cowboy Junkies and Calexico all make appearances on that one. Both discs are easy to listen to from beginning to end, with familiar songs scattered throughout their tracklistings, but, as with Faithless Street, I've been struck by how familiar-sounding many of these are, even if I've never heard them before.

He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not

Okay, the whole reason for my watching this was that Audrey Tautou was in it (well, it's a good reason), so I certainly didn't know what I was in for. In writing the entries that make up this blog, I've been pretty bloody-minded about the fact that I'm writing them for myself and not for anyone else, and the contents have reflected this, but here I feel compelled to say to anyone who may read this: spoilers follow, and if you haven't seen this film, you should stop reading this right now.

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The thing is, He Loves Me... depends on its twists and shifts in tone for its effect, and they are many. Not having the faintest idea of what this film was about, I was pulled along by the film's deceptive series of cloaks: the bright, colourful opening, Angelique (sweet Audrey, of course, whose intimations of opacity perfectly fit the role) browsing in the flower shop, suggests a whimsical romantic comedy of some kind, and this is gradually overlaid by a pall which settles over proceedings as things get considerably darker and unsettling-creepy-obsessive, causing the opening scenes to seem rather Blue Velvet-esque - serious cracks appear in the veneer, murder is done, and 'Act 1' culminates, dear reader, with our heroine gassing herself...

And the next move - the rewind - more or less turned my head inside out, not because it's a particularly original device (another Lynch film, Mulholland Drive obviously comes to mind, though that latter is weirder than He Loves Me... by about a factor of ten), but simply because it was so unexpected. Similarly, the way that the retelling from Loic's perspective gradually brings the truth to light, while also enriching and filling the gaps in the first telling, is well-crafted but fundamentally straightforward - but it works despite that straightforwardness.

I think that He Loves Me... has a bit to say about love - not least that it's complex and murky, and can take many forms - and, in the telling, it seems both oddly affirmatory and really rather dark. The last scene in which we see Loic and Rachel suggests that theirs is a true love and will prevail - but it seems to be suggested, too, that Angelique's love is no less real for being erotomanic and self-deceptive, and the grimness of the scenes showing her treatment take on a different significance when watched in light of that idea. Anyway, I'm surprised that I've written so much about this one - but it really is a rather unusual film, even if the story it tells is a familiar one.

Don DeLillo - Cosmopolis

I don't know - maybe you only need to read one DeLillo book in your life, or maybe I'm just not in the mood for him right now, but I found Cosmopolis frankly boring (of course, it may just be that the book itself isn't any good, with no reflection upon the rest of his oeuvre). Ideas of the obsolete, the morbid fascination with death and endings, mediation of reality, and world-systems are all intrinsically interesting, and DeLillo has elsewhere shown himself able to imagine and render them convincingly and subtly - but Cosmopolis is really just a parade of DeLillo's these days all-too-familiar ideas, too programmatic and obvious to be interesting, and lacking in the 'novelistic' sense and deft touch that made White Noise so compelling.

Clifford Ross and Karen Wilkin - The World of Edward Gorey

At the same time, I also borrowed this appreciation of Gorey's work, having spotted it in a bookstore earlier that day (I'm not really one for delayed gratification any more, if ever I was). For what it is, it's solid rather than exciting - there's a reasonably extended interview with E.G. himself (conducted by Ross, who's an artist of some stripe), a glowing analysis of Gorey's work by Wilkin (an art critic), and a generous collection of reproductions of Gorey's art, some scattered throughout the interview and analysis, and some collected in the final part of the book. Still, while I may've come close to damning this book with faint praise - 'solid rather than exciting' - I'm not sure how it could really have been improved; as a whole, it gives a good sense of what Gorey's art is all about, and I did pick up quite a lot from it which I hadn't previously known (he likes Matisse but not Picasso; he's fond of cats (though I could've guessed that); he often portrays himself in his own books; there are far more allusions to other artists and works of art than I'd begun to imagine (the Ronald Firbank comparison is a good one)...). Perhaps it's just that, although there's so much that could be said about the peculiar, delightful work of Edward Gorey, the art speaks more eloquently for itself than anything else ever could.

Edward Gorey - Amphigorey Also

Killing time on campus the other day, I thought that it might be a good opportunity to renew my acquaintance with the wonderful Edward Gorey, and so reborrowed this anthology from Rowden White; still as exquisite as ever.

J M Synge - The Playboy of the Western World

Another that I read - quite cursorily, I must admit - for Genre Interventions.

Spoon - Kill The Moonlight

The sort of music to which you can dance in your bedroom - or, at least, the kind of music to which I tend to dance in my bedroom. It's very catchy, building songs out of wiry, nagging, repetitive rhythms, simple structures and minimalist arrangements - often departing from the guitar-bass-drums template but always underlaid by a firm grasp of rock-pop dynamics...in some sense which I can't quite define, I think that this is very charismatic music. "Jonathon Fisk" and "The Way We Get By" are the best songs on the album, but I also particularly like "Don't Let It Get You Down" and "All The Pretty Girls Go To The City".

Bic Runga - Beautiful Collision

It's taken me this long to get around to Beautiful Collision because I always felt that Drive was so perfect on its own terms that I simply didn't need another Bic Runga album. Listening to it, was initially a bit sceptical due to the fuller sound of the record (not necessarily a virtue with this kind of music), but have been won over by those so-charming vocals, the underlying simplicity of the arrangements and the goshdarned sweetness of it all. For mine, it can't touch Drive, but Beautiful Collision has a pleasing grace of its own.

Ernest Hemingway - In Our Time

Read this for my Genre Interventions class paper. Didn't make much of an impression, but I quite liked it, and found some of the writing quite poetic, neither of which I would've expected given my preconceptions about Hemingway's style and subject-matter.

Heathers

And while I'm writing about old favourites...

I first came across Heathers entirely inadvertently, on tv, back in high school - having happened to tune in near its start, I was transfixed by the film's unhinged, blackly comic progression and uncritically fell in love with it. It's the first film that I thought of as my 'favourite' (in a similar way, "#1 Crush" was my first 'favourite' song), and quite possibly the one that clued me in to the fact that movies could actually be worthwhile (I think that it was fairly shortly thereafter that I came across The City of Lost Children - but that's a whole other story).

I'm not sure how aware I was of this at the time, but in retrospect it seems entirely natural that Heathers should have appealed to me as it did - its undiluted cynicism and acerbic perspective on teenagerhood, high school and larger society, and the disaffectedness writ large of its central protagonists, could hardly have been better calculated to strike a chord with me. The unsparing, dark satire obviously spoke to my inner misanthropist (not so very far from the surface at that time) and the more bizarre and ridiculous elements of the film must also have resonated - not to mention how funny it is. And I know that I was drawn in by the unique, quotable vernacular - much of which is still woven, for better or for worse, into the rhythms of my own speech - and the black-edged adolescent cool of JD and Veronica (it was certainly the start of my Winona fandom thing). All in all, it was just the kind of fantasy that I needed in those times.

So anyway, I watched it once more after that initial encounter (probably while still in high school), but not again since then, I don't think. This was partly because it's not easy to track down on video, partly because I didn't want to taint my memory of the film (for of course it came to assume semi-mythic proportions in my mind, as do all works of art which touch me in this way), and partly because on some level I suspected that I had, maybe, grown out of it, with the latter two reasons becoming more and more important as the years went on.

But, all of that said, I've been meaning to pick it up on dvd for a while now, and, upon spotting it a few days ago, promptly did so and rewatched it last night - and now, what to say but that I still love it as much as ever? It may no longer be absolutely my favourite film (well, I no longer have an absolutely favourite film, but even if I did, Heathers wouldn't be it), and I may nowadays be more likely to turn to a Lost in Translation or a Three Colours: Blue for solace, but Heathers is still brilliant. It still burns - and, if I no longer feel it as immediately or intensely as in the past, the passage of time has allowed me to better appreciate its intelligence, insight and subversiveness. The extras are good value, but, as interesting as it was to learn, for example, that Jennifer Connelly was originally cast in the role of Veronica (her mother refused to allow her to take up the role due to the 'anti-social' nature of the film...impossible though it is for me to see anyone other than Winona Ryder as Veronica, I have to admit that Connelly would've been pretty good, too), for me everything else will always be secondary to that original, mind-opening experience of the film itself.

Garbage - beautifulgarbage

I've written about myself and Garbage elsewhere, but basically, the band, through Garbage and "#1 Crush", was the link between my commercial radio-listening days and everything that came thereafter, and so are a pretty important landmark for me (as well as an old favourite). That notwithstanding, by the time Version 2.0 came out, my enthusiasm for them had waned considerably, and this dropping-off continued to the extent that when beautifulgarbage hit the stores in 2001 (was it really that long ago?), I didn't even bother to listen to it. (Too much listening to the Cure will do that to a boy...) A few years on, though, there's a new one on the way, and so I figured that the time might be ripe to finally check their last one out.

I actually thought that I'd probably quite like it, but, it has to be said, I'm finding the album quite underwhelming at present. The production is fantastic, but the songs just aren't quite there, and some of the musical tics (especially the dj scratching) get really annoying. The highlight for me is "Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!)", which I remember hearing on the radio - it's a fab, glam pop stomp, and the glistening production sheen works in its favour. I also quite like the band's uber-glossy Shangri-Las homage, "Can't Cry These Tears" (albeit mainly because it's an uber-glossy Shangri-Las tribute), and "Androgyny" and "Parade" are also quite good, but there's not much else on here to write home about - somehow, the sound is just too big and the songwriting too uninteresting to hold my attention.

I suspect that I'm inclined to be overly harsh in my judgement of this album precisely because of how significant the band's earlier stuff was for me, and how good that stuff was. Considered apart from any history (personal or general), beautifulgarbage is probably the sort of record that I'd enjoy quite a lot - but I don't have that kind of unmediated access to it, and so I'm left only sort of liking it, and mainly feeling that it really could have been much better.

Belle & Sebastian - This Is Just A Modern Rock Song EP

Four songs - all of them nice, and all of them très Belle & Sebastian. But none of them really touch me, meaning that this ep is a pleasant listen but a bit of a disappointment.

Starsky & Hutch

Pretty good, this, and very funny in places - lays on the 70s stuff fairly thick while affectionately sending the decade up, and gains a feel-good gloss from that approach which makes the film an enjoyable one.

In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003

Of course I already had all the album tracks, and if I wanted to listen to an R.E.M. best of, I'd make my own, including IRS stuff, dawg! But I didn't have "The Great Beyond" or "Bad Day", and I wanted to hear "Animal" and "All the Right Friends" (and, in a bonus, Peter Buck's liner notes on the individual songs are interesting), so here we are.

Still, nearly all of the songs on this cd are pretty much essential (though I could've done without the Reveal cuts, "All the Way to Reno" and "Imitation of Life"), and hearing them back to back has reminded me of why I like R.E.M. as much as I do, and really hammered home the band's greatness. It's also got me wondering how my own 'best of' would look, including music from the whole of their career, at least at the moment...there are 18 songs on In Time, so that'll be the limit; 'favourites' not 'best', all due indulgence of sentiment and personal meaning, and no attempt to represent the whole of the band's recorded output, listed in tracklist order.

1. Drive (Automatic for the People)
2. Losing My Religion (Out of Time)
3. The One I Love (Document)
4. What's The Frequency, Kenneth? (Monster)
5. Daysleeper (Up)
6. E-Bow The Letter (New Adventures In Hi-Fi)
7. Everybody Hurts (Automatic for the People)
8. so. Central Rain (Reckoning)
9. Fall On Me (Life's Rich Pageant)
10. Orange Crush (Green)
11. At My Most Beautiful (Up)
12. Be Mine (New Adventures In Hi-Fi)
13. Shaking Through (Murmur)
14. Pretty Persuasion (Reckoning)
15. Finest Worksong (Document)
16. Wendell Gee (Fables of the Reconstruction)
17. I've Been High (Reveal)
18. Electrolite (New Adventures In Hi-Fi)