Philip Pullman - The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass

About 50 pages into The Amber Spyglass, it struck me that this series, which gets better and better as it goes along, is something of an anti-Chronicles of Narnia, and that impression had been considerably augmented by the time the book had raced to its close. The Subtle Knife suffers slightly from middle book syndrome, though it does well enough for itself in introducing some important new characters and keeping the central plot moving forward, but from very early on in The Amber Spyglass, one gets the sense that all the pieces are coming together and converging upon a single point, and the pace never flags from there - an extremely good trick for a 500+ page book! This whole series is fabulous - I'm glad I came across it.

(Northern Lights)

Laura Veirs & the Tortured Souls @ Manchester Lane, Sunday 29 May

Was very excited about seeing Veirs, and had made my (anticipatory) peace with the likelihood that it would be quite a Carbon Glacier-centric set (CG's a very good album, but not half as lovely as Troubled By The Fire). Indeed, most of the songs she played were from her latest, but it was really nice to hear them given a more organic treatment (one of the reasons I don't love Carbon Glacier as much as I do TBTF is that it feels a bit too, well, glacial, as if all of its songs are coated by a thin layer of ice), with Veirs' fabulous voice right out the front.

On that subject, it really was a wonderful experience to hear the charming Laura sing live. Having spent so much time listening to her voice on record, it was odd - in an entirely pleasant way - to hear precisely the same voice coming across while I was in the same room. It made me realise how good the production on her albums is, and how unvarnished her voice is on those recordings, for she sounded pretty much exactly the same in person (and I got a kick out of hearing those familiar enunciations and intonations - that familiar accent, really - in her conversational chatter to the crowd between songs). Plus, she's such a great, unaffected yet memorable singer - how could it go wrong?

Anyway, as I said, most of the songs were from Carbon Glacier, but Veirs did play "Devil's Hootenanny" and "Tiger Tattoos", as well as some new songs (which sounded good - apparently the album's due in August), and I didn't feel shortchanged in that regard (though it would've been nice to hear "Ohio Clouds" and "Midnight Singer" - my favourite of her songs). There was also an interlude in the middle during which the band performed three songs by Tortured Soul Karl Blau (who's doing a full solo show at the Rob Roy next week) - I wasn't really feeling his stuff, but the crowd seemed to be into it...my impressions are vague but I think it was kinda Bright Eyes/Mountain Goats-y, though less harrowing/pretentious.

All in all, it wasn't as amazing as some of the gigs I've been to over the last 12 months or so (Pretty Girls Make Graves and Belle & Sebastian stand out) but, given how much I like Veirs' music, and how familiar I was with most of the songs in her set, I was always going to enjoy this, and indeed it was pretty darn good.

2046

Not sure why, but while normally I feel at least a hint of nervousness or trepidation before watching/reading/listening to something that I've keenly anticipated, somehow it never even crossed my mind that 2046 might be anything less than wonderful; my expectations having (largely subliminally) reached such great heights, then, it's probably unsurprising that my immediate reaction after seeing it was a little muted (well, there's that, and then there's the internal reeling from the sheer, lush romanticism of the film - but more on that later). I suppose that I took for granted that it would be visually spectacular, and allusive and wistful and truthful and wise, and just all round beautiful - and so when all of this was indeed realised, it wasn't the revelation that it might otherwise have been.

With the passing of a bit more time, though, the particular joys of 2046 have begun to sink in. Foremost amongst those, of course, is the swooning romance of it all - the unwavering foregrounding of love and its endless ramifications and reverberations. Unlike many films which resonate with me because I see some part of myself in them, 2046 doesn't strike me as a fantasy (sci-fi elements notwithstanding); it feels like a dream, but like the sort of dream that someone could all too easily live.

Just as we have no access to the world except through our experience of it, so too with love; the thing with Wong Kar-Wai, I think, is that his representations of these experiencings - hyper-stylised, dreamily but sometimes painfully disconnected, and shot through with colour, suggestion and sadness - feel like pictures from my own mental landscapes (though I haven't quite expressed that as fully as I'd like), and perhaps especially in 2046. I don't really empathise with Tony Leung's character in this film, nor with any of the others - they're further along in their stories than I am in mine - but I can see a real continuity between them and myself, for I organise my own world similarly to them, and it makes me terribly wistful, as well as renewing the old question of what will eventually become of me...

The Missing

A bit of a disappointment, this one. It's competently made but feels somehow hollow - not exactly barren (which would have been appropriate given the starkness of the settings and the harshness of the characters' lives), nor particularly 'airbrushed' or 'glossy', but just somehow missing something intangible. At no point was I really emotionally or viscerally engaged - and such engagement is pretty much the sine qua non for a successful entry in this genre, I think.

"The Sound of Painting" @ Arts Centre

A smallish collection of contemporary Australian art inspired by music in a variety of ways. The most striking is Jensen Tjhung's installation, which takes up the entire back wall of the George Adams gallery, the installation being made up of a burned-out 19th century piano; the artist having, with a few of his friends, ceremoniously set fire to it one night (while listening to Johnny Cash, etc) and then done a series of large paintings about the experience. A decent concept, and sounds as if it would've been fun to be part of, but the art itself didn't much speak to me.

My favourites were Cathy Blanchflower's organically formalistic, repetitive 'oil on canvas' patterns, which struck me at the time as having a sort of shifting duck/rabbit effect, although the connection to music eluded me till I came across this, while looking for examples of her work online. Other noteworthy ones were Noel McKenna's cute bird/musical notes pieces, and the two brightly coloured oil paintings by Anne Wallace, one depicting Grant McLennan and Robert Forster (of Go-Betweens fame) and the other, "Showpeople", showing an androgynous figure sitting in an armchair, mirroring the pose of a starlet in a b&w photo in the background.

The Royal Tenenbaums

Expected this to be a lot funnier than it actually was, but it was still rather good. Actually, the film isn't really an out and out comedy, though it's too (deliberately) absurd to properly be called a drama; The Royal Tenenbaums works quite well as some kind of quirky admixture of the two (surely not 'comma', so perhaps 'dramedy', which is itself rather too close to 'dromedary' for me to take it seriously...). Royal's contradictory attitude towards his family seemed an apt sort of metaphor for the attitude of the film as a whole (deadpan/satirical/wavering/ultimately fond) towards its subject(s); in its portrayal of family dysfunctionality, it reminded me a bit of The Corrections (surely it won't be too long before a film version of that one appears?), though the vivid colours and outfits were distinctly cinematic. Quality cast, but Gwyneth stole the show as the most Gorey-esque character I've ever seen on screen (I'm always surprised to be reminded that she can actually act, and yet I don't think I've ever seen her put in a bad performance).

It took me a while to get into this, but it really grew on me as it went on, and I found myself smiling as the closing credits rolled.

Aimee Mann - I'm With Stupid

Delicious - sweetly, perfectly acerbic, like all of her best work. Mann's second solo lp, it's a big step forward from Whatever, if not in the same league as Bachelor No 2; compared to Lost In Space, it seems less fully realised but is, I think, probably the better record. Most of I'm With Stupid is made up of the sophisticated mid-tempo pop songs that are Mann's primary stock in trade, but, as usual, she pulls off the mournful ballads ("Par For The Course" is lovely and amazing) and the upbeat power-pop numbers (I must've listened to "Superball" about ten times consecutively while walking around the city today) equally adeptly...appetite now well and truly whetted for the new album, assuming it ever actually hits local shores.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

In the aftermath of the frantic last few days of doing very little other than writing the draft of my Rationality paper, I dropped by the local video store last night and picked up a few movies, amongst them this one. And really, what's there to say about it? It's still spectacular; I'm so glad that these films were so well made.

forbiddenlibrary.com

Another neat link which made me smile: http://www.forbiddenlibrary.com.

Country Songbirds

More splashin' around in the shoals of the massive ocean that is country music. A few familiar and well-loved names to guide me - Gillian Welch, Lucinda Williams (two of her best cuts, "Passionate Kisses" and "Right In Time", no less), Caitlin Cary, Lisa Miller - and other pantheon types whom I know primarily by reputation/name-recognition (the ilk of Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline - plus Dusty Springfield, Janis Joplin and some other more unexpected inclusions). It seems a remarkably comprehensive double cd set, focused on female 'country' artists of course, and there's heaps to enjoy on it beyond that with which I was already familiar.

It occurred to me that one of the reasons why I respond to this kind of music (apart from the obvious double punch that it tends to be both tuneful and sad) is that often there's a sense of coming in midway through a conversation or continuing story, both lyrically and melodically, and both in the sense that individual songs often seem to pick up a thread as if they'd been going on before the song actually started, as it were, and in the sense that there's obviously a rich heritage stretching back upon which these artists are drawing (and of which they're themselves a part), the particular song triggering that thought being Laura Cantrell's "Not The Tremblin' Kind"...

All of this listening to compilations is beginning to give me a sense for how the genre as a whole fits together, from its iconic figures and songs through to its leading contemporary practisers (Shelby Lynne's "Leavin'", say, recurs on a couple of these sets; Alison Krauss is ubiquitous; and so on)...not sure whether this counts as an organic process or quite the opposite. Either way, it's quite exciting to feel this whole field opening up in front of me, waiting to be explored more fully (and explore it I will, I think, despite some continuing misgivings about the simplicity and lack of innovation of much of this music).

Unsurprisingly, I tend to be drawn to the more contemporary musicians - apart from Lucinda, Gillian, etc, Kathleen Edwards' "Six O'Clock News" is one of my favourites (reminding me a bit of Leona Naess' fab "Charm Attack"), and Julie Miller's distinctly pop-inflected "Ride The Wind To Me" is another high point at this stage (her girlish keen reminding me inevitably of Kasey Chambers); Heather Myles' "Love Me A Little Bit Longer", a marginally more 'country' "Right In Time"-esque rocker is also really good. (That said, my favourite 'new' song across the set is probably Wanda Jackson's 1960 number "Funnel Of Love" - the liner notes say it's 'rockabilly' but to me it sounds more like some kind of crazy spaghetti western theme filtered through vaguely sixties-girl-group-esque pop sensibilities and topped by a wonderfully eccentric, gritty voice and delivery.)

Arabesque: All About Lily Chou-Chou - Original Soundtrack

I simply haven't been able to get this film out of my head - I've seen a lot of really good films lately, but All About Lily Chou-Chou may well be the best of them, or at least the most compelling. I don't know why it's gotten so deeply stuck inside me - normally my cinematic tastes run to the pretty/beautiful or the quirky/stylishly dark, and I don't think that Lily Chou-Chou is really any of those things (though you could make a case for all of them, albeit in a somewhat unconventional fashion)...I'm a bit afraid to watch it again, lest the magic be lost.

Debussy is well represented, as one would expect; the selections' lightness/dream-heaviness fits perfectly. Elsewhere there's some other piano music (delicate and pretty), the song performed by the students in the film, the mournful folk dirge intoned by the guides on the boys' island trip, and various incidental stuff...all extremely listenable, especially when tied to my impressions of the film it accompanies.

In The Mood For Love - Original Soundtrack

A curious mix of styles and stylings, loosely connected by two threads - the film which it soundtracks, and the air of nostalgia hanging over the whole. Like the film, it's sort of kitschy, though in a good way (sometimes I wonder if I'd even recognise 'bad' kitsch any more, so wrapped up am I in my world of happily depthless pomo simulacra...maybe the point is that there's no longer such a thing as 'bad' kitsch)...and in some indefinable sense it's also very 'soundtracky'. It doesn't really engage me to the extent that some soundtracks do, though, possibly because it feels like a series of ephemeral, allusively-related snippets of music rather than a coherent whole.

O Sister! The Women's Bluegrass Collection

A nice little collection, though not an inspirationally good one. It was put out by Rounder, which is apparently quite a well-established roots music label, and holds pretty much the sort of music you'd expect it to, based on its title. As I'm very much a bluegrass neophyte, I can't attest to the 'authenticity' of the cuts (always an important consideration!), but I have my doubts given that they don't, for the most part, feel particularly old-timey...

None of the individual songs really stand out (I tend to listen to the disc as a whole, anyway), and to these pop music-conditioned ears there's not a great deal of variation, particularly tempo-wise, but the Alison Krauss cut, "Every Time You Say Goodbye", left an impression thanks to her wonderful voice, and the melodies of several of the others have gotten into my head. Incidentally, when I stopped to think about it, I had a quiet giggle at the song titles: "Sad Situation", "True Life Blues", "You Tried To Ruin My Name", "Blow, Big Wind", "Comin' Down From God", and so on...comes with the territory, I guess!

Guitar Wolf: Wild Zero

1. Rock 'n' roll will save the world.
2. All you need is love.
3. Quiffs, bikes, sucked-in cheeks, shades worn at night, and leather all round; Japanese guys who look like Elvis and Richard Ashcroft.
4. Zombies. A villain in a hairpiece. And a hella cute transgender.
11. Japanese b-movie heaven.

McSweeney's lists

Just came across this, and am finding it intermittently hilarious: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/lists/...have only dipped into it myself, but I do particularly like "Things Heard During John Cage's Folsom Prison Performance of "4'33""" (unfortunate conjunction of double quotation marks and all).

I'd imagine that the rest of the McSweeney's site is in a similar vein. Ah, Dave Eggers - love him or loathe him (or, as in my case, a bit of both), there's no avoiding the man these days (symptomatically, I read a few days ago that he's somehow associated, presumably as a screenwriter, with a mooted film version of Where The Wild Things Are!).

Umberto Eco - Foucault's Pendulum

Funny. I felt that I understood this book a lot less after this, my second reading, than immediately after the first (two or three years ago, I think). It's also not as good as I remembered it to be, although possibly I'd just built it up to an unreal level in my mind between these two readings; I still enjoyed it, but felt no sense of intoxication or joy in the reading. If circumstances were rather more conducive, I'd think about doing a bit of analysis of, or at least a bit of gesturing in relation to, this novel which, after all, I've in the past considered to be one of my favourites; as it is, though, I'll content myself with the thought that this changed response to Foucault's Pendulum can most likely be, in some measure, mapped on to changes in my own mental landscape in the intervening period.

You Am I - #4 Record

The singles from this album - "Rumble", "Heavy Heart" and "What I Don't Know 'Bout You" - were played a lot on triple j at the time when I listened a lot to triple j (late high school), and so are coloured with a nostalgic hue even though they're not the match of songs like "Berlin Chair" and "Cathy's Clown"; the album as a whole is workmanlike but unexciting.

Just Because I'm A Woman: Songs of Dolly Parton

As is frequently the case with covers albums, the songs with the best melodies come through best, meaning that the immediate standouts on this disc are Melissa Etheridge's slow-burning, hesitant version of "I Will Always Love You" and the "Jolene"-by-way-of-nineties-singer-songwriter-sensibilities offered by a newcomer, Mindy Smith. (I also liked the Kasey Chambers take on a song called "Little Sparrow", though the melody is strikingly similar to that of Chambers' own (rather fab, though perhaps, as it now turns out, unoriginal) duet with Paul Kelly, "I Still Pray".)

I'm not particularly familiar with Dolly Parton's back catalogue, but this cd has been another factor causing me to re-evaluate the caricature buxom blonde overblown good ol' fashioned country singer image of her that I've been carrying around for as long as I can remember, because these songs, as interpreted by an impressive rollcall of female pop/country artists (Alison Krauss, Norah Jones, Shania Twain, Emmylou Harris, Sinead O'Connor and others) are quality, and the respect that all of the musicians associated with the disc obviously have for her is remarkable.

Salyu/Takeshi Kobayashi - Kokyu (music from All About Lily Chou-Chou)

This is the disc made up of music ostensibly by Lily Chou-Chou (performed by a singer named Salyu). The music itself is surprisingly difficult to describe - it's basically pop-electronica, I guess, though not entirely cut adrift from more organic sounds, generally tending towards the drifty/ethereal though at times breaking into soaring choruses and getting downright noisy in other places (sort of Julee Cruise-esque). Overall, the record's a bit uneven, and feels more like a collection of individual songs than an album proper, but I'm liking it. "Kaifuku Suru Kizu" is by a long way my favourite track, and I'm not sure how much I would like the rest of the songs were they not so closely connected with the film - but then that conditional is hardly relevant, is it? The fact is that those connections are there, and my experience of the music is correspondingly enriched.

Harlan Ellison - Alone Against Tomorrow: Stories of Alienation in Speculative Fiction

I'd read "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" before, on the strength of that story's attention-grabbing title, and enjoyed it, but there's not much else in this collection which is up to that standard. I wouldn't say that there are any real lemons, but Ellison's unsettling tales of futuristic nightmare-scapes and - there's no better word for it - alienated humanity tend to pall after one has read a few of them in a row; it's probably telling that my other favourite piece in this collection is one which is actually quite funny and even a bit optimistic, "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman". Still, taken as a whole, these stories are quite gripping and thought-provoking, and humankind is always firmly at the forefront of Ellison's imagination without the writing ever being preachy or overly obvious in its messages.

Chungking Express

Wasn't able to make it out to any of the ACMI screenings but stumbled across a cheap ex-rental video copy of this while looking for Ghost World and swooped upon it. A rare treat it is, too - thoughtful and meditative but also laugh-out-loud funny, and it left me with a really warm, happy feeling. Its pleasures are at one and the same time immediate (the kinetic, colourful, in-love-with-pop-culture style, the joy of the characterisations and characters' interactions, the nonchalantly off-the-wall elements...) and subtle (these latter being of their nature harder to specify, but the numerous manners in which the two storylines parallel each other are a significant aspect); it's garish and energetic but also rather deep and is just satisfying on every level.

The actors playing the four central roles were all very good. Faye Wong, who I know as a mega pop-star with a penchant for covering English pop songs - or, at least, adopting their melodies - was cute and nowhere near as annoying as I'd have expected, but Tony Leung really stood out. I'm sold on him - for he has great screen charisma and I can fully understand why he's such a favourite of the fairer sex (on top of that, he's a good actor, though that's almost beside the point!). Liked the use of pop music, too ("California Dreaming" and a Cantonese cover of the Cranberries' "Dreams"), a far cry from the cringe-worthy appearance of the canto-pop version of "Take My Breath Away" in As Tears Go By - in another film, I might have found the repetition and extended playing annoying, but here it works really well.

In two words, sheer delight.

As Tears Go By

Fun to watch, but not very memorable (the experience wasn't improved by the fact that the imported print had been damaged, and so was sans subtitles at various points). Gangster films, Asian or otherwise, don't generally particularly excite me, though there are a few nice touches (the delicately played encounter between Ah Wah and his old girlfriend, sheltering from the rain, comes to mind) which lift As Tears Go By above the run of the mill. (Of course, I was watching it as a Wong Kar-Wai film, rather than strictly as a genre piece, which must have coloured my response to it...)

D M Thomas - The White Hotel

This was recommended to me by Nicolette (from Mallesons) and I just got round to borrowing it in the midst of my Derrida/Fowles paper-writing flurry. Expected it to be fairly heavy going, and so it proved to be (good grief, the holocaust comes into it about three-quarters of the way in). I always struggle with this kind of literature - 'this kind' being, I suppose, the kind which doesn't offer me any obvious hooks (the foregrounded 'textuality' and postmodernist-y elements notwithstanding) - and suspect that my enjoyment would have been considerably increased were I more familiar with Freud, psychoanalysis and 'sexual hysteria' (my knowledge of those subjects is fairly scattershot, having been picked up in an ad hoc fashion whilst doing other things). It's cleverly put together in the way that it gradually lays out its extensively (and often deliberately misleadingly) documented 'case history', and I'm sure there are quite a lot of layers to the novel (the imagery seems very rich, and there seems to be some kind of underlying, circular structure to it all), but I didn't really get it.

shoutingatspeakers.com

Hey, Nenad and some of his friends have started a music-type website. Early days yet, but it's looking pretty good: http://www.shoutingatspeakers.com.

All About Lily Chou-Chou

How to respond to this, another of those films that's like nothing I've ever seen? It's beautiful and stark, and my strongest impression of Lily Chou-Chou is the loneliness that it conveys. All of the main characters - Yuichi, Hoshino, Kuno and Shiori - seem quietly desolate; it's as if there are holes inside them, or gaps between them, that can't be filled, at least in the 'real' world, away from the Ether of Lily's music and the backlit screens of the bulletin boards where they can interact, awkwardly but passionately...the bullying, then, is in some sense the cause of this damage, but it also seems to be symptomatic of a deeper rot in (Japanese) society, and particularly amongst its young.

Somehow I can't stop thinking about the movie. Initially, I was a bit confounded by the jumps backwards and forwards in time and then, having more or less worked out how all the pieces fit together (though I'll still need to watch the whole thing again to be sure), thought that they seemed pointless stylistic affectations - this all happened last night, immediately after watching it (1 - 3.30am for the viewing, and then later for the reconstruction). Having slept on it, though, I do think that those shifts add to the experience, as does the decision to shoot the whole thing on digital video - both devices better dramatise the inwardness of the protagonists and (I think) give the film more of an emotional punch than would have been possible through a more conventional, linear means of telling the story.

Everything is clouded and murky, and the few 'sunnier' moments seem, even at the time, partially occluded by subsequent sadness and the gauze of nostalgia, but somehow the colours bleed through as well. This is hardly an optimistic film - in fact, in many ways it's very depressing - but somehow it's strangely uplifting at the same time (the kite scene, say, is beautiful, and that's what makes it, in the end, terribly sad), and the film's insistence on the 'colours' of life and at least the possibility of something better are never abandoned. Indeed, the closing sequence is absolutely crushing in its balancing of these two themes - the grey of the everyday world and the colours of the other - and images of loneliness and near-connectedness (so near and yet so far, and of course it, too, is from before everything had played itself out events-wise). I don't know - it may not be for everyone, but All About Lily Chou-Chou makes a lot of sense to me.

I watched the film because a mix cd that trang gave me earlier this year had included one of its songs, but I was only a few minutes in when I realised that there was another connection - a large still of the boy standing in a green field, listening to music through his discman, had somewhere caught my eye before and in fact I'd incorporated it into one of the collages in my room (without being aware of the provenance of the image)...which now comes to form something akin to the Aimee Mann/Ghost World link, especially given that that image acquires such emotional freight over the course of the film...

Also, this is a good link to follow after watching Lily Chou-Chou - it provides a lot of the context for the film.

Wilco - Being There

Mmm...I guess that there's a bit of country in here, but I think that Being There is basically a rock and roll (double) album, and a darn good one, too, heaps of fun all the way through from slow-burn opening anthem "Misunderstood" to riotous bar-room romp closer "Dreamer In My Dreams". They're both highlights; other favourites are "Outtasite (Outta Mind)", "What's The World Got In Store" and "Sunken Treasure". Thinking about it, though, it's hard to pick individual songs out, as the record works best as a whole; I like the way the two discs kind of mirror and comment on each other, too, the second serving as a more mellow, laidback counterpoint to the first (until its closing number). One of the key things about Wilco, I think, is that they're fantastic songwriters - the melodies often aren't particularly immediate, and even once they've emerged are frequently far from memorable, but the songs stick with you.

On another note, while browsing in Readings last night, I heard "I Am Trying To Break Your Heart" and the song caught me a little bit, making me think that the time might be ripe for me to reassess YHF (a pity that I no longer have a copy of it...although something suddenly makes me think that I might still have it after all - will need to dig around and have a look for the cd. I know that I have a tape of the documentary, which I'll presumably get round to watching one day, somewhere in my room)...

Daniel Clowes - Ghost World

At first, I was liking this very much less than the film (which may have had something to do with the fact that I read the first bit while balancing it in one hand and photocopying stuff with the other, buried in the bowels of the Baillieu), but I got into it more and more as it went on, and, after finishing it on the bus heading home, ended up going through the whole thing again later the same night (last night). I think that the initial response was mostly born of the fact that the characters in the graphic novel are much less attractive than their filmic representatives; much of the appeal of the film is that Enid and Rebecca are such beautiful drifters and, even allowing for the differences between graphic art and real people, Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson these illustrations ain't. Perhaps even more importantly, the world as a whole is a much more washed-out place in the comic - apart from the black and white of the line drawings, the only colour is a sort of pale unvarying turquoise, giving proceedings an air of perpetual twilight.

But - let's face it - the comic is far more true to life. The Enid of the comics isn't unbearably cool, and its Rebecca isn't impossibly gamine and doe-like, but really, neither are people who act and talk like this in 'real life', just as lives such as these aren't lived in vivid daubs of technicolour and intangible sparkle. And there's something about the comics that makes me want to read them over and over despite the unprettiness - a lot seems to take place between the panels, and the disjointedness of some of the transitions is apt to the floating 'ghost world' Clowes renders. They may be grittier than the film, and consequently have evoked less of a response from me, but these comics share an undefinable edge which, if anything, cuts deeper (though less personally profoundly) than their cinematic adaptation.

Downfall

Agreed to see this with Kevin before realising that it would interrupt my Three Colours sequence, but oh well - I haven't really been in the mood to watch Red (or, for that matter, anything else) these last few nights anyway. Anyway, I thought that it was very good. What do I know about the historical events it portrays? Practically nothing. But nonetheless I felt very strongly that there was a sort of verisimilitude to its representation of those last days in the bunker in Berlin - the film had an almost documentary feel, an impression perhaps augmented by (a) the absence of any overtly cinematic or artistic narrative thread (it's depiction rather than story); and (b) (compensating for (a)) my basic familiarity - no doubt shared by everyone who has watched Downfall - with its subject matter (figures like Himmler, Goebbels, Eva Braun and, needless to say, Hitler himself are instantly recognisable - and of course we all know how this story ends).

I don't really buy into the idea that, by depicting Hitler as human, and capable of human affection and so on, this film somehow runs the risk of inspiring sympathy (or even pity) for him, and of glossing over the unquestionable evil of his deeds. It's a tricky one to work through all the way, though. It's true that he's portrayed believably, and as possessing at least flashes of what we might call humanity (most notably his affection for those of his staff who he believes have not betrayed him), and the spectre of the Jews falls relatively lightly on the film (although the question is certainly not entirely glossed over). However, this does not a sympathetic portrayal make, and I find it hard to imagine that a film such as this could inspire sympathy for Hitler in any way which we might account harmful.

All of which goes to show how much of an exercise in sifting through associations is watching this film - watching it, one is always and inescapably watching a film about Hitler and the collapse of his regime. It would be futile to view Downfall separately from its historical basis - to try to judge it 'on its merits' as a work of art, separate from its subject matter, would be to miss the point. There's something I want to say but the words aren't quite coming out. It's something like: if a film with this storyline had been made, but not explicitly based on the last days of Hitler and his inner circle, nevertheless we would have recognised the story in it and viewed it accordingly. What can I really say about this film apart from describing its effect? I hardly noticed the acting, or the cinematography - which makes me think that both were probably excellent, or at least excellently apt, in that they were believable enough to make the experience seamless. As to its effect: it engrossed me from start to finish. Like I said, I think that it was very good - whatever that may mean in this context.

Thomas Harris - Red Dragon

Somehow this ended up in my collection a while back, and I've just finished it for the second time (I really need to buy more books, if only to give myself more choice of reading material in the small hours of the morning). I don't read much of this kind of stuff, but it's competent enough - fast-paced, grey-shaded and unnerving in places.

First Fictions: Introduction 13

A collection of short fiction - I picked it up from a secondhand discount bin at some point last year, or the year before. Can't remember why any more; possibly something had leapt out at me from whichever page I'd happened to open it up to. Anyway, it seems to be a volume from a periodical of some sort put out by Faber & Faber (1997); I'd never got around to reading it before now.

I don't really know anything about any of the writers represented, although I have a feeling that I've heard Elliot Perlman's name recently (possibly there's been a film adapatation of one of his books?). Four of his stories are included, and they're quite good - terse and adept in drawing out the sadness of the everyday (it didn't surprise me to learn from the biographical notes that he's a lawyer - he writes like one), and about people trying to get by. Art Corriveau's, haunted by death, are in a similar vein, and are probably my favourites in the book. As to the others, Keith Ridgway is represented by a single, rather Winton-esque novella-length piece, "Horses" (okay but not brilliant), and there are four Hannah Crow stories which I have a feeling might be quite good but don't have the stomach to tackle just now (jumpy, fragmented, semi-stream of consciousness, long paragraphs, etc).

The Wilco Book

A handsome volume, laid out in true postmodern style with bits and pieces everywhere (often bits and pieces which seem to have little or no connection to anything else), but it's fun, rather than frustrating, to browse (probably because there's a pretty clear, conventional structure underlying all the odd juxtapositions and unlikely collage effects).

The band come across very much as musicians' musicians - much musing about the song-writing/recording process, and the joys and perils of playing live, as well the many loving photos of, and burblings about, guitars, percussion, amps and other equipment, are ample evidence of that - and also seem very thoughtful about what they do (although, wisely, they shy away from over-intellectualising the process too much).

Elsewhere, Rick Moody writes a high-falutin', excessively pretentious and really rather insightful piece about 'five songs', one from each album (scoring major Howard-points by picking "She's A Jar" from Summerteeth); random/purposeful bits of art (done by the band/related to the music and otherwise) and scientific schematics are interspersed throughout; the margins are filled by all kinds of ephemera, including a haiku written by the bass player ("They sit listening/Then a bit of conferring/Zen Palate again?"); and so forth.

Acoustic

It was always way optimistic to imagine that a double cd set including acts as well-known as Radiohead, Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley, Aimee Mann, Mercury Rev, Doves, Coldplay, Dido and so on would be made up of acoustic versions of their often iconic songs, even if it was called 'Acoustic'. Anyway, that optimism having indeed proved to be misplaced, and the set instead being made up of the original recordings of these songs, I now find myself in possession of 36 songs' worth of polite, mostly contemporary cafe music, a solid one-third of which I already had in my collection, one way or another. Of the ones I wasn't already familiar with, only Grandaddy's "So You'll Aim Towards The Sky" and Morcheeba's "Part Of The Process" have really stood out, though the set as a whole tends towards homogeneity, so that I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few more good ones buried amidst all the restrained strumming and gentle trip-hop beats.

Interjection 5: Connections

It struck me a couple of days ago that the song "Ghost World" on Bachelor No 2 must be a Clowes reference; having made that connection, I realised how perfectly Mann's typically bitter-sweet tune captures that same sense of alienation, of hanging around and watching summers waste away. The realisation made me happy - the splendidness of Ghost World the film is still fresh in my mind and "Ghost World" the song is one of the high points on one of my favourite albums, and it satisfies my sense of rightness that there should be such a close connection between the two.

Though it's rare for the connection/relationship to be as precisely apt as this one, I've come across similar links between favourites of mine from time to time. The only one I can think of just now is the smashing edition of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland/Through The Looking Glass I found a while ago, illustrated by Mervyn Peake (a perfect match, for mine) and, moreover, printed with introductions by Zadie Smith (perfect in a different way) and Will Self (less perfect, but still someone whose stuff I came across independently and quite enjoyed, if not to the extent of anything else I've mentioned in this entry).

[7/9/17: an edit to move the last para to a new home]

Three Colours: White

White is very different from its companion pieces - lighter in tone (appropriately enough given its colour theme) and distinctively sardonic in flavour, and, unlike Blue and Red, not really about anything larger than its immediate concerns. These factors probably had a lot to do with White being, for me, the least immediately appealing of the three, and its remaining my least favourite upon repeated viewings. Still, that's hardly a damning criticism given how much I like Blue and Red, and White has plenty going for it in its own right.

For me, White really works - and works well - on the level of amusement. The film as a whole amuses me in the way that things which are light and weighty at the same time often do; the characters are interesting enough, and things move on rapidly enough, to hold my interest (although it's a bit choppy at times - odd, when Kieslowski's films are normally practically paeans to fine editing). Moreover, watching it with the theme of 'equality' in mind adds another layer to proceedings (though again, not as much as in Blue and Red), and the colour white is used wittily throughout in the cinematography and settings. All of that said, though, I don't think that I could really watch this one over and over and continue to enjoy it.

Amélie Nothomb - The Book of Proper Names

Another wonderfully tart Nothomb fable - they slide down so easily, and I suspect them to be addictive (I don't know how I'm going to cope with losing the near-instant gratification of all literary desires provided by the university library systems). This seems to be her latest (it's certainly her latest in English translation), and she's shucked off much of the annoying preciousness which marred her earlier writing. As a result, the book (at 122 widely-spaced pages, it's hardly a novel) is pleasingly taut - slender and well-formed, or words to that effect - and the moments of whimsy work better (including the amusing, unbalancing metafictional entry of Amélie Nothomb late in the piece). The flipside is that it's slightly lacking in zest, but tis still très bien.

Three Colours: Blue

Having splashed out and bought the collectors edition of Kieslowski's amazing Three Colours trilogy, this seems a good opportunity to sit down and watch the three in close succession and to set down a few thoughts about each along the way...

It starts, appropriately enough, with Blue, blue for liberty - the first in the trilogy, the first that I saw, whose soundtrack I can listen to over and over, and to which I respond in a way that no other film comes even close to evoking. Suffused in blue, it's a film of immense subtlety and visual and emotional depth; so much is unsaid but so much is conveyed and suggested. I always find watching it to be an incredibly rich experience, heart-piercing and uplifting all at once - it's oblique and stylish to the point of stylisation, and somehow this adds to its insight and truthfulness. Every image is exquisite and many linger in the mind (especially the scene in which Julie physically abrades herself, dragging her fist along a stone wall as she almost runs alongside it, all sorts of things written in her face), the music is gorgeous (and central), Juliette Binoche is remarkable...

I think that Blue might be the most perfect film I've ever seen.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I was all prepared to be a hard marker with this one - I didn't see how the books could translate effectively to film, I'd seen the filmic Marvin and thought he was way too cute, and hey, they're messing with literature for which I've had some serious love in the past (and which, for better or for worse, has definitely left its mark on me). But the initial sequence with the dolphins went a long way to winning me over, and I thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the film - it wasn't uniformly funny, but there were no 'down' or dull parts for me, either.

Oddly given my expectations (but perhaps not so oddly in another sense), I think that this was a film best appreciated by those who are familiar with the books (and, presumably the radio/tv series, neither of which I know much about) which comprised its source material - that kind of familiarity gives the film a richness and a sense of unifiedness that I suspect would otherwise have been lacking. This works in a global sense (grasping what it's all about), from scene to scene (anticipating the payoffs with jokes and planted clues, such as the two mice, say, and enjoying the added scenes like the strangely hilarious idea-discouraging spades buried in the sand of Vogsphere...the subliminal joke there being that the Vogons, as bureaucrats, of course never have any original ideas...of which there are a surprising, and effective, number), and on the level of minutiae (David pointed out to me afterwards that the original tv-series Marvin actually got a cameo in the film).

I thought (again somewhat against expectations) that everyone looked right - Arthur and Trillian certainly, Mos Def as Ford Prefect made sense immediately (though I'd always visualised him as a Harrison Ford/Han Solo type, for regrettably obvious reasons), Zaphod was good once I got over the disappointment of where his second head was (ingenious enough but I would've liked them side by side on his neck), Slartibartfast was perfect, and as to Marvin, well, it wasn't as I'd always imagined him but I didn't find the change too offensive and it worked in its own way. Overall, I felt that the Adams feel was preserved quite well - the special effects were both impressive and somehow dinky, and the Python-esque feel of the whole was appropriate enough (and let's not forget the improbability drive-induced craziness which was actually shown). So, no complaints in these parts - this is jolly good.

"Excuse me...who are you?": Perfect Blue

I've never quite been able to work out why, but people often expect me to be into anime - they seem to feel that it'd be consonant with my other tastes, my personality, or possibly both. Truth be told, anime isn't a particularly big thing for me at all - sometimes I come across one that I like (not that I've seen more than half a dozen or so), but I don't generally have strong feelings either way.

Perfect Blue was pretty good, though. It's well-plotted and structured, and definitely kept me disoriented and guessing throughout (and had me thinking about it well after the closing reel, which isn't always the case with these kinds of perspective-shifting thriller type films...I'm still not sure of the significance/'reality'/nature of certain key scenes). It was psychologically sophisticated enough to keep things interesting (although the sophistication arose more from the ingenuity of the screenplay than from any particular psychological insight), and the stylish (stylised) animated format seemed particularly suited to the film's shifts and inversions between reality and fantasy, adding an extra layer of disconnectedness. Neat.

Azure Ray - Hold on Love

One of the things about being excited by music that isn't terribly well known (but still well known enough to make its way into the shops) is that while paying $35 for an import or difficult-to-find disc is not unusual, it's just as frequently possible to pick up a potential gem for something more in the vicinity of $5, which happens to be exactly what I paid for both Long Shot Novena and, a couple of days later, this disc, Azure Ray's Hold on Love (to be honest, I probably wouldn't have paid any more for either of them).

As it happens, while I wouldn't quite go so far as to call Hold on Love a gem, it's a more than pleasant listen: hushed, sombre, downbeat, and oh so pretty (for the most part, it's just two girls sing-murmuring to the accompaniment of piano, acoustic guitar and muted programmed tones), Azure Ray takes some of its cues from contemporary gothic-inflected folksters like Will Oldham, and some from indie-pop of the precious/wistful stripe, and comes up with something sweet and occasionally haunting. Favourite songs at the moment are "We Are Mice" and "Look To Me"; the Saint Etienne-esque "If You Fall", while unrepresentative of the album's overall mood, is also very nice.

The Last of the Mohicans

Had the impression that this was a cut above the standard period adventure film (I must have seen it back in high school) and so persevered despite the poor picture quality and muffled sound of the tape of it that I'd borrowed. It is good, too. I suspect that it stuck in my mind mainly because it contains a couple of motifs that preoccupied me during those years (most prominently the way in which Alice, really quite a minor character, goes to her death), but it's very strong across the board: all the elements - exciting set-pieces, sweep, pace, good acting, magnificent cinematography, heart-tugging music - are there.

"Bill Henson: 3 Decades of Photography" @ NGV Australia

Checked this out (with Wei) because the shadows and broodiness which dominate the examples of Henson's photography used in the ads seemed likely to be my bag. Having now been through the eight rooms of the exhibition, covering the whole of his career, my strongest impression is that that interplay of light and dark is fundamental to Henson's work, whether brought to bear on his characteristic long-limbed, sombre-transported adolescents, urban crowd scenes, or cloud-dominated landscapes. It's all very expressionistic, and there are hints of decadence and the gothic scattered throughout, as well as a distinct swell of romanticism (if my Lit degree has been good for nothing else, it's at least taught me to distinguish between some of these terms - and, obviously, to write sentences completely weighed down by them).

I particularly liked the series of paired, chemically manipulated images (apparently gelatin silver photographs, laid down in lead...whatever that means) which were mostly girl/decayed architecture, and the vistas in which the outlines and forms of clouds trace, highlight and shade into semi-silhouetted trees and muted, branded buildings; wasn't so keen on the crowd scenes or the cityscapes. The often eroticised adolescents were a bit of a mixed bag - the ones focusing on the body were compelling, particularly when taken as a whole, but less so once the novelty wore off, and the fragmented cut-ups, in which pairs or groups of Henson's semi-naked subjects are posed or juxtaposed in darkness against both nature-landscapes and man-made structures (I was amused that Wei didn't linger in the room containing those ones), were striking but a bit strident for my tastes.

Haruki Murakami - "Where I'm Likely To Find It"

A nice little slice of Murakami's world: here.

Philip Pullman - Northern Lights

I started looking for this, the first book in Pullman's "His Dark Materials" series, after seeing it on a few lists of books/films/music which also contained a number of my personal icons, so I had every expectation of enjoying it, and it is very good; though it's ostensibly 'childrens' literature' (Paradise Lost-referencing series title notwithstanding), I imagine that a large part of these books' fanbase would be people in similar headspaces to myself.

The basic genre is fantasy, and it's pretty heady stuff given its supposed target audience (which is all to the good) - not as dark as the Borrible trilogy, say (though, on the evidence of Northern Lights, equally good), but a significant step further into the shadows than the Harry Potter books (not that I've read beyond halfway through the first of those). The reader spends a large part of the first fifty pages or so in the dark as to what's going on (a deliberate move on the author's part), but once things begin to coalesce, they do so richly and satisfyingly, gradually revealing the breadth of Pullman's imagination. The plot moves forward at a fair clip, aided by crisp, largely cliché-free writing and good dialogue, and the characters are unobtrusively but fully drawn. I have a feeling that the series has been quite acclaimed; if so, then the pundits have definitely got it right with this one.

"Cyclops"

A mix cd from David. On first, tracklist-less listen, it struck me as a bit conceptual, though I was at a loss as to what the concept actually was; later, David mentioned that it was somewhat 'ill-formed', which may go some way to explaining that initial response. So, basically a collection of indie rock, with the highlight and track most frequently on repeat being Iggy Pop's "The Passenger" (seguing neatly from Bowie's "The Man Who Sold The World" - in fact, the whole mix flows well), although aforementioned Bowie and Talking Heads' live "Electricity (Drugs)"/"Drugs (Electricity) double are naturally also fab and John Mayer's cover of "Kid A" unexpectedly has considerable merit even apart from the intrinsic quality of the song (which is just as well, since I have my doubts about the 'intrinsic quality' of "Kid A" as a song, as opposed to as a piece of music); the Spoon cut, "Revenge", is also good.

Eileen Rose - Long Shot Novena

More diverse and murkier (not to mention somewhat more fraught) than I'd expected based on the small handful of Rose's songs that I'd heard before (one of which, the bluesy six-minute ballad "Good Man", is on here), Long Shot Novena is rather good. Kicking off auspiciously with the sonorous acoustics of its title track, the album really starts to move with its next song, "See How I Need You", quirky, sinuous and swampy, and thereafter traverses a range of other folk/roots/rock stylings in fine style...without ever threatening to change my world, a solid, engaging listen from start to finish (the knees-up, tempo-shifting, jew's harp-underlaid, country stomp/shuffle closer, "Big Dog", is another highlight).