stylusmagazine.com

Wow - from what I've read so far, the reviews in Stylus are even more pretentious than those on pitchfork (which may or may not be a good thing, natch). Update (a few minutes later): okay, most of them aren't that pretentious -turns out I just read a couple of outliers. Looks like a decent site, though.

Bram Stoker's Dracula

I didn't adore this film even back in the days when I was pretty heavily fixated on vampires, Winona Ryder and Gary Oldman, so I was curious about how I'd respond to it this time round, probably about six or seven years on and with all of those preoccupations having since largely passed; the answer, it turns out, is 'much the same'. It still looks fantastic, and has a definite air of gravity to it, but conversely it's still oddly uninvolving, and possessed of a tendency to tip into OTT-ness (Gary Oldman is a great actor, but some of the scenes are just too much even for him to carry off this side of ham). Also, Keanu Reeves is as bad as I recalled, though I'm more willing this time round to give him the benefit of the doubt and think that he was at least attempting to come across as mannered. Maybe what's missing is a real sense of the sinister - this film doesn't feel haunted in the way that it should, a hauntedness that should be heightened by the sympathetic portrayal of Dracula himself.

M.I.A. - Arular

I'd been vaguely aware of M.I.A. for a while, but hadn't really been paying attention and had formed the vague impression that I probably wouldn't like her music all that much. The other night, though (between "Pictures of the Floating World" with Myles and Wonderful Days with David), I was browsing in Polyester Records when I realised that the music blaring through the in-store system was really good - one beats-and-vox-driven call to arms after another, each different from the others and collectively pretty different from anything I'd heard before...the end of this story is, of course, that the record being played was Arular, and I was sold.

I didn't buy it straight away, wanting to give myself a chance to: (a) get it cheaper at jb hi-fi; and (b) (and more germanely) see reason and realise that I didn't really need to own the record. Come Monday, though, the music was still in my head, and so I went out and got it (in the process hearing a glowing endorsement of the album by the store attendant who served me) - and, for the time being at least, it's replaced Kathleen Edwards as my repeat-play soundtrack of the moment (I spent all of yesterday (Tuesday) having to ask people to repeat themselves, having - I think - temporarily damaged my hearing in that cause). Put simply, it's fantastic, but it's hard to explain it much beyond that - Arular is an album that really needs to be listened to.

A large part of the appeal is the gleeful way in which so many disparate musical strands are pulled together - or at least touched upon - across the course of the album. The music is basically rooted in hip-hop, and it's pushed forward by some pretty hard beats as much as by M.I.A.'s charismatic vocals, which are usually in a style closer to a sort of scat-rap than actual singing, but there's a lot more than just hip-hop feeding into the mix and the result is an almost 'world-beat'-type record which covers a great deal of ground across its 40-odd minutes. My favourites at the moment are the urgent up-and-down shuffle of "Bingo" and the sleaze and shimmy of "Hombre" (that latter being the one which first caught my ear in Polyester), but each song has its own distinct personality and I expect that I'll go through phases of particularly liking almost all of them in the next few days and further into the future.

Much has been made of the political aspects of M.I.A.'s music, particularly to do with the background of Arulpragasam (London-born child of Sri-Lankan parents with strong links to 'infamous' Tamil Tigers, etc), but while there's attitude to burn, of both the inconsequential ("And could it be that me and he are tighter than R Kelly in his teens?"...unless there's some kind of commentary on the machine which produces pop music as/and commodities in there), and the social/political ("I'm hot now you'll see/I'll fight you just to get peace") varieties, and while the songs still sound thoroughly righteous, and have retained that air of being calls to arms in the transition to repeat bedroom and discman listening, what Arular above all else is, is fun. It's a melting-pot, and it's catchy, and it's brilliant.

Hole - Celebrity Skin

Another of those whose singles got played a lot on triple j at the time when I was listening a lot to triple j, and so coloured by nostalgia, and whether by operation of that nostalgia or on their own merits, those songs, tracks 1, 2, 3 and 4 - "Celebrity Skin", "Awful", "Hit So Hard", "Malibu" - still sound great. ("Awful" is still my favourite of the singles, and I think that it's the best song on the album.) For fuzzed out pop, I'd rather listen to Belly any day, and for arty punk anthems, of course there's Pretty Girls Make Graves and Sleater-Kinney. But Celebrity Skin mines a sort of modern rock seam which occupies the middle ground between those two styles (themselves not exactly diametrically opposed) and generally does it well, though it sometimes drags after the initial flurry.

Donna Lewis - Now In A Minute

"I Love You Always Forever", of course. Why else would I buy this cd? I've always had a large soft spot for the song, with not even any meaningful associations to speak of to explain the fondness - perhaps the explanation lies in the song's extreme sweetness, for I'm not generally one to find twee-ness cloying, at least not when it comes in the form of a near-perfect pop song. The album as a whole, naturally, is unobjectionable but complete vanilla, kinda like Roxette crossed with Julee Cruise on valium.

Wiskey Biscuit - Wiskey Biscuit

I'd heard opening cut "Santa Ana Delta Blues" before, and liked it, but it misled me as to what the album would be like. In all, this is a kind of retro-sounding rock record, but apart from the brilliance of the aforementioned swampy stomp of its opener, there is, variously, Weezer-esque power-pop ("Mom Song"), "Sunday Morning"-vibing indie ("Stonergirl"), psych/prog noodling ("Hidin' In My Kitchen"), 'no depression'-styled country-rock ("Trailerpark Sweetheart"...well, the title's a bit of a giveaway, I s'pose, but the song itself is one of the better moments on the record) and plenty else into the bag, too, including various none-too-exciting takes on the blues-rock thing. It's not that this is a bad album, exactly, but I expected it to be much bluesier and much more fun.

Wonderful Days

Another anime (though Korean, I think), another post-apocalyptic world...to be fair, I ought to note that the animation was pretty spectacular, and some of the imagery effective (the early shot of the struts supporting a part of the city-structure, resembling the fossils of some giant extinct beast, was a good one, for example); however, while the story and characterisations weren't particularly poor, they were on the generic side, and there wasn't quite enough there in the visual/visceral stakes to carry me past caring about that lack (though it got close when Shua's glider and the insurrectionists' truck were converging along their respective paths in the closing stages)...the extended cut-out sequences were interesting (I think there were two, or maybe three - the only one I can bring to mind now is that of the dancer against the hallucinogenic backdrops) but rather pointless, I thought. All of that said, I didn't notice my attention flagging at any stage, which suggests that Wonderful Days largely gets the job done.

Pictures of the Floating World @ NGV International

Quite liked this. There's a real combination of vividness and subtlety to these woodblock prints, and the colours are really gorgeous, especially the blues (that latter being a funny way to respond to an exhibition, but it was a strong impression). I also liked the way in which some very fine detailing work often appeared in pieces whose outer edges were rendered in simple outline sketches - suggestive of that idea of the 'floating world'. My favourites were the landscapes (including the examples from the famous 'Views of Mt Fuji' series), probably because they were the ones which best embodied that basic interplay of boldness and delicacy, but it was interesting to learn about the celebrity culture of 17th-19th century Tokyo (Edo), in relation to both kabuki actors and courtesans - one cabinet housed a book of renditions of particular kabuki actors which had been collected swap-card style - even though I wasn't as drawn to the portrait-style prints.

Rob Roy

For some reason, this film didn't grab me. I saw it a long time ago - long enough ago that I couldn't remember anything about it before watching it again this time around - but had retained the impression that it was very good. But, this time round, it just didn't excite me and I can't figure out why. I have a suspicion that the direction may have been a bit pedestrian - maybe that's it...and perhaps it wasn't dramatic enough (there was plenty of drama, but maybe it didn't feel dramatic enough). Or maybe I just watched it in the wrong frame of mind. Anyway, unquestionable highlights: Tim Roth's film-stealing turn as a vicious, deadly swordsman of a fop, and the climactic swordfight.

Garth Ennis/Steve Dillon - Preacher: Dixie Fried

Another one, and largely more of the same (back to the main story of Jesse, Tulip and Cassidy's search for God, with the Grail, the Saint of Killers, and diverse supernatural beings lurking in the background). Psychological complexity gets upped a notch, though, and (not à propos) boasts the funniest panels yet in a Preacher comic in Starr's trying on of the wigs and hats.

Garth Ennis/Steve Pugh/Carlos Ezquerra/Richard Case - Preacher: Ancient History

Back-stories for the Saint of Killers (good - a real dark Western myth) and "you-know-who" (ie, 'Arseface'; very much on the dull side), and an episode from the past involving Jody, T.C., and a pair of cliche action movie heroes (a send-up, obviously, and a rather fey one - odd to see such direct satire in a Preacher comic). Not up to the standard of the series proper (Jesse etc don't appear, although the Devil does), but still compelling enough.

Kathleen Edwards - Back To Me

Definitely a cut above the standard singer-songwriter fare - very, very nice chiming jangly yearnful (to coin a phrase) country-infused electric guitar-based rock. The music is vibrant, warm, a little bit melancholy; hooks are plentiful and sometimes completely irresistible (the gorgeous uplift of the bridging line "don't say that you'll change" in "In State", the transition into the chorus of "Old Time Sake", the whole chorus of "Summerlong"...). The songwriting is consistently good, and sometimes much better than just good - like Caitlin Cary, say, Edwards has the knack of writing songs, both mid-tempo/more upbeat rockers and pretty ballads, which feel all summery and golden and mildly swoony and which carry you along from start to finish. Her voice, too, is fantastic, silvery-raspy and sweet: she sings with a Lucinda-esque combination of swagger and ache, and her songwriting owes something to that latter as well, especially tracks like "Independent Thief" and "Summerlong"; at times, too, a bit of Chan Marshall huskiness comes through to good effect...bring it on.

Heartland: An Appalachian Anthology

A collection of music created by a disparate group of musicians over a series of albums, this set effects a melding of a number of musical styles, most notably 'classical' chamber music, bluegrass, and Irish folk, to produce a whole which is subtle, stirring and really, really good. It's basically instrumental (though James Taylor guests on the traditional song "Johnny Has Gone For A Soldier" and Alison Krauss lends vocals to another); a lot of the tracks are violin-driven (violin/fiddle played by Joshua Bell or Mark O'Connor), but cello (Yo-Yo Ma), bass (Edgar Meyer), banjo (Béla Fleck), mandolin, guitar, and other instruments (including, poignantly, the pennywhistle) are a vital part of the mix.

The result is a wonderful synthesis which is neither 'classical' nor 'popular' nor 'roots' but meaningfully partakes of all three streams, and others besides - it's unashamedly melody-driven at times, and quite tone-based and abstract at others, sprightly and mournful by turns, but it's never less than captivating. In some ways, the title of the set is misleading, for bluegrass - the 'appalachian' musical style - is less prominent than either the Celtic-styled folk (with which I'm primarily familiar through the recorded output of acts like My Friend The Chocolate Cake and various incidental film scores, rather than with traditional sources) which most directly shapes the songs' melodies or the 'classical' instrumentation and leanings which frame the music. But above and beyond that, the music does have a distinctly americana feel to it, seeming to 'fit' very well with the whole mythos. It's a bit beyond words - well, my words, at least - to explain why or how this is so good beyond the way it makes me feel, and the sorts of images it summons...

Tom Stoppard - Lord Malquist & Mr Moon

I always intend to read some Stoppard beyond Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, and had thought that his output was restricted to plays. Turns out, though, that he wrote at least one novel, and it's a slightly deranged pleasure. The events it portrays are pretty surreal, and the deadpan, matter-of-fact way in which it's written increases the reader's uneasy, vaguely inexplicable feeling that things aren't quite lined up as they should be. Reminded me of Iris Murdoch's novels - wordily droll and lightly but substantially philosophical in the same breath, and touched by a sense of oddness and absurdity (not to mention written in the sixties).

The process by which I came to read Lord Malquist & Mr Moon was as follows: I took the book from the shelf (in the library), opened it randomly, and my eye fell upon the line "So you carry this bomb about with you expressly for the purpose of throwing it at someone?". After that, it was a foregone conclusion that I'd take the book home to read.

Happily, that chance phrase turned out to be not unrepresentative of the book as a whole - it's Moon who carries the bomb around with him all the time, with the vague but over-analysed thought that its detonation might serve as some kind of Statement about the state of the world, but his interactions with his wife Jane, Lord Malquist, Lady Malquist, the two cowboys competing for the love of Moon's wife, the 'Risen Christ' (complete with donkey), Marie the French maid (unfortunately deceased), the General her 'admirer' (also unfortunately deceased), Mr and Mrs Cuttle the anarchists (the latter also unfortunately deceased), O'Hara the black (Irish) coachman, and of course Rollo the lion (plus one unfortunate flamingo), provide just as much joy as Moon's inner musings.

There's a real philosophical heft to the novel, too - grappling with society and the place of the alienated individual within it, and particularly with that universal condition of absurdity (overtones of French existentialism). But it does so in a way which is unfailingly unintrusive, and grounded in a recognisably real (if distorted) setting, so that the overall effect is something like a completely mental version of chinese water torture - drip, drip, drip - except, of course, less torturous. I suppose I mean that the novel itself is philosophical (and specifically existential, in at least some sense) rather than merely being about philosophy or existentialism. It really is.

Escape From New York

Huzzah for midnight movies (huzzah = hooray for people who are too cool to say 'hooray', duh). Actually, this film was obviously bad, but fun to watch anyway in a way which has something to do with its badness but also something to do with the bits of it that were actually quite good (most notably the look of the film - the blasted, post-apocalyptic NYC was rather well done). Kurt Russell and Lee van Cleef heaps of fun. But really, could only ever have even slightly worked as a midnight viewing.

Amélie Nothomb - The Stranger Next Door

Didn't enjoy this as much as I have Nothomb's others. While I appreciated both its blend of lightness and weight, and its nonchalant perversity, and was pleased by the numerous unexpected right turns it takes, I didn't get much out of the book. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was reading it in the wrong way, but the simple fact is that I didn't much like this one (possibly, now that I come to think about it, because the narrator, Emile, is himself so unlikeable).

The Rough Guide To Bluegrass

Another genre compilation, featuring both contemporary and older artists...much banjo, mandolin, and twangy singing. It's interesting to hear all of these songs alongside each other - makes me realise that there's often not a great deal of difference between 'bluegrass' recorded thirty or forty years ago and today. I'm not sure how far I need to go into this music, though (looking beyond this particular disc) - although it's very easy to listen to as background, I often don't find the songs to be especially rewarding on close listening, and have a feeling that I'm not likely to get into bluegrass in a big way at this point in my life, beyond maybe a handful of relatively modern acts working at the margins of the genre. Maybe the truth is that unless it's sad it doesn't speak to me.

American Beauty

The summer between high school and university was a charmed period for me, all too brief but it seemed to stretch out forever. Really, it's not surprising that, when I look back, that time should seem rather indistinct and ungraspable - a fuzzy gold-tinged haze of dreams and potential. I miss those days...but I digress. One detail that I do recall is that I saw some great films over that summer: Being John Malkovich, Fight Club - and American Beauty.

I've since revisited those first two on the small screen, and in each case was severely disappointed, for they didn't seem anywhere near as good as I'd recollected (although neither of these subsequent viewings was at all under ideal circumstances), which may, on some level, have been part of the reason why I never got round to watching American Beauty again - I didn't expect to enjoy it another time around. A little while ago, though, the idea lodged in my head that it would be a good film with which to renew my acquaintance (pre-Ghost World, incidentally - it wasn't Thora Birch-inspired), and having just done that, it feels as if the film never went away, for American Beauty is still wonderful.

It's excruciating in places...the scene early in the film in which Carolyn, her back against the drawn blinds, dissolves into tears and then shrieks at herself in disgust was harrowing enough to have seared itself into my store of cultural reference points all those years ago, and it still makes me cringe, but the passing of time had caused me to forget how many other scenes in the film are just literally unbearable to watch - how painful and embarrassing they are. But it's all done in such a deadpan way - it's a small miracle that everything looks so flat (all the better to highlight the daubs of red which colour the sets from time to time) and yet feels so personal. And, yes, the beauty (such as it is) touched me...we're all looking for something, I suppose, and I'm not sure if I'm much closer now than I was five years ago. I may still be too young to really 'heart' a work like this (films like Ghost World and Lost In Translation feel a lot more personal to me), but it's still reached me, then and now, and it won't go away.

Terry Pratchett - The Last Hero

A Pratchett that I hadn't read before, and in a handsome volume, too (generously illustrated by Paul Kidby). Probably because it's a bit on the short side, and the episodes are usually only a few paragraphs in length, it struck me as slightly lacking in inspiration (also, characters like Vetinari, Ponder Stibbons, Rincewind, etc, seemed to just be going through the motions - or rather, Pratchett did in writing their roles in this book)...although of course I just completely take for granted how good Pratchett books are, so that seeming lack probably doesn't mean that much. Particularly enjoyed the scene when Evil Harry and his stupid henchmen appeared, and got a fair few laughs out of the book from thereon in.

Kill Your Idols edited by Jim DeRogatis and Carmél Carrillo

A cute premise - rock critics tackling canonical albums which they hate, and tearing into them. There are 34, and the only one which I really love is OK Computer, though many others which I like, or at least have liked in the past, are the subjects of essays - The Joshua Tree, Blood On The Tracks, Dark Side Of The Moon (of course), Nevermind...The quality of the pieces is very variable, though I often found it difficult to put my finger on what was wrong, or right, with any given one - Jim DeRogatis' shellacking of Sgt Pepper's, for example, seemed to have all the elements but was just turgid.

For mine, Allison Augustyn is spot on in criticising YHF on the basis that it's, uh, boring, and Fred Mills hits a lot of nails on the head with his dissection of Harvest, especially in complaining about the jarring track sequencing, but also about the fact that it's just generally not that good. Jim Testa's tearing apart of Never Mind the Bollocks was also very effective, even though I occasionally convince myself that I actually enjoy listening to the album. And the damning-by-faint-praise of the Doors' Best Of done by DeRogatis and Lorraine Ali articulated a lot of thoughts I've had about that band in the past.

Most of the pieces are relatively restrained despite their determinedly counter-cultural posings (though the Fleetwood Mac murder fantasy induced by Rumours, which I've not listened to, was a bit off), often dissing the record but expressing respect for the artist; the striking exception is Chrissie Dickinson's vicious take on the double-album cd set GP/Grievous Angel, administering a good kicking to Parsons himself along the way. David Menconi, who writes aforementioned criticism of OK Computer, obviously misses the point of the album (for chrissake, he considers "Electioneering" to be its best song)...and so on.

I've listened to most of these, though a few have got past me (and I was flummoxed to see Paul & Linda McCartney's Ram given the treatment...what on earth is "Ram", and since when was it a supposedly 'classic' album?). Each of the writers also put in a list of their top 10 favourite albums, and I was fascinated to see Lucinda Williams in no less than three of the lists (and namechecked in one or two of the other writers' actual contributions).

Stephen Donaldson - Reave the Just and other tales

I'm less familiar with these than with the Daughter of Regals stories, but like those others, the tales collected here are less satisfying than those in Donaldson's full-lengths. Although his ability to tell a story is undimmed in this shorter form, I think that Donaldson is a writer who really needs room to sprawl just a little - otherwise, the extravagance of his characters' conflicts and choices just don't ring true and the resolutions veer dangerously close to triteness. All up, the stories in Reave the Just are more in the way of being idly entertaining than truly spectacular (the best is "The Killing Stroke", though it has its share of windy philosophising).

Islaja (again)

Oh, here they are (though the site promises more at a later date): "Rohkaisulaulu" and "Sateen Tullessa". Have listened to them a couple of times through and quite liked, but now is really way not the time for me to be listening to even somewhat challenging music. Back to Marx! (Islaja to be revisited another day.)

Islaja

Have been out of town, and partly for that reason am still 2000-ish words out from finishing my Marx paper, due tomorrow (well, strictly speaking, later today). Currently on a snack/procrastination break and thought I'd check in at pitchfork; hadn't heard of Islaja before, but the review made me think that I might well like her music. The label website - Fonal (of which I've also never heard before) - promises to provide some of her music at some point; I'll need to remember to check back from time to time.

Sheridan Le Fanu - In A Glass Darkly

Scanning my bookshelves and stacks looking for something to read several nights ago (must've been a fortnight or so past), I came across this (I bought it for one of my lit subjects a few years back - "The Victorian Supernatural", I'm guessing - but only skimmed it at the time). Le Fanu was an Irish writer of the 19th century, best known for his supernatural tales, and I get the sense that he more than half believed the mystical gibberish regarding third eyes, inner senses, spirit realms and so on which form the shape of at least three of the five stories in In A Glass Darkly. The stories are about hauntings, and the only one which I remembered reasonably clearly - "Carmilla", which I read back in the day because it has some notoriety as an early lesbian vampire story - is the most atypical in being clearly supernatural. It's much more Le Fanu's style - at least on the evidence of these stories - to leave some doubt as to whether a supernatural or 'rational' explanation is more accurate (much like James's "Turn of the Screw"), an ambiguity heightened by the quasi-scientific rationalisations proposed in relation to the hauntings by various of his characters. They're fun to read, though, their elegantly unsettling effect enhanced by the 'period' nature of the writing.

Bis - The New Transistor Heroes

For the most part, Bis at this point were doing a sort of DIY bubblegum-punk thing, occasionally breaking out some early Blondie-esque new wave guitar, and, to be honest, it wears a bit thin over the 54 minutes of the album - several of the songs would've benefited from being cut to something closer to two rather than their existing three-to-four minutes in length, and the album as a whole would've worked better as a more compact 30-minute blast than it does at its actual length. A large part of the problem with this album is that, in the absence of either catchy tunes (for the most part) or genuine punk-rock rage, the band's lack of musicianship and the inability of either vocalist to actually sing begins to grate.

Still, it's not a complete loss - opener "Tell It To The Kids", "Antiseptic Poetry" and "X-Defect" (that last being the album's most 'Blondie' moment - though I'm not sure if I've partly associated that from "X-Offender") all nail the bratty catchiness which Bis spend much of the record striving for. I also have to give them credit for attempting a bit of subversiveness with their kiddy-aesthetic take on the punk thing, and while they don't do themselves any favours with some fairly dreadful lyrics ("Hey popstar you look real silly/I want to kill you now", echoed by a chanted "kill, kill, kill!", which sounds better on paper than it actually is), their hearts are in the right place. Give me action and drama indeed...

Cibo Matto - Viva! La Woman

Too cool for words, obviously - this is Cibo Matto we're talking about, after all (and, that being the case, I'm not even going to try to describe their sound). This isn't the sort of album I could listen to everyday, but it's still completely brilliant. (Incidentally, it manages the singular feat of having "Know Your Chicken" make perfect sense as part of the whole - it's not even one of the album's crazier songs.)

China Miéville - Iron Council

I haven't read The Scar yet, but Perdido Street Station is nothing short of brilliant (and Miéville's debut, King Rat isn't too shabby either, though it loses a little by not being a 'New Crobuzon' book), so I started Iron Council with high hopes, and wasn't disappointed. It has to be said, though: Iron Council isn't as mind-blowing as PSS. It's not that Miéville has lost his capacity to fascinate and compel (and it certainly loses nothing in the imagery stakes, with its central conceit of the never-stopping train, its passengers and followers laying tracks before it as it travels ever further) - but somehow Iron Council seems less vivid, and less fully-realised.

It's as if, in stepping out of the sprawling dystopian city-state of New Crobuzon, Miéville stumbles because he's forced to quite literally cover too much ground. Much of the joy of PSS comes from its denseness - the way in which Miéville dwells on the details (and even then things occasionally seem to come out of nowhere - the emergence of the handlingers and their doomed aerial combat with the slake-moths, while a bravura, indelible feat of imaginative writing, is a prime example of that), giving the city an endlessly ramifying, pulsating life and really creating a sense of scope, goes a long way to justifying the comparisons he draws with Mervyn Peake and Gormenghast. Here, though, there's not quite the same denseness of evocation - much of the narrative takes place in the badlands outside the city, and both those parts and those set in New Crobuzon suffer from not being as fully developed. Moreover, in Iron Council, Miéville focuses more strongly on the story's protagonists (I initially wrote 'human interactions', before realising that while Miéville's characters are all people, they most certainly aren't all human), and there's a pretty clear - though not too distracting - political subtext.

But in some ways, the whole previous paragraph is just quibbling. I wasn't thinking any of those things while I was reading Iron Council - they came to me afterwards while I was trying to work out why it hadn't impressed me as deeply as PSS. Above all else, Iron Council is a great read - like all of Miéville's writing, darker, grimier and more uncanny than anything else I've come across in contemporary literature.

Janis Joplin - Pearl

It took a couple of listens to get past the raggedness of Joplin's voice, and her tendency of singing around a tune rather than in it, but once those initial qualms had disappeared, this album really hit me between the eyes. The best thing about Pearl is, I think, that it rocks really hard. It doesn't sound that heavy, but everything shudders and crashes and bangs, and it all works. Some critic somewhere once wrote (in relation to Nick Cave and, in particular, "Red Right Hand", if memory serves me correctly) that rock is all about dynamic, and that probably goes a long way to explaining why Pearl sounds so great. Added to that, Joplin's high wire singing is so soulful and bluesy - it's as if every raw-edged syllable catches against something and strikes sparks - and her choices of songs really showcase that singing. This may be one of those that I'll lose interest in once the initial excitement wears off, but I'm pretty into it right now.

Audrey Auld - Losing Faith

I basically like this album, but it leaves me a bit in two minds. In part, I think that this is because the record is mildly schizophrenic - the shifts from track to track are jarring at times, and there's perhaps too much diversity for one album - which may be more a sequencing issue than anything else, but still affects my enjoyment of the music; also, there are points at which Auld becomes a bit predictable, and these cul-de-sacs further disrupt the flow of the whole. Both of those criticisms lead me to think that perhaps Auld hasn't yet really found her voice (or hadn't - she may've put out another album since this one), and while Losing Faith is a pleasant rather than particularly distinguished entry in the 'new country' genre, there are enough good songs on it to suggest that Auld oughtn't to be written off yet, either.

Haruki Murakami - After The Quake

It may just be that I've become inured to Murakami's characteristic craziness, but the stories collected here seemed much more 'normal' than is usual for this most subtle fabulist (with the notable exception of "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo", which is exactly what its title promises). Perhaps that relative normality is a function of their all dealing, directly or elliptically, with the Kobe earthquake of 1995 (leading their author to be more straightforward in bringing the human concerns of his writing, and the characters' arcs, to the fore); it could also be partly attributable to the shorter form of the writing, with Murakami compelled by that brevity to be a bit more explicit and concise in developing his 'themes'.

Although I'm normally a fan of short stories, I didn't find these as satisfying as Murakami's novels. They have a tendency to be a bit parable-like, with quirks present only in the details rather than underlying the narratives as wholes, and while the clarity and cleanness of the writing is there, something of the sense of meanings and ideas teeming between the lines is lost. That said, I still enjoyed these six stories very much - "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo" is my favourite, but the opening story, "UFO in Kushiro", is also particularly good (that latter invokes The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in some respects, with its mysteriously departed wife and pair of faintly inscrutable women who appear shortly after, and also plays elegantly with the ideas of beginning/ending and inside/outside being enfolded upon each other...at which I, after this semester, naturally think of Derrida on/and Blanchot).

The Hollies - He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother

A strange twist that I should have ended up with a Hollies cd in my collection - a best-of. "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother" and "The Air That I Breathe" are the memorable ones; the other songs blur into each other in a (to these ears) undistinguished swathe of 60s/70s AM radio easy listening fabric. Incidentally, I've just dug up a copy of the Virgin Suicides soundtrack - a soundtrack which I didn't like half as much as I'd thought I would - and found "The Air That I Breathe" on it (I'm far more familiar with - and fond of - the Feline cover)...

Waylon Jennings - Greatest Hits

Hmm. Hummable and easy to listen to, but while I like it, this music doesn't excite me. Admittedly, 'excitement' isn't really its raison d'etre, but that's kind of a moot point - the result is that, pleasant though Jennings' music is, it's unlikely to change my world any time soon. (It's mostly restricted to tracks he laid down in the 70s.)

Gilbert Adair - Alice Through The Needle's Eye

In the past, writing in the style of others has appealed to me, at least when I've been doing the writing (VCE saw takes on both Ethan Frome and Fly Away Peter in that vein) - possibly this reflected my sense that I didn't yet have a clear voice of my own; a fondness for mimicry in general was probably also at play. Whatever the reasons, I'm not the only one to have so indulged myself - there seem to be many 'sequels' to canonical novels out there, and relatively recently I saw a book which imaginatively sought to fill in the 'naughty' bits in various of Jane Austen's novels (only browsed it in a bookstore, but it seemed to be well done). And, most recently, came across this revisiting of an old favourite, in the form of Gilbert Adair's attempt at writing a third adventure for Lewis Carroll's beloved Alice (the ambiguity in that last phrase being fully intended - and probably appropriate given Carroll's own penchant for wordplay).

In many ways, though, this book was probably doomed from its inception, and especially when read by someone like me (that is, a book whose 'originals' have become a part of our collective cultural landscape, read by someone whose fondness for those originals dates back to impressionable childhood), and while I thought that Through The Needle's Eye was a worthy attempt, it nonetheless could never measure up Wonderland and Looking-Glass simply because the series of ((un)fortunate) events it details aren't already deeply embedded in my consciousness. Adair's book also seemed to me to be too cute, too precious at places, overly self-conscious about its invocations of (post-)structuralism, linguistic theory, etc (the constant textual references to the book itself and its illustrations grow quickly wearisome), and, in general, too fixated on inconsequentialities and details to really achieve the wonderfully light absurdity, seeming to gesture beyond itself at the greater world, characteristic of Carroll's writing. All of those criticisms may well be traceable back to that fundamental problem that Through The Needle's Eye is a subsequent copy - albeit a highly respectful one which captures much of the spirit of its sources - and not itself one of those original landmarks, but, even if so, that's not really the point, is it?

Will Self - Grey Area

Mining a similar vein to Quantity Theory of Insanity, but not as good; whereas that other was viciously clever and creative, the stories collected in Grey Area often left me with the sense that some fairly simple points were being heavily laboured by Self, with the result that their calculated sordidness was merely unpleasant rather than cutting and witty. After the first couple, I didn't bother to read them too carefully - maybe Self is another of those writers whose work doesn't really benefit from extended exploration (perhaps one book is exactly the right amount of his stuff to read).

Stephen Donaldson - The Mirror of Her Dreams and A Man Rides Through

For me, these ones have (inevitably) always palled somewhat by comparison to the Covenant books, but they're still better than most fantasy out there, epic and/or mainstream and otherwise. Darkly compelling and richly imaginative, I'm not yet tired of them. (Also provoked to laughter by a few of the one-liners, though I'm not sure if they were deliberately funny.)

I only own The Mirror of Her Dreams, so having finished it on Monday night, I walked out to the Pines library to pick up the second, and was amused to notice that the best-dressed people in the library were the two librarians - though that observation may say as much about me as it does about the sartorial standards of all concerned.

On another note, on my way out from the library, I noticed a flyer descriptively (and, I felt, slightly dramatically - though again, that's probably just me) titled "Librarians Choice: The Top 100", which turned out to be a listing of the results of Victorian librarians' votes for their "all-time favourite Top 100 reads available @ your library". From my perspective, the most interesting one was Brideshead Revisited hitting number 7 - very much a 'librarian' book, I think. Other favourites of mine to appear included The Secret History (another very 'librarian' book - # 35), The Gormenghast Trilogy (# 58) and Wizard of Earthsea (# 75) (also, the first "His Dark Materials" book, Northern Lights, was # 98). Elsewhere, most of the usual suspects - Austen, Winton, etc (though one wonders what sort of people - to whom custodianship of our libraries has been entrusted, recall - would collectively cast enough votes for the Melway - Greater Melbourne Street Directory for it to reach number 55)...

Life Is Beautiful with ABC Classic FM

This cd came free with The Age a fair while ago and has been lying around my room since; the selections are quite brief and many of them are familiar. Attention caught by Ross Edwards' "Dawn Mantras", though, complete with didgeridoo (spelt 'didjeridu' - is that how it's done nowadays?) and shakuhachi.