Gabriel García Márquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude

So this is 'magic realism'. I'd always recoiled from the phrase, not expecting to find much to enjoy within the genre (though I've enjoyed what Borges I've read, if he counts), but my expectations were, to some extent, upended by One Hundred Years of Solitude. To begin with, I didn't expect it to be so strongly grounded in social reality, and in political concerns. And for seconds, I didn't anticipate that the 'magic' or fantastic elements would so effectively serve literary purposes - the way in which the returns of dead people, instantiated through their ghosts, serves as a literalisation of the underlying theme of the ongoing dialogue between past and present, for example.

The sense of the endless repetition (which I'm not entirely sure is repetition with difference) and circularity of history is what I most clearly took away from the novel. The theme is made explicit at several points, as Úrsula in particular remarks on it, crossing over and mixing with the sense that history, literature and reality are separated by boundaries that are inherently permeable, which complicates the historically deterministic flavour of that emphasis. I wasn't sure what to make of the ending - will need to think more on it, but initial impression is that the idea of deciphering the image that one is living is at least potentially a transformative rather than conservative one.

A less critical response: I liked the book without loving it - and you have to admire its verve and what seems to be a real accomplishment.

The Velvet Underground - Loaded

While having intended to do so for ages, I'd never got around to listening to this record properly, but my interest was recently piqued anew when Swee Leng declared it her favourite Velvet Underground album. Anyhow, I like it, but it doesn't speak to me in the way that The Velvet Underground & Nico does, and it doesn't compel in the way that White Light/White Heat does (not that I'm particularly a booster of that latter); it's probably about on a par with The Velvet Underground, for mine, or maybe slightly below...turns out that I don't have much to say about Loaded, which sort of says it all, really.

"Hope Is Important"

A new mix cd from David, its title picking up on an old - but perhaps still apposite - symbolic phrase. It's made up mostly of acoustic-y stuff sung by boys (a style of music traditionally liked much more by David than by me), which gives rise to some nice transitions (Simon and Garfunkel to the Shins is a good one, as I've thought of the Shins as a modern day Simon and Garfunkel crossed with Big Star before). Actually, my favourite is Beck's newie, "Girl"; least favourite is definitely either the Gorillaz song featuring Shaun bloody Ryder (I really don't like the man), or the unnecessary disco-rock (a tautology, ha ha) song "If I Ever Feel Better" by Phoenix. Iron and Wine's cover of "Such Great Heights" also falls into the unnecessary category, but I'm glad that I've heard it. Quite like the Surfjan Stevens cut, "The Lord God Bird", too, which pretty much sums up my feelings about Stevens so far.

Kilowatthours - The Bright Side

Not bad, this. Hard to describe, though - guitar and keyboard-based, vocals low down in the mix (when there at all), downbeat, slight shoegazery pop music. It's a quality album, and has some pretty fine moments ("Almost Airtight" is especially good), but lacks the spark that would allow it captivate.

"Welcome to Orlando.mp3"

Some loose ends

It's relatively unusual for me to start a book and not finish it, but it does happen, especially with non-fiction. Given the volume of reading that I'm going to be doing this semester, though, a few that I'm currently various amounts of the way through look likely to be left hanging. I've already returned Don Quixote to the library, having thoroughly enjoyed its first few chapters but sadly decided that now might not be the best time to read it in its entirety. I'm unsure whether I'll return to Love in the Time of Cholera - seems more likely that I'll leave it for another time. And, for the second time, I'm going to return The Collected Dorothy Parker to the library only partially read.

While I like Dorothy Parker very much, if I'm honest, it's more the idea of her than the woman or her writing themselves which appeals. Her best known verse is deliciously cynical and clever but doesn't touch me deeply, and many of her short stories don't resonate (although the acute observation of "The Standard of Living" and the sustained bile of "The Waltz" are both just grand). The reviews and miscellaneous critical essays are something, though - wonderfully, terribly acerbic and knowing, even when she praises something.

Anyhow, usually books/films which I start without finishing don't rate a mention on this blog, but absolute consistency isn't, after all, a virtue.

New Buffalo - New Buffalo EP

A little musicbox of a record. Alternate versions of three songs from The Last Beautiful Day ("I've Got You And You've Got Me", "Recovery" and "Inside"), none of them improvements on the originals (though the distorted-guitar version of that first has a certain je ne sais quoi, tweaking the fuzzy dreaminess of the album version in a different way) plus two pleasant but not really memorable new cuts, and yet I can't honestly say that I'm disappointed by this ep, much as I would've preferred it had it been comprised of entirely new material, for it has that shimmery New Buffalo-ness to it...

Tony Takitani

Based on a Murakami story, which I haven't read - in fact, I don't know if it's available in English. I liked it, which obviously wasn't true of everyone in the audience - I noticed about half a dozen people leave at various points, and there were probably more - and suspect that coming at it as 'a film based on a Murakami story' helps, for it allows one to fill in a lot of the gaps as well as to be a lot more forgiving of how slowly it moves.

One key aspect of Murakami's work which the film conveyed really well was the all-pervasive loneliness and the sense of the gaps and missed connections between people - the theme was pretty explicit from the get-go, and the way it was rendered 'felt' right, down to the way that contingent and partial happiness is nonetheless possible in places. I thought that the characters really looked and behaved like Murakami characters (the way that their motivations are sort of opaque and yet their actions and interactions somehow familiar), and the way the film was shot, like a series of chapters, was also effective. Overall, it was kind of faintly dreamy while at the same time being very much grounded in real life (or at least the approximation of it that most, if not all, of us are living) - again, very Murakami.

Missing were the madcap elements and any outright fantasy, and had they been present, Tony Takitani would've been a rather different film. Something of that effect was obtained by the way in which some of the lines of the voiceover were delivered by the characters, in character rather than overtly metafictionally but nonetheless in a sort of space where it seemed that any other characters who were around the speaker at the time didn't hear their words, which struck me as both profound and, on occasion, funny.

See, it's not a depressing film as such - or, at least, it didn't seem so to me, though I can see how some might respond to it in that way - but its worldview isn't overwhelmingly positive either. I suppose that it corresponds pretty well to my own perspective, and so it seems truthful to me, which is why I like it.

J M Coetzee - Waiting for the Barbarians

Certainly has an impact - this is a powerful novel - but not very much fun to read. It's perhaps too obviously an allegory, and some of its symbolism rather too obvious (the scars on the girl's body, for example) - but I do tend to be a hard marker about these kinds of things, and perhaps I spend too much time reading stuff on the boundaries of 'literature' to really enjoy a Novel like Waiting for the Barbarians. As with all these books that I'm reading for my course, will look forward to the new perspective brought by studying it formally later on.

Subjectivity

Having settled (I think) on my English subjects for this semester, I've been interested to note the books that I'll be reading for them (although naturally the books themselves played a part in my choices of subjects). For "Reading the Subject: Freud, Fiction, Lacan", which is the only one I was always committed to, the major fiction texts are The White Hotel, Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and Mrs Dalloway (plus a D H Lawrence short story and Hitchcock's Vertigo); for "Contemporary Historical Fictions", it's One Hundred Years of Solitude, V, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Sexing The Cherry, Sontag's The Volcano Lover: A Romance, Iain Sinclair's White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, True History of the Kelly Gang and Kate Grenville's The Secret River. Taking them in turn...

The White Hotel I read earlier this year, following the recommendation of a lass I met on a clerkship in '04; I admired it but didn't really like it, and I'll be interested to see how it reads in light of what I'm presumably going to learn about psychoanalytic theory etc over the coming semester. In keeping with the theme of law firms and literature, Coetzee was recommended to me by the human resources manager of a firm during my articles interview (a bad sign as far as my chances of being offered the position went, I thought, but I filed the recommendation away nonetheless); I hadn't got round to reading any of his stuff, though, before Waiting for the Barbarians over the last few days. Thoughts on that to follow...and Mrs Dalloway shall be my second confrontation with Virginia Woolf after the failed tilt at To The Lighthouse of a couple of years ago - may this encounter prove more fruitful! I started it last night and found it making more sense to me than that other did at the time.

As to the Historical Fictions books, well, Sexing The Cherry is one of my favourite books by an author who used to be my favourite author, while V is one of my favourite books by an author who may well be my favourite author right now. One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I started on the bus on the way home from uni today, makes the second Márquez book I've commenced in the last month, after basically 23 years of him slipping under my radar (Steph C had recommended Love in the Time of Cholera to me a while back, and I read a few pages of it before being distracted by other things; it's still somewhere in my room). I don't know much about Morrison, Sontag or Grenville (though have been hearing each of their names forever), and am looking forward to reading them; also, never having read any Peter Carey novels despite enjoying his short stories, I'm keen to get my teeth into True History and expect the Sinclair to be good (I haven't heard of him before, but the blurb is promising).

As it happens, it's just as well that I'm reasonably enthused about that reading list because, given that there's quite a lot of other material associated with both subjects, and that the philosophy subject upon which I've settled, "Recent European Philosophy" (Heidegger's critique of metaphysics) looks as if it might understatedly be termed challenging, and that I've also a thesis to write, and that I intend to take my studies a bit more seriously this semester, I don't imagine I'll be reading much else in the way of literature over the next few months.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack

Took me a while to get round to this, and in the end did so as a fairly natural outgrowth of current listening habits (though Aimee Mann and Mazzy Star are currently predominating over the more overtly country/folk, nevermind bluegrassy, stuff). Anyhow, it's a good listen, especially in view of the film, which I like.

Talking Heads - Talking Heads '77

The debut - pretty good (like all of their albums that I've heard). To be honest, most Talking Heads albums tend to blur into each other for me except Fear of Music and Remain in Light, but I did have the sense that, "Psycho Killer" aside, this one lacks the pop highlights which make Little Creatures, Speaking in Tongues, etc so much fun.

Neil Gaiman - The Sandman: Season of Mists & The Kindly Ones

I've been aware of Sandman for a while now, but found the proliferation of Sandman-related books rather bewildering, and wasn't excited enough to dig around and work out how they all fit together. Anyway, the subject came up with Yee Fui and she lent me a couple of volumes, which I've since gratefully devoured (Season of Mists twice over; I'm halfway through a second reading of The Kindly Ones). I was initially something of a sceptic - I've always found Gaiman's purely prose work to be a little unsubtle and overblown (Coraline excepted, and the childrens' picture books fall in a different category) - but was quickly won over.

I think that the graphic novel format brings Gaiman's strengths - fervid imagination, interesting use of symbols and mythic tropes, the ability to paint on a large scale, and a talent for the grotesque - to the fore, and the Sandman narrative-set is a suitable subject for their showcasing. I was surprised by how dense its stories are, and how likable its characters (it's hard to pick favourite characters based on just these two, but Dream appealed, needless to say, and likewise Death (and, in a different way, Delirium); also liked Matthew the raven). The comics are really inventive, particularly in the writing (which is also rather clever in places), and yet have a flowing, easy-to-follow style which may owe something to the fashion in which they tap into so many cultural archetypes; while reading the two volumes, I frequently got the sense that Gaiman was involved in a kind of metaphorical mapping of our collective (un)consciousness, a suspicion borne out by the introduction to The Kindly Ones.

One thing that I found interesting was the way that figures like the Endless, Cain and Abel, Lucifer, the Furies, and so on coexist alongside both totemic figures like the raven, the mythological beast gatekeepers and the librarian, and other characters who aren't obviously drawn from any particular source while seeming to resonate with several (Hob Gadling interested me, and likewise Larissa; Mervyn is another example) - which seems true to the way that our unconscious would function, 'peopled' by this kind of diaspora of types, not all of which are readily accessible or recognisable for us. Reading Season of Mists and The Kindly Ones (volumes 4 and 9 respectively) left me with the sense that there are a lot of gaps for me to fill - I guess I have a new series to track down through Rowden White.

The Langley Schools Music Project - Innocence & Despair

This is one that I owe to pitchfork (damnit, I'm not going to hate them just because their coverage is so comprehensive!) and, indirectly, to David who, having read the same review (I think) put one of the songs from these sessions on a mix cd for me a while ago. The music, recorded in the 70s, is basically vocal, with a bit of fairly primitive instrumentation (mostly clangorous percussion, with a bit of piano and the occasional acoustic guitar) - and all made up of popular songs done by pretty much untrained kids ranging in age from 9 to 12.

It's largely choral, though two of the highlights are solo renditions of "The Long and Winding Road" and, especially, "Desperado", and great to listen to; the numbers include "God Only Knows" (my favourite Beach Boys song), "Good Vibrations", "Sweet Caroline" (my favourite - ahem - Neil Diamond song), "Space Oddity", "To Know Him Is To Love Him", and so on...it's hard to listen to the recordings independent of the story - these songs recorded in two sessions as part of student 'musical education', in a school gym, with the most basic of production tools and with numerous flaws and imperfections and yet arguably grasping something transcendent in their simplicity.

The liner notes suggest that the project "echoes Brian Wilson, Carl Orff, Eno, and Phil Spector, with traces of Philip Glass, Moondog and Gregorian chant", and while I'm not familiar with all of those artists and styles, I don't think the comparison to those which I do have a handle on is too great a claim. Writing that really makes one think about music, though, and what it is about music that we find valuable and worthwhile. More than most forms of art, perhaps, there's a necessary tension between design and chance in the creation of music, and the precise relationship between the two is, it seems, rather fluid. And it does seem to call into question the standards by which we evaluate music - and, more fundamentally, the validity of holding to any such standards in the first place...

Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita

Yee Fui recommended this to me, and had she not done so, I think it's eminently possible that I'd never have read it. I'm very glad that I did, though; herewith an (edited) extract from an email I've just written to her, since it pretty much captures my initial response to the novel:

... "The Master and Margarita", which I finished yesterday and really loved. At first, while reading it, my predominant response was one of simple pleasure at the gleeful anarchy wrought by Woland and co (of which co Behemoth is, as I mentioned to you the other night, definitely my favourite - I was always going to like The Cat, but what a cat Behemoth is!) - it's such a joy to read, and all the better that the targets of this havoc should predominantly be the literary and artistic set and its numerous functionaries and hangers-on (at first, the proliferation of characters - all with Russian names, natch - bewildered me a bit, but I'd more or less found my feet by the end). As it went on, though, the metafictional aspects became more apparent ('the master', hah!), and of course I enjoyed them, too.

... [Woland] strikes me more as a Stalin figure; even so, given that a key aspect of both regimes was, I'm pretty sure, the suppression of religion (qua opium of the masses a la Marx, I presume), it seems odd that the Stalin-figure should be incarnate as the (Christian) devil (not to mention one who eventually seems to serve the ends of good by both reuniting the master and Margarita, and liberating Pilate). Still, a certain ambiguity seems central to the book - which probably allows it to skewer as many targets as it does, and in such wickedly sharp fashion, too. Of course the best thing about "The Master and Margarita" is how crazy and skewed and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny it is ...

This is one book that I definitely want to re-read in the nearish future (though I don't know if the pressures of coursework/thesis-writing and the constant thrill of the new will actually allow me to do so); a second reading would allow me to pay more attention to the nuances and perhaps read it more critically (maybe with some kind of commentary to help me work out the particular social context in which it was written). In particular, I'd want to think about it more in political terms, which would in turn necessitate knowing a bit more about 20th century Russian politics...

Mazzy Star - Among My Swan

Well, another Mazzy Star album. Woozy and splendid, of course, if perhaps slightly less intoxicating than She Hangs Brightly and So Tonight That I Might See.

The Hudsucker Proxy

First viewing since learning that this is a Coen brothers film (second or third viewing all up), and it's still enjoyable. This time picked up that it's as much a satire of a certain type of old-fashioned film genre as it is one of big business; Jennifer Jason Leigh steals the show, of course, but there's plenty of delight to be had in Robbins' performance and the scenery-chewing of Paul Newman.

Cowboys, Indians and Commuters: The Penguin Book of New American Voices edited by Jay McInerney

This collection has been several weeks in the reading, at scattered intervals (the number of books I have on the go is becoming unmanageable again), but tonight I read the last of the stories within it that I intend to. I'd picked it up in the first place because Donna Tartt was one of the contributors - the story, "Sleepytown", is a sombre, haunted meditation which has more in common with The Little Friend (at the time still unwritten) than The Secret History and is very good. As to the others, only Charles D'Ambrosio's "Her Real Name" and William T Vollmann's "The Blue Wallet" particularly appealed to me; I admired Eugenides' "Capricious Gardens" but, as usual with his writing, didn't particularly enjoy it, and the DFW story included, "Forever Overhead", is the only piece of his that I've read in the past and actually liked somewhat (though it still left - and leaves - me a bit cold).

McInerney (whose fiction I've never read) selected the stories with the usual composite of aims in mind - a sort of 'state of the nation' sampling with appropriate nods to diversity which also included the 'best' recent short fiction (though he doesn't put it quite like that in his rather good introduction and editor's note to the collection). I found a lot of the selections to be simply boring - unpleasant and/or unengaging, and dealing with various strata of society which the authors obviously knew well but which hold no interest for me. I'm not sure if perhaps I'm growing more narrow-minded (or, to put a better construction on it, specialised) in my literary tastes...but then again, when did I ever enjoy this kind of gritty, true-to-life type fiction? More of a dreamer, I.

The Concretes - Boyoubetterunow

Since discovering the joys of the Concretes' self-titled lp last year, I've had Boyoubetterunow on the 'to buy' list without holding out much hope of ever getting my hands on it, but, much to my surprise, Collector's Corner came through with the goods (as it so often does) yesterday. I'd actually been looking for a Ronettes best-of, which is kind of appropriate - the latter-day Swedish outfit are steeped in that kind of delicious girl group pop ("Other Ones" even starts with the "Be My Baby" drum fill, though of course without coming anywhere near the Jesus and Mary Chain's appropriation of it on "Just Like Honey").

Boyoubetterunow is a repackaging of the Concretes' first two eps, and while it doesn't have the swagger and glitter of The Concretes, a lot of the elements are there (the quirky tunefulness, the voice, the punctuating horns, the keyboards that sound like organs, and so on), and these early songs possess a pleasing modesty in their own right. They're devoted to melody, which always helps, but the band's sunnier impulses are intersheaved with darker, more downbeat elements - a neat concoction.

Sin City

In many ways, there's very little to Sin City, but that doesn't stop it from being stunning. The film is all spectacle; it doesn't flag for a second, and packs a mighty punch - the action is comic-booky and so both spectacular and visceral. Its universe is a harsh, individualistic one, but there's a morality of sorts of play, and indeed it's the implicit moral choices made by the characters which drive much of the action forward. I don't know much about the noir genre, but doing a whole film in black + white, with only the occasional splashes of red and yellow and blue-grey-green eyes, and setting it seemingly exclusively at night, must be a good start, particularly when taken with the hard-boiled dialogue (and voiceovers) and frequent outbreaks of violence. The film is pulpy in feel - there are basically three completely separate narratives, more or less related one after the other - but it's all part of the effect...

I also thought that all of the lead actors (primarily Willis, Rourke, Owen, Alba and Del Toro) were very good - striking the right notes and sustaining them from the get-go. The support cast was uniformly good, too (Elijah Wood stood out as the absolutely terrifying, spidery 'eater of souls'). And the city looked just right - not ostentatiously gothic or baroque in its layout and architecture, but all shadows and alleys, urban dystopia writ large precisely because done in such muted, accretion-of-everydayness style.

On a different note, I was bemused by the way in which Sid completely ruled over me in the medium-famous celebrity identification stakes - variously, he was excited about Jessica Alba, recognised Josh Hartnett, and actually knew who Alexis Bledel was - although, thanks to David's repeated mentioning of the 'lesbian Charlie's Angels film' and my consequent googling of that very phrase to learn that the film in question is called 'D.E.B.S.', I was at least able to pick the sword-wielding Japanese prostitute as Devon Aoki...

Audition

This is another of those entries which shouldn't be read by anyone who might ever consider watching the film in question themselves...

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Not sure how I heard of Audition, but if someone recommended it to me, I'd sorely like to know who it was. For much of its duration, the film is an almost aggressively everyday narrative, touched by genuine warmth (especially between Aoyama and his son) and humour (I'm thinking of the parade of unsuitable candidates who present themselves at the audition) and broken up only by a couple of rather Lynchian touches (the intercut scene where Asami, kneeling alone in her apartment, slowly raises her head, which has taken on the aspect of a death's head, followed by the violent jumping, gobbling movement of the mysterious canvas bag, definitely made me nervous). But the last third! The insertion of the needles was bad enough, but I was nauseated enough to have to look away while Asami was sawing off Aoyama's foot with the piano wire. I must admit that, despite initial impressions, the film as a whole seems to fit together cogently enough, both plot-wise and thematically, and in fact is a rather interesting meditation on any number of subjects (guilt, abuse, female objectification...), but the climax was so sickening that I'm almost reluctant to say so. Ugh.

Haruki Murakami - South of the Border, West of the Sun

I was touched by this one, and really cared about its characters - found myself almost holding my breath while reading the chapter in which Shimamoto first reappears at the bar but also felt the force of the novel's ending. Having lately been a bit enthused about getting back to writing myself (so to speak), I've been amazed anew by the way in which Murakami's fiction just makes sense.

Magnétophone - I Guess Sometimes I Need To Be Reminded Of How Much You Love Me

I've resigned myself to the reality that I'm unlikely to make it all the way through this album, at least not now, when the bulk of my playlist is basically sweet sad songs - Aimee, Lucinda, Kathleen Edwards, and so on. Indeed, enjoying this kind of fractured ambient/idm stuff would probably be a stretch for me at the best of times, but I can sort of see why 4ad put it out - there are some broody-pretty washes of synthy melodies happening, and I can actually imagine myself liking this quite a lot if I were to listen to it in a more receptive mood. For the time being, though, am putting it to one side.

Emmylou Harris - Pieces of the Sky

From 1975 - her solo debut, I think, and almost exclusively made up of interpretations of others' songs. Gentle, tasteful, melodic - really nice, though I prefer Wrecking Ball. My favourite's "Sleepless Nights" (Boudeleaux and Felice Bryant), which is just the right kind of plaintive.

Emmylou Harris - Wrecking Ball

Relatively recent Emmylou - 1995 - and my first of hers (though I borrowed Pieces of the Sky at the same time), and, it has to be said, the music sounds the way I'd imagine 'cosmic American music' would sound (thank you, Gram). A key thing about this recording seems to be that it was produced by Daniel Lanois, who also wrote two of the songs (and co-wrote a third) - which may go some way to explaining why the Lanois-penned opener "Where Will I Be" is so reminiscent of U2 circa Achtung Baby - and he brings a clean, subdued air to proceedings, over which Harris's voice drifts and glitters.

When I got this cd, the first cuts I wanted to hear were the Lucinda and Gillian songs ("Sweet Old World" and "Orphan Girl" respectively), and after initial consternation I've grown to like Harris's interpretations (particularly of "Orphan Girl"). She also does songs by Dylan and Young which I didn't know (the Young composition, "Wrecking Ball", giving this album its title), plus Steve Earle ("Goodbye" - one of the album's best moments), Julie Miller, Hendrix, Anna McGarrigle ("Goin' Back To Harlan", another highlight) and two which she had co-written with others.

Listening to this record and Pieces of the Sky, I was initially a sceptic, but both have won me over in the last week or so. Harris can certainly sing, and judging by the ones whose originals I'm familiar with, she has a knack for bringing her own voice (literally and otherwise) to the songs she chooses. I said earlier that I thought this recording could well qualify as cosmic American music, and by that I meant that it has the sort of wispy widescreen country flavour, tinged with a discrete rock bent, that I've always associated with the phrase...I like it.

Preacher: War in the Sun & Salvation

(More...)

JJL and other celebrity crushes

Having managed to watch three Leigh films in the last two nights, I've been thinking about celebrity crushes (I've done my little disquisition on this general subject, or at least on a particular sub-species thereof, the indie-rock crush, elsewhere) - it's always nice to have at least a couple of these. But the list is pretty short, really - Leigh's the main one, and I'm finding it hard to think of any others. Audrey Tautou, maybe, but that's more an Amelie thing than anything else. Zadie Smith, but only while I'm reading White Teeth and for a few days after I finish the book. Dorothy Parker, perhaps, if it's possible to crush on someone who was dead before one was born (and in any case that probably owes much to Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle). Aimee Mann? Juliette Binoche? Well, not really...and I think that's it.

Kansas City

Strikes me as something of a cinéaste's film - directed by Robert Altman, it's a film about setting and period and, to be honest, not much else. Kansas City, 1934 - petty thieves and organised crime, deal-making politicians and violent enforcers, laudanum-addicted socialite wives and tough-talking dames, cacophonous jazz bars and neon-lit nights. But the jazz scenes are great and Leigh completely carries the film - as far as I'm concerned, there's no one more watchable in cinema today - ably supported by Miranda Richardson and the rest. So, all in all, I wasn't disappointed.

In The Cut

Really only rented this because Jennifer Jason Leigh had a supporting role in it - the prospect of watching Meg Ryan in a psychosexual thriller didn't particularly do it for me. And unfortunately In The Cut is, in a word, dull (though all of the actors are very good in it) - I was tempted to give up on the film at several points. As a thriller, it's frankly uninteresting, and while Campion seems to be trying to make some points about the psychology of desire, it's all too murky to unravel (if there was a point to the ice-skating flashbacks, I didn't pick it up). A while ago, Penny gave me a copy of To The Lighthouse, and possibly having made it more than about a third of the way through before giving up might have augmented my appreciation of this film (I do intend to have another go at that book one of these days)...

eXistenZ

Second time round, this one (if I've remembered correctly) having been another that I originally caught on the big screen in the months between high school and university. I'm pretty sure that it was my first Cronenberg (not that there've been all that many since), but I have a feeling that I was already enthused about JJL at the time, at least if the magazine cover dated July 1999 and still on my wall today is anything to go by. I remember quite enjoying it that first time without loving it, appreciating the reality/virtuality thing, and on principle liking the existentialist ponderings (though even at the time they struck me as worn a bit on the film's figurative sleeve) but feeling somewhat let down by the ending (and being terrified by Willem Dafoe's Gas). On this viewing, the film stands up as a neat package, the flatness of the visual style struck me more clearly (a flatness which is entirely apt to the settings), and the ending seems less like a cheat (after all, it had to end in something like the vein that it does, one way or another), but eXistenZ is still somehow on the insubstantial side and not as satisfying as it might have been.

"Better than wrestling": Ed Wood

This was one of those films which kept me in a state of wry amusement for its entire running time, occasionally prompting smiles and even laughter (particularly in the scene where Wood's motley assortment of associates sneak into the warehouse in order to steal the suspended mechanical octopus). The aesthetic is very Tim Burton, and it works well; it would've been easy to slide into outright ridicule of Wood and his ilk, and there are plenty of other obvious targets woven into the fabric of the film, but instead Ed Wood chooses the more difficult route of presenting its subjects as both ridiculous and sympathetic. We're meant to feel both exasperation and a sort of admiration in relation to Depp's Wood, and likewise towards the whole industry, its hucksters, conmen and icons alike, and that's exactly how I felt.

There's pathos in the figure of Martin Landau's Bela Lugosi, abandoned by the industry that made him great and reduced to a tattered morphine addict, and, less obviously, in Bill Murray's melancholically ageing queen, and Sarah Jessica Parker as Wood's long-suffering girlfriend is spot-on in her scathing assessment of Wood's crew as a bunch of no-hopers and never-weres, but it's all balanced by the sheer enthusiasm of Ed Wood for the films he makes and for cinema itself, constantly talking himself out on the fine edge of nothing, filled with joie de vivre and chutzpah but also faintly aware of the tenuousness of it all, and the appearance of Orson Welles (Vincent D'Onofrio) near the end is just what was needed to tip things in the right direction, both for Wood and for us as viewers, so that Ed Wood ultimately appears as a celebration of all things cinematic, remaining true to its fond, if unsparing, tone throughout.

M.I.A. & Diplo - Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1 and Diplo - Favela on Blast

The Piracy Funds Terrorism mix preceded the release of Arular but contains remixed versions of cuts from that album along with other sampled material; because I was never excited enough to track it down before I heard the album proper, I'm actually in the position of hearing the two recordings in the order in which they would, had the natural course of events obtained, have been made available to the masses. Perhaps that explains why I'm comparatively unexcited about Piracy Funds Terrorism - I've largely heard these rhymes and beats already, and in a more familiar (to me) and concentrated, if less fluent, setting (ie, the lp itself). The "Baile Funk" tracks backloading the mix are something a bit different, though.

Diplo's 30-minute Favela on Blast mix is, for me, far more interesting to listen to. Apparently 'favela' is the Brazilian term for shanty-towns, and the music here is based on a genre called 'baile funk' which emanates from Rio, and listening to it (Diplo is, from what I gather, a sort of cultural reappropriator, equipped with sample machine and usual tools of the trade), I can see that the influence is pretty strong on Arular, from the outright copping of the trumpets for use on "Bucky Done Gun" to the haranguing vocal style and heavy, straight-up beats. My favourite parts are the vocal which carries the first five minutes or so and the call-and-response at around the 15-minute mark, but it stays at a pretty high level all the way through.

Both of these are legitimately available here.

Paul Auster - The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room

I first came across the name of Paul Auster earlier this year, while doing reading for Genre, and have just now followed it up (reading it in the gaps between doing other things over the last fortnight or so). The trilogy is made up of three inter-connected novellas, each bringing a slightly different perspective to bear on the theme of writing and the world. These tales of detectives and writers, constructions and disappearances, signs and meanings, are impeccably postmodern in their particulars, right down to the references to key texts from Hawthorne's "Twice-Told Tales" to Don Quixote to Walden.

While doing research for my Genre paper, I came across Brian McHale's characterisation of the shift from modernism to postmodernism as a change in dominant from the epistemological to the ontological. He comments that this was particularly evident in detective fiction, and while I can't remember whether McHale discusses Auster in this connexion, it's an apt way of approaching the New York Trilogy - the nature of the detectives' investigations is continually shifting, as is the figurative ground under their feet, and these shifts occasion striking alterations in the realities of the world as they experience it.

This time round, I read these for pleasure (these themes fascinate me, after all), and I feel as if I've only scraped the surface of Auster's reflectively multi-faceted text-structures. The closing section of The Locked Room made my head spin with its bewildering juggling of signifiers and images from City of Glass and Ghosts, and especially with its sudden reorientation of the position of the reader and writer of all three books, and I suspect that it all fits together on a deeper level than I've yet properly thought through...needless to say, I enjoyed these very much.

K J Bishop - The Etched City

Not bad, but not great, either. Aspires to be a dark fantasy somewhat in the mold of Miéville, and has its moments, but doesn't quite have the sense of pacing and scope which would have allowed it to work. In her city descriptions, Bishop's obviously going for a sort of 'teeming metropolis' vibe, but it doesn't come through properly, and neither the city nor its characters really come to life (even the central protagonists, Raule and Gwynn, didn't strike me as being especially clearly drawn - moral ambiguity is all very well, and in fact is something that Bishop does well, but lack of vividness of characterisation is something else altogether). Also, the way in which the philosophical ruminations are handled is rather tedious - it isn't so much their content as the way in which they are expressed, in long monologues on the parts of the characters (occasional stiltedness of dialogue and descriptive writing also dog The Etched City). So, a litany of criticisms - but all of that said, I'd probably be willing to give Bishop another go if she puts more books out in the future, because there are hints of something pretty good in here.

Daria: "Disenfranchised" & "School Dysfunctions"

Just renewing my acquaintance with the delightful Daria through this pair of video collections, the forming including "Cafe Disaffecto", "Malled", "This Year's Model" and "Lab Brat", and the latter being made up of "Arts 'N' Crass", "Fair Enough" and "Through A Lens, Darkly". I came across the show on tv back in high school and (television never having been a big part of my life) probably only watched about a dozen or so episodes, maybe twenty at tops, but the impression it left was deep nonetheless.

Returning now (a couple of these episodes seem familiar, but I think most are wholly new to me), I'm surprised by how gentle the humour is, but therein, I suppose, lies much of the show's charm - Daria and Jane may be teenage desaffectées par excellence, but for all their sarcasm and negativity neither is truly sad or angry, and both remain wired into the rest of the world to a very large extent. On the flip side, many characters who could've been unremittingly obnoxious (Kevin and Brittany, say, or Quinn and the rest of Daria's family) instead come across as basically sympathetic albeit on a different planet from Daria herself...it's not as dark as Ghost World, say, or, for that matter, real life - despite their differences, everyone more or less gets along in Daria's world (well, for a given value of 'more or less', anyway). But it's that sugarcoating which makes the show go down so sweetly.

"Life just kind of empties out": Aimee Mann - The Forgotten Arm

At first, this album seemed all a bit samey, I definitely felt the absence of more (or any) soaring moments - there's no "Pavlov's Bell" or "Today's The Day" to immediate grab one's attention - which added up to a fairly lukewarm initial listening experience. But I expected that it would get better with time, and on about the third or fourth listen, The Forgotten Arm just opened up for me; "Goodbye Caroline" was the first song to really hit home (what is it with songs referencing girls called Caroline?) but I'd felt the sense creeping up on me before, and from there it was all magic.

Have since listened to the album over and over (in the process, incidentally, also remembering how great Bachelor No 2 is) and it continues to grow (most recently while doing the long train ride and walk home today after a day which should have been fun but somehow just wasn't, mainly because I was so incapacitatingly tired, I think - an appropriate mood in which to be listening to Aimee Mann). The 'concept album' conceit works, I reckon - there does seem to be a suitable flow to its narrative from beginning to end, both lyrically and musically, and I doubt that closer "Beautiful", for example, would've had the impact that it does without the story structuring the album as a whole.

At the moment, the high point for me is the stunningly sad double punch of "Little Bombs" and "That's How I Knew This Story Would Break My Heart" (that latter, tremulous yet direct, is something of a cousin to the wonderful "Wise Up"), but "King of the Jailhouse" is brill (working particularly well in the context of the album's conceptual scheme), too, and I also like "She Really Wants You", even though it's probably the most obvious song on the album, rather a lot.

Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

While not as perfectly pitched to appeal to me as The Secret History, I very much like The Little Friend, Tartt's second novel. The first time I read it, a couple of years ago or so, a lot of its charm lay in the central character, Harriet Dufresnes - a precocious, bookish, prickly, and distinctly unlovable little girl preoccupied with solving the mystery of her brother Robin's death (which occurred too early for Harriet to remember, when she was a baby)...given those character traits, it's not hard to see why I like the character so much, I guess.

Anyway, this time round, for one reason and another I happened to be feeling quite sad over the period in which I was reading The Little Friend, and, perhaps for that reason, the sadness which permeates the whole book was at the forefront of my mind throughout. Not only is the entire family haunted by Robin's spectre, but there are other sadnesses too - the old, quiet tragedies of Edie and the aunts, Libby's untimely death, the departure of Ida Rhew, the only sketched-out plight of Lasharon Odum and all the others like her in the background, Danny Ratliff's inability to escape his family and circumstances, the growing away of Hely from Harriet, and, hanging over everything, the oppressive weight of the Mississippi atmosphere and the grim history of that part of America.

There are some loose ends, and things which feel unresolved (most notably, the central mystery regarding how Robin came to be hanged from the old black tupelo tree in the yard on that fateful day), but I don't feel that they particularly detract from the novel, for The Little Friend functions primarily as a treatment of the ramifications and reverberations of loss, secondarily as an imagining of a particular childhood and the passing of much of its innocence, and 'tertiarily' as a study of a certain slice of small-town America of the past - not, in any meaningful sense, as a murder mystery...in its rendition of the latter two, the book has definite shades of To Kill A Mockingbird, and indeed, Tartt seems to nod to Lee's book by including a passing reference to a girl who is a champion baton-twirler (though possibly I'm reading more into that than was intended). In some ways, it's quite a distanced, reserved book, but it speaks to me anyway.

Gemma Hayes - Night On My Side

On my first couple of listens through this album, I was distracted by Hayes' odd, subdued ululations, but they soon receded into the background; what I couldn't shake, however, on repeated spins, was the feeling that these songs just aren't very good. There are hints of something better - "Hanging Around", "Let A Good Thing Go", "Ran For Miles", "Lucky One (Bird of Cassandra)" - but even those ones only half work for me, and most of the album blurs into a gently indistinct wallpaper.

'Til Tuesday - Coming Up Close: A Retrospective

Aimee Mann's old band - I'd heard and liked "Coming Up Close" (the song) before, but didn't really have a sense for what the rest of their stuff was like. From that starting point, this collection was initially a little disorienting - the selections from the band's first two albums, Voices Carry and Welcome Home, in particular are very 'eighties' in sound, dominated on first listen by that decade's characteristic, dreaded drum machine/synth sound (my thoughts turn unavoidably to "Take My Breath Away" and its ilk). In fact, though, rather incongruously, I prefer the cuts from those two to those from the band's third lp, Everything's Different Now, even though the latter are, unsurprisingly, closer in style to Mann's solo work.

The charm of those earlier songs - of which "On Sunday" is, apart from "Coming Up Close" (which is in an entirely different league), my favourite - lies in their straight-ahead, swooping melodies and dramatic choruses. By contrast, the picks from Everything's Different Now are, if somewhat more sophisticated, rather on the anemic side - for mine, Mann's songwriting wasn't quite strong enough at this point for these more elliptical, delicately-fashioned songs to fully work. With the benefit of hindsight, I think that Whatever and I'm With Stupid saw her striking out in a slightly different (and successful) direction, before really bringing all the various 'Til Tuesday and solo-to-date threads together in Bachelor No 2 (then more or less treading water with the very good but somehow undistinguished Lost In Space) - songs like "How Am I Different", "Red Vines", "Deathly", "Calling It Quits" and so forth are wonderful because they have those sweeping irresistible melodies and the stately Bacharach-esque elegance (plus, by then, the synth was long gone and to the forefront come a clean, biting electric guitar which perfectly set off Mann's voice and songs...).

Anyhow, glad to own this cd, but I think that it has pretty much sated my curiosity as far as 'Til Tuesday goes.

China Miéville - The Scar

Another treat from Miéville's chest of dark wonders - weird and fantastic in every sense. Even more shades of grey than Perdido Street Station or Iron Council and just as gripping - which really is saying an awful lot.

Sophie B Hawkins (and a long-standing mystery solved)

From Ms Hawkins' official website:

* * *

Q

Hi Sophie,
I like your song "As I lay me down." I work in a bank and we listen to the radio all day long and hear your song alot. Me and the girls at work were listening one day, and this new girl started singing your song. And in the background music on one part the new girl thinks it says "I like tacos", but I think it is just music or humming. This has been a big controversies between us and I was wanted you to answer my question. So does it really say "I like tacos" in the background?? Sorry for the silly question.

Thank you,
Alicia
Tulsa, OK

A

--Dear Alicia, this is a sweet question. I love tacos, but that's not what I'm singing in the backround, it's "ooh la kah koh", which is an indigenous language of the Ballantine tribe. It means, "wash your feet before you sleep", which is good advice on any account. I hope you all keep enjoying the song, and check out my new album, "Wilderness", there are some cool backrounds on that album, too. Take Care, come see a show and you and your friends can sing the backrounds on stage! Bye, sophie.

* * *

Have idly been reading a bit about Hawkins, who I know solely through "As I Lay Me Down" and, before that, "Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover", both of which I remember from years back and have always rather liked in that ubiquitous radio song kind of way. Seems that there's rather more to her than just those two songs, though - have been halfway inspired to try to listen to a full album somewhere along the line.

Haruki Murakami - Sputnik Sweetheart

This is a nice book, preoccupied with the gaps between people, and the divisions within them - with how people can almost but never quite feel or perhaps be complete, either in themselves or when paired with another. And it's about writing, and language, and, in some enfolding-yet-within kind of way, how they relate to all of the above. It's briefer than most if not all of his other novels, and perhaps for that reason it produced a couple of almost paradoxical responses in me. On the one hand, I found it quite tricky to get a handle on - while I 'felt' the overall sense of what was being written, I didn't really see the point of some of it. But on the other, Murakami seems a lot more obvious in places than he normally allows himself to be. In a way, they're both criticisms, I suppose, but they didn't really detract from my enjoyment, because being able to grasp the shape of a Murakami book is enough, at least initially.

Anyhow, saw a bit of myself in K but, to be honest, more, in some indefinable way, in Sumire (I'm still too young, undamaged, unpoised to identify with Miu); also, Sputnik Sweetheart seemed, if not sadder, then at least less optimistic than anything else Murakami has written, though I haven't really systematically thought about this...

The Replacement Killers

A splashy bit of fun. Wastes not a single minute of screen-time and always looks (and sounds) the part - the unusual camera angles are a particular highlight, though the taut gunplay shouldn't be underestimated either. Chow Yun Fat and Mira Sorvino are excellent with what are basically cartoon cut-out roles, and likewise the supporting cast of villains, police officers and associates. There's nothing to this film, but it's an entertaining ride.

Built To Spill - Keep It Like A Secret

I'd been aware of Keep It Like A Secret for a while, partly because it was well received critically, and partly because of its extremely cool cover artwork; having taken the plunge, it took me a couple of listens to get my ear in for it (as it always does with this kind of rock) but, having done so, the album is growing on me pretty strongly.

Even though some of the songs are pretty long, the band doesn't muck around with these songs, throwing in plenty of melodies (half-melodies) and hooks (half-hooks) and doing a really good job with that indie-rock thing of taking a song in a number of different directions over its running time while always bringing together the various aspects in some kind of intricate mesh ("The Plan" and "Carry The Zero", two of my favourites, do this particularly effectively). There are guitar heroics a-plenty, and also some nicely spacey cuts ("Else" being the obvious one in that latter regard); drawing on my own musical vocabulary, I'd say they're sort of like Buffalo Tom meets latter-day Dismemberment Plan (though obviously there are antecedents for both of them which may have more directly influenced Built To Spill, and Keep It Like A Secret actually came out in the same year as Emergency & I and before Change).