A mix cd: "...music from a film"

I haven't mentioned my own mix cds here before, and usually don't bother flagging them in my hand-writtten journal either. But I put one together last night and polished it up today, and it came out so well that it seemed to merit an exception:

* * *

Side A
1. "Sight" - Takeshi Kobayashi
2. "I Lost You (But I Found Country Music)" - Gordon McIntyre & Laura Cantrell
3. "Wayfaring Stranger" - Emmylou Harris
4. "Comes A Time" - Neil Young
5. "Seven Year Ache" - Rosanne Cash
6. "I Kicked A Boy" - The Sundays
7. "In Love With A View" - Mojave 3

Side B
8. "Why Not Smile" - R.E.M.
9. "Theme For A Trucker" - Whiskeytown
10. "The Color And The Light" - Jennifer O'Connor
11. "So Long, So Wrong" - Alison Krauss + Union Station
12. "Tabu" - Kronos Quartet [Margarita Lecuona; arr. Osvaldo Golijov]
13. "I'm Not Afraid To Die" - Gillian Welch
14. "Song Of The Liberty Bell" - Mark O'Connor

* * *

Not sure why I like it so much - it just seems to fit together just right (I'm going through a period where I value consistency of mood more than show-offy eclecticism in mix cds). I conceived of it as the soundtrack to an as yet unmade film; sides 'A' and 'B' are more for effect than anything else, figuratively breaking the mix up and also highlighting the way in which the two halves mirror each other in certain respects.

Without wanting to indulge too much in exegesis, I think of "I Lost You (But I Found Country Music)" as establishing a motif for both soundtrack and film, and all else sort of follows from there; the songs were chosen mostly because they seemed to make sense rather than because they're particular favourites of mine at this very moment. As I said before, this film hasn't been made (and nor have I written it), but I think that I can see its outlines anyway.

Tegan & Sara - "I Know I Know I Know" (and other current favourites)

Alright, I just have to write about this song.

I've been listening to it for the last month or so, and every time I hear it, it's a little bit more delightful - for goodness sakes, I even had a 'Tegan & Sara' moment a little while back, driving with the windows down and "I Know I Know I Know" soundtracking my sense of a momentarily snatched freedom. What to say? It's just the most irresistibly (and why would you want to resist it?) goshdarned gorgeous thing - totally cute (love their voices and the way that every note of the music is just right) and shamelessly sweet and über-melodic (in a 'takes you over almost without you realising' kind of way) and all that stuff ("Stick your hands inside of my pockets,/Keep them warm while I'm still here..."...it's all in the way that it's sung)...it makes me happy. If there was any justice, this would've been a number one hit on pop charts all over the world.

You can - and should - download it here.

* * *

Well, I've put my head down a bit with this Thesis business lately, so there hasn't been as much music listening as usual, of either the 'proper' or 'background' varieties...it's been more short, sharp bursts, which usually translates to individual songs rather than albums. But, in any case, leading the charge with Tegan & Sara have been Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's simply splendid "Upon This Tidal Wave Of Young Blood" (here), Sons and Daughters' "Dance Me In" (here) and various Neil Young (plus snatches of Humming By The Flowered Vine); also, the other night I downloaded some Stars (have lost the link, though), and am particularly liking "Celebration Guns", which reminds me a lot of the wonderful "Anthems For A Seventeen Year Old Girl" (easily the best song on You Forgot It In People, an album that was, incidentally, way overrated).

Joni Mitchell - For The Roses

I've thought before that while Joni may well be a great songwriter, she's only a moderately good singer - all that upper register fluting can be pretty distracting, especially in conjunction with the frequent wordiness of her lyrics - and this album strikes me as a neat illustration of that principle. I found the first few songs on the record in particular to be quite hard to get into, with Mitchell's vocalisations sometimes feeling kind of like a curtain obscuring the melodies, dissolving it all into a drizzle of (a) high-pitched vocal flutters and (b) well, other bits. But by the second half of the album (say, from the title track onwards, it being one of my early favourites), she's well and truly hit her stride, and songs like "You Turn Me On I'm A Radio" and "Blonde In The Bleachers" show her at the top of her form, the songs benefiting from a more restrained vocal performance (and also being somewhat fuller musically than most of the others, which may mean that they'd be less beloved of the Joni purist). (Also, "See You Sometimes" is the first Joni song that has made me understand, in a more than intellectual way, the incessant comparisons that Tori draws to her.)

Anyhow, it's relatively early Joni - For The Roses was released in '72, the year after Blue - and quite piano-driven, but beginning to experiment and innovate more than on her previous recordings, including showing hints of the jazz influence that was later to become much more prominent (oh no, a saxophone!). She still comes across as perhaps somewhat too much the naïf at times, but it's not too intrusive and generally I think this is a pretty solid album, and maybe a bit of a transitional one. (Also, Joni records have a habit of suddenly speaking to me some time after I first listen to them - things need to be in their right place for her albums to find their voice with me.)

Kronos Quartet - Nuevo

They're pretty reliable, Kronos; as a collective, they seem to have a really good ear for what will work, and so their experiment-collaborations with disparate musicians and musical traditions from around the world all seem to come off. This one's a Mexico-inspired record, featuring (as far as I can work out) the quartet reworking a mix of traditional/folk songs written between the 1920-1960s and a few more recent compositions, and it makes for a consistently enjoyable, interesting, rewarding and immediate listen (very diverse, too, which makes the sustained quality all the more impressive). Pretty lively for the most part, waltz/tangoish tempos and colourful, textured instrumentation and dynamics oft punctuated by effects including wolf-whistles, gunshots and general clatter - really good all over. My favourites are the slide and swirl of "Se Me Hizo Facil" ("It Was Easy For Me"), the minor key Morricone-isms of "Perfidia" ("Perfidy", natch), highlighted by musical leaf solo, and the slink and scuttle of "Tabu" ("Taboo").

Neil Young - Decade

About half of this double cd set was already familiar to me - mostly the middle half - but I'm on enough of a Neil Young kick at the moment to be happy to repeat-listen to the discs all the way through notwithstanding.

From what I can gather (from the liner notes), the early songs are a mix of tracks written and recorded with and around the margins of Buffalo Springfield and CSNY and a few that Young wrote and laid down entirely on his own. It may just be the perspective from which I'm looking at them (ie, a retrospective one, comparing them to what came after), but they seem a bit unformed, the ideas and sound rather inchoate; they're mostly fairly nice (though I'm not getting "Broken Arrow" at all), but I have a feeling I'd give them fairly short shrift outside the context of a Neil Young collection. Then come all the songs that I know, interspersed with a few others; of those that I didn't already know, I particularly like "Winterlong" (Young's take on 60s girl group pop, complete with 'sha la la las', echo-commenting backing vocals and fade-out ending!), "Deep Forbidden Lake" (though its melody reminds me of that Bee Gees song "Words") and "Campaigner".

A provisional 'top 10 Neil Young songs' list (not limited to those on Decade), rendered particularly provisional by my not having explored large parts of his back catalogue:

1. Only Love Can Break Your Heart
2. Revolution Blues
3. Cowgirl In The Sand
4. Cortez The Killer
5. Helpless
6. The Needle And The Damage Done
7. On The Beach
8. Southern Man
9. After The Gold Rush
10. See The Sky About To Rain

Strikes me as quite a wimpy/soppy list, but then we don't listen to Neil to be macho, do we?

Linda Lê - "Voice Crisis"

trang gave me this story to read a while ago, but I neglected to do so until now, put off by the dense, unparagraphed, quasi steam-of-consciousness styled prose. Sample from the first page:

She gets up, wanders down the hallway, comes back toward me, I'd like to remember you, I hear, I'd like to dismember you. She sits back down, leans against me, her whole body trembling, I'm afraid, We're in prison here, We're going crazy, There are bad influences.

However, being conscientious about these things, and also always appreciative of recommendations, I'd left the photocopy on top of one of the more visible piles of paper in my bedroom, the better to serve as a constant reproach, and yesterday finally got round to reading it. I was very much a sceptic at first - I often find destructured, apparently (and/or actually) rambling, self-consciously experimental writing to be lazy and unsatisfying, and not worth the effort of the deciphering. Having read "Voice Crisis", some of that initial scepticism has dissipated; I appreciate the craft of it, and I think that it's effective and largely successful in its phenomenological representation of the world as given to a particular individual consciousness (one for which the differentiation between self and other is, to some extent, dissolved in a schizophrenic Septimus Smith kind of way). But while I can appreciate the writing on that level, I didn't really like the story, mainly, I think, because it doesn't particularly speak to me - my own world and internal narrative logic are very different from that of the piece's 'narrator', and while that's not always an insurmountable problem, in this case it is.

Terry Pratchett - The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

Seeing as today was the first day during which I approached actual productivity in working on the Thesis, I let things take their course after reading the first few pages of this one, having pulled it off the bookshelf to fill a spare few minutes with some familiar, pleasant words...it's a good 'un alright.

Monday

A Japanese movie, on just before midnight last night, directed by one 'Sabu'. Starts off with a man waking up in a hotel, dressed in a dark suit; it's Monday morning and he's unable to remember anything of his weekend. In a series of flashbacks, the sequence of events gradually comes back to him...so far, so generic.

Except that it's really not generic at all. The first flashback sets the tone - showing a small wake, eight guests plus mother and sister of the deceased (who is in a coffin at the front of the room), all dressed in dark suits, it's excruciatingly uncomfortable and increasingly surreal and hilarious, beginning with the stilted conversation amongst the kneeling participants, followed by the phone call from the doctor informing them that the deceased's pacemaker is still on and must be turned off before cremation lest the body explode, and culminating in the opening of his body to cut the wire, along with the high tension attendant upon the question of which wire to cut (they're both red!). It's deadpan and absurd and I squirmed and laughed all the way through.

To be honest, that's probably the high point as far as individual sequences go, but the film doesn't flag much from there on in, becoming positively Kafkaesque as the salaryman whose trajectory we follow drifts into a murky, increasingly bizarre nocturnal underworld - and really, really funny (the scene in the toilet, say, or the way in which he holds the yakuza and women hostage with forced laughter).

Then, about two-thirds of the way in, comes the revelation, and suddenly Monday shifts into 'message' mode, only the message is distinctly muddled. It has something to say about guns, and alcoholism, and state power, and the responsibility of the individual (and why does he have those fits of uncontrollable laughter? To be honest, I could empathise with them a little bit...), but I'm not sure exactly what. I'm inclined to think that its message is anti-gun - at least, that's what seems to be coming through in the extended probably-fantasy sequence which almost closes the film. But the ridiculousness of the way in which everyone divests themselves of their guns and celebrates suggests that Sabu may actually be satirising the mindset that sees an easy fix in just doing away with guns (and all that they stand for). But that in turn appears to be flipped on its head by the way in which the central protagonist (I can't remember his name) then meets his demise.

I suppose that to some extent it depends on how you read the devil-figure and the effect of the alcoholism, and their relationship to the main character. He blames both the devil and the gun, rather than himself, suggesting that the drunkenness allowed the devil to get inside him. If we perceive him sympathetically and take this to be accurate, then the film seems more open to an 'anti-gun' reading - some things are out of our control and we should not surround ourselves with the means of facilitating destruction when those forces take us over. But such a reading is rendered a bit problematic by his alcoholism, for surely this is something for which some moral blame must accrue to him, and for which he must take some responsibility? (A further layer is the 'coercive power of the state'/justice issue which comes up.)

The very final scene is kind of annoying, but it was always on the cards, I guess - it's rendered extra ambiguous by the suggestion it brings that this is a moment of choice.

So, pretty strange. But in a good way.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Mmm...not sure what I thought of this one. It's fun, and gleefully looks the part, but I can't shake the feeling that it's also on the insubstantial side. Part of the problem here is that I'm holding it up against previous Tim Burton films, and the book, and the previous screen adaptation (even though I only have vague impressions of those latter two) - compared to most mainstream fare, it's amazingly weird. This Willy Wonka has a nasty streak, but it manifests itself in dismissiveness and aloofness rather than appearing as the working through of any genuine malevolence, and he's a sympathetic character, his back story filled in and his quirks 'explained' (having chuckled at the craziness throughout, the first thing I said to Nenad afterwards was 'awwww', at the sweetness of the film's ending).

There's a certain mawkishness to much of Burton's work (one of the things which makes me nervous about watching Big Fish), which is generally balanced by the more fantastic aspects of his films and a sense of how far to go (I'm thinking particularly of Edward Scissorhands here). That's present here, too, and while at first I wasn't 100% sold on the spin he puts on the Wonka character, it's ringing a bit more truly now (I don't recall there being anything in the way of family background for him in Dahl's book - my impression is that he was more of a sui generis figure there - but I could be wrong, and if all of that is Burton's fabrication, well, all the better). Charlie and his grandpa don't get to do that much except be exemplars of wide-eyed good-naturedness, but that's fine. The other children - and their parents - are suitably obnoxious, in a 'I want to see more of them' kind of way. And the oompa loompas are, well, pretty much beyond description and so about what you'd expect.

Incidentally, this film also made me go 'mmm' in a different sense, inasmuch as it reminded me of the gorgeousness of Helena Bonham Carter, but that's another story...

Laura Cantrell - Humming By The Flowered Vine

I always think that there's something just a little bit magic about the way that music comes to be woven through one's life. I'm not sure exactly how to describe it, for I'm not sure exactly what it is, but it's something to do with the way that music can come to feel so naturally and familiarly part of day-to-day existence, both internally and externally, and something to do with the sense of 'at home-ness' that comes from listening to music which has been transmuted in that way - a sense of rightness, profound in its intangibility. It's a feeling that can be either contemporaneous or retrospective (or, where the nature of the weave shifts over time, both), and often finds its inception in simple repeat playing of an album/song (the repeated playing acting as cause rather than effect, at least initially).

I bring this up in an attempt to make sense of how I feel about Humming By The Flowered Vine, an album about which I do feel this way just now and the main thing that I've listened to over the last couple of days. It wouldn't quite be accurate to say that it's slipped under my guard, for I fully expected it to be a treat, but I still feel as if something like that has happened, probably because the album's pleasures are so delicate and subtle. As a whole, it's somehow slighter than the music of, say, Lucinda or Gillian (always my points of reference for contemporary female countryish singer-songwriter types), and it's that which caused me to be surprised when I realised that I'd internalised it notwithstanding.

As I said, I did expect the album to be a treat, mostly on the strength of unutterably sweet lead single and album opener "14th Street" (available from her website along with plenty of other good stuff), which I've had on high rotation in recent months. I'd also heard Cantrell's take on an unrecorded Lucinda song, "Letters", which I'd heard on the radio, and a pair of Cantrell-composed ballads, "Khaki & Corduroy" and "Bees", which came to me through some music blog or other, but the thing is that only "14th Street" had really captured my attention, "Letters" having been a once-off hearing and the other two coming across as 'nice but not essential' - which is what made me think that, apart from the unassuming nature of the music, that sense of music-weaving has also been at play in my liking of the album.

As it looks now, then, all ten songs are lovely in their own right, but I particularly like "Khaki & Corduroy" and "Bees", both sparse, plaintive odes, the gradual burn of "Letters" (unusual in that it's partly propelled by electric guitar), summery closer "Old Downtown", and, of course, "14th Street", which is still gorgeous - lilting, melodic and yearnful (so, in the end, mostly those that I'd heard before - though of course I've just named half of the record!). I'm not sure what it is that I particularly like about Cantrell - her singing voice and style of singing are very winsome, but I think that almost as much of the appeal resides in the insightful, uncluttered arrangements of the songs and the high level of understated musicianship throughout. Very lovely.

Radiohead - "Karma Police" cd single (Australian)

Completism rearing its head again (looking at a discography on greenplastic.com has made me realise how far I've got to go, though, even with my restricted aim of just trying to collect all the songs in their various versions, as opposed to all of the different packagings). B-sides are "A Reminder" and "Melatonin", neither of which I've heard before (though the title of that latter, at least, sounds familiar). I particularly like the Low-esque synths and Yorke plaintive prettiness on "Melatonin", and both sulk and climb in that lovely Radiohead way - I'd give them pass marks even when graded against the high standard of Radiohead b-sides generally.

A Very Long Engagement

I was just thinking about which films' cinematic releases I've most keenly anticipated in the last few years - and, by extension, ever - and I think that A Very Long Engagement may be top 3 to date (the others being Donnie Darko and Amélie). All signs were auspicious - directed by Jeunet, starring Audrey Tautou, and I'd loved the book, having tracked it down secondhand and read it a while back after hearing of the film adaptation.

In other words: "Objectivity? What of it?".

This time, was struck more forcibly by film's nature as wartime romantic epic but, oddly (in light of that), wasn't as swept up by the drama and romance (the first time round, I had the shivery chills at a few key emotional moments) - maybe the relative lack of emotional response on my part was simply due to this viewing's second-timeness. Still liked it heaps, though in a different way from The City of Lost Children and Delicatessen, and differently again from Amélie (Alien: Resurrection was decent, but in these parts we don't count it as part of the Jeunet oeuvre proper)...I suppose that it's a bit pointless to compare Jeunet films anyway, given that each has come at such a different point in my life, and that my responses to them have been accordingly shaped by my perspective at the time (moreover, both The City of Lost Children and Amélie have, in their different ways, been such talismanic films for me that I don't hesitate to say that they've actively crystallised and shaped important features of my mental landscapes)...

So yes, A Very Long Engagement = good.

The Best of Patsy Cline

Since becoming infatuated with "I Fall To Pieces", I've been minded to buy some kind of Patsy Cline best of; finally came to it a couple of days ago, and, I have to say, it makes me happy that I did so. The music sounds inescapably retro, of course, but I think that may be part of the appeal for me; also, while Cline's usually spoken of as a country singer (having been affiliated with Nashville et al), I hear a fair amount of the contemporaneous sixties girl-group pop sound in these songs (apparently the story is that, for one reason and another, she didn't really hit her straps until the sixties, whereupon she had three or so years of glory before dying in a plane crash in '63).

Set off nicely by the retro feel is the swooning romanticism of these songs and Cline's delivery of them. She invests her material with such feeling, and, taken with her crystalline voice, it's easy to see why people rate her as a truly great singer. It may be deeply unfashionable today to sing in such a clear-toned, heartfelt fashion, but, having finally made my way to a point where I can appreciate and feel her singing, I'm inclined to think that the music made by this one just may be a bit timeless.

Mary Chapin Carpenter - Stones in the Road

Somewhere midway between country and folk, teased through with the usual more or less implied rock elements - sort of like Lucinda Williams crossed with Natalie Merchant/10,000 Maniacs, but without the melodies or the spark. Eminently pleasant-sounding, but also eminently unmemorable.

Neil Gaiman - Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes and Dream Country

It's come as a bit of a surprise to me that I've worked my way through nearly the entire Sandman series in this scattershot fashion - in fact, after a bit of thinking, I'm fairly confident that I've read all of them except the last, The Wake (I've said it before and no doubt will say it again many more times: I'm really going to miss the university libraries).

Anyhow, Preludes & Nocturnes was the very first collection, and it's much more straightforwardly 'horror' than any of the subsequent ones. In certain respects, I'd spoilt this one by having read the prefatory notes to volume 2, The Doll's House, which summarise the events of Preludes & Nocturnes, but of course finding out what's going to happen is only half the pleasure. I don't know how much I'd have enjoyed these without the connecting thread of the whole Sandman thing - meeting Judy, say, or seeing Morpheus' battle with Choronzon to recover his helmet. Again, there's a very strong sense of 'story' throughout. And, coming after this procession of darkness and horrors (not always hand-in-hand), "The Sound of Her Wings", which is the last issue reprinted here and also the first of The Doll's House, is even more of a relief.

Dream Country is also from relatively early in the series - volume 3 - and it collects four shorter narratives: "Calliope", "A Dream of a Thousand Cats", "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Façade". All enjoyable, but relatively minor, I feel.

Vertigo

This is the set text for the "Reading the Subject" seminar in a couple of weeks' time; given the extra effort involved in getting hold of a copy of the film (as opposed to just reading something), I might well not have bothered in the ordinary course of events, but probably my favourite person in the class is giving the class paper that week and so, thus motivated, I sat down to watch the film last night.

My initial impressions are a bit of a mess (I'm deliberately writing this before reading the film-crit articles in the course reader). To my eyes, the film is very stylised and very chilly, and some of the effects are a bit hokey (though still effectively disconcerting). That all serves to keep the viewer at a distance (perhaps especially the contemporary viewer, as opposed to one who watched the film when it was first released), which is not entirely a bad thing, since it also kept me guessing and unsure of what to make of the characters' interactions and motives; it also meant that the central love plot took me by surprise (though in retrospect it really oughtn't to have).

The film is artfully constructed - the various bits and pieces of the plot slot neatly into place, one by one, and it all looks great...camera angles shift dizzyingly and almost always seem just right, but it's destabilising, because no sooner does one become oriented than the next shift occurs. It also seems a very symbolically charged film - the role of the feminine in particular. (And I wondered what the particular significance of the colour green was.) The leads - James Stewart and Kim Novak - seemed right, acting somehow as if from a great distance, almost to the point of stiltedness (though again I don't know if that just reflects my modern perspective on then-contemporary modes of interacting).

Luka Bloom - Before Sleep Comes

My introduction to Luka Bloom was his cover of U2's "Bad", which got played a bit on the radio a few years back (along with other tracks from his rather good album of covers of pop songs, Keeper of the Flame, which also included "Throw Your Arms Around Me", "No Surprises", "In Between Days" and "Dancing Queen"). Bloom's an Irish folk-singer type, basically voice + acoustic guitar, and I remember his version of "Bad" opened up the song for me in a way which had never happened before; having heard it, I went back to the original version and appreciated its greatness for the first time.

I don't know what the rest of Bloom's work is like (I get the impression that he's quite prolific), but Before Sleep Comes is gentle, wistful, and pretty. There's not a great deal to it - 30 minutes of softly undulating ballads, and in Bloom's own words, it's "a cd of non-performance", recorded over two nights - but what there is, is very nice.

Waikiki - I'm Already Home

Alternative radio rock-pop, done in that indie Australian way (reference points here are bands like Deadstar and George). "Here Comes September", a melodic power-pop number, got a bit of airplay a while ago and I still quite like it, but the album covers a bit more ground than I might've expected (which is to the good). Overall, a solid record.

Terry Pratchett - Going Postal

Well, I'm not really supposed to be reading anything which doesn't relate to uni at least until my thesis is done, and probably until the final coursework paper is handed in, but: (1) in a sense, I started reading Going Postal before my self-imposed ban came into effect, as I've been gradually working my way through it in bookstores at very scattered intervals over the last few months; (2) I'd placed a hold on it with Rowden White, also before that ban was instituted; and (3) (and most importantly) it's a Pratchett which I haven't read before.

So, I was determined to savour the book but, despite that resolution, it was all over in a day (a couple of days later, I re-read it). First things first - it's good, and there continues to be no appreciable slipping in the quality of the series. A few specific thoughts:
- Very much has the characteristic Pratchett lightness, but doesn't seem to be as laugh-out-loud funny as most.
- Possibly relatedly, the 'thematising' seems a bit more obvious than in most of his previous books - freedom and reinvention of self (separately and in conjunction) in particular. The more I think about those themes, though, the more I realise the complexity of his treatment of them.
- Moist von Lipwig is an appealing central character, with a bit more personality than some of Pratchett's other 'once off' leads (Victor Tugelbend and Pteppic come to mind).
- And in the prickly, cynical, chain-smoking, very-attractive-in-a-severely-plain-dress Adora Belle Dearheart, the book contains probably my favourite female Pratchett character to date bar Susan (I like Granny Weatherwax as well, but in a different way).
- Has a few fairly cheap jokes - not sure if these types have always been in Discworld books or not...eg:

Moist shrugged. 'Oh, all right. Of course, I accept as natural born criminal, habitual liar, fraudster and totally untrustworthy perverted genius.'

'Capital! Welcome to government service!' said Lord Vetinari, extending his hand.

or Miss Dearheart's dry comment while looking over the stamps designed by Moist:

'Oh, the Tower of Art ... how like a man.'

Anyway, while I don't think that it'll become one of my favourite Discworld novels, Going Postal is a very solid entry in the series.

Sufjan Stevens - Illinois

Sufjan Stevens seems to've been lumped in with this new- or avant-folk movement that's supposedly happening right now, but I'm not entirely convinced - to me, on the basis of this album at least, he seems more in line with the whole orchestral- or chamber-pop thing, albeit with definite folky elements. It's all pretty, lush, warm horns, strings and woodwind, with vocals either mildly jaunty or mildly melancholy, reminding me sometimes of Belle and Sebastian (especially the vocal and melody on "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!"), or perhaps Architecture in Helsinki ("The Tallest Man, The Broadest Shoulders", say) and even, on "The Seer's Tower", of Will Oldham.

I reckon that Illinois is a really good record, but I don't find it amazing or revelatory; in lots of ways, I feel similarly about it to the way I do about a comparable one from last year, Joanna Newsom's The Milk-Eyed Mender. It works best as a whole - even at a sprawling 74 minutes - but songs that I particularly like at the moment include "The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts" and "Casimir Pulaski Day" (both of which I'd already heard), "Decatur, or, Round of Applause for Your Step-Mother", "Chicago", and the oddly-named (though by no means unique in this oddness) "They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhhh!". On that note, also boasts one of the best closing song titles that I can think of in "Out of Egypt, into the Great Laugh of Mankind, and I Shake the Dirt from My Sandals as I Run".

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

The way in which I came to watch this one was as follows: Wei wanted to do something on Saturday night and, having discussed with Kai, proposed Little Fish and Turtles Can Fly (worthy films both, no doubt, but unlikely to be very much fun). I, wanting something a bit more fun, had a look and noticed that the Nova was running advance screenings of this first Wallace & Gromit feature-length and quickly threw its hat into the ring; fortunately, it was found acceptable by the masses. (Though I'd definitely have gotten round to watching it in the end regardless, most likely on dvd.)

Turns out that we were amongst the first people in the world to see the film, as it's not being released till October in the UK and US (not sure about elsewhere) - huzzah! (Found that out by lobbing onto the imdb and being surprised to see that it hadn't yet been rated by the requisite 5 people for an overall rating to show up; for the record, I give it 8/10.) It was just what one would hope a full-length Wallace & Gromit would be - gentle and funny and cute (getting maximum 'cute' mileage out of the bunnies) and a wee bit cheeky (Lady Tottington with the vegetables, the 'wrestling nuns' magazine), and featuring plenty of inventions, strange English fixations, bad jokes, general tweeness, and cracking claymation action sequences in which Gromit stars. Wallace and Gromit well set-off by the OTT-ness of Lady Tottington (as voiced by Helena Bonham Carter) and Victor Quartermaine (Ralph Fiennes) and the usual cast of mildly eccentric English village types; sci-fi spoof elements also gleefully over the top (the scene where Victor and the vicar's conversation is ostentatiously punctuated by the storm, say). Needless to say, a minor pleasure, and assisted by my being in a receptive mood, but a nice way to spend a Saturday night.

The 'Madagascar penguins' short shown before was also v. good. "Blend! Blend!"

Neil Young - Tonight's The Night

Once I got used to this one - which took a few listens - I quite liked it, but I haven't really gotten into the album. Despite that, it has the Neil Young trick of making me want to listen to it repeatedly (perhaps more reflective of my current state of mind than anything else - although I don't think so, actually)...all of the songs are kind of 'good in a way', but "Tired Eyes" is probably my favourite. Feels like an album that needs to be lived with, and perhaps discovered at some later, opportune date (though a time that was opportune for discovering this album might well not be a time opportune for anything else, except gloom).

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind soundtrack

More recurrent figures on this soundtrack. Most obviously, Jon Brion, who grows increasingly ubiquitous - I've known him through work with Aimee Mann (and on Magnolia sdtk), also recently saw him pop up on a Marianne Faithfull record, and then recognised his style on Punch-Drunk Love (aided by the P T Anderson connection). Also, the Polyphonic Spree pop up with a couple of tracks. Soundtrack as a whole is a nice listen but a little indistinct, no doubt in part owing to my not having seen the film; singing/humming "Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime" under my breath rather a lot.

Virginia Woolf - Mrs Dalloway

Made it through on my second attempt, having bogged down about 10 pages in on the first go, a few weeks ago. All signs really quite inauspicious but I persevered, and once I'd got my ear in for Woolf's distinctive style, I began enjoying the novel very much. The passage which first made me take notice is the description of the aeroplane's skywriting, first funny then lyrical, neither a mode which had previously been much apparent, if at all (and also, in passing, a perfectly weighted reference to the previous focus, the inscrutable motor car with its intimations of greatness):

'Blaxo,' said Mrs Coates in a strained, awestricken voice, gazing straight up, and her baby, lying stiff and white in her arms, gazed straight up.

'Kreemo,' murmured Mrs Bletchley, like a sleepwalker. With his hat held out perfectly still in his hand, Mr Bowley gazed straight up. All down the Mall people were standing and looking up into the sky. As they looked the whole world became perfectly silent, and a flight of gulls crossed the sky, first one gull leading, then another, and in this extraordinary silence and peace, in this pallor, in this purity, bells struck eleven times, the sound fading up there among the gulls.

The aeroplane turned and raced and swooped exactly where it liked, swiftly, freely, like a skater --

'That's an E,' said Mrs Bletchley --

or a dancer --

'It's toffee,' murmured Mr Bowley --

(and the car went in at the gates and nobody looked at it), and shutting off the smoke, away and away it rushed, and the smoke faded and assembled itself around the broad white shapes of the clouds.

There's a throwaway line in the introduction to this edition which, I think, captures the novel's feel: 'Airy and haunting, it is a book that matches lightness with melancholy.' It all takes place on one day in June, oriented - in flowing stream of consciousness style - around Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith (and especially the first of those), but often slides into viewing events from the perspective of other characters, sometimes just for a paragraph or two, sometimes for pages on end.

Woolf's style of writing is certainly the most striking thing about Mrs Dalloway, but I'm not sure exactly how to describe its effect. It brings a certain immediacy and intimacy, both with the inner lives of the characters (especially in the reminiscences) and with their external circumstances (ie, London of 1923), but it's also a little distancing, in a way that I can't quite put my finger on. One certainly feels for the characters, and seeing Clarissa and Peter Walsh in particular through each other's eyes brings depth and sympathy for both (and likewise their relationships with Sally Seton), as well as a sense of the quiet tragedy and pathos of their lives. Woolf handles the sadness at the edges with a really delicate touch, always filling out the picture with a sense of causes and contexts and never allowing the regrets and wistfulness to overly dominate.

The Septimus threads are touched by something similar. Young, shell-shocked by the war, deeply unhappy, and suffering from delusions, Septimus is set up as a contrast to the middle-aged, well-off social hostess Clarissa, who has led, by her own lights and those of the company she keeps, a full and successful life (though dissenting views are strongly, if subtly, presented by Woolf through the perspectives of Peter and Sally). But I think that Claire Tomalin is right to suggest in her introduction that (to paraphrase somewhat) the deep parallel between Septimus and Clarissa lies in their inchoate attempts to grapple with the everyday terror of life, despite the divergences in their circumstances. Taking it a bit further, this parallel really underlies the entire novel - in a sense, it's what the book is 'about', and what gives it much of its strange power to move me, which it has done.

Like, I suppose, all great literature, Mrs Dalloway is ultimately about life.

Swimming Pool

One who I forgot to mention in my list of film-related people, but who would definitely fit into the 'like rather a lot but am nonetheless quite ambivalent towards' category, is François Ozon. I always enjoy his films, but am also always unsettled by them - by the dark undercurrents that run through them. 8 Femmes was kitsch, hyper-real, lovely and weird; Criminal Lovers was scary; See The Sea was nothing short of horrifying. With those latter two, at least, there's a great deal of psychology, and Ozon brings some ordinarily submerged things to the surface; maybe one of the most unnerving things about his films is that one always senses (and, having watched one or two in their entirety, learns) that he's a director with no compunctions about following through with the most troubling of his suggestions.

In that last sense, Swimming Pool was a positive relief, for its ending and resolution is much nicer than I'd feared. It inverted my expectations at least twice - once when it took the turn away from the 'repressed English writer..."Sarah wants to swim but it's too dirty for her"...experiences sexual reawakening after encounter with liberated younger woman' narrative expectation it'd set up, and then again with the closing clue as to what had gone before - and the way that it does this adds another dimension to the array of symbolic and verbal clues which form the main substance of the film, overlaying a new perspective through which to understand them. (It also provides a new angle to look at the coolness and reserve with which the whole is presented while throwing into sharper highlight the strong eroticism which runs through it.) So yep, this is a good one.

Martha Argerich - Début Recital (Chopin/Brahms/Liszt/Ravel/Prokofiev) / Liszt: Sonata in B Minor

One advantage of: (a) refusing to celebrate one's birthday; and (b) having an array of scattered friends whom one doesn't always see all that often, is that birthday presents trickle in for weeks and sometimes months after the date itself. So, this, from Laura. Quite a bit outside my usual listening horizon - generally when I listen to 'classical' (which isn't that often in the first place), it's either symphonic or in the fairly contemporary, minimalistic or minimalist-influenced style of Pärt, etc, as opposed to solo piano music like this) but I like it, particularly the Prokofiev ("Toccata op. 11", if anyone's keeping track). Apparently this (DG) recording is quite legendary, but of course that doesn't mean much to me in a direct sense...

Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Zuma

Lately, I've been spending a lot of time walking around and listening to Neil Young, so it seemed a good idea to raid David's collection and listen to more of Young's back catalogue. Zuma is basically Neil Young-styled, often lovelorn rock - towards the introspective and woozy end of the 'rock' part of the spectrum - and I like it heaps. Hearing "Cortez The Killer" in context has brought home the song's greatness; also its positioning as the penultimate song (with the closer, "Through My Sails", being a short one) tends to act as a hook for multiple listens to the album as a whole.

On that subject, Zuma seems to have, intentionally or otherwise, a symmetry to it: nine songs; 1 and 9 are short at only about two and a half minutes each; 2 and 8 are easily the longest songs on the album, both slow-burning epics (#2, "Danger Bird", is the other that I particularly like apart from "Cortez The Killer"); 3 and 7 are three-and-a half to four minute pieces; 4 and 6 are three to three-and-a-half minute ones; 5 is pretty much a flat three minutes. Unfortunately for the theory, though, there's no obvious musical or lyrical mirroring going on apart from in the lengths of the songs...

Shaolin Soccer

Again, pretty funny and filled with a goodly amount of ridiculousness, though I think I must've seen the cut version. I enjoyed Kung Fu Hustle more, though - perhaps two such films in the space of...what, two or three weeks?...is one too many for maximum enjoyment.

Powderfinger - Vulture Street

Despite the massive space in my musical association landscape occupied by Powderfinger, I never felt any urgency about listening to this album; I was surprised to realise that it came out all the way back in 2003. A large part of that lack of haste was attributable to the vibe I'd picked up that Vulture Street was a bit rockier, the two most 'rock' moments on Odyssey Number Five - "Like A Dog" and "We Should Be Together Now" - being my two least favourite on that previous album of theirs. Another important factor was that I've always had a suspicion that I wouldn't like Powderfinger all that much were it not for the really strong associations which their music carries for me, suggesting that listening to new stuff would be unlikely to prove especially rewarding.

Speaking of those associations, though, it's beginning to get to the time of year when they're at their strongest, so I thought it an apt time to finally check out Vulture Street. Verdict is that it's alright - not to damn it by faint praise, but it's just a solid pop-rock album, with a couple of minor highlights ("(Baby I've Got You) On My Mind", "Stumblin'") and a bunch of perfectly serviceable other songs, all benefiting from that familiar Powderfinger sound and especially Fanning's always listenable vocals. Still, even on some kind of imaginary 'level playing field', I think I would've liked Internationalist and Odyssey Number Five, and probably even Double Allergic, more than this one.

Jackie French & Bruce Whatley - Diary of a Wombat

Hypothetical interviewer: So, what did you think?
Howard: (Laconically, like a wombat) Cute.

Machine Translations @ Union House Courtyard, Melbourne University, Tuesday 6 September

Tuesday lunchtime, some nice-sounding music drifted into Rowden White from outside, so I drifted out to have a look; not long after I got there, the band played "She Wears A Mask", so I knew that it was Machine Translations (it's the one song of theirs that I would've recognised). On the whole, they were janglier than I'd have expected, with a bit of what Lucy S called an 'earthier' element to their sound, too (she drifted along a few minutes after I arrived). I remember liking "She Wears A Mask" at the same time as I first got into "The Way We Get By", which must've been a couple of years ago at least, probably more, and listening to Machine Translations, I could actually hear a bit of Spoon in them. Anyhow, they seem like a good band, making good use of the sunshiney outdoor vibes and unfazed by the constant lunchtime hubbub in the background and the relatively few people actually paying attention to the set. Just another thing I'll miss about university...

Punch-Drunk Love

Gosh this is a good film, and about 100% weirder than I expected it'd be,

and,

gosh this is a weird film, and about 100% better than I expected it'd be.

Also: Adam Sandler (who would've thought it?).

Plus: Emily Watson (bonus!).

So I felt that there was a bit of the flavour of the Burned Children of America stories to Punch-Drunk Love - I was getting an A M Homes vibe while watching it (though I'm no longer sure how accurate that is), and maybe a wee bit of DeLillo (though that was mostly the hyper-real supermarket kitsch, I think). I was sitting there actually physically squirming with discomfort at points (the party scene, say) but also found myself laughing out loud, sometimes at the same points at which I was feeling most uncomfortable. For me, the film didn't really take off until Barry's sister (who most amusingly reminded me of someone who I'm not going to name here) and Lena visited the warehouse which doubles as Barry's office, and the romance really took centre stage, but from there, I was held suspended in a state of constant aghastness and enjoyment. It's pretty dark, but also very sweet.

Plus, at some point, about when "He Needs Me" was playing on the soundtrack, the 'love' thing hit and made me melt inside and feel a little wistful in the way that a good cinematic love story always will...

And at the end, I was touched. I'm pretty sure that I had a silly smile on my face as the credits rolled. I know that I felt a bit light-headed and off-balance for a while afterwards. Absurd, really. But some kind of wonderful.

Nick Hornby - The Polysyllabic Spree

Nick Hornby is another of those literary-cultural figures who annoys me almost as much as I like him (well, he probably annoys me a bit more than I like him, as to which, see below). The starting point was High Fidelity the film, which I enjoyed very much and in the course of which I found myself strongly identifying with both Rob (John Cusack) and Charlie (Catherine Zeta Jones) - an unusual duo for one person to see a great deal of themselves in, I dare say. Then, I read the book and enjoyed it in a lukewarm way, which was, I think, mostly the fault of the film, which did such a good job of reproducing the tone and flavour of the book itself. The only other thing I've read of Hornby's since was that 32 Song book (I'm not sure if I have the number right), and I think that it's with that one that it may have gone sour for me - while I was impressed by his choices, I have a feeling that I also took against his writerly persona as expressed in those miniature essays.

I'd browsed a bit of The Polysyllabic Spree in a bookstore a while ago, and not been unduly impressed, but in the interests of procrastination was still willing to borrow it from the library today and skim/read it on the way home and into the early evening. It's a collection of essays tracking the books that Hornby (a) bought and (b) read (with considerable disparity between (a) and (b)) from month to month, written in very much the Hornby style and so replete with asides about soccer ('football'), his family and the rest of his life.

What he has to say about the various books that he does read, and fail to read, is often diverting, but somehow never substantial (which is, to be fair, not really the intention). The little digressions are amusing enough, but never particularly profound (again, not the point). Also, while I'm doing my best to be scrupulously fair, I've gotta say that I haven't read most of the books mentioned in the essays. But then again, Hornby doesn't make me particularly want to read any of them, even when he's heaping praise.

The way that the people who run the magazine in which the essays were originally published, Believer, are characterised as a constantly changing number of "chillingly ecstatic" robe-wearing literary equivalents to the Polyphonic Spree is cute, but (one paragraph about Chekhov's strange obsession with the sound of pissing aside) the only really funny thing about the book. It's not that Hornby takes himself too seriously (except insofar as he takes himself too seriously as someone who doesn't take himself too seriously, which he does quite a lot, with predictably mixed results) but something about his persona-as-writer (which, not coincidentally, includes his persona-as-person) just rubs me the wrong way. I don't know why. Maybe there's some kind of half-buried snobbery at work. Or maybe I just suspect that he's not really as hip as he'd like us to think (while affecting not to think himself hip at all, which is part of the whole thing, natch), nor as nice/unpretentiously intellectual/etc...I don't think I've ever had the experience of disliking someone I've met because they possessed character traits similar to those which I disliked in myself, but maybe (only maybe!) the principle works for me in relation to figures such as Hornby.

Neil Gaiman - Sandman: World's End

Another, again making the centrality of stories to these books quite explicit. I'm realising, as I work my way through these in an order which is pretty close to random, how few of the comics/volumes are concerned with the central narrative of the series, and the richness of the intertwining of threads from the various minor storylines and characters. I like these ones rather a lot, certainly more than those collected in Fables and Reflections.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Watched the 'extended dvd version', meaning that you get an extra 48 minutes and the 'approximate running time' is given as 240 minutes (you do the math - that's a large chunk out of one's day). I saw this once on the big screen, and maybe once since on dvd (the cinematic release version again, if so), and it's still a bit breathtaking on this second or third viewing. I'm not really enough of a trainspotter to have picked all of the new footage; the only extended sequence which really stood out was the extra stuff in the city of the dead. Again, much gratitude is due to Peter Jackson for doing this so well.

Richard Flanagan - Gould's Book of Fish

Another contemporary historical fiction, though not a uni-related one. Yee Fui foisted the book on me, mainly (I think) because of my tendency to put 'goldfish' and 'philosophy' in the same sentence - or at least closely adjacent ones - though no doubt also partly because she thought I might enjoy it! It starts off well, but somewhere along the line, it just lost me a little bit, and while I spent a lot of time enjoying and being amused by the quirkiness and craziness (the 'conversations' with the King, for example), and also admiring the craft and representation of history/fiction (the way things circle back and forth, and endings are beginnings are endings and so on), and also being impressed by the audacity of the book and what it attempts (not just its metafictionality, but also the way it works the 'fish' theme), it didn't captivate me in the way that I'd anticipated and I ended up liking rather than loving it.

There are, I think, a few reasons for this response. First, I often find it hard to get past this kind of colloquial language - it hurts me to see ampersands on the page rather than 'and's, and I rarely enjoy reading about shit, piss and other such things (and especially in those words - I can be a bit of a prude about some things, especially when it comes to language). Still, that wouldn't have been a killing blow in itself. Second, I probably didn't read it under ideal circumstances. With the business end of the academic year increasingly looming, this was to be the last substantial non-study reading I was to tackle for a while, and even now it was read in a fairly fragmentary way, meaning that I've probably missed lots of the nuances as well as some of the bigger picture. Third - and this was a bit of a death-blow to my chances of really taking Gould's to heart - despite the distracted nature of my reading, I saw the direction that the book was taking very, very early, so that its subsequent metafictional/historiographical moves came as no kind of revelation but more as 'oh, is that all? I knew that already' type ticking-off of points.

Still, all of that quibbling notwithstanding, my basic reaction of the book is a positive one. It appeals to me on a lot of levels, not least that of being easy to read and hence a fun journey in many respects (which goes some way to making up for my having guessed the eventual destination and many of the signposts along the way all too early). And, as I said, I admire the craft that has gone into its writing, and would reckon it to be, all told, definitely a success. But it wasn't quite the right book for me at this time, and probably there's never been a time in my life at which it would have been right (commingling of fish and philosophy notwithstanding!).

Gould's also made me think that postmodernism may very well be the literary dominant at present, at least in a thematic (as opposed to enacting, or embodying, or something more substantive) fashion (another caveat being that I'm here using 'literary' quite narrowly) - it seems the norm for literature these days to be overtly and self-consciously concerned with itself (language, writing, fiction, etc), even if most examples don't take it as far as Fowles, say, or Pynchon (or, for that matter, Richard Flanagan). Of course, the problem with talking about postmodernism in these terms is that such talk tends, of its nature, to illegitimately flatten out the very idea and reduce it to formal, stylistic elements.

Goldfrapp - Supernature

With plenty of shimmy, sparkle and stomp, Goldfrapp are back, and in delicious style. To start at the beginning: the lead single, "Ooh La La", hadn't really grabbed me when I'd heard it on the radio/website, but in context as the opening track on the album, it was immediately about 150% better (which is strange given that, as the first track, it didn't yet have any album-related context to speak of - perhaps the lusciousness of the cd packaging had something to do with that, but more likely it was the anticipation of what was to come...listening to it loud and with a decent amount of bass probably helped, too). If it's not already apparent, I hoped for - and pretty much expected - great things of Supernature.

As it happens, "Ooh La La" isn't one of the best songs on the album, but it does provide a pretty reasonable index of where the record's at as a whole; Supernature strikes me as like Black Cherry, but more so. The disco and electro-glam elements are ramped up even higher, the beats are a bit harder, and the singing of Alison Goldfrapp still more very - ever alluring, from dramatic, swooping trills to dark-eyed, mewling sighs through the coy, breathy style in which she carries most of the melodies. For mine, the high points come near the end, in "Koko" and "Satin Chic", but really, all that sets them apart is that they're even more deliriously sweet and darkly pulsating than the rest.

So, another treat from this too-fabulous duo. I can never decide whether I like Felt Mountain or Black Cherry better, and while it's early days yet, I have a feeling that Supernature is in every way their equal.

Lucinda Williams - Live @ The Fillmore

Owing to the cricket happening on the other side of the world, I found myself watching Letterman late one night a few weeks ago. As it happened, Lucinda Williams was on that night, and while I enjoyed it, I thought that if I hadn't already been a fan, there was a chance that I would've hated the performance. She did "Changed The Locks", which is a good song, but, as Williams comments in her notes to the album from which it came, it's also a song without a bridge or a refrain; moreover, her singing was basically a rough, grinding, ragged growl. So I had some idea as to how this live cd might sound.

Actually, I was torn between buying this and the live dvd which is in stores at present. The obvious advantage of the cd is that it's portable - I can listen to it in my room, on my discman, in the car, and so on. Additionally, I'm not one who generally gets much out of watching recordings of musicians' performances. But the big 'plus' in favour of the dvd was that its track list is skewed towards Car Wheels, whereas Live @ The Fillmore is very much weighted towards cuts from World Without Tears, which is my least favourite of the Williams albums I've listened to. In fact, across this double cd set, near the whole of World Without Tears gets a run; most of the other songs are from Essence, with only "Changed The Locks", "I Lost It", "Pineola" and "Joy" from the earlier recordings.

Having gone ahead and gotten the Fillmore cd, I'm pulled in two directions in my response to it. On the one hand, it's good simply in that it's Lucinda, giving her songs a different complexion. And the roughness of her singing enhances its expressiveness (the straining, gravelly vocal on "Blue" and the cracked notes on "Changed The Locks" are prime examples) while also giving it a feel of authenticity. But, on the other hand, I'd have enjoyed it much more were it not so strongly slanted towards World Without Tears. And while the voice is less cleaned-up than on the studio versions, and the instrumentation a bit more immediate, all giving the live cuts quite a different feel from their studio counterparts, I don't feel that these interpretations take me anyplace new with the songs (at least not when listened to on cd, as opposed to actually live).

Still, ultimately the Lucinda factor outweighs all else, and these are such great songs, and it's different enough from the familiar album recordings, so it's all good.

* * *

A brief comment on Lucinda Williams-listening more generally. I still haven't got around to buying her first two albums, Ramblin' On My Mind and Happy Woman Blues (I've been a bit money conscious lately), but lately my preferences have definitely shifted to the earlier end of her back catalogue. World Without Tears never really struck me, and while I still find the highlights of Essence - "Steal Your Love", "Out of Touch", and "Essence" in particular, as well as a couple of the ballads like "Blue" - amazing, I don't have any hesitation in rating Car Wheels as her best, and these days listen to Sweet Old World, which I'd initially found underwhelming, more than any other (Lucinda Williams I liked from the start).

John Coltrane - Soultrane

Jazz hasn't ever been a big part of my life, but I've always tended to like Coltrane when he's cropped up (in cars, at parties, etc). But basically I haven't got the ear for jazz, and it doesn't normally speak to me, so while I like this record well enough, for me it's pleasant but little more.

On a side note, I don't think I've ever known anyone who really liked jazz (as opposed to vaguely, politely enjoying it from time to time) who I really liked.