Jenny Traig and Peter McGrath - "Traig & McGrath, Shut-In Detectives"

Spent a while this afternoon reading through these strange little 'detective' narratives. For some reason, they strike me as having a faintly Gorey flavour - could be the surreal edge and bizarre 'logic', not to mention the intimations of metaphysics at the edges, and maybe the self-contained, puzzled eccentricity of the shut-in detectives themselves, Peter and Jenny (there's also a wee bit of Dorothy Parker in some moments) - but the whole point is the contemporary settings, of course. It goes something like this:

Last year, Jenny Traig and Peter McGrath, cousins, left their jobs to become self-declared shut-ins. They quickly discovered that even the shut-in's life is full of many small mysteries. Inspired by the great tradition of housebound detectives, they resolved to become investigators themselves. The following are cases from their files.

And here is an example:

* * *

#22: The Case of the Lonely Detectives OR Why Doesn't Anyone Ask Us Out?
Status: Solved

One evening, after drinking more than is their habit, the Shut-Ins found themselves in a maudlin and introspective mood. Draining his second Brandy Alexander, Peter asked, "Why is it, dear cousin, that no one ever asks us out? You, in particular, are what they call a 'catch.' If your mood swings are any indication, you are still fertile, and your uncommonly wide midsection suggests you'd bear children easily. And yet no man has snapped you up. How can that be?"

"I could ask the same about you," Jenny replied. "You are fun company. Those deeply carved lines around your mouth and eyes suggest you laugh easily and often. And yet, here you sit, alone." Peter shook his head. "It's a mystery, indeed." What was the cause?

"Perhaps it's because we so rarely leave the house," Jenny suggested. Peter countered that this often heightened one's allure. Wasn't Greta Garbo the most pursued woman in the world?

Well, then, perhaps astrology was to blame. Peter disagreed. "We're different signs. We can't be under the same bad star. But maybe the problem is bad feng shui." Jenny dissented. "That can't be, either, because feng shui is a load of crap."

The cousins were stymied. But a few hours later, as they settled into late-night TV, the mystery solved itself. As a talk show reminded the detectives, people are often single because they are too hot. "The answer, in a phrase, is that we're too sexy for our shirts," Jenny announced. Peter nodded in agreement. "There's a perp, all right, and it's our own damned attractiveness." The Shut-Ins toasted each other's tragic allure before falling asleep in their respective chairs, where they remained, snoring delicately, until morning.

* * *

But really the case studies need to be read as a whole for maximum effect - cumulatively, they're v. funny.

Traig & McGrath, Shut-In Detectives

Returning to the texts: Beloved and V. (and the run home)

Last night, skim-read Beloved, scouring it for themes, connections and quotations in light of the general argument of my soon to be written (fingers crossed) paper; presently at page 157 of about 500 in V., doing the same. Obviously a different mode of reading from the more leisurely dégustations in which I engaged first time round this year, but the fundamentals still come through - Beloved made my insides churn, gave me the chills, and clutched at my throat, while V. is dazzling me once more and choking/surprising/forcing lots of laughter on my part. One thing I'll say for honours (and there's much to be said, but I won't say it here) is that it's well and truly put reading and literature back to the forefront of my life.

Anyway, this is where it stands:

Thesis [7 November]: 6800 words (/10 000). Still not in great shape, but after meeting with François today, I feel that I ought to be able to pull it all together with a bit of application (ha ha, hermeneutics pun).

Contemporary Historical Fictions [7 November]: 1800 words (/5000). I'm pretty happy with the exposition and initial theoretical critique - ie, these 1800 words - but talking it through with Sarah yesterday made me realise that I still need to do a bit of work on this part. That should be fairly manageable, though, and once I've finished going through V., the textual part, browsing of secondary sources for citatory window-dressing, and closing (anti)metaphysical gesturing shouldn't be too difficult. Aim to get this one done fairly soon, I think.

Reading The Subject [7 November]: 0 words (/4000). Not seriously worried about this yet, but beginning to get just a bit nervous that I still haven't settled on a topic. Intend to read Lacan's reading of Poe's "Purloined Letter" soon (then Derrida's reading of Lacan's reading) and maybe reevaluate the uses of Lacan for literature a bit more sympathetically (and less foundationally) - someone (Liz?) said, after my presentation in class on Tuesday, that my outline sounded like a thesis more than a coursework paper, and they were dead right. Probably do The White Hotel rather than Mrs Dalloway.

Recent European Philosophy [17 November]: 0 words (/5000). Needless to say, haven't given this any thought at all. It's gonna be a Heidegger-filled 10 days or so, which could be really good, but could also get pretty ugly...

Living life like an island/(before it even started)/crowds of people: Soundtrack to the end of the affair

What I'm particularly taking to heart right now:

Natalie Imbruglia - White Lilies Island
Aimee Mann (especially "Stupid Thing")
Neil Young - On The Beach

Natalie. Enough of the "what more did people want from their mainstream pop" already - this is a lovely album on any terms, damnit! Somehow apt that I should've cycled back to liking her again at this stage in my life...maybe a new cycle is about to commence, entropy having set in inescapably with this last some time ago.

Aimee. Still glorious...sometimes she sulks, sometimes she burns.

Neil. After the final Historical Fictions class (Tuesday) - a nice one - myself and a few of the others drifted on to the area outside the postgrad lounge (a regular haunt for me in the last fortnight or so) for a drink and I got into a music talk with Peter, in the course of which he picked out Zuma as his favourite Neil Young album. I responded that On The Beach was mine, and though I don't think I'd really stopped to think about the question before, as intuitions go it was dead on...lately I've found myself listening to the record over and over; particularly feelin' the title track but really it's all quite perfect for my now.

Lone star statements

Time magazine recently published a list of the 100 best English-language novels published since Time first hit the presses (1923). I reckon it's a pretty good list, actually, though of course every single online article I've read or skimmed which mentions the list has just hated all over it. On that note, came across a very funny compilation of one-star amazon.com reviews of books which made the list. These are some of my favourites:

* * *

A Clockwork Orange (1963)
Author: Anthony Burgess

“In the first 20 pages, Alex and his lackies beat a guy senseless and rob him; they steal a car and trash it, they get into a vicious gang fight; they attack a couple at their home, destroy the husband’s life work (his book, A Clockwork Orange), beat him and his wife senseless, and rape the wife. This really ticked me off.”

* * *

The Great Gatsby (1925)
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

“It grieves me deeply that we Americans should take as our classic a book that is no more than a lengthy description of the doings of fops.”

* * *

The Lord of the Rings (1954)
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

“The book is not readable because of the overuse of adverbs.”

* * *

Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
Author: Virginia Woolf

“The only good thing to say about this “literary” drivel is that the person responsible, Virginia Woolf, has been dead for quite some time now. Let us pray to God she stays that way.”

* * *

1984 (1948)
Author: George Orwell

“Don’t listen to anyone who tries to distinguish between “serious” works of literature like this one and allegedly “lesser” novels. The distinction is entirely illusory, because no novels are “better” than any others, and the concept of a “great novel” is an intellectual hoax. This book isn’t as good as Harry Potter in MY opinion, and no one can refute me. Tastes are relative!”

* * *

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

“In the novel, they often speak of a planet called Tralfamadore, where he was displayed in a zoo with a former movie star by the name of Montana Wildhack. I thought that the very concept of a man who was kidnapped by aliens was truly unbelievable and a tad ludicrous. I did not find the idea of aliens kidnapping a human and putting them in a zoo very plausible. While some of the Tralfamadorians’ concept of death and living in a moment would be comforting for a war veteran, I found it relatively odd. I do not believe that an alien can kidnap someone and house them in a zoo for years at a time, while it is only a microsecond on earth. I also do not believe that a person has seven parents.”

* * *

Plenty more where they came from: here.

Ha! So many brands of moronic logic and plain wrong-headedness on the one page...

Neil Gaiman - Sandman: The Wake

Speaking of endings...

Well, I reckon that Gaiman's earned a send-off like this for the dream king, and he does it in style. The first three issues, detailing the wake itself, are the real elegy; the final three are more of a coda. Collectively, they have about the impact that they ought to, which is to say that they involve you emotionally, and leave you feeling sad and also kinda hopeful...

"Omnia mutantur, nihil interit" indeed.

Aimee Mann - Live at St Ann's Warehouse

Mmm...recently, I haven't been so intensely feeling music in general, including this one's, mostly because of the current severe oppression being caused by Thesis and coursework.[*] At this particular moment (a moment which has extended over the last couple of days), though, I'm in no state to be doing any substantial writing or thinking, and so it's an opportune time for this live dvd/cd set, made up of performances from a three night stand somewhere in Brooklyn, New York, to have arrived in at Basement Discs for me (some weeks after I first started stalking/awaiting it there). Last night I sat down and watched the dvd, and while it's pretty bare bones (shot on digital video, unadorned show footage, not much cutting or editing), I enjoyed it muchly and fell in love with the music afresh (and, to the extent that I'm in love with her, with Aimee, too).

Actually, there's a rather good review of this set which I read a while ago: here. The opening paragraph sets the tone and is worth the price of admission in its own right:

I love Aimee Mann in ways you could never understand. I love her big blinking frog eyes and her reedy skeletal body and her white suit coat and the metallic sky-blue tie she wears. I love the creepy deep lines that are gathering around her mouth and connote a certain unfriendly kind of Wasp woman--you can see her elderly mother frowning with disapproval at Christmas dinner. And most of all I love the mini-sized blue-eyed-soul melismas that make every Aimee Mann song an adventure in irony.

As to specifics, the dvd and cd set lists overlap closely but not perfectly. I'd heard this version of "Long Shot", and it was that which made me certain that this would be worth listening to all the way through; it's probably the highlight, with Mann and her band really ripping it up in style. Of all the songs on the set list, it's the most markedly different from the original studio version (though "Red Vines", which appears on the dvd is also subtly stripped back). Also, have been reminded of something I already half knew - that "Stupid Thing" is great. And enjoying the "Wise Up"/"Save Me" double; the glorious fragility of both comes through extremely well in the live performances.

It's actually notable how similar these live takes are to the studio recordings - they're not similar in the sense of being facsimilies [sp?] (which is, say, how I felt about the Interpol live concert experience), but more in that the underlying elements come across very strongly, most notably Mann's singing, which is almost note perfect. Listening to her sing 'live', too, has made me realise how expressive a singer she is - it's striking how clearly that expressiveness is reproduced.

I mostly wanted the cd, really - I was very much of the attitude that I could take or leave the dvd. But it's actually kinda neat to be able to see the musicians, even if they're basically just standing in place and sometimes shuffling-shaking-swaying a bit - it's nice to see Mann singing the emotional bits with her eyes shut, and to witness the swapping of instruments that goes on (realising, say, that she's on piano in "King of the Jailhouse", at least in these concerts/recordings), and to be able to hear the banter (including a nice line in self-deprecation on Mann's part, regarding the habitual subject matter of her compositions). Plus the extras are pretty endearing, especially the interviews with Mann and band.

* * *

[*] [ Edit 22/5/17 - more than a decade on, having just re-read while listening to this year's (2017) Mental Illness, edited to remove several paragraphs of more personal reflections for housing somewhere more appropriate. ]

Kingdom of Heaven

I always watch these epics just in case they turn out to be good, and I thought that there was a better than average chance that this one would be, seeing as it was directed by Ridley Scott (who, most relevantly, directed Gladiator, which was one of the good ones). In the event, watching it was a bit of a frustrating experience, for while it was stirring in parts, I felt as if it really needed more space in which to sprawl for it to find its natural, expansive shape; as it is, the pacing of the film seems a bit off, and it never quite coheres. Adding to the problem is that while Orlando Bloom fills the central role effectively enough, he doesn't have any genuine presence or stature; moreover, the love interest is pretty weak (in most senses of the word) and, in fact, several of the secondary characters cry out to be better developed. So, good in patches but mildly disappointing.

last.fm

Yo whattup, last.fm is really addictive. I'm here.

F Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

Given the variety of ways available to us for marking off significant periods in our lives, perhaps the surprising thing is that we're so little, rather than so much, aware of them. Some of these are largely shared - the passage of days, weeks, months, years, decades (to name the most obviously prescribed and linear ones), and then there are seasons, of course - while others are more individual but nonetheless widely recognised (birthdays being the obvious example). But I reckon that the really interesting ones are more idiosyncratic - organising one's life history in terms of relationships, say, or friendships, or the music of the time, or key books read, and so on. And naturally all of these can and do coexist.

One such for me, perhaps not as significant as some but still looming reasonably large, is the Review's Annual Dinner. This isn't the place to excavate everything associated with that event, but I'm remembering one conversation I had at last year's, with Ros C, the Dean's wife, about literature and life and the rest of the usual, and in particular her saying that she thought that The Great Gatsby was a book which was particularly prone to reading differently each time one returned to it at a different stage in their lives. I think that I'd read it fairly recently at that stage, but what she said immediately made sense to me and it's stayed with me.

As it turns out, I've re-read the book sooner than I'd expected, inspired by the making of that list of favourites, and while no single interval of a little over 12 months - during which my external life has slowed to almost a complete lull - is likely to effect a dramatic change in my perspective on things (literature and life &c), this past year has, I suspect, seen more change than most.

Returning to Gatsby, though, I've been struck anew by how it glitters - how every page is scattered with cynical bon mots and wry witticisms - and (the other side of the coin) by how it shimmers with sadness lying just beneath the bright, shiny surface. I was also (ahem) reflecting, as I read it, on how nice it was to be reading prose which wasn't afraid to reach for the lyrical - and, moreover, which succeeds in that aim - and generally loving the 'literariness' of it all, the facility of the writing and the way that images and themes emerge and work themselves through.

...how it glitters. A lot of the appeal for me lies in the marrying of the glib, mannered, cynical cleverness of its protagonists with their rich inner lives; how fragile and beautiful and doomed they are. Only it isn't really beauty so much as attractiveness, and of that kind that could never endure (moths drawn to the flame of their time). I would have liked to live in that time, I think, romanticised though it may be in the writing of Fitzgerald et al.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Wrapped up in books

On a cheerier note, on Tuesday I got to talking with a girl from my Historical Fictions class - one Sarah - and the conversation turned, naturally enough, to the iconic books in our lives. Hers were all Dostoevsky and Faulkner and a whole lot of French writers of whom I'd never heard before, but she said that she'd make a fuller list and I promised to reciprocate (not ever needing much of an excuse to indulge in this kind of list-making) and so voilà:

Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities
Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being
-
Mervyn Peake - Gormenghast trilogy
Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
Kate Atkinson - Behind the Scenes at the Museum
Donna Tartt - The Secret History
Gregory Maguire - Wicked
John Fowles - The French Lieutenant's Woman
F Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
Haruki Murakami - Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
-
Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights
Jeanette Winterson - Gut Symmetries
David Malouf - Fly Away Peter
Umberto Eco - Foucault's Pendulum
Evelyn Waugh - Brideshead Revisited

The first three are the ones which are really 'iconic' for me - the ones to which I return over and over, and within which I always find something new and truthful and real. The next lot are, I guess, the rest of my favourites - I love all of them, but my response is slightly different to them than it is to Lot 49, Invisible Cities and The Unbearable Lightness of Being...one way of putting it might be to say that I don't feel as if they really map out a whole design or manifesto for life in the way that the first three do. But each, in its own way, has left a deep mark on me which goes far beyond mere liking of the book.

And as to those last five, well, they're five which I don't really love any more but which also marked me very deeply in their time - indeed, each probably more deeply than any of the 'favourites' bar the Pynchon, Calvino and Kundera works. Each of them is such a huge landmark and so feels as if it's in its own place, and for some of them, I don't really know how I'd feel if I were to re-read them today. I haven't read Wuthering Heights or Fly Away Peter since high school, and quite possibly not Gut Symmetries either (though I was still into Winterson for the first couple of years or so of uni, as I've recorded elsewhere on this blog). Re-reading Foucault's Pendulum earlier this year was a disappointment - it was still good, but no longer amazing - and when I started to re-read Brideshead Revisited (probably last year, maybe '03), I found myself not enjoying it at all and hurriedly put the book down rather than risk tainting it, meaning that I've still only read it the once...

Neil Young - After The Gold Rush

In fact, I think that my enjoyment of After The Gold Rush has been diluted by similar factors to those which have prevented me from really burrowing into the bluegrass set - things are kind of hard right now, and the days hang heavily. In another time, the album might well have been a balm, and it probably will prove to be so at some point(s) in the future - it's that kind of record, gentle, tired, introspective - but it's not quite having that effect at present...my weariness is grey rather than mauve or anything more brightly hued. Oh, but nonetheless it's really good - I know it - and I've listened to it quite a lot, and it makes me feel and want to sigh, just a little.

Can't You Hear Me Callin' - Bluegrass: 80 Years of American Music

A huge indulgence, this - laying down $70 for a four cd set tracing the development of bluegrass from its recorded origins in the 1920s through to the present day - but indulgence isn't always a bad thing, and sometimes it's positively necessary (ie, indulgent in the particular instance, necessary in the overall scheme of things...incoherent or not?). There's something like five hours of music across the set, and even after the better part of several weeks I don't feel as if I've absorbed it all properly; times being what they are at present, though (that is, tiring, flat and unconducive to listening to music), I don't see this changing much in the near future, and hence the present writeup.

A couple of the songs were already familiar to me, to greater or lesser extents ("I'm A Man Of Constant Sorrow" and "Keep On The Sunny Side" through O Brother, Where Art Thou?, "Poor Ellen Smith" through Laura Cantrell's version of it, "Orange Blossom Special" thanks to Johnny Cash, Alison Krauss + Union Station's "So Long, So Wrong", Rhonda Vincent's "Is The Grass Any Bluer" and Mark O'Connor's "Soldier's Joy"), but I was struck by a sense of familiarity which lingers through all of the music collected here, and which owes much, I think, to the continuity of sound that seems to have been preserved in the genre from those early days through to now (so that the earliest cuts, by artists like Bill Monroe, Charlie Poole, the Carter Family and others, have more in common than not with the more contemporary bluegrass currents with which I'm more familiar). I feel that there's so much to be explored here - perhaps will have more to say once Thesis and coursework have been negotiated.

The Proposition

Given that this was a Nick Cave-penned film set in mid-nineteenth century frontier Australia, The Proposition was almost exactly what I'd expected, and fully self-actualised as such - spectacular, gritty, violent, visceral, morally ambiguous and occasionally poetic. It wasn't exactly a fun film - Serenity, which was the other option, would've been a markedly different experience - but it was gripping and convincing, gaining a kind of cinematic-documentary feel from the combination of the graininess of its picture style and the panoramic landscape shots.

I thought that all of the actors were really good (Guy Pearce and Ray Winstone, as the real centres of the film, in particular), including those in relatively small parts or cameos - David Wenham, who's usually very good, was the only one who struck the occasional false note. And it had a very distinctive aesthetic - as an exercise in mythologising, it's effective (although, as may well always be the case with myths, much of that effectiveness comes from the extent to which it taps into archetypes which we already possess), and I wondered afterwards just how accurate a picture it gave of life in that time. It's not particularly preachy - Captain Stanley's determination to civilise the land is taken seriously, just as are Charlie's choices, and though the aborigines aren't ignored, the film seems unselfconsciously neutral in its stance towards the questions associated with those issues. Nor is there any shying away from the brutality and casual bigotry of the times.

To some extent, it's concerned with family and the bonds between people, but primarily, I feel that The Proposition locates its moral compass in extremes, and is a film 'about' human nature, extremes and extremity - what we find in people when they're pushed to their extremes, and how the choices that they make in those circumstances reveal and shape what they fundamentally are. Cave's vision is a brutal, harsh, near apocalyptic one - I always think of his music, especially the earlier Bad Seeds stuff, as very 'Old Testament' - but he's always thinking in terms of ambiguous redemptions and saving graces (his language, I think, not mine). One feels that he's carving a vision out of the Australian wilderness and history just as the Captain Stanleys and Charlies sought to do in their time, in building the idea of the nation.

She Will Have Her Way: The Songs Of Tim & Neil Finn

The first I knew of this was hearing New Buffalo's "Four Seasons In One Day" on the radio one morning, and I immediately became quite excited about the record (the operative word in that phrase being 'quite' rather than 'excited') - Tim and Neil Finn songs, covered by female Australian and New Zealand artists, and an impressive roll call of artists at that. It was the sort of cd that I didn't particularly want to buy but really wanted to hear; luckily, then, Beck C soon lent me her copy.

For me, it's mainly about the Crowded House songs - I haven't heard much Split Enz or solo Finn work but, like everyone else, I internalised Recurring Dream at some point in the distant past so that it feels as if it's always been there. Throughout, a real love for the source material comes through, which is (ahem) only natural, for doesn't everyone love Crowded House? I was initially nervous that it might be a bit embarrassingly earnest, but actually listening to the record all the way through made me realise what a silly thing that was to think in relation to these songs - they're all about honesty and feelings in the first place, and it'd ill behove me to hold the simplicity or straightforwardness of an interpretation against the interpreter.

The New Buffalo is, of course, a highlight, and in fact the best song of the set - "Four Seasons In One Day" is one of my favourite Crowded House songs, and Seltmann does it over in her own style while keeping it suitably bare and preserving that rare combination of directness and allusion which made the original so great. Almost as good is Clare Bowditch's take on "Fall At Your Feet" (another favourite), which opens the set - wavering, restrained, slightly haunted, and so exactly how the song should be done.

As to the other Crowded House numbers, Kasey Chambers' "Better Be Home Soon" is about exactly what you'd imagine that it would be (ie, earnest but good), Sarah Blasko deconstructs "Don't Dream It's Over" and does rather a good job of it, Renee Geyer successfully funks up "Into Temptation", Brooke Fraser stays pretty faithful to "Distant Sun" (and with a song like that one, staying faithful means you can't go far wrong...I think that it might be my actual Favourite of theirs), Holly Throsby reinforces my growing good opinion of her with a sensitive take on "Not The Girl You Think You Are" (which I've never been that keen on), and Natalie Imbruglia (hurray) does a by-the-numbers-but-sturdily-so "Pineapple Head".

As to others of note, the Lisa Miller contribution - "I Hope I Never" - is less wonderful than I'd have hoped (given that it's Lisa Miller) but still rather wonderful (honestly, she could sing anything and make it sound good), Missy Higgins releases another pleasant but unexciting song (I don't know...I want to like her, but her music's just kinda dull), Little Birdy are energetic and, to my surprise, quite good with a song called "Six Months in a Leaky Boat" (I don't know why I always expect to dislike them these days!)...elsewhere, Amiel, Stellar*, Sophie Koh, and a couple I hadn't heard of, Sara Storer (whose "Won't Give In" is another highlight, a light, delicately tripping bit of sweetness) and Goldenhorse (aw, no Bic Runga?).

In general, I tend to enjoy covers, though for every fairly good one there's at least one terrible one, and the great ones are pretty rare. The covers which annoy me tend to be those where I like the original a great deal but, on this cd, I basically like all of the Crowded House ones, while my responses to the other songs tend to be more muted. The mutedness is probably due to my being completely unfamiliar with the originals of the Split Enz and other stuff, meaning that they might as well be originals as far as I'm concerned; as to the liking of the Crowded House ones, well, maybe it just comes down to the melodies being so strong that these kinds of covers can't help but work.

Natalie Imbruglia and White Lilies Island

I remember "Torn" - that was where it all started. It came out at more or less the same time that I began taking serious notice of pop music (in the broad sense) generally, as opposed to just having the radio on all the time, which was also the time at which I began to become aware of music videos, and I remember waking up early on Saturday mornings in order to catch it on rage - it was a huge hit, and so there were a few weeks there where it would reliably be on at the time when the program got up to counting down the ARIA top 10 (am I just imagining-misremembering this, or was it held off number 1 by Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On"?). Part of the appeal unquestionably resided in the video clip, an elegantly sparse thing depicting the gamine Natalie in a state of arty despair, but mostly it was an infatuation with the song itself. I can't even begin to imagine why it gave me such a rush - these things are always a bit ineffable - except by surmising that it was (and remains) just one of those perfect pop songs, delivered (and produced) just right, breezy and sweet and sad.

I must've bought Left of the Middle fairly shortly after, even though at the time each cd purchase was still a major decision, and I imagine I must've spun it plenty, though memory, ever unreliable, fails to supply on this point. Circumstantial evidence provided by this rather embarrassing 'single review' from a magazine that Tim Watson and I put together for a school project in high school:

* * *

Smoke - Natalie Imbruglia

Smoke is the standout track from a fine debut album, and if Natalie had as much sense as she has looks and talent, she would have released it immediately after smash hit Torn. As it is, Smoke is the fourth single from the album, and most likely won't do as well as it deserves. Anyway, the track itself is a heart-felt ballad with slightly better lyrics than a typical such song.

* * *

Ah, the callowness of youth!

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that it was one of the first cds that I ever bought (other early ones that I can recall were the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack, Garbage, Tragic Kingdom, (What's The Story) Morning Glory, Ten...). And it was a nice enough album, and still is, with decent songs and state of the moment production, and I've never for a second regretted its purchase. But things were moving quickly for me at that time, and it wasn't long before I got into Radiohead, and from thereon in everything else was kind of inevitable, and Left of the Middle and Natalie naturally enough slid by the wayside.

Fast forward about four years and comes the release of White Lilies Island. By now, I'm second year university, and it was probably all about the Smiths and the Cure (not to mention Radiohead!) at this stage, but still I download the album just in case (back in the days when audiogalaxy was a thing of wonder and before we knew - or at least before we were particularly aware - that downloading music was illegal), and it strikes me as faintly pleasant, just enough so to linger on my hard drive indefinitely, which it does. Now fast forward about another four years, and we reach today, with my just having finally bought the album and found myself liking it heaps. I don't usually mention it here when I buy albums which I've already listened to properly, but since I don't think I've really written about Natalie before (and certainly not on extemporanea), well, why not?

You know, I don't understand why White Lilies Island wasn't a huge hit. Often when people say that kind of thing, they mean it rhetorically; often when I say that kind of thing, I mean it rhetorically. But in this instance, I really don't understand it - it just seems so good. Not great by any stretch of the imagination, sure - but the kind of good that I would've thought would be eminently palatable to the masses, especially given that Left of the Middle had been such a massive seller.

Perhaps I'm just giving the masses - and the record label execs and radio djs who basically determine the tastes of aforementioned masses - too much credit for good taste, though. And/or perhaps White Lilies Island is rather more 'indie'-sounding than I'm registering, not being particularly conversant with top 40 of the last (relevantly) four years or so. But damnit, this album is just so pretty and jangly and mildly epic in all the right sorts of ways - like the Sundays, but glossier - one great tune after another, no rough edges to speak of...what more did people want from their mainstream pop? I can imagine "That Day" throwing people off - it's a good song, but its choruslessness may've made it a bit difficult to digest out there in radioland, and admittedly not that many of the songs on the album really seem made for chart domination, for all of their immediacy. So maybe the natural audience for this album would've been more the 'adult album alternative' crowd, which would've completely overlooked it because of Natalie's putative pop star status, meaning that it fell through the cracks. But still, it's a crying shame that more people haven't taken White Lilies Island to heart, because it deserves a larger audience.

Well, in any case, there you have it...

A writeup: Gillian Welch - Soul Journey

Thesis temporarily put to one side, current object of 'procrastination from' is Contemporary Historical Fictions paper on Pynchon, Morrison and historiographic metafiction; in interests of said procrastination, finished writing up an old epinion on Gillian Welch's wonderful Soul Journey:

"Dusty yearnful at-peace cosmic americana".

Feeling unsure and catastrophic: Blonde Redhead - Melody Of Certain Damaged Lemons

I'm not quite sure how to put this, but after listening to Melody Of Certain Damaged Lemons, I feel as if I like the idea of the band more than the band itself; perhaps another way of putting it would be to say that I like their sound more than their songs...but even that's not quite right - maybe another way again would be to saying that I like the various parts of their songs more than the songs as wholes, but that too doesn't really capture it.

This split response reflects my experience of the album, and of Blonde Redhead's music generally (or at least what I've heard of it to date). I love the sound, the shivery uneven refractive swoony cinematic fraughtness of it all. There's a very distinctive aesthetic at play, clattering yet pretty, stop-start in any given moment but ex-centrically oriented around a kind of guiding internal momentum, melodies seemingly dialed in from some other dimension, working its way through differently in the various individual songs. I can't really pick any 'best songs', because every one is really good...

Which is kind of 180 degrees from what I thought I was saying earlier, but maybe the best way of thinking about these two ways of expressing my thoughts is as two sides of the same coin. The tunes of these songs seem different from what I'm used to in pop music (even indie-type art-pop); structurally, too, the songs have an air of uniqueness to them. And that difference is what makes it problematic to think about Blonde Redhead's music in terms of 'songs', at least insofar as that presupposes comparison to more typical examples of the category (even though these obviously are pop songs, at least in some sense).

But in any case, it's really good.

Speak Low: Kurt Weill: Songs & "Die sieben Todsünden" (von Otter / Forsberg / Gardiner)

Weill's is one of those names which comes up a lot, but he and his art have always seemed sort of just off in the horizon, rather than being on the verge of graspability. I suppose that I'd been put off by my hazy sense that he was a kind of High Art - maybe Modernist, maybe postmodernist (but in either case, Difficult) - type, which is all very well in some fields, but not so much when the starting point is 'classical' music (given my own background, I mean).

A little while back, though, I was haunting the local library looking for something new and noticed a recording of his stuff; thought I'd give it a go, and it turns out to be very listenable indeed. The key thing here, I think, is that the pieces gathered here - his 'ballet chanté' "Die sieben Todsünden" and various other songs - really are songs in the natural sense, voice-focused and with melody lines almost always carried forward by a single instrument when the voice is absent. As a result, I can enjoy the tunes and the drama and the sense of humour, and get a handle on the genre-crossing that's going on, and realise that it's neat-o.

"La révolution de spunk"

Label samplers are always fun, but this one's somehow less fun than it ought to be. A lot of good indie stuff seems to funnel into Australia through Spunk (the 4ad acts are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head, but there are plenty more) and, given that, I would've expected a Spunk sampler to be good value (value for time, if the nature of the value needs to be specified - given that it was free, I can hardly quibble on the basis of value for money!), but instead it's kinda boring.

It's in the nature of these cds that one doesn't listen to them closely - instead, it's left up to the songs themselves to leap out and demand attention. Here, though, none of the 18 songs have really done so. Apart from Sufjan's "Chicago" and the Arcade Fire's "In The Backseat", which I already knew, the only ones which have left any particular impression are:
* Akron/Family - "Running, Returning" (post-millennial, post-Kid A indie-rock; I kind of got over it after the first couple of listens, but it seems to be growing on me again)
* Smog - "I Feel Like The Mother Of The World" (fairly good, but you know, so far so Smog)
* Holly Throsby - "As The Night Dies" (better than most of the current crop of Just Another (Female) Australian Singer-Songwriters, from what I've heard of them - not the sort of song to be transcendental, but the album might be good)
* Antony & The Johnsons - "Fistful Of Love" (the first Antony & The Johnsons song I've heard since the spectacular "River of Sorrow", and hence my first since they burst into the alternative mainstream a while back and everyone started talking them up - it's nice, and I like it)
The rest of it is fairly nondescript 'of the moment' indie - quite samey in a lot of respects (one surprising element of the samey-ness being a folk current running through the cd). Not unpleasant - just not particularly good. Still, I'm not complaining - it'd be churlish to whinge about free music!

JJ72 - JJ72

This is one those albums that bought in hope more than in expectation - hope that the Fairly Good Single one remembers from a few years back will turn out to've been indicative of a Fairly Good Album without having any particular confidence that this will in fact be the case. The FGS in this instance was "October Swimmer", and the album, well, call it two parts Placebo and one part post-Sunburn Muse but, aforementioned single aside, not as catchy as either, and it's about as good as that description suggests (ie, Not Really Very Good At All). You could say that, to save myself the possibility of some private embarrassment in the unlikely event of my doing an about-face in my opinion at some point down the track, I ought to've listened to JJ72 more than once before writing this - but really, there'd seem to be little point. Oh well.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - The Communist Manifesto

She spoke in dialect I could not understand
But one thing that she made clear
There was no coming on to her
There was no intellect
That she could respect
If it couldn't see
That the girl just wants to be
Left alone with Marx and Engels for a while ...

* * *

I hadn't read this before - parts of Capital, and various other bits and pieces, but somehow never the famous manifesto. Picked it up last night, and have since read it in gaps and on buses ...

[7/9/17: actually, I still quite like what I wrote about this all those years ago. But probably the internet doesn't need to retain a copy of what my university self thought about The Communist Manifesto!]

Porco Rosso

A Miyazaki. About a jaded pig who is a legendary sea-plane pilot bounty hunter. And has an awful lot in common with Humphrey Bogart's character in Casablanca. With a supporting cast of bumbling pirates, a beautiful, faintly melancholy childhood friend, a preternaturally gifted, cute-as-all-get-go younger girl, and an array of others odds and sorts of the endearingly grotesque variety. Whimsy, spectacle, humour. What more is there to say, really? Don't get me wrong - I'm still not lined up with the ranks of the anime-lovers. But this was pretty good nonetheless.