The Work of Director Chris Cunningham: Directors Label vol 2

Eight music videos and a few extras. Cunningham's work is largely futuristic-looking, blue-grey metallic sheens, bright lights against shades...often rather disturbing (the ones for "Come To Daddy" and "Window Licker" must be two of the most troubling music videos ever to have achieved a mainstream release - stumbling across them for the first time during separate late-night rage watchings was fairly intense, and they still give me a small jolt today).

Apart from the Aphex clips, there are two pop songs whose videos are amongst my favourites - Björk's "All Is Full Of Love" (robot sex and all, it somehow fits the chugging slink of the single edit of the song perfectly; apparently Björk had asked Cunningham to make a 'white heaven' clip, and I think that it must be accounted a success on that front) and Madonna's "Frozen" (which I remember watching on early morning video tv back in the day - must've been high school - and thinking both very weird and very cool...many of the details, it turns out, are still etched in my mind). The jerky culture-shock narrative of Leftfield's "Afrika Shox" is the way that I'd have imagined the song's video would look, if I'd ever paused to imagine how the song's video would look. The one for Portishead's "Only You" is suitably moody but, rather like the song itself, doesn't really go anywhere. The Autechre one ("Second Bad Vilbel" - I hadn't heard the song before) fits the music - industrial-styled props and glitches jerking and wavering in time to the music - but is kinda boring for all that. And the Squarepusher one ("Come On My Selector" - again, I didn't know the song) is, while weird, also a bit blah.

Marian Drew - "Still Lives" @ Dianne Tanzer Gallery

The premise is this: found Australian roadkill (magpies, wombats, bandicoots, possums, etc) posed and photographed as part of otherwise traditionally-composed still lives (fruit, cutlery, background landscapes, etc). Done in a way, though, which is thought-provoking without being jarringly incongruous - the writeup which brought the exhibition to my attention suggests that Drew's art 'plays up their [the dead animals'] languid beauty', and I think that that's quite true...the overall effect is one of slightly bruised prettiness rather than of shock or grotesquerie. But of course there is a striking element of the incongruous to the juxtaposition, rendered more effective by the almost stealthy way in which it intrudes itself.

There was a short video projection running on loop in the rear space of the gallery, giving some insight into the works. The most interesting part is the connection which Drew makes between our social reactions to roadkill and the presentation of food (both in images of art, and at the table itself, if I have this right) as a sign of mastery (the latter being a typically European gesture, according to her); through these works, she seeks to call these responses and practices into question.

I thought that it was quite neat.

Information here.

The Hours

Sometimes a film comes along at just the right time.

It had occurred to me that now might be the right time for me to see The Hours, having read and loved Mrs Dalloway this semester, and also becoming increasingly serious about the possibility of writing a novel myself as the days and nights stretch into summer. But I hadn't realised just how right it would turn out to be - The Hours is a gorgeous film and touched me deeply.

I think that it made a big difference that I was familiar with Mrs Dalloway, and also, I guess, that my sensitivities and sensibilities are such as to make me receptive to both book and film. In one way, The Hours is 'about' Mrs Dalloway, but it also somehow mysteriously 'feels' like Woolf's book, developing many of the same ideas and, in the process, moving me in many of the same ways. Well, it's about life, I suppose, and choices - so sad and yet ultimately hopeful. There's a clear-sightedness and a truth to it.

As a film, it's very graceful and completely involving. Feels quite literary, and I can imagine people (sophisticated film-goers at that) finding it rather slow going, but I truly didn't want it to end. Yet it ends exactly when and as it had to.

The acting is wonderful. Kidman's Woolf is tormented, needy, alluring, human - I saw echoes of myself and of many people I know in her. Julianne Moore is fragile and unbearably sad. Meryl Streep is note perfect. For all three, this was the best I've seen them. And the supports are just right - Ed Harris, Stephen Dillane (as Leonard Woolf), Claire Danes, Toni Collette (in a brief cameo), and all the others.

The choice of Philip Glass to provide the score at first struck me as being rather out of left field, but in fact works perfectly - his cyclic, mournfully pretty compositions set just the right tone and provide a link for the three stories beyond the parallels and the book Mrs Dalloway itself.

There's so much more to say, but I can't find the words to say it. I can't say it better than the film itself does.

Anyway, I suspect that 'objectively' The Hours isn't a 'great' film, whatever that means. But what can I say? It spoke to me. Sometimes a film is just right.

Joseph Heller - Catch-22

I suppose that this reflects the particular circles in which I move, but certain books and authors come up in conversation over and over - The Outsider, The Great Gatsby, The Age of Innocence, Wuthering Heights, White Teeth, Foucault's Pendulum, Austen, Plath, Dostoevsky, Rushdie, Pynchon (admittedly in part because I always talk about him...), DeLillo, Eggers, Kundera, Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Peter Carey, Tim Winton...some of these were on vce syllabi and others are basically unavoidable for anyone majoring in lit (at least at Melb Uni), but still they must have something in order to stand out from the many others of which or whom the same could be said.

Catch-22 is one such - a lot of people have read this book, and many of them have loved it (I'm not sure if I've remembered this right, but I think that it was Ben S's favourite book, at least as of a few years ago). So I'd always kind of intended to read it but never had any particular impetus to do so; having finally read the thing over the last few days, I've been wondering why no one ever told me how ridiculously funny the book is...I haven't laughed so much while reading a novel in ages, in cafes and on public transport as much as at home by myself.

'Ridiculously' is right, for the humour is deliberately absurdist. Much of it's slapstick - one passage which sticks in my mind is that in which Yossarian and Dunbar pull rank by telling a series of other patients (including one A. Fortiori) to 'Screw', culminating in Yossarian's run-in with Nurse Cramer - but there's a deeper purpose to the pratfalls and general grotesquerie, for it all highlights the pointlessness of war and bureaucracy (witness the inescapable influence of Wintergreen's low level malevolence, say).

There are quite a lot of loose ends - to name just a few, Doc Daneeka is left to languish as a dead man without there being any particular resolution of his fate, General Dreedle just disappears from the scene once he's replaced by General Peckem, nothing ever really happens in relation to Major --- de Coverley (though that last may be apt in terms of the figure's general inscrutability), and does Chief White Halfoat end up dying or not? - but perhaps that's apt...the narrative cycles and repeats itself, but this endless circularity ('Catch-22'!) needn't - and, in Heller's universe, doesn't - imply resolution or completion. Events are oriented around the logic of the titular 'Catch-22', which encapsulates the absurdity of it all, appearing and ramifying in guises and situations which are ever-changing but somehow always the same.

It's striking, too, that in some ways the novel evinces quite a conventional progression - the characters are introduced, we begin to sympathise with them (with figures like Yossarian and the Chaplain in particular, who eventually prove to be the (anti-)heroes of the book), and then, in order to make the author's point, they begin dying (Cathcart, Korn, Milo, and others of their ilk are, of course, insulated from any such risk, but the McWatts and Natelys begin falling with an indecent haste in the final sections of the book). They're not really grotesque characters, but they find themselves in grotesque situations (eg, war) - that reminds me of Pynchon's aphorism about paranoids (in Gravity's Rainbow?) which, paraphrased, goes something like 'paranoids are paranoids not because they're paranoid, but because they, fucking idiots, keep putting themselves in paranoid situations', but then one never really sympathises with Pynchon's characters, only identifies with the pathos of their Situations.

Catch-22 does remind me of Pynchon, and also of Dr Strangelove - these are easy comparisons, but none the less revealing for that ease, I don't think. But to me it seems to have more of a centre - a core - than Pynchon's work (not least in the forms of subjectivity and thematic development it evinces, and in its close, specific targeting of the effects of war) and more of a wildness, an unhingedness which is perhaps the prerogative of literature (as opposed to film), than Strangelove. Easy to read, but there's plenty going on.

Hilary and Jackie

An emotionally involving film, this - I spent nearly the whole time with my arms wrapped around myself or with one hand pressed to my forehead in a kind of warding-off gesture, and realised at a couple of points that I had almost forgotten to breathe. Sometimes films take me like that, and I think that it mainly has to do with my sympathising with the characters - I squirm and wince and feel awkward and embarrassed for them...it's a very immediate experience, and I don't think it depends at all on being able to imagine myself in their shoes - just the depiction itself is enough.

Actually, the last film which provoked this sort of response in me was Punch-Drunk Love, and it may not be entirely coincidental that Emily Watson was also in that one; she's an astonishingly good actor, and I can still vividly recall how much of a punch in the guts Breaking The Waves - the first thing I saw her in - was when I watched it years ago (much as I loved it, I haven't been able to bear the thought of watching the film since). In Hilary and Jackie, as Jacqueline du Pré, she's utterly compelling - you can't take your eyes off her, and yet some of her scenes are almost unbearable to watch because of the awkwardness and rawness of her character. And Rachel Griffiths is just as good, as her sister, Hilary - in every way, she's just exactly right...both ring completely true.

This film could easily have been boring (because it's so unassuming in its conception) or tritely melodramatic (because the feelings and relationships are so deeply felt and sometimes extravagantly expressed), but both performances and screenplay are perfectly pitched and so instead it's simply lovely...one of those films that, in its modest, poignant way, is about nothing more nor less than what it is to be human and alive.

The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases edited by Jeff Vandermeer and Mark Roberts

Okay, squeamish isn't quite the right word, but I can be a...uh...call it 'physically sensitive' reader. A good example of this was the fashion in which, when I was reading Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire series, back in the day, I often noticed that a large vein at the side of my throat would start throbbing in sympathy after a while - I don't know if it was actually the jugular, but even if it wasn't, quite possibly all that matters is that I thought that it was. And reading descriptions of throats being cut or wrists slit often make me physically uncomfortable to the point that I have to stop reading for a while and think hard about something else (the description of the murder early in Kate Atkinson's latest, Case Histories, had that effect on me).

For that reason, I found that I wasn't able to read too much of this Pocket Guide at any one sitting. See, it's ostensibly a medical guide to, as its title suggests, a variety of diseases which fall somewhat beyond the compass of orthodox diagnosis. Its major part is comprised of individual entries for particular diseases (submitted by a long roll call of worthies including Miéville, Moorcock, Gaiman and Alan Moore), ranging from: Ballistic Organ Syndrome, which: "manifests as a sudden, explosive discharge of one or more bodily organs at high velocity; this exit may be accompanied by some pain"; to Inverted Drowning Syndrome; to Mongolian Death Worm Infestation, to Postal Carriers' Brain Fluke Syndrome, propagated by flukes whose mode of dissemination is so elaborate and dependent on fortuities that they seem to be "performing an extinction-defying trapeze act purely for the sake of impressing other parasites" (with accompanying footnote to a book entitled Vanity: Watch Spring of Evolution); to Reverse Pinocchio Syndrome, in which people who tell a great number of lies are eventually afflicted by the development of a black hole in one nostril once it has developed its own gravity, eventually resulting in the skull being sucked into the black hole itself. Scores of them, each detailed in terms of symptoms, first known case, treatment and cures, etc. Gross, and funny.

Also includes a publishing history of the Pocket Guide (this is supposedly the 83rd edition) complete with reproductions of covers and entries from past editions, an 'obscure medical history of the twentieth century', in which phenomena including but far from limited to the career and demise of Freud, Stalingrad, the Kennedy assassination, and AIDS are explained in terms of the diseases enumerated, various reminiscences written by other doctors who have encountered the formidable Lambshead in the course of his storied career, an introduction by the centenarian Lambshead himself, and various other odds and ends, including 'a disease guide benediction for the health & safety of all contributors, readers, and (sympathetic) reviewers', which concludes (and this made me laugh out loud - too much philosophy for me lately, obviously):

Z is for Zeno's paradoxysm, which fills us with misgiving,
By infinitely tiny steps it deadens but won't kill.
As no one could be sure if Aunt Augusta was still living
We propped her in her favorite chair to wait. She's waiting still.

So obviously all of this is made up, from the diseases themselves to the spurious biography and historiography of Lambshead and the Guide. On one level, it satirises the pretension of medical guides and the language and style in which they're written. But that's really just a launching-pad for some very postmodern imaginative pyrotechnics, as many of the disease entries are written by authors who've apparently been infected by the diseases themselves, other of the diseases can be transmitted by being read about, and self-referentiality, inter-textuality (Borges - a natural touchstone for this kind of speculative writing - is mentioned as often as made-up legends of the eccentric disease field), and so on. Definitely recommendable, though some might find its general attitude of too-clever-for-its-own-goodness to be a bit annoying.

Some information here.

Van Helsing

Gosh, this is a really bad movie. It has precisely two redeeming features: great set design, and comic relief from David Wenham. Apart from that, unremittingly awful - basically boring and frequently so bad it's laughable. Two hours of my life that would've been much better spent wrapped up in books.

The Cardigans - First Band on the Moon

Cool Scandinavian indie-pop with a bit of an edge, circa '96. This is the one with "Lovefool" (not to mention a Black Sabbath cover). "Lovefool" still a joy after all these years and despite constant listening on R+J soundtrack, "Great Divide" nice in a chimey fairground "Mike Mills" (as in the Air song) kind of way, and a couple of others deliciously off-kilter and catchy, though most of the songs on this record can't hold a candle to the band's simply splendid (and splendidly titled) current single, "I Need Some Fine Wine And You, You Need To Be Nicer".

Another list: Key early books

And while I'm excavating my past as a reader, here's my attempt at recalling and listing the books which left a deep impression when I read them in primary school (no doubt I'll miss many, but anyway...):

- The Green Wind by Thurley Fowler. This just might have been the first 'proper' book that I really loved and treasured. Looking back, it's easy to see why I was drawn to the central character, Jennifer - a sarcastic, prickly, but sympathetically-rendered 11yo type with aspirations of being a writer who feels herself to be different from everyone else - but at the time, all I knew was that the book spoke to me. Years later, I was pleasantly surprised when I learnt that Penny, one of my best friends from uni, had felt similarly about the book at the corresponding time in her life - indeed, being female and approximately red-haired, and having grown up in the country, she's much more of a Jennifer type than I.
- Master of the Grove by Victor Kelleher. Might well have been the book which first opened my eyes to the wonder that literature can bring.
- Space Demons by Gillian Rubenstein. This one just caught my imagination and wouldn't let go. I dreamt about it - and its sequel, Skymaze, too.
- Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell. Pulled my mum's tatty old copy from the book shelf one woozy summer day and lost the next few weeks to its reading, completely wrapped up in its drowsy charms; have re-read several times since (most recently a couple of years back - I wrote about it on open diary at the time), finding it to be almost a completely different and new book each time.
- To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I'm not 100% sure, but I think that this was the book which first planted the thought that I might want to be a lawyer. It really stirred me up when I read it, even though I'm sure that I didn't grasp half of what was going on. For some reason it came up in a scholarship interview I went to in grade 6 (for year 7 onwards) at Melbourne Grammar, and I remember the headmaster asking what I thought about capital punishment...heavens know what I answered!
- Small Gods by Terry Pratchett. The first Pratchett book I read and, for better or for worse (I'm much inclined to think 'better'), the beginning of a very long and deep engagement indeed.

I suspect there were at least one or two others, but those are the ones which spring to mind right now.

George R R Martin - A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings & A Storm of Swords

Having drugged myself into a familiar, dazed drowsiness with these three hefty volumes for the better part of the time since that last paper was handed in, I've been wondering just why I read (and re-read) fantasy. The genre was pretty significant in the development of my reading habits - I remember Victor Kelleher's Master of the Grove making a huge impression at some point which must've been no later than grade 4, since I have a distinct memory of reading it in the library of my old primary school, and at around that time there were also those godawful 'choose your own adventure'-type books (I can't remember the series title, but they had bright green covers and were written by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone [sp?])...and then, I think, it was David Eddings (and Terry Pratchett) from grade 6 and Stephen Donaldson the year after, in AAP (again, distinct memory of reading and being amazed by Lord Foul's Bane on the way up to camp). I'm pretty sure that Eddings was the first author whose books I was reading from the 'adult' (as opposed to 'junior'/'teenage') section of the library...somewhere in those early years I also read Tolkien and was suitably awed.

At the time, and even (especially?) through high school, I loved the genre because it was so epic - it held the promise of richer, more magical worlds, and, at its best, had such heft and sweep, and my teenage years were stormy and black enough (or, at least, so they seemed at the time, which is of course what counts) that the sheer escapism must've been alluring (though I don't think I ever thought of it in quite those terms). It's really hard to articulate, and I don't think I could've done so properly even at the time when I really felt it.

The thing is, though, that I don't feel it any more, not really, which brings me back to where I started: why do I read these books? I guess that in part it's indolence - they're so easy to read, and an enjoyable escape (even if they no longer make my spine tingle, or at least not as much as they used to), and if I'm going to read anyway, why not? Not really a very good answer, but maybe it wasn't a very good question in the first place.

As to the "Song of Ice and Fire" series itself: Well, this one I only read last year (well, read up to its current state, anyway - it's not yet finished by the author), I think, or the year before at the very earliest, and it struck me at the time as one of the best epic fantasy series out there. Simply put, it's gripping. It has gravitas and the all-important epic sweep, but it also has well-drawn, interesting characters. There's political intrigue a-plenty - much moving of pieces around the board (fates of nations and individual consciences both at stake), unexpected reversals of luck and loyalty, marriages promised and broken for the sake of alliances...the great families bound to one another by a complex merry-go-round of arranged marriages, children of enemies warded in foreign lands, imprisonments, ransoms, escapes, recaptures, characters flung together in strange configurations as they jostle and are jostled for position. But the battle and action scenes are also well done, and Martin doesn't stint on the characterisation either (witness Catelyn's complex emotions, or Tyrion, or the arc followed by Jaime Lannister, to name just a few), nor on the surprises (the first time I read these books, I was astonished when Eddard Stark died, and again when Robb met the same fate). Nor does he go overboard with the magical or fantastic elements - they become gradually more prominent as the series goes on. One of the glowing comments on the back of the books references the War of the Roses, and I reckon that's exactly right. On this re-read, it's slightly less excellent (unsurprisingly) but still pretty darn good.

Alison Lurie - Love & Friendship

I can be a boy of obscure whims; one such, of a little while ago, was the desire to be complimented on some item of my wardrobe (it didn't really matter much which item) so that I'd be able to reply, 'Oh, this old thing?'.

As I said, obscure.

Anyhow, this book reminded me of that passing thought, for its characters - middle-upper class university academics and their wives in a secluded New England university town, some time in the 1950s (as far as I could gather) - are just the sorts to utter such words. Take this passage, for example:

Feeling rebuked, Emmy removed herself. This time she went upstairs and began to straighten out Freddy's closet. All I have to do to keep Mrs Rabbage quiet is to insult her now and then, Emmy thought to herself, and she gave the kind of cheerful laugh that might be supposed to go with this kind of cheer, but she did not care for it. She was chagrined to think that she had spoken rudely to a servant.

Or this one:

'Hateful thing,' Miranda said, kicking the stove. 'And do you know, when we first moved in here I was completely enchanted with it. Oh, lord!' She snatched the coffee-pot up just as it boiled over. 'I'm so sorry. That just shows you. Do you still want some?'

One interesting thing about Lurie's writing - apparent in that first passage - is that she writes, self-consciously or otherwise, in much the same voice as that adopted by her characters ('but she did not care for it'). In part, this is because the narrative voice is almost exclusively that of one or the other of the characters (that is, it's presented as the thoughts of one of the characters - in conventional third person prose, though, rather than Joycean stream of consciousness), sometimes in the form of letters. There's an amusing little digression in there somewhere in which Holman reflects that Emmy's use of intensifiers ('perfectly horrid', 'terribly thoughtful', etc) actually indicates a diminution of feeling/opinion - I wonder whether that's an entirely fair appraisal, though (not that Lurie necessarily endorses Holton's p.o.v., etc, etc). Much use made of adverbs in general, sometimes as qualifiers ('rather delightful'). (These examples aren't actually from the book itself, but they might as well be.)

So, the milieu is academia (university lecturers and administrators; not students except at the margins) in a very particular time and place, mostly the humanities - not a microcosm for the rest of the world because, as one of the characters notes, all of the violence and irrationality has been abstracted (besides, most of the world doesn't make passing references to Keats, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hobbes, classical mythology, Arthur Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, and so on in casual conversation), but still a fascinating study, at least for me.

Focuses on the little intrigues and maneuvers (both academic and personal), and the petty and major disasters (again, across both dimensions) of the town's inhabitants, tracking them through dinner parties, faculty meetings, clandestine encounters in parks, chance run-ins at supermarkets. Social dynamics strongly determined by class and other traditional indicia of social status, filtered through and inseparable from the university hierarchy. Cast of nouveau riches, frightfully well-bred old money types, 'picturesque' (Lurie's description not mine, and a good one) arty semi-bohemian types, drifting musicians, struggling young instructors, boorish/feared senior professors, inept and mildly corrupt administrators, and their wives (who are very much active subjects in their own right) and children. Much time spent on the merits and otherwise of the divisive 'Humanities C' course. In some faint way, put me in mind of The Great Gatsby. Often very amusing, albeit more in a 'wry smile' than 'laugh out loud' way.

All of which should be more than enough to explain why I like this book so much.

* * *

Something was wrong with the game, though. 'But they're all blindfolded!' Emmy objected.

'Yes,' Miranda said. 'They like it better that way.'

Alison Krauss + Union Station - New Favorite

All the accoutrements of this elegant modern bluegrass-styled music - most notably, Krauss's voice - taken together make for a really nice sound, guitar and Dobro more prominent than banjo, fiddle or mandolin. There's a pleasant airiness to proceedings (especially on songs like "The Lucky One" and "New Favorite", not coincidentally two which I already knew), with neither the 'mountain' nor 'melancholy' (obviously not opposed to each other) aspects of these stylings pushed too strongly, and the record hangs together well. Still, I haven't yet taken this one to heart - maybe that'll come with time, or maybe it's a function of my approaching it from the pop end of the spectrum rather than the bluegrass/folk. That said, I'm writing this after less than a day of repeat playing, and have probably spun it about a half dozen times already, liking it a tiny bit more each time, so who knows?

Minutiae: (1) Amusingly, I found it in the 'jazz' section at the library (and labelled as such); and (2) the title track was written by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.

War of the Worlds

Of all the early sci-fi/adventure novels by Verne, Wells and co, a large number of which I seem to've read somewhere along the line between primary school and now, The War of the Worlds has always stood out, even though my memory of it is fairly vague. I saw one of the 1950s versions on video when quite young (I think there was a whole series, and I happened to watch the first one) and it left a strong impression - it was frightening. The book also left me quite uneasy, in part because of what I recall as being its somewhat distanced, clinical air of reportage (though I presumably didn't think about it in quite those terms back then). And I also knew the story of the whole Orson Welles radio broadcast thing, which added to the intrigue surrounding the book.

So, when I came to watch this adaptation, I considered it auspicious when the introductory prologue (after the pull-back shot from microsopic view to universe) consisted of an old-fashioned montage and reassuringly sonorous male 'historical' voiceover. The film proper gets off to a good start, too - I didn't mind that it focused on Tom Cruise and his family, rather than depicting Pentagon generals or fighter pilots or their ilk...in fact, this seemed a good approach given that, in the end, it's the air itself which brings the invaders undone rather than any technological might or scientific nous on humanity's part (though Spielberg can't resist giving us the sight of the military shooting down one of the tripods after its shields fail, complete with suitably vanquished - ie, dead ('the only good alien's a dead alien!'; wrong movie, I know...) - alien emerging at the end).

The scenes of destruction get the job done, and there's a pervasive unsettling feeling to much of the film (eg, the ghostly shots of the family's faces early on, the menacing fellow who takes Ray and Rachel into his basement, and particularly the culmination of that encounter), which is suitable. But the character arcs are predictable and not entirely convincing, and with the focus on the individuals and not on larger-than-life heroes, that proves to be a telling flaw. As a film crit might say, three stars out of five.

Neil Young with Crazy Horse - Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

Well, the three famous songs - "Cinnamon Girl", "Down By The River" and "Cowgirl In The Sand" - are the three most memorable, and together comprise more than half of the running time of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. As to the others, the title track is one of those jangly mid-tempo semi-rockers that Neil does well, and is indeed quite good, "Round & Round (It Won't Be Long)" is a slow, not unpleasant but basically forgettable tune, "The Losing End (When You're On)" comes back to the mid-tempoisms, and "Running Dry (Requiem For The Rockets)" comes across as a kind of drunken dirge (it could be the strings).

As that summation suggests, this record is, for me, one of two parts - the three songs I knew, and then the rest. In fact, those three basically orient the album, which is bookended by "Cinnamon Girl" and "Cowgirl In The Sand" and seems to cohere around "Down By The River" at its centre. So, while I suppose that it must be good, it's hard for me to listen to it as a whole because, depending on how I'm listening to it on the particular occasion, either the famous ones or the ones I hadn't heard before tend to 'bulge' out as a group.

Hem - Eveningland

Gentle, sighing, soughing folk music. The singer (Sally Ellyson) has one of those heart in her throat type voices, and the full range of instrumentation that one would expect is around it - twangy and acoustic guitars, mandolin, banjo, piano, strings, assorted percussion and orchestral effects - and it's all very sweet and nice. It's kind of end-of-day music ('eveningland', I suppose) - graceful, delicate and finely-wrought - but with more of a tendency towards highlighted, upswooping choruses and occasional baroque ornateness than I'd expected, sometimes pulling the songs more towards the melancholy, downbeat end of country than the folk streams in which they're rooted.

It's very sincere, and more trad than, say, Azure Ray (and neither better nor worse than that duo by virtue of it - just different)...and is on Rounder rather than Saddle Creek, which pretty much tells the story. It's a bit strange listening to it, though, and reflecting that it must be closer to the origins of this kind of music than those who've become more popular with variations on it, but hearing bits of outfits like Azure Ray (not that they've yet become immensely popular), Mojave 3, the Sundays, even up-to-and-including-Surfacing Sarah McLachlan (especially, in relation to that last, on "Redwing"). I prefer the more mournful-sounding numbers - "Pacific Street", which I'd heard before, is my favourite.

Pure Movies

It was seeing Björk's name on the front which caused me to pick this up, and not recognising the song's title, "Play Dead", which caused me to buy it, coupled with the roll call of famous film songs that it contains (every last one of which I'd heard before - including, it turns out, the Björk cut...but I'm pretty sure that I don't have it on cd anywhere else, and it's a good song, suitably dramatic). The flavour of the thing can be appreciated by way of some thoughts about a few of the songs:
- "Love Is All Around". The first song on the compilation - enough said, really. Others in the 'enough said' category: "How Deep Is Your Love", "Up Where We Belong", "Lady In Red", "Unchained Melody", "I Just Called To Say I Love You", etc, etc.
- "Stuck In The Middle With You". This song has reminded me of Dylan in the past.
- "Blaze Of Glory". Some days I'm sorry that I taped over that old Bon Jovi best of. I mean, I probably replaced it with some Pink Floyd album or other...seriously, which one would I more often want to listen to? Bon Jovi'd win hands down.
- "I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do". And all the Concretes, Shangri-Las, etc must be having an effect, 'cause I've been quite enjoying this one. So this is what they mean what they talk about slippery slopes...
- "Nights In White Satin". Well, next time I feel like listening to this song (ie, come next blue moon), I'll be able to do so on cd instead of firing up the groaning old laptop, I guess. Here, it's the triumphant set closer.

Bonus! There's an East 17 song! Wow, that Kalifornia soundtrack must be pretty weird.

Tim Winton - The Turning

Well, the best way to describe this collection of linked short stories would have to be 'Wintonesque' - they're so recognisably written in his voice, and set in the small town Australian milieu which he's made his own. It'd be easy to dismiss his imagery and symbolism as heavy-handed and obvious - 'literature for people who don't read literature' is the slur I might sling, if I were minded to do so - but, when Winton's name comes up (as it often does), I more often find myself arguing the opposite. I feel that his writing is very honest - unadorned without being plain...it's as if he, as a writer, is producing these books and saying 'well, this is what my writing is - take it or leave it', without any attempts to distract or cozen the reader. But simplicity is not always lack of subtlety or craft.

The Turning, then. More bruised, battling types, trying to make a go of things, poised between failure and contingent success (which only ever, in this world, seems to mean 'survival'). It's delicately done, though - the characters emerge and re-emerge as they cycle through the stories in different guises and are seen from different perspectives, and different parts of their individual and collective histories come to light. I'm not intimately familiar with his previous work, but I got the sense that these were maybe a bit less mysterious, less touched by grace, less filled by those minor key redemptive (or maybe 'affirmatory') moments. Good, though - I sat up nearly all night to finish it.

The axe for the frozen sea inside us: Summer reading list

Well, university is all over bar the handing-in tomorrow, so I thought that I'd make a partial summer reading list, composed indiscriminately of books that people have given me, books which I've bought but not read, books on one of my various lists of 'books to read' lists (some based on recommendations, some because I came across them while doing research for my literature essays, and some for no reason that I can recall), new and forthcoming books by favourite authors, books which I've been meaning to re-read, and academic books which I don't seriously think I'm actually going to get through. In no particular order:

Günter Grass - The Flounder
Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls
Alasdair Gray - A History Maker
Joseph Heller - Catch 22
Kazuo Ishiguro - The Remains Of The Day
Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire
Tim Winton - The Turning
Marcel Proust - Swann's Way
Raymond Queneau - The Bark Tree
Italo Calvino - If On A Winter's Night A Traveler
Thomas Pynchon - Mason & Dixon
Ian Watson - Chekhov's Journey
A S Byatt - Possession
Aragon - La Mise à Mort
Gérard de Nerval - Aurélia
Louis Guilloux - Le Sang Noir
Amélie Nothomb - Antechrista
China Miéville - Looking For Jake
Terry Pratchett - Thud
George R R Martin - A Feast For Crows [though I'll probably have to go back and read the earlier ones first, to refresh my memory]
Zadie Smith - On Beauty
Jacques Derrida - Of Grammatology
Edmund Husserl - Ideas

Also, a couple of names: Alison Lurie and Ivy Compton-Burnett.

Anyway, obviously I won't read all of those (and, conversely, will read many not on the list), but I can't help but feel that the making of a list like this is an optimistic gesture, in ways which extend beyond just reading and literature.

On perfect albums (and a list of my current top 20 favourite albums ever)

Listening to "American Flag" this afternoon and remembering why it's so great, I got to wondering about how I make sense out of my 'favourite' albums. Thinking about the lps which I do think of as my favourites, it's striking that I wouldn't consider any of them to be flawless or perfect (even to the extent that these are meaningful concepts when applied to pop records) - the closest are probably Loveless and Treasure, and in that respect it's probably telling that they're likely the two most distinctive-sounding records on the list (see below) and so perhaps the easiest to think of as 'perfect'.

Take Moon Pix, for example. I love this album, and definitely consider it to be one of my favourites, but for me, after the opening-in-glory that is "American Flag", it doesn't really properly hit its stride again until the run home, starting with track 7, "Moonshiner". So what's with that? It's one of my favourite albums and yet I reckon that it hasn't really 'hit its stride' for the better part of half its running time? Or take Funeral (admittedly an atypical one in that it's only been part of my life for a span of months, rather than years): there are really only two songs on that album - "Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels)" and "Rebellion (Lies)" - which I out and out love (though obviously any record on which cuts like "In The Backseat", "Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out)", "Haiti", etc, can be 'second tier' has a lot going for it), and yet right now I'm definitely counting it as a 'favourite'.

Some of it may be down to how 'high' the high points are. Plus, some of us are just wired to respond to the sound of certain albums. And it's never wise to underestimate the effect of the right record coming along at the right time...

Another important part of what's going on here is that 'perfection' and 'flawlessness' must be, to some extent, relativised to the particular album. Kate B once opined that Tigermilk was a perfect album, and I pretty much agreed (and still do), at least to the extent that it's a perfect album on its own terms...and this despite my thinking that Sinister (and maybe even Arab Strap) is probably 'better'. But how does that work? There's got to be an interplay between, on the one hand, the way in which every album - like every work of art - in some sense sets its own terms, and, on the other hand, the overall framework within which we make these kinds of value judgments, right? So where does that leave us?

Well, with another variation on the old subjective/objective thing, I suppose. In other words, it's ineffable.

* * *

1. Bachelor No 2, or The Last Remains of the Dodo - Aimee Mann
2. OK Computer - Radiohead
3. Loveless - My Bloody Valentine
4. Treasure - Cocteau Twins
5. Blue Bell Knoll - Cocteau Twins
6. The Velvet Underground & Nico - The Velvet Underground & Nico
7. Moon Pix - Cat Power
8. On Fire - Galaxie 500
9. New Adventures In Hi-Fi - R.E.M.
10. Summerteeth - Wilco
11. Homogenic - Björk
12. Isn't Anything - My Bloody Valentine
13. The Queen Is Dead - The Smiths
14. The Bends - Radiohead
15. Psychocandy - The Jesus and Mary Chain
16. Closer - Joy Division
17. Funeral - The Arcade Fire
18. Disintegration - The Cure
19. f#a#∞ - Godspeed You Black Emperor!
20. Blacklisted - Neko Case

Raymond E Feist - Prince of the Blood

Have done some serious damage to my sleep patterns in the last few weeks, to the extent that it's now difficult to sleep any time before 4, with 5 or 5.30 being more common (it's always a worry when you're trying to fall asleep as the sky outside is beginning to grow lighter).[*] Some nights, I can more or less push on with Heidegger pretty much till then (albeit not as efficiently as at more sane times of day/night), but on other nights, this leaves me with some dead time between shutting up shop for the night and actually being able to fall asleep. Last night was one such, and I really needed a break from the paper-writing to allow my thoughts to settle and take shape, all of which is to explain why I sat up and re-read what is really a particularly mediocre entry in the Feist oeuvre (I picked it up about a quarter of the way in, having read the first quarter or so relatively recently) - an oeuvre which is, incidentally, not particularly mediocre as a whole, as far as it goes - mainly on the basis that it'd be thoroughly undemanding and I didn't already know it absolutely inside out (unlike most of the other undemanding books on my shelf).

* * *

[*] Actually, I suspect that there are a host of other factors bleeding into this inability to sleep, but they all kind of aggregate and compound in - or are compounded by - the brute fact of not having slept properly in recent times.

"And death shall have no dominion": Solaris

[Edited 14/7/19 to remove some personal content]

Actually, this time round it seemed more of a sci-fi film than a metaphysical one (and no, I'm not trying to draw bright lines between the two). I've never been much of a reader of sci-fi, but I've dipped in from time to time, and once in a while a book in the genre (I don't really remember names, but I think that Greg Bear may've written one or two) has given me a strange, dislocated sort of feeling, as if I really am reading about a kind of refracted reality - plausible but distorted (perhaps the word I'm looking for is 'uncanny' - unheimlich), making me feel as if the ground is shifting beneath my feet. Anyway, Solaris made me feel like that.

See, the first time I watched the film, I was thinking more in terms of it exploring the nature of reality and its interaction with consciousness (phenomenology again, though this would've been before I formally studied 'phenomenology and existentialism', I think), but this time round, Solaris seemed more like a 'sci-fi' concept around which was built a recognisably humanistic moral and rational core (again, not that this and 'metaphysics' are mutually exclusive).

The mood it creates is really something, and it looks and feels exactly as it should. It's artfully done - the way that memories and perceptual streams are shot as formally disconnected yet fade into each other (the device of the visuals dropping away while dialogue continues is an effective one) and also the structuring of the film as a whole, particularly the repetitions...all quite dream-like, or memory-like, or maybe simply everyday experience-like, when you stop to reflect on it.

The sci-fi and the metaphysics are hard to disentangle; the Sistine chapel moment near the end strikes me as a pivotal scene, one way or another. This is such a strange thing for me to write, but I somehow felt in that final scene (the one in Kelvin's apartment, I mean - not the Sistine chapel one) as if I might almost be able to believe in something like heaven, in principle, perhaps - but in the realm of sci-fi or that of phenomenology? Well, that's the question, I guess.

Background music, and studying

I think that it was only really this year - or maybe '04 at the very earliest - that I admitted that working with music on is distracting. If I really want and need to think hard about something - which was rarely the case until the final stages of my uni career - then silence is the way to go, the exception being when I'm really pushed (say, on the night before a paper is due) and need some kind of background stimulation to prevent me from just subsiding into total inactivity and/or falling asleep. Since it's been all about writing and, consequently, actual thinking this year (as opposed to the largely automatic grind of studying for law exams), and because I've been taking arts seriously, this has meant that a fair amount of my working time has been sans music.

Still, in this twilight period of ten days (post-Thesis/literature papers but pre-final philo paper), I've found myself mostly writing/thinking with music on, and doing so reasonably productively, which I think is attributable to my having gotten into the right sort of zone for absorbing and thinking about philosophy over the last, say, month or so (though it's really probably been cumulative over the course of this whole year, and particularly the last semester). It's strange how one's mind shifts into different configurations over time, according to the influences to which it's (ahem) subject - although I guess that the strangeness inheres more in those shifts and resultant configurations not being directly accessible but rather only becoming apparent in their 'outputs' (as thoughts, ideas, conversational modes, etc), than in the idea of the shifting itself.

So anyway, mostly this background music has involved:
- Year of Meteors
- Humming By The Flowered Vine ("What You Said" is my favourite at the moment)
- Wilco (mostly A Ghost Is Born and the first disc of Being There)
- Eva Cassidy (uh-oh, adult contemporary beckons)
- Cat Power's rather stunning newie, "The Greatest" (is Matador the best label in the world these days?)

Talulah Gosh - Janice Long session, 7 August 1986 & Peel session, 11 January 1988

I've been listening to these for a while, but just now thought that I might as well remark upon it (y'know, for future reference and all that). Talulah Gosh were a simply fabulous indie outfit from the eighties who became quite famous in certain circles with their straight-ahead but clever bubblegum pop (funny how I always seem to end up using that descriptor 'bubblegum' in a positive way) - sort of one part 60s girl group melodies and vibes, and one part ny punk attitude and buzzy guitars (no bass, but plenty of backing vocals and handclaps!)...two-minute songs galore (all about boys, and sung by girls, of course).

These radio sessions were more or less my introduction to the band (though I'd heard some of their stuff on last.fm as similar music to the Sundays, or Lush, or Belly, or the Shangri-Las, or summat) and they're wonderful. Favourites: "Looking For A Rainbow", "Talulah Gosh", "World's Ending", and "Spearmint Head", all concentrated blasts of sweetness. Stand by for the inevitable spending of too much money to import their best-of...

Also, pitchfork recently ran a feature on the whole c86/twee movement, which was good for two reasons: it allowed me to feel superior at being ahead of the curve (ha!), but it also gave me the pleasant sense of being part of a wider community of taste...so, the best of both worlds, really.

The Janice Long one is here and the John Peel one is here.

Laura Veirs - Year of Meteors

Much as I like the charmful Laura, I didn't race out to buy her latest, Year of Meteors, as soon as it hit the stores, several weeks ago now. There were two main reasons for this: the previous one, Carbon Glacier, while rightly (if somewhat surprisingly) embraced by the masses, had quite literally left me just a little bit cold by comparison to Troubled By The Fire (so I liked it rather a lot, and if anything considered it to be a step forward from TBTF, but didn't find myself really feeling the record); and I'd listened to and liked but again not really loved the samples which were up on Veirs' website (although that's such an unideal way to listen to music that I didn't place much stock in it...).

Anyhow, the other night I made a flying visit to uni to photocopy/borrow some Heidegger stuff, and stopped off at Readings in the expectation that a brief browse would be likely to improve my (not particularly poor to start with) state of mind (plus, I'd been struck by this weird dizziness, possibly born of lack of sleep + general being in a slightly weird headspace, and thought it might not be the world's worst idea to try to shake it off before driving home); ended up leaving with Gillian Welch's Time (The Revelator) (well, it was cheap), The Nightmare Before Christmas, Fear and Trembling (Kierkegaard not Nothomb, although I did read somewhere recently that there's a new Nothomb in translation which will be out soon - good news), and this cd.

I suppose that hoping that Veirs will record another "Ohio Clouds" or "Midnight Singer" is a bit like hoping that Radiohead will do another "Fake Plastic Trees" or "Street Spirit", although, like that latter hope, it's not entirely implausible if one is willing to accept that the resultant 'doing of another' would come wrapped in a fairly different sonic cloak. And, on its own terms, Year of Meteors is pretty fine. It continues in the direction indicated by Carbon Glacier, but it's a bit less distanced and cool, if equally echoey and vibey. Electric guitar is much more prominent (my fave moment on CG is still "Salvage A Smile", short as it is) and it's overall a bit more upbeat and drifty - 'oceanic', as is often the case with music I like, isn't too far off the mark (so okay, not that upbeat). It's actually a really neat sound overall, the folk strands are still very much there, and the electronic bits integrate well, and I'm not sure that anyone else is really doing a similar thing right now (Beth Orton, sorta...and there's a faint-but-definitely-there edge of New Adventures in Hi-Fi to its vibes, too).

Opener "Fire Snakes" is pretty cool, and likewise second track "Galaxies" (surely the first single, if any get released). "Magnetized" is the sort of gorgeous slow-burner which floats along and then suddenly gives you the chills, and somewhat recalls her older stuff, but it's probably the boppy "Rialto", complete with handclaps and that tasty wavery ragged crunchy guitar sound, which is my favourite; also particularly like "Parisian Dream", which slinks in on a slippy viola line and shuffles back and forth over the top of it for the rest of the song.

A few other scattered thoughts:
- After couple of listens, I realised that the familiar-sounding descending scale which features prominently in "Where Gravity Is Dead" has also been used in the Muses' "Honeychain", and hence the familiarity.
- Speaking of "Where Gravity Is Dead", I wonder if there's a vague kind of concept to the album, a thought prompted by a corresponding lyric from "Galaxies": "gravity is dead you see/no gravity!/ all I need is beating red/no gravity! ...".
- Also, one corollary of getting into all these singer-songwriters is that an increasing number of the records I own have pictures of the artist's face on their covers; I can live with this as a seemingly necessary evil, but I'm really not at all down with it. (Q: Would it make a difference if they were all extremely good-looking? A: No, that's completely not the point.)

The Nightmare Before Christmas

This one had managed to get by me until now, and it was as much of a treat as I'd always anticipated in that vague way of mine. One thing that I hadn't realised - and which would've sharpened that anticipation - is that it's a musical (in the way that animated films often are); another thing which I hadn't known is that Disney is the studio behind the film. But of course the main event here is the Tim Burton thing, and on that score it's exactly what I'd expected - deft morbidity and grotesquerie, splashed with colour and wit and general vim, and populated by characters who are all recognisably human, even if they also happen to be skellingtons, stitched-together dolls, or other escapees from the menagerie of our collective nightmarescapes (ha, ha).

Writing this is making me think, though, about just what it is about Burton characters (at least his central protagonists). They always feel real, in a way that the characters in a film like, say, The Royal Tenenbaums only kind of do. One feels that there are actual emotions and feelings driving them - for all of their (literally, in this case) cartoonish appearances, they never seem opaque or truly alien (whereas I find a lot of people I know in real life to be quite alien, for example, including some with whom I get along really well).

A'course, that's not to say that Burton's characters are somehow more truthfully rendered than Anderson's. Truth is a multi-faceted thing, and I thought that there was a lot of truth in the characterisations in another film about extremely opaque people which I saw earlier this year, Intolerable Cruelty. There's a difference between understanding someone in terms of 'getting' what's going on 'inside', and understanding them in terms of knowing how they respond to certain stimuli (a 'black box' picture), and I'm not sure that the first is necessarily more profound than the second. But I think that what I mean to say, maybe, is that I can always quite directly identify with Burton's main protagonists (and, let's face it, this is what I'm talking about when I talk about truth, right?).

So that's not going to surprise anyone, least of all me. Am I surprised that this principle should also operate in relation to an animated film - and not one with any notable aspirations to realism, at that? Not really, but a little bit. Emotional responses to animated films are nothing remarkable - for me, this goes at least back to primary school and An American Tail (did I spell that correctly?) - but direct identifications are perhaps just a little bit so (Daria?). Then again, Jack Skellington is a character outline in pretty broad brush strokes, so how much of myself do I really see in him? Maybe it's like reading one's horoscope in the newspaper and being astonished by its accuracy. Then again, maybe the animation form allows a distillation of what's always going on with any identification with Burton characters, or even cinematic characters period.

Anyway.

The Nightmare Before Christmas is very sweet and amusing and made me feel better about everything. The tunes are a bit unmemorable but there's not much else to criticise, and besides, it's the sort of film that one doesn't want to criticise. I liked the trick-or-treaters, and basically everything else about it. And okay, I did identify quite a lot with Jack. So there.

Cocteau Twins - Twinlights EP

I haven't listened to the Cocteau Twins so intensely this year, but they still have a pretty fair claim to being my favourite band ever; so, I've been looking for this ep for a while and recently came across it here. It's a bit of a curio, being made up of extremely stripped back (mostly just piano and voice) versions of Cocteaus songs - "Rilkean Heart" and "Half-Gifts" from their final lp, Milk & Kisses (though I think the deal is that Twinlights actually came out before Milk & Kisses), "Pink Orange Red" (off the Tiny Dynamine ep), and one, "Golden-Veins", which seems to've been written and recorded specifically for this ep (though there's also a version of it on their bbc sessions cd)...

Anyway, they're all very much of a piece with one another, delicate, hushed and pretty - and notably different from anything else the band has done (the closest reference point is Victorialand, but that's not very close). I prefer the versions with which I'm more familiar over the ones on this record, unsurprisingly (representative microcosm: the vocal flutters which chime "Pink Orange Red" out comprise one of my favourite moments in the Cocteaus' extensive back catalogue of wonders - in fact, the song is one of my very favourites, along with "Lorelei" and "Heaven Or Las Vegas", and maybe "Musette And Drums" and "Pearly-Dewdrops' Drops" (and "Blue Bell Knoll", and "Carolyn's Fingers", and ...) - and the more subdued fluting we get here is, while in keeping with the set's overall tone, just immeasurably less magic), but these versions have a modest, unobtrusive charm of their own.

Re-reading the subject: The White Hotel (and the increasingly short run home)

I've reflected before on the way that our relationships with works of art have a continuing existence beyond our particular encounters with them - the relationship that I have with a novel, say, continues in the spaces when I'm not actually reading it - and that the nature of those relationships can shift quite markedly in the spaces between the encounters. One good example of this for me has been The White Hotel, which has really opened up for me over the course of the semester, and particularly over the last week or so, during which time I've had it on the 'back burner' of my mind, allowing it to simmer as I've had Lacan &c in the foreground in the hopes that the twain would meet somewhere in my half-thought thoughts. Anyhow, have just browsed through the text itself; reading very much framed by the demands of the particular paper that I plan to write about it and the time constraints under which said paper-writing will need to proceed (as to which, see below). But finally, I like this book. I really wouldn't have expected to at all (after my first reading), but I do.

Right, this is how the (university-related) big picture looks right now:

Thesis [7 November]: 8400 words (/10 000). This is the major worry at present - I made a bit of a dent in it today (Thursday) but am still pretty far off from wrapping it all up into a decent argument. Plus, that 8400 is nowhere near as concise as my academic writing normally is, meaning that in effect it's somewhat less than that figure (though, circumstances being what they are, a bit of flabbiness in my prose may not be such a bad thing, as it'll bring me closer to the required word length).

Contemporary Historical Fictions [7 November]: Basically finished. Although I haven't had the time to pull all of its threads together, I'm pretty happy with the way this one has turned out.

Reading The Subject [7 November]: 1800 words (/4000). Well, this is what they call 'progress', I guess. After really struggling with the bloody thing, I've managed to carve out a reasonable recapitulation of the Seminar and plot an approximate narrative for my own paper (looks like it's going to be three of three English papers I've written this year in which Derrida gets a guernsey). The plan is to finish this tomorrow (well, today, but it counts as tomorrow once I've slept on it) so that I'll have two full days and nights, plus whatever of Monday I need, to do the Thesis.

Recent European Philosophy [17 November]: 0 words (/5000). And this is what they call (planned) 'lack of progress', I know.

Stop Making Sense (Talking Heads/Jonathan Demme)

David lent this to me without any particular provocation, and I sat down to watch it last night in the interests of procrastination (a recurring theme, though less so these last few days as I've been trying to make sense of the Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter' and so on). I've had a copy of the associated cd for a while, so I was already pretty well familiar with the music; the interest lay in seeing if it lived up to the hype (on the cover of the dvd: "The most extraordinary rock movie ever made" gasps Uncut; "The Citizen Kane of the concerts movies" burbles The Face). And, well, it's pretty cool, and it's fun to see a young, hyper-skinny (look who's talking) David Byrne strutting his stuff and especially with the whole band and associates getting into it - "Life During Wartime" is a particular highlight - and the music is fab of course and obviously the Heads were a great live band and I was feeling the joy and the craziness and I was hanging out for the "my god, what have I done?", but I don't know, maybe I was just taking it for granted that it'd be like that because somehow I only sort of enjoyed it as if from a distance (not so uncommon for me these days, that). Gotta watch this one again when the fires are burning a bit more brightly.

Emily Haines - Cut In Half And Also Double

This courtesy of That Girl Needs Therapy. I hadn't heard of Haines before; seems that she now sings in a band called Metric (as to which I also draw a blank), and is somehow associated with the whole Broken Social Scene...uh...scene (then again, isn't everyone these days?), and this is a somewhat obscure recording of hers from a few years back.

The sound is basically indie-rock female singer-songwriter w/guitar - useful reference points here being, maybe, the Breeders and Throwing Muses/solo Kristin (the vox in particular sometimes being reminiscent of the fraughtness of that last), though more lo-fi than any of those, and less immediate to boot. I'm quite liking it, but it's not going to set my world on fire; best song for mine is opener "Dog".