A genre selection for the next book club meeting and I finished it in a night (I suspect that it was picked in part as an easy read, to set us up for finally tackling The Magus - which has, amusingly, been increasingly becoming to the book club what Proust is to me, its reading deferred over and over - the following month). I'm pretty sure that I've read some Wyndham in the past, probably back in primary school - The Day of the Triffids, Chocky, maybe The Chrysalids? I don't have clear memories of any that I did read, but a strongly lingering if diffuse sense of being distinctly unsettled by them remains with me. I have that same kind of sense-memory of The War of the Worlds, and I think that what that novel has in common with those of Wyndham (at least on the strength of Midwich) is the combination of a cool, detached authorial voice and an escalatingly monstrous devolution of the familiar in the face of an onslaught of the alien.
The Midwich Cuckoos was first published in 1957, post-WWII, Cold War at its height, and all haunted by the shadow of the Bomb, and I think that that context is significant - intriguingly, some aspects are practically spelled out by Wyndham himself (I'm thinking particularly of the collective nature of the Children and the threat that this is seen to pose, and the conversation that a couple of the characters have about the similar communitarian setup in communist Russia), we're left to guess just how much Wyndham intended of many of the other motifs (the figure of Zellaby being a key one, and particularly the manner in which he figures in the novel's closing). I also wonder how much of Wyndham's seeming preoccupation with Darwinism and the possibility of the human race being superseded by a rival species can be attributed to the various competing national and racial threats then so latterly thrust into British consciousness (the Germans with their bastardised-Nietzsche Übermenschen (is that the plural?), the irreducibly foreign Japanese with their alien value systems, the supposedly endless 'production line' of the Russian infantry, and perhaps not least the unquestionably ascendant Americans, rising as the old empire crumbled). And no doubt the barbarity of war can also be felt in the theme of the essentially contingent nature of civilisation when confronted with the old underlying struggle of nature, red in tooth and claw.
Anyway, taken at face value it's a good read, too - kept me up a lot later than I'd have liked last night, and moves quickly and elegantly from scene to scene, carefully building a creeping, insidious sense of horror without ever pushing too far or too hard. Has a journalistic air to it, and comes across very much more as a novel of story and ideas than one of character. 3.7/5, by jove.
Monday, June 26, 2006
"Naked Democracy: Governing Victoria 1856-2006" @ State Library of Victoria
Read something about this in The Age a while back, written by the exhibition's curator, Robyn Annear, and mentally filed it away as a 'to attend'; yesterday, midway through a mid-paced Sunday, I had a window of an hour or so and dropped by. The exhibition is to mark the 150th anniversary of responsible government in Victoria, and works its way forward from the institution of the Westminister system in the newly independent colony through various key events in Victoria's political history - the gradual entrenchment of first full male and then female suffrage (the newspaper coverage, pamphlets and so on associated with that latter being probably the most interesting part for me), shifts in the nature of political party organisations and parliamentary composition, the police strike of 1923, the campaign for early shop closing, and others.
For mine, the exhibition as a whole doesn't have the same kind of unity as some of the ones I've seen in the State Library in the past - it's a bit 'lumpy', and there's not really a strong unifying theme beyond the broad goal of "look[ing] at ways in which the governing of Victoria has made a difference to how people live, and vice versa" (the bit at the end given over to various types of maps of Victoria, while interesting (ain't maps the greatest?), seemed particularly random). Where it's stronger is on the quirky, interesting details - noting in passing, say, that the initial elections in 1856 were conducted by the world's first secret ballot, or adverting to the loophole in the Electoral Act of 1864 which inadvertently conferred the franchise on women (an inadvertence which was hastily rectified in time for the next election). Also enjoyed reading through newspapers down the years - got a kick out of the old-fashioned prose and all the olde-worldisms (not least the Myer advertisements from the 1920s).
For mine, the exhibition as a whole doesn't have the same kind of unity as some of the ones I've seen in the State Library in the past - it's a bit 'lumpy', and there's not really a strong unifying theme beyond the broad goal of "look[ing] at ways in which the governing of Victoria has made a difference to how people live, and vice versa" (the bit at the end given over to various types of maps of Victoria, while interesting (ain't maps the greatest?), seemed particularly random). Where it's stronger is on the quirky, interesting details - noting in passing, say, that the initial elections in 1856 were conducted by the world's first secret ballot, or adverting to the loophole in the Electoral Act of 1864 which inadvertently conferred the franchise on women (an inadvertence which was hastily rectified in time for the next election). Also enjoyed reading through newspapers down the years - got a kick out of the old-fashioned prose and all the olde-worldisms (not least the Myer advertisements from the 1920s).
Wilco - Kicking Television: Live in Chicago
Man, Wilco are a great band.
Also: I think I kind of already knew this on some level, but listening to Kicking Television has made me realise that what I've really always wanted with Wilco songs was to hear them done with the really warm, satisfyingly fuzzy and crunching guitars that, one way or another, they so often seem to deny us on record - it's a great moment when they slide in underneath set opener "Misunderstood", and they bring a new joy to cuts like "The Late Greats" and "Handshake Drugs" (that last being a definite highlight). And generally, too, a lot of these songs come more to life live than they do in their lp versions, especially the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born cuts (which is just as well, as the 23-song setlist is heavily weighted towards those last two studio albums). Very, very good.
Also: I think I kind of already knew this on some level, but listening to Kicking Television has made me realise that what I've really always wanted with Wilco songs was to hear them done with the really warm, satisfyingly fuzzy and crunching guitars that, one way or another, they so often seem to deny us on record - it's a great moment when they slide in underneath set opener "Misunderstood", and they bring a new joy to cuts like "The Late Greats" and "Handshake Drugs" (that last being a definite highlight). And generally, too, a lot of these songs come more to life live than they do in their lp versions, especially the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born cuts (which is just as well, as the 23-song setlist is heavily weighted towards those last two studio albums). Very, very good.
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Nicole Krauss - The History of Love
Since finishing The History of Love a couple of nights ago, I've read and re-read the novel's last few pages. The first time, it induced a chill and a shiver down my spine, and simultaneously with that, that odd quietly overwhelming feeling of being momentarily filled with something very warm and larger than myself which manifests itself as a sudden lump in the throat; and I feel that twinge anew each time I read those closing passages.
The beauty and the especial charm of The History of Love lies, I think, in the simplicity with which it tackles its subjects. It's an unassuming little thing, gracefully trailing its fingers across swathes of a deep, unanswerable sadness and sense of loss and absence which underlies the lives of all of its major protagonists, both those who are overtly present (Leo, Alma S, Bird, Charlotte, and in a way Bruno) and those who make themselves felt through or in their own absences (Alma M and Isaac in particular, but also Zvi and perhaps Rosa), and eventually tracing the outlines of a spirit-uplifting path through those thickets, weaving at the same time a subtle and sustained meditation on the transformative and effectual power of literature, writing and words. We've seen this done before, not least in Krauss's husband JSF's Everything Is Illuminated, but while that one was good, this is better, I think - more modest but ultimately more touching and more perfectly conceived and formed.
It's strange, though - for the vast majority of the novel, I was enjoying it but I didn't feel myself to have properly fallen for it,[*] in either sense of the phrase. It wasn't like the first time I read The Secret History, or Invisible Cities, or A Wild Sheep Chase, where I felt the whole time that I was reading a book which was speaking directly to me and which would become one of my favourites - but (and noting that I wouldn't put The History of Love up with those kinds of iconic books for myself) with Krauss's novel, it's really the ending that seals the deal, so to speak, capping everything off incontrovertibly and just right. I was so looking forward to reading this, and it was worth the anticipation.
* * *
[*] On that note: Nicolette, who's also reading the book at the moment, prodded me a couple of days ago by commenting that Krauss is beautiful and wondering aloud (well, by email) whether the author photo in the paperback edition had caused me to fall in love with her...and, while I suspect that those photos are often more than a little misleading, my gentle interlocutor was, as far as these things go, right on the money.
The beauty and the especial charm of The History of Love lies, I think, in the simplicity with which it tackles its subjects. It's an unassuming little thing, gracefully trailing its fingers across swathes of a deep, unanswerable sadness and sense of loss and absence which underlies the lives of all of its major protagonists, both those who are overtly present (Leo, Alma S, Bird, Charlotte, and in a way Bruno) and those who make themselves felt through or in their own absences (Alma M and Isaac in particular, but also Zvi and perhaps Rosa), and eventually tracing the outlines of a spirit-uplifting path through those thickets, weaving at the same time a subtle and sustained meditation on the transformative and effectual power of literature, writing and words. We've seen this done before, not least in Krauss's husband JSF's Everything Is Illuminated, but while that one was good, this is better, I think - more modest but ultimately more touching and more perfectly conceived and formed.
It's strange, though - for the vast majority of the novel, I was enjoying it but I didn't feel myself to have properly fallen for it,[*] in either sense of the phrase. It wasn't like the first time I read The Secret History, or Invisible Cities, or A Wild Sheep Chase, where I felt the whole time that I was reading a book which was speaking directly to me and which would become one of my favourites - but (and noting that I wouldn't put The History of Love up with those kinds of iconic books for myself) with Krauss's novel, it's really the ending that seals the deal, so to speak, capping everything off incontrovertibly and just right. I was so looking forward to reading this, and it was worth the anticipation.
* * *
[*] On that note: Nicolette, who's also reading the book at the moment, prodded me a couple of days ago by commenting that Krauss is beautiful and wondering aloud (well, by email) whether the author photo in the paperback edition had caused me to fall in love with her...and, while I suspect that those photos are often more than a little misleading, my gentle interlocutor was, as far as these things go, right on the money.
Kathryn Williams - Relations
Some music glitters with a hint of something which can't possibly be deliberate but is utterly intrinsic to the music itself - a certain unadorned, crystalline quality of simplicity and purity. I hear it very much in Laura Cantrell's stuff, and also in Troubled by the Fire-era Laura Veirs, and in a slightly different way in the gentle lamentations of the Sundays (especially circa Reading, Writing & Arithmetic), and in no small measure it's also present in the work of Kathryn Williams, a folksy songstress type whose vocal sweetness and stripped-back instrumental arrangements belie the depth of her songs and singing.
Relations is the first of Williams' lps to which I've listened, and it's made up entirely of covers. Two of these I'd heard before - her readings of "Spit on a Stranger" and "All Apologies" - and all up I know about half of the originals (those two + Big Star's "Thirteen" + the Velvets' "Candy Says" + the Bee Gees' "I Started A Joke" + Neil Young's "Birds" + "Hallelujah", which I admittedly know much better in Jeff Buckley's version than Leonard Cohen's...Williams' version is the equal of either of those, lullaby-like and quietly heartbroken), but (somewhat unusually) I enjoy the ones I don't know in their original recordings as much as those which I've just mentioned (opener "In A Broken Dream", cinematic and hesitant, is particularly good). I think that it's because Williams is so adept at doing them all over in her own style - gentle and languorous but clearly-defined and perfectly poised. In truth, the record as a whole doesn't linger even after repeated listening - but it's still all very nice indeed.
Relations is the first of Williams' lps to which I've listened, and it's made up entirely of covers. Two of these I'd heard before - her readings of "Spit on a Stranger" and "All Apologies" - and all up I know about half of the originals (those two + Big Star's "Thirteen" + the Velvets' "Candy Says" + the Bee Gees' "I Started A Joke" + Neil Young's "Birds" + "Hallelujah", which I admittedly know much better in Jeff Buckley's version than Leonard Cohen's...Williams' version is the equal of either of those, lullaby-like and quietly heartbroken), but (somewhat unusually) I enjoy the ones I don't know in their original recordings as much as those which I've just mentioned (opener "In A Broken Dream", cinematic and hesitant, is particularly good). I think that it's because Williams is so adept at doing them all over in her own style - gentle and languorous but clearly-defined and perfectly poised. In truth, the record as a whole doesn't linger even after repeated listening - but it's still all very nice indeed.
Sunday, June 18, 2006
The Smiths - "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" single
"There Is A Light That Never Goes Out", still lit with something of the old glow, even if it's been years since I really felt as if the song had anything immediate or new to say to me; live versions of "Hand In Glove" and "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others" (the former working better, muscular electric guitar ringing and crunching); and an instrumental called "Money Changes Everything" which I hadn't heard before and which is something like a cross between "How Soon Is Now" and, I don't know, Tubular Bells or summat (it's okay but not great).
Eldorado @ Malthouse Theatre, CUB Malthouse
One of those shows that I went to just on spec, without much of a sense as to what it'd be like. On Friday, an email had gone around from the MS social club advertising free tickets, and since I didn't have plans for Saturday night and it looked interesting, I put my name down, ringing Swee Leng in since they were double-passes.
The premise is this: in some place, at some time in an unspecified but presumably not too distant future, a city has been largely destroyed by invasion and bombing, aggressors also unspecified. The extent of the ruinedness is laid out for us in the opening monologue by a sinister man in a buttoned-down dark suit, standing partially in shadow, likening the topography of the city to a decapitated head while illustrating this by tracing outlines on his own face (shattered gravestones to the north, the cries of the refugees to be heard in the stadium in the south, and so on) - and is capped off by the man's deadpan continuation to the effect that 'the company' is pleased to offer this unique investment opportunity to its investors, and suddenly the nightmarish litany of the city burning by night and shuddering itself apart by day simultaneous takes on a hue which is a different and darker shade of black, and reveals the sharp edge of its social commentary.
We learn that the man in the black suit is named Aschenbrenner, and that he is the head of the mentioned company, which is selling property - and dreams - on the surface of a ruined city. His second in command, Anton, has been forging Aschenbrenner's signature on documents, and he is humiliated and dismissed by Aschenbrenner early on; much of the rest of the play chronicles Anton's subsequent mental disintegration, which is paralleled by the collapse of the tenuous order that has been established by the military in the city below, as insurgents revolt against their imposed rule. Anton is married to Thekla, a highly-strung and only moderately successful pianist, and the couple have purchased and developed in lavish style one of the city properties. Then there's Greta, Thekla's decadently rich mother, who keeps a pretty boy, Oskar (who grew up with Thekla and still carries a torch for her), for amusement; and rounding out the company is Manuela, a student of Thekla's.
All of the action of the play takes place behind a row of glass panels dividing the players from the audience. This division serves primarily to dramatise the way in which the characters are all sealed off from the city below them, and, in so doing, builds a sense of unease in the audience (who's watching who?), not least as it becomes progressively more smeared as the play goes on, and it also serves a dramatic function at times (people are pressed up against it, use it to support themselves as they sit on a non-existent piano stool, and once, memorably, drool saliva down it and allow that saliva to mingle with the hair on their naked belly as they continue to converse). Sets are moody and effective - lots of green lighting to evoke night-time, much in the way of shadows and smoke - and the props are effective and integral (a piano, a birch tree, a lobster, a strap from which to hang oneself).
There are really two main threads to it: the narrative of corporate rapaciousness in respect of the destroyed city (and the haste to capitalise - word deliberately chosen - on the human tragedy and destruction of history); and that of Anton's descent into what appears to be a complete schizophrenic breakdown. Swee Leng focused very much more on the first thread and, once she'd pointed it out, the parallels with the situation in Iraq weren't hard to see (putting another gloss on the screen between us and the players - cf Baudrillard - and also spinning the title, "Eldorado" - ie, 'city of gold' - in a new way given that oil is, natch, often known as black gold...). I thought that that element was certainly a major part of it, but my attention was more captured by the Kafka-like downwards trajectory of Anton, dramatised on stage by the device of sometimes having the other actors actually act in the way that Anton perceives them (taking on the guise of lobsters or fish - a reference back to the initiating trauma of his dismissal from the company), which is weird and effective (in a similar, if anything more extreme vein, is having the student mournfully sing a few lines from "Heart Of Glass", then to be joined by all four of the players bar Aschenbrenner standing absolutely still in a row across the stage, intoning that "ooooh-oooh-ooh-oooh" over and over, turning it into a deadpan dirge).
All of that left us both a bit confused at play's end - while it had been an interesting ride, it seemed, straight after, ultimately undermined by its messiness and general all-over-the-placeness...the threads didn't seem to be satisfyingly tied together, either throughout the play or at its end. I still feel that that initial impression was fair enough, but now, with a day's distance on the play, it seems more coherent than we gave it credit for in the immediate aftermath - maybe I've since had time to fill in some of the gaps, or something. The overall sense of nightmarishness which it invokes from the very beginning and sustains so well is maybe the thing which unifies the two threads over and above their plot-based connection (and parallels)...it's quite a visceral play, but it also works strongly on the imagination, and it's often funny in a way which makes one feel uneasy - and, at its centre but never thrust upon the audience, sits a rather uncompromising love story.
Anyway, Eldorado is by a German playwright named Marius von Mayenburg, and apparently this is its English-language premiere run. Directed by Benedict Andrew, cast is Gillian Jones, Robert Menzies, Hamish Michael, Bojana Novakovic, Greg Stone and Alison Whyte - apparently at least a couple of them are quite well known, but I'm not really up with tv/theatre figures, especially Australian ones. I'd like to get my hands on a translation of the text of the play, though it seems unlikely that there's any such thing in the stores...in its shadowy, unsettling way, I think that it'll stick with me.
The premise is this: in some place, at some time in an unspecified but presumably not too distant future, a city has been largely destroyed by invasion and bombing, aggressors also unspecified. The extent of the ruinedness is laid out for us in the opening monologue by a sinister man in a buttoned-down dark suit, standing partially in shadow, likening the topography of the city to a decapitated head while illustrating this by tracing outlines on his own face (shattered gravestones to the north, the cries of the refugees to be heard in the stadium in the south, and so on) - and is capped off by the man's deadpan continuation to the effect that 'the company' is pleased to offer this unique investment opportunity to its investors, and suddenly the nightmarish litany of the city burning by night and shuddering itself apart by day simultaneous takes on a hue which is a different and darker shade of black, and reveals the sharp edge of its social commentary.
We learn that the man in the black suit is named Aschenbrenner, and that he is the head of the mentioned company, which is selling property - and dreams - on the surface of a ruined city. His second in command, Anton, has been forging Aschenbrenner's signature on documents, and he is humiliated and dismissed by Aschenbrenner early on; much of the rest of the play chronicles Anton's subsequent mental disintegration, which is paralleled by the collapse of the tenuous order that has been established by the military in the city below, as insurgents revolt against their imposed rule. Anton is married to Thekla, a highly-strung and only moderately successful pianist, and the couple have purchased and developed in lavish style one of the city properties. Then there's Greta, Thekla's decadently rich mother, who keeps a pretty boy, Oskar (who grew up with Thekla and still carries a torch for her), for amusement; and rounding out the company is Manuela, a student of Thekla's.
All of the action of the play takes place behind a row of glass panels dividing the players from the audience. This division serves primarily to dramatise the way in which the characters are all sealed off from the city below them, and, in so doing, builds a sense of unease in the audience (who's watching who?), not least as it becomes progressively more smeared as the play goes on, and it also serves a dramatic function at times (people are pressed up against it, use it to support themselves as they sit on a non-existent piano stool, and once, memorably, drool saliva down it and allow that saliva to mingle with the hair on their naked belly as they continue to converse). Sets are moody and effective - lots of green lighting to evoke night-time, much in the way of shadows and smoke - and the props are effective and integral (a piano, a birch tree, a lobster, a strap from which to hang oneself).
There are really two main threads to it: the narrative of corporate rapaciousness in respect of the destroyed city (and the haste to capitalise - word deliberately chosen - on the human tragedy and destruction of history); and that of Anton's descent into what appears to be a complete schizophrenic breakdown. Swee Leng focused very much more on the first thread and, once she'd pointed it out, the parallels with the situation in Iraq weren't hard to see (putting another gloss on the screen between us and the players - cf Baudrillard - and also spinning the title, "Eldorado" - ie, 'city of gold' - in a new way given that oil is, natch, often known as black gold...). I thought that that element was certainly a major part of it, but my attention was more captured by the Kafka-like downwards trajectory of Anton, dramatised on stage by the device of sometimes having the other actors actually act in the way that Anton perceives them (taking on the guise of lobsters or fish - a reference back to the initiating trauma of his dismissal from the company), which is weird and effective (in a similar, if anything more extreme vein, is having the student mournfully sing a few lines from "Heart Of Glass", then to be joined by all four of the players bar Aschenbrenner standing absolutely still in a row across the stage, intoning that "ooooh-oooh-ooh-oooh" over and over, turning it into a deadpan dirge).
All of that left us both a bit confused at play's end - while it had been an interesting ride, it seemed, straight after, ultimately undermined by its messiness and general all-over-the-placeness...the threads didn't seem to be satisfyingly tied together, either throughout the play or at its end. I still feel that that initial impression was fair enough, but now, with a day's distance on the play, it seems more coherent than we gave it credit for in the immediate aftermath - maybe I've since had time to fill in some of the gaps, or something. The overall sense of nightmarishness which it invokes from the very beginning and sustains so well is maybe the thing which unifies the two threads over and above their plot-based connection (and parallels)...it's quite a visceral play, but it also works strongly on the imagination, and it's often funny in a way which makes one feel uneasy - and, at its centre but never thrust upon the audience, sits a rather uncompromising love story.
Anyway, Eldorado is by a German playwright named Marius von Mayenburg, and apparently this is its English-language premiere run. Directed by Benedict Andrew, cast is Gillian Jones, Robert Menzies, Hamish Michael, Bojana Novakovic, Greg Stone and Alison Whyte - apparently at least a couple of them are quite well known, but I'm not really up with tv/theatre figures, especially Australian ones. I'd like to get my hands on a translation of the text of the play, though it seems unlikely that there's any such thing in the stores...in its shadowy, unsettling way, I think that it'll stick with me.
Saturday, June 17, 2006
Internet distractions
So Tamara sent this around yesterday, in the interests of procrastination at work - jacksonpollock.org - and I promised to make a list of my own favourite internet distractions, and here we are (it's pretty words-focused, but I guess that's how I usually distract myself, one way or another):
~~ Culture, etc ~~
Bookslut
Cokemachineglow
McSweeneys archives and lists
Pitchfork
Popmatters
Stylus
Wikipedia
~~ Webcomics ~~
Cat and Girl
Dinosaur Comics
Questionable Content
Scary Go Round
Wondermark
[A Softer World]
~~ mp3 blogs ~~
Angels Twenty
PopText
The Rich Girls Are Weeping
Vain, Selfish & Lazy
[and plenty of others - but those four are the ones that come to mind when I think about writing and layout, as opposed to just the music itself]
~~ Culture, etc ~~
Bookslut
Cokemachineglow
McSweeneys archives and lists
Pitchfork
Popmatters
Stylus
Wikipedia
~~ Webcomics ~~
Cat and Girl
Dinosaur Comics
Questionable Content
Scary Go Round
Wondermark
[A Softer World]
~~ mp3 blogs ~~
Angels Twenty
PopText
The Rich Girls Are Weeping
Vain, Selfish & Lazy
[and plenty of others - but those four are the ones that come to mind when I think about writing and layout, as opposed to just the music itself]
Friday, June 16, 2006
Aloysius revisited / "some of them very beautiful and quite ethical others not so much": Evelyn Waugh - The Loved One
I read Brideshead Revisited a while back (2002, I think - third year) and fell in love with it ...
Speaking of books, [Hugo] mentioned that he'd also read The Loved One (which I knew was coming up for book club), and called it, amongst other things, a great America-bashing book. Having now read it myself, I have to agree, but actually Waugh also gives the Brits a pretty good kicking, too. In fact, he really has the knives out for everything in his sights, but it's touched with that faint sense of mortality and a grounding reality which I remember so clearly from Brideshead, even now, with many of the details of that latter novel having fled my memory, and it deftly leaves its mark on the reader almost as if in passing.
So I enjoyed The Loved One muchly. It has a sharp, sharp edge and the humour is bound up with that, so that every throwaway line or passage builds upon and is informed by the whole. Dennis, Aimée, Joyboy and the rest are finely and cruelly drawn and wonderful to spend time with - Dennis so opaque and casually callous, Aimée so vacuous, Joyboy just so utterly wet and pitiable, and yet all somehow sketched in such a way that we feel something approaching affection for them. Aimée Thanatogenos, especially - that 'decadent', her name already redolent of death - is a source of much of the humour but there's a sweetness and a pathos to her which makes her fate quite terribly sad rather than merely ridiculous.
The novel's sub-headed 'An Anglo-American Tragedy', and Henry James is invoked in its pages at least twice, once explicitly (now, didn't James have some kind of connection with the English decadents - early writings published in the Yellow Book or whatever it was called, or something along those lines?); the tragedy with which Waugh's primarily concerned (and which he dramatises through the perambulations and prevarications, overt and otherwise, of his characters and settings), I think, is that of society at large, English and American, and its attendant hypocrisies and ludicrousnesses (to probably coin a phrase)...I don't know which is more absurd, Whispering Glades with its overblown cant or its animal-disposal imitator, the Happier Hunting Grounds ("Your little Arthur is thinking of you in heaven today and wagging his tail"!)...not to mention the wonderful Mr Slump or the dreadful Sir Ambrose...
Also, happily, my (Penguin) edition has a Magritte on the front (by coincidence, I've been winnowing my way through a book on the painter's works and life over the last week, too).
[Edits in the front end of this one to remove some autobiography: 6/9/17]
Speaking of books, [Hugo] mentioned that he'd also read The Loved One (which I knew was coming up for book club), and called it, amongst other things, a great America-bashing book. Having now read it myself, I have to agree, but actually Waugh also gives the Brits a pretty good kicking, too. In fact, he really has the knives out for everything in his sights, but it's touched with that faint sense of mortality and a grounding reality which I remember so clearly from Brideshead, even now, with many of the details of that latter novel having fled my memory, and it deftly leaves its mark on the reader almost as if in passing.
So I enjoyed The Loved One muchly. It has a sharp, sharp edge and the humour is bound up with that, so that every throwaway line or passage builds upon and is informed by the whole. Dennis, Aimée, Joyboy and the rest are finely and cruelly drawn and wonderful to spend time with - Dennis so opaque and casually callous, Aimée so vacuous, Joyboy just so utterly wet and pitiable, and yet all somehow sketched in such a way that we feel something approaching affection for them. Aimée Thanatogenos, especially - that 'decadent', her name already redolent of death - is a source of much of the humour but there's a sweetness and a pathos to her which makes her fate quite terribly sad rather than merely ridiculous.
The novel's sub-headed 'An Anglo-American Tragedy', and Henry James is invoked in its pages at least twice, once explicitly (now, didn't James have some kind of connection with the English decadents - early writings published in the Yellow Book or whatever it was called, or something along those lines?); the tragedy with which Waugh's primarily concerned (and which he dramatises through the perambulations and prevarications, overt and otherwise, of his characters and settings), I think, is that of society at large, English and American, and its attendant hypocrisies and ludicrousnesses (to probably coin a phrase)...I don't know which is more absurd, Whispering Glades with its overblown cant or its animal-disposal imitator, the Happier Hunting Grounds ("Your little Arthur is thinking of you in heaven today and wagging his tail"!)...not to mention the wonderful Mr Slump or the dreadful Sir Ambrose...
Also, happily, my (Penguin) edition has a Magritte on the front (by coincidence, I've been winnowing my way through a book on the painter's works and life over the last week, too).
[Edits in the front end of this one to remove some autobiography: 6/9/17]
Monday, June 12, 2006
Slumber Party - Slumber Party
A while ago (we're talking years rather than months), I heard a couple of cuts from this band - "Sooner Or Later" and "I Don't Mind" - and liked them heaps; having finally got my hands on the album, I've found that it lives up to all expectations.
Okay, here's what I expected: repetitive-jangly, tuneful, downbeat, moody, disaffected Velvet Underground and Loaded-era Velvets-lovin' all-girl pop perfection.
Done and done - Slumber Party are a delight and their music is a tonic. Absolutely delicious.
Okay, here's what I expected: repetitive-jangly, tuneful, downbeat, moody, disaffected Velvet Underground and Loaded-era Velvets-lovin' all-girl pop perfection.
Done and done - Slumber Party are a delight and their music is a tonic. Absolutely delicious.
"The Monster"
Mix cd from David, mostly filled with various takes on the current indie electro-pop thing. Things that I have taken from listening to "The Monster":
* "Movie Monster" by Sound Team (I've never heard of them) is ace.
* I may eventually have to come to terms with the fact that the Knife are pretty good after all ("Marble House" being the latest track on that side of the ledger).
* Other people's versions of Radiohead songs continue to be unlikely to move me (Mark Ronson feat. Alex Greenwald doing "Just" and RJD2 taking on "Airbag").
* The National sound rather like the Magnetic Fields (also represented here, incidentally).
* Stars, it seems, can do no wrong (even though every time I listen to Set Yourself On Fire I remember how many blah songs there are on it).
* "Movie Monster" by Sound Team (I've never heard of them) is ace.
* I may eventually have to come to terms with the fact that the Knife are pretty good after all ("Marble House" being the latest track on that side of the ledger).
* Other people's versions of Radiohead songs continue to be unlikely to move me (Mark Ronson feat. Alex Greenwald doing "Just" and RJD2 taking on "Airbag").
* The National sound rather like the Magnetic Fields (also represented here, incidentally).
* Stars, it seems, can do no wrong (even though every time I listen to Set Yourself On Fire I remember how many blah songs there are on it).
Rosanne Cash - Super Hits
"Seven Year Ache" is a great song, chugging and aching, but the rest of the tracks on this cd are less striking, often seeming to take their cues as much from the 80s pop songbook as from real country (whatever that means)...although possibly that's more a sign of Cash looking back to the commercial origins of the modern country music genre (via the Nashville sound etc) than of the particular time in which these songs were laid down.
Song of the moment: Amy Millan - "Skinny Boy"
I downloaded this song because: (a) some blog had good things to say about it; and (b) it's called "Skinny Boy" (okay, I actually shrugged at the screen as I typed (b)...). So at first I thought that it was nice enough, but kind of a nothing song; actually, that still pretty much sums up my response to it but somehow I find myself listening to it over and over...it's just the kind of wavering, slightly sad, tastefully electro-inflected pop number that I often respond to (also, it turns out that Millan is the girl singer from Stars), and it's over before it really seems to've started, and it has one of those tunes that gets up your spine without your realising quite how it happened...there is something to it, after all, I guess.
Gormenghast
Watching this bbc production has inspired me to re-read the series, so comments on the significance of the books to me will be saved for another time; for now, suffice to say that, taken individually and collectively, Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone are three of my very favourite books, and definitely my favourite examples of the imaginative literature genre.
So I was holding this adaptation up against a high standard, which it unsurprisingly fails to reach (indeed, when it was screened on free to air a few years back, I watched the first couple of episodes but didn't bother to tune in for the second two, so disappointed was I by what I'd seen). Wisely, the makers of the series elected to film only the first two of Peake's books, those which take place within and immediately around the confines of Gormenghast itself, but even so it feels quite choppy, especially at the beginning, as we leap from one character and event to another. Partly in consequence, the adaptation never comes near to capturing the sense of grandeur or scale of the books, and nor does it really evoke the rich, stifling sense of decay, or the inescapable, funereal air of suffocation and heaviness, or the shadowy endless architectural ponderousness (the phrase owing a debt to both Peake himself and Anthony Burgess's up-taking of it in writing about the books), or the creeping, all-encompassing sense of nightmare and horror which is woven through the novels (although at least it approaches a suitable grotesquerie)...
For all that, though, I still enjoyed watching it plenty, just to see all of these characters and scenes which have so richly thronged my mind for so long given an external expression, even if that expression fell short of the dramas which play out in my own mind's eye...
So I was holding this adaptation up against a high standard, which it unsurprisingly fails to reach (indeed, when it was screened on free to air a few years back, I watched the first couple of episodes but didn't bother to tune in for the second two, so disappointed was I by what I'd seen). Wisely, the makers of the series elected to film only the first two of Peake's books, those which take place within and immediately around the confines of Gormenghast itself, but even so it feels quite choppy, especially at the beginning, as we leap from one character and event to another. Partly in consequence, the adaptation never comes near to capturing the sense of grandeur or scale of the books, and nor does it really evoke the rich, stifling sense of decay, or the inescapable, funereal air of suffocation and heaviness, or the shadowy endless architectural ponderousness (the phrase owing a debt to both Peake himself and Anthony Burgess's up-taking of it in writing about the books), or the creeping, all-encompassing sense of nightmare and horror which is woven through the novels (although at least it approaches a suitable grotesquerie)...
For all that, though, I still enjoyed watching it plenty, just to see all of these characters and scenes which have so richly thronged my mind for so long given an external expression, even if that expression fell short of the dramas which play out in my own mind's eye...
Saturday, June 03, 2006
10,000 Maniacs - Our Time In Eden
There was a time (it would've been the tail end of '04 and early into '05, I think) when I really liked this band a lot; at their best, they created music of a clarity and a grace rare in any form of music, never mind in pop. Anyway, Our Time In Eden was their final record with Natalie Merchant out front - and hence the final real 10,000 Maniacs album - and it brims with the mystery and joy of the band's best work, housing many of their best songs..."Noah's Dove" (probably my favourite of theirs, though I prefer the sparer demo version on Campfire Songs), "These Are Days", "Stockton Gala Days", "Circle Dream" - all up, I think it's as strong an album as In My Tribe, though I could've done without the jaunty horns woven through several of the numbers. I've already thrown several words at band and album here - clarity, grace, mystery, joy - to which I ought only add that it's all of those and a prevailing feeling of quiet wonder which are the lasting impressions left by the album, making it somehow more than the sum of its parts even now, with my initial infatuation with the band having long faded.
Natalie Imbruglia - Counting Down The Days
More of the sweet, lilting, Sundays-by-way-of-the-top-40 pop music that Natalie does so well these days. I don't think that Counting Down The Days is quite as nice as White Lilies Island, which was such a large part of the soundtrack to the final part of my 2005 - the songwriting isn't of as consistently high a standard - but the best songs ("Starting Today", "Shiver" and, especially, "Perfectly") hit the spot in the same way as the highlights from that previous lp.
Romeo and Juliet @ the Playhouse, Arts Centre
...as put on by the Bell Shakespeare company. Already had my eye on it, but then Sarah W organised an MS AC outing so I went with her (plus beau Keith Wo--), Nicolette, Natasha, Jarrod, Jason and Katherine on Thursday night (Kai also coincidentally there, with her beau Neil in tow). I quite enjoyed it, but more simply because it was a chance to see Romeo and Juliet put on, on stage, than for the merits of the particular production itself; it was well enough done, but somehow I felt that it failed to penetrate to the truth of the play or to illuminate it in any meaningful manner.
It's hard to put one's finger on the reasons for these kinds of responses, but here it had something to do with the choices made by the director - choices which almost seemed not to be choices at all. For example, the costumes and general ethos are quite contemporary - the tale, it seems, has been updated to our time, at least if the hip hop stylings of the opening chorus and the generally everyday (more or less) costumes worn by all are anything to go by...but the longer the play goes on, the more it slides towards a more traditional manner of presentation, and I wasn't sure if this was deliberate (I would imagine not) and, if so, what purpose it served. The effect of this apparent setting of events in a kind of amorphously contemporary milieu was unconvincing - it seemed done only for the sake of some ill-defined idea of relevance without anything deeper underlying or motivating the choice.
Then, too, there was Juliet, who was the subject of most interval and post-show conversation. In this production, she's very much the rather histrionic and sometimes petulant teenage girl rather than the more tragically romantic figure that other interpretations often offer - and I wasn't sure whether Chloe Armstrong's performance was merely uneven or actually seeking to convey a progression in Juliet's character (it was also interesting that, by design or inadvertence - probably the former, I think - she flattened out her delivery of all the famous lines, perhaps in an attempt to bring them home to us anew, in some measure removed from the deep layering of associations which so many of them carry with their every utterance).
Also, on stage the burning love between her and Romeo requires more of a suspension of disbelief - it's a medium which lends itself far less to aestheticisation than, say, film (one positive effect of seeing this has been the development of a great desire to watch the Luhrmann version again) and so probably depends more on its leads, and I wasn't feeling any particular chemistry between the two here. (Most of the other figures acquit themselves well, though - I thought that John Batchelor as Capulet was particularly good in rendering that figure sympathetically, Matthew Moore as Mercutio was fun (although, as Nicolette pointed out, Mercutio is a great character for an actor to take on), and James Hird lookalike Paul Eastway did a good job in bringing some interest to the earnest, do-gooding character of Benvolio.)
Anyway, still glad that I went, and will try to get out to the company's production of "The Tempest" when it comes around in a little while.
It's hard to put one's finger on the reasons for these kinds of responses, but here it had something to do with the choices made by the director - choices which almost seemed not to be choices at all. For example, the costumes and general ethos are quite contemporary - the tale, it seems, has been updated to our time, at least if the hip hop stylings of the opening chorus and the generally everyday (more or less) costumes worn by all are anything to go by...but the longer the play goes on, the more it slides towards a more traditional manner of presentation, and I wasn't sure if this was deliberate (I would imagine not) and, if so, what purpose it served. The effect of this apparent setting of events in a kind of amorphously contemporary milieu was unconvincing - it seemed done only for the sake of some ill-defined idea of relevance without anything deeper underlying or motivating the choice.
Then, too, there was Juliet, who was the subject of most interval and post-show conversation. In this production, she's very much the rather histrionic and sometimes petulant teenage girl rather than the more tragically romantic figure that other interpretations often offer - and I wasn't sure whether Chloe Armstrong's performance was merely uneven or actually seeking to convey a progression in Juliet's character (it was also interesting that, by design or inadvertence - probably the former, I think - she flattened out her delivery of all the famous lines, perhaps in an attempt to bring them home to us anew, in some measure removed from the deep layering of associations which so many of them carry with their every utterance).
Also, on stage the burning love between her and Romeo requires more of a suspension of disbelief - it's a medium which lends itself far less to aestheticisation than, say, film (one positive effect of seeing this has been the development of a great desire to watch the Luhrmann version again) and so probably depends more on its leads, and I wasn't feeling any particular chemistry between the two here. (Most of the other figures acquit themselves well, though - I thought that John Batchelor as Capulet was particularly good in rendering that figure sympathetically, Matthew Moore as Mercutio was fun (although, as Nicolette pointed out, Mercutio is a great character for an actor to take on), and James Hird lookalike Paul Eastway did a good job in bringing some interest to the earnest, do-gooding character of Benvolio.)
Anyway, still glad that I went, and will try to get out to the company's production of "The Tempest" when it comes around in a little while.
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