Ivy Compton-Burnett - A Family and a Fortune

I've not come across Hilary Mantel before, but whatever her story, she's spot on in her characterisation of Compton-Burnett's writing in her introduction to the omnibus edition in which I've just read A Family and a Fortune:

It is breakfast time, c. 1890; we are somewhere in England, and our class is upper middle. The family assembles. Coffee cups are passed; a letter arrives, perhaps from a treacherous lawyer, or a spouse believed seven years dead. A manservant stands by, ready to relish the night's disasters. Has there been a suicide attempt, perhaps? Or a cast-off nightgown (incriminating, monogrammed) found in a room where it should not be?

Assume that for once the night has been uneventful. No uncles have disappeared into a snowstorm; no one has a sudden marriage to announce. Breakfast conversation proceeds: formal, dignified, polite. Between the lines you can hear the sound of knives being sharpened.

...

Ivy Compton-Burnett is one of the most original, artful and elegant writers of our century. To read her for the first time is a singular experience. There is almost no description or scene setting; the writing is pared to the bone, the technique is a gavotte on needles. The story unfolds in page after page of spiked dialogue. It is not always clear who is speaking; the words themselves are unlike any you have come across before.

And this, from the back cover blurb: "To the listening ear, these Ivy Compton-Burnett novels will play a rare music, subtly attuned to the most disturbing notes of the human comedy."

All true, perfectly true. Compton-Burnett does have a unique style, and to read her for the first time is a singular experience - although, in some ways, the oddest thing is how naturally the writing flows despite a solid 90% or so of it being undiluted dialogue. The characters are unfailingly proper in their addresses to each other, and yet there are so many undercurrents flowing through all that they say, and nearly every phrase is somehow barbed (even if the only person being pricked is the speaker). It's all very genteel, but not gentle at all - and one feels the acuteness of Compton-Burnett's intellect and observations very keenly as she goes about dissecting the mores of these very English upper-middle class types from the turn of the last century, well-off enough but not so much that money isn't the single largest concern in all of their lives. It's really difficult to give a sense of A Family and a Fortune - I don't think I could do better than Mantel (and hence the quotin' above) - and I think it needs to be read. The closest analogue I can come up with is Lurie, but that's really not all that close.

Toby Burke and "Is self-help any help at all?" @ Melbourne Writers' Festival Club, Malthouse Theatre

Just by way of note:

Having decided to catch up at a festival event on Sunday, Swee Leng and I were torn between the earlier "Exclusion zone" session about "those politically unfashionable responses: compassion, anger and action" to the federal government's refugee policies and the self-help debate. In the end, we settled on the latter because it seemed more likely to be soul-nourishing and less potentially heavy on the intellectualisin'; unfortunately, we'd misinterpreted the blurb and what we'd thought would be a discussion of the value of literature in one's life in fact turned out to be a 'debate' about the value of self-help books (Linda Jaivin, Andy Griffiths, Kerry Greenwood, Danny Katz)...o well, better luck next time. Having arrived early, we also happened to catch Toby Burke, who it turns out I'd seen perform before, under the name 'Horse Stories' (as a support to Kathleen Edwards) - he was quite good though not getting much in the way of attention.

100 favourite songs: #77: "Dance Of Sulphur" - Scout Niblett

One who’s certainly in it for the creation is Emma Louise Niblett, adopting ‘Scout’ in honour of the (wideeyedwisewonderful) character in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. The music she makes is extraordinarily sparse, stripped-back, and bare, but by no means barren — rather, it is stark with a luminous vividness which only the aching space between notes can give rise to. Sweet Heart Fever was her first album, and it’s a thing of wonder. - 9/1/04

I’ve always felt that there was something profound about the gaps between the music in this song, a sort of ache that sound is inadequate to express, but which can be gestured at by the silence that falls between the notes. There’s also something very spiritual about the song…it’s resignedly fatalistic and yet somehow hopeful (“and my healer said it was meant to be; he’d have my smile…”) and makes me think of magic done in smoky tents, and rebirth, and lost, wandering people, and they’re all alone and looking for something they can’t quite name, and one of them, just for a second there, caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of her eye… - 30/1/04

I guess that this is folk music of a sorts, and I do hear something of the Appalachias in its lonely uneven wavering strum and pluck, but “Dance of Sulphur” really seems to inhabit a space all its own. There are a few songs which I think feel genuinely out of time, and this is one of them.

100 favourite songs: #78: "Fake Plastic Trees" - Radiohead

I’m not sure that I could write truthfully about this song if I tried — not about how I feel about it, anyway. When I listen to “Fake Plastic Trees”, I can feel in my chest all the other times I’ve listened to it. Oh, but it pierces…

100 favourite songs: #79: "Mimi On The Beach" - Jane Siberry

… quotes Philip Glass both lyrically and musically, filtering those references through new-wave synths and eccentric 80s singer-songwriter stylings (which might initially sound incongruous, but isn't at all once you stop to think about it) and ending up with seven and a half minutes of tuneful, pulsating, resonant, widescreen pop genius … - 30/3/06

I always forget how great this song is until I’m listening to it again, whereupon it all always comes right back to me. It’s in the way it moves, bouncing and kerplunking, humming and echoing, buzzing and singing. And in the weirdly just right details — the first fading “na na na na na na na na”s, the “don’t you have money I asked/Of course I do!” line, the offbeat guitarish-sounding squiggles which appear about halfway through, the emphatic clatter between those last repetitions of “mimi on the beach…mimi and me” and the fade-out. And in the genius melody and the way it contrives to catch you off balance with every turn while also feeling entirely natural, playing endlessly with standard pop forms and motifs. And, obviously, I’m just a sucker for seven and a half minute long synth-pop songs with Philip Glass opera-referencing titles which sound rather like Glass, too…who isn’t?

100 favourite songs: #80: "How Soon Is Now?" - The Smiths

So in making this list, I’ve taken a pretty hard line when it comes to including old favourites — if it doesn’t speak to me now for some reason extending beyond how much it has spoken to me in the past (I know, as if that distinction can be maintained), then I’ve tended to cut it. Well, “How Soon Is Now?” is, I reckon, the nearest thing on the list to an exception to that principle. There aren’t many other songs that I’ve out and out loved for as long as I have “How Soon Is Now?” in the past, and if nowadays it feels as if maybe the time for it has passed, well, some things still linger.

I first became aware of the song somewhere around the tail end of year 11, I think — happened to hear it a couple of times on the radio in reasonably close succession and it caught my ear. First off, it was the sound — the shimmer of the guitar bed and the swirling siren line that cuts through at intervals, the drama of the drums, the intoned vocals, and the generally epic vibe (the only words that I initially retained, I heard as “I am the sun and the air”). So somehow I became a bit obsessed with the song — I can’t remember whether this was before or after I worked out what the words were actually about — and I went out and bought Singles and for ages I just couldn’t get past “How Soon Is Now?” to appreciate the rest of the band’s canon because we really are talking obsession here (and, no doubt, because it sounds rather different from the most of the rest of their oeuvre)…when I made a ‘top 100’ list in the same vein as this one at the start of 2000 (year 12/first year uni), I had it at number 2,[*] and it would’ve basically stayed at around there (ie, one of my very, very favourites) for the next four or so years, I reckon.

It’s always felt like one sustained swoon, a shuddering extended fall and cry of desperation and hopelessness, form and content in some ways oddly matched (but then they always were with the Smiths) but in some ineffable but vital way undeniably complementary. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt precisely the way that Morrissey seems to in “How Soon Is Now?”, but there was definitely a time when I more than recognised the shape of it and it rang deeply true in its general tone even if not in its specifics; it’s a song about atmosphere and mood and state of mind, after all, more than about details.

So do I still love this song? I guess I do. These things go beyond words, or memories, or associations. Feel something deeply enough for long enough and somehow it burns itself into the patterns of your thoughts; here, it’s the song itself as much as, if not more so than, what it carries with it — I will insist on trying to make these distinctions, because they reflect how I immediately feel, even if not always what I convince myself of later — and, well, it’s still great.

* * *

[*] By way of historical snapshot, the top 10 as at 1/1/00:

1. “Lightning Crashes” – Live
2. “How Soon Is Now?” – The Smiths
3. “Comfortably Numb” – Pink Floyd
4. “Creep” – Radiohead
5. “Spark” – Tori Amos
6. “Epic” – Faith No More
7. “Paranoid Android” – Radiohead
8. “Cornflake Girl” – Tori Amos
9. “Stinkfist” – Tool
10. “Glory Box” – Portishead

100 favourite songs: #81: "Everybody Hurts" - R.E.M.

It’s been a while since this song really loomed immediately large for me, but you know, every once in a while I hear it again, and some of those times I really hear it, and then I’m reminded of what a simple straightforward miracle it is. We take it for granted because it’ll always be there.

Janet Evanovich - Eleven on Top

Fun to return to the Burg; I'm almost fully caught up with the adventures of Stephanie Plum now, being in arrears only to the tune of the latest. Have been reading at intervals in bookstores, but naturally that experience doesn't compare to being able to sit down and go through the whole thing in a day or so of concentrated reading. Continues to be very funny in places and the characters are still utterly likeable - what I want out of a Stephanie Plum novel.

Inside Man

Quite good - Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster and Willem Dafoe all in reliably good form, and I didn't know what was going to happen or what kind of twists it might have up its sleeve (although I did pick the general contents of Case's safe deposit box very early on). A bit of a strange beast in some ways, though - it's a genre piece but has some odd quirks which, while not precisely detracting from the whole, seem to sit oddly with that whole. Not memorable, but good.

"Lexicon" @ City Library

The notes in the catalogue for this exhibition are pretty good and so here they are:

The Chambers's English Dictionary - perfect bound with 1255 numbered pages, printed in London, 1898, bought by a friend for $20 in a second hand bookstore is an edition that now has the aura of a unique object. Signs of use and accident - stains and tears, jottings and yellow-edged pages - mark the book as integral with its material history, suggesting a world in which the reference book is now an artifact of wisdom. A communal archive of shared knowledge, symbolic of the library and its holdings, the lexicon bears witness to old belief systems still functioning through language.

The intimate boundaries of its form - finitude and sequence, repetition and extension - provide the spatial gestalt for the exhibition. Dismantled and reconstrued, its integrative internal structure sits like a collaged landscape of language. A found poem - an arbitrary gesture in the rooms of a bibliotech - the 'absent text' of the dictionary is now playfully rendered in textual, visual and material manipulations of the original pages.

Artists respond to the codified formal elements of the page - margin, gutter, type, text block, illustration, running head... and to the binarism of black ink on white paper. But words seep through, along with their labyrinthine associations. There is a tension between the literal and conceptual page as artists play with the sonoric and visual aspects of language that form part of the substance of the dictionary substrate.

In other words, about 50 artists each given a double page from said 1898 edition of Chambers's and given licence to create art incorporating that page as they saw fit - interesting concept, and I enjoyed the exhibition. Jade T spotted it and I went with her and, perhaps a bit surprisingly, by and large our favourites were similar. The ones I particularly liked (pretty much in order):
• Presence de l'Absence - Considering Blanchot II (Tara Gilbee). Well, with a name like that...in fact, it is a neat spin on Blanchot, words and phrases craftily cut out from the page and raised on pins to spell out a text about the nature of the dictionary (text) itself, thereby enacting the presence/absence thing. Also liked the materiality/substantiality of the red/maroon thread dangling from the pins (reminiscent of if not actually from the binding of a dictionary of the time).
• Contents (Louise Rippert). Cute little book shelvesque. And, I suppose, hints at infinity, too.
• O (Annee Miron). Paper folded into little boxes, filled with ash. Immediately attractive and seemingly immediately obvious, but holds the mind afterwards...
• OO (Anna Finlayson). Most of the words blacked out with a marker pen, to leave only "ou"s, "woo"s and maybe some "oo"s and "o"s as well. I don't really know why I liked this one so much, but I was thinking while looking at it that the appeal had something to do with the way it seemed somehow retarded, and gleefully so (and you know that I'd only use a phrase like that, even in my head, with great care); I just realised that that association came from the panel in Ghost World where Enid and Rebecca are looking at the sidewalk slab where a little kid has written his name over and over and one comments about how they love the way that it's so retarded and egomaniacal...but OO isn't egomaniacal - it's all about the "woo". Excellent whichever way you look at it.
• Reliquary (Sandra Bruce). It says "reliquary", and it is one, just as it gestures at its surrounds as also being so; a bit "ceci n'est pas une pipe", then. Looks nice, too.

John Fowles - The Magus

I'm not yet sure how much I liked The Magus, or how good I think it is, but I've certainly been reminded of how weirdly compelling Fowles' writing can be. The French Lieutenant's Woman was the first of his that I read, and it immediately became one of my favourite novels, but the next after that was A Maggot which, while good (and good enough that I was inspired to stage an encounter between it and a Derridean fragment - "The Law of Genre" - for one of my honours papers last year), didn't have the same compulsiveness or anything of the same magic.

Now, if there's one thing that The Magus definitely has, it's magic - that, and a sinuous, sinister air which doesn't seem quite to be accounted for by the events it actually depicts. Reading it, I felt as if the ground was continually shifting beneath me, a sensation which to some extent proceeded in parallel with Conchis' manipulations of Nicholas' experiences and perceptions but also operates on an additional level of prestidigitation effected by Fowles which is rather more difficult for the reader to put their finger on (so to speak).

Well, actually, I don't know if puns are ever truly appropriate, but that last one probably comes pretty close, because puns are very much Fowles' stock in trade - but not straightforwardly immediate, 'merely' linguistic ones but rather more complex, incrementally detonating intellectual plays/ploys which are planted or suggested at multiple points and then realised/re-realised at intervals going forward. At the same time as being a genuine page-turner, it's also a very intellectual book and rewards both careful reading and a good working knowledge of Greek, English and French literature (I think I picked up at least most of the obvious allusions, but one can never be certain with these things). It's about freedom, and humanity, and society, and (elliptically for all that it's right on the surface) love, and has something to say about war, too. It's a fantastic end-upon-end jumble and I think I've just about convinced myself that it's a good 'un, too.

The Greenhornes - Sewed Soles

The hope was, of course, that it would hold another "There Is An End". But I always suspected that this was likely to prove a forlorn hope, and I'm not too disappointed that that's how it's indeed shaken out - another part of my interest was simply in seeing what the Greenhornes sounded like when they didn't have Holly Golightly guesting out front, and this record (a 'best of' of sorts, although - judging by the liner notes - only approximately so) pretty much resolves that. Retro-sounding rock and roll, 'garage' in feel; okay but nothing special by my lights.

100 favourite songs: #82: "In Love With A View" - Mojave 3

…the romance was hard to ignore — / you were beautiful, I was happy to fall…

For me, in many ways “In Love With A View” is all about those few words — simple, plain even, but resonant, too…I hear them running around in my head more often than would seem at all likely. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the song is an introspective, woozy, folk and country-tinged weeper which soars and really burns when everything comes to a head before subsiding gently back into a starry-eyed dreaminess…

100 favourite songs: #83: "Pearly-Dewdrops' Drops" - Cocteau Twins

From quite early in their storied career, and has a jangle and a wide-eyedness which I find delightful. The Cocteaus would go on to cut many more brilliantine and amazing records, but few to touch the outright charm of this one; especially love the ragged half-shrieks with which Fraser intersperses her vocals throughout.

100 favourite songs: #84: "Good Woman" - Cat Power

Even though it came relatively late in her career, I always think of “Good Woman” as the archetypal Cat Power song. Sombre and heartbreakingly pretty, the magic of it lies in the simple, gorgeous melody and the mingling of the resonant, fuzzy guitars beneath Marshall’s incomparably expressive, sad voice.

100 favourite songs: #85: "Cornflake Girl" - Tori Amos

Such a left-field classic, this, but a classic nonetheless; the time of my Tori-adorin’ has well and truly passed, but “Cornflake Girl” still sounds as good as ever. I’ve never been able to explain why I like it so much, and I still can’t, but I know that, from its still-thrilling opening bars through the unlikely (well, ridiculous really) hook of “you bet your life it is” and the great piano breakdown to its rushing end, the song just works.

100 favourite songs: #86: "Today" - Smashing Pumpkins

The main thing with “Today” is that it’s basically a perfect power-pop song, bittersweet and singalongable (turns out that I still know all the words, after all this time). In high school, to the extent that I did the grunge thing, I was more of a Pearl Jam boy than a Pumpkins or a Nirvana one (though naturally I had the holy documents, Nirvana and Mellon Collie and Siamese Dream, anyway), but even then “Today” made my nerves tingle and caused some nameless want to swell inside me; in the time since then, Siamese Dream has become a bit of a touchstone record for me — I only listen to it at very long intervals, but every time I do it seems to be somehow a key moment, crystallising or exemplifying a particular point in my life while recalling and referring back to the past. I listen to “Today” on its own more frequently (and sometimes other individual songs, usually some combination of “Disarm”, “Soma” and “Mayonaise”), and while it partakes of that reification of the album in my mind, it also bears with it its own set of associations and it’s a rare day when I don’t enjoy turning it up loud and being swept along…

"Meeting a Dream: Albert Tucker in Paris 1948-1952" & other exhibitions @ Heide Museum of Modern Art

"Meeting a Dream: Albert Tucker in Paris 1948-1952", "Imagine...The Creativity Shaping Our Culture", "Living in Landscape: Heide and Houses by McGlashan and Everist" & "It Ain't Necessarily So...Mike Brown and the Imitation Realists"

McClelland gallery was yesterday, and this was today (the former, along with today's sunshine and the desire to be outdoors for it, probably providing some of the trigger for my suggesting Heide as today's outing) - first visit since it was reopened (not that I've ever been a regular - given that, in relative terms, it's pretty much in my backyard, I've always felt that I should go a lot more than I actually do) and it has to be said, the sheet metal cows are still the best thing about Heide.

Reunion with them aside, the rest of what was on offer was a pleasant enough way to spend an afternoon, but none too inspiring for me. I quite liked the Tuckers, but felt that I would have been much more drawn to their murky browns, maroons, nocturnal blues and occasional lamp-lit splashes of colour and general demi-mondismes in high school than I could be now; also, they were kind of samey. The pieces in the "Imagine" space were variously put on by ten current Australian artists, with no particular unifying theme, and while they're an interesting cross-section, none particularly grabbed me (though a brief animation showing a couple of stick finger protagonists making their way through some iconic works of Australian art - a Nolan "Kelly", "Picnic at Hanging Rock" (complete with the Saints' "I'm Stranded" as soundtrack and re-enactment of dialogue), "Blue Poles" - appealed). The architecture one wasn't really my thing, especially given that I'm not really up with the whole 'major significance of the Heide I and II houses' story, though it was kinda cool to be able to wander through the house; and similarly (though in a different way) the Mike Brown, which was all collages and counter-culture and you know, blah blah blah (significant and interesting at the time - probably so, I'll believe what they tell me. But particularly engaging now? No).

"Painting for Joy: New Japanese Painting in 1990s" & "Louise Weaver: Taking a Chance on Love - Selected Works 1990-2006" @ McClelland Gallery

trang picked up on the "Painting for Joy" exhibition, highlighting works in painting by more or less contemporary Japanese artists, and invited me in part because some of Yoshitomo Nara's work is showing there ('there' being the McClelland Gallery out in Langwarrin, which I now know to be somewhere in the Frankston direction). And I liked looking at the Naras - five all up, all rather characteristic, including the "Little Red Riding Hood" that has been reproduced quite a lot - but my favourites were two others, neither of whose artists I'd heard of before.

The highlight for me was definitely Takanobu Kobayashi's "Gate", which put me very much in mind (the turn of phrase is deliberate) of Magritte. There's a simplicity and a sense of space to it, but it's also very much framed - it's a perspective as immediately and subjectively present and constructed, flat with intimations of depth. The gate in the foreground which dominates the painting proves, on closer inspection, to be mounted on castor wheels and hence presumably movable; moreover, it's distinctly sky-like in appearance, and not only that, but its cloud hues appear to extend to the thin grey strip at the bottom of the picture which we had previously been presuming was the ground. Then there's the matter of the 'trees' in the background - and the unaccountable regular poles (trunks?) with which they are intersheaved. All in all, it's a kind of pictorial representation of how I feel that I see the world, not least in its slightly disorienting dream-likeness.

The other which particularly appealed was Makoto Aida's "Pavement of Yukiko Okada", a series of panels arranged four by four and each a variation on the same general theme - a face or a tree, depending on which panel one looks at and how one looks. Each has a different colour scheme and character and hints suggestively at meaning (both individually and taken as a whole, each all at once in that familiar hermeneutic circle) - it's quite abstract but also quite conventionally aesthetically pleasing which made me think of the European impressionist style (while also, no doubt influenced by the context in which I was viewing it, seeing cherry blossoms and other 'Asian' motifs in its patterns).

(I was also drawn to the Op Art-type "Jungle Gym" pieces by Nobuhiko Nukata - reminded me of Bridget Riley, though I like what I've seen of her's more.)

Also had a look at the Louise Weaver, since it was on in the same building. It seemed to be a career-spanning retrospective of sorts, and her thing is basically the creation of new forms and effects through crocheting and stitching onto and over existing 'canvasses' of various kinds - some quite large and installation-like, others more intimate. I was much more drawn to the neat textural effects she had achieved with relatively restrained stitching on to paper, coupled with linedrawings, etc, and the cute, similarly restrained ones she'd done with black-and-white wildlife photography of animals (especially the bear one), than to the larger-scale monochromatic ones.

And also walked through the gardens to look at the sculptures scattered about - especially liked "homespace", an almost pitch dark shed with many little lights set into its ceiling and a reflective surface below, so that walking on it produced a giddy sense of wavering depthlessness and being somehow above the stars.

Gina Czarnecki - "Spine 1.2" @ Union Lane

The Saturday night before last, 10.30pm-ish (after drinks), sliding towards the Queen Street bus stop for the last bus, took a short cut down Union Lane (connecting Bourke Street Mall and Little Collins, sorta near Royal Arcade) and was confronted by a tumbling swirl of lights, projected on to a screen high overhead, revolving over and over; turned out that I'd come in halfway through, and the initial stages involved an increasingly rapid tumble of brightly glowing human figures falling in a stream from the top to the bottom, become more and more dense in that stream and eventually all coalescing in the circular swirl which was my introduction to the work (screen dimensions very approximately five metres (height) by one metre (horizontal width), lowest point maybe six metres above the ground.

So anyway, it was quite hypnotic and a little beautiful, and just right for my state of mind at the time. We're not talking transcendence or perfect moments here, but still, it fit.

(Artist, title and its nature as part of a series titled "Laneway Commissions 2006" gleaned from a small plaque mounted at the Little Collins end of the lane.)

Reading list

The piles of books 'to be read' arranged around my room have been out of control for some time. Here are all the ones (fiction only) I've been able to round up, vaguely in the order that I think I might eventually read them:
• The Magus - John Fowles
• Mason & Dixon - Thomas Pynchon
• A First Omnibus - Ivy Compton-Burnett
• The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
• Real People - Alison Lurie
• Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard - Kiran Desai
• Tales of the Jazz Age - F Scott Fitzgerald
• Birthday Stories selected and introduced by Haruki Murakami
• The Mill on the Floss - George Eliot
• The Waves - Virginia Woolf
• Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
• The Bark Tree - Raymond Queneau
• Strait is the Gate - André Gide

Also, three that I'm really keen to read but haven't yet accumulated:
• What I Loved - Siri Hustvedt
• The Accidental - Ali Smith
• Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl

Also-also, now that he's been installed as the bookmakers' favourite for the Booker after the announcement of the long list last week and all, something by David Mitchell (turns out that I had heard of one of his books before after all - Cloud Atlas); read some bits and pieces of two of his earlier novels while killing time on Brunswick St before brunch this morning, and they looked alright.

Plus, The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard, which is next up for the ACs' book club (happily, the only one on this round's short list that I really wanted to do).

And, as of last weekend, am the proud owner of the Oxford complete works of Shakespeare...but I won't be reading that one cover to cover any time soon!

Anton Chekhov - The Kiss

Months and months ago, I got to talking books with Lev and he gave a strong (especially for him) recommendation to Chekhov; I wondered how much of that was attributable to the Russian heritage, but filed it away anyway (as is my wont when people talk up music or, especially, books/writers) and after a while someone else lent me the pocket Penguin 70 years volume which includes two of his stories, "The Kiss" and "A Visit to Friends".

A'course I knew of Chekhov's reputation as one of the great short story writers, but I had a feeling I'd read him in fits and bursts in the past without his stuff having made much of an impression - and, having read these two, I still feel much the same. They're finely etched and good on the details - the writing gives a sense of real craft - but the stories don't do a great deal for me...another instancing, maybe, of a telescoping of my tastes in literature.

Annie - Anniemal

I don't think there's much I need to say about this album, except that it's ace. I'd already heard what I now reckon to be the four best songs on it - "My Heartbeat" (which I knew, and will continue to think of, simply as "Heartbeat"), "Chewing Gum", "Anniemal" and "Come Together" - but had only previously been able to really listen to the first of those over and over (ie, because I had it on mp3, whereas the others were just repeated appearers on last.fm), but it's all really rather good, Annie's thin voice and simple beats transformed (well, absorbed into and by) her - or (I'm not sure) her songwriters' - knack for the unobtrusively vivid hook and a crisp, lean pop sound making for a delicious whole.[*]

* * *

[*] I was actually wondering about the constituents of her fanbase a while back. Kelly mentioned that the audience at the show Annie played in Melbourne was disproportionately 'macho' (w/ something of a goth turnout, too!), which is rather troubling (although, somehow, I wasn't wholly surprised upon hearing that review) - although very possibly Annie's one of those artists whose live show attendees aren't necessarily representative of her fanbase as a whole...related question: just how large (and wide) is that 'fanbase', anyway?

100 favourite songs: #87: "Nothing Natural" - Lush

… a near-perfect fusion of the always closely aligned dream-pop and shoegazer streams. - 10/04

…said I with my ‘pocket music critic’ hat on, but when I took Lush to heart, it was with no such critical inclinations at play; rather, it was an instinctive response to the spangly yet oddly downbeat rush their music provides. If you hear them on the radio nowadays, or see them on a compilation cd, it’s probably by means of something off their second (middle) or third (last) lps — “Single Girl”, “500 (Shake Baby Shake)”, “Hypocrite” — and while all those songs are pretty fab, I don’t think they can touch the band’s Spooky days, when they were giving that glorious unmistakable ethereal 4ad sound its sweetest and perhaps most gossamer expression, all sparkling, shimmering, crashing guitars and swirling, reverberating walls of sound and vocals seemingly only lightly tethered to anything at all, and never more so than on “Nothing Natural”, which in addition to all of the above has an urgency and a momentum and, too, a breeziness along with which one can’t help but be swept along…

100 favourite songs: #88: "If I Give You A Smile" - Whistler

One from the tail end of high school, and incontrovertibly a summer song — a lot of my earlier comments about Beth Orton are applicable here, too — and a song which, in retrospect, set the tone for a lot that was to come afterwards for me. It’s a harmonica-tinged folk-infused yearn, clear-eyed and sun-dappled, and it may have been the song which first showed me just how effectively wistful it was possible for a song to be without the slightest hint of bombast or melodrama, either musically or lyrically — its tale of a relationship seemingly near its end is keenly observed and initially has an air of resignation (“when we’re scared we’ve made compromises we can’t continue to make, and you’ve just about fooled me and I’ve just about fooled you…”) but, gradually, builds to an end that is hopeful and even almost rousing without anything seeming to have actually changed…everything about it is just perfectly balanced.

100 favourite songs: #89: "Way To Blue" / "Day Is Done" - Nick Drake

Two songs rather than just the one, but for me “Way To Blue” and “Day Is Done” have always been a pair, coming back to back on Five Leaves Left, the sombre stateliness of the one serving as an ideal prelude to the lightly-sketched melancholy of the other, which itself has the air of an epilogue; together, they form more than the sum of their parts…

* * *

Years ago, I used to occasionally awake filled with a sense of overwhelming melancholy more intense than any I’ve known before or since. It took the form of a diffuse yet intense yearning, a feeling that I’d been touched by something while I was asleep, something inarticulable which involved, maybe, having been adrift on distant oceans (or amidst the clouds), and having visited shores pristine and uncharted, or standing atop a great mountain and looking out and across forever, or something similarly ineffable. That’s the imagery that I tended to be left with, but the overwhelming sense was one of bittersweet loss — of having dreamt, felt, experienced something beautiful and magical which had but recently fled, but of its always being ungraspable and completely impossible in waking life, even as its traces remained upon me for those precious ephemeral moments between sleep and wakefulness. I felt it, those mornings, as an almost physical pain, an indescribable pang, and, it has to be said, it could make me feel like crying — but at the same time, I wanted the feeling to linger, to remain wrapped in it aching, to continue to believe in everything it so intangibly yet so keenly seemed to hint of.

Well, once, one such morning awakening was, it seemed, scored, softly, at its faintest edges, by these two songs, “Way To Blue” and “Day Is Done”, and that sense of all-encompassing melancholy was all about them, and they’ve never been the same since.

* * *

[Interjection: I know, I know - all of the above is totally and embarrassingly overwritten…but that's what happens when you try to express something that (I'm convinced) is plain inexpressible.]

100 favourite songs: #90: "Simple Things" - Belle and Sebastian

The merest of bagatelles, this — not even two minutes long and minor even at that length. But it’s touched with something — you can’t put your finger on it, but if you understand then you know it’s there…it’s something about the prettiness and aptness of its winsome strum n jangle, the gentle, unassuming lilt of the verse, the plaintive hopefulness of its delicate build, the perfectly conjured air of wistfulness…it all just fits. If a sigh were set to music, this is how it would sound.

100 favourite songs: #91: "Daybreaker" - Beth Orton (Four Tet remix)

For me, there are two artists whose music, more than any others’, always invokes that sweet old summer sadness — the feeling that everything is intangibly possible but always just out of reach which I associate so strongly with the dreaminess of my late-teenage years. Powderfinger and Beth Orton are the two: in terms of Powderfinger, it’s Internationalist, the Two Hands version of “These Days”, and Odyssey Number 5, a trio of records which carries stronger associations for me than any other, all mixed up as associations (and expecially those from that time of my life) tend to be; and when it comes to Beth Orton, it’s all about Trailer Park and, especially, Central Reservation (and, especially especially, “Stolen Car” and “Central Reservation” itself)…music that made me feel something hazy and rich and inexpressible at the time, and which is now laden both with something of that original effect and with the wistful nostalgia with which I recall that first reception and all that came with it.

So it’s more than a little strange that my favourite of Orton's songs should not only be from her third album, Daybreaker (which I heard well after the time at which Orton’s music was possessed of that kind of heightenedness for me, and found ‘objectively’ underwhelming into the bargain), but be a remix no less. But there it is — and it’s true, ringing, chiming and insistent, the Four Tet cut-up of “Daybreaker” is my favourite Beth track.

The thing with Four Tet remixes is that, while he very much does songs over in his own style and adorns them in the clicks, shimmers and edges that are unmistakeably his, he also always retains the integrity and the sense of the original — indeed, keeps those elements at the centre of his refashioning. And so it is here that Orton’s voice, that thorny soulful croon, is the focal point of Hebden’s “Daybreaker”, and the melody is the thread about which everything else is woven — but it’s the little twists and flourishes that he adds which really make the track…and in the commingling of the various resonances of Orton's and Hebden’s music, it takes me somewhere both familiar and new.

Thom Yorke - The Eraser

The thing about the record, really, is that it just sounds exactly like a Thom Yorke album. As far as the Radiohead back catalogue goes, its closest cognate is probably Amnesiac, but really it's most recognisably that indie-rock/electronic thing that you can't help but identify with latter-day Radiohead (and, by extension, Yorke). It has its moments - the weary coda to "Analyse" is an early 'moment' - and the sound is still both new and familiar, but it's just not really where I'm at right now, and probably --

* * *

Scratch all of the above. What I really want to say goes something like this: responses to music are subjective, after all. The Eraser is a good album but I don't love it. I'm not sure if I could ever have loved it. But I don't really know what I meant by that 'ever'. It's probably not a meaningful statement - not a meaningful hypothetical, I mean.

* * *

Also, in general, I'm lacking some essential lightness right now. As they sometimes do, the words are coming out all weird.

Niobe - White Hats

Different from most of what's out there, and almost always interesting to listen to, but ultimately lacks whatever it is that really sets certain music apart from the common run and causes it to linger in what might be called the mind's ear (to coin a possibly somewhat unfortunate phrase). Heard bits of it playing in a record store and my attention was caught; interrogation of the store clerk produced the cd case, from which I learnt that the album's on Tomlab (which was a plus); and decided to take a chance and bring it home. It's a fractured, inchoate mix of styles - Tomlab-styled electro-pop, jazz gestures, old school funk, flashes of torch and, maybe most perceptibly, a distinct lounge sensibility. The voice in which 'Niobe' sings has been reminding me of someone for weeks now, but it's only writing these notes just now that I've been able to place it - the resemblance is to Feist (and that only because the cd's sitting on my desk right now), though Niobe's perhaps a bit more forthright, with shades of Nellie McKay, and in fact the musical style isn't a world removed from those two, either, though much more on the 'electronic' side. So this quirkiness is all well and good, but I find that the tunes aren't there - and, in the case of White Hats, there isn't enough else to make up for the lack.

David Guterson - Snow Falling on Cedars

I started reading this mainly because I wanted something easy and involving - any kind of insight or emotional payoff would have been a nice bonus. In the event, the novel made me want to keep reading it in order to find out what happened at the end, but I found the writing a bit clunky and I was annoyed by the way the novel kept shifting from one character's point of view to another - I'm always very alive to that aspect of writing. (Really there's no good reason for my irritation on that account, but I can't help it...that's how I responded.) All up, for mine, Snow Falling on Cedars is just okay but nothing special.

Candy original soundtrack

This soundtrack has made me want to watch a film that I didn't previously have the slightest interest in seeing. Initially, a few things caught my eye about the tracklist; from most to least interesting:
• a recording of Pärt's "Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten" done by the Bournemouth Sinfonietta, an ensemble whose name I knew but couldn't place
• two versions of Tim Buckley's great "Song to the Siren", one by Buckley himself and the other by a pair whose names were unfamiliar to me, Paul Charlier and Paula Arundell
• a song - the "wedding theme" - by Johnette Napolitano, who I thought was the lead singer from 4 Non Blondes but turns out to be from Concrete Blonde (damnit, they have more in common than just the word 'Blonde' in their names!)

As to those, the reading of the "Cantus" here is more hesitant, less ineluctably sweeping, its various instrumental lines more distinct (and the bells more pronounced) than the recording with which I'm most familiar, the one from the Tabula Rasa cd put down by Dennis Russell Davies and the Stuttgart State Orchestra. But it works. The Charlier/Arundell "Song to the Siren" (I presume that the music was done by Charlier, who's the composer of the score to the film, and the vocals by Arundell), which opens the soundtrack, seemingly owes much more to the version done by Robin Guthrie and Liz Fraser under the 'This Mortal Coil' moniker than to Buckley's original, and has a gloomy, broody prettiness which sets the tone for the soundtrack as a whole; Buckley's is a live version and its simplicity, done by him, is as affecting as always. And the Napolitano is a muted, plaintive, somehow bruised thing which is rather lovely.

Elsewhere, the music's in a similar vein to those four tracks - listening to it really makes me feel as if I have a sense for the film already, despite not having seen any trailers, etc and having only the vaguest idea as to what it's about. I'm sure that it'll be a downer, but I think I should watch it.

Haruki Murakami - Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

In the past, I've much preferred Murakami's longer form writing - that is, his novels - to his short stories, and indeed I was almost halfway through this career-spanning collection before I felt myself really respond to anything in it (that said, it finishes on a high - the last four stories are all really good, and there are some others in the second half, including "Tony Takitani", which are touched by that familiar Murakami magic). In general, I think that he's an author who benefits from having some space in which to develop his ideas and worlds - in the briefer medium, his stories tend to come across as a bit obvious and their off-the-wallness not really justified, rather than occupying that happy space between the ordinary and the extraordinary in which his novels seem to dwell. I don't know whether this is a case of me holding an author up to a higher standard than usual because I've so loved his work in the past, or whether it's that very prior familiarity which is causing me to fill in at least some of the gaps in the craft of these stories in order to imbue them with the spirit of which I know he's capable, but in either case the end result is that I was left only partially satisfied by the stories here. That said, of course, he still writes - quite literally - like a dream, and even if I think these are down on his usual standard, I flew through them once I got started.

The Tempest @ the Playhouse, Arts Centre

I'm pretty sure that The Tempest was my first exposure to Shakespeare. We read parts of it in grade 6 and it left an impression on me which penetrated, I'm convinced, beyond the idea of 'reading Shakespeare' to something of the magic lying beneath it. I don't recall which part or parts I read, but I do remember how the words made me feel.

So it was an auspicious beginning for the Bard and I. Notwithstanding that, though, and notwithstanding a succession of other Shakespeare throughout school - as far as I can remember, The Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet in year 9, Macbeth and maybe Richard III in year 10, King Lear in year 11 and then Hamlet in year 12, I think - and various exposures (though not as many as you'd think if you'd never been a Melbourne Uni English student) at uni, I've never been one to truly love his work. There are people of my age who genuinely have a feel for Shakespeare and unequivocally believe his greatness; I am not one of them.

But, to state the obvious, it's Shakespeare (and if there were some way of 'double capitalising' that name, I would) and so we all know him anyway, and his plays are fundamental to our experience of literature, art and life, whether or not we're aware of it at any particular time and whatever the 'intrinsic' merits or qualities they may possess, or once have possessed...so when I was looking at the Bell program for this year, I thought that it might be good to check some of it out and earmarked The Tempest as particularly likely to be rewarding; saw their Romeo and Juliet but then, feeling overrun by everything, gave up on organising for The Tempest; happily, Swee Leng had her act together (so to speak), so I caught it with her last Friday, along with a friend of hers, one Rob S (some very young-seeming uni friends of the latter also being around but elsewhere, having student rushed it on the night).

And it turned out to be good - better, I think, than the company's staging of Romeo and Juliet (although these kinds of comparisons are always to a certain extent a matter of apples and oranges). Set design was impressive - an appropriately enchanted forest, replete with obscured doors and hatches - and took on different characters throughout as the play required with some effective use of lighting and shadow effects (the way that the whole backdrop flickered when magic was being done was especially neat). Costumes generally quite thematically consistent - Caliban as a tall, angular British punk rocker in a white suit, complete with mohawk, somehow made sense, but was the exception rather than the rule in needing to have sense made of it - and relatively undistracting. Interesting choice to have the songs - as done by a (female) Ariel - rather Enya-esque (needless to say, with my long experience of ethereal female-voiced music, I could come up with more accurate comparisons - but that wouldn't be the point), and I wasn't sure about the reason for seemingly sending it up during the wedding scene...

I hadn't seen John Bell himself act before, so it was good to see him as Prospero - a fitting role. Freya Stafford as Miranda was about right, though I thought that Stephen Phillips as Ferdinand was a bit too much the footy player (but maybe that kind of swagger is more suited to the role than the lanugishings of a more expiring, sensitive romantic type). The rest of the cast good, also - most notably, those playing Caliban and Ariel. And the humour came through well, too.

The pacing seemed a bit off at the end - in particular, the ending seemed to begin quite early and then just keep on going, and there wasn't really a strong sense of climax at any stage - but, not being particularly familiar with the play, I don't know whether that was attributable to the play-text itself or to this particular staging. Anyway, I enjoyed it a lot and was interested to notice how thought-provoking it was - regardless (as above) of the extent to which this was due to 'the play itself' as opposed to its subsequent endless reproductions and reifications...

A Tale of Two Sisters

I'm not particularly a wimp about horror films, but nor am I especially a fan - to a pretty large extent, I just don't see the point of them (I know, I know - the wrong kind of question to be asking ). Anyway, consequently I don't see that many example of the genre - which maybe accounts for why I can't recall having ever felt genuine creeped out-related chills down my spine because of a film before A Tale of Two Sisters (which works the trick not once but several times)...unnervedness yes, and sometimes the shock and jump in my seat induced by a sudden appearance or apparition, but not honest to goodness chills.

I became aware of A Tale of Two Sisters a little while back, probably last year or the year before - whenever it showed at MIFF, anyway. The promotional picture - two doll-like Asian girls against a Laura Ashley background - caught my eye, as did the blurb, and those impressions stayed with me sufficiently that I rented it last weekend. The upshot, anyway, is that it's very good - I didn't really know anything about the film, so I didn't have any inkling as to the direction that the creepiness would come from, with the result that I was on edge the whole time and, as the film went on, increasingly uneasy about the darkened room in which I was watching it. The sets are lush and deeply coloured, and menacing, and the acting is high quality, keeping the viewer unsure about what is happening at any point - has a spooky, increasingly suffocating atmosphere, some outright frightening moments, a couple of genuine twists and a satisfying (as far as the conventions of the genre go) ending, that last pushing it in a direction which is both new and in line with what has gone before.

Alexander

The critics canned Alexander, but while I thought that it was a failure, I really feel that its failure is both noble and interesting, born of a failure to fully realise an overly grand ambition rather than any failure of imagination. I don't know if it's quite accurate to call it a revisioning of Alexander's life and person - is there even an accepted account of either? But it's characterised by a resistance to and incredulity towards any simple narrative of his feats or account of his personality - this is made perfectly clear both in the structure of the film, which is cut up by flashbacks, flashforwards and revisitings at several points (an interesting example is the way that it initially seems to be presenting a standard "rise to greatness" narrative culminating in Alexander's famous victory over the Persians at Gaugamel, before immediately going back and by filling in the gaps in the chronology leading up to that triumph - Alexander's exile by his father Philip, etc - problematises the status of what it had just presented as a straightforward received account), and in the comments of the framing narrator, the old Ptolemy, at the end. So far so good.

In a similar vein but maybe more overtly 'revisionistic' are the depictions of Alexander's homosexuality and the distinctly enlightened nature of his tyranny (the former is clear, albeit never made 100% explicit...and what's with Hephaiston's eyeliner?...and the latter comes through in Farrell's (and, perhaps more germanely, Stone's) Alexander's sensitivity and especially his wish to unify all of the races and tribes that he conquers for some kind of pan-utopian reason rather than from the simple desire for conquest or power...and then, shading from that, the psychologising of his character, and particularly the way his personality and actions are depicted as flowing from his troubled relationships with his mother and father. All of that is interesting, but I didn't feel that the pieces quite came together - while it looks and to a large extent feels right (the battle scenes and the council ones work), I just wasn't convinced (which is, natch, part of the function of what I was talking about in the first paragraph), and while Farrell was good, he lacked the necessary stature to make it all work.

I don't know if it's even possible for a film to have it 'both ways', so to speak - all I can say is that Alexander falls short (and this is the director's cut that I saw, too)...but I admire it nonetheless.

100 favourite songs: #92: "Under The Milky Way" - The Church

… a shimmering, subtly layered, guitar-driven number which builds and then peters out, and builds again, and peters again, often all within the space of a single line, and is graced by an almost naff (but absolutely perfect) racing keyboard bridge which appears only once, midway through. It’s wonderfully, mysteriously evocative, and completely majestic in a fashion which derives much of its power from its sustained restraint, and there’s a real sense of yearning to Kilbey’s vocals, and of wonder, too, as he sings those enigmatic words: “Wish I knew what you were looking for,/Might have known what you would find…” - 21/11/02

I always think of this song and “Wide Open Road” as a pair and, like that other, I kind of feel like “Under The Milky Way” will never go away — that it’ll never cease to affect me at least in some measure in the way that it did when I took it most intensely to heart. Unsurprisingly, given its lyrical content (and the musical bed on which those vocals lie), I think of “Under The Milky Way” as one of the soundtracks to that time when I used to go for broody night-time walks around suburbia, gravitating to the open, grassy space of the green, where I’d sit or stand on a hill or a slope, looking up at the stars and clouds going around and past above me…

In its understated way, this song is a classic — there’s a magic to it which I can’t locate in any of the song’s constituent elements but which is all the more undeniable for that elusiveness.

100 favourite songs: #93: "Wide Open Road" - The Triffids

Hauntingly simple in its sparse use of keyboards, clean, ringing guitars, and just the one, repeated drum fill, it has an epic majesty which is entirely suited to the semi-mythical Australia of The Triffids’ vision; no other song has so perfectly captured the sense of vast, uncharted expanses which characterises the Australia of our collective imagination. - 8/9/02

I’ve been pretty into the Triffids at various time in the past, and there are still some days when I think that Born Sandy Devotional is probably the best Australian album I know. Their palette is broad, but “Wide Open Road” is the one that everyone knows, and with good reason — it’s a genuine nation-defining anthem, resonant and powerful in its simplicity. Songwriter David McComb knew how to wield a symbol and a mythology, and the music is fit to match, haunted, spacious and rich without being adorned any more than necessary, and the result is something at once distinctively Australian and unquestionably universal.

100 favourite songs: #94: "Ghost World" - Aimee Mann

… how perfectly Mann's typically bitter-sweet tune captures that … sense of alienation, of hanging around and watching summers waste away. -8/5/05

I decided a while back that Bachelor No 2 is, these days, my single favourite album; and while there are better songs on the record, I’m not sure if there are any (with the possible exception of “Save Me”) which affect me as “Ghost World” can.

It starts unceremoniously, a perfunctory chug of the guitar and then straight into it:

“Finals blew, I barely knew my graduation speech,/ With college out of reach, if I don’t find a job it’s down to dad and Myrtle Beach…”

Sulky, spiky, and tart but sweet at the same time (I’ve thought before that if Mann’s music had a flavour, it would be citrus), with a quiet sadness underneath it, not only is it what she does best, but it’s perfectly suited to the mood of this song…and leads seamlessly into the chorus, which has a hint of the soaring to it but, aptly, only gets partway there:

”…so I’m bailing this town — or tearing it down — or probably more like hanging around…”

The first two lines of the next verse deepen the sense of drifting, disengaged summer alienation…

”Everyone I know is acting weird or way too cool,/They hang out by the pool,/So I just read a lot and ride my bike around the school…”

…but it’s the third line which is the first really magic Aimee Mann moment in the song, as her drowsy, disaffected backing vocals float in, accentuating and counterpointing, and wrapping the words in another layer of wistfulness.

”…cause I’m bailing this town — or tearing it down — or probably more like hanging around…”

…and then the bridge, musically flowing smoothly from what's gone before but lyrically unexpected, crisp, emphatic, with just a hint of yearning to its tone:

”…and all that I need now is someone with the brains and the know-how to tell me what I want, anyhow…”

A pause, then:

”12th of June, a gibbous moon,/Was this the longest day? I’ll walk down to the bay and jump off of the dock and watch the summer waste away…”

…a return to the verse, and it does feel like a return — the first three phrases a bit more restrained, a bit more tentative…and then the second glorious Aimee moment of the song, coming at the corresponding point in this verse to that in the earlier, everything dropping away for a fraction of a moment before the drums and the guitar push things forward again and there’s a new fluency and poignancy to Mann’s singing as her narrator quite literally immerses herself in this bittersweet, tremblingly poised ‘freedom’ and once again we feel that sense of almost-soaring.

”…then I’m bailing this town — or tearing it down — or probably more like hanging around…probably more like hanging around…so tell me what I want…”

…fade out, on three and a half minutes of the most perfectly pitched evocation of late-teenage (and beyond) anomie you could ever hope to hear.

(And see also here.)

100 favourite songs: #95: "Helpless" - Neil Young

Why this song, and not any number of other Neil Young songs in a similar vein? For mine, there’s just something a bit special about it, something in the shivering tenderness with which its tentative threads of vocals and instrumentation are all woven together, in the stuttering way that it slides in and its weary stumbling plaintivity thereafter, in the way that the line “throwing shadows on our eyes” makes me feel.

Girls Aloud - Chemistry

Despite the immediacy of the songs on this album, it took me a few listens for them all to sink in - probably because I spend most of my time listening to music which is very different from the glossy chart-oriented pop of Chemistry (and so have conditioned myself to respond more immediately to music which is, 'objectively', less immediate, maybe?). Anyway, once I'd got my ear in, I enjoyed this album heaps - there's nothing on it to touch the sheer hyper genius of "Biology", but it's solid throughout and there are details to savour everywhere. All up, it comes across as of-the-moment without being gimmicky or too obtrusively 'up to date', and the backwards-looking moments (the Pretenders influence is made explicit with the final track, a faithful cover of "I'll Stand By You") are well-weighted. (Incidentally, speaking of 'influence', I do have a vague sense of the provenance of the group - oh no, manufactured! - but it doesn't seem to have affected my response to the music...)

I don't know if they even play live, but if they do, and if they ever come to Australia, I really think that I would go and see them, and with every expectation of having a great time.

Françoiz Breut - Une saison volée

Another that I've had for ages but never got round to noting here (there's still a backlog pile of between a dozen and twenty other cds/records, depending on how far back one draws the line, in a similar position). Anyway, I like the album, and would've done even had I not seen her show a while back, but it's a bit more uneven than Vingt à trente mille jours and on the whole less swooningly captivating, although it certainly has its moments.

Belle and Sebastian - "The Blues Are Still Blue" EP

Not to be too dismissive or anything, but for me, all that really needs to be said about this ep is that it's latter-day Belle and Sebastian. A couple of songs from The Life Pursuit - "The Blues Are Still Blue" and "Funny Little Frog" - and a handful of others; it's all quite tuneful and pleasant, and it's almost completely forgettable. Maybe in ten years' time I'll be able to come back and listen to all these now-recent B&S records and appreciate them a bit more - but it's not happening just now.

One Kiss Can Lead To Another: Girl Group Sounds, Lost & Found

To start with the way it looks:

Lavishly presented in packaging done up to look like a vintage hatbox: cake-tin cylindrical in shape (diameter of about 25cm, maybe 10cm high); slightly diagonal black and white candy stripes running down the side; large curly pink writing across the flat black lid, which fits snugly on the box but is also decorated and held in place by a drawstring. Inside, luscious black foam inlay housing extensive book-form colour liner notes, photos and all (and with the single word 'diary' on the front, along with a rendering of a keyhole), and four cd cases, each decorated differently to resemble a compact (complete with mirror).

As to the music, well, it's wonderful, of course. This is part of what the sticker on the plastic wrap on the outside says, and it's a pretty accurate indication of the music itself:

"The Should-Have-Been Hits From When The Girls Ruled The Airwaves!"
4 CDs of '60s Girl-Pop Heaven - the First Boxed Set of Its Kind
120 Songs You Just Gotta Hear
Plus a Spectacular 200-Page Book With Fetching Photos, Essays, Track Commentary & Artists' Reflections

* * *

Anyway, I've had this for months and, what with my utter lack of time for leisurely discovery of music, it doesn't look like I'll get anywhere near absorbing all of the music here any time soon. Lots of familiar names - Shangri-Las, Ellie Greenwich, Ronettes, Velvelettes, Chiffons, Shirelles, Dusty, Carole, etc, etc - sometimes with familiar songs and sometimes not, all bursting with that sound. Lovely.

Fowler's Modern English Usage (revised 3rd edition by R W Burchfield)

Okay, this is kind of sad, but it bears recording...

Every six months, a voucher arrives in the mail from Reader's Feast, to the value of 10% of the total amount I spent there over the preceding six-month period. I always try to put it towards a luxury - something that I couldn't normally justify buying (or, at any rate, buying new, as opposed to secondhand) but the owning of which would make me happy.

That's not the sad bit.

The sad bit is that this year my luxury was a copy of the latest edition of Fowler's, a guide (well, really the guide) to the correct usage of the English language, arranged alphabetically by word, phrase or fragment (prefix, suffix, etc) in pithy dictionary (though sometimes quite discursive and even, in places, notably opinionated) style. I first became aware of Fowler's during my time on the Review, and particularly while I was editing, when it was frequently used to settle disputes, and it was recalled to my mind the other day by a conversation in the office about why the correct phrase was "two-year sentence" and not "two-years sentence" or "two-years' sentence". Words, expression and language have always been important to me, but I've never been much of a grammarian (being of the cast of thought which much prefers descriptive to prescriptive grammar) or, for the most part, a real stickler for correct usage; still, I am happy to have a copy of Fowler's to hand, and it's the sort of reference book that I could well end up reading - with varying degrees of attention - basically cover to cover.

Mervyn Peake - Titus Groan [incomplete]

I started re-reading this after watching the mini-series, but then became distracted and have been preoccupied lately, and I think the moment has passed for now. But I wrote the below a while back, between said mini-series and the beginning of the re-read:

* * *

I don't know if it's quite accurate to say that the Gormenghast trilogy, taken collectively, was a personal watershed, but I can't doubt how deeply the series has marked me. I think that I must have come to it in the later years of high school - I remember picking it up in Box Hill library on spec, knowing nothing of its putative status as a classic of imaginative literature, and tumbling headlong into its dark, convoluted, endless ramifying visions. The reverberations spread. For years, the online alias I favoured was 'Fuchsia'; my email address incorporated 'Steerpike'. I wrote the passages in which Fuchsia and Keda met their ends by falling on my bedroom wall - the one because it so perfectly encapsulated and crystallised the tragedy of its subject and the other because its lyricism left me astonished - and indeed, the idea of writing directly on my walls was probably born of the books themselves. The books spoke to me.

100 favourite songs: #96: "I Know I Know I Know" - Tegan and Sara

It's just the most irresistibly (and why would you want to resist it?) goshdarned gorgeous thing - totally cute (love their voices and the way that every note of the music is just right) and shamelessly sweet and über-melodic (in a 'takes you over almost without you realising' kind of way) and all that stuff ("Stick your hands inside of my pockets,/Keep them warm while I'm still here..."...it's all in the way that it's sung)...it makes me happy. If there was any justice, this would've been a number one hit on pop charts all over the world. - 29/9/05

Because I didn't hear a cuter or more catchy song all year, nor one that was more liable to make me feel happy in a slightly light-headed, silly kinda way. (And for another reason that we don't need to go into here...) - 16/1/06

When I’d finished what was more or less the first cut of this list, I looked it over and thought (amongst other things, of which more to follow later, obviously) that surely “I Know I Know I Know” couldn’t be one of my hundred favourite songs — it just didn’t make sense. But pop music isn’t supposed to make sense, and the thing about the feelings induced by the best pop songs is that, even as you know that they’re not going to last, you still wholeheartedly believe that they will.

Above all else, this is a gorgeous, uplifting song, but I always listen to it with a pang of wistfulness, too. Sometimes a song just comes at the right time.

100 favourite songs: #97: "Lovefool" - The Cardigans

What can I say? … one that somehow never went away, and one that I’ve never been ashamed of loving despite its uber-pop stylings. One of those songs that I will always turn up when I hear it on the radio, it’s absolutely perfect for what it is … - 1/04

…somehow never went away, and, in a way, feels as if it’s always been there. The Romeo + Juliet soundtrack was, as it seems to have been for so many other people, a key landmark along my road to falling in love with pop music, and “Lovefool” played its part and then some.

Things I especially love about this song:
* the opening bars and the way those rhythmic bleeps underpin the whole thing from start to finish
* the first line and its delivery, at once coyly languid and totally deadpan: “Dear I fear we’re facing a problem…”
* the chorus, of course
* the backing vocals
* the whimsical-resigned trail-off of its closer: “I can’t care 'bout anything but you…”

I’ve said it many times before, but Scandinavian pop really does make the world a better place, damnit. In that regard, this is where it all started for me, and it’s still a straight-up joy after all this time…shimmer, stomp, sparkle, and a shiver to Nina Persson’s voice — I don’t know how it could be any better.

Frank Warren - Post Secret

And (since all of these last few entries seem to have a name attached at their start) this one came from Jade T. I stumbled across the blog quite a while back, before it became a genuine cultural phenomenon I think (or, at least, before I was aware that it had become a genuine cultural phenomenon), and enjoyed it at the time; the premise - soliciting the anonymous revelation of secrets by postcard, decorated to taste, to be published for all to see - still appeals to me, both in terms of the 'communal art' aspect and as far as the 'anonymous disclosure of secrets' goes, tho' then as now it's only the first of those which actually attracts me as far as my own potential actions go.

So it's neat to be able to leaf through this handsome volume and revisit/rediscover. It's in the nature of the exercise, I suppose, that a lot of the postcards make one feel just a little bit grimy to read them - these are, after all, other people's secrets, even if they've chosen to reveal them to the world. Despite obviously being an extremely critical person, I have a real tendency to idealise others (and, I suspect, myself) - which doesn't always mean seeing the best or the most exalted in them (although it probably often does), but does mean that I tend to like to gloss over the nitty-gritty, mundane things which ground us all in our factical real lives (and, quite possibly, hence - while I'm casting all these aspersions on myself - a large part of my attraction to phenomenological and 'postmodern'-type lines of thought, and folks like Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Sartre, Derrida, Lacan, etc, though I haven't thought this through enough to be able to justify that 'hence'), and in large measure it's those things that I'd rather ignore about people, or pretend don't exist, which are on full display in this book. So, no doubt there's plenty to be said about the cultural significance of the project and all, but evidently one of the more immediate effects it has is to get the spectator thinking about themselves...

Anyway, to come back to the point on which I started that last paragraph - most of the postcards reveal unhappiness and/or dissatisfaction of one kind or another...I suppose that these are the kinds of things that people keep secret. The mode of expression reminds me rather of open diary (back in the day, that is - I've no idea what kind of beast OD is nowadays), though it's perhaps a bit more creative and less overtly self-absorbed...that same kind of matter-of-factness coupled with the desire to emote, to solicit, to reach out without quite knowing what it is in oneself that's missing. I generally prefer the funny ones, or the more abstract, artistic ones (my favourite in the book is a simple, colour spectrum type thing - you know, sort of blurry-edged horizontal bars shading into each other, from yellow through oranges to pinks, with the words "I feel lighter" written on its left-hand side)...I also like the way that the book can function as a kind of tarot deck equivalent, or magic 8-ball - open it to a random page and divine the answer to your question, or meaning in general, from whatever you find there...

Everlasting Regret

Steph asked me if I wanted to see this, screening at MIFF, and, as usual, I was happy to drift along. Follows (in the words of the festival guide blurb) a troubled anti-heroine through the upheavals of the recent history of Shanghai, from the 1940s through to today, and has a kind of wistful elusiveness that worked the trick on me. The early scenes paint a picture of Shanghai in nostalgic hues, all hazy soft edges and luscious bleeding colours Wong Kar-wai comes inevitably to mind), men in nice suits and women in pretty dresses, Western jazz music in the air, and they're my favourite - but the subsequent slide through successive epochs has the flavour of a whole (albeit composed of distinct parts), and it's involving despite the distanced way in which it is shot, given focus by the trajectory of Qiyao (played by an actress who's apparently a hugely successful pop star under the name 'Sammi') and her lifelong friends, Lili and Cheng (one of the best things about the film is the way the dynamic develops and shifts as between the three of them), along with the lovers with whom she becomes entangled, the nationalist powerbroker Officer Li, the rich man's sensitive son Ming, and the young drifter Kela.

It's about the people as much as it is about the city, and it's shot with a heavy focus on faces and bodies, and as far as the broader settings go, it virtually never moves beyond interiors - there are no panoramic city shots, only rooms filled with mirrors and the detritus of domestic and social life. (The look of the film is a real strength - it's uniformly gorgeously shot.) I found the melodrama rather overdone - I haven't seen so many tears and tantrums in a film for as long as I can recall - but the ending is quite affecting in its restraint. I'm not familiar with Shanghainese history, but the backdrop is the takeover of government by the Communist party and the various black market, nouveau capitalist and so on machinations that ensue, but all of it is only really sketched in, even when it's in the foreground as far as plot goes; moreover, the chronology of the events of the film itself is quite confusing and difficult to follow, which isn't helped by the film's tendency to make large leaps in its narrative without really filling in what has happened in between.

So a bit of a mixed response all up, especially once I try to make sense of it, but overall I definitely liked Everlasting Regret - somehow, it just has a feel to it which has caused it to linger.

100 favourite songs: #98: "Faster" - Manic Street Preachers

Time was when I was a lot angrier than I am nowadays, but I liked a good anthem just as much then as I do now, which may go some way to explaining why, after all these years, The Holy Bible still stands up so well for me. It was the Manics’ last with Richey James on board, and their one true masterpiece, and I think that it must be the angriest and the blackest album that I’ve ever heard; there was a time, brief but stormy, when it was pretty much all I listened to, slouching around uni or at home, and even now, I can perfectly understand how it gained that hold on me.

Really, the whole album is basically the same thing over and over — grinding riffs, sneering, ragged vocals, lines that don’t scan and are all the better for it, one magnificent call to arms after another — and the quality of its songs is consistently high, but two in particular have always stood out: “Ifwhiteamerica…” and “Faster”. The former is distinguished by having the most compulsive verse/chorus/bridge on the album, and being one of the most immediately memorable and obviously tuneful. “Faster”, by contrast, is in many ways a relatively weak song, but it has two things going for it, along with all the other virtues of The Holy Bible as a whole, which make it a favourite of mine: the raging, spiralling, stabbing blast of its opening salvo and first verse, and the three seconds of sheer bile and genius conjoined in which JDB throws out all notions of scansion and simply spits out the words “I know I believe in nothing but it is my nothing”. Utterly undeniable.

100 favourite songs: #99: "Alison" - Elvis Costello

It’s a great song, is all, and timelessly so. Clear-sighted, caustic, hopelessly romantic; seething, articulate and heartfelt, and a classic melody into the bargain.

100 favourite songs: #100: "Sand" - OP8

Came across this on Rage one night, and was captivated. I’m fascinated by Americana — by the myth of the wide open expanses ’cross which solitary figures travel, searching for themselves — and this song perfectly captures that windy, desolate dream-landscape … - 9/4/04

OP8 was a joint project of members of Giant Sand and Lisa Germano, and this duet, scuttling and sighing, feels like every mysterious nocturnal Old West chance encounter you ever imagined, campfire, hauntings, tumbleweed and all (it’s actually an old Nancy and Lee number, I think). For me, the shadow-edged spag-western dynamics of “Sand” summon a swirl of images and associations which I can’t quite grasp even when they arise in my mind, never mind articulate them in words — but they have something to do with drifting, and solitude, and endless uncharted new frontiers with the horizon always before one, and the unnameable magic that seems to inhere in all of that…it’s a song that works in the space between imagination and allusion, and it’s mighty fine at that.

Truman Capote - Summer Crossing

And, speaking of appropriate giver/book combinations, this one was from Tamara. I don't know much about Capote, my previous exposure having been basically limited to Breakfast at Tiffany's and the recent film, but Summer Crossing is apparently a newly-discovered first novel of his. I didn't really know what to expect, and was quietly delighted (a delight which was quiet even by the standards of those usually offered in the immediate moment of reading literature, but a delight nonetheless) to find an elegantly drawn portrait of sparkling, doomed youth in the 1940s - though the milieu's not quite the same, at times I felt almost as if I were reading Fitzgerald.

Possibly I've only imported this thought because of my knowledge that Summer Crossing was a first novel, but it does feel a bit rough around the edges in places - a sentence or an image falls in a place that strikes a subtly wrong note, or a shift to a different character's point of view jars, or the pacing seems to have momentarily skipped a beat (most notably in the last 15-20 pages or so) - but it's probably revealing that the figures of speech which have come naturally to mind in describing this novel are musical...

The writing is, for the most part, light and clean, and if it occasionally tips into over-floweriness, every one of those slight miscalculations is balanced by a moment of genuine lyricism; as far as the latter goes, this passage was the first in the novel that touched me a little (it really needs the context, but anyway):

...Whereas Peter had cared exceedingly. All their childhood she'd helped her friend build, drafty though it was, a sandcastle of protection. Such castles should deteriorate of natural and happy processes. That for Peter his should still exist was simply extraordinary. Grady, though she still had use for their file of privately humorous references, for the sad anecdotes and tender coinages they shared, wanted no part of the castle: that applauded hour, the golden moment Peter had promised, did he not know that it was now?

...a passage which takes on greater resonance in light of the novel's ending, too.

Anyway, this doesn't feel like a book to which I'll return, but it does have something - an air, an atmosphere - that I very much associate with The Great Gatsby, this sense that I can never put into words but which I feel has something to do with bright, glittering lights, beautiful people poised fragilely, and intimations of shadows at the edges...

Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle

This was from David (inscription: "Finally, I get you a book") and, of all the people who are at all likely to be giving me books, he is/was, in retrospect (that is, having read Cat's Cradle), by far the most likely to've given me this one, I reckon.

Reminded me of nothing so much as a less dense Pynchon (who, incidentally, has a new book in the works - much excitement...must get round to finally reading Mason & Dixon some time soon) - that same sense of screwball alarums wrapped up in textual puzzles and enigmas and inextricability,[*] of a cynical vision touched by an unsettling and sometimes shocking but nonetheless humane (or at least human) humour, of an author (text) engaged in mapping out and showing us How The World Is, of a voice and narrative that is at once smart (in the sense of both 'clever/intelligent' and 'wise-cracking'), acerbic and clear-sighted, all seeming more to unspool (or 'ramify', or something) than simply to develop or go forward.

Also, it's funny and acute and maybe a little bit wise, and it's about the end of the world.

* * *

[*] Consider the framing device - the "tentative tangling of tendrils" in which the narrator offers his Bokononist warning about lies. (Never mind the opening epigraph, renewing the old problem of the Cretan - "Nothing in this book is true".) Accept for a moment that the narrator 'really' is a Bokononist; in this case, there's no reason to think that anything else he recounts in the book is true. But, he tells us, something useful can be founded on lies, and that's surely how we must take Cat's Cradle. Is Vonnegut a Bokononist? It's probably as good a term as any.