k d lang - Hymns of the 49th Parallel

An elegant and lushly autumnal collection of covers of songs by other Canadian songwriters - it was "Helpless", playing over the end credits of Away From Her, which caught my ear and then brought Hymns to my attention, and lang also does "After the Gold Rush", "A Case of You", "Hallelujah" and others, all pleasantly.

No Country for Old Men

People are hailing this as a masterpiece, but I'm more inclined to say, a bit grudgingly, that it's merely very good. Unremittingly tense and grimly existential, and at the same time a careful study of character and evil and a thorny-edged love letter to the American Western, graced by performances which invoke and undermine archetypes in a way that one doesn't notice at all while watching, it's impressive but just not a film that I can love.

(w/ Wei and Julian F)

"IMP November 2007"

Is it wrong that my favourite song on this mix, apart from those that I already knew, is by Michelle Branch? Anyway, this is a mellow, cafe-ready set - "The Blower's Daughter", "Right To Be Wrong", Frou Frou, Sigur Ros, etc (plus two in a similar vein which I both know and like a great deal - Powderfinger's "Passenger" (ah, the memories) and Cary Brother's "Blue Eyes" (off the Garden State soundtrack)) - and, if a bit middle of the road, still nice to listen to.

(from Jeff in Boulder, CO)

"Listen, again"

A mix from trang whose avowed purpose is partly to familiarise the unfamiliar while defamiliarising the familiar; it also flows as, to quote, "a piece of dreaming and nostalgia and longing". The unfamiliar is made up of traditional Asian (mostly Vietnamese) music; the familiar (whether or not I already knew the particular pieces well) is mostly misty, wistfully melodic pop from the western canon (Nancy Sinatra's "As Tears Go By", "God Only Knows", the Velvets' "I Found A Reason", etc). It's all very nice, but the real revelation is Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face", which I suppose I'd heard before, but never really listened to - it's slow-burning, soulful and quietly wondrous.

Mean Girls

It's a teen movie and it has claws, though they're largely retracted in the film's closing stretch - Heathers it ain't, but one thing that Mean Girls does well is temper the more saccharine, formulaic tendencies of its genre with a pretty sharp satirical edge (evident from the title, if from nothing else).

It's a cure premise - Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), home schooled all her life and having spent the last several years in Africa with her zoologist parents, starts at a public school for the first time in her life and becomes entangled with the ruling girl clique, 'the plastics'...cue many analogies between the law of the jungle and schoolyard practices (including amusing fantasy sequences of students acting out animal kingdom jungle behaviour) and some impressively mean behaviour all round. Lohan, who I haven't seen before, is good (and reminded me of someone I know who I suppose I shouldn't name), as is the rest of the ensemble (special mention to the long-suffering maths teacher, Tina Fey (who actually wrote the screenplay); also, Lacey Chabert has grown up and is completely unrecognisable; and, of course, Amy Poehler is always welcome). Liked it.

Underworld: Evolution

Underworld: Evolution looks and plays exactly like a video game - which is, of course, exactly what I wanted. Nearly every minute drenched in blue and black, and with cracking action sequences and back story revelations coming hard on each other's heels throughout, it never slows from the get go. There isn't much to it (although it does have Derek Jacobi up its sleeve), and the actor who plays Michael, Scott Speedman, is still a curiously charisma-free zone, counter-balancing Kate Beckinsale's dramatic (if not exactly demanding) 'hot vampire death dealer' turn, but the film does what it promises.

(Underworld)

The Golden Compass

Much like the part of Hogfather that I saw a couple of nights ago, The Golden Compass sticks fairly close to the letter of its source text, and in doing so comes up with something which quite satisfyingly imparts something of the pleasure and feel of that source without coming near to its magic. Everyone's well cast, everything looks right (down to the slightly hazy edges surrounding everything), and it sticks reasonably close to Pullman's novel, but it comes off as a bit choppy and ungrounded, leaping from one apparently deus ex machina moment to another (apparently d.e.m. because the background is insufficiently fleshed out to convince). But impression definitely overall positive, and fingers crossed that the next two get made.

Roald Dahl - The Witches

Eek! This book freaked me out when I was a kid, and the film was even worse. Good though, innit?

Pony Up! - Make Love to the Judges With Your Eyes

Somewhere between wry and wide-eyed is where these popsters stake their camp, and just about bring it off, too. Not an unqualified success, nor fully living up to the promise of "The Truth About Cats and Dogs (Is That They Die)", but good enough to get by on.

"Pretty girls keep growing up": Don't You Know Who I Think I Was? The Best of the Replacements

Maybe you had to be there. I like this kind of stuff well enough, and sometimes I can almost feel how it could really take someone, but somehow it never really quite takes me. You can certainly hear the influence their melodic-anthemic punk-rock had, indirectly or otherwise, on any number of others who came after them - Buffalo Tom and Foo Fighters being the two most obvious for mine.

Hogfather

Only caught the second instalment of this two-parter, and regretted not seeing the first - it wasn't perfect, but it was possibly as good as one could've hoped for, given the difficulties needed to be overcome in bringing a Pratchett to screen. It's pretty faithful to the book, though it inevitably loses much of the nuance and sheer joy - even allowing for Hogfather probably being one of his darker novels...a darkness which happily comes through in just about the right degree - and most of the characters look about right (Susan being particularly important, seeing as she's (1) the central character in this one and (2) one of my favourite Discworld characters, along with Vimes, Vetinari and (it goes without saying) Death). If they make more of these in a similar vein, I will be very well pleased.

Star Wars: A New Hope

I don't think I've ever watched this all the way through before! Anyhow, watched out of its historical context, it's more than a little hokey, but still okay for all that.

Roald Dahl - Kiss Kiss

Revisiting these for book club (we're doing The Witches and an at the moment ill-defined assortment of short stories), they haven't stood up particularly well. Part of the problem, I guess, is that I can pretty much remember the 'twists' in each of the stories - not that they're all dramatic blind-siders, with many being more in the way of straight up, if unanticipated, plot turns or events. But a bigger part is possibly that I don't have such a taste for this kind of under-the-skin, more than a little nasty style of story - though that doesn't explain why I like John Collier so much. Oh, and some of them have morals, some don't...

Bruce Springsteen - Nebraska

Barren and resonant, like everyone says it is. But in the time that I've been listening to it (months now) I haven't yet been moved to give the album the close attention that I suspect it requires to reveal itself deeply.

Spoon - A Series of Sneaks

Heck, this one's good too. More wiry (even more wiry) than their latter-day records, and more likely to drop in familiar-sounding rockisms, but, as usual, filled to the bursting with Spoon and all that - indeed, though they've continued to refine their sound with each successive record since this one, they seem to've emerged pretty much fully formed.

Boa - Love & Honesty

Apparently Boa is the most popular k-pop artist going around, but on the strength of Love & Honesty, she's nothing to get excited about - glossy and hyper-produced (which is to the good) sub Michael Jackson-esque (distinctly not to the good) dance-pop belted out by Boa herself.

Joss Stone - Introducing Joss Stone

Her latest, title notwithstanding - a bit more of a contemporary feel, but still recognisably the same artist as that behind Mind, Body & Soul. It's come more to life for me since seeing her live but still hasn't made a large impression.

Saint Etienne - Sound of Water

Pretty atmospheric / atmospheric pretty, but I haven't had a 'Saint Etienne moment' with this one yet, even after a few months of background - and sometimes foreground - listening. Still, if past experience is anything to go by, it's only a matter of time.

Kelly Clarkson - Thankful

Best songs: "Low" and "Just Missed The Train" - which are, truthfully, kind of the same song, but hey, who's complaining? The kind of song that is, incidentally, is the usual rocky sort of pop anthem, in which the soaring chorus is the name of the game but it's the little things surrounding said chorus which really make the song. Elsewhere, there are other things to like - "Miss Independent" and "Beautiful Disaster" come to mind - but the more straight up pop (or slightly soul-infused numbers) tend to be a bit boring. Not a patch on Breakaway, but not too bad either.

Only the Bones: Deborah Conway's Greatest Hits

Hey, guess what? "Only The Beginning" is actually a lot like "Just Like Heaven"! Apart from that, no revelations in this set, though it's much stronger and also more interesting than I would've expected, had I ever stopped to think about what a Deborah Conway greatest hits might be like.

Amanda Palmer @ the Spiegeltent, Thursday 13 December

[snip]

I was at a show last night that I think you would have enjoyed, actually...you may have heard of the Dresden Dolls? Anyway, one of their members (there are only two, I think) - Amanda Palmer - did a midnight gig at the Spiegeltent, and it was excellent - a sort of art-punk-cabaret-performance amalgam (much like the Dolls' stuff)...many goth kids in the audience completely losing their minds with excitement, particularly when she came down off the stage and walked through the crowd, still singing (never mind the capering, heavily made up performers who ran amok throughout).

(Also, she did a cover of "Creep" (w/special guest), and one of "Hallelujah". It really all was very good - dark and romantic and more than a bit baroque, shades of This Mortal Coil.)

(w/ trang, and two of her friends - E-L and a David)

Joss Stone @ the Forum, Sunday 9 December

One thing's for sure - Joss Stone is a sensational live performer, possessed of a spectacular voice and great presence, and backed by a five star supporting cast (especially the three harmony singers) which seems straight out of Memphis, and that alone made this a good show. But I felt about it as I do about her recorded material (Mind, Body & Soul, and the bits and pieces I've heard of the other two) - she is much better than her material, which tends to be pretty average...the best moments are those when she's able to really pour herself into the music, which means mostly the slightly rockier songs and the near-ballads (which even come close to torch on occasion). All up, though, was worth checking out.

(w/ Steph)

Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

From: Choo, Howard
Sent: Thursday, 6 December 2007 11:25 AM
To: [WL; AC; AB; CM; KC; DP; JF; TV]

Subject: the thieving magpie - exhuming book club


Hallo all,

I think the last consensus date for book club was this Saturday (the 8th), but with that date almost upon us, how is everyone for Saturday the 15th? Assuming the weather holds up, I was thinking perhaps a picnic-y thing beginning early afternoon (say 1pm and make a lunch of it) at the Edinburgh Gardens, but other suggestions are most welcome.

For anyone who has - quite forgivably - forgotten, the current book is Murakami's "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle", which is about solitude, memory, loss (also society, perception, and discoveries), and pasta. It also features metaphysical sex, snatches of opera, recollections of wartime atrocities, a really deep well, beautiful women, near-death experiences, one of the weirdest villains ever, much contemporary anomie, sundry unexpected disappearances, and of course several wind-up birds…all wrapped up in a steam train of a story, natch. What's not to like?

Howard

* * *

(last time)

FreeRice

A vocabulary game that helps to feed the poor - try it.

freerice.com

(The highest I got to was level 46, and I tended to hover around 43 to 45. You can't play for too long, though, or the words start to repeat.)

Little delights

1. Today I learned a new word: autology. Hurray!

2. This year's Turner prize was won by a video of a guy dressed up in a bear suit.

3. And Scarlett Thomas's website is still the cat's meow.

The Bangles - Greatest Hits

Back when I was less generally sanguine about things than nowadays, there were a handful of songs frequently making up my winamp playlist for night-time gloom - music for playing over and over in fits of inchoate despair...well, most of us have been there in one way or another. Anyhow, the point is that "Eternal Flame" was one of the mainstays ("Strong Enough" and "I'll Stand By You" being the other two which have particularly lingered), and so I've got a soft spot for the song a mile wide - no cynicism here!

But I always had an idea that that big ballad wasn't characteristic of the Bangles, and this greatest hits shows their style to be much more a minimalistic, tuneful rock-pop thing replete with quiet (but immediately apparent) charms. Their take on "Hazy Shade of Winter" is easily the best thing on the cd, though "Manic Monday" is also particularly liable to charm me.

Feist - The Reminder

For me, there aren't any real standout songs on The Reminder, nor any especially show-offy ones; what there is instead, is an elegant, understated, coyly soulful twist of a thing, with plenty of depth as well as a pleasing airyness which stands up well to repeat play...

Robyn - Robyn

Finally, this one gets a local release, and it just about lives up to expectations, too. "Konichiwa Bitches" and "Be Mine!" are still the bomb, and "With Every Heartbeat" is just as good; "Who's That Girl" is another big fave of mine. As usual, I end up thinking that it doesn't get much better than Scandinavian pop - some things don't change.

Rilo Kiley - More Adventurous

Pretty good - Rilo Kiley have a very listenable quality even during their least inspired, and while there's little on More Adventurous that's really striking (the exception - and it's a big one - is "Portions for Foxes", which is still too, too delightful...it's just everything that a pop song should be) it's still plenty engaging for all of its surprising modesty.

Also: when I trotted up to the counter with this cd in hand a couple of weeks ago, the record store girl glanced at the back of the cardboard slipcase and was moved to exclaim, of Jenny Lewis, "Hey, she's cute!"...which is, of course, perfectly and incontrovertibly true.

"Space & Sci-Fi mix" (IMP October 2007)

An entertaining listen from start to finish, this, and some good stuff on it. High point is 14-minute mix closer "2001" (a prog-jazz-disco rewrite of / elaboration on the "2001" theme by Phish); "Space Oddity" sits dead centre; elsewhere, Ornette Coleman, Gnarls Barkley, Calexico (with a song tres cool, "Attack Robot Attack"), the Flaming Lips, and a host of others less well known jostle for space.

(from Sean in Albuquerque, NM)

Into the Wild

I've gotta say, I respect this film in a way that I didn't think I would before I saw it - there's something magnificent about the thing, all two and a half hours of it, and there's no doubting how well it's crafted, following the wanderings of the fiercely idealistic Chris McCandless (it's based on a true story; it aspires to be a true story), who finishes college with great prospects and promptly gives all of his savings to charity and breaks off all communication with his family and old life to test himself in the wilds of America, winding up in what seems to him the purest possible embodiment of that ideal - the climax of his wanderings - alone in Alaska, subsisting on whatever he can shoot or forage, encountering a succession of marginal and outsider types en route.

It's a film that deepens as it goes along, in parallel with the deepening of our understanding of (or, at least, perspective on) its central character. I had thought it was going to be something like On the Road crossed with Walden, and this fear was only increased when the opening epigraph (bad news, that, in a film of this kind - an epigraph of any kind, I mean) came from that arch-Romantic Lord Byron, but it turns out to be considerably more complex than that, finally making its point about meaning and happiness explicit just a few minutes before its end.

Like I said, I respect the film, but in the end, I don't really rate it. It's heartfelt, sure, and quite impressive on its own terms (on those terms, I think it needs to be 2 1/2 hours long - to say that it's too long, as I was initially tempted to do, would be to miss the point)...but it didn't move me, and nor did it inspire me to re-evaluate my own life or beliefs, which would be a great example of criticising something for falling short of impossibly high standards, except that, by its very nature, Into the Wild sets itself up to be judged against just such standards...

(w/ Steph, who won the free tickets which were the only reason we went to see it)

Stephen King - The Dark Tower series

The Gunslinger, The Drawing of the Three, The Waste Lands, Wizard and Glass, Wolves of the Calla, Song of Susannah & The Dark Tower

* * *

Inspired by Robert Browning's poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came", it's obvious that this series means a lot to King; indeed, judging by the prefatory and closing remarks which appear in most of the volumes (not to mention the content - and the massive length - of the series itself), he seems to have come to regard it as his magnum opus - the central work in his massive ouevre and imaginary.

Above all else, it's a Western, tracing the gunslinger's weary progress towards the Tower, accompanied by his companions, and that predominant thread is woven through all of the books' other elements. And it's also structured as an epic, constructed around a plot with the highest of stakes and spanning huge distances and times - but this is where it falls down a bit, for while the story is strong, it doesn't compel in the way that the best books of this type do (which is not to say that the overarching narrative isn't plenty gripping - it'd have to be, to keep me reading through seven books at, on average, some 600 or 700 pages each!).

One of the striking things about the series is the extent to which each of its constituent books is limited to a particular part of the overall arc (which is not to say that they're in any real sense self-contained) - Wizard and Glass (largely devoted to Roland's relating of the story of his coming of age in Mejis) and the Seven Samurai-esque Wolves of the Calla particularly come to mind. The first in the series, The Gunslinger, is the most interesting, and, I reckon, comes closest to the spirit of Browning's poem in its cryptic, tersely poetic series of fragments, but it's not until The Drawing of the Three that King really hits his stride and things begin to take the shape they'll more or less hold for the duration.

To be honest, I was disappointed that it wasn't darker - I read the standalone short story "The Little Sisters of Eluria" a while back, and was very struck by its intensity and darkness, but the same isn't to be found in the series at large, which is more oriented towards action and (necessary, I suppose) exposition - and its central protagonist, Roland himself, not more solitary...but all up, while I don't think I'll be re-reading any time soon (probably not ever), it's eminently readable - and the last few pages make a killer ending, too.

Smokin' Aces

Smokin' Aces ain't half as cool as it wants to be - taking its cues from Tarantino & co, jive dialogue, comic book archetype villains and heroes, bloodbath climax, 'twist' ending and all, it ends up being far short of the colourfully violent film geek mainstream-cult piece for which it shoots. In the end, I think, the problem is that one just doesn't care about any of the characters, nor about the plot, and even the style isn't anything we haven't seen before.

The Descent

Not to put too fine a point on it, this movie scared the shit out of me. Six women go spelunking, get caved in, and find out that there's something alive down here; of course their group has its own pre-existing tensions, and once things go wrong, they go very, very wrong. One interesting gambit is the film's decision to show the monsters quite clearly (albeit with a tendency to drop shockingly suddenly into frame); another (maybe relatedly) is for the women to give a pretty good account of themselves when fighting for their lives against their subterranean hunters. It's all set up very economically, and almost from the outset is throat-clenchingly tense, punctuated by abrupt 'shock' moments, and ends well too. pfah!

Kylie Minogue - Impossible Princess

Impossible Princess was going around at about the time when I really started getting into music, and I have distinct impressions of all four of the singles (including their videos - unusual for me), all of which got plenty of radio play at the time, and each quite different from the others: "Some Kind Of Bliss" (cruisey pop-rocker and truthfully quite blissful - yearny and sort of shut-eyed-in-the-sunshine happy), "Did It Again" (groovy, and catchy as all hell), "Cowboy Style" (techno-cowboy funk) and "Breathe" (mellow and fluid).

The album, then (I've been meaning to buy it for years and years, but have only managed to do so just now): a pleasant, electro-inflected pop album with a few hints of indie stylings, but in the end a bit too repetitive to be really interesting.

Pixies - Bossanova

Hey, hey, this is excellent - love the demented surf-rock thing they've got going on here. It's deliciously, deeply pop, too, and though it seems off-handed, almost tossed-off, it's pretty great in a 'just below the surface' sort of way (a bit like the Breeders' Pod, say).

Emmylou Harris - Roses in the Snow

On paper, it's impeccable - Emmylou Harris doing a bluegrass record - and that's pretty much the way it is on record, too. 'Pristine', the liner notes call it, and aptly (though the album's lively, too, when it ought to be) - simply put, everything works.

"Voicing Emily" @ Beckett Theatre, the Malthouse

A so-called 'lieder-opera', this show combines elements of both those forms ('lieder' being 'art songs', and 'opera' being, irreducibly, opera), mixing them in with spoken word interludes both pre-recorded and live, and a stream of visual images projected on to screens behind the performers - three singers, all dressed in white, representing different stages in the life of their subject, Emily Dickinson, and three musicians (piano, acoustic guitar, cello) - to produce an impressionistic-thematic account of Dickinson's life and work (the 'libretto' is a setting to music of her poems, including some of her most famous), organised thematically rather than strictly chronologically or biographically ("death", "home", "Susan", "nature", "Samuel", "immortality").

Described like that, it probably sounds a mess - but actually it was quite wonderful. Dickinson is my favourite poet, and this performance rung true - it reminded me of many of the reasons why I fell in love with her work in the first place...above all else, she felt things so intensely, and through her poetry we are at once brought into the presence of something true and larger than ourselves and reminded of its fundamental unknowability. There's a mystery at the heart of everything she wrote, and yet it speaks directly to us.

(w/ trang + Arthur)

* * *

There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself -
Finite infinity.

Princess Mononoke

Many of the sequences in Princess Mononoke, and particularly some of those painting the landscapes through which Ashitaka travels between his home town and the land of the Iron town and the forest, made me wish that I lived someplace where there's more space - not just physical but also, I suppose, metaphysical (in this instance, the two are related)...someplace where people can properly be, heroic or villainous or some combination of the two, in a way far larger than that allowed by my own current circumstances...another sense in which it's a fantasy, I suppose. That aside, this is a pretty sweet film (ie, I liked it) - it's technically very impressive, which translates into a seamlessly immersive viewing experience, and has a nice blend of lightness and weight...

The Drones - Wait Long By The River And The Bodies Of Your Enemies Will Float By

One from Jon, who went so far as to describe this band's music as transcendent one Friday afternoon. Now, transcendence is always contingent and particular (or have I precisely missed the point?), but having listened to this album pretty solidly over the last few days, I think I can see his point, at least out of the corner of my eye...because although it initially feels like just another rock album (albeit one tied together by some extremely solid songs and tight playing), there's more to Wait Long... than meets the eye - I can't put it better than to say that the record has a sense of depth which sets it well apart from the run of the mill. ("Shark Fin Blues" is the one that I listen to over and over, but I get the feeling that it may be an entry point in more ways than one.) I was walking around listening to the album today, and it just felt right.

Joss Stone - Mind, Body & Soul

Puts me in mind of nothing so much as a smoother Janis Joplin, with more of an emphasis on the 'soul' and less on the rock and roll - although, it has to be said, not approaching Joplin's work on either count. That's the thing about the similarities - to a point, they work in Stone's favour, because I like Joplin, but inevitably Mind, Body & Soul also suffers by comparison, 'cos as I've said before, Janis Joplin was basically a goddess. Still, this is a pretty listenable album, and a couple of songs - "Security" and "Sleep Like A Child" are extremely good.

Elliott Smith - XO

David and I used to half-joke that, when we're 30, all we'll listen to is Elliott Smith (a designation including ES himself but also using him as shorthand for a certain kind of music); well now, not yet 30 but here we are - Elliott Smith indeed. I've listened to "Waltz #2" a lot over the years, but on my first proper listen to XO, while I pricked my ears up at that one, it was much deeper into the record, at the appearance of a mournful electric guitar figure, that I found a thought fully formed in my mind: "oh, glory". Melodramatic yes, but that's how the response came to me - and damn it, it is a glorious moment.

That moment came about midway through "Bottle Up And Explode!" - it's still one of my favourites, but the effect was in no small part due to its positioning after the sparenesses of what comes before, lines upon lines of Smith's acoustic guitar and expressive but unadorned singing, embellished unobtrusively by minor chamber-pop elements, wrapped up into little two or three minute songs. So far, I like this album rather than loving it, but there's a real charm and piquancy to it, not to mention (in light of his biography) an incipient (well, more than partly realised) sorrow.

Fleetwood Mac - Rumours

Pleasant, but yet to reveal anything to me which would justify its status as a classic - so far as I can see, it's just a fistful of nice tunes (admittedly including, in "Dreams", an honest to goodness genius moment) and a couple of other less memorable ones. Maybe my expectations were too high.

Stephen King - Cell

Man really is a great storyteller. I read him despite not having any especial fondness for horror or for adventure novels (those being the two main genres within which his work sits) because his writing has that quality that can't be faked - it pulls like a steam train (it also gets under my skin and often leaves me a little unnerved). Of course, it doesn't hurt when, as in this one, an apocalypse is in the offing (anything he writes in that vein will always be in the shadow of The Stand, but it has to be said that he's attempting something a little bit different here, and the way in which the victims of the 'pulse' evolve collectively is really quite interesting)...

Infernal Affairs

Taut and cool, and great dynamics everywhere one turns. Didn't see where it was going; indeed, was too involved in each moment to even attempt to guess at any point. Next up, The Departed.

"Nick Cave: The Exhibition" @ the Arts Centre

Liked this, but feel it would have a lot more to offer the genuine hardcore Nick Cave fan than a passer through like myself. That's not to say that his music doesn't loom pretty large for me - there was the No More Shall We Part period and the The Good Son phase, and then there are the heavy associations which come with "The Ship Song" plus moments with many others of his songs (including, recently, "Do You Love Me?"), and of course there's always "Shivers" - but rather that I've never been a lock and stock devotee in the way that he inspires in many. It is pretty neat the way the centre of the room is laid out like Cave's office (and it was interesting to read about the importance of the idea of the office to his creative process/imagination); all up, I think the exhibition gives a pretty good sense of the man, by which, of course, I mean the myth - ie, it was very (latter-day) 'Nick Cave'.

Resident Evil

Goddamnit, I got hustled into renting this by the trailer for the latest one but had clean forgotten that I already saw it; it wasn't any good this time round, either, and yet I watched it all the way through...go figure.

The Royal Tenenbaums

Felt much about this as I did the first time, perhaps a bit less into it this time round.

21st century fairy tales

The Guardian has three very pleasing "fairy tales fit for the 21st century", written by Hilary Mantel, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Audrey Niffenegger. Best is the one by Mantel, who I like every time I come across her by way of fragments like these - I'll need to check out one of her books...

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Fittingly, the finest moment in this epic film, all two and a half hours of it, is the assassination scene, James, Ford and his brother Charley moving around and taking their appointed places in James' sun-filled sitting room as if propelled by slowly unwinding clockwork, Cave and Ellis' melancholy score coiling and redoubling upon itself all the while, until at last, the gunshot, the long deferred end towards which everything else to that point has been a single extended dying fall - at its best, Assassination is slow burning and magnificent.

A western but then not, with shades of a character study but ultimately inclined to leave its central figures undeciphered, oriented from its very title towards a single, inevitable action but content to take a series of divergent, meandering paths along the way, shot through with some of the most astonishing landscape cinematography I've seen in a long time, it's soaringly ambitious - and almost, almost pulls it off. That it doesn't quite get there can only be attributed to something ineffable - a subtle failure to completely coalesce, somehow - but even so it's a real achievement.

Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck dominate affairs, whether when onscreen or by their absence, their uneasy relationship the tense central spring from which the narrative derives much of both its immediate and ongoing drive, but the film doesn't play as a two-hander; rather, a whole cast of others move prominently through events, appearing and recurring at intervals. Indeed, those supporting characters are a huge strength of the film - they're uniformly economically but effectively written and drawn, portrayed and inhabited by an understatedly brilliant cast (though, not really a propos, I must confess to being disappointed that Mary-Louise Parker and Zooey Deschanel, two of the cutest female actors going around today, didn't get more screen time).

Scienceworks

Kind of an unlikely excursion, but Andrew L and Lily wanted to go, and it's not like I ever say no when people invite me to these things. Anyhow, it was kinda fun, but you know, not all that much. Shame we didn't get to see a planetarium show (sold out), though - that would've been a highlight for sure.

"Game Over" (IMP August 2007)

I suspect that there's some kind of concept to this mix, but it's beyond me what that concept may be.

The cd leads off with seven heavy metal/hard rock tracks in a row, by outfits so famous that I've even heard of all but one (the exception being Gojira, which I choose to believe is Japanese for 'Godzilla'; having watched one or two of the Japanese Godzilla films in my time, I don't think that this is completely impossible). The two which have left most of an impression on me are "Phantom of the Opera" by Iron Maiden (live, no less - sadly not a cover of the Lloyd Webber show tune, but equally dramatic) and "Sleepwalker" by Megadeth - both catchy in that riffy kind of way - and, for old times' sake, a live version of "Head Like A Hole" is also welcome.

Then, a glammy 90s-sounding rocker (harmonies and all) by a band called the Wildhearts ("Bi-Polar Baby" - pretty good) and a more meat-and-potatoes hard rock tune from Terrorvision (previously known to me only through their rousing cover of "Forever & Ever"), after which we get, in order, a cover of "Hazy Shade of Winter" by the Bangles (v.g., of course), the theme from "Enter the Dragon", something by the Music, a cool Moloko song ("Fun for Me"), "Central Reservation" (still affecting, and in much the same way, after all these years), a dreamy Ash guitar ballad, an acoustic guitar romance (no vocals, anonymous artist), and then a live Joan Baez weepie. It's all quite surprisingly listenable, but like I said, I don't get it as a whole.

(from Matt in Bournemouth, England)

Rome (season 1)

Satisfyingly very - blood, sex and speeches in equal quantities. The show begins with Caesar's final victory in Gaul, Pompey wielding power from the Senate in Rome, and in the space of this one season covers the overthrow of both amidst the machinations of dozens of others, including many known to us through Shakespeare and the history books - Mark Antony, Brutus, Cicero, Cleopatra...indeed, that's my main quibble with Rome, which I enjoyed a great deal (if a second season was made, I'll definitely seek it out): the way that everything seems to happen so quickly - major events, shifts, upheavals, all take place in the span of a 40 minute or so episode, and so something of a sense of scope is lost.

That said, one of the show's strengths is the emphasis it gives to the stories of the other personages making their way through Rome and its empire - particularly the centurion Lucius Vorenus and his family. And it deals well with translation issues, giving the viewer a largely unjudgemental take on society of the time and its mores...it's made me interested to learn more about all of its characters and the events it depicts - though I'll be surprised if I get beyond wikipedia in that regard...

(lent to me by Gian, ages ago)

M.I.A. - Kala

Arular was pretty good at the time, and M.I.A. live showed a bit too, but still, I didn't expect her second album to be good at all, and hadn't listened to it properly until a few days ago; well, I sure got that one wrong. Kala is a large step in a whole range of different directions and, in its totality, a vivid pop album which doesn't sound much like anything else out there.

"Boyz" is the standout - I hardly understand a word of it, but that's no hinderance to recognising its genius. Particularly like "$20" too; like all of the tracks on Kala, it strikes an ideal balance between beats and melody, busy-ness and structure, sounds and song. We already knew that the girl had talent - now, it's beginning to seem as if she might be the real thing.

Stephen Donaldson - Fatal Revenant

Never mind objectivity, I left behind any semblance or possibility of even critical distance about this series years ago. This is the new one, and it's good; there are two to go; that's all.

(previously in these 'last chronicles': The Runes of the Earth)

Alice (dir Jan Svankmajer)

'Inspired by' Carroll's Alice rather than being a direct adaptation, this is a film I've wanted to watch for years - ever since I read about it somewhere on the internet ether. It's a little surrealist gem, bizarre motifs repeating and many (most) of the oddities of Carroll's original tale translated across directly if refractedly. Grotesque and even gruesome in places, but also delightfully (albeit darkly) whimsical and enough so to provoke laughter, surprised out of me by unexpectedly cognate allusions and suggestivenesses, it hints at overarching interpretations of both itself and its source text, but never stumbles into anything so facile as an explanation. Faintly unsettling, but not quite in the way provoked by the darker explorations of Ozon, say (I'm thinking especially of Criminal Lovers, though with something in common with those plumbings of the unconscious - there's a bit of the uncanny to it, and maybe an aspect of the 'uncanny valley', too, in the changeable and somehow frangible figure of Alice herself as she appears, ramified, throughout.

Neil Gaiman - The Sandman: Endless Nights

A couple of days ago, the words as near as I can remember:

PENNY: I saw someone reading that on the tram the other day.
ME: Really? This exact one?
PENNY: Yeah.
ME: (Having thought this over for a second) What did they look like? Pasty and nerdy, or dark and interesting?
PENNY: Neither. Thirty-something.
ME: Oh... (A pause. Then, in tones of scorn) Trendster.
PENNY: It was only a question of the appropriate sneer, wasn't it?

Not so! Indeed, I don't think I would've sneered at either of the two types I named myself, come to that. But true it is that I surprised myself with a certain preciousness about Sandman, and as to who else ought to (or could) 'really' read it; not surprising at all, really, it having been brought to my attention - but even so.

I didn't get to Endless Nights first time through, so the thrill of the new fizzed through my reading of it. What's being attempted here is a sort of deepening - a bringing to light of other facets than those apparent from what has gone before - coupled with an extension of the known story both forwards and backwards in time, by way of one issue/story focusing on each of the Endless, each illustrated by an artist specifically selected by Gaiman for the complementarities existing between their style and the nature of the particular member of that strange family whose tale they render. The only of these illustrators who I knew, Glenn Fabry of Preacher fame, seemed aptly matched with Destruction given his other work, but the affinities between artist and subject are obvious in all of the others, too. My favourite's the Delirium one.

The Sadies - In Concert volume 1

I know the Sadies as Neko Case's tour band but it turns out there's much more to them than that. All country twang and bluesy rock and roll, it's ace - you can feel the energy and rawness as well as the rock-solid musicianship and sympathy with what they're channelling and creating.

Best of Luna

The band that Dean Wareham made after Galaxie 500 was no more, and to my ears a pale reflection. Luna's music has the same reverberating dazedness but, more mellow than that of Wareham's earlier outfit, is commensurately less necessary and compelling; it doesn't sear, and too many of the songs sound all the same.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali - The Caged Virgin: A Muslim Woman's Cry for Reason

The subtitle isn't adventitious - the central strand in this book is a call for the insights of the Enlightenment, and most particularly the primacy it accords to reason, to be brought to bear on Muslim thought and society, both from within and without. Essentially, it's polemic - ferocious and engaged, if not all that sophisticated - in that cause, wedded to an uncompromising argument for an integrationist approach in Western societies and a particular concern for the position of Muslim women, illustrated with often horrifying anecdotes of female mutilation and oppression.

Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia and raised a Muslim, but now resides in the Netherlands, where she's a member of the national parliament and (though I'm not entirely sure about this) no longer identifies as a Muslim; she had also collaborated with Theo Van Gogh on a film before he was infamously shot and killed on the street by Islamic extremists. I don't for a second doubt that she knows that of which she writes, but I was nonetheless nagged by a couple of misgivings while I was reading The Caged Virgin.

The first was that, despite the vast disparity between her background and experiences, and mine, Hirsi Ali is, for many relevant purposes, essentially the same as me - by which I mean that she has absorbed and internalised the basic values of the West and Western society. One may well argue that these are in some meaningful way the 'best' set of values now or historically available to us - I suspect she would argue this, and I'm sure from reading this book of the scorn she reserves for 'moral relativists' (unsurprisingly, a term she doesn't clearly define or grapple with, but what she means by it is clear enough from the context) - but nonetheless I felt that, as a result of that shared intellectual heritage, I wasn't being pushed enough to accept the basic premises of the book; what I really need to read is an intelligent defence of a contrary position to hers, written by someone steeped in Muslim values and not taking Western assumptions as a starting point. (Forgive the waving around of broad-brush ideas like 'Western values' here - there's nothing to be done about it at this high level, and besides, they're useful shorthand at this high level, we all know it.)

My second cavil is equally fundamental, and builds somewhat on the first (if pulling me in a slightly different direction, and it's this: Hirsi Ali suggests that an important part of the solution is interventionist legislative (+ executive + societal) action to integrate Muslims into the Western societies in which they live - suggesting, for example, compulsory regular checks of all Muslim girls to ensure that they haven't been subject to genital mutilation. At risk of falling into that cultural relativism which Hirsi Ali so abhors (although, let's be honest, I'm not really afraid of this, for reasons already implied above - there are far more sophisticated formulations of the position than those which she seems to assume), the problems with this kind of approach, applied uncritically, are too many and too obvious to bear listing (the cultural violence which it would entail, affecting not only 'culture' but also the individuals implicated in and effected by it to their various extents, not to mention the absolutist streak running through it). I'd be prepared to entertain proposals in this vein, but to me that flavour here is too insensitive and 'slash and burn', as heinous as the prevailing situation may be. There are no easy answers, but that goes both ways - and sometimes the best option of a bad lot isn't the one which seems immediately to move most swiftly to the end result we want.

(a gift from Laura of a while ago)

Bjork - Volta

It's taken me a long time (I've had this cd since pretty much day one of its release) to get past "Earth Intruders", and I mean that literally - it's the first track, and nearly every time I've begun listening to Volta, I've bogged down there and then. Months on, I'm still not really into it (any more than I ever got into Medulla), though its ornate peculiarities are making a bit more sense to me; only "Wanderlust" has really struck home.

Pixies - Surfer Rosa & Come on Pilgrim

Ha, this is excellent! My fears that I'd be underwhelmed, listening to these records all these years on and through an inevitable thick overlay of expectation and Pixies-ana, have proved unfounded. Now that it comes to it, there's nothing much to say - I hate to toe the party line but this is pretty much genius. This music is good for the soul.

Some favourites: "Where Is My Mind?" (of course), "Gigantic" (also of course - and how great it is to be able to put this on repeat play!), "River Euphrates", "Caribou", "Isla De Encanta" (gotta love the Spanish).

"Mix tape" (IMP September 2007)

Kicks off with the Cranberries' "Dreams" and thereafter treads a pleasantly middle-of-the road, roots-influenced path with a bit of a patriotic flavour near the end; multiple songs by the Dixie Chicks (the live "Top of the World" - not a Carpenters cover - is excellent), John Mellencamp, Hem (two songs which I don't know - probably off one of the new albums), and an outfit called Vienna Teng (airy girl vocals - not too bad).

(from Gary in Potomac, MD)

Haruki Murakami - after the quake

Some of these are much better than others, but they do genuinely seem to fit together as a whole; tied together by the titular earthquake, yes, but also by a recurring sense of absence (absence being, incidentally the very fashion in which the earthquake itself is felt in the stories). I think last time my favourite was "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo"; this time, I was particularly touched by "Landscape with Flatiron".

Neil Gaiman - Sandman: A Game of You, Fables & Reflections, Brief Lives, World's End, etc

[the 'etc' being The Kindly Ones & The Wake]

Yep, this is still quite magnificent. A second time through the whole lot, now, this time in sequence and reasonably carefully, and still I don't feel as if I've come close to plumbing all of its depths. Perhaps, once one begins to take them seriously, this is a particular prerogative of graphic novels, with their myriad textual and visual (to name just two) dimensions and possibilities.

This time round: 1-4.

Last time: [5]&[6], [7], [8], [9], [10].

Away From Her

I must admit, when I heard that Sarah Polley had directed a film, it seemed a waste that she'd chosen as her subject the intricacies of the relationship between a pair of old people. I mean, Sarah Polley is plainly wonderful, and I thought that a film made by her could have been another Before Sunrise or Lost in Translation, or something like that, anyway - a generational film, and one to speak directly to me and to take to heart. But what it is instead is something no less worthwhile, I think: a graceful tableau (I know, not still, but it has that kind of air to it, as though every aspect is part of a single self-enwrapped whole) which, with no melodrama or false sentiment at all, depicts a situation which is at once complex and painfully simple, and affective (a real word or not?) in the same ways.

Two particular resonances for me:
* Away From Her is, in a way, like a much grown-up version of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - memory, identity, love (marriage), ice.
* NL was always terrified that she might lose her mental faculties when she grew older. As inapt as the memory may have been (the inaptness is appropriate, hah), it came to me while I was watching this film.

Julie Christie is very good, as is her opposite number (one Gordon Pinsent). And Neil Young drifts through - first "Harvest Moon" playing, wavery on the car radio as they drive to the care home, and then a lush version of "Helpless" by k.d. lang over the end credits.

Angie Hart @ the Toff in Town, Friday 19 October

It's true - Angie Hart has grown up a bit since her (and our) Frente days. Even the voice is less girlish (I suppose the surprise would've been were it otherwise), and the songwriting is stronger, though I much preferred the ones where she actually wrote songs complete with honest to goodness drums and electric guitar, and choruses with words, to the more meandering half-tunes which made up a reasonable proportion of her repertoire on Friday (at her most distinct, she hit a pleasing Clouds-y vibe, but these were interspersed amongst some relative lulls, too). All up, a pleasant show (albeit with an audience populated all too heavily by scene types) and a nice revisiting of a minor figure from my past.

(w/ Cassie)

Chuck Palahniuk - Lullaby

My continuing resistance to Palahniuk notwithstanding, Lullaby went down very easily - apart from one truly disgusting scene which I'll forbear from describing, it wasn't as unpleasant as I remembered his novels to be (this is bearing in mind, too, that I'm a fan of Fight Club the movie), and if it has only a limited number of things to say and a limited number of ways of saying them, well, what's it's saying is at least apposite and wrapped up in an engaging narrative. I'm not sure why I react badly to Palahniuk, to tell the truth - I just do.

[23/10: Oh yes, I meant to mention: Palahniuk's a bit like Vonnegut, isn't he? Only not as good, natch.]

Control

I read somewhere that the director of Control - Anton Corbijn - is a photographer (fashion? rock and roll? both?) - and it shows, in the way that virtually every shot is framed: that is, like a photograph. The black and white cinematography works well (of course an Ian Curtis biopic must be in black and white), as does the music (the guy playing Curtis - Sam Riley - does a good job with the singing; in fact the performances generally, and especially those of the two leads, are excellent).

I don't know how I would have responded to Control were Joy Division not such a large part of my past (let's not overstate this - their impact wasn't/hasn't been in the same league as Radiohead, say, or the Cure...but it was still big), but I think I still would've responded to it; then again, those very responses have been at least partly wired into me by the band and its music themselves.

It feels like a photograph set to life and music. And it also feels real - like this is how it was.

(w/ David, at a triple j preview screening a couple of weeks ago)

Jasper Fforde - First Among Sequels

This was okay but it didn't quite have the spark, somehow. This time it did feel like going through the motions, though I give him credit for leapfrogging Thursday several years into the future and then attempting to partially reinvent her. I dunno, maybe I was just anticipating this too much.

Insight

So things have been busy on the work front lately, which has involved a few late nights, often with Spoon as my companion, and particularly Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. And anyway, I was listening to "The Ghost of You Lingers" and suddenly it hit me - this song must be a homage to Glass's "A Gentleman's Honor". That's all.

All About Lily Chou-Chou

Not as shattering as the first time, but still heartbreaking and astonishing.

(The first time; and then the music...)

A few small revivals

Joy Division and Lush, two bands less dissimilar than they appear on initial inspection - particularly within my personal musical constellation - and two old favourites of mine, have been on high rotation lately, especially Spooky (Lush's first and most crashingly gossamer and stargazingly brilliantine album) and Permanent (the first Joy Division record I heard, and the one which is really burned into me from beginning to end). If I'd been in danger of forgetting the magic of pop music, this is all the reminding I needed.

The Essential Neil Diamond & The Best of the Corrs

As is so often the case for me, it's all about the melodies. Neil Diamond has always been there: my parents listened to him a lot, and so many of the hits are patterned into my earliest memories ("Sweet Caroline", "Shilo", "Holly Holy", "Brother Love's Travelling Salvation Show", etc, etc); a bit later, "Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon" became lodged similarly inextricably thanks to the perfect use of Urge Overkill's version of it in Pulp Fiction; and many of the others on this compilation turn out to be so familiar as almost to have come out the other side. As I said, it's all about the melodies.

With the Corrs, it began with "Runaway". I heard it early one morning, and it carried me away; following that, Forgiven, Not Forgotten was one of the first handful of albums than I owned (it must have been one of the first 20 or so). I haven't really followed their career since, but a smattering of radio singles have penetrated and, you know, there's still something there. We don't shake these early experiences off easily; nor, after all, would we want to.

KT Tunstall - Drastic Fantastic

The good songs on this album are really good - especially "Little Favours" and "I Don't Want You Now", both endearingly chipper, catchy pop tunes with slight indie leanings ("Suddenly I See" is also tops, not to mention familiar-sounding). The rest of 'em are just okay, you know how it goes. Don't know anything about her, but she must be a Brit I think, p'raps one part Catatonia + one part Lisa Loeb + maybe a slight Indigo Girls-y flavour.

"Selecao" (IMP June 2007)

Brazilian music! (Including Seu Jorge, no less.) My favourites are the ones by an outfit called Tribalistas.

(from Steve in Alexandria, VA)

Neil Gaiman - Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes, The Doll's House, Dream Country & Season of Mists

Have been feeling a hankering to re-read these lately ('read' seems not to do the experience justice - in fact, some to think of it, 'experience' in itself might be better), and this time in sequence instead of madly in whatever order I could get my hands on the various books; doing so has confirmed their genius. I've also been struck by how much of the series is taken up by digressions from the main story, and at the same time by how integral these 'digressions' in fact are. Knowing the ending also gives these earlier volumes a greater gravity - a sense of inevitable and yet always [I've lost the word - something like 'circumstantial', 'opportunistic', 'tendentious', but none of those...I mean that it occurs through a series of tenuously linked events, each unpredictable and unlikely in its own right, never mind in the aggregate] gathering tragedy.

Last time: [1] & [3], [2], [4].

Neil Gaiman - Stardust / Stardust (the movie)

Read the book first (admittedly, finishing it with only a couple of hours to spare before watching the film, and only having started because I wanted to've read it before said watching), and it's a darker, starrier thing than its cinematic adaptation. It sees Gaiman attempting, as is his wont, to create something deeply universal - archetypal - by deploying and reworking familiar elements and forms, seeking a synthesis between Story and Self-reflexivity to arrive at something both underlying and new; and, as usual for Gaiman's longer form prose, it shows occasional hints of being something special but never ascends to the heights to which it aspires. There's just something missing - I think that maybe the inversions and deconstructions of fairytale which structure Stardust, while lending the novel much of its interest, also undermine its central assumed narratival drives, without the text proferring a sufficiently satisfying alternative way of reading it.

The film, taken on its own terms (which are more modest), is more successful. It's definitely more whimsical in tone, and highlighted by a number of very pleasing performances (Claire Danes as Yvaine, Michelle Pfeiffer as the witch, Robert DeNiro's pirate (of course) and also the fellow playing Septimus, who reminded me of Steve Coogan); sets and special effects are appropriate (The Princess Bride by way of The Brothers Grimm, and it's appropriately somewhat askew, too, while always remaining entertaining.

(film w/ Michelle - who incidentally found it very satisfying)

Like a movie

Friday night, 1 am, Fad bar: J's going-away. I'm in the middle of the room, standing, watching T and J's sister E talk. E is dressed all in white; with her long blonde hair and recent history, did I hear T describe her as ethereally beautiful earlier tonight? I might have; I'm not sure. They're too far away for me to hear what they're saying, but I was sitting between them just before, and I can guess. J, P, and two of J's friends who I don't know are standing nearby, in the half-light. I know the song that's playing but can't place it; in a moment, just before Cave starts singing, I'll recognise it as "Do You Love Me?". For the first time in a long while, I feel as if I'm in a movie.

Rilo Kiley - Under the Blacklight

Oh, Rilo Kiley. I had such high hopes and low expectations for your new album, and what do you do but throw me a curveball and make it sing? As I'd anticipated (going by what I'd heard of the last one, and by the first single "The Moneymaker"), it's Rilo Kiley gone pop, but what I hadn't factored in is that the result would still sound so much like, well, like Rilo Kiley, which means that when all's said and done, though it has neither the alt-rock-country scathe and edge of The Execution of All Things nor any individual moments as glorious as "Portions for Foxes", Under the Blacklight is still hella neat. For mine, the best of what the record does have are the disco-y "Breakin' Up", the funked-up "Dejalo" and (my favourite) the old-fashioned singalong of "15".

It seems that Rilo Kiley's increasingly all about Jenny Lewis - which is no bad thing, of course, though the band is strong enough to feature in its own right (as it did more prominently on Execution) and Blake Sennett is a good low-key songwriter in his own right (here, his "Dreamworld", right in the middle of the album, sets off everything else well). I am interested to see what her next step is.

Emmylou Harris - Blue Kentucky Girl

Actually, I bought this kind of by accident - I thought that it was her bluegrass album (a simple glance at the tracklist would've apprised me of my error, but oh well). In fact, however, Blue Kentucky Girl is the most straight-up 'country' of Harris' albums that I've heard, and in fine style, too - the absolute highlights are second track "Beneath Still Waters" and her stripped-back reading of "Hickory Wind", but with other high points including the title track, "Save the Last Dance for Me" and "Even Cowgirls Get The Blues" (complete with backing vocals from Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt) it's perfect sunny day listening for this time of year.

The Sound of Girls Aloud: The Greatest Hits

10/10 - or close enough that it doesn't matter...scintillatingly good of-the-moment pop, genuinely exciting in a way that you feel in your stomach - a shiny aural package wrapped up with all the bells and whistles, a hook a minute, and sold by the girls themselves with enough personality to be convincing. For me, "Biology" and their gigantic cover of "I'll Stand By You" still stand out, but none of the 11 other songs on the cd are far behind.

Interpol - Our Love to Admire

The main reason why Antics was such a non-event for me when compared to Turn on the Bright Lights was, I think, that whereas Bright Lights chimed and rang, Antics plodded. Considered across that dimension, Our Love to Admire plots something of a middle course between its two predecessors, and so it's not surprising that it's somewhere between them in terms of quality, too...Interpol are good at what they do, but the problem is that they've been good at it from the start - and they were better, then.

Don Watson - Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM

This book, Watson's memoirs of his time as Keating's speechwriter, has been praised to the skies, and I can see why, for it's a book to make the reader believe - above all else, to believe in the possibility of government (and a progressive government especially) as an effective force for social good, in the ideal of policy rather than politics, in social justice and 'left' principles wedded to hard-headed economic management and fiscal responsibility. I started reading this before seeing Keating!, and like the musical it's made me think 'if only -'; and it's taken me a bit like The West Wing, in that it makes me wonder 'what if?'. Full of insight and interest, and written in a style which is a model of clarity.

The Apocalypse Reader edited by Justin Taylor

I do like a good apocalypse, but the stories in this collection tend far too much towards that 'experimental' style characterised by curt, disjointed, prose, usually heavy-handedly irreverent and almost invariably somehow supposedly shocking or taboo-breaking (sex, drugs, critiques of consumerism) - stories written for people who don't usually read by people who really can't write. Reader, it sucks.

That said, there are some good ideas in here, buried amidst the dross, and fewer (but still some) decent stories - mainly those from older masters like Poe, Hawthorne, Le Guin, Moorcock...Kelly Link, Joyce Carol Oates (really gotta read her some day), Theodora Goss and Jeff Goldberg also make good contributions. But too many of the stories are just bad - in some cases, so bad that I couldn't even get enough purchase to finish them.

More thoughts on Life of Pi

(Having been asked which of the stories I thought was real.)

In a literal sense, I'm not sure - could be either the 'realistic' one he tells at the end or the 'fantastic' one which makes up most of the novel.

I'd be strongly inclined to say the realistic one were it not for the bones in the boat which no one is able to identify (and so which may belong to the meerkat-y creatures from the island, suggesting that the fantastic one may also in a sense be real).

Without the bones, I would read it as: the realistic story is what actually happened in the external world, but in some internal or figurative sense, the fantastic story is how it really was for Pi, and that internal/figurative (ie, subjective) sense is just as valid/true (it's a better story; so it is for God; etc).

But with the bones, I think the ambiguity is a weakness of the novel (although some would call it a strength). There's nothing wrong with leaving the status of a narrative open to question and having its ending ambiguous; however, it should be possible to articulate exactly where the ambiguity lies. Here, the interesting question about the respective statuses of the realistic and fantastic stories is muddied for no good reason by the crossing-over between the two possibilities which results from the bones (which are apparently inexplicable except if you accept the fantastic story is the real one).

Another possibility, of course, is that any attempt to read Life of Pi literally, misses the point of the novel - the text wilfully mingles the apparently real and the apparently fantastic. On this reading, neither story is 'real' (or they both are). But if that's what the text sets out to do, it needs to earn or justify that mingling far better than it actually does, so it would still be unsatisfactory for me.

A number of small things

I. At a party on Friday, talking in a group with Tamara, Jarrod, Maree, Bec P and Cassie - ie, more or less the kind of people with whom I'm likely to be talking at a party - I mentioned my disappointment with My December and was surprised by the amount of Kelly Clarkson love then expressed by the others, someone else even going so far as to describe Breakaway as the best break-up album ever. Very pleasing!

II. There's a nice exhibition on at that little "city gallery" in the Town Hall - "Urban Arboreal: The Tree in the Grid". Photographs, prints, drawings, sculptures and one painting directly onto wall and window, reflecting on "the place and shape of nature in the urban environment" (according to the excellent curatorial notes by David Hansen) - modest but interesting. I especially like the twinned "Regeneration" pieces by Julie Gough (a standing eucalypt branch with embedded bronze leaves, and a photo of a large quartz-etched gum leaf marked out on the ground) and the mysterious garden paintings of Kristin Headlam.

III. Had another look at parts of the Guggenheim exhibition - I realised that generally, the more recently done ones have faded on further inspection (they're still cool, but don't seem to have all that much to say on revisiting), whereas those which I liked in the first room ("...Whose Name Was Writ in Water" and Soulages' "Peinture, 195 x 130 cm, mai 1953" in particular) have only become better and deeper.

Billboard Top Rock'n'Roll Hits 1966

Glorious - ten shining golden moments, ageless and infused with that special glow that's almost but not quite nostalgia which comes only with songs that have always been there:
1. "I'm A Believer" - The Monkees
2. "Summer in the City" - The Lovin' Spoonful
3. "Wild Thing" - The Troggs
4. "Hanky Panky" - Tommy Jones & the Shondells
5. "You Can't Hurry Love" - The Supremes
6. "(You're My) Soul and Inspiration" - The Righteous Brothers
7. "Monday, Monday" - The Mamas & the Papas
8. "Good Vibrations" - The Beach Boys
9. "These Boots Are Made For Walkin'" - Nancy Sinatra
10. "Reach Out I'll Be There" - Four Tops

Kelly Clarkson - My December

Sad to say, not half the record that Breakaway was - not a single killer song, and very few that even stick in the mind at all. Beset by minor keys, weird anti-melodies and non-harmonic harmonies, and yet it's clearly intended to be all anthems and massive choruses - the songs just aren't there.

Louis Sachar - Holes

Neat bit of kiddie fic with a few layers to it. And magic realism again, what the hell?

Yann Martel - Life of Pi

Everyone but everyone told me how good this was, and it is quite good, but it's really not all that. I don't know what it is - it's as if, in some essential way, the novel is clumsy or not quite perfectly realised in a way which has nothing to do with the idiosyncratic voice of Pi Patel (or at least isn't reducible to the deliberate diffractions of that voice)...some part of me just resists it, I don't know why. That said, the ending is (as several people had promised) really something, and there are some genuinely amusing passages along the way (the battle between the tiger and the shark, the interactions between Pi and the Japanese investigators at the end), and it wasn't anywhere near as twee as the synopses I'd heard had led me to fear (not twee at all, in fact).

...okay, maybe here's what it is: Life of Pi does what it does very well - but I'm not entirely keen on what it does (tautological enough?). Part of this probably comes from the magic realist elements...

The Cranberries - Stars: The Best of 1992-2002

Because Chungking Express has been much in the air for me lately; happily, "Dreams" is the first song on the cd.

Caroline Overington - Kickback: Inside the Australian Wheat Board Scandal

Went out and bought this in a fit of enthusiasm some time ago, the interest having been at least latent for obvious (work-related) reasons and then being triggered by my spending some time trawling through the Cole Report. 's a good read, anyway - a clear narrative and well-drawn characters...journalistic in style and for me provided a bit more context and colour to these familiar names and doings/findings.

Mark Gatiss - The Devil in Amber

Got this (a "special limited proof edition - not for resale") as a freebie at the writers' festival and was pleased to have picked it up, seeming to promise as it did to be lurid in the extreme. Set in period immediately after the Great War, it chronicles the efforts of Lucifer Box, Esq (by appointment to his majesty - ie, in his majesty's secret service) to unravel a literally fiendishly complex plot involving drug-running, gangsters, organised fascism, his estranged sister Pandora, a mysterious convent, raising of nuns from the dead, centuries-old conspiracies and attempts to summon the Devil, all the while preening himself, trying to convince himself that, though he's slowing down, he's not yet past it, and having it off with or at least eyeing with lascivious intent a succession of yummy boys and girls. A bit of piffle, really, but enjoyable - though the steamy mixed-race nun sex (coitus interrupted by the manifestation of the face of a disembodied ghastly goatish apparition, no less) was almost too much.

Ratatouille

A solid three star picture - a nice way to pass an hour and a half or so, with a strong main narrative and some nice touches (the fearsome restaurant critic is brilliant - voiced by Peter O'Toole, no less), but not memorable. Speaking of voice actors, nice to see Janeane G pop up again, this time as a haughty French chef.

Mary Gentle - Orthe: Chronicles of Carrick V

The elements all seem to be there, but these books don't quite come together in the way they should. (Two novels, each long in its own right, plus a short story - and the strange, offbeat ending of the second novel throws everything which had gone before it into a different light...is it, after all, a cautionary tale, then?) There's no doubting Gentle's ambition or her ability to evoke a world or to tell a story, nor her capacity to weave in complex and challenging themes, but in this sci-fi/fantasy amalgam account of contact between human and alien society, it's not quite all in place and so the novels don't grip as they might have.

The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition (Lewis Carroll, edited by Martin Gardner)

A paperback edition, with Tenniel's original illustrations for the books. Neither Wonderland nor Looking-Glass (impossible not to think of them as a pair) ever palls on re-reading - one always forgets delightful little details somehow, like the suppression of the guinea pigs for cheering in court, or the way that the Messenger to the White King says that he will whisper his message, leans down to do so, and then instead shouts it into the king's ear - and this time there was the added enticement of being able to read Gardner's annotations, which add much to the magpie potpourri order (non)sense of the original texts, whether providing French and German translations of "Jabberwocky", listing possible answers to the riddle of why a raven is like a writing-desk, digressing to discuss the physics of the looking-glass world, being scathing about particular film adaptations, ruminating on Carroll's relationship with the 'real Alice' and with many others, or chasing any of hundreds of other rabbits down their figurative holes in shedding light on Carroll's words.

Padi Museum in Kedah, Malaysia

Downstairs is a collection of information and exhibits relating to padi (paddy) planting, primarily in Malaysia, and on the ground (entrance) floor is more info and some large paintings done by Malaysian artists mostly concerned with the country agricultural past and present (with a strong nationalistic - and, in a couple of instances, communist - slant), but the main event is up a few flights of stairs: a very large (circumference of several hundred metres at its outer range, I reckon) painted panoramic view of the surrounding area, aiming to capture a 'typical' Malaysian scene (mountains, rice paddy fields, forests, villages, etc). The scene is painted on to the inner wall of the overhead dome (with real materials used in the foreground), which the observer sees from a central, slowly rotating platform...really quite impressive. (It was an initiative of Mahatir's, apparently.)

Steven Hall - The Raw Shark Texts

The Raw Shark Texts is one of those books that I would like to unpick and dissect, and probably the next time I read it, I will (it's already largely laid out in my mind, but I'm honest enough to admit that if I can't easily transfer it from that inchoate state onto the page, then I probably don't have as complete a grasp of it as I might intuitively think). Suffice to say that it's dead clever - pacy and erudite and tricky and emotionally rich (at its heart, a love story)...it comes as no surprise that Hall thanks, amongst others, Ali Smith, Scarlett Thomas and David Mitchell, all youngish and hip, sharp-enough-to-cut-you ideas-weavers cum story-tellers with a fondness for intellectual digressions and action set pieces (all Brits too, with the possible exception of Mitchell, who may be Canadian?); also, all (including Hall) frequently give me the sense that they've stolen my moves when I read them (Hall's debt to Murakami is also quite explicit)...if this is some kind of new literary sub-movement, I'm all for it.

In lieu of actual exegesis, this is what the text(s) is about:

The animal hunting you is a Ludovician. It is an example of one of the many species of purely conceptual fish which swim in the flows of human interaction and the tides of cause and effect. This may sound like madness, but it isn't. The streams, currents and rivers of human knowledge, experience and communication which have grown throughout our short history are now a vast, rich and bountiful environment. Why should we expect these flows to be sterile?

...

The Ludovician is a predator, a shark. It feeds on human memories and the intrinsic sense of self. Ludovicians are solitary, fiercely territorial and methodical hunters. A Ludovician might select an individual human being as its prey animal and pursue and feed on that individual over the course of years, until that victim's memory and identiy have been completely consumed.

(and much more)

Did I mention that it's really damn good? Like really, really good.

Blades of Glory

Heh, this was pretty good if not reaching the heights of Zoolander (the obvious reference point). Super bonuses: William Fichtner's cameo, and the casting and performance of Will Arnett and Amy Poehler (aka Gob and his wife in AD) as the villains. It made me laugh out loud and I would watch it again.

Amy Winehouse - Back to Black

Neat-o - like it a lot. All of the bits and pieces are good themselves; pulled together by the stark Ms Winehouse, they're ace. Every time I listen to Back to Black, I'm surprised and a bit disappointed by how quickly it's over. Still extremely digging the title song, but all the others are good too.

"Fun on Grub Street" and "This just in from cyberspace" @ Melbourne Writers' Festival (Sat 25 / Sun 26 Aug)

From my journal:

... it was starting to feel a lot like summer (by which I perhaps mean that it was starting to feel a lot like spring): writers' festival shows Sat/Sun with Cassie in the sunlit surrounds of the Malthouse.

"Fun on Grub Street" - Saturday, early evening - was Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida talking about McSweeney's. Both very likeable (in Eggers' case, more so than I'd really expected) and adept with the quasi-interview/discussion format (Louise Swinn playing interlocutor), though I'd heard/read some of the stories before (eg, the one about DE being deceived into believing that photos of houses being airlifted were 'real' and the origin story for McSweeney's initially choosing Icelandic printer). It was nice to see that they really are in love with what they're doing, and for the right reasons, and the sessions provided a bit of insight into the phenomenon that is McSweeney's (and its sundry associated 'movements'/trends) as well as reminding me of just what a phenomenon that whole thing really is, and how ubiquituous its many strands have become, at least in my personal network/framework/whatever. Also, I hadn't realised that DE could probably be described as a bit of a dish!

"This just in from cyberspace" - Sunday afternoon - was a panel of four (Rachel Hills; Emma Dawson; Nick Moraitis of GetUp! fame; and Cory Doctorow, whose name I hadn't heard before, but turned out to have fingers in several pies which I've, well, partaken of - eg, boingboing.net) plus facilitator Jose Borghino of newmatilda.com, discussing the effect of the internet and online publishing on the media, political reporting, and public discourse and speech generally from various perspectives. Anyhow, it's an obviously interesting area and the panellists did it justice, and likewise the wide-ranging (though generally politically-focussed) questions after - Doctorow being the most impressive.

Good festival vibe, too - like last year. There's just something in the air this time of year.

The West Wing season 7

[spoilers ahead]

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.
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I. More proof (were it needed) of how thoroughly this show has involved me: I knew it was coming, but still I actually had tears in my eyes not once but twice for Leo's death - first when Annabeth appears in tears, and then at the funeral service. We're not talking bucketloads here, but I've never had such a strong crying response to a tv show or a film before.

II. Also, I want to say something about me and Janeane Garofalo. Well, there's not much to say, really. Back in high school, I basically thought that she was too great for words (because of Reality Bites and Romy and Michelle, I think - Mystery Men too, maybe? Truth About Cats and Dogs was sweet but didn't make much of an impression.). Then I kind of forgot about her (was vaguely aware that she had taken up political activism or maybe had always been doing it; discovered that she was snarkily answering reader questions in the Believer). So anyway, it was a delight to see her pop up as a fast-talking, take-no-prisoners campaign strategist in this season and then to promptly take it all the way up to Josh.

III. What a great show this is. I'm sorry that it's over - but it may not be too long before I start again from the beginning...

* * *

1 & 2 - 3, 4, 5 & 6

"Two Steps from the Middle Ages: Another Spunk Sampler"

Pretty good as far as these go. Best songs: Machine Translations - "Need A Miracle", Explosions in the Sky - "So Long, Lonesome", Meg Baird - "Dear Companion", The Besnard Lakes - "For Agent 13". Ted Leo & the Pharmacists' "Bomb Repeat Bomb" is rockin' too (in addition to great song title).

"1977" (IMP July 2007)

Befitting the year from which it draws its title, leads off with a punk blast (Ramones - Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers - Clash) and follows through with more of the same plus a bit of early post-punk ("Psycho Killer" - always raises a cheer when it pops up), industrial and ambient, winding up with a bit of sweetness (Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams") and a dash of Tom Waits ("I Never Talk To Strangers" and "Cinny's Waltz"). A real old snapshot of a time.

(from Salvatore in Italy)

Bob Dylan @ Rod Laver Arena, Sunday 19th August

I didn't have high expectations for this show - given the likely preponderance of new stuff and the probability that any old ones would be drastically reinterpreted, I expected it to be solid, nothing more...but I went anyway (a) just in case and (b) because it's Bob Dylan, man!

Anyhow, it was basically exactly as I expected - I didn't know all that many of the songs he played, and the classics that he did do ("Don't Think Twice, It's Alright", "Just Like A Woman", "Highway 61 Revisited") were basically flattened out and lacked the sheer pure thread which runs through each in their original recorded/lp cuts. Also, the sound quality kinda sucked.

On the plus side, there was an excellent banjo song near the middle which I would guess is called "Blind Willie McTell" or something similar and was the highlight, the band was very good - and, of course, it was Bob Dylan there on stage, singing his songs. Not a great concert experience by any stretch of the imagination - I actually found myself drifting in and out in patches, thinking about other things - but I'm glad I went.

(w/ Kevin)

Razorlight - Up All Night

Middling-to-mediocre 'alternative brit rock' circa 2003. "Golden Touch" is good, but that's pretty much it...it's not that the record is bad, I suppose, but just that it severely lacks any kind of spark.

cd86: 49 tracks from the birth of indie pop

Early indie pop classics and forgotten gems, spanning the years '84 through to '87 - jangle, fuzz, melody and 'plaint (I know, not a word - but it oughta be), c86 stuff obviously, and for the most part proudly wearing its influences on its collective sleeve. Double cd set - deliciously packaged and filled to the rafters with quality, most of it new to me though of course I know the sound and the attitude.

Faves: Primal Scream - "Velocity Girl", the Clouds - "Get Out Of My Dream", the Raw Herbs - "He Blows In", the Hit Parade - "You Didn't Love Me Then", Close Lobsters - "Just Too Bloody Stupid", Meat Whiplash - "Don't Slip Up", the Darling Buds - "If I Said", the Mighty Lemon Drops - "Like An Angel", and of course shining unimpeachable cuts from Talulah Gosh and the Jesus and Mary Chain.

Paul Auster - The New York Trilogy

One of the things that makes this trio of pieces at once so accessible and so ungraspable is the apparent clarity of their language and narratives - it's as if the reader, in seemingly so easily penetrating the surface of the text, finds themselves all at once to have come out on the other side while being none the wiser as to the meaning of what they have just encountered. So with that in mind, how might a literal reading of City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room proceed?

Well, it would need to begin at the end, with the third of those, whose unnamed narrator says that he wrote all three, each representing different stages in his self-understanding (or something to that effect).

* * *

Wrote the above some two or three weeks ago, then left it to sit, not particularly having the time to develop and think through the rest. In the mean time, we've book clubbed the trilogy, most of which was spent trying to work out what actually happens in the book(s) and how all the pieces fit together (I'm convinced at least by Andrew B's conjecture that all three are written by Fanshawe - although of course that's without taking 'Paul Auster' out of his box, though it's probably not possible to arrive at the reading whereby F is indeed the author without an awareness of the existence of PA 'within' and 'outside' City of Glass and the trilogy as a whole). Discussing the book(s) was an experience much like reading it/them (see above); The New York Trilogy is at once both a complete tease and extremely satisfying. I feel that I've almost grasped it - but full understanding is still just beyond my reach.

Isobel Campbell - Milkwhite Sheets

Surprisingly, quite a left turn from Amorino - and a successful one, too. Very hushed even by her quiet standards - so wispy as to seem barely there for much of the time, like diaphanous little nursery rhymes edged all about with an old-fashioned folk-ness. And good, too.

Frank Black - 93-03

These be the (solo) Frank Black songs I'd heard before: "Los Angeles" and "Man of Steel" - both of them naggingly tuneful and memorable, and solid 9/10 songs (ie, very very good). This best of, though, is only so-so - it's very uneven, and there are relatively few highlights, scattered at intervals. "Headache" is fun, but generally I like the cruisier, more melodic ones more ("You Ain't Me", "I Don't Want To Hurt You", "All My Ghosts", "Bad Harmony" & ors)...in any case, definitely more good than bad, if not thrillingly so.

The Essential Janis Joplin

I've been known to describe Janis as a goddess, and I'm gonna stand by that. She's one of those rare musicians - rare artists - who penetrates deeper than the common run, whose work genuinely partakes of greatness. I don't usually listen to her stuff over and over - it doesn't work like that. But whenever I do listen, I know.

(also: Pearl)

Bob Dylan - Modern Times

Modern (ie backward-looking and a little bit timeless) Dylan-rock-and-roll. I know the critics jumped up and down about this one, but to me it's impossible to hear the record out of the context of everything else the man has recorded - it makes sense when set against that background, but has only a limited amount to offer outside of it...playing with artificial distinctions maybe, but that's the best way to make sense out of my response to it - it's listenable, and yet not especially captivating, and all I can think while listening to it is that Modern Times is a latter-day Bob Dylan album. In a more receptive phase I might be more taken with it, 'cause it certainly has that Dylan-ness - but that's how it sounds to me now.

Amy Sedaris - I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride; if I'd known that this was a recipe book, I wouldn't have bought it -- well, it's not entirely a recipe book (if it were, I'd have only myself to blame for bringing it home anyway), but a lot more of it's taken up by recipes than I'd anticipated, and accordingly much less by New York sass than I'd hoped. Still, I enjoyed it and perhaps the recipes will even come in useful (though healthiness doesn't seem to be a major, or even a minor consideration in their putting together, so maybe not so much then).

The Man From London

Black and white, almost two and a half hours long, existential: this seemed very likely to be good. Unfortunately, though, it's not, in all of the ways that one would expect (if, of course, one were to expect it to not be good in the first place).

Saw it with Vanessa; afterwards, we both craved chocolate (chocolate ice cream in my case) - it was that kind of movie.

The Rough Guide to Astor Piazzolla

Casting around for a description of my current daily patterns for the benefit of an overseas comrade about a week ago, came up with this: "Listening to a lot of Astor Piazzolla (perhaps you know him? An Argentinian tango innovator - 'tango ballet', eg - very dramatic and swirling and energetic and melancholy, &c, &c), and dancing in my bedroom when the sun comes out." Not really so much of the bedroom dancing this last week, with work kickin' my ass a bit again, but still plenty of the Piazzolla by way of this compilation, which reveals a lighter and more playful side to him than Tango Ballet and in so doing has cracked his music wide open to me (much as I've always liked Tango Ballet, it's always been an album that I listen at long intervals rather than in an ongoing way), leaving me keen to explore further. Certain themes and motifs recur across songs and albums, but the ones which've most caught my ear are "Libertango", "Vuelvo al Sur" and "Los Suenos", all genius in their different ways.

"Dear Junior, I Miss You. <3 Senior (SXSW 2007)" (IMP - May 2007)

Seems a safe guess that the theme of this mix is 'acts who played SXSW in 2007', which translates to a setlist mostly made up of current indie faves - including several which I already knew and which are always welcome ("Thursday", "The Gulag Orkestar", "Young Folks", "Do The Whirlwind") - and an engaging listen.

The best of those that I hadn't heard before are the shimmer and groove of the Fratellis' "Flathead" (hadn't heard of them at all before) [edit 16/8/08: turns out this was actual Midlake's "Roscoe" - misled by an erroneous track listing!] and, in particular, Amy Winehouse's brilliant invocation of girl group swoon and drama (you only need to hear the first few bars to pick it up) mixed with hints of jazz and rock and roll circa the same era on "Back to Black" (I'd only previously heard "Rehab" of her stuff, and hadn't thought much of it). Also especially like Les Savy Fav's "The Sweat Descends" and the 1900s' sixties-dappled "Living the Medium Way".

(A replacement from the administrator for the May mix, which never arrived.)[

Echoes of Home

About ten minutes into this, a documentary about contemporary yodelling, I found myself trying to remember why I'd thought it would be a good idea to watch it - not in an 'oh my god this is terrible' way, but more in a bemused 'no really, what was I actually thinking' kind of vein...whether this was before, during, or after the yodellers wearing the creepy masks and model houses/villages on their heads, I'm not entirely sure.

Enjoyed it, anyway - it was a good way to kick off my Sunday, and I left smiling. Focused on three musicians, all Swiss and all pushing the envelope of yodelling in one way or another - a Stuart Murdoch type named Christian Zehmer (I think), Noldi, an older fellow who comes from a famous yodelling family (the Alders) but has, with his violin, struck out on a more experimental path (not entirely to the pleasure of his relatives, one gathers from the interviews with them), and a messily bohemian type whose name escapes me (a woman) - and plays the inherent quirkiness of its subject more or less with a straight bat.

(Preceded by a 30-minute short, Katoomba, about small town anomie, friendship, escape, and circumstances - pretty cliché, but pretty nice, too, highlighted by some spectacular scenery.)

(w/ Tamara)

Day Watch

Unexpectedly, lighter and more whimsical than Night Watch, but still satisfyingly explosive and hyper-dramatic. One or two of the set pieces come across as a bit forced or gratuitous - the car shearing along the curved outside of the hotel skyscraper, for example - but generally it hangs together well in an OTT kind of way, aided by its distinctive aesthetic and feel, and also by solidly charismatic performances all round. A long movie, but it doesn't feel it - and it even has an ending to warm the heart!

(w/ Marc, and his friend Kam, and her friend Rei [sp?], and also Rob)

Jasper Fforde - The Fourth Bear

Really sheer delight; maybe he's coasting a bit at this point but it's still such a pleasure that one simply can't mind. And now there's a new Thursday Next one to read!

John Keats - You Might As Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker

Really conveys a sense of Mrs Parker's times and life - it's only a sense, of course, one person's and partial and inevitably coloured and all that jazz, but for all of that, it feels right and true, glittering and sharp-edged, fuzzy-edge, sepia and rose-hued and sad. Paints a picture of her as contradictory and partly but intensely and unbearably self-conscious - reading this book, I felt as if I knew her, and yet the very point is, of course, no one ever did.

previously

The Last Winter

Well, go on - would you expect a film whose MIFF synopsis could be distilled to "environmental horror: The Thing meets An Inconvenient Truth" to actually be frightening? And especially when said synopsis leads off with "Starring Ron Perlman as a gruff he-man" (said lead-off being, incidentally, the reason Michelle and I initially picked the film out as one to possibly watch)?

Well, I'm here to tell you that (a) 'environmental horror' is a perfect genre description for The Last Winter and (b) yes, it's pretty damn scary (also (c) Ron Perlman, as usual, does Ron Perlman to a 't'). 'Stressful' is the word that we latched onto afterwards while talking about the film's effect; 'intense' was equally apt...it has a slow burn unnervingness, and also its share of sudden shocks - Michelle and Vanessa were on either side of me, and both really jumped at several points throughout (not that I was entirely immune either...). Bleak and white and ultimately unhopeful - totally not a Sunday night film. A cautionary tale, and effective.

(w/ the aforementioned, plus Rob and Laura too, neither of whom had any idea what they were getting themselves into when they signed up on the night)

"Art for Science" @ Nellie Castan Gallery, 26 July 2007

A 'champagne preview' of works donated by Australian artists to raise money for the Murdoch Institute, where my dad works (which is how I heard about it). I'm not especially wired into the art scene so wasn't familiar with many of the artists, but recognised a Bill Henson straight off as I walked in. Others which caught my eye:

(Three photographs:)

* "Tuesday 28th March 2006 (Fremantle)" - Matthew Sleeth. Probably my favourite: a sports ground at night, nearly all dark, a thin row of middle distance house-lights across the central horizontal band - the horizon - of the photo, broken up by some tall standing trees, one bright overhead light blazing cryptically near the centre. It speaks to me - there's something strong and real to it.
* "Blue City, India" - Sonia Payes. Mysterious ruined-looking walled city, like some conquistador's hazy early-morning dream.
* "I Did It For You" - Jane Burton. A woman on all fours, in silhouette, seen from outside through a cross-framed window and delicate lace curtain - black and white, of course...it's striking.

(A couple of others:)

* "The Wall and the Bubbler's Shadow" - Jeff Martin. Just an oil painting, green park bench against red wall, all rough. But there's something very appealing about it, I don't really know what. A sort of heightened familiarity maybe; the barest hint of the uncanny.
* "Ever" - Angela Brennan. I wasn't actually mad about this one, though I liked it well enough. The main thing which struck me about it was how compositionally Rothko-esque the piece is; that said, it lacks (and possibly doesn't aspire towards) the vividity of MR's work - a common theme with the more non-representational pieces in this show, incidentally, when compared to their most obvious antecedents.

Diana Ross & The Supremes - The No. 1's

You only need to bring to mind the songs: "Where Did Our Love Go", "You Can't Hurry Love", "You Keep Me Hanging On", "Baby Love"...the solo Diana Ross work isn't as near to peerless as the Supremes classics and overall I find it a pinch too smooth by comparison to say the Shangri-Las (always my benchmark for any 60s girl group stuff, no matter how removed in sound or in other respects the outfit being compared) but these are really minor quibbles.

Bon Jovi - Cross Road

It's not news that I'm listening to this - many moons ago, I borrowed a copy of this best-of from the library and put it on tape at the time...so far so good, then. Problem is, somewhere along the line I taped over it (if memory serves, with one of those obscure Pink Floyd albums that I've never even listened to all the way through) and since then - this was all years ago - have frequently found myself hankering for the record, sometimes particular songs and sometimes just for the concentrated hit of several of those singles all in a row: "Blaze of Glory", "Bed of Roses", "Livin' on a Prayer", "Always", "Wanted Dead or Alive", "You Give Love a Bad Name", "Keep the Faith"...

Anyway, the yearnings have been particularly frequent lately, and I finished work early one night last week and set off determined to finally buy myself a copy; happily, it was going for $10 at jb (which is about as much as I could've decently spent on a Bon Jovi album after all) and, somewhat to Penelope's chagrin, have been listening to it plenty since (much finding myself with the tunes caught in my head as I walk around).

"Guggenheim Collection: 1940s to Now" @ NGV International

Much excitement in the lead-up to this on my part, going back to last year when I first heard about it, and the exhibition pretty much justifies all of that anticipation. It leads off with overviews of post-war abstraction in each of the US and Europe, and figuration in both Europe and the Americas (first room), then jumps spectacularly to minimalism, post-minimalism and conceptual art (large second room) before sliding into pop art and thereafter into four 'thematic chapters' ("the legacy of pop", "the natural world", "constructed worlds" and "between public and private").

Have actually been twice now - last weekend with Kelly (+ Glenn), Tamara and Vanessa, and the weekend before on my own (by way of a birthday/non-birthday activity) - with more trips to come, too, so these thoughts are by way of synthesised response...


The main event for me was always going to be the abstract expressionist stuff, and the show leads off with pieces by three of its most famous artists - one of Rothko's untitled canvasses of wave-blocks of colour, de Kooning's "...Whose Name Was Writ in Water" and an "Untitled (Green Silver)" by Pollock. All three are characteristic of more or less the most famous periods/styles of their respective painters (I could have wished that one of the two Rothko selections in the show would have been one of his solid swathe/banded ones, rather than the earlier Surrealist-influenced piece and the blotchy, less intensely pulsating transitional work which actually made the cut, but I guess the curators/assemblers might have thought that including one would be slightly otiose given that there's one in the NGV's permanent collection) and collectively make a most pleasing introduction.


In that first room, my other favourites are Pierre Soulages' "Peinture, 195 x 130 cm, mai 1953" (the representational/non-representational black on white with shadows cross), Adolph Gottlieb's amorphous and immensely aesthetically satisfying "Mist", and Jules Olitski's deliciously colour-drenched "Lysander 1". Morris Louis' "Saraband" seems to have been a winner with other folk (I quite liked it too, but more the first time than the second); Jesus Rafael Soto's "Vibration" and Asger Jorn's "A Soul for Sale" also much fun; and definitely experienced the hypnotic quality of Ellsworth Kelly's "Dark Blue Curve" with which Kelly was much taken (and which Tamara thought was altogether too 'insurance company logo').


As to that last, actually, a key part of the whole exhibition is the sheer size and scale of many of its components - it really adds to the experience to be able to immerse in them. That was a big thing (pun unintended) in the next room, too - the most untraditional, installation-oriented part of the show. There, I liked Sol LeWitt's colour-pencilled gridded wall drawing a lot, and also enjoyed walking on (Carl Andre's "5 x 20 Alstadt Rectangle" metal carpet squares on the ground) and into (Bruce Nauman's "Floating Room (Light Outside, Dark Inside)") the art. It's a cool room and if its constituents were generally perhaps a bit too 'Concept' to really speak to me, I like it being there.

Pop art has always been a non-event for me (I find it hollow and vacuous, which may be the point but that doesn't make me like it any more) and I don't like the stuff collected here under the "legacy of pop" umbrella any better. The "natural world" pieces, though, are brill in all different ways: Nigel Cooke's "Mummy" is cute and profound (I picked up on the fruit-stuffed-with-dynamite on my first pass, but missed the little head) in that 'illustration from a really cool children's book' style that so often appeals to me; Olafur Eliasson's horizon photographs are delightful; Elger Esser's minimalistic, stark "Ameland Pier X, Netherlands" is the kind of scene I dream of on good nights; Dave Muller's cloud and balloon panels are close to the most simply whimsical things in the whole exhibition.


As to the rest, not much of it was my cup of tea, though it was neat to see a Gregory Crewdson original-sized print (I liked it but prefer the more anonymously forboding dreamscapes of his that I've previously seen in magazines and whatnot to the 'naked dirty mother arriving at the dinner table' one here) and Rachel Whiteread's plaster cast of a basement is simply ace.

So!