Sarah Waters - Affinity

The only Sarah Waters books I've read, and now I've read it twice. I can't remember why I read it the first time - it may've been just one of those that one picks up in a library (probably Rowden White, oh I miss that library) on the strength of its cover and then takes home for the intriguing blurb, though possibly on the back of all the kerfuffle about the tv adaptation of Tipping The Velvet. Still, it was a great read then and I raced through it - atmosphere to burn and a ripping story, too. This time, I made myself go more slowly, but it was still all over in a couple of days. It's a honest to goodness Victorian ghost story, done with a modern sensibility which has nothing of the anachronistic to it (at least as these things are reckoned). Waving the flag for readable lit fic.

"It was not death, for I stood up" - Gabrielle Bell (Emily Dickinson graphic poem)

This is great.

Scarlett Thomas - Going Out

Reading Going Out made me understand for the first time why Thomas continually draws the Coupland comparisons - which isn't necessarily a good thing (it's been years since I read him, and even at the time I was fairly iffy) as far as I'm concerned. As with a few books I've read lately, it didn't seem to take off until about midway through - initially it just seems to be just too deliberately shooting for zeitgeistal flavour and wasn't doing a great deal for me, though that early section is punchy enough to keep me going. Where it takes off is at about the point where everyone comes together for the road trip and starts running around completing various related missions (the shopping trip, the spacesuit construction), Leanne reveals that she thinks she's a witch, and things generally really begin percolating. I raced through that section to about two or three chapters from the end this morning on the bus. 

It's not that the novel is especially life-affirming - though it shoots for that in the final chapter, and doesn't really get there - but somehow it worked upon me anyway. It's quite different from PopCo and The End of Mr Y, and not as good as those others, but even still, it has something.

Match Point

Quite enjoyed this but it didn't send me into raptures. All the actors are good, and Rhys-Meyers is exactly right (in a bit of a "the new Jude Law" sort of way); Scarlett's Nola is kind of the way I've always imagined Jordan Baker, though more voluptuous and deliberately alluring. Reminded me a bit of Closer - that glassy sense of amorality - and is neatly constructed. Still, good rather than great.

By the by, doesn't the new Woody/Scarlett film look just excellent.

The Brothers Grimm

Well, it's Gilliam, and it has the colour and the invention and the grotesque whimsy (whimsical grotesquerie), and it's pretty engaging. But it's a bit of a mess, really, and just doesn't quite work. I did like Cavaldi, but then I always enjoy characters like him.

Gladiator

I still think that this is one of the best epics out there, but it definitely lost a bit for me on this viewing - it's just not as thrilling as it was the first (and second?) time round, years ago now.

The West Wing seasons 3, 4, 5 & 6

Phew - and now normally transmission can resume for a while. Some things about The West Wing, in no particular order:

- The way that everyone says "ok" all the time, especially in the early seasons, often because what's been said before is just, you know, so darn intense that there's nothing else to say.
- The episode in which Zoe is kidnapped is probably the single most tense tv episode I've ever seen, and to the strains of Massive Attack's "Angel", too, though a large part of that is probably due to my investment in the show. But the single most memorable moment is the micro-scene where Amy asks Donna if she's in love with Josh and the camera cuts immediately.
- The various strands in episodes are often thematically related - something I tend to notice near the beginning and then forget all about as the story takes over.
- Josh is my favourite, and has been from the start. I probably don't seem much like him to other people, but I definitely identify.
- The show plays fair - it sets things up using generic conventions, and it has the confidence to develop them over a long period. For example, from about halfway through season 1 I was thinking that there had to be some kind of romance between Josh and Donna, and also expecting that Hoynes would end up showing his patriotism somewhere along the line.
- I didn't know about the MS.
- There's a pretty serious dip in quality in seasons 4 and 5 (and especially 5), but it really picks up again in 6.
- Toby as press secretary is gold.
- It does get a wee bit distracting the way pretty much every woman who passes through is extremely attractive (in a "hang on, this isn't how the real world is" rather than some kind of sub-libidinous way, natch).
- The episode structures keep things interesting (eg, sometimes opening with a flash-forward) - it's only really around aforementioned season 5 that things feel formulaic.
- Lots of episodes give me a rush and a chill down the spine.
- I do particularly enjoy the court and judge-related ones.
- If only everyone I worked with was like the people in this show!
- So much more to say but what says the most is that I fully intend to watch it all the way through from the beginning again once I've done this final season 7.

One season to go!

Drugstore - Drugstore

This, Drugstore's debut, is in a similar vein to Palomine, actually, though it tends more towards clangour and noise (and brevity) than that other. Isobel Monteiro's rasp is in fine form throughout, and the band's knack for a beguiling melody is well in evidence across the album. The music is maybe too low-key, too basement-esque, to get me really excited about it, but still, Drugstore is an unobtrusive treat.

Bettie Serveert - Palomine

Pleasingly lo-fi early 90s jangly-fuzzy melodic mostly downbeat indie-pop; "Palomine", the one I'd heard before, is a good taster for the rest of the album.

José González - Veneer

This seems nice enough, but I don't really have the patience to listen to 'guy and his acoustic guitar' albums with full attention these days. I do like the cover of "Heartbeats" though.

Sarah Blasko - What The Sea Wants, The Sea Will Have

Although many of my musical faves are singer-songwriters, I maintain what I think is a pretty healthy suspicion of the breed in general, and this has carried through into my not having been particularly attentive as far as the new crop of female Australian s-s/writers go. Sarah Blasko, though, has gradually come to stand out over the last few months; I first heard her through her spare, spectral reading of "Don't Dream It's Over" on the wonderful She Will Have Her Way, and her songs always seem to be playing on the radio, first thing in the morning as I'm struggling towards wakefulness, too early (it's been a long time since I was a triple j kid but I still wake up to the strains of the station every weekday).

It's a good context in which to hear this music, too - groggy, still half dreaming, wrapped in darkness with perhaps scattered light straggling through. But what started to strike me after a while, after the pleasing crystalline starkness of Blasko's sound had become more familiar, was the strength of the songs and the melodies - while they're not the sort to have one humming them all day long, nonetheless each one stuck after I'd heard it. I couldn't have hummed one if I'd tried - not after only that one hearing - but I knew I'd know any of them if I heard them again. And in fact, that's how it's turned out - "[Explain]" I think I'd heard a few times (during the day as well), but I'm certain I'd only heard "Always On This Line" and "Planet New Year" (that latter, wryly sweet and more upbeat, too, being the one that tipped me into buying What The Sea Wants...) once each yet knew them straight away when I heard them tonight on record. So even though I didn't really know any of her songs beforehand, the album sounded half-familiar to me - again, dream-like. Reference points: New Buffalo, Laura Veirs (and I think that Blasko sometimes sounds like a female Thom Yorke). Favourite song possibly "The Garden's End". This will be an apt accompaniment, I think, as the nights grow longer and winter creeps stealthily closer.

Beirut - "Lon Gisland" ep

I got around to buying Gulag Orkestar, and the version in the stores at the moment comes with this presumably earlier ep, which is good in much the same way as that other - assuming that this did come out before the lp, it seems that his sound was already pretty fully-fledged here.

The Best of the Ronettes

Man, this is exciting. I've been looking for this for ages, and then suddenly, last weekend, passing through Missing Link for a cursory browse on my way somewhere else, what should confront me from the racks but a best of the Ronettes! It kicks off with "Be My Baby", as of course it must, and from thereon in it's 18 songs of girl group bliss, much of which I haven't heard before because of Phil Spector's curmudgeonly refusal to license his songs for release on compilations on other labels. So yes, it's wonderful, and while I haven't got as into their stuff as the Shangri-Las, it's still very great indeed.

Oxford Collapse - Remember the Night Parties

Neat and fairly inventive, of-the-moment but also backwards-looking indie rock (backwards-looking say to five or ten years ago, I mean) - good stuff. High point at the moment definitely the yowly ricocheting anthemicity of "Please Visit Your National Parks" but I suspect that repeated listening will bring others into prominence.

Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex

I don't know, maybe I just don't like family sagas, because for me, Middlesex didn't start to really pull until its focus shifted mainly to Cal/Callie themselves, as opposed to his/her family and antecedents (though I see the importance of the family/history aspects given the novel's preoccupation with genetic (in both the broad and the narrow senses of the idea) causes, effects, etc), at which point I began to feel very involved - Eugenides brought me to empathise completely with his unusual narrator, and I think that a lot of that comes down to the way he grounds his main character's experience in some seemingly universal (or, at least, readily recognisable) human narratives, desires and so on. It's not that the family stuff isn't well done - but it just doesn't engage me, or not as much, anyway.

When I read a novel, I want to get a story - stories - from it, but that's not enough to be satisfying...'Story' may not, on its own, be enough, but it's not that 'character' or 'ideas' are either, whether on their own or in conjunction with 'story' (and obviously you can never meaningfully disentangle these various strands). Maybe what I'm trying to get at is that I'm engaged by a sense of narrative consciousness and construction, not necessarily self-reflexively (either on the part of the empirical author or the narrator themselves - which goes as much for third person as for first person writing), of the way that things present themselves (or are presented) to us, us as readers and as characters 'within' the text - that's what I felt began to come through more in the second half of Middlesex that I didn't feel in the earlier stages, even though the events of the plot and interesting characters kept me going through those early sections.

Anyway, obviously that's a bit of a personal predilection...As to other aspects of the novel, the sex-gender aspect is handled with a reasonable degree of sophistication, I felt (and obviously I say that as a former Butler-reader, etc, etc), and I (surprisingly) enjoyed the way that the Greek-ness of the characters was front and centre and felt I learned a bit about the Greek people, if we can ever make these kinds of statements (based on literature or otherwise). Quite enjoyed the drawing out of historical events too. All in all, though, for me, Middlesex is a solid three-out-of-five type book and no more...it just seems to lack some extra indefinable ingredient that I can't express but know when I see it.

(By the way, I'm pretty sure that I've skimmed Middlesex before, because a lot of it felt very familiar and I definitely recognised one or two passages outright. Must have been during my 'not reading books properly phase'...)

Notes on a Scandal

After the exhibition, we still had a few hours to kill before Jarrod's birthday do, and though I hadn't been particularly interested in seeing it, Notes on a Scandal was the film that best fit both timings and interest levels (we really wanted to see Dreamgirls but sadly it wasn't screening any more); anyway, it was actually very good. It's a film that really depends on the performances of its leads, Dench and Blanchett, and both are quite magnificent - totally believable and (hoary old cliche) fully inhabiting their characters.

The affective nature of this film is difficult to pin down in some ways - it keeps the viewer somehow at a slight distance, and I couldn't work out afterwards why I'd had that impression. Some of it may've had to do with the ever-cyclic Glass score, which runs through virtually the whole of the film's running time (if not actually the whole of it), and it also made sense when I read later that the screenwriter had also done Closer, a film with which it has a fair bit in common (and more and more in common, the more I think about it). It's very funny in spots, too. I probably wouldn't watch it again, but I'm glad to've caught it.

"Attention Please! Posters from the Gerard Herbst collection" @ Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne

Went to this with Steph, who sold it to me on the basis that the poster being used to promote the exhibition (see left) had something of Magritte to it (surreal elements, plain and shaded elements, 'bowler hat', and other aspects more intangible). It turned out to be a collection of posters, mostly from Poland and more or less adjacent countries circa 1960-1970 - film and theatre posters for the most part, and a few others (a striking Amnesty International one comes to mind). Tended to be pretty heavy, almost to the point of being oppressive - faces and hands were recurring motifs. Also some (quite amusing) ones from workplace safety campaigns in Britain, also from around that time I think. Interesting, although I wouldn't want too many (any) of them on my bedroom wall!

"Jazz Convulsions" (IMP - February 2007)

This comment from the cd's creator says it best:

That music got under my skin many years ago, starting with Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong. The two greatest cornet players of jazz ever and friends...one white, one black. Destined to never play together in public, but only in secret jam sessions after the clubs had closed to a privileged few. Sometimes with this music playing, the right reading material (preferably with your Gatsby within reach), maybe throw in a Hitchcock silent, and you can pull a "somewhere in time" a la Christopher Reeve. But this activity can become somewhat addictive, so consider it only in moderation.

I'm liking this mix a lot - even though my previous exposure to jazz doesn't extend much beyond a bit of Miles and a smattering of Coltranes John and Alice, its moody, smoke-wreathed, after-dark sounds made sense to me straight away.

(from John in Philadelphia [?])

The Arcade Fire - Neon Bible

It's good, very good in fact, from the get-go - that is, from the ominously stormy, climbing but never quite resolving introduction of "Black Mirror" - but the moment on Neon Bible when I first really thought "yes!" to myself came somewhere in "Intervention" which, crashing through in waves, is towering and unabashed and really just too magnificent for words.

Generally, the album has more of a mythic quality than Funeral and it seems more clearly to be grounded in classic rock and roll than the band's debut (which sounded, when it first exploded upon us, near completely sui generis); to my ears, the record is resonant with the echoing highways of Bruce Springsteen, and peopled by the shadows of some of rock's most darkly, fervently inspired figures, haunted visionaries like Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley and Nick Cave. But the ornately baroque, heightened undercurrent of fraughtness that has most characterised the band's sound in the past still dominates, and their urgency and fire hasn't diminished one bit, nor their propensity for dramatic, veering shifts and subversions of both the traditional rock songbook and the expectations set up by the beginnings of their own songs.

My initial sense is that Neon Bible is a more challenging and more substantial album than its predecessor lp, if lacking in the obvious immediate high points of that other (the pleasures of Neon Bible are more subtle than those of Funeral), and probably a darker one, and likely to be just as rewarding over time, if not more so. On the strength of this record and what they've done so far, I reckon that the Arcade Fire are right on the verge of greatness.

Lucinda Williams - West

From the opening lines of first song "Are You Alright?", I felt in sure hands with this record, Williams' latest. I don't know if it's her best album (though if it's not, it's pretty close), but I do think that it could well be a culmination of sorts - the apotheosis of everything she's recorded before. Expansive and unhurried, it's the sound of an artist with complete faith in her voice and songs; more than anything else, it sounds like a Lucinda Williams record, but to me West also seems to partake of that same pure, rich stream that runs through Emmylou Harris's best work - a clean, fierce kind of ache which is grounded in the dirt but also has something of the stars to it. It's understated and restrained and it burns slowly all the way through, but if West isn't a masterpiece, it's the next best thing to one.

Belle and Sebastian - "Dog on Wheels" ep

Their first ep - really basically just Stuart Murdoch and Stuart David (though Mick Cooke does bring his trumpet to the title track). It seemed the right time to finally buy this; lately, I've been listening to B&S a lot again, especially Sinister and Arab Strap; and very charming it is, simple and under-adorned, and lightly touched by that always lightly felt magic. Title track, an early version of "The State I Am In", the mildly rocky "String Bean Jean" and, lastly, "Belle & Sebastian" itself (which I hadn't heard before). Sweet.

New Buffalo - "About Last Night" ep

I think this was her debut - it was definitely before The Last Beautiful Day, anyway. And, like that other, it twinkles and shimmers and is oh so fine.

"Astralwerks: Fallwerks 2006"

A record label comp - Beth Orton, Sparklehorse, Phoenix, Placebo, Hot Chip and others. The only song that's particularly caught my ear is the Radio 4 cut, "Packing Things Up On The Scene", in which they get their rock on a lot more than I'd have imagined given the other stuff of theirs that I've heard.

St Jerome's Laneway Festival, Saturday 24 February

Once again, the laneway festival comes through with a great day. I went with Vanessa this year, and we linked up with David and Justine (and, with them for a while, Wendy L) pretty quickly. As usual, lots of familiar faces - hooked up for a while with a girl I'd met in passing at the Australia Day croquet picnic (Ellie [sp?] - a friend of Michelle's, I think), briefly touched base with Vera and waved at an ex-seasonal clerk (one Cassidy) from the toilet queue, etc. Crowd colourful and friendly - there was a lot of smiling happening. Taking public transport to and fro was a good move as it allowed me to drink which, it has to be said, definitely improved the experience.

The first two bands I saw, I'd both seen in the past, supporting others. Love of Diagrams (who curtain-raised for either Interpol or Pretty Girls Make Graves when I saw them a few years back - I can't recall which) were, as I'd remembered them to be, angular and rockin' and pretty darn good. I don't remember them having as much in the way of vocals as they did today, but memory can play funny tricks, and besides their sound may well have evolved; anyhow, the whole package has more than a bit of Sleater-Kinney (mid-period) to it now, which is no bad thing. Then Bumblebeez, who were heckled throughout when opening for Radiohead back in '03 [?], but here were quite endearing with their fun-oriented hip-hop/rock hybrid thing.

Saw the second half of the Archie Bronson Outfit set and enjoyed it - three bearded guys banging out hectic, vaguely asthmatic guitar rock. Then Camera Obscura, who were very nice though their sound didn't travel particularly well in the laneway setting (they did do a delightful "Let's Get Out of the Country") - I always feel as if I should listen to them properly, and seeing their show hasn't pushed me particularly in either direction.

Only caught the middle part and some of the end of Love Is All, which is kind of a shame because, based on what I did hear of it, their set was one of the highlights of the day. I haven't retained a strong impression of what the band actually sounded like (there was a saxophone and a girl singer, neither of which I'd expected) but they were darn good.

After that, Youth Group and the Sleepy Jackson, both of which were loved by the crowd but neither of which did particularly much for me - the former had a few decent songs but seemed a bit middle-of-the road, and while the latter definitely knew how to sell what they had, I still found their music a bit underwhelming.

Then came the Walkmen, who were good and, with "The Rat" produced one of only about three songs that got some serious crowd singalong happening (the others being "Forever Young" and "Young Folks"). When listening to their albums, I'm always struck by the scratchiness of the band's sound, which comes not just from the singer's voice but from everything else as well, and I've sometimes wondered whether it was a production thing or just a music thing (I've also wondered whether I'd find their music more satisfying if they had a fuller sound going, though possibly it would lose some of the urgent edginess in the process)...anyway, in light of that, it was interesting that the same wavery-ness was shot through their live set, producing a similar response from me. But they rocked pretty hard and yeah, theirs was probably my favourite set of the day.

Riding the good energy, next up was Peter, Bjorn & John, who were pretty good, but I didn't get much of a sense as to what they were really about (a bit of pop, a bit of rock and plenty of melody, but it was all kinda muffled). After that, went upstairs to see a bit of Ground Components (who were shambolic and rough-edged and exciting (and, in the case of the singer, skinny and topless)) but by then was feeling that it was time to move on, and so I did.

>> 2005
>> 2006

Scarlett Thomas - The End of Mr Y

It was somewhere between the sex scene on the glass table and the bit where Apollo Smintheus, eight foot tall mouse god, starts running around shooting people with his bow and arrows, that I decided that Scarlett Thomas was my new literary crush...said mouse god resides in the Troposphere, a metaphorical/imaginative/real space accessible by imbing a particular homeopathic concoction and then staring hard at a big black dot drawn on a piece of paper or cardboard; it's a realm in which all consciousness is connected, natch, and it's possible to 'surf' other peoples' minds through being and time.

Some of the many things which make The End of Mr Y so grand:
* The way that it connects up so many theorists and ideas in ways that I've done myself, and wraps them all up in a novel-narrative that's both crazy and compelling, and also ultimately satisfying - Heidegger-Derrida-language-consciousness-absence-being-phenomenology-postmodernism (with more fleeting references to, amongst others, Lacan and Poe) - and then some...the 'then some' including Baudrillard (who I've always vaguely disrespected and expected to be a rather facile thinker - but who I've never actually read and now think perhaps I should), Samuel Butler, and plenty of quantum physics.
* The wonderfully effective use made of the first person present tense voice - ideal for a phenomenological representation and conducive to both a clean postmodern flatness and lack of affect, and to an affecting and striking immediacy, according to what's most appropriate at any particular point.
* The unforced integration of contemporary technology - ipods, email, blogs, web searching. I read an article a while back which commented that people hadn't really worked out how to write about technology and its impacts yet (in fictional settings), which I thought was true as far as fiction in which said technology isn't front and centre goes (by contrast to, say, cyberpunk etc which is deliberately and centrally concerned with mapping out such impacts and relations), but Thomas does it as well as anyone.
* And, relatedly, the way that Thomas's voice is thoroughly of the now - hip, cynical, casually erudite, frequently profane - but still feels somehow classically literary.

Actually, as a novel, The End of Mr Y has plenty of flaws. But I forgive those flaws easily for, well, all of the above reasons and plenty more.

"Why Refugee Law Still Matters" (James Hathaway - 25th Allen Hope Southey Memorial Lecture)