Wieland Schmied - Giorgio de Chirico: The Endless Journey

De Chirico was a kind of proto-Surrealist, his key work done in the early 20th century, a major influence on Max Ernst as well as on those who came after him. I'm much more drawn to his mysterious, dream-like plaza scenes ("The Red Tower" & "Mystery and Melancholy of a Street"):


than to the mannequin ("manichino") ones (though, as "The Disquieting Muses" evidences, they're not mutually exclusive categories):


I haven't delved deeply into his work (this book is the first substantial collection I've read/looked at), but I get the impression that de Chirico's paintings were characterised by a number of repeated ramifying motifs and life-long preoccupations...much is made here of his friendship with the poet Apollinaire and the way in which he was influenced by classical mythology, particularly the figures of Ulysses and Orpheus.

The Watson Twins - Southern Manners

This is very nice (much better than the Jenny Lewis & the Watson Twins stuff I've heard, by the way) - a melding of folk, country, general americana and a bit of an inoffensive easy-listening strain (best song "High School" would have fit right in on the Virgin Suicides soundtrack, which I've actually been listening to a bit lately, goodness knows why). Hem is the closest analogy I can think of, with touches of the Cowboy Junkies, Mazzy Star (sans electric guitar) and the Sundays stirred in...

Andrew McClelland @ Alley Bar, Friday 20 April

Auspicious beginning when I arrived just after 8pm to meet Swee Leng as planned and found her outside talking to the night's entertainment (they slightly know each other) who guaranteed me a good time (I didn't tell him that I've never paid to see comedy before and was possibly a bit of a sceptic). Still, his promise was fulfilled - I enjoyed the show, based around the theme of "Andrew McClelland's somewhat ambitious plan to make the world a better place" (or words to that effect). Much laughing. Particularly enjoyed the bit where the girl sitting next to me (she looked vaguely familiar, as if we might have met at a party long ago, or perhaps clerked together or something) totally lost it for several minutes. McClelland has a very endearing presence - he's like a giant puppy dog, quite physical and plenty energetic, and his material is good too (though a lot of the charm's in the delivery). It wasn't profound and nor was it meant to be, but it struck me as very solid and well done.

Lisa Miller @ Readings, Friday 20 April

Had some spare time between knocking off work and going to Andy McClelland so sauntered up to Readings in Carlton to see Lisa Miller's album launch - half a dozen songs or so, some old, some new. It was nice.

Frank Miller and Lynn Varley - 300

About what I expected after seeing the film, which is very faithful to the novel. Enjoyed the film more, actually - probably that medium lends itself more to this kind of story-telling. Interesting that some of the scenes in the film which I'd thought were very 'graphic novel-y' (eg, the slowed down fight sequences in which the Spartans swivel and pirouette through opponents) in a "I can imagine how these were drawn in panels" way actually don't appear in the novel at all.

Wilco @ the Palais, Wednesday 18 April

Solid show; I'm glad I went, and it was sure fun to see Wilco live. Still, three main reasons why I'm not more enthusiastic about it:

1. Having listened to Kicking Television as much as I have, I was already familiar with a lot of their live tricks (eg, the ramping-up of "Handshake Drugs"), and most of the old songs they played were off that set. The new ones sounded good, though - quite rocky, with some flourishes.

2. The Palais is a nice venue but I'm not really used to going to shows where the act is so far away and so small. It was like watching the Wilco toys. It was cute the way Jeff Tweedy was all bow-legged the whole time, or at least that's what he looked like from on high (he also has an endearing stage presence and banter).

3. They didn't really play any of my favourite favourite songs, though "A Shot In The Arm" got a run and was the highlight for mine.

Support act was Glenn Richards from Augie March, who played mostly (but, I think, not all) Augie March stuff - didn't excite me.

(w/ David)

Tori Amos: Video Collection - Fade To Red

Watching this was a real trip down memory lane, back to the days when I adored Tori. I think that even then I was aware of and a bit put off by her sheer self-absorption, and that's something which comes through very clearly in these videos, none of which I'd seen before except "Spark" (downloaded back in the time when that was still unusual) and "Crucify" (caught on rage once, years ago) - she is everywhere in them, front and centre, as dramatic (histrionic) as you could wish. I was a bit disappointed that the videos don't particularly reflect the colour schemes of the album covers - I tend to do this a lot in general, but with Tori albums in particular (and especially venus and choirgirl) I very much think of the music in the same tones as the colours of their respective covers.

"Songs from Julian"

A mix cd from Julian F; no immediately apparent theme (except maybe a small NZ slant) but lots of excellent music, most of it by artists previously unfamiliar to me.

The song most likely to be stuck in my head is "Death and the Maiden" by the Verlaines, and particularly the sung-chanted refrain: "Verlaine, Verlaine, Verlaine, Verlaine, Verlaine, Verlaine, Verlaine, Verlaine...". I would guess that they're from the early 80s; presumably they're named after Paul rather than Tom Verlaine (if either) but they do sound a bit like Television. Hella catchy either way. Also particularly enjoy "The Best Ever Death Metal Band out of Denton" by the Mountain Goats (I laughed out loud at the "hail hell" bit the first time I heard it, and it's got a heck of a great tune - I oughta listen to more of this guy's stuff), the stately folk/country-tinged low-key rockism of "Body's in Trouble" by Mary Margaret O'Hara and the heart-struck drama of "Sparrow Falls" by Woven Hand (which must surely be the guy from 16 Horsepower and is as good as anything on Secret South).

Other pleasing things about the mix:
* The closing song, "Infiltration", is by Sam Phillips, and is just the kind of thing I like - that sort of country-infused adult-oriented singer-songwriter stuff. But there's also a story about Sam Phillips in particular...see, somewhere along the line the Stealing Beauty soundtrack became a bit of a key record for me, carrying a great deal of emotional/affective freight (dreamy, airy, a bit melancholy but also very light - about exactly what you'd expect, given the music) given that I've neither seen the film nor ever had any direct external association formed with the soundtrack, and the two songs which close it are the key tracks in that respect: "You Won't Fall" by Lori Carson - and "I Need Love" by Sam Phillips.
* Whereas by contrast, "Dead Dogs Two" by Clouddead is normally precisely the kind of thing I would dislike, from the title to the self-consciously experimental and slightly tinny sound, but it's completely ace.
* Roxy Music! "In Every Dream Home A Heartache" is overblown and grand. hee hee.
* The singer in Van Der Graaf Generator sounds an awful lot like Bowie.
* "Run Run Run" by Goldenhorse is neat, and not really what I would've expected of the band based on their entry on the She Will Have Her Way set - equal parts 80s post-punk, 90s indie-pop and general post-millennial indie.

Jasper Fforde - Lost in a Good Book

Was inspired to read this despite my only lukewarm positive response to The Eyre Affair after a conversation with one Buffy at T's party the other week, during which I (a) learned the true ending of the 'real world' Jane Eyre and (b) was told again that they improve after the first. Glad I did, too - Lost in a Good Book is lighter and more fun than the first in the series. Thursday Next is an engaging central protagonist and it's nice to see recurring supporting characters appear (and those characters are generally treated fondly); in this one, too, particularly enjoyed the Kafka pastiche.

Jodi Picoult - My Sister's Keeper

Picoult's not an author that I'd ever have been likely to read without one of her books being foisted on me - I've not (and still don't) know much about her, but my vague impression has always been that she's a kind of writer for the middle-brow and for women (this is me at my most open-minded and unsnobby, évidemment) - though the vagueness of that impression is becoming obvious as I try to specify it right now - and unlikely to do much for me. But having one of her books foisted on me is exactly what happened a while back, thanks to Trudy from MS, and having read My Sister's Keeper, I find that (1) my preconceptions about the content of Picoult's work were entirely accurate and (2) my preconceptions about their effect were, as it turns out, a bit off the mark, 'cause while you could never mistake this novel for high literature, it has a lot going for it and worked for me nonetheless.

The premise is this: Kate is born with leukemia, of a form that can only be staved off by frequent transfusions - and, sometimes, more invasive transplantive surgeries - from a very close match. Neither her parents nor her elder brother is close enough; her parents, confronting this battle for their daughter's life, decide to have another child who will (through a bit of scientific engineering) be a suitable match...so what happens when that second daughter, Anna, begins to grow up (she's 13, I think) and wants to make her own decisions about her body, after a childhood of being subject to constant discomfort and pain, both physical and emotional?

The short chapters are told from a range of alternating points of view in the first person present tense, which works well: those of Anna; each of the parents (Brian and Sara (that latter sometimes from a few years back, to provide the back story and fill in why she made some of the choices she did)); Anna and Kate's troubled brother Jesse; Campbell, the lawyer who retained by Anna on a pro bono basis; and Julia, the court-appointed guardian ad litem.

For me, the main pull of My Sister's Keeper is the emotional dimension rather than the 'ideas' aspect - Picoult is very good at involving the reader, at showing multiple sides to a story, and she works the situation for all the pathos that it's worth. There were times when I felt that I was being manipulated, but those tended to be the points at which there was some kind of actual emotional response, so I didn't mind.

Dixie Chicks - Fly

Their well-publicised spat with US country music radio notwithstanding, one of the most immediately obvious things about the Dixie Chicks' most recent album was its fm radio-friendly sheen. Fly, by contrast, while hardly rough around the edges, allows itself more spaces and more unevenness, and is a better album for it; nice to hear the lap steel and dobro more prominently too. First half is noticeably stronger than the second, songs like "Cowboy Take Me Away" and "Goodbye Earl" sticking in the head. They don't take themselves too seriously, either - there are plenty of good-time songs and yee-haw moments, none of them grating.

So Frenchy So Chic - 2005 & 2007

Bec P set me up with these, seemingly mainly for the sharin'. The 2005 set has struck me more than the '07 one - the songs on it seem much more distinct, not necessarily in the sense of being more differentiable from each other, but rather in that they tend to be more intrinsically memorable in their own rights. Anyhow, some favourites across the two sets:
* the two which kick off the 2005 disc, Helena's "Né Dans La Nature" and Keren Ann's "End Of May", both touched with shades of Francoise et al
* also the third on that disc, in a different vein, "Qui De Nous Deux" by M, which I've definitely heard before (one doesn't quickly forget that kind of crooning)
* the rainy-day moodiness (apt of course, given the title) of Daniel Darc's "La Pluie Qui Tombe"
* Fabienne Del Sol's take on "Laisse Tomber Les Filles"
* the skittery dream-brood of Mansfield TYA's "Pour Oublier Je Dors" (I really do wonder about the extent to which I'm taking my cues for these responses/descriptions from the titles of the songs)
* Rose's "La Liste"
* Dominique A's "Dans Un Camion" (another I've heard before)

Actually, I've heard bits of the 2005 one before. Hanging around with Sarah V - the only real live French person I've actually meaningfully known (I think) - one time, the subject of music came up, and it was one of the cds that she picked for listening in Basement Discs...if memory serves, she liked "Qui De Nous Deux" (that was probably where I previously heard it, actually) and also Paris Combo's "Baguée" and "Poêmes" by Les Hurlements De Léo, and I definitely recall the disgusted face she made when I said that I'd heard and liked "Laisse Tomber Les Filles" when it came on.

Bruce Springsteen - Born To Run

Thought it was about time I heard me some Springsteen beyond Born in the USA and the usual radio tracks; glad I did, for Born To Run is bloody magnificent. The key tracks are the epic soarers slap-bang in the middle of the record - "Backstreets" and "Born To Run" - but the whole album is utterly grand. It's rock and roll as celebration and aspiration, and it works from the word go.

The Devil's Backbone

Penny gave this a huge rap, so I went to see it on Sunday afternoon at ACMI. Enjoyed it - it's suitably ghostly, and the 'western' elements are well done too.

"You Don't Need Darkness To Do What You Think Is Right: New Geographic Music"

It had a Kevin Shields track I hadn't heard before ("Outro") and a Nagisa Ni Te track called "Me, on the Beach" which I thought might be a reference to "Mimi On The Beach" (having listened to it now, it doesn't seem to be), plus some Pastels, and it didn't seem to be a record label comp, so I was intrigued; it was going cheap, so I was sold (so to speak). It's a fairly quiet, dreamy set, hanging together well as a whole - that certain kind of indie that will never excite but possesses a quiet charm nonetheless.

Raymond E Feist - Magician, Silverthorn and A Darkness At Sethanon & Honoured Enemy (with William R Forstchen)

Have read Magician several times since first encounter in primary school (I actually own a copy); the other two in the series probably only once each prior to this time. Went through them quickly, but I don't think I'll be re-reading the series again any time soon - this time, they just seemed a bit bare (even the massive Magician, though that one least so) despite the epic, fate-of-worlds scope. I don't think that I've lost my taste for fantasy, but those tastes have changed and maybe I'm more demanding nowadays.

The other - Honoured Enemy is a full-length novel (though on the short side) and set as an outtake from the Riftwar (ie, during the event of Magician). It's quite fast-paced and narrower in its focus, and reasonably taut, but the writing suffers from the same flaws.

Trewin Copplestone - Modern Art Movements

An old book of my uncle's which has been lying around my room for years. Published in '62, revised in '67 (my paperback edition '72) - covers 20th century movements in what we traditionally think of as 'art' (ie, of the painted kind). No mention of abstract expressionism but I suppose there will always be quibbles with these kinds of survey works.

Accessible overview commentary and plenty of full colour plates - a good 'un and not noticeably dated. (Though there is the question of whether there has been a substantial 'art movement' which could be placed in the same tradition/lineage as those in this book since it was published - Pop Art comes naturally to mind, but to me that seems more of a clean break (not to mention infinitely more shallow - which is kinda the point, but that doesn't mean I have to like it), and likewise with various streams that could fall under the umbrella of 'postmodern art').

Examples:

Fauvism
Matisse - The Green Stripe



Cubism
Gris - Still Life in Front of an Open Window



Expressionism
Munch - The Dance Of Life



Futurism
Boccioni - Electricity



De Stijl
Mondrian - Composition



Surrealism
Dali - Premonition Of Civil War

Gene Wolfe - Innocents Abroad

I remember that series of Wolfe's that I read a while back was good, and that plus the neat cover illustration (I later discovered that it's a Magritte - figures) was enough to get me to borrow this collection of his short stories. The inside of the dust jacket contains some rapturous praise from the Washington Post Book World, comparing him to Dickens, Proust, Kipling, Chesterton, Borges and Nabokov, before going on to nod at H G Wells, Jack Vance, H P Lovecraft and Damon Knight (who?), and I can see where this kind of enthusiasm comes from, even if I don't share it in full measure. Wolfe's a wonderfully intelligent craftsman of genre fiction - his stories start in unexpected places and twist even further away from what one would expect, but they're always true to themselves and always (perhaps like all the best fantasy and horror writing) seem like diffracted reflections of the familiar.

Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Have wanted to read this for some time now, and with much (albeit ambivalent) anticipation; as it turns out, I do like it - sure it's pretentious, but I think that Special Topics just about pulls off its central conceit (that is, its structuring in overtly literary terms, chapters named after famous works of literature &c), a success which owes something to the multi-faceted way in which Pessl develops that notion, something again to her ability to evoke a mood and a difficult-to-describe sense of depth, and perhaps still more to her commitment to not allowing those structuring ideas to obscure Character and Story within the novel.

Storywise, the most obvious reference point is The Secret History, from the introductory self-conscious musing on the narrator's own Life Story through the central motif of the eccentric group of college students orbiting around a charismatic lecturer via a death that is flagged in the opening pages and plenty of other parallels, and I'll make the comparison: Special Topics is not as good. But it's still an engaging, serious-minded and impressively conceived and executed, and surprisingly subtle thing of a novel and, I reckon, pretty much deserving of the raves.

New Buffalo - Somewhere, anywhere

Starry and lovely - this is very fine. Not as immediate as The Last Beautiful Day, but if anything even more affecting than that other.

The Illusionist

Jarrod wanted to see this because of the Philip Glass score and I was happy to go along because (a) I'm a drifter and (b) The Prestige was good and I like Edward Norton and don't mind a Glass score myself. Anyhow, it's not by any stretch of the imagination mind-blowing, but The Illusionist has a few tricks up its sleeve - the main things going for it are the blurry soft-focus effects and the quality acting of all four of the leads, Norton in particular.

300

I was keen to see this - I'm always up for a spectacle, and 300 seemed likely to fit the bill, not least because of the Frank Miller connection. It is a genuine spectacle, and I liked the hyper-realism (well, the hyper-everythingism, really) and the battle scenes...it's well done. I'd probably watch it again, just for the visuals and the spectacular battles, but it doesn't quite come together in the way that Sin City, say, did.

(w/ Sid)

New York Dolls, Phoenix, Jarvis Cocker and the Pixies @ "Best of V Festival", Sidney Myer Music Bowl, Wednesday 4 April

By happy arrangement, each of the acts playing here was better than the last, at least by my lights (the squealing teenage girls who basically totally lost it while Phoenix were on stage, say, may well have begged to differ). The New York Dolls were quite good albeit totally not my kind of thing - they were into what they were doing, anyway (trashy rock n roll - equally parts Van Halen and the Stooges), and didn't seem to mind the relative lack of audience at that point. Phoenix were okay as well - I'd only heard "Too Young" and a couple of others before, but it turned out that I'd gained a pretty fair idea of what they were about...slightly disco-y of-the-moment indie-rock with an eye to the mainstream. All of their songs kind of sounded the same and they were pretty Killers-esque in places, but you know, they were okay.

So anyway, between Phoenix and Jarvis Cocker, we met up with a friend of Nenad's (one Steve) who got us into the seated area in front, which was seriously something like a hundred times better. Hardly anyone was sitting down, with most folks standing near the front, but the rising 'bowl' arrangement of the stadium meant that anyone standing on any of the steps had a brilliant view from only a few metres away - it was grand. Jarvis, impossibly thin, was ace - put on a real show, complete with constant jerky 'dancing', karate kicks, wriggling around on the ground, and, at one point, an extended swing and hang from one of the giant speakers, plus plenty of witty banter between songs. And the music itself was tops too - I hadn't heard any of his solo stuff before, but it seemed very much like Different Class era Pulp (I've had "F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E." stuck in my head since the show, and many of the songs have stayed with me from that one hearing (the "black magic" one was cool, and of course the magnificent show-closing anthem "Cunts Are Still Running The World" (it may have a different title than those words of the chorus, but I doubt it)). Wonderful!

And, finally, the whole reason I'd gone along - the Pixies. And they were just great, pure and simple. Rattling through all of their famous songs ("Monkey Gone To Heaven" and "Wave Of Mutilation" thrown in very early on; "Here Comes Your Man" flood-lit with rainbow coloured lighting to go with the joy it brought somewhere in the middle; "Debaser" and "Where Is My Mind" nearer the end (and "Gigantic" to round off the encore)), and doing so with both a remarkable tightness and an air of loving every minute of what they were doing, it was an honest to goodness live music experience, borne upwards by the anticipation and appreciation of the crowd. Black Francis (hard to think of him in those terms, having been long accustomed to "Frank Black") sang and screamed just as he does on record, Kim Deal was just hella cool, and the four of them really seemed like a band; more than that, they really seemed like the Pixies. The sound was great, the guitars tearing away (though I'd somehow expected them to be rougher-sounding live), and I realised for the first time just what monsters of anthems some of their songs are (I've always thought that the production on Doolittle, the only of their records that I've listened to a lot, does the band no favours at all). I like the Pixies without ever having been fanatical about them, but their set the other night was really something else, both on its own terms and for the new life with which it's imbued their songbook and the band itself for me.

(w/ Nenad)

Black

An installation/performance (four actors in a confined central stage with audience sitting, standing or moving around and above them) presenting a kind of cut-up, non-narratival interpretation of the death of the "Black Dahlia". The space within which it takes place is significant (in more than one sense) and plays a constitutive role in the surrealistic, dream-like ebbs and flows (and occasional abrupt outbursts) of the actors' movements and dialogue; Black is a dramatised presentation of both the events it 'portrays' and the broader collective processes of imagining and reification of those events (and the forces and compulsions lying beneath what is seen or consciously known, making themselves felt only through their effects and in shadowy hints at the edges of awareness and vision). Interesting and compulsive - I liked it.

(w/ trang)

Peter Hartcher - "Bipolar Nation: How to Win the 2007 Election" (Quarterly Essay issue 25)

Didn't initially strike me as one of the most obviously incisive QEs that I've read, but on further reflection I think that the quality of analysis in Hartcher's piece is actually quite high, and that I may've been misled by the seeming familiarity of what he has to say - though the broad outlines of his argument aren't new, the particular way he wraps them together adds something. Takes the ideas of Australia as the "lucky country" and "frightened country" as orienting themes and looks at the strategies employed by Howard and Rudd to date, particularly in relation to national security and the economy. People have been talking a lot about this next federal election - more than I remember them doing about the last one - and me, well, I've been thinking that an awful lot may ride on who gets in, even more so than usual.

China Miéville - Un Lun Dun

Miéville's first foray into "childrens' literature", and very nicely done it is, too. Un Lun Dun has the weirdness of his other work, but it's less dark and more whimsical, and also less dense, all of which works well (not least given the book's intended audience). It doesn't have the darkness of the Borribles books or the creepy unnervingness of Coraline, say, though I think it has some affinities with both, but neither is what Miéville is shooting for here. One thing that the novel does have is an endless inventiveness - as always with him, there are countless images to savour which appear fully-formed in the mind's eye (not to mention the generous number of illustrations, drawn by Miéville himself, which appear throughout) and, in this one in particular, he really goes to town with verbal invention as well. The explorer with a birdcage containing a bird for a head (actually, the bird is the explorer, using a human torso and limbs as a vehicle), the super-strong diving suit-enclosed school of fish (named "Skool", of course), the heroic bus conductors (and buses with feet), the killer giraffes, the binja, the words-come-to-life ("utterlings"), the intelligent broken umbrellas ("unbrellas"), and Curdle the milk carton, to name just a few...

Stephen King - Night Shift

I've read these before - Night Shift is one of the collections of King's short stories. It's from earlyish in his career, and the stories are less developed than his later ones, but still very recognisably him.

The Best of McSweeney's volume 1 edited by Dave Eggers

Have been reading this on and off for the last few weeks, and have probably now read as much as I'm going to in the near future. Has its moments, but no real standouts ("The Republic of Marfa" by Sean Wilsey is my favourite). Noticeably more overtly 'experimental' than volume 2.

The Wrong Man

A bit too clever-clever and somewhat derivative of The Usual Suspects; distinctly offbeat in a way which is distracting and probably deliberately so; big cast for a film I'd never heard of before I watched it on dvd (Josh Hartnett, Bruce Willis, Ben Kingsley, Morgan Freeman, Lucy Liu). Enjoyable.

Air - Original motion picture score for "The Virgin Suicides"

Airy and nice, apt to and part of the film.

Update

A while between drinks here - my laptop gave up the ghost and I've not yet got around to sorting out a new one, and the frustrations of work have been, well, frustrating. Still and anyway, here goes.