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.