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)