"Grace" (MTC)

The first in the 2009 MTC season, and not a bad one, though not one that overly impressed me either; it stages the playing out of the response of Grace, a committed atheist (though she disavows the label on the basis that it still presupposes the validity of theism, preferring 'naturalist'), to the news that her son intends to become a priest.

I'm not sure quite why I didn't like it as much as everyone else seemed to (no one seemed to love it, but the general response was pretty positive); at first, it struck me as overly programmatic, but some of the turns it took in the second half pretty much shook that off (though not completely so), and I didn't feel that the characters were too much mouthpieces for particular points of view (though they kind of were at points), nor that any particular agenda was being pushed upon me.

The main thing, I think, is that I found it a bit trite and kind of uninteresting - at a purely intellectual/abstract level, it didn't have anything especially profound to say (the early stages in particular, as some very familiar examples are laid out - the indeterminacy of legal concepts of truth, proof and doubt; the old 'blind watchmaker' argument and response; 'why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast'; made me wince), and at the level of investing abstract ideas with a specific/personal dimension and thereby illuminating them, which is really the province of the play (as opposed to other forms like the philosophical essay), there simply wasn't a strong enough thread to hold it all together (though to be fair, "Grace" does take the form, I think, of a conversation in openness, rather than seeking to run any particular line)...as to that latter, I mean that the play itself wasn't lacking a certain something that would have really brought it to life, or made it genuinely about life (though the actors were all solid - I don't think any blame could accrue to them for the failure).

A couple of personal resonances - Philip Larkin, my favourite poet in high school, and Ani Difranco's song "Untouchable Face", also a favourite during my school years, both feature prominently (indeed, the copy of Larkin's Collected Works that was used is the same edition as mine, green with the yellow and white text on the cover). Also, the juxtaposition of Grace's hardline rationalism with religious faith made me wonder for the first time about possible similarities between continental philosophy and religious belief - the one obviously far more rigorous and, for mine, more, plausible than the other, of course, but both founded on a rejection of any narrow (I would say, 'artificially narrow') understanding of concepts like 'knowledge', 'proof' and 'truth'.

* * *

[Edit: As usual, Alison Croggon is spot on about this one (her blog is rather excellent).]

* * *

[part of an MTC subscription with Steph, Sunny & co]

Neil Young @ Myer Music Bowl, Wednesday 28 January

Well, whatever 'it' is, Neil still has it. It was a stinking hot day (43 degrees) which hadn't cooled much by the time he was on in the Bowl - it had been even worse during My Morning Jacket's rather good but necessarily short opening set, which I arrived partway through - and I was a bit tired, having just arrived back in Melbourne fairly late the previous night (the timing of the end of the o/s trip actually having been dictated by my desire to catch this show), but none of that mattered once he started playing. He and his band sounded great, and my wish for plenty of real guitar action was answered from the outset; both the songs I knew and those that I didn't were great, and there wasn't a single flat spot. The clear highlight was the pulling out of the sprawling "Cortez the Killer", which is saying something given that he also did "The Needle and the Damage Done", as well as killer versions of "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" and "Words", among others (plus a respectful but reimagined "A Day In The Life" for an encore). Really great.

(w/ David + Justine)

Leona Naess - Comatised

"Charm Attack" is still a treat, a jangly, attitude-filled alt-pop jewel that can be listened to over and over, but the rest of the album is unmemorable - not generic exactly, but just not distinguished in particular.

China Miéville - The Scar

Airplane reading (along with starting Cyptonomicon) on the Vancouver-SF-HK-Melbourne return series of flights. It doesn't lose anything in the re-reading; there's a lot going on in Miéville's novels which is easy to miss on first (and even second) pass amidst the dizzying fecundity of his imagination. I do wonder what the next New Crobuzon (or related) book will take as its focus - it strikes me that all of the first three (this is the second, after Perdido Street Station and before Iron Council) have one particular endlessly moving built environment at their centre (here, the astonishing floating city, Armada), which I suppose stands in for (capitalist) society as a whole in his works' schemas [pl?].

(last time)

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

I've watched this before, though not particularly attentively - a tale of adventure on the high seas (add capitalisations as appropriate) during the Napoleonic wars. It's pretty good, and seems to make a genuine effort at veracity in its depiction of ship-board life, often diverting itself from the central pursuit of the Acheron to dwell on its characters, which somewhat disrupts the flow of the action but probably makes for a richer experience overall.

Appaloosa

Two gunslingers (Ed Harris, who also directs, and Viggo Mortensen), a girl (Renee Zellweger), a villain (Jeremy Irons) - the gunslingers are lanky, hard-bitten, taciturn; they're partners, and they travel from town to town upholding the law for pay; the girl (neither a whore nor a squaw, as one of the characters comments, though not exactly the faithful wife type either) makes her entry in a carriage and dressed in finery, and comes between the lawmen, though not in quite the way that one would expect; the villain is suitably villainous, smooth talking, quick on the draw and murderous...it's a western, alright. But it has some nice touches, particularly the subtle interactions between Harris and Mortensen and the occasional flashes of wry humour, often involving Harris's character's inability to recall the precise word that he wishes to use, and it's economically written and directed enough that it holds the attention the whole way through.

The Best of No Depression: Writing About American Music edited by Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock

No Depression is a magazine that I sometimes browse through, usually while listening to something at a listening station in Basement Discs in the city, but I've never read it enough to have gotten a feel for its style (as opposed to its subject matter, which is reasonably well-defined in a loose sort of way); this book is a collection of feature articles about particular artists which have previously appeared in the magazine's pages.

So I've read all the ones about those I know, and most of the ones about those I don't, and while they're well put together, for the most part they don't really make me want to go off and listen to the music in question - not that they have the opposite effect either, but it's just that they don't inspire. I think that maybe part of the problem for me is that the articles tend to focus more on the artists than on their music; of course the two can never be taken in isolation from each other, but the balance is skewed so far as my tastes go. That said, of course it's still fun to read about so many of my favourites - Lucinda, Gillian, Kasey, Buddy & Julie, Wilco and others.

Steven Erikson - Malazan Book of the Fallen books 1 to 8

[actually finished and wrote up these books in December, but didn't get around to posting]

--> Gardens of the Moon, Deadhouse Gates, Memories of Ice, House of Chains, Midnight Tides, The Bonehunters, Reaper's Gale & Toll the Hounds

This is remarkable epic fantasy - right up there with the Covenant and Song of Ice and Fire series as the best of its kind (probably just slightly shaded by both of those, but not by much, and only because of an occasional tendency to drag in its most 'big picture' moments). Indeed, it has much in common with that latter in its grittiness, sprawling multiple storylines combining action, politics and character drama, and penchant for spectacular and gruesome set piece battle scenes, not to mention a tendency to subject its major characters (of whom there are many) to dramatic reversals in fortune and a willingness to kill some of them off from time to time (not always, admittedly, permanently); that said, magic plays a big role in the Malazan series, as do gods and the various other supernally powerful figures who move through its pages, though the sections in which they figure, while integral to the plot and underlying structure of the series and its individual books, tend to be weaker and less gripping than the more grounded, military/campaign focused parts.

Gardens of the Moon is an auspicious beginning, but the series really gripped me from its second book, Deadhouse Gates, its backbone provided by the Chain of Dogs and Coltaine's doomed march, woven through with dozens of dark fates and struggles and drenched in blood. From there, it has an impressively wide canvass, ranging across continents (and worlds) and back and forth through time, often introducing characters in one book, only to backtrack much later to fill their stories in in considerable detail (the Toblakai/Karsa Orlong is the most obvious of those), now one character (or set of characters), now another assuming a central role, and others recurring over and over at longer intervals.

Each of the individual books is massive, and sees an awful lot happen; taken as a whole, they're quite staggering. They're hugely readable, too, despite Erikson's habit of frequently introducing a whole bunch of new characters in an entirely new setting, with no (initial/apparent) overlap with those who are already known - most notably in Midnight Tides, when the Tiste Edur take centre stage (also, if memory serves, the one where humour enters the series for the first time, mainly by way of Tehol Beddict and Bugg). Seriously, seriously good.

Haruki Murakami - Underground

This is the book which compiles a series of interviews that Murakami conducted with those affected by the Tokyo subway sarin release by the Aum cult in 1995, along with some reflections of his own about the event and what it suggests about the Japanese psyche.

The first part is made up of the testimonies of victims of the attack, along with those of two of the doctors who were involved, with the part divided into sections according to the different train lines on which sarin was released, each section introduced by a brief description of the two Aum members who released the sarin on that line - for these, Murakami keeps very much in the background, leaving the interviewees to speak for themselves and recording very few, if any, of the questions that he posed during the interviews. It's striking how similar many of the accounts are, from the daily routines revealed in them to the responses to the attack; although their recollections of the details vary, the broad outlines are very consistently recounted, including the relative ineffectuality of the emergency response system (at least at an overall coordinated level), and an interesting snapshot of Japanese life emerges. That part ends with a short essay by Murakami entitled 'Blind Nightmare: Where Are We Japanese Going?', reflecting on the experience of conducting the interviews and on the attack and aftermath themselves.

I found the second part even more interesting. It contains Murakami's interviews with a number of current and former cult members, and the stories of how they came to join Aum are a fascinating window into the problems faced by the disaffected and misfits in Japanese society, including some who outwardly appear to be completely contented and successful; Murakami himself reflects on this in the preface and afterword to the part. It comes through very clearly that, while those interviewed disavowed or condemned the attacks, nearly all still hold to the underlying tenets of the cult (and its Buddhist underpinnings) and regard them as valuable; one thread running through the entire book, which Murakami makes quite explicit, pertains to the absence or lack in contemporary Japanese society which can give rise to such a space or need in people, and the possibility of any number of recurrences in the future.

Guy Gavriel Kay - The Summer Tree & The Wandering Fire

I suppose it's inherent in the nature of fantasy literature that it requires a certain suspension of disbelief, a suspension which, while it must always be willing in some sense, is positively demanded by the best examples of the genre. Still, the suspension will hold only for so long as the work itself doesn't break the spell, and the major failing of the otherwise excellent first two books in Kay's 'Fionavar' trilogy us that it's difficult to believe that the five figures from 'our' world who are drawn into the events in Fionavar can so quickly assume the heroic capabilities and roles that they do (particularly Dave, a basketball-playing law student who somehow becomes a great battleaxe-wielding warrior in the space of pages); the reasons for their willingness to just drop everything and go along with Loren and Matt in the first place are also not particularly well fleshed out. That said, those are more in the way of teething problems than anything else, and once the books get going, they're really rather good, if just a bit less detailed/panoramic than I tend to prefer.

Woven Hand @ Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, Tuesday 20 January

This was a good show, and the heaviest that I've been to for as long as I can remember. To begin with, David Eugene Edwards is one intense dude - on stage, when he's not glaring out at the audience with eyes narrowed, his eyes tend to be rolled back in his head and/or his face contorted like a man possessed. He sings like one possessed, too - there are shades of both Jim Morrison and Ian Curtis in his deep, resounding voice. Live, Woven Hand are a three piece - Edwards, a cracking drummer, and a guitarist who loses nothing by comparison in either volume or urgency - and they create an unholy racket (though 'unholy' is, of course, a misnomer, given the strong spiritual/old testament current running through their music). It was very loud, and many of the songs were just two-minute blasts - there wasn't a lot of discernible melody, though there was a surprising amount of riffage - but it was powerful stuff...

Support act-wise, I arrived halfway through the first, Holy Ghost, who did a kind of punky blues thing, their lead singer (skinny as) I think copping some moves from Nick Cave (in his younger, more piss-and-blood days) both musically and physically - they were okay. The second, a Brooklyn band called Silver Summit, impressed me - they were kind of like a swampier, more textured (even a bit psychedelic in places), and more eastern-influenced Mira (nb: not Mirah), and not a world away from a certain end of the 4ad roster.

Vivre sa vie

Yet another Godard, and Anna Karina again (his wife at the time, I think). This one was at a theatre called the 'Red Vic' - a 'worked owned and operated movie house' here in San Francisco - and features AK as a penurious young woman in Paris who slides into prostitution. It's told in twelve scenes, each introduced by a scene card which summarises (and in some cases illuminates) what is to come, and involves periods of silence, unexpected outbreaks of music (one of which is accompanied by dancing), and one explicitly philosophical conversation (in which a stranger, 'l'inconnu', expounds on Liebniz and on how German philosophers showed that it is necessary to take life as it is, with all of its imperfections and lumps, rather than seeking an impossible perfection). Fittingly, given its subject matter, it offers relatively few flights of whimsy 'within' the film, and stylistically it's somewhat more restrained than some of the other JLGs that I've seen in the last few months, but it's still recognisably one of his, and it has a kind of, I don't know, aesthetic and anti-sentimental (anti-kitsch?) toughness that makes one think, 'Yes. Yes, this is a real movie.'

L D Beghtol - 69 Love Songs

One of the 33 1/3 series on landmark pop albums; possibly the only one written by a member of the band that recorded the album in question, and certainly the first in the series that I've read. (As attractive as the books are in many ways - and deal though they do with many of my favourites - I've always preferred not to know too much about the circumstances in which the music that I like was recorded, and generally don't find it rewarding to read others' exegeses or blow-by-blow accounts of the songs themselves.)

The first part is comprised of an indiosyncratic glossary of terms used in 69 Love Songs; the second is a track by track, including various technical information and comments by band members and interested others. All up, it has much of the tone and feel of the album(s) - arch, erudite, amused, engaging - and sheds considerable light on the music without, happily, giving anything essential away.

Lucinda Williams - Little Honey

It oughtn't be surprising that Little Honey is a very solid, consistent album, rich in expressive musicality - this is Lucinda Williams we're talking about, after all. And yet, it has come as something of a surprise, and it's taken me months to really listen to the album, and I think that both are because, for all of its worthiness, it, like West before it, lacks the fluency and lightness that characterised the albums in her great mid-career run, Lucinda Williams, Sweet Old World and, especially, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, and which still touched Essence even if to a lesser extent. She's older now, of course, and doing something different - something closer to blues, and to real, earthy rock and roll - but it doesn't speak to me as much as her older stuff did (and still does).

Final Fantasy - He Poos Clouds

It's impressive that an album as quirky and experimental as this can at the same time provide plenty of genuine pop thrills, both on early and repeated listens, but that's just what it does. The violin gives it an unusual sound and texture, but it's just as much the songs' unconventional structures and melodies which set He Poos Clouds aside. I find it very pleasing - delicate, gentle, challenging, memorable.

(the show)

Peter Carey - Oscar and Lucinda

I've intended to read this for a while now, having been unsure about whether I'd read it before (turns out that I hadn't), and it was worth the anticipation. The cliche about feeling oneself in safe hands from the beginning rings true here - Carey's prose has a casually elegant storyteller's rhythm and tone from the first page; the tone is sustained throughout and it, along with the shortish chapterlets in which Oscar and Lucinda is written, does much to send one flying through what is a very readable novel...really, though, much more of its success stems from the story it tells, and its two memorable central characters.

I didn't particularly identify with either Oscar or Lucinda, but I was definitely rooting for both of them. They're sympathetic - intensely, poignantly so - by virtue of the access to their inner lives which we have (a similar trick is worked with several of the other characters) but at the same time they're painted in a way that makes it clear how each becomes and is so thoroughly unsuited to the society in which they find themselves. As a character study, it's rich; as a historical fiction, immersive; as a love story, unorthodox and believable; as a novel, at times earthy but filled with unaffectedly lyrical writing and glittering images for the mind's eye, it's wonderful.

Rolf G Renner - Edward Hopper: Transformation of the Real

One of the Taschen series of black-spined short to medium length artist monographs, this book's underlying theme is summed up near its end: 'Realistic though they may seem, Edward Hopper's paintings are not mere representations of supposed reality.' Renner does a good job of showing how those layers are encoded in Hopper's work, accounting for the painter's characteristic use of colour, shade, framing and perspective in those terms - and, more importantly, tying them into the peculiar effect and mood generated by Hopper's best paintings.

Renner is particularly strong on highlighting the connections and continuities between the different phases and subjects of Hopper's work, tying his often luminous and apparently more simple rural scenes satisfyingly to his more famous city tableaux ("Nighthawks", "Chop Suey", etc). I visited the Whitney Museum while partway through, too, and it was great to be able to see many of the actual paintings discussed and reproduced in the book, giving me a far richer appreciation of what they were about.

"The Sweet Hereafter" OST

This is a really nice soundtrack, and very apt to the film, which which it's closely entwined. The songs on which Sarah Polley sings (I'm not sure if she also wrote any of them; it turns out that there's no Jane Siberry, but one of the songs was written by her) convey the same mood and are in the same vein as the instrumental pieces - pretty, plaintive, simple, gently swelling. Polley's not an especially vivid singer, but the music lingers nonetheless, as does the haunting main theme, frequently reiterated, of the instrumental score.

"Hedda Gabler" @ American Airlines Theatre, NYC, Tuesday 13 January 2009

To a large extent, "Hedda Gabler" stands or falls by the performance of its lead actress, and by that measure, this was a spectacular success - Mary-Louise Parker is predictably brilliant, convincing us that someone as manipulative, sharp-tongued, stand-offish and at times even shrewish as Ibsen's anti-heroine does indeed have the power to captivate the men around her, and the intellectual and emotional depths and restlessness, that the play demands she possess, and also bringing us to care about what end she will meet by play's end despite her many unsympathetic traits...so, for that alone, I enjoyed this one a lot, even though the pacing seemed just slightly off, so that the dramatic arc of the play seemed to stutter at points instead of building, as I think it was intended to, to a shattering close. (A couple of bonuses: Peter Stormare as the curiously mannered but strangely menacing Judge Brack, and the evocative music written by PJ Harvey.)

Comparing this and "All My Sons" to what I've seen of Australian theatre, and particularly the MTC (a closer equivalent than most of what goes on at the Malthouse or elsewhere in Melbourne), what sets the Broadway productions apart is, I think, the calibre of the casts - those that I've seen have included big names, but they've shown serious acting chops, too, and the 'personality' of the actors hasn't seemed to get in the way at all of the characters they've been playing.

Made in U.S.A.

This is currently screening on limited engagement (one cinema - two weeks only) in NY, and I didn't want to miss the chance to see a Godard on the big screen - and in colour, too! As usual with the director, everything's up for grabs, but particularly the 'cinematic' nature of the film itself - this is the most overtly metacinematic of his films that I've seen. It's based on a Donald Westlake novel, so the genre is 'thriller', with Anna Karina trying to get to the bottom of a possible politicial conspiracy that has seen her former lover Richard killed in Atlantic City, but its stop-start rhythms, repetitions, and excisions of critical parts (as well as irrelevant details - Richard's surname is drowned out by a ringing telephone, an overhead plane, or something else, every time it's spoken...presumably it was in homage to this that Tarantino did something similar in Kill Bill), it's calculated to frustrate any ordinary narrative drive or expectation. It's a delight; the dialogue in this one is particularly good.

The Magnetic Fields - Distortion

What is it? It's a Magnetic Fields record with distortion, and that's exactly what it sounds like - and, happily, one for which Stephin Merritt obviously had his mojo while he was writing the songs to go on it. Despite the (relatively light) distortion which is variously wrapped around the guitar, percussion or vocal lines of its songs, Distortion is a very concise album, and the outlines of each song come through clearly (interestingly, there seems to be a higher proportion of female vocals than usual). All of the Fields' hallmarks are there, particularly the literate pop-ness and that characteristic mix of the sprightly, the grandiose and the lugubrious (another way of telling that one is listening to a Magnetic Fields album: one of its catchiest songs is called "Zombie Boy" - and that's that song's chorus, too).

"All My Sons" @ Schoenfeld Theatre, NYC, Wednesday 7 January

Very impressive, this. Miller's play is a study in tautness - there isn't a wasted line, and it feels far shorter than it is - and it's well served by this staging. It's the oldies who really dazzled - Dianne Wiest was completely compelling, and John Lithgow not much shaded by her. They inhabit their characters while bringing them to life through gestures small and large, and the sense of forgetting that I was watching a play came most frequently when one or both of them held central focus on the stage. But Katie Holmes was extremely good too (also, much taller than you probably imagine), including on the dramatic high points required of her, and Patrick Wilson's (who I recently saw in Hard Candy) performance, while a touch uneven I thought, was also very good. (Needless to say, it gave me a kick to be sitting just a few metres away from all of them - I had a pretty sweet seat, just a few rows from the stage.)

All four are excellent when it comes to modulating their characters, rendering them at once sympathetic and flawed in ways which feel real rather than staged, so that the unfolding of events and unveiling of layers of personality feel both natural and inevitable (though that also owes much to Miller's craft in having seeded the hints of what's to come from early on). "All My Sons" strikes me as a very moral play - I don't think it's unfair to say that the play is, above all else, 'about' responsibility for one's actions and beliefs - and here, that aspect of it was fully brought ought and allowed to play out...it really was good stuff.

The Spirit

A disappointment, particularly given Frank Miller's involvement. Endearingly offbeat in some ways (Scarlett's turn is the best thing about the film), but with no real sense of tension or darkness despite the atmospheric visual palette from which it's painted.

Blue Man Group @ Astor Place Theatre, NYC, Saturday 3 January

I hadn't particularly planned on catching this, but when I washed up across the road from their theatre one evening, I didn't feel I had any choice but to buy a ticket for the next night's show. From Arrested Development, I knew that it'd be three bald guys covered in blue paint playing drum, but the show also takes in a wide range of performance theatre, visual projections, music and audience participation (including rolls and rolls of toilet paper dropping from the ceiling) - a kind of postmodern dada experience, though its absurdist tendencies veer more towards the simply humoroous than the genuinely thought-provoking. Enjoyed it.

Blonde Redhead @ Terminal 5, NYC, 31 December 2008

It's not stretching the point to say that "23" was the one track that most sounds like 2008 to me - there's no song that I listened to more, nor any which took on as much significance, over the 12 months just gone - and I can't imagine a better way for the year to have been rung out and the new one welcomed than with Blonde Redhead playing it at midnight last night (it's 1.45pm on 1 January, local time, as I write this), vivid and loud and clangorous, like the whole of the show that had come before it, with confetti from above still glittering on the crowd's heads and clothing. It was an obvious one for them to pick - from their entire, lengthy back catalogue, it's almost certain the most swooningly straight-ahead surge - but that didn't make it any less right.

This was how I chose to spend my new year's eve - alone in a crowd in NYC, at this concert - and it felt like the right thing to have done, for all of the minor inconveniences that it entailed (getting lost on the way in an unfamiliar city, navigating massive crowds and police lines, freezing half to death, trying to keep my footing on the roads made slippery by the sludgy snowfalls of earlier in the day). They were dazzling, kicking off with "Dr Strangeluv" and, after an initial run of several 23 cuts, also digging into Misery is a Butterfly and Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons which produced a couple of the show's highlights (most notably the ever epic "In Particular"). Everything was loud and wonderful. That said, it was odd - the whole of the concert was somehow less than the sum of its parts...while nearly every song was amazing, the overall experience was merely great; I couldn't put my finger on why. Still, all in all, pretty great.

Twilight

Yes! Thanks to KB, I had a pretty good idea of what I was in for with Twilight, and it delivered - it's hyper-dramatic, impossibly teen-romantic, drenched in atmosphere - and it doesn't falter at any point...it held me in its world the whole time (this even when, at points, I couldn't help smiling at how very it was), and it's not a world that I at all mind visiting. Bring it.