The Bourne Ultimatum

Unusually good conventional action fare. As with the other two instalments, probably the most striking thing about it is the emphatic, realistic-seeming nature of the fight scenes.

IMP audit

I've been doing the IMP thing for almost three years now; have flirted with the idea of dropping off, but am likely to keep it up for at least a while longer. Anyway, I've gotten behind in noting them here, and so here we are.

2007

Jan - "Sweet Soul / Disco: 70s - Party Down!"
Feb - "Jazz Convulsions"
Mar - "Score!"
Apr - "SF local mix"
May - "Dear Junior, I Miss You. <3 Senior (SXSW 2007)"
Jun - "Selecao"
Jul - "1977"
Aug - "Game Over"
Sep - "Mix tape"
Oct - "Space & Sci-Fi mix"
Nov - [untitled]
Dec - "Chillaxin"

2008

Jan - "Jan 2008: The Best of 2007"
Feb - "Love Gone Bad"
Mar - [untitled]
Apr - [untitled]
May - "if you were a kiss ... then i'd be a hug"
Jun - [untitled]
Jul - "Uncovered"
Aug - "Country Influenced"
Sep - "Jump Into Fall"
Oct - [untitled]
Nov - [untitled]
Dec - "Disco Villians & Christmas Songs"

2009

Jan - "Happy new year 2009"
Feb - "Cosmopolitan Living"
Mar - "20 Questions" (from Thomas in Glendale, AZ). I listened to this a few times without it making much of an impression; three which stood out (apart from the classic "Do You Realize??" are Andrew Bird's "Why?", PJ Harvey's "Is That All There Is?", and a song called "Where Is My Boy?" with vocals by Chris Martin (done by a dj called Faultline).
Apr - "Ah Spring! When A Young Man's Fancy Turns To Love"
May - [untitled] (from Andrew in Plymouth, MA). The maker's almost-closing salutation, "I hope your records drone sweetly on", says it all. A nice mix, kicking off with a Velvet Underground outtake and ending with Cat Power & Eddie Vedder's exquisite "Evolution", and taking in, among others, Yo La Tengo, Pale Saints, Slumber Party, Beach House, His Name Is Alive and Spacemen 3 in between.
Jun - "Some Old Favourites"
Jul - "Alternative Static"
Aug - "Songs that reference other songs/artists/bands/albums" (from Graham, unknown location). Given the theme, unsurprisingly a mixed bag in terms of musical styles, but mostly pop/rock and polite indie; some decent tunes.
Sep - "Purple Mounted" (from Steve in Alexandria, VA). I think there's kind of a horse/animal theme running through this one; coming with the territory is a strong contemporary country/folk tinge (Neko Case, My Morning Jacket, Bright Eyes, Bon Iver, etc).
Oct - [I remember this coming in the mail - it had a UK postmark - but I'm not sure where the cd itself has got to...no doubt it'll turn up]
Nov - [untitled] (from unknown, somewhere in Australia). A fun one, featuring lots of familiar songs that I like listening to (eg, Vampire Weekend's "I Stand Corrected", "Dry the Rain", the Futureheads' "Hounds of Love"), in which melody and rhythm are both prominent.

St Trinian's

Only so-so unfortunately - it was a premise that promised much, but the film doesn't quite hit the right tone (which should have been something like D.E.B.S. crossed with Mean Girls and then given a more anarchic twist). Still, snappy enough, and boasting enough interesting faces, for me not to regret it.

"Dusk To Dawn"

A mostly mellow mix cd from Kim, melding nocturnal modern rock (the Frames, Jeff Buckley), electronic/ambient (Mum, Mogwai), folkesque & singer-songwriter (Lou Rhodes, Scout Niblett) and noise (Sonic Youth, Einsturzende Neubauten), with some more unclassifiable stuff interspersed; as is always the case with mixes from good friends, it very much has the stamp of its maker, an impression strengthened by the presence of several familiar tracks and artists.

Avatar (3d)

Genuinely spectacular and quite immersive. Yes, the story is entirely predictable, the characters are flimsy, and the message (while worthy) is delivered with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but none of that is the point - the film looks amazing and delivers a thoroughgoing 'movie' experience. Very impressive.

(w/ M)

X-Men 2

Another very watchable instalment. But I don't know what it is about these films - they're enjoyable, and they have a certain style, but they just don't quite coalesce into anything more than the sum of their parts.

Stieg Larsson - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire & The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest

So this is what all the fuss is about! They really are compulsively readable, somehow despite Larsson's technical skills only being okay-to-good at best (the structuring, in particular, is often peculiar, particularly in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) - what pulls them through is the gripping story (with occasional but always effective action sequences) and, even more than that, the characters, and particularly the intriguing Lisbeth Salander. For mine, The Girl Who Played with Fire is the best of the three - it's certainly the most straight-ahead in terms of story, and benefits from having a particularly streamlined plot - but in many respects the three books read as an impressively unitary narrative, building up to the reveals and revelations in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest and unified by their laser-like focus on the ills of contemporary Swedish society.

George R R Martin - A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords & A Feast for Crows

Steven Erikson having made up my epic fantasy diet in recent months, on re-reading Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series (at any rate, as far into it as he's gotten - unfortunately, he lacks Erikson's ability to turn out weighty tomes on a more or less annual basis), it's striking how quickly he sets up many of the key character arcs and narrative threads at the very outset. This was the third time that I've read these books, and they were correspondingly less gripping and intense, but they're still immensely good.

Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apart regularly appears on those 'best book/novel ever' lists, but I've always conscientiously avoided it as one that I was unlikely to enjoy; having now read it for book club, I feel entirely justified in having done so. I simply didn't get anything out of it - nothing that I look for in literature was significantly present in it.

Fantastic Mr Fox

Tremendously pleasing. The idea of Wes Anderson doing this book in stop-motion animation, with all of the animal characters essentially acting (and dressed) like Wes Anderson characters, was always very appealing, and the end result is delightful. Oddly, it probably has the most consistent tone and recognisably 'normal' characters of any of his films to date - normal, at any rate, in the sense that the layers of emotional affect (both the characters' and our responses to them) are relatively naturalistic, insofar as that's a meaningful comment to make about a bunch of nattily-dressed talking animals. But above all else, Anderson's Fantastic Mr Fox is a lot of fun - very likeable, with just the right amounts of archness, slapstick, 60s music, conflict, feeling, and existential moments.

(w/ Kevin)

9

The best description for the surprisingly entertaining 9 that I've seen is 'stitch-punk' - stitched puppets with mechanical workings in a ruined post-apocalyptic landscape where the threats come from other, fully-mechanised constructs. The action is non-stop and takes place against an effectively rendered backdrop, and there are several good voice actors in the mix too; it's not a classic of its kind, but still plenty diverting.

(w/ M)

Akron/Family @ Corner Hotel, Thursday 10 December

I haven't listened to a lot of Akron/Family; live, at least, they're a kind of psychedelic folk band with some serious jam elements. It was a good show - the band exerted themselves to involve the crowd, and by the end had pretty much succeeded.

(w/ Julian F)

Where The Wild Things Are

Actually significantly better than I'd expected. The book wasn't actually a particularly large part of my childhood, but I was aware of this film a long way out because of the people who were attached to it and the initial promise that it could be something genuinely dark. But my expectations fell dramatically after hearing that it had been de-fanged to make it more palatable for children, so it was a very pleasant discovery to find that there is, in fact, a genuine wildness to the finished version. The sets and images are of the kind that is often used to evoke childhood imaginings - detailed and naturalistic sweep mixed with some surprisingly (and deliberately) rough edges. The wild things themselves are convincing, and genuinely menacing when required; overall, I think the film is a missed opportunity, but really not too bad.

(w/ M)

Komaneko

Not unpleasant but also not particularly interesting and somewhat over-cutesy series of animations.

(w/ family, M and Kevin - at ACMI)

Once Upon A Time In The West

Of course, a truly iconic film, and one that is still strikingly vivid today. The American mythos, which finds one of its clearest expressions in westerns of this era, strikes a chord with me, and Once Upon A Time In The West is probably the most archetypal western film that I've seen; as is usually the case with this kind of film, it leaves an impression both by drawing on the rich stock of imagery that already exists and by remaking those visual ideas anew, a sort of (re)iterative deepening.

(w/ Kevin)

Picnic at Hanging Rock

Picnic at Hanging Rock is a film that is almost purely mood - I first saw it back in high school, or maybe early uni, in summer I think, although inevitably (given the nature of the film and the vagueness of my recollections of it) that would be the season that I associate it with. It stayed with me, and I've thought of it as one of my favourite films since, although more in the way of being a recurring touchstone than on its own terms as such, if there's a meaningful distinction to be made there; returning to it now, I found it to be just as painterly, drowsily dream-like and hazily enveloping as I'd recalled, if slightly less compelling.

The Brothers Bloom

What a wonderful concoction! Stylish, whimsical, off-beat and preoccupied with narrative and story-telling, it's another film that could've been calculated to appeal to me (the most recent other having been (500) Days of Summer). It was several weeks ago now that I saw The Brothers Bloom (extemporanea is somewhat in arrears), so the details are no longer fresh in my mind, but the colour and the shape of it haven't faded, and besides, speaking 'objectively', I'm always happy to watch Rachel Weisz and Adrien Brody no matter what they're doing - and enjoyed the scruffy, slightly savage charisma that Mark Ruffalo brought to his role too. Of the films released this year that I've seen, this one just may be my favourite.

(w/ M)

Live music

Seeing that Neko Case is coming down again, early next year, has had me thinking about my favourite live music experiences; happily, being (obviously!) the archivin' type, I have a more or less complete Record of shows attended, updated on facebook but now duplicated here (you never know, facebook might explode tomorrow).

Looking back, three really stand out: Françoiz Breut at the Corner in early '06 made a deep impression on me for more reasons than I can count; Neko Case, raising the roof in St Kilda one balmy February night in 2007, was simply great; and then, just a couple of months later, the Pixies' brilliant, ecstatic set at the 'best of V' mini-festival at the music bowl came almost out of left-field to floor me.

To be honest, what the other particularly memorable ones tend to have in common is that they were put on by favourite artists of mine, past or present, but second-guessing why some shows linger while others recede is really essentially a pointless exercise, not only because the sum total of factors feeding in is always so large, but, more importantly, also because, when it comes to music, who cares why something makes you feel good, so long as it does? In chronological order, then: the ineffable electro-pop of Tujiko Noriko at the end of several hours of noise at Ding Dong in early 2004; Radiohead at Rod Laver Arena a couple of months later (objectively probably really only a quite good show, but it felt like such an event - it was Radiohead, after all, and it seemed like everyone was there); Belle and Sebastian's joyful career-spanning set at the Palais mid-winter '04, at the height of my love for them; Pretty Girls Make Graves at the Corner late that year (another that was really probably actually only quite good, but I was basically obsessed with the band at that point, and just enjoyed it so much); then a leap forward to last year where Bjork unexpectedly made my head spin at the Big Day Out, and then, a few days later, Spoon totally killed at the Corner; Wilco a few months on, a show that I took almost for granted at the time, but, in retrospect, was pretty unimpeachably great; and most recently, spring-feeling-like-summer '08, Goldfrapp rocking the Palais something wicked.

* * *

2009

Jen Cloher & the Endless Sea (20/9)
Aimee Mann (5/9)
Flaming Lips (29/7)
Vic Chesnutt & Victoria Williams (9/7)
Luluc (2/7)
Je Suis Animal (17/6)
Ladytron (5/6)
Lucinda Williams (2/4)
Fidler, Sal Kimber & Fireside Bellows (22/3)
Jolie Holland (13/2)
Neil Young + My Morning Jacket (27/1)
Woven Hand (20/1)

2008

Blonde Redhead (31/12)
Final Fantasy (11/12)
Emiliana Torrini (18/11)
Julie O'Hara Quintet (19/10)
Joan as Police Woman (10/10)
Toni Childs (1/10)
Goldfrapp (26/9)
The Last Town Chorus (12/9)
Band of Horses (3/8)
Sigur Ros (1/8)
Kasey Chambers & Shane Nicholson (9/4)
Smashing Pumpkins, Jesus & Mary Chain, Modest Mouse, Queens of the Stone Age + others @ V Festival (5/4)
Patty Griffin (28/3)
Wilco + The Drones (26/3)
Jens Lekman (10/3)
Kelly Clarkson (4/3)
Lisa Miller (29/2)
Stars (28/2)
PJ Harvey (20/2)
Rufus Wainwright (1/2)
Spoon (31/1)
Bjork, Arcade Fire, Spoon, Kate Nash, Sarah Blasko + others @ Big Day Out (28/1)

2007

Amanda Palmer (13/12)
Joss Stone (9/12)
Angie Hart (19/10)
Emilie Simon + Nouvelle Vague (7/7)
Lisa Miller (20/4)
Wilco (18/4)
New York Dolls, Phoenix, Jarvis Cocker, Pixies @ Best of V Festival (4/4)
Love of Diagrams, Camera Obscura, Love is All, the Walkmen, Peter Bjorn & John + others @ St Jerome's Laneway Festival (24/2)
The Audreys, Four Play @ St Kilda Festival (11/2)
Neko Case (2/2)
Lisa Miller, Laura Veirs, Mary Gauthier, Jen Cloher & the Endless Sea + others @ the Harvest Festival (20/1)

2006

The New Pornographers (12/12)
Talvin Singh (7/12)
Yann Tiersen (29/11)
Kasey Chambers (22/11)
Black Cab (4/11)
The Crayon Fields (29/9)
Francoiz Breut (29/4)
The Sticks + Zero/Some (1/4)
Talvin Singh, Kusun Ensemble, Dhol Foundation, Renegades Steel Orchestra, Evelyn Glennie + others @ All-Star World Percussion Spectacular (19/3)
Pretty Girls Make Graves, Augie March, New Buffalo, Broken Social Scene, Les Savy Fav + others @ St Jerome's Laneway Festival (26/2)
Kathleen Edwards (14/2)
Lisa Miller (18/2)
M.I.A. (1/2)


2005

Machine Translations (6/9)
Tujiko Noriko (11/8)
Laura Veirs & the Tortured Souls (29/5)
Architecture in Helsinki, Gersey, Ground Components, Eskimo Joe, the Dears + others @ St Jerome's Laneway Festival (27/2)
New Buffalo (13/2)
Ennio Morricone Experience (23/1)

2004 and earlier (incomplete)

Pretty Girls Make Graves + Love of Diagrams (November 2004)
Belle and Sebastian + Architecture in Helsinki (23/7/04)
Radiohead (26/4/04)
Tujiko Noriko (18/2/04)

Interpol (7/8/03)

Goo Goo Dolls, Tea Party, Billy Idol + others @ M-One festival (2002)

Beth Orton, Alex Lloyd, Spiderbait, Nine Inch Nails, Red Hot Chili Peppers + others @ Big Day Out (January 2000)