"The Drowsy Chaperone" (MTC)

Season's kick-off, and as GFC-proof as a play could be. Crowd-pleasing MTC-style musical theatre, and done well, helped along by Geoffrey Rush's central turn. The key word here is 'fun' - it doesn't pretend to be much more than that, but, sharply written and well-mounted, it didn't give me any cause for complaint.

(this year's troupe including several newcomers; not sure, but I think the full complement would be Steph, Ben K (absent from this one though), Gia, Bec P and some others who I know less well - Katie H, Dioni P, Rachel G and Marnie O'B)

Camera Obscura @ the Corner, Saturday 23 January

A pretty sweet show, drawing almost entirely (possibly actually entirely) on Let's Get Out Of This Country and My Maudlin Career. It was endearingly obvious that singer Tracyanne Campbell in particular isn't an entirely comfortable live performer, with the songs and her singing tending to lilt and swing less than on record, and many of the high notes not even attempted, but the heart and the sparkle in the songs came through, and Camera Obscura have been a large part of the soundtrack to my last couple of years so the familiarity factor was high, too.

Support act was a charming UK two piece called Slow Club. I can't remember exactly what they sounded like, but I think it was a bit Talulah Gosh (garage-y/twee) with some folk-y elements - a lot of fun, anyway.

(w/ M)

Lost season 2

More and more addictive - in this season, the commitment to story-telling amidst the increasing weirdness is a feature, as is the willingness to kill off major characters (although not necessarily, one can't help suspecting, for good).

Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca

Bitte Orca is hard to get a handle on - at once ragged and ornate (crystalline, even), it comes on like genuine art-pop, the 'art' as crucial as the 'pop', and as such, it's perhaps not surprising that the closest analogue to the music on this record that I can find is Talking Heads' (oddly, also the nearest reference point that I came up with for another towering 00's record, Funeral, at the time it came out - an indication, perhaps, of Byrne & co's lasting influence or at least massively-ahead-of-the-curveness).

I've listened to Bitte Orca a lot over the last month or two; I don't think it's a great album, but there's something a bit special about it, particularly in the heights it reaches (most notably clear highlight "Stillness Is The Move", which is flat out great). It's never less than interesting - and at its best, it gives me a feeling that only music and (tellingly) abstract art can, a sense that parts of me are being stretched and dragged upwards and outwards, a kind of heightening.

The Wrens - Silver

Murkily Pixies-esque - not a patch on later efforts Secaucus or, especially, The Meadowlands.

Dave Rawlings Machine - A Friend of a Friend

Pleasant down-tempo americana, but unlike musical partner Gillian Welch's recordings, not hugely memorable. That said, it has a certain touch - a craft - which catches me at me a bit when I listen to it, so perhaps it'll prove a grower.

Up In The Air

Up In The Air makes three winners in a row from Jason Reitman, who's developing a neat line in cleanly contemporary-feeling, pleasingly subversive mainstream films. It's a difficult film to describe - not quite a comedy, nor purely a piece of social criticism (or even simply observation), nor really a character piece as such, it has elements of all three, and they come together well. It's a very observant film, and has the ring of realism to it - everything is played straight, and there's a deliberate flattening of affect which stops short of itself being overtly unrealistic or anti-naturalistic. All up, quietly enjoyable but very much so.

(w/ M)

Nine

Has a certain pizazz, and plenty of star wattage, but Nine never comes to life - it's only spasmodically entertaining, and if the film has anything in particular to say, it's obscured by the terribly workmanlike nature of the script and direction. Ironically, what Nine lacks more than anything else is a real vision. Marion Cotillard is the best thing about it, and everyone else does what's asked of them too (which isn't generally all that much, dramatically speaking), but it's not the kind of film that can be saved by strong performances alone.

(w/ M)

Joanna Newsom @ the Forum, Wednesday 20 January 2010

I was surprised to discover that The Milk-Eyed Mender came out so recently as 2004 - it feels much longer ago. Anyway, it was much in the air for me for a few weeks after I got my hand on it back then, and then abruptly dropped off my radar altogether, and I never really listened to the stuff she put out after, so Wednesday's show marked something of a reacquaintance for me.

As it turned out, much of the show was made up of new songs, with four or five from The Milk-Eyed Mender and, I'm told, only one from Ys, and it was v.g. (much more satisfying than Neko Case last week) - she seemed to really be enjoying herself, and the songs were fleshed out well by her band. As a performer, she's intent while actually singing and playing (mostly harp, but keys for a few songs, including a rousing "Inflammatory Writ") but relaxed and charming between songs, and it was notable that, in a live setting (or perhaps just on her more recent songs), her voice seems both more natural than on record and more integrated and wielded as an instrument forming part of the whole.

(w/ Ruth, Meribah and Simon H - also met up with CT from work)

Neko Case + Jen Cloher & the Endless Sea @ Hi-Fi Bar, Friday 15 January

Learning on Friday afternoon that Jen Cloher was supporting was, of course, a big bonus for a show that I was already keenly looking forward to - and, as usual, she was good, mixing in two or three from Dead Wood Falls with a handful more from Hidden Hands, and ending with a Grant Lee Buffalo cover (one of the famous ones, but I don't know what it's called).

That said, the main event was Neko Case, and it was a good show, as I'd known it would be - with her material (including a last album as good as anything in her great back catalogue) and her ability, including as a live peformer, and especially given the quality of her band, it could hardly have been otherwise...but. But it was only a good show (and not a patch on last time), when it could so easily have been so much more. It started with the sound, I think - something was very wrong with the mix for the first three or four songs, with everything muddy and muffled, and the different instruments (most importantly, her voice) not coming through anyway near as clearly as they ought to've. During a break between songs, people from the audience started calling out for a sound check to be done, and Case seemed to take it personally; the sound was much better from then on (the sound people presumably having realised that they'd stuffed up), but by then the damage was done, as the performer herself didn't seem into the show at all from that point.

So, while I enjoyed it, this one was rather a disappointment, sad to say.

(w/ M, Wei, Meribah + a friend of Meribah's, one Caitlin)

Lost season 1

I've said before, only a little bit facetiously, that everything I know about television, I learned from my friends; with the recent exception of 30 Rock, every tv show into which I've made serious inroads (at least during what it pleases me to call my 'adult' life) has been evangelically recommended and/or more or less forcibly lent or given to me by a friend beforehand. Lost is no exception, coming to me through Jon with a pretty much unreserved recommendation, and while I've watched it a bit in fits and starts, I've definitely got into it. I like the mystery and the somewhat high-falutin' themes of coincidence, fate, chance, choice, etc, and, so far at least, the show has carried me with it through its increasingly unlikely twists and turns, while maintaining my interest amidst the array of flashbacks, unexplained loose ends, and rather implausible happenings. I want to find out what happens at the end - but, more than that, I also want to see what happens along the way.

Sherlock Holmes

A very enjoyable Friday night movie - exciting and reasonably atmospheric, and Downey Jr and Jude Law make for a good central pair. I liked that it didn't take itself too seriously, too.

(w/ M)

Ross Gittins - Gittins' Guide to Economics

Joan Robinson, distinguished Cambridge economist and contemporary of Keynes, once said that the purpose of studying economics is to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists. My take on the subject isn't quite so defamatory; I think we study economics to learn when to use the many synonyms for the word 'money'. Economics is full of them: income, wealth, assets, liabilities, debts, wages, costs, prices, revenue, savings, investment, and more.

That's how chapter 1 of this primer begins, but neither of the motivations it describes particularly captures my own reasons for reading it. At uni, I was only an indifferent student of Public International Law, though I was pretty interested in the subject matter - somehow, it just didn't take with me, and I have a feeling that I was going through a bit of a general motivational trough when I did it - but one throwaway comment made by the subject's glamorous lecturer, GT, stuck with me; it was to the effect that if one wanted to really make a difference in the world, it's more important to know about economic, finance, international trade, etc than to be an expert in international human rights law, or else one risks being taken as nothing more than a bleeding heart.

That attitude has informed a lot of my choices and thinking since then (most notably, deciding to go to MS), and one result has been a desire to learn at least the basics of economics (a field, incidentally, that I find quite intrinsically as well as instrumentally interesting). Anyway, I've finally gotten around to making a systematic effort in that direction - starting in my current job has finally provided the necessary impetus - and Gittins' book has proved an excellent starting point: 33 bite-sized chapterlets dealing with the basics of key concepts and issues in Australian economics, arranged into eight parts: 'Introduction to economics', 'The labour market', 'The financial markets', 'Government and the economy', 'The global economy', 'Australia's place in the global economy', 'Economic issues' and 'Economic policies and management'.

To be honest, I probably only absorbed about 10 or maybe 20 per cent of the content, and less of its implications, on my first pass, but that hasn't fazed me - I've been carrying it around and reading it on trams, and I intend to go through it at least once more in the same fashion straight away (I'm sure that a lot more will sink in each time, proportionately - a lot of it is about working out how the concepts fit together).

The xx - xx

I've thought about this, and decided that it's true - xx is one of those rare records that truly is something like sui generis. That's not to say that the music on it doesn't sometime evoke other artists' work - at various times, I reckon, there are threads of acts like, say, the Cure, Joy Division, Slumber Party and, most of all, the Notwist - but the point is that, girl (Romy Madley Croft) / boy (Oliver Sim) vocals entwining sinuously in obscure - and obscurely memorable - melodies amidst slinky, spare guitar lines weaving through moody landscapes of muffled beats and pulsing bass notes, it doesn't really sound much like anything else I've heard.

It'd be selling the xx short to say that this album is all about mood (the songcraft is too strong for that to be fair), but one thing it does terribly well is sustaining a particular mood - foggy, intimate, breathy, ambient - and the whole thing flows from start to finish, scattered with little gem-like moments along the way. xx isn't particularly an album with stand-out tracks - everything about it just works. It's early days yet for me with this one, but it feels like one of the very small number of indie-rock records of the last decade with something of that elusive savour of greatness.[*]

* * *

[*] Off the top of my head, incidentally, clear (as opposed to possible) '00s qualifiers for that tag - 'greatness' - would be Kid A (in retrospect, clearly the best album full stop of the '00s) and Amnesiac, Funeral and Third (if that last counts as indie-rock - which it may well if Kid A does); Turn On The Bright Lights would almost certainly get there too; maybes would be The Meadowlands, Electric Version, Kill The Moonlight and Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, and Boxer - and that's probably it.

Camera Obscura - Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi

Turns out that Camera Obscura were really good from the get-go. I've listened to them an awful lot over the last three (count it back) or so years - most recently My Maudlin Career, and before that, Underachievers Please Try Harder and, especially, Let's Get Out Of This Country - without particularly tiring of them, and Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi, their debut, is another charming and easily loveable hit of the band's sunnily wistful melodic sweetness, cuts like "Eighties Fan", "Pen and Notebook" and "Anti-Western" all basically perfect.

Thank You For Smoking

Sharp, funny satire which loses some of its edge and comes across as having slightly muddled politics because of the number of targets it selects - engaging, though.

X-Men: The Last Stand

The third in the series. To me, it felt more dramatic than the other two - as if more was at stake - and I enjoyed it correspondingly more, but I still felt that something was missing, some essential quality that would compel me to really go with it.

30 Rock season 3

This show keeps getting better and better, not to mention more and more crazy. I like it very, very much; that said, I don't think it's either as clever or as funny as Arrested Development, which of course is the gold standard for sitcoms as far as I'm concerned.

The Lovely Bones

I read The Lovely Bones several years ago - probably not too long after it came out - and, while not exactly high literature, it left an impression on me without having really gotten under my skin; still, given what a phenomenon the book was, it's surprising that a film has been so long in coming, and I was interested to see what Peter Jackson would make of it.

Well, the trailer made it look pretty bad, and I get the impression that reviews have been mixed, and in some quarters downright terrible, but all of that said, I thought that the film was pretty good. It's a bit of a hodge-podge, and a bit too obviously emotionally manipulative, but both of those come with the territory, and the two best things about it - namely, Saoirse Ronan's note-perfect turn in the central role and the SFX which bring her 'in between' place to life - work strongly in its favour. It's no classic, but judged against any expectations other than the unreasonably high ones which preceded it, I reckon The Lovely Bones to be a success.

(w/ M)

Red Eye

A taut Wes Craven thriller, well served by Cillian Murphy and Rachel McAdams, but rather insubstantial-feeling.

John Ajvide Lindqvist - Let The Right One In

Let The Right One In works as both genre piece and literarily-edged fiction, though much of its impact was probably spoiled by my having seen the immaculate (and, in some respects, admittedly quite different) film adaptation. That said, I'm glad I came across them in the order that I did - the book is very good, but the film, I think, verges on greatness.

"George Baldessin" @ TarraWarra Museum of Art

Didn't leave a huge impression on me; the bronze sculptures were the clear highlights. (The museum itself, though, is striking.)

Big Fish

Something of a lesser Burton, but not without its charms. Overall, it struck me as heartfelt but a bit muddled, and, dare I say it, just a touch dull - although I wonder if I've marked it a bit overly harshly as a result of taking the director's quirky touch too much for granted.

Lisa Mitchell - Wonder

Nice indie-inflected pop, in which Mitchell sounds at various times like Soko (mostly the vocals), Natalie Imbruglia (in their respective modern-pop ballad-leaning moments), Kasey Chambers (at her least country), Kate Nash (just a small bit) and the Concretes (at the more restrained end of their spectrum), with a pretty clear voice of her own coming through too. I've listened to it quite a few times, but it hasn't really grabbed me - still, Wonder is promising.