Vampire Weekend - Contra

A well-crafted follow-up to their surprisingly charming debut, Contra feels more expansive but no less economical than its predecessor, and equally strong on the inventive, lightly-landing hooks. Vampire Weekend don't elicit any particularly strong responses from me, but they are fun.

Underground Lovers - Leaves Me Blind

Hazy pop melodies threaded through sweetly droning layers of 4ad/post-My Bloody Valentine sound; I've always liked the Underground Lovers, and Leaves Me Blind holds a couple of their most recognisable songs in "I Was Right" and "Your Eyes".

Taylor Swift - Taylor Swift

Having come to this, her debut, after the considerably glossier and more fleshed-out Fearless, it's probably inevitable that I found Taylor Swift a bit unsatisfying; still, while a bit slight, it's a likeable enough slice of contemporary pop-country.

In The Loop

Sardonically funny back office 'halls of power' satire - slightly ridiculous, but maybe only slightly.

"Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson" @ Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

Art is always inseparable from the context - both external and, particularly, internal - in which it is experienced, and even at the time, I felt that this rather excellent exhibition of Eliasson's immersive explorations of colour, light and shadow was affecting me in a way heavily influenced by the odd state of mind in which I wandered through it; attempting to fully describe that state of mind would (were such a thing possible in the first place, natch) violate the 'no personal excursions' injunction that theoretically holds for extemporanea more violently than I'd like, so suffice to say that it was bittersweet...I felt light, slightly unmoored from everything.

The work which was most deeply coloured by that state of mind was "Beauty", at the very end of the exhibition - a dark room in which shimmers a rainbow generated by the refraction of light (from a suspended spotlight) through a fine spray of mist, changing in appearance as the viewer walks around, towards or away from it. It's a stunning piece, and reflects many of Eliasson's preoccupations and techniques - most notably, a recurring concern with interstitial spaces between those three key components of his art, colour, light and shadow.



The exhibition itself is deliberately put together as a journey, and that's how it feels; "Beauty" is an apt end-point, and "Room for one colour" (the colour is yellow) an equally appropriate beginning. In between, a sensuous (in the truest sense) sequence of often literally kaleidoscopic installations, most of them walk-throughs, whose titles really tell the tale - "360 degree room for all colours", "One-way colour tunnel", "Multiple grotto", "Soil quasi bricks" - broken up by a room with four sets of elegant, vaguely serialist photographs (one, "The horizon series", was the set that first brought Eliasson to my attention, when I saw it as part of the Guggenheim exhibition a while back) and, adjoining it, another containing a bunch of models and prototypes with large colour spectrum wheels on posters all around on the walls...whatever else was going on in my head at the time, this was really good.

Scarlett Thomas - Dead Clever

I reckon that Scarlett Thomas is still my leading literary crush by some considerable margin, that position being down mostly to her latter day, more literary novels (most particularly, PopCo and The End of Mr Y) and, to an extent, various interviews, etc, and much less so to the trio (?) of detective novels she wrote while starting out. Dead Clever falls into that last category, but it has its own pleasures, chief among them a likeable central protagonist in Lily Pascale and a sharpness of voice and prose that's characteristic of all of Thomas' writing (last time).

Léon (The Professional)

This has been one of my favourite films since I saw it for the first (and before this, only) time in high school, and returning to it now, I like it for what I reckon are pretty much the same reasons why it made such an impression back then, more than a decade ago: Gary Oldman, Jean Reno, a young Natalie Portman (although of course then that was all I knew her from), constant action (not always of the gunplay variety), continual style, the relationship between the two leads, the way it draws one in right from the start, the pathos and climactic explosiveness of the ending.

Wilco - Wilco (The Album)

As modern rock records go, Wilco (The Album) is perfectly fine - concise, melodic, edgy in spots (eg, early wig-out "Bull Black Nova") but basically mellow, and a pretty coherent artistic statement into the bargain. As Wilco albums go, though, it's a tiny bit disappointing (really only a tiny bit); it's good, and there are many winning tunes and pleasing textures to enjoy, but somehow it lacks the streak of righteousness, the ineffable sense of significance that ran through Sky Blue Sky, A Ghost Is Born, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and, in a different way, Summerteeth and even Being There. For all that, though, it is still good, and a natural place for them to have landed for the time being, given the seemingly fairly organic way that their sound has developed over time.

The Hurt Locker

For mine, while The Hurt Locker is a tense, realistic-feeling war movie, it's not anything particularly amazing...it was gripping enough, but after all the hype, I couldn't help but think, 'is that all?'.

"Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years" @ City Gallery, Wellington, NZ

A while ago, walking along the Yarra, I was surprised to come across a series of clusters of largeish red and white polka-dotted objects, scattered along and around the path - playful and whimsical, and coming on like some unlikely transplant from the world down the rabbit hole, they were delightful. It turned out that they were the work of an artist named Yayoi Kusama, who I hadn't heard of at the time, but that installation made enough of an impression that the name stuck, particularly once I noticed another - and equally pleasing - work of hers in the NGV's permanent collection (the illuminated ladder between two mirrors in a darkened room).

So I didn't want to miss the chance to see more of her stuff since there happened to be a small retrospective on in Wellington while we were in town a couple of week ago, and it didn't disappoint. Analogies with other artists' work are easy to find (they always are) - Bridget Riley for one (who I like a lot), Andy Warhol for another (who I really, really don't) - but my strongest impression was that she really is just making art that expresses her own idiosyncratic worldview without any concessions to fashions or others' sensibilities. Dots and colours are everywhere, and most of the works are large-scale (many immersive, and some literally room-sized) - most enjoyable.

Stephen King - The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon & Under the Dome

More holiday reading; The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon finding King in fable territory, and Under the Dome in full-blown epic mode. The first of those is an eminently readable distraction; the second another testament to his prodigious ability to tell a story and to take a simple but potential-filled concept and really run with it. The most obvious comparison to Under the Dome is The Stand, and while it's nowhere near having that other's mythic sweep (it suffers from having too many fairly important characters and not enough really vividly drawn ones, and by the relative absence of back story for them), it did have the significant virtue of making me really want to know what would happen next, all the way to the end.

Leonie Swann - Three Bags Full

Still winning on a second read. (Previously.)

Midlake - The Courage of Others

There's something about The Courage of Others that feels deep. Taking its cues from both 60s folk and the more prog/apocalyptic streams that have flowed through the intervening decades, it's a record that's about texture much more than melody (and in that respect something of a contrast to its predecessor The Trials of Van Occupanther; there's certainly nothing on it with the immediacy or sweet tunefulness of cuts like "Roscoe" or the title track from that other).

The music on it is richly detailed, but subtly so - it's easy to miss the layered harmonies and carefully constructed resonances between the different instrument and vocal parts, and the rises and falls in the songs, while providing important dynamic variation, are generally built of several more lines and layers than is initally apparent. I haven't made up my mind about how good The Courage of Others is - for mine, it falters in the mid-section and becomes a bit too murkily homogenous - but it's a real record, and in high points like "Winter Dies" and "Core of Nature" it hits some genuine peaks.

Amélie Nothomb - Antichrista

There's something about Nothomb's writing that I find very appealing. I don't know exactly what it is - a certain piquancy, a cryptic flavour that creeps in amidst her deceptively simple sentences, more than a hint of the infraordinary...at once matter of fact and riddlingly philosophical, her short fictions seem to inhabit a space and genre of their own.

The premise of Antichrista is apparently (and, given the wild flights of her other books, disappointingly) banal: Blanche, a plain, painfully shy girl, is befriended by her charismatic, exotically worldly classmate Christa, who insinuates herself into Blanche's life and then proves the most vicious kind of 'frenemy'. But the style in which it's written makes the book far more interesting than a simple statement of its narrative would suggest - and it does so in a way that I find delightfully mysterious.

Reading Nothomb always gives me the impression that her writing is imbued with much more of herself than is usual for fiction, even literary fiction...somehow - and this is part of the trick, I suspect - whether that impression is accurate or illusory seems almost entirely beside the point.

* * *

Loving Sabotage
The Character of Rain
Fear and Trembling
The Book of Proper Names

John Grisham - The Rainmaker

Holiday reading!

My Sister's Keeper

Like the book, an unashamed tear-jerker and actually pretty good. Somehow, though, despite a pretty high-powered cast (including Cameron Diaz, Alec Baldwin and Joan Cusack) and apparently high production values, it feels like nothing so much as a particularly polished tele-movie.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

A dour and reasonably faithful adaptation which, in its streamlining of Larsson's book, even more clearly brings out the aptness of its source's original title, 'Men Who Hate Women'. It's well-made, but ultimately adds little to the book itself.

Michael Moorcock - Elric

Part of Gollancz's impressive 'Fantasy Masterworks' series of reprints, this volume collects the first two Elric books and makes for intriguing reading. Two grabs from J G Ballard strike me as apt:

These strange and tormented landscapes, peopled by characters of archetypal dimensions, are the setting for a series of titanic duels between the forces of Chaos and Order. Nightmare armies clash on the shores of the spectral seas. Phantom horsemen ride on skeletal steeds across a world as fantastic as those of Bosch and Breughel.

...

A world of powerful and sustained imagination ... successor to Mervyn Peake and Wyndham Lewis ... The vast, tragic symbols by which Moorcock continually illuminates the metaphysical quest of his hero are a measure of the author's remarkable talents.

What Moorcock's about here is the creation of a complete mythos, and one which is markedly different from any that came before him; the sense of ruin and a fatal (and fatalistic) drive towards destruction are palpable, and integral to the narrative and characters who walk these pages. At times, the writing is clumsy, and Moorcock's descriptions can be thin, feeling more like sketches than fully-realised images, but the underlying imaginative force of the books more than makes up for those stylistic flaws.