The Ides of March

An extremely well acted, enjoyable political morality drama, if just a tiny bit heavy-handed at the end. Ryan Gosling impresses again, surrounded by a quality cast.

(w/ Cass, David, Justine)

Nicole Krauss - Great House

It's easy - indeed, a pleasure - to read, but despite the wonderful prose - consistently fluent and clear, and scattered with images, sentences and passages that particularly sparkle - and strong narrative voices and emotional undertows running through the book, Great House doesn't readily or ever fully offer up its secrets and deeper meanings; in that sense, it's much like the towering desk that is its structuring metaphor and pivotal plot object, locked drawer and all.

The book is carefully constructed around that central object and idea, its crucial absences, repetitions, losses and doublings finally interlocking - and at the same time unlocked by Weisz's final disclosures - at novel's end, though with at least one crucial element left unsaid (locked), I think, namely the question of who the father of Lotte's child was. Someone - I can't remember who - once said to me that they thought the test of books with fragmented, non-linear structures was whether they would still be good if the plot were instead presented from start to finish; Great House is all the rebuttal to that idea that's needed, its intricate construction designed to embody its thematic and narratival preoccupations.

Unlike Man Walks Into A Room and The History of Love, there is no overwhelming climactic ending, but only having read the last sentence did I feel that the pieces were beginning to fit; thinking about the book, and flipping back through it again, it seemed me that a buried phrase almost exactly halfway through the book, Isabel in a single sentence referring to a "later' involving her and Yoav, suggested that perhaps, Weisz's vision for the future of his children, Yoav and Leah, with its hint of resolution, might come to pass. It's an aptly subtle suggestion; the other points at which the characters' various stories are left are left similarly unresolved, poised - Nadia's encounters with Weisz and then Dov, Arthur's internal and external paths to something approaching true understanding of the necessary gaps in his life with Lotte, the haunting appearances and absence of Daniel.

I liked Great House a lot; I'll forgive a lot for writing as sustainedly good as Krauss', and indeed, there's nothing here to forgive. There are deep undercurrents in it, and it's moving and poignant without ever being straightforwardly so, and Krauss' ability here to keep the many interconnected themes and underlying metaphors which shape her novel and its characters' lives is impressive. Great House is very good indeed.

The Very Best of Fleetwood Mac

A steady stream of familiar songs; in common with most people my age, I imagine, Fleetwood Mac have always been there in the background for me, and sometimes, their music just fits the moment.

Jasper Fforde - One of Our Thursdays is Missing

A welcome return to the world of Thursday Next, this one related - in a further spiral down Fforde's metafictional rabbit hole - by 'the written Thursday Next'...that is, the character who plays Thursday in the series of five books (one, two, three and four, five) featuring the 'real' Thursday, Jurisfiction agent extraordinaire, over the course of which it transpires that the real Thursday has gone missing (or has she?), dragging the written Thursday into an investigation of her own through both the shifting genres of BookWorld and the confusing RealWorld.

"Way to Blue: The Songs of Nick Drake"

A really pleasant evening of music at the Melb Recital Centre - an ad hoc travelling group, joined by Australians Luluc and Shane Nicholson, doing Nick Drake songs with varying degrees of adherence to the original recordings (ranging from a very faithful, and very effective "River Man" to Krystle Warren's soaring, unexpectedly completely apt gospel take on "Time Has Told Me"), but all with great respect and feeling for the songs.

It was low key, but they got it right - all of the vocalists were nice to listen to, and their contrasting voices and singing styles kept things interesting, along with the novelty of hearing these songs sung live, backed by a full band and six piece string ensemble no less. I liked Lisa Hannigan's contributions, and Vashti Bunyan's wispily pretty, waverily folk voice was a perfect fit, but Warren was the real revelation, her remarkable voice taking Drake's autumnal melodies somewhere new but always clearly recognisable.

(w/ C, Trang and Arthur)

Harvest Festival (Saturday 12 November)

The line-up was promising; a large part of  it could have been targeted straight at my about-a-decade-ago self.

Arrived early afternoon in glorious sunshine. Saw a bit of This Town Needs Guns; they were quite winning in that somewhat mathy, hint of emo-y Dismemberment Plan-ish indie-rock way.

Then the Walkmen, rocking hard and gratifyingly intense, enjoyable; with the exception of a couple of songs (this is probably the comment of a casual listener, but "The Rat" still seems head and shoulders above anything else they've recorded), they've always kind of eluded me, but I liked them last time I saw them live too.

After that, Mercury Rev; for me, it's always been about Deserter's Songs, and they didn't disappoint, doing its three flat out classics, "Holes", "Opus 40" and "Goddess On A Hiway", and drawing their set almost entirely from it and All Is Dream. Frontman Jonathan Donahue came across like a real hippie, striking grasshopper poses and declaiming positivity, but the music came through clearly, with a bit of a psychedelic streak jagging through their baroque, orchestrated pop tunes.

Saw the top and tail of Bright Eyes - enough to appreciate how far he's come since the sparse, wracked self-examination of "Something Vague" and Fevers and Mirrors...based on the bits I saw, he's more in the vein of an alt-country troubadour/rock star a la Ryan Adams nowaday, and pretty good at it.

Then the National, for whom we managed to get close to the front, dusk arriving, and they were good as expected - there wasn't a song they could have played that I wouldn't have wanted to hear, and - across the last three records in particular - their output is so even that even my favourites are only songs that I like just a little bit more than all of their others. Matt Berninger was charismatic and slightly awkward-seeming in that dapper way of his and sounded better than the last time I saw them; the band was tight; it was good.

And after them, Portishead, who were easily the act that I was the most excited about, and whose set turned out to be the clear highlight, not only of the festival but of the live music year so far. By this point we were basically right in front, in the centre, and so perfectly placed, with dark fully fallen, for immersion in a set that mixed touchstone moments from those first two indelible records with cuts from 2008's unexpected, astonishing Third. I must admit that I had a funny feeling somewhere in my stomach standing there waiting for Beth Gibbons to start singing as the set began, a mix of anticipation and nervousness that she might no longer have it after all this time - but she sounded great, as did all of the music and sounds they conjured up, jagged guitars, heavy beats, and floating keyboards and samples all integral as they nailed, gloriously, one song after another. I'm not sure I've ever really thought of Portishead as one of my absolute favourite artists, but they do occupy a special place in my heart, and this set was brilliant.

Then, finally, caught a bit of the Flaming Lips, but wasn't especially enthused by that point - like their Festival Hall set a while back, seemed more about spectacle than music. And then mass exodus, shuttle bus, train, home.

Good venue (Werribee), well spaced and located stages and other amenities, decent vibe helped immeasurably by the perfect festival weather, singificantly brought down about the absurdly long queues.

(w/ C and her friends Sachini and Mikaela; also briefly saw David + Justine, CStCW and Nenad)

[No connection to the last 'Harvest Festival' I went to, a few years back!]

Richard Matheson - Button, Button: Uncanny Stories

Economical and mildly unnerving, but somehow not of the kind that linger - unlike, say, the somewhat similar stories of John Collier.

Midnight in Paris

It's difficult to tell how knowing, how tongue in cheek, Woody Allen is being in this film, from the familiar-to-the-point-of-cliche picture postcard montage that opens it, to the completely-in-love-with-Paris cinematography throughout, through the almost archetypally apt casting (Owen Wilson as a bumbling, wide-eyed American in Paris, Rachel McAdams his annoying, also American, fiancee, Marion Cotillard an alluring frenchwoman); possibly, the very question is beside the point, so immersed is the film in the Paris of cinema, art and the imagination, and so inseparable Paris from all of those facets of itself.

It's certainly not particularly substantial, but it ischarming, particularly the 1920s sequences, inhabited as they are by a series of scene-stealers - Alison Pill as Zelda Fitzgerald, Corey Stoll hilariously doing Hemingway, Adrien Brody not far behind as Dali - and many pleasing others including Cotillard as the impossibly beautiful artists' muse, Kathy Bates as a sympathetically pragmatic Gertrude Stein, brief cameos from a befuddled Bunuel and cryptically matter of fact Man Ray, and roles of varying significance for F Scott, Cole Porter, Djuna Barnes, Pablo Picasso and sundry others. And for various reasons, some universal and others more personal, it made me feel a touch wistful, too.

(w/ C)

Harvard Business Essentials - Power, Influence and Persuasion

One that PG lent me a while ago; I've been meaning to read it for a while because, ultimately, power, influence and persuasion are what my current - and likely future - line of work is about. It's very much a distillation - hence very practical, concrete, simple - but useful.