Paul Maar - Lippels Traum (Lippel's Dream) [trans Kevin Lee & Andrew Martin]

Sometimes people do the damndest - and most impressive - things. After seeing a film adaptation of this apparently classic German children's novel, Kevin went looking for a copy of the book, learned that it had never been translated into English, and decided to do it himself despite not speaking any German at all; rather remarkably, with the help of free online translators and a friend who was fortuitously learning German at the time, he succeeded.

The story itself is quite charming, alternating between waking reality and the night-time dreams of the ten year old Lippel which are inspired by his reading of The Tales of a Thousand and One Nights and reflect his daytime experiences and encounters with people. In essence, it's about dreams and the power of the imagination - themes, of course, suitable for literature of all kinds and in all languages.

The Laramie Project - 10 Years Later (Red Stitch @ Arts Centre)

In 1998, a young gay man named Matthew Shepard was brutally beaten and left hung on a fence to die in Laramie, Wyoming. The media descended, the crime and the public reaction came to be seen as a turning point for gay rights in some circles, and it seems to have played at least some part in the tortuous progress of hate crime legislation eventually passed under Obama a couple of years ago. Not all that long after, members of a theatre company travelled to Laramie, conducted interviews, and put together The Laramie Project, a piece of documentary theatre - its dialogue taken verbatim from those interviews - about the effect of the crime and resultant media circus on the town.

Ten years later, the play's creators returned to Laramie to explore the ramifications of those events ten years on, interviewing many of the same people and, this time, the two convicted murderers in jail; the result was The Laramie Project - 10 Years Later, presented in the same form (apparently comprised of verbatim dialogue from the interviews and extracts from the play-makers' journals), with the actors going through a range of subtle but effective costume, accent and mannerism changes to play not only the interviewers/creators but also the many members of the community who they interview.

The play explores the way that the town has tried to make sense of the events and the way they've been received and portrayed, illustrating the slippery nature of 'truth' about these kinds of things, even in a context where guilt seems to have been conclusively and uncontentiously proved in a criminal trial; it also has something to say about people generally, and the way we all come to terms with traumatic and, more generally, crucial or impactful events. The way it foregrounds its own status as a piece of theatre is effective - the constructedness is thematic and highlighted in the way the sets are used and characters donned and put aside in the ensemble round - and generally it's well conceived, put together and acted. For me, it wasn't a piece of theatre that reached any great heights - but it was worth the seeing.

(w/ Erandathie, who suggested we go having been moved by the original Project)

Marianne Dissard - L'Entredeux

For me, this seemed like something of a 'can't miss' proposition - a mix of two of my favourite things in French chanson and dusty Americana - and it is good. "Merci De Rien Du Tout" is the one that introduced me to Dissard, and it's a highlight; the languorous "Cayenne" is another. It's all done with a contemporary - and contemporarily nostalgic - sensibility, and inevitably (given its sources), with a cinematic flavour.

Iron Sky

A very silly movie, but enjoyable....as much could be guessed from the premise - in 2018, Nazis from the dark side of the moon invade Earth in flying saucers, to be confronted by US President Sarah Palin. Good for a Friday night movie.

(w/ Cass)

Grimes - Visions

A few things combined to cause me to buy Visions:

1. I was in Polyester looking for some road trip music for that day.
2. The store was playing the record at what turned out to be two of its poppiest (and best) tracks, "Circumambient" (a punchy, vivid, electro-pop anthem) and "Vowels = Space And Time" (Robyn + School of Seven Bells + a hint of U2 = excellent), while I was in there.
3. It sounded great loud.

So I was expecting its pleasures to be immediate, and some of them are, but mostly it was a bit underwhelming at first, and actually it's taken quite a few listens for the record to begin to really reveal itself to me, becoming better and better the more I listen to it.

It's kind of electro-pop, I guess; it reminds me a bit of Janelle Monae's excellent The ArchAndroid, not so much musically (Claire Boucher, the artist behind Grimes, has a versatile voice but not Monae's high-wire virtuosity, often preferring to chop up and mix her vocals into a song so that they're more akin to another layer of instrumentation/tone than to a true lead line) as in terms of its approach and overall vibe, particularly the very constructed/'produced' feel that it has.

Anyway, like I was saying, it's definitely a grower; its little hooks (just as often an earworm of a beat or unexpected synth line as a quirky vocal run or blissful-sounding concoction of reverb-y upper register trills) have a tendency to gradually become more distinct and then lodge firmly in the head. The brightest moments are high-energy, heading towards dance music; the quieter moments (the 6-minute Four Tet-y "Skin" is a particular highlight) are just as good...with the benefit of a couple of weeks of living with Visions, and working my way inside its world, I'm starting to really like it. This one might turn out to be a keeper.

On The Voice

1. First, I'm watching it, and a little bit hooked. Apart from Q&A (which I mostly don't watch these days, because of how infuriating it can be) and Insiders (which I'm often just not in the mood for first thing on a Sunday morning), it's the only show currently on tv whose time and day I know.

2. The judges are a fair part of it, especially Seal, but really all of them collectively. (Also, Megan Washington is kind of scary. And - unexpectedly, and not totally comfitingly - Delta Goodrem is kind of hot.)

3. There's a bit of humanity there too. Especially in those bits when the camera holds on the singer post-performance while the compere guy tells everyone how they can vote for them...judging by the discomfort on display there, some of these contestants are real introverts (and/or maybe it's just a basically awkward setting).

4. It helps that there are some actually really talented singers on the show. My favourites so far: Emma Louise Birdsall, Brittany Cairns, Darren Percival. Of course, one of the nice things about actually following the show is that your feelings about the singers have a chance to develop over the show - three in particular, Karise Eden, Sarah De Bono and Diana Rouvas, were much more impressive in their first round 'live' performances than I'd registered in seeing them in previous weeks.

5. And it turns out that, going by the results of the first week of the live rounds, I'm pretty much entirely in sync with the voting public - I thought that the two who went through based on votes from each of 'Team Seal' and 'Team Delta' were definitely the two strongest from their teams (and the judges then got it right in the other two each who they put through, each whittling the two weakest of their crews).

Beach House - Bloom

On the evidence of a first day or so of listening, one of a very few (fingers of one hand) dream-pop records that even get close to the magic of the Cocteau Twins, Bloom starts promisingly with the building, enveloping, arpeggio-cascading "Myth", and gets even better as it goes on. Beach House have largely passed me by before - I've heard a couple of their songs on mix cds and liked them well enough, and thought their festival set a while back was pretty good - but Bloom is fantastic. It's true that I'm wired to like this kind of thing - sweeping, spacey, swathey dream-pop, full of swoons and upwards surges - but the flipside is that I listen to a lot of it, and mark hard, and this is the real thing, at once ethereal and vivid, distinctly of a piece but filled with textural variation and colour, and without a weak song (the opening pair of "Myth"-"Wild", second act "New Year"-"Wishes" and show-stopping closer (pre-hidden track) "Irene" are particularly great).

Teenage Fanclub - Bandwagonesque

In terms of the music that I tend to listen to, nearly all roads lead back to the Beatles, the Velvet Underground, Gram Parsons or Big Star, but rarely as directly as the path between that last and Teenage Fanclub's Bandwagonesque - apart from the hints of 90s-ish fuzziness and moments of punkier aggression that sometimes underscore the ring and chime of the guitars that drive the album forward (you could trace all of the above back to the Velvets, if so inclined), it could practically have been a Big Star record.

The album kicks off with its best moment, the soaring, melancholy-sounding "The Concept", which I'm pretty sure I heard for the first time a few months ago in Young Adult, but which, like all of the best songs in this genre, nonetheless sounded instantly familiar. All told, for mine, Bandwagonesque isn't near greatness, - most of it just sounds too familiar - but it's good nonetheless (also, close hewing to the Big Star template notwithstanding, I wouldn't be surprised if it was itself part of the playbook on which Girls drew for their excellent Father, Son, Holy Ghost).

Dark Shadows

The tone of Dark Shadows is uneven, taking in extreme melodrama, a range of often naff (but funny) comedy, some campy gothic/horror elements, a fair dose of absurdity and a dash of gravitas and solemnity too - but actually the strange mish-mash has a consistency of its own, and what it consistently feels like is a Burton film, and more particularly a Burton/Depp outing.

It's very good, too. It's hard to explain what makes it good; so many of the preoccupations are there, but (unlike Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Sweeney Todd and Alice in Wonderland - all, incidentally, like Dark Shadows, adaptations of one kind or another) it doesn't feel too much like Burton-by-the-numbers, but instead does manage to summon and maintain a shadowy, slightly pastiche-y but also sincere mood, set at the very beginning of the post-prologue 'current' (70s) action by the overhead shot as "Nights in White Satin" plays mournfully and melodiously over the top. Perhaps the simple point is just that it's very entertaining.

Good performances from all of the principals - Depp, of course, as the displaced vampire Barnabas Collins, Michelle Pfeiffer fantastic as the surviving Collins family matriarch, Eva Green suitably seductive and melodramatic, and nice turns from Chloe Grace Moretz (a star in the making, helped by her knack for picking good roles - most notably so far in (500) Days of Summer, Kick Ass, Hugo and a memorable couple of cameos in 30 Rock), Helena Bonham Carter, Jackie Earle Haley and Bella Heathcote.

(w/ Meribah - at imax)

Lisa Hannigan - Sea Sew

Just lately - the last two or three months, maybe - I've been feeling more enthused about music than I can remember feeling for ages; I've been listening more attentively, staying up late doing so, seeking out new stuff, and, most importantly, it's been having an effect on me, making me feel in a particular, difficult to describe way that only art (and, for a lot of my art-consuming life, particularly music) does.

That feeling is kind of ineffable; it arises in the moment, but it's always connected to a host of other feelings, associations, impressions, longings, acute and diffuse. Somewhat unexpectedly, Bic Runga's latest has been the big one in the last few weeks, which probably has something to do with the music itself and more still to do with my receptiveness; and even more lately, I've gotten completely stuck on the first track (and the one that got me to order the cd after hearing it on a compilation) on Lisa Hannigan's Sea Sew, "Ocean and a Rock", in the same way.

Like the rest of the album, "Ocean and a Rock" is basically a folk song with some pop trimmings, Irish-inflected, adorned with a few instrumental elements, but the song is set apart by its stately, oceanic (ha) melody and the perfect way that the steady drum beat, the punctuating strings and brass parts, and Hannigan's quietly expressive voice mesh together. It has a bit of a Holly Throsby mood, though not quite as hushed; each time it ends, it leaves me wanting more.

The rest of Sea Sew isn't quite as wonderful, but there's a bit to like on it. On repeated listens, it reveals more, and there are a few surprising - even somewhat dissonant - arrangements and variations built in throughout.

(Lisa Hannigan has been vaguely on my radar before, first as the backing singer on "The Blower's Daughter", which lodged in my head because of Closer, then as one of the standout vocalists in "Way to Blue".)

Slow Club - Yeah, So

Charming indie-folk-countryesque boy-girl record, faintly reminiscent of Camera Obscura and, at times, She & Him (is it bad that I just used a Zooey Deschanel musical project as a reference point?). The best moments are the liveliest and most peppy - "It Doesn't Have To Be Beautiful", "Because We're Dead", "Our Most Brilliant Friends".

Stephen King (as Richard Bachman) - "Rage", "The Long Walk" & "The Running Man"

I've read all of these before, and "The Long Walk" in particularly probably four or five times previously - there's something about the high-concept storytelling that grips.

Sundowner (Kage - Arts Centre)

Sundowner's syndrome is a syndrome involving particular disorientation, erratic behaviour, mood variation, etc during the evening hours from sundown in people suffering from dementia - eg when suffering from Alzheimer's - and while I hadn't heard of it before, it's something that interests me, as I do tend to be drawn to snippets about dementia and loss of mental faculties...it's not something that particularly preoccupies me, but at least since early university, and probably earlier, the prospect has haunted me just a little bit, at intervals, a kind of premature darkening and death.

This production, a piece of dance theatre, I suppose, is an allusive, sometimes slightly mawkish, occasionally poignant evocation of the experience of Sundowner's, and dementia more generally, bound up with some subtle human drama. It's poetic in moments, the interpretive dance functioning well in its figuration of the theatre of the central figure's mind (the use of the back of stage area for some of the dance, behind a thin curtain, worked well), and while I didn't personally feel that it went anywhere particularly profound or unusual, nor was it unengaging or uninteresting.

(w/ Wei, Ash, Meribah)

I Am Legend

I like a good post-apocalypse, and I Am Legend isn't bad - tense, a bit reflective, and well paced and structured. Nothing amazing - but watching it on tv, with ad breaks, wouldn't have helped. Also, Will Smith is good.

An untitled soul mix cd

A mix cd from DS (from work) from a while back, designed as an introduction to soul for me. A lot of famous artists and famous songs, some familiar to me but most not - or at least not specifically, as nearly all sound at least vaguely familiar, either in their own right or as echoes in stuff that I do know very well (including, surprisingly frequently, Patty Griffin). Otis Redding, Etta James, Sam Cooke, Stevie Wonder, Al Green, Marvin Gaye, Dusty Springfield, Aretha Franklin and then some.

Emilie Simon - Franky Knight

A smoother, more consistent listen than The Big Machine - like.

Soley - We Sink

A discovery of Wei's from Iceland. Tidal-sounding, slightly fractured indie-pop; "Pretty Face" stands out for the way it combines her programmed tones and more organic elements (piano, voice, percussion)  into something distinctly catchy and tuneful.

Bic Runga - Belle

It'd be overstating it to say that Bic Runga is a totemic artist for me, but her music has run through a lot of my life, even soundtracked much of it in the background, despite never having really become laden with any specific strong associations (which might be just as well, in some ways). "Sway" and Drive pierced me in high school, and I kept on listening to them at intervals; near the end of uni, I belatedly picked up Beautiful Collision at around the time that my tastes were coalescing around a lot of that kind of pretty, melancholy-edged female singer-songwriter stuff; and then came the lovely Birds (*), easily her most mature and best to that point. And it seemed that, infrequently but somehow consistently, her songs would appear on mix cds, float out from the radio, come up on an ipod shuffle - always there, each time winding just a bit more of a personal thread around her music for me.

Anyhow, there's a new one out, Belle, and it's another good one. It's another album of elegant, finely crafted and performed adult alternative pop, perhaps a bit more experimental and a bit more sophisticated than the previous three; it starts sprightly, and then explores a range of other musical moods, from the classicism of "If You Really Do", through the Morricone-esque opening and mysterious swirl of "This Girl's Prepared For War" and the shimmery "Darkness All Around Us", on which Runga takes a back seat to collaborator/producer Kody Nielson (to pick out my favourites)...also, the dream-like two minute title track is honestly just a little bit magical, a gossamer, ethereal moment that sticks in the mind, as much for the otherworldly mood it invokes as for its wistful melody.

Emmylou Harris - Luxury Liner

What is it that makes Emmylou so consistently wonderful? This is one of the early ones, from the 70s, and it's as great as all the others; a particular highlight is her version of "She". It's partly the voice and partly the sensitivity of her interpretations - and the ability to pick songs that will work for her - but altogether she really is something.

"Still Smiling: A Tribute to the Genius of Brian Wilson"

Came with some music magazine or other. Seems like a good roster of currentish Brian Wilson / Beach Boys-inspired acts (there've probably always been many, but they seem especially prominent at the moment), but hasn't really taken me, for the most part; while I'm all for this kind of hazy sunshiney melancholy, I prefer that kind of vibe when it comes with more melody than is generally on offer here.