"Different Worlds"

Of the performances that I saw on The Voice, a handful particularly stood out: a couple each from Karise Eden and Darren Percival (deserved winner and runner-up - for mine, two of the three best singers in the competition), basically every time that Diana Rouvas was on stage (the third, and technically the most accomplished and spectacular singer on the show, if less distinctive than those other two) - and one of Brittany Cairns', a stunning song I didn't know called "Different Worlds".

So couple of nights ago, I downloaded it from iTunes - both Cairns' version and the original, as recorded by a singer named Jes Hudak - and I've been really stuck on the song since...it's wonderfully effective and affecting, built around a simple yearning, building melody and put together in a way that pulls the listener all the way through to its end. I've even listened to it enough - and been grabbed by it enough - that I've worked out how the structure of the song contributes to its achieving its effect: it starts with a building four line verse, follows that with another four lines that sound more like an extended bridge more than a second verse, seems to return to the verse again for two lines before unexpectedly, gloriously taking off on the line "You'll be like in a movie", then repeats the trick at the third line of the next stanza, soaring upwards on the repeated line "I'll leave the ocean behind", another bridge, and then just one surging final verse, ending leaving the listener wanting more (a lot of these kinds of songs lose some of their effect by spending too long tailing off at the end, but "Different Worlds" is a miniature epic, all over in 3 minutes).

Having worked that out hasn't taken any of the magic out of the song at all; iTunes tells me that in the few days since downloading them, I've listened to Cairns' version a somewhat ridiculous 65 times and Hudak's 19. I do like Cairns' version more; while she kind of belts it out a bit more than Hudak, I prefer the arrangement on her version, the instrumentation both simpler and fuller (also, it must be admitted, glossier and more radio-friendly), and I also like the different choices she makes with it (in particular, choosing to really open her throat on the earlier 'movie' line, while Hudak holds a bit more back until the climactic crest of the 'ocean' lines).

Anyway, I've always been susceptible to this kind of song, so in some ways it's not surprising that I've so latched on to it, but be that as it may, it's a wonderful song; it could have come along at any time, but it's also (as always with these things) the right song at the right time...it feels good to have found it.

Laura Tingle - "Great Expectations: Government, Entitlement and an Angry Nation" (QE46)

A lot of people have been talking about this one, and for good reason, I think - in this Quarterly Essay, Tingle has hit upon something. Like all the best diagnoses, it seems somehow obvious once laid out, but that's a function of it having highlighted something that underlies a lot else rather than of any triteness. Having said that, to the extent that Australia is nowadays an 'angry nation' - a not insignificant extent, for sure - I think that it's at least as much due to disillusionment and disgust with the current state of federal politics and political discourse as to the now-unmet sense of entitlement to government provision of the good life, historically developed and more recently fed by successive governments of both political stripe, so neatly analysed in the essay.

Robin Hood

What I said last time (I remember being in a terrible mood the night I saw it on the big screen, and wondered if that might have coloured my impressions - but seems not).

Care to Make Love in That Gross Little Space Between Cars? A Believer Book of Advice

The advice columns in Believer are often a highlight - snarky, witty, and frequently wildly off the wall...so it's surprising that this (second) collection of Sedaratives - somewhat misleadingly named, given that they're now shared among a wide roster of writer-comic types, rather than all flowing from the deliciously sharp pen of Amy Sedaris - is only intermittently amusing. Oh well.

In search of an unwritten life: The Brothers Bloom

This really is a delightful film. It would be easy for a film that is centrally concerned with the search for a 'natural' life, free of narratives and contruction, self-imposed and otherwise, to get in way too deep (il n'y a pas de hors-texte etc), but while The Brothers Bloom is clearly aware of the deconstructionist ideas that it invokes, at its heart is a tightly plotted, distinctly human story focused on the brothers Bloom themselves, Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo perfect as the con men brothers who are hopelessly entangled in their own story-telling; Rachel Weisz is equally good as the disarmingly open eccentric shut-in who gets caught up in their tale, and Rinko Kikuchi a delightful ornament as the taciturn Bang Bang (I'm pretty sure that her only words in the whole film are "campari" and "fuck me!").

I said after the first time I saw it that it could have been calculated to appeal to me - one of my personal preoccupations as its central theme, a style that seamlessly melds the artificial and the natural (a formal fixation of mine there), three of my favourite actors as the principals - and on a second viewing it still hits all of its marks...along with all of the above, it's clever, witty and self-aware, and it has both pizzazz (a surprisingly hard word to spell, incidentally) and heart.

As an aside, the way that they're all dressed doesn't hurt, either - something to aspire to.

Prometheus

Impressively, Prometheus feels of a piece with the Alien universe, while also working as pretty much a standalone piece of science fiction. There's real wonder in some of the shots, and also a taut horror as the party on the Prometheus begin to realise what they're dealing with. Satisfying.

(w/ Kim)

Daria seasons 3-5 + "Is It Fall Yet?" & "Is It College Yet?"

Been watching these at intervals over the last six months or so, maybe longer. In retrospect, when I was watching the show during high school, it must have been its first run on Australian tv, which probably explains why most of seasons 1-3 were familiar, but not the later 4 and 5. It was appealing back then, and still is, albeit now at far more of a remove. Daria and Jane are at the show's centre, but I think Quinn (for the airheadedness and flashes of insight) and Sandi (for the sheer unremitting malice) are my favourite characters apart from them.

(seasons 1-2 ; previously)

The Secret History of Fantasy edited by Peter S Beagle

I read fantasy mainly for pleasure, and that mainly escapism, but there's another layer to it, too - both to the genre and to my appreciation of it - and in her short essay 'The critics, the monsters, and the fantasists', which appears at the end of this anthology, Ursula K Le Guin nails the connection between those two facets as well as anyone ever has, elegantly and lucidly highlighting both what is unique about the genre and the absurdity of its frequent literary ghettoisation.

One of Le Guin's points is that true fantasy is not allegorical; in a typically nuanced elaboration, she also points out that fantasy and allegory can overlap, and that socially conscious readings of fantasy are not only possible but often desirable. And those notions seem to run through the stories in this excellent collection - all of them fantasies, nearly all with at least something of an allegorical flavour, and the large majority of them genuine literature on any terms. Their careful selection is evident not only in the consistent quality of the stories, but also in the way that none of them goes anywhere near the classic Tolkein-esque style or motifs, instead carving out a whole range of magics and mysteries in their own veins.

I'd read a few of these before - Patricia McKillip's "The Lady of the Skulls", which does take a familiar motif but makes something new of it, Neil Gaiman's dark, effectively revisionistic version of Snow White "Snow, Glass, Apples", T C Boyle's hilarious yet strangely affecting "We Are Norsemen" and Stephen King's "Mrs Todd's Shortcut" - and each of them is good. Steven Millhauser's "The Barnum Museum" is probably the most memorable story in the anthology; its catalogue of a museum of the fantastic brings Borges to mind, along with the idea of the wunderkammer, and also made me think of MONA (which reflects well on the museum itself). Also particularly good, all in different ways: Maureen McHugh's "Ancestor Money", Jeffrey Ford's "The Empire of Ice Cream", Kij Johnson's "26 Monkeys, Also The Abyss".

Berlinde De Bruyckere - "We Are All Flesh" (ACCA)

The first, large, extremely white room contains only two pieces. Suspended above the ground from one wall, a horse (headless and partly opened up), and in the middle of the room, two horses, splayed, again suspended from a kind of simple, brutal hanging frame - stitched/grafted to each other, belly to belly and facing in opposite directions (necks only - again headless). They're monumental, visceral and striking; I'm pretty sure that the horse hide, at least, is actual horse.

In the other rooms are wax sculptures in a range of settings - some, twisted trunks, in a wooden cabinet, doors disconcertingly open towards the viewer, others, resembling exposed human viscera, mounted to the wall or suspended in a kind of bridge/cradle of wood and string, and one abject human figure, head buried, naked. Sinuous, solid, memorable (and aptly titled).

Simon Reynolds - Retromania

A wide-ranging look at contemporary pop's retro fixation - its obsession with its own past. The focus is on pop music but Reynolds takes in a range of other strands of popular culture, often in impressive depth. I skimmed large parts of it - as much as I love listening to music, I don't at all have the obsessive interest in analysing it and tracing its history or cultural significance that Reynolds himself clearly does - but it was worth the read.

In a possibly dangerous move

...I have just signed up to the iTunes store. Hopefully I can use this for good.

Good = downloading internet-only releases
Also okay = acquiring individual songs that I want to be able to listen to whenever I want but don't think I need the album of (a lot of these may well be because of some kind of sentimental connection from the past) ... obviously this is how they get you, but $2.19 is a small price to pay
Probably okay = albums that I want to listen to instead of buying them from shops (this one remains to be seen)
Not okay = accumulating masses of music that I never get around to listening to (as if I don't have enough of that already)

So far (in order):

* Laura Cantrell - Trains and Boats and Planes (this one is internet-only)
* Bonnie Tyler - "Total Eclipse of the Heart" (you might think that this was somehow ironic, but then you'd be dead wrong)
* Jewel - "Hands", "You Were Meant For Me", "Foolish Games", "Who Will Save Your Soul" (there was a period where all of these songs got played a lot in these parts)
* Don Henley - "The Boys of Summer" (I remember David seeing my winamp playlist, years ago, full of sad girl singers (including some by Jewel, probably) - plus this song...cue mock-masculine "Don Hen-leeeyyy" shaking of the fist)
* Hunters & Collectors - "Holy Grail" & "Throw Your Arms Around Me" (two great songs that I remember fondly from school and probably haven't heard since...I think I actually taped "Holy Grail" off the radio and listened to it on one of those old-fashioned self-made mix tapes!)
* Kendall Payne - "Wonderland" (I think Jade put me onto this melancholy little song and I listened to it quite a bit at the time, I think - it had completely slipped my mind till just now)
* Goo Goo Dolls - "Iris"; Collective Soul - "The World I Know" & "Shine"; Matchbox 20 - "3AM" & "Push"; The Wallflowers - "One Headlight" (a whole lot of 90s rock - I was into all of this stuff at the time, even though my tastes were already heading towards 'alternative' by then)
* Seal - "Kiss From A Rose" (one of those songs that just sinks in deep. When I heard it on the radio - google tells me this must've been around 1995 (year 7/8), and that sounds right - it was lush, mysterious, romantic, different from anything I'd heard before. Good moment around the lunch table at work the other day when it came up on songlines...several people 'ahh'-ing in pleasant recollection)

Anyway, enough for tonight...that became a trip down musical memory lane.

"I was in love and I knew that he loved me because he made me a tape": Saint Etienne - Words and Music

A tight, more or less extroverted pop record with the expected nostalgic threads running through it, and gaining an extra (hypothetical) half-star for its sheer unabashed love of pop music and insistence on its transformative effect on people's lives. Saint Etienne are a totemic band for me, and while it's unlikely that anything new that they release will get me as much as the older, classic stuff that I was listening to while most susceptible, years ago, this is still solid.

Alison Krauss & Union Station - Paper Airplane

Alison Krauss & Union Station's not so secret weapon has, of course, always been Krauss herself - even when, as is often the case on Paper Airplane (and several of the records that came immediately before it) the music that she's creating is more comfortingly familiar than particularly interesting, it sounds wonderful. On this record, most songs are led by guitar and bass, with dobro, lap steel, banjo and even fiddle much less prominent; it's symptomatic. Of course, Dan Tyminski - he of constant sorrow - can be relied upon to liven things up, and in fact, the three songs where he takes lead responsibilities are amongst the best on this tasteful but just somehow too subdued set.

Regina Spektor - What We Saw From The Cheap Seats

As good as she can be, Regina Spektor hasn't ever put out a great album - all the ones I've listened to before this one have had at least one or two truly great songs ("Carbon Monoxide" and "Us" from Soviet Kitsch, "Better" from Begin to Hope, "Blue Lips" from Far) and a smattering of other very good ones, but none have really pulled together as a completely satisfying whole. And, unfortunately, ...Cheap Seats isn't the one to break that pattern; if anything, it's a step backwards - while listenable, there's nothing really exciting, either because of interest or straightforward emotional impact (closest in that latter respect is "How"), on it, with honourable mentions to "Patron Saint" and "Ballad of a Politician".

Chairlift - Something

(A fair bit of extemporanea activity this (long) weekend - procrastination from the last minute sprint to tomorrow's uni exam.)

Chairlift were good at this year's laneway, and I'd seen some good reviews of this one on the web, but I think maybe they're best as a live proposition. While Something is more even than Does You Inspire You, and a better album for it, there's still not that much to it - it's fun while it lasts, even giddily so in spots, but doesn't linger.

Norah Jones - Little Broken Hearts

I guess I've been aware of Norah Jones for a while - her first album, what seems ages ago, was ubiquitous (though I never actually listened to it), and while the general reception made it sound pleasant enough, it didn't seem likely to be something I'd particularly enjoy (ie coffee house-suitable jazzy vocal pop). I knew that she was still going around, and the (to that stage non-existent) interest factor went up a bit when she showed up in My Blueberry Nights, but still, she remained peripheral for me until those fantastic drop-ins on Rome - which were enough to get me to buy this new one of hers.

Actually, the thing that really tipped it was that Little Broken Hearts is billed as a collaboration with Danger Mouse, the driving force behind Rome, and this album isn't a million miles from the Jones-contributed vocals on that other record. On many of the songs, there's the same sense of slightly chilly drama, jazzy elements largely subsumed by a rootsier, spaghetti-western vibe itself lightly cloaked with a twinkling airiness; a couple of the songs in the middle in particular, "Take It Back" and "After The Fall", really nail it. All of that said, there's something just a bit insubstantial about the album - I'm not sure where it comes from - but it's the high points that linger in the mind.

Marianne Dissard - L'Abandon

Sometimes nice things happen when you buy on the internet. I ordered L'Abandon on amazon but hadn't realised I was buying directly from the artist - until I got the cd and found that it had been signed with a message to me, complete with a note written on the outside of the shipping bag (sorry for delay! i hope you like it. M) and a DISSARD return address in Paris. The music itself is good, too - atmospheric, heavy-feeling and concerned more with dynamic and mood than melody, but still completely listenable.

Ryan Adams - Ashes & Fire

I've always kind of vaguely assumed that one day I would probably listen to Ryan Adams, and probably quite like his music (but probably not love it) - based mainly on the excellence of Faithless Street and Pneumonia and the likelihood of diminishing returns amidst his more recent, disconcertingly prolific solo output. Anyway, Ashes & Fire is a recent one (2011), and it's a pretty nice wistful alt-country singer-songwriterish record, a handful of good songs and the rest not unpleasant, but without the spark of near-greatness that animates the best moments from those two Whiskeytown records.

Terry Pratchett - Snuff

As enjoyable as Discworld novels always are - amazingly, this is number 39, including the ones aimed primarily at younger readers. Much as I like reading them, it's been a while since a new Pratchett really impressed me, and this one doesn't break the run - it has its moments, but doesn't break any new ground (quite a few of the recent ones have been quite self-consciously concerned with the importance of tolerance of difference - with goblins the downtrodden here).

There's something slightly small-canvas about it, not least in the way that it's nearly entirely told in the same narrative stream (though Vimes is admittedly probably one of the best major characters to do that with), so that there isn't the sense of slightly chaotic plotting and general teeming panoply that normally prevails in these books. Also - Death doesn't appear in it! Which made me wonder if he stopped showing up in every single book a while back and this is just the first time I've noticed. Still, all in all, nothing to complain about here.

China Miéville - Embassytown

The epigraph is from Benjamin - "The word must communicate something (other than itself)" - and the possibilities of that assertion are central to this typically brainy, intricately plotted and disorienting novel from Mieville, surprisingly his first out and out work of science fiction, and with a cracker of an idea at its centre - an alien race whose language operates in such a way that their words, rather than signifying anything outside of themselves, are instead pure referents, with no gap between language and meaning, and no concept of symbolic language...until, that is, an odd human infection takes hold.

Of his previous novels, it's probably closest to The City & The City, mostly in the careful, sinuous way that he works through the implications of his central premise, wrapping it up in equal measures of unexplained mystery and, crucially, story, with machinations, conspiracy and unexpected turns around every corner. The exotic is rendered almost graspable while still fundamentally opaque, the familiar strange; while it has a sort of detachment and weightlessness that prevents it from packing the same kind of punch as the Bas-Lag books with which he really came into his own, Embassytown is another piece of wonder from Mieville.

Best Coast - The Only Place

The problem with The Only Place is that it drags. All the songs are mid-tempo, clean-sounding and uninspired; the record has none of the energy and flashes of vividity of Crazy For You. Sadly, it's dull.

The Jesus and Mary Chain - Upside Down: The Best of the Jesus and Mary Chain

Psychocandy is a great album, "Just Like Honey" an even greater song, and there's something about the band's sound and their style of songwriting that hits a sweet spot for me, so that whenever I hear another song of theirs, I like it. Listening to this 2xcd best-of, though, chronologically mixed up, it has to be said that there's a certain sameness to their output, with the result that listening through it makes for nice aural wallpaper but no new revelations.

Sam Phillips - Martinis & Bikinis

I haven't seen Stealing Beauty, but I ended up with its soundtrack at some point, and I've listened to it a lot over the years (e.g.). One that's always stood out is Sam Phillips' "I Need Love", a brightly yearnful, jangly, slightly country modern pop tune; somewhere during that distracted period a couple of months ago, I had a High Fidelity moment and came up with a current '200 favourite songs of all time' list - "I Need Love" lodged at #186.

I didn't know before seeing the liner notes for the 1994 album from which it came, Martinis & Bikinis, that it was produced by the estimable T Bone Burnett, and somehow neither had I made the connection between the lyric "I need fire to melt the frozen sea inside me" and that line of Kafka's. Anyhow, the whole album is pretty nice, elegant and just a little bit earthy, highlighted by excellent songwriting. Reference points: Liz Phair (90s model), Aimee Mann, etc.