Triple J's Like A Version Anthology: Best of Volumes 1-5

Been a long time since triple j was my listening staple (the last vestige fell away a few months ago when I realised that even having it as my morning clock radio wakeup station was a bridge too far - in a further sign that I'm getting old, I started finding the announcers too loud, too braying, and shifted to triple r instead), but it was Sarah Blasko's lovely take on "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", heard post-play in the Malthouse bar as they called last drinks, that got me to buy this.

With a generalist covers compilation like this, there are some that you want to listen to because of the song, others because of the artist, perhaps a handful because of the particular combination. Here, a few of my favourite songs are in line ("Wide Open Road", done well by the Panics; "There She Goes", ploddingly and unfortunately covered by the Wombats; "Joga" given a dull do-over by Hermitude; "Look at Miss Ohio", faithfully but somewhat more somberly, and overall effectively, done by the Kill Devil Hills); the highlights overall, along with Blasko's version of the Elton John classic, are a typically twee yet urgent take by Tegan and Sara on "Dancing in the Dark" (reminding me what a classic that song is), Bob Evans' countrified spin on Lily Allen's "Not Fair", Evermore's melancholy cover of Little Birdy's "Relapse", and Little Birdy themselves with a straight-up but enjoyably sprightly version of "These Boots Were Made For Walking".

Carl Little - Edward Hopper's New England

Lighthouses, boats, Cape Cod scenes, etc. To some degree, light and composition play a different role in these ones, an important part of Hopper's body of work, than they do in his urban pieces; but like those others, they exactly capture one facet of America as I imagine it.

Yes Minister & Yes, Prime Minister

Very amusing, very cynical; complete satire of course but that doesn't stop it from sometimes having resonance.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Now this was a really sweet film. It combines two of my favourite genres - teen movie and that stream of literature that takes in The Great Gatsby, The Secret History and perhaps most pertinently, Brideshead Revisited - and presents the resulting amalgam in a nostalgically rendered early 90s package, complete with glorious indie soundtrack (Smiths, Cocteau Twins, Throwing Muses, etc).

There were plenty of moments that had the potential to throw the viewer out of the extended moment that the film invokes, but it's good enough - and, of course, completely enough in my personal zone - that it instead carried me straight through; the best example is probably the first tunnel scene, the suggestion that these kids of such great musical taste could have not heard Bowie's "Heroes" and then Emma Watson's Sam's (she's good, as is the rest of the cast) arms-outstretched pose, wind pulling at her as the car races ahead, both potentially risible in a slightly different context but instead combining to create the kind of ecstatic moment that is inevitably rendered nostalgic when played out by people of an age and in a time that is long behind us, but of course would have been experienced as at least potentially bittersweet, albeit perhaps in a different way, even at the time.

(w/ Kai, David + Justine, and Cass)

"Pompeii, L.A." (Malthouse)

I have to say, I haven't found the Malthouse plays that I've been to this year to (collectively) be up to their usual - high - standard...possibly partly a reflection of the last-minute, second half of the season only subscription bit. Having said that, of those that I saw, Declan Greene's "Pompeii, L.A." yesterday was the stand out (I was similarly impressed by his "Moth"). There's more than a hint of Mulholland Drive - of Lynch generally - to its rendition of the internal apocalypse of the Hollywood dreaming that is its subject; a a highlight was the production's bold, fluid theatrical confidence, including a set design that finds room, between its two acts (the first a vivid fragmentation of scenes and identities, the second a hospital-room crawl towards death), for the towing of a battered red sports car out the back of the Merlyn theatre.

(w/ Steph C, Julian, Jarrod + friend (Larissa?), and Cass)

"Jeff Wall Photographs" & "Thomas Demand"

On at the NGV Aust & International respectively, entry on one ticket to both.

Jeff Wall's large-scale photos - most finalised and exhibited as transparencies in light boxes, to be lit from behind - were a mixed bag for me. A few were quite striking, either for their pictorial flair (the last two in the exhibition, "A sudden gust of wind (after Hokusai)", 1993 and "Coastal motifs", 1989, in particular) or for the successful way they metaphorise (or literalise) their subjects' psychological interiority ("A woman and her doctor", 1980-1; "After 'Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue", 1999-2000), but most simply didn't leave much of an impression.

Thomas Demand combines media - he creates paper and cardboard sculpture and then photographs or videos them - in a manner that seems holistic. Scenes like "Copyshop" and "Bathroom" take on an unfamiliar air when constructed, in a way that is oddly undetailed yet wholly familiar, and then preserved via colour print; also notable is his "Rain" video, the raindrops created again using paper.

Sharon Van Etten - Tramp

It starts with the voice - as with Epic, initially a bit of a barrier, mixed high and raspy in a way that seems to push out everything else, but on repeat listens revealing itself as an instrument of considerable power and expressiveness and, on Tramp, subtlety. Tramp is a really good album, interesting to listen to throughout, Van Etten's haunted vocals riding on an shimmeringly atmospheric indie-singer-songwriter-country-rock-ish sound a bit reminiscent of Neko Case, the songs being of the kind that don't obviously conform to conventional structures but instead seem to have distinctive shapes of their own. Tracks 2 and 3, "Give Out" and "Serpents" stand out, but the real show-stopper's "All I Can", unabashedly shooting for grandness and nailing it, cresting on its climactic cry "we all make mistakes".

The Kirishima Thing

A high school movie, done with a very nice touch. The characters come quickly to life, and while their types, relationships and paths are familiar, there is an obliqueness to how the film moves them around, often denying us the expected outcome in a way that seems entirely designed and indeed structural, right down to the unresolvedness of the ending. Being Japanese, it naturally called to mind All About Lily Chou-Chou and Battle Royale for me, but it's far lighter than either of those, albeit still serious-minded in its focus on its (impressively large) roster of characters. There was something very pleasing about it that's hard to define, but I liked it a lot.

(w/ Andreas - part of the Japanese Film Festival)

"Radiance: The Neo-Impressionists" (NGV International)

A nice little exhibition about a movement that I knew very little about before. Beginning in France and Belgium in the 1880s with Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, neo-impressionism took impressionism as its starting point and sought to incorporate the then new sciences of optics and colour perception and theory, using careful dabs of bright colours in a 'divisionistic' style - juxtaposing complementary colours, both at the level of detail and overall picture - with the aim of inducing the intended effects through the viewer's perceptual response to the use of colour and line rather than swift brushstrokes aimed at capturing the essence of a moment in the traditional impressionist style.

By and large, I found the paintings in the exhibition pleasant rather than amazing - they have a tendency to perhaps be a little mannered, at least by comparison to the finest of the impressionist (including late impressionist) style...having said that, a couple by Maximilien Luce were very striking - "Views of London (Cannon Street)" (1892-3) and "The Louvre and the Pont du Carrousel, night effect" (1890), the former dusk and the latter night, both making use of violets, lilacs, greens, city lights on water. And my favourite in the exhibition, Theo van Rysselberghe's "Canal in Flanders, gloomy weather" (1894), is wonderful, done with a vivid blurriness, like a photograph of a memory.

Actually, in some ways, the most interesting thing about the exhibition was the way that the use of colour, particularly in later neo-impressionism, very clearly prefigures that of a range of more familiar movements that would follow in the 20th century - bringing to mind Matisse and the fauves - and the turn towards something approaching abstraction, again in that later part of the movement.

(w/ Trang)