Records

If I'm honest, going out was never really on the cards for tonight - not in this current phase that I'm in. Well, staying in instead, with no particular plans, and my eye fell on my old box of records, literally gathering dust under the coffee table; idly flipping through a few, I came upon Tigermilk, and it all at once reminded me of a whole bunch of things - how much I loved that album in particular (extemporanea's name is from Dorothy Parker, but the colour scheme comes direct from Tigermilk), and the way I felt about music during that time, and a whole lot of other things besides.

So I pulled out the record player from the shelf where it's been sitting, unused, since I moved into this current apartment coming up to two years ago, put on Crowded House - although I'm now on to Temple of Low Men - poured myself a glass and set up in front of the speakers and so here we are.

The turntable was a birthday gift from Sid; it may have been a 21st, which would've made it 2003 - which sounds about right. He also gave me a copy of The Unforgettable Fire - a good choice, U2 being a band that's always been there and whose music I've felt close to at more than one time in my life (another memory - my parents giving me their best of 1980-90 cd one Christmas), and that one perhaps my favourite.

It coincided with a time when I was super excited about pop music, still discovering new things all the time, and spending probably far too much (but never enough) time in second hand music stores. Dixon's on Brunswick St was a great one, and so too that one on Swanston Street (was it Collector's Corner at the time, or something else?)...most of the records I've ended up with were acquired over that final period of uni, from mid 2003 (I guess) through '04 and '05.

The Cocteau Twins were big for me then - really, absolute-favourite-artist big, and I was deeply enough in love with their music that I wanted to listen to everything they'd ever released. Thing was, they had a massive back catalogue, lps, eps and singles - some of which had never made its way onto cd. And so the record player enabled me to listen to music that was otherwise unavailable to me - specifically the wonderful "Aikea-Guinea" and "Love's Easy Tears" eps, plus The Pink Opaque compilation and the "Echoes in a Shallow Bay" ep (the latter two actually available on cd, but hard to find), and I also acquired a vinyl copy of the ever-amazing Treasure along the way too (in fact, from memory, it was bundled with the "Aikea-Guinea" ep). I really did love the Cocteaus at that time, and it was so wonderful to be able to get to these whole other swatches of their music via vinyl.

In a slightly similar vein, at some stage I picked up Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (despite the massive Cure fandom from a few years previously, I'd never got to the cd - in some, small, part because the cd omitted one of the songs from the original double-record version); also a Lush ep ("Mad Love") and the Smiths' Hatful of Hollow.

Also, a few pieces of new vinyl bought for various reasons: a Scout Niblett ep, a Tujiko Noriko 12" called "I Forgot the Title" (both of those first two weren't available on cd, I think), We Are The Pipettes, In Rainbows.

And then there was a lot of cheap second hand vinyl, and I wasn't always particularly discerning, so some of these are more random than others: Pavlov's Dog's At the Sound of the Bell, Dead or Alive's Youth Quake (I guess I bought that one because it had "You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)" on it, not that that's really an explanation), Kim Carnes' Mistaken Identity ("Bette Davis Eyes" - still a great song), Bread's Lost Without Your Love (??), Ry Cooder's Get Rhythm, a Shirley Bassey 25th anniversary greatest hits (this was probably because of that "History Repeating" song), a DG Karajan/Berlin Philharmonic recording of some Debussy, a cd called Spanish Classical Guitar by Juanillo de Alba, two 12" singles by the Darling Buds ("You've Got To Choose" and "Crystal Clear"), the Boomtown Rats' The Fine Art of Surfacing, Roxy Music's Manifesto (I listened to that one earlier to see whether it had gotten better with age...it hadn't), Modern English's After the Snow (a 4ad record, and home to "Melt With You"), Lloyd Cole and the Commotions' Easy Pieces, Paul Simon's Graceland (good album!), Kate and Anna McGarrigle's Love Over and Over, Don Henley's Building the Perfect Beast, a 45 of the "Brass in Pocket" single...some of those I'll hang on to, but most I'll get rid of now, I think.

Amidst all that, a few do stand out. ABC's The Lexicon of Love was one - unexpectedly, I ended up really liking that one and listening to it a lot. Born in the USA - pretty sure that I came to this one through the vinyl. Also Bridge Over Troubled Water, which I don't remember really getting into at the time but which I'm certainly glad to have in my collection now.

Plus a whole lot of Talking Heads, some of which I also have on cd, some not - I guess there was a lot of their stuff second hand in stores at the time (I wonder whether the more recent surge of modern bands influenced by them has changed that): Remain in Light (1980), Speaking in Tongues (1983 - two copies ... I think at least one of them maybe had a tendency to skip or get stuck), Little Creatures (1985), True Stories (1986) and, most pleasingly, Fear of Music (1979), the first of theirs that I listened to - borrowed from the ERC library at Melbourne Uni - and still my favourite, textured corrugated cover and all.

Finally, of course, I've acquired a bunch of touchstones, mostly new and, for the older ones, generally in re-pressings...I already mentioned Treasure and Tigermilk; in addition, there's Unknown Pleasures, Closer, Isn't Anything, Loveless, OK Computer, Moon Pix, Funeral, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, In The Aeroplane Over the Sea, Boxer. (And, to a lesser extent, Sgt Peppers, Parallel Lines and the Diva soundtrack.)

And really, it's that last batch that's most telling - all of them of course utterly, intimately familiar, inside and out via cd but I've got them on vinyl anyway in part because music sounds better that way and I wanted to be able to hear those records at their finest, and in part just because I wanted to have them on record, the physical artifact, large-size sleeve and cover (and insert) art, and the record itself, shiny black and tactile. The role that music plays in my life has shifted over time, and certainly I don't have the same intensity of feeling for it that I did back in the days when I was building this collection - but it's at no risk of going away either, and these records are a reminder and a link back to those times, and by any means completely of the past at that.

Banksy: Wall and Piece

I'm not particularly one for street art in general or Banksy in particular, but it and he are something to be reckoned with, and I've enjoyed working through this photo collection of some of his work, interspersed with little sardonic bits of text - a gift from Ray and Amy.

Kill Your Darlings

Another Beat movie, though a very different proposition from Howl. Pretty sombre, and struck me more as well-made than actually an especially good film, but I did like the way it made writing and words seem like the most important thing in the world, almost literally a matter of life and death.

(w/ Cass)

Six Feet Under seasons 1 & 2

It was the closing image of about the second or third episode in season 1, the house across the road on fire, that made me think I would stick with Six Feet Under, both because it showed that the show was willing to go to some slightly stranger (and perhaps more melodramatic) places and because of the striking nature of the image itself, the eerie suburban vision straight out of Crewdson (an artist, incidentally, explicitly referenced later in the series). And what's kept me going since has been the human drama at the heart of the show, woven in with its themes (which are the biggest ones - mortality and how to live a life), very much including the characters' arcs, some of which I at least think I can extrapolate to possible endpoints over the remaining three seasons, others much less clear to me (about midway through the second season, I began to feel Ruth - the wonderful Frances Conway - particularly intensely).

Melbourne Now again (NGV Australia)

Sheltering from the heat yesterday afternoon between engagements (it only got to 36.5 degrees in the end but that was hot enough), I went and had another look at the bits of Melbourne Now housed in the Fed Square building. Only a few really stood out:
* The installations in the foyer by the 'Hotham Street Ladies', pitch perfect recreations of inner north living in icing and cake - somehow barely kitsch at all, and instead just pleasingly, piquantly familiar.
* Clare Rae's photos of herself (I think) in various behind-the-scenes NGV spaces.
* Phuong Ngo - "Look past". A lightbox table with hundreds of 35mm colour slides to explore.
* Slave Pianos - "Gamelan sisters". A musical structure designed as an abstraction of an 18th century double grand piano, complete with central gong and various other percussion, playing compositions with titles like "Pointless vanishing point".
* David Jolly's paintings, photo-realistic in their detail, translucently on glass panels.

(previously)

"Crescendo" (ACCA)

Seven video pieces from around the world. The two that I watched all the way through were Hans Op de Beeck's "Parade" (2012, about 12 mins) and Julian Rosefeldt's "My home is a dark and cloud-hung land" (2011, about 30 mins); the first, as its name suggests, a parade of various types of people moving slowly across the stage of an opulent theatre, accompanied by a piano and horns soundtrack that reminded me of the music from Beasts of the Southern Wild, and the second a four-screen installation revolving around the German forest and surprisingly compelling with it. And there was one other longer one that I'll try to go back for another time.

American Hustle

Very good. Not as broad as I'd expected, and not so much of a genre - or genres - as something that defies easy categories, driven as it is primarily by character, albeit in a way that generates plenty of story and with the late 70s period trappings front and centre ... it feels as much like a movie made in the 70s as one that's about that decade.

David O Russell is a good start, and all of the big five actors moving through it are ace. Bale, Cooper and Renner are all entirely convincing (although, with the first of those, there are occasional - perhaps unavoidable, but rather incongruous - flashes of Batman), but it's the women who sear - Jennifer Lawrence steals every scene she's in, while Amy Adams is simply brilliant (thinking back, I think she was similarly great in the only other film I've seen her in, The Master). And, not least because of those performances, the whole thing's got soul.

(w/ JF + Vera)

Terry Pratchett - Raising Steam

This one feels like one for the fans, with plenty of cameo appearances and asides that do little or nothing to advance the story but do provide welcome reminders of old favourite characters, places, events and things. Steam-powered trains come to the Discworld, 'deep down' (fundamentalist) dwarfs are violently agitating, and the march towards the equal recognition of all species (aided by the tide of technological advances) continues apace, Moist von Lipwig plays impresario with Vetinari moving pieces behind him.

Edinburgh Gardens / Chvrches

If my personal - or emotional - map of Melbourne has a centre, it might well be the Edinburgh Gardens. So many successively layered associations, some piercingly specific and others permeating more generally across events and periods of time, leading to the gardens having long ago become such an important site for me, there even when absent, and not least as totemic symbol of inner northern Melbourne.

Anyway, last night, dinner in Clifton Hill with AM, ZG, CT and partners of those who currently have them; afterwards, walking alone home to Carlton along familiar-feeling side streets (familiar-feeling even though I don't think I've ever been down those particular ones before), sky all shades of black and plum-lilac and deep electric blue, I found myself at the gardens' edge, coming from what I always think of as its back - the non-St Georges Road side. A few steps inwards to the low fence encircling the oval, facing west; before me, a spread-out night sky vista, trees and buildings dark-silhouetted on the near horizon. Listening to Chvrches, I'm not sure how long I stood there looking before stepping through the open gate and walking across to the bright lights and whir of passing traffic of the main road ahead...it was a bit of a moment.

Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

Despite how incongruous it seems to suggest that I've been anticipating something for more than a decade, that's kind of how it's been with The Goldfinch, qua 'the next Donna Tartt' book, at any rate. The Little Friend came out in 2002 and I would've read it then or soon after and my liking for it has only grown over time (including through a re-read a couple of years later); and of course The Secret History was already one of the most totemic of all novels for me. And so maybe, against that backdrop, The Goldfinch was almost destined to disappoint, at least marginally.

It's a good Story, no doubt about it, and as part and parcel of that, I believed in the characters - most importantly the narrator Theo Decker, and even those at risk of caricature like his tearaway friend Boris. The key structuring motifs and events - the death of Theo's mother, his longing for Pippa, the (happily, not overly determined) painting itself - are plausible, as are the sets of motives and actions at whose centres they sit. I certainly wanted to know what would happen. And there's some really lovely writing along the way.

Having said all that, it somehow felt that The Goldfinch didn't really penetrate, and I don't quite know whether that's to do with the novel itself or rather with some present lack of receptiveness of my own. Part of it, I suspect, is that for all of my efforts to savour the book and not to race through it, over the weeks that I've been working through its 770-odd pages, the usual momentum did take over and I found the pages turning faster than maybe needed to really absorb it. And the final pages in particular probably need re-reading and time to percolate, throwing as they do the entirety of what's come before into just a subtly different perspective, hard-headed and demanding, yet lyrical:

...this middle zone illustrates the fundamental discrepancy of love. Viewed close: a freckled hand against a black coat, an origami frog tipped on its side. Step away, and the illusion snaps in again: life-more-than-life, never-dying. Pippa herself is the play betwen those things, both love and not-love. Photographs on the wall, a balled-up sock on the sofa. The moment where I reached to brush a piece of fluff from her hair and she laughed and ducked at my touch. And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky -- so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

In fact, re-reading those pages now, with the distance of a few days, already I feel a slight transmutation in how I feel about The Goldfinch, the inkling that it will grow for me over the years, just maybe, as the novel itself ends, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

* * *

As an aside, I've been enjoying the kindle that Jade gave me a while back and in fact had purchased The Goldfinch for possible reading during the recentish WA trip. But I ended up deciding to save it for post-holiday reading - and then, once back in Melbourne, surprised myself with the thought that, seeing as I'd only get one first read of The Goldfinch, I'd better read it as a 'real' book, and duly picked up and read it as a physical copy rather than the e-version.

Best Coast - Fade Away

This kind of music is best when it's at its most simple, and the nicest moment on Fade Away is its simplest, on a record not exactly trading on complexity - and 60s-quoting closer "I Don't Know How" just nails it. The rest isn't bad either.

(Crazy for You ; The Only Place)

Library Wars

There's a 'declaration of library rights' and the solemn warning that a society that burns books will someday burn people, the rapid layout of the (fictional; alternate universe) 1980s rise of book censorship including black-uniformed 'media betterment' squads dedicated to eradicating unsuitable books, opposed by a library service force that protects libraries, the last bastions of freedom of thought and expression, both armed with machine guns - although the library force, being 'heroes of justice', don't shoot to kill - and then the story, which focuses on a plucky young volunteer who finds herself in an elite taskforce and you don't really need to know anything more than that, although (marginal, but still pleasing), there are supporting turns from this guy who looks like a Japanese Willem Dafoe and also the actor who played Gogo Yubari in Kill Bill; the principals are effective too. Much fun.

(w/ Meribah and Ash)

Chvrches - The Bones of What You Believe

It's nice to be surprised by pop music sometimes, even in little ways, and that's just what The Bones of What You Believe has done to me.

Well, 'surprise' implies some kind of expectation, so maybe that's slightly misleading - while I knew there was a band called Chvrches, that was as far as my knowledge extended till reading popmatters' list of the year's 75 best songs, including an enticing description of "The Mother We Share" (#10) as, among other things, 'the most complete pop song of the year' going on to enthuse: 'Lauren Mayberry and her crew [have] crafted what amounts to the most inescapable hook any music fan has heard in a long, long time. If the accented synths through the verses won’t get you, the desperation of the chorus will.'

But the surprise is really that, well beyond the sugary, skatey genius of that one song, the album bats deep - nearly every one of its 12 synth-y electro-pop cuts has something interesting to say, a murderous hook or a series of twists that takes it in an unexpected, catchy direction, tunes like "We Sink", "Gun", "Lies", "Recover", "By the Throat" all dragging you along in their wake; it doesn't hurt that she has one of those singing voices that conveys personality. Something something, this is good.

Cults - Static

Despite how much I liked - and continue to like - their debut, Static wasn't super immediate for me, taking a few listens to hit. But now that it's done so, aided by some city listening last Sunday, first day of summer (specifically while sitting outside the NGV in the sunshine, enjoying a takeaway Campos coffee), I'm really getting it...'static' is a good title, because the music's static-sweet - hazily, shimmeringly crackly, like a pop record equivalent of an alcoholic milkshake, full of tiny crunching shards of ice.

The Apology King

Pleasingly absurd, escalating eventually to needing to apologise on behalf of the entirety of Japan.

(w/ Alice and Steph N - part of the Japanese Film Festival)

"Melbourne Now" (NGV International bits)

First, I like both the idea and the execution of "Melbourne Now", a wide-ranging survey - exhibition - of contemporary Melbourne art and design, dispersed across the two arms of the NGV.

Anyway, today I spent a couple of hours down in the International (last Sunday - opening weekend - Jade and I took a quick look around the bits in the Potter but didn't have enough time to properly take it in) and enjoyed it, from the 'Community Hall' at the entrance, the flags suspended from the ceiling of the great hall, Caleb Shea's colourful, playful steel sculpture series "What are you looking at Balzac" on the terrace out back, Laith McGregor's "OK/KO" in the ground floor comprised of two table tennis tables with pen/pencil portraits of the artist drawn on their surface (both tables were being enthusiastically used as I passed through), and onwards.

Some that appealed:
* Juan Ford - "You, Me and the Flock". Large curved wall, the vast majority of its height sky, horizon-line a few centimetres above ground, and the invitation to add some birds to the wall yourself (my empty sticker sheet photographed above, along with the page from my notebook to which one've them escaped).
* Daniel Crooks - "An embroidery of voids". A video work, moving through a spliced series of inner Melbourne laneways; I only specifically recognised one (from the cbd), but the sense of general recognition, particularly from my North Fitzroy days, was strong and piercing.
* Siri Hayes - "Plein air explorers" and "Wanderer above a sea of images" (below), a pair of large, compositionally similar backlit photos. I've seen these before, though I can't remember exactly where; her work has struck me before.
* Tomislav Nikolic - "enter this sublime corrosion" and "3: we all have a dream of a place we belong", both colour paintings.
* Raafat Ishak - "Half a proposition for a banner march and a black cube hot air balloon". A series of abstract, geometric, somewhat Frank Lloyd Wright-esque paintings of room interiors - of the NGV itself, though I wouldn't have known without the explanatory plaque.
* Also, one whose name I didn't take down, but which was basically a room-size installation of lights and speakers which, once you'd been there for long enough, emitted a terrifyingly loud industrial blare (and flashing of lights), like the room was shouting at you.

Never Let Me Go

As film adaptations of books go, this is a good one. The hazily sunny, limpidly white and pastel hues and early air of foreboding shading into more regretful tones as the years pass, the elegant mournfulness - all are entirely congruent with the wonderful source. Carey Mulligan is fantastic, and Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley also good.

30 Rock season 7

Perhaps it's lost a bit of zip in its closing stages, but 30 Rock has never been less than a pleasure - and very much Tina Fey's calling card for those like me, who watch tv shows but not tv (and therefore not SNL, except in dispatches).

(1-5; 6)

Sloane Crosley - How Did You Get This Number

Wry vignettes of being young in NYC and at larger in the world, generally circling around being lost and trying to find yourself, often at the same time.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Straight after this one finished on Saturday night, back row, imax, the girl to my right - a stranger - turned around to me and exclaimed "how good was that!" and I completely agreed - The Hunger Games: Catching Fire was very satisfying.

Having read the books is a double-edged sword; on the one hand, it's meant that I've been primed to enjoy the films, but on the other it removes some of the impact of the turns and twists, many of which weren't at all predictable on the first pass. But in any case, like with the books, the first one was good, but the second improves on it - it hits harder on the ethical responsibilities and consequences of revolution and of Katniss's choices as well as the trauma of her experiences, and it stays impressively tough-minded in its treatment of the whole subject matter while also delivering an unflagging, enveloping piece of entertainment through the whole of its nearly 2 1/2 hours...both V for Vendetta and Children of Men [*] seem reasonable comparisons, though maybe the most impressive thing about the Hunger Games films is that, actually, they don't seem to fit strongly into any existing genre, such that it's the events of the story story themselves - and, to a perhaps lesser extent, the characters and ideas - that are most striking.

(w/ Cass)

[*] Worth noting, re-reading what I thought about that latter straight after seeing it, that time and at least one subsequent viewing have significantly raised my opinion of it.

The Avengers

Fun but I don't really see why everyone was so all up about how great it was; having said that, I did like the sheer belligerence of the bit where Thor and Iron Man fight, and all of the super-hero characters are pretty enjoyable really.

Stories We Tell

Pretty interesting and indeed about the stories we tell, and made me wonder whether Polley had discovered the 'truth' about her father before Don't Come Knocking, in which she plays the oddly parallel role of a young woman searching for a man who may or may not be her father.

The Hunger Games

I happened to see the trailer for the next one a few weeks ago and have been looking forward to it ever since; thought I might as well watch the first film again beforehand. (Also, last time I watched it was before I - and, possibly, the whole world - discovered how great Jennifer Lawrence is.) It's good!

Patty Griffin - Silver Bell

The love affair continues. This one was originally recorded around 1999, 2000 - so between Flaming Red (which formed much of the soundtrack for the recent driving around WA, songs like "Tony", "Christina", "Wiggley Fingers" and "Blue Sky" really hitting the spot) and 1000 Kisses - but got lost in record label disaster and so was only officially released (with some production changes from the bootleg that's apparently been in circulation for years) earlier this year. Clocking in at a generous 14 songs, stylistically it bounces around a bit, a mix of mellower numbers (often drifting with something of a mysterious air) and more rocky ones, but the songs, they're so good. Just wow.

Gillian Flynn - Gone Girl

I was looking for something pacy to read, and picked Gone Girl because of its strong showing in this year's Tournament of Books. A couple of nights later and I see what all the fuss was about - across the alternating narrations between Nick and Amy within each of its three parts, it's a suspenseful, surprising, and surprisingly thoughtful (not to mention very dark) picture of the nasty insides of a marriage between two extremely flawed people. Very difficult to put down once started.

How I Met Your Mother season 8

I've gotta say, after all this following along, it was a genuine thrill to finally see the face of the mother in this season's closing shot. There's a definite feeling of moving towards a close through the season, with various loose ends from the previous seven resolved to varying degrees...it's been quite the ride. One final season to go, I think.

(1-5; 6; 7)

Laura Cantrell - No Way There From Here

Laura Cantrell's one of that small handful of artists whose music I love so much and in a way that I really can't properly describe. There's something so simple about it, and so sweet, and listening to her it always feels like she's never gone away.

(In fact, it's been a little while, depending on how you figure. 2005's Humming By The Flowered Vine is where it all started for me, and while I quickly worked my way backwards through Not The Tremblin' Kind, When The Roses Bloom Again and her debut ep (not to mention all the other stuff available on her website), in terms of new material there's actually only been the "Trains and Boats and Planes" ep in 2008 and 2011's covers record Kitty Wells Dresses since Humming.)

Anyway, No Way There From Here doesn't miss a beat - it's as disarmingly wonderful as anything else she's ever released. At first I was particularly stuck on the delicately country-ballady title track, but my affections have since moved more to "Starry Skies", a gently, joyously swooning shimmy that's just a little bit transportive; having said that, it's all good - no low points here. So glad to have it to listen to.

"Van Gogh, Dali & Beyond: The World Reimagined" (Art Gallery of WA, Perth)

Compiled from holdings of the NY MoMA, tracing the development of three totemic genres - landscape, still life and portrait - from the late 19th century through to today.

Opens with one from each, all very strong - Van Gogh's "The Olive Trees" (1889), Cezanne's "Still Life With Ginger Jar, Sugar Bowl, and Oranges" (1902-06) and Toulouse-Lautrec's "La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge" (1891-92) - and invites reflection by closing with another trio: JoAnn Verburg's "Olive Trees after the Heat" (1998 - four large photograph panels, a sort of triptych in four parts), Urs Fischer's "Untitled" (2000 - a suspended piece made up of a half-apple and half-pear bolted together) and Elizabeth Peyton's "Jake at the New Viet Huong (1995 - actually not a world away from the paired Toulouse-Lautrec).

In between, it takes the three in turn. Probably unsurprisingly, given what draws me in art, I was most drawn to the 'Landscape' section; it, like the others, was essentially a tour of modern through to contemporary art - the fauves, expressionists, surrealists, cubists through to more conceptual work all represented, along with some of those harder to categorise but essential individuals like Cezanne, Kandinsky ("Church at Murnau", 1909), Klimt ("The Park", 1910 or earlier - I was very taken with this one), Duchamp, Matta, Gerhard Richter ("Meadowland", 1985 - an oil work that looks very much like a blurred photo).

'Still life' was haunted by the mournful sound of Laurie Anderson's "Self-Playing Violin" (1974); I was struck by the Klee apples, Boccioni's "Development of a bottle in space" (1912 - the futurism somehow made more sense to me in a bronze sculpture than it usually does in a painting) and another bronze work, Lichtenstein's "Glass IV" (1976)...given that still lives are about objects, pop art made much more of a showing in this section.

Somehow very few of the portraits made an impression, but that one that did, really lodged in the stomach for me. It was a series of photos by Nicholas Nixon, actually - black and white portraits of his wife and her three sisters ('the Brown Sisters') taken at five year intervals from 1976 through to 2011, so eight altogether (so far), all in the same ordering and all outdoors, mostly in Massachusetts - although I see from the MoMA website that there are actually many more.

There was something about them that really got to me - I guess there's an inherent poignancy in being able to see the ageing process, but I also responded quite personally to them, trying to place myself within the chronology (by age) and also seeing elements of people I know in the appearances, faces and expressions...particularly in the relatively earlier, but certainly not the earliest, of them.

Lev Grossman - The Magicians

After the first five minutes of magical wonderment passed it began to be socially awkward, blatantly following the tree-spirit-thing like this, but it didn't seem to want to acknowledge them, and they weren't about to let it go.

The Magicians isn't generally as blatant as that about its juxtaposition/melding of the contemporary-NYC-coming-of-age and fantasy lit genres, but it's a nice example to hint at what Grossman's about with this very appealing novel. The characters are believable, and so are the magic and the school at which Quentin and the others he meets there - as to those others, it's the usual miscellany but that doesn't make them any the less appealing, Alice and Eliot especially...the pitch could maybe be Harry Potter meets The Secret History (not that I've read the HP books) - which I guess would be enough to sell oh maybe 90% of my friends on it! There is a sense of wonder and, in moments, lightness to the book - but also a nicely, mutedly melancholy and downbeat air to it that works a treat.

Terry Pratchett - Dodger

Not a Discworld novel but feels a fair bit like one, not least because of the early Victorian setting; Charles Dickens is a major character. Undemanding and readable.

Ian F Svevonius - The Psychic Soviet

A bright pink, pocket-sized tract (a collection of short essays, actually) - no doubt intended to recall both Mao's Little Red Book and pocket Bibles, and also all the better for 'street' use, as the instructions in the front helpfully suggest...which is indeed in part how I've ingested it, in various moments between other moments around Melbourne, and even on one occasion while walking home along Lygon St (East Brunswick to Carlton) after dinner.

The essays are a series of broadly Marxist (certainly class-based and anti-capitalist) readings and counter-histories of a whole range of historical and cultural phenomena, with a particular focus on rock n roll - took me back a bit to uni (Das Kapital, Walter Benjamin, cultural studies). Deliberately provocative in both theses and presentation, so much so that it appears at least partly parody, nonetheless there's also a strong sense that Svevonius is a true believer in terms of what's argued here.

A representative couple of paragraphs:

The drinks at this juncture in American history are indisputably coffee from Starbucks and the vodka of Absolut. The popularity of these drinks stems from their value as symbolic war booty from recent conquests. A culture's adopted beverage represents the blood of their vanquished foe.

Drink is transubstantiation a la the Catholic cannibalism of Christ's blood and body. The smell of coffee is the odor of the Sandinista hospital, maimed by Contra bombs. Ice-cold vodka is the blood of the Russians, raped and murdered by capitalism.

In any case, regardless of the extent to which you might buy into this particular brand of agitprop, enjoyable and interesting. (It was a gift from Julian.)

Brief Encounter (Kneehigh Theatre)

Wittily knowing in its staging, but sincere in its presentation of the two central characters' (unconsummated?) romance; lively (musical numbers, video projections, fourth wall-breaking etc) and not altogether unpoignant - good Friday night theatre.

(w/ Cass, Erandathie and Meribah - at the Ath)

Son Volt - Honky Tonk

I already knew, of course, that I liked this kind of modern-sounding, backwards-looking alt-country, especially weepies like "Down the Highway", which is the one that caught my ear in Basement Discs the other day. Having said that, by and large, Honky Tonk is one of those that slides by perfectly easily without especially grabbing me along the way.

Like a Version Nine

I basically got this because of how great Haim's take on "Strong Enough" is, and it's a reminder of both the ubiquity - and importance - of triple j and the looseness of my own connection to it nowadays; amidst a handful of songs or artists that are familiar to me are a whole bunch that are not, including plenty where I've basically been lapped, having heard of neither the song being covered nor the act doing the covering.

Anyhow, there's some nice music on here and some that makes less of an impression. My favourites, apart from aforementioned "Strong Enough":

• "Sweet Nothing" - Something For Kate (Calvin Harris feat Florence Welch cover)
• "Get Free" - Hermitude feat Elana Stone - this one is especially ace ... a cover of a song by someone (or some outfit) called Major Lazer; google tells me the original featured Amber from Dirty Projectors)
• "Pony" - Abbe May (as in Ginuwine - so maybe a bit of a novelty but still fun)
• "Lost" - The Bamboos (so it turns out that I had heard a Frank Ocean song after all - this is a sweet song)

Gattaca

Been a long time since I saw this one, and it's stood up extremely well - engaging from the outset, and sleekly, stylishly moody in an understated, aesthetically pleasing way. Just one of those very well put together little sci-fis.

"Spectacle: The Music Video Exhibition" (ACMI)

Walking downstairs, I could hear Madonna's "Vogue" blaring, and arriving in the exhibition space proper, there it was playing on a huge screen directly in front of me; the screen, it turned out, was dedicated to one of the exhibition's nine organising themes, 'Body Language' - ie dancing. (Later I saw Kanye West's "Can't Tell Me Nothing", about the music of which I could tell you precisely nothing, but the video - featuring Zach Galifianakis and Will Oldham vamping it up in a rural setting - is indelible.)

It's in the nature of the thing that I only got a very partial experience of the exhibition - a lot of the videos were on loops of between a dozen and twenty, perhaps more, on each screen, and besides I ran out of time. But that didn't matter - dipping in and out brought just as much joy as a more systematic attempt would have, especially for songs that I know and, in many cases, love, some on headphones on smaller screens and others drifting through various parts of the exhibition area.

Amongst others, Air's "Playground Love", Blur's "Coffee and TV", Bowie's "The Stars (Are Out Tonight)" (featuring Tilda Swinton - a perfect synergy)...I probably need to go back some time.

Oz the Great and Powerful

Well, not bad. Although, to be honest, it was always unlikely that I'd be unhappy watching Mila Kunis and Rachel Weisz as hot (at least until Mila becomes all evil and green-faced) witchy sisters, not to mention the bonus of James Franco - and the special effects department shows up in style too.

Kingdom of Heaven

To my surprise, I've seen this one twice before (I only remembered once). But as it happens, the thoughts I had on first and second viewings pretty much sum up those on this third.

The Garden of Words & Ghost in the Shell: Arise

A school night anime double feature at the Nova - each at around the 45 minute mark.

The Garden of Words was interesting. Lovely animation and poetic mood which I responded to (reminded me of Murakami), but with an odd - and maybe unintended - undertone arising from how it depicts the student-teacher relationship at its centre, even though the unself-discovered nature of the (female) teacher's character is one of the particularly nice elements of the film.

As to the Ghost in the Shell one, I wondered how much I missed by not being familiar with the franchise. It was entertaining enough, but not particularly anything more.

(w/ Kevin)

Goldfrapp - Tales Of Us

I've more or less followed along with Goldfrapp from the very start - "Lovely Head", "Human" and, especially, "Utopia" on the radio and then the majesty of Felt Mountain (released terrifyingly long ago, back in 2000 - but which figures, seeing as I remember walking around during first year, listening to it on my discman - or was it still a walkman at that stage? Surely not.). Later, the startling and brilliant left turn of stomping Black Cherry (2003) and dramatic Supernature (2005) - a twinned pair of elegant, vivid, electro-pop records followed by the drifting, cresting swirl of Seventh Tree in 2008, itself another sharp change of direction (and, with the benefit of the passage of time, every bit the equal of the three that came before it), before the relative misstep of 2010's Head First. And, of course, many associations built up along the way...

And now, Tales of Us - for mine, not from the top shelf of Goldfrapp albums, but still quite the rabbit for them to have pulled out of the hat at this stage in their career, 13 years and six lps in. It certainly most harks back to Seventh Tree and Felt Mountain, and is quieter than either, being built almost exclusively on folkish acoustic guitar, generally understated strings, and Alison Goldfrapp's ever captivating breathy soprano. Only a handful of individual songs stand out - "Annabel", "Drew", "Clay" - but the whole passes in such a dreamy cloud that the tendency towards indistinctness doesn't really matter. Who knows how long Goldfrapp can keep on going, creating records this good, but I only hope it's for a long while yet.

Jessie Baylin - Little Spark

Thoughts on this one in the form of (a) some miscellaneous thoughts and (b) editorialising about the words on the sticker on the front of the cd (italicised) that made me pick it up while browsing the other day.

For me, there's something romantic about listening to cds in a record store. Some of it's probably inherent, and bound up with the nostalgia of discovering music through such an old-fashioned means; there's a more specific dimension to that, too - memories of younger days at listening stations in the Bourke Street HMV. And then there was that scene in Before Sunrise, and also the recollection of one particular occasion, summer, involving a girl - blurry now but there's obviously a reason why I still remember it. Anyway, the setting for that last was Basement Discs - and likewise, much more recently, for last weekend's listening to Little Spark, all of which all told very likely contributed to my deciding to buy the record.

Blue-eyed soul, dusty folk and blues-pop for fans of SHE & HIM, CAT POWER and NEKO CASE.

An appealing description, it goes without saying, and as it turns out, not completely off the mark. For the most part, though, Baylin tends (and errs) towards the more languid end of the spectrum, lacking in the drama and/or intensity that makes the three acts to which she's being compared, all in their different ways, so interesting to listen to; of the three, she's most similar to Zooey's 60s inspired pop confections, but less exuberant.

ROLLING STONE "like Portishead with a girlish Dusty Springfield at the mic"

This line made me think that the Rolling Stone reviewer hadn't listened beyond the swirlingly urgent - and, not coincidentally, album highlight - first track, "Hurry Hurry", on which Baylin does indeed sound like a girlish Dusty Springfield (a good thing, and a good description), though even then about the only thing it has in common with Portishead is some strings and a dash of moodiness. The rest of the album = somewhat like a girlish Dusty Springfield + nothing like Portishead at all.

FILTER "a curious, soulful Winehouse-ian vibe"

Actually, the somewhat lighter fare of Norah Jones' or Bic Runga's latest (Little Broken Hearts and Belle respectively) would be a better comparison - both rather nice records which reach heights that Baylin's doesn't.

Anyway, I've maybe ended up sounding more down on this album than I actually am. It's nice enough, but just a bit middling, is all.

Cranlana colloquium

So, last week I went to the Cranlana colloquium - Sunday afternoon through to Friday. Aiming to support the development of wisdom in leadership, the readings and discussions were about ideas of the good life and the good society - extracts from Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, the whole (I think) of Antigone, bits from most of the canon of political philosophy (Hobbes, Locke, J S Mill, Marx, Rawls) and a range of other important political thinkers in the broader sense (Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, Amartya Sen, Edward Said, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Luther King), and a few others introducing or dealing with key ideas (particularly in relation to morality and power), including a Le Guin short story ('The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas') and extracts from Huckleberry Finn and The Grapes of Wrath.

Many of the ideas and writers were already familiar to me, but it was good to read (and then discuss) the whole lot in such a concentrated form and period of time - some new perspectives on what it means to try to be a good person and to make the world a better place, and a reminder that so many of both the big questions and our day to day actions and decisions can be articulated in terms of some basic problems and assumptions (as organised thematically by the course: 'the good society', 'power and self interest', 'the nature and origin of justice', 'economic justice', 'freedom and dissent' and 'ethics and the individual').

Sucker Punch

So, sure, it quickly becomes a bit problematic if you engage with it on any kind of intellectual level, but as spectacle and enjoyment, Sucker Punch definitely succeeds, even on a second watching.

(last time)

ParaNorman

Auspicious signs:
1. Good trailer, which I saw a while back (and in a different language - in Finland, maybe).
2. 'By the makers of Coraline'.
3. Delight expressed by the lovely librarian (Katy) when I borrowed it from the Ath.

And so yes, enjoyable! I think I like this kind of stop-motion animation more than the Pixar etc type, and also the way that ParaNorman in particular is quite wise in more than one way.

Gravity

One of the most visually spectacular movies I've ever seen - perhaps even the most spectacular. Gravity hinges heavily on its space-scapes being convincing, which they are, adding to the inherent tension of the scenario, along with the swiftness with which it moves and the excellent cinematography (dizzying but always easy to follow) - Cuaron was important here, I'm sure. And no doubt imax and 3d improved it!

(w/ Andreas)

The Royal Tenenbaums

Sometimes you have to learn how to experience a work of art, and that's how it's proved for me with The Royal Tenenbaums. It's come about largely through watching successive Anderson films (Tenenbaums was my first), and in the process coming to very much take his cinematic idiom and aesthetic to heart, with the result that on this rewatch, the film's poignancy came through unobscured by the undeniably arch, mannered style in which Andeson works - not least in the way that it takes as one of its primary themes disappointment and in the many losses that structure its plot. And yet, too, it's both entertaining and in the end allows its characters the kindness of as happy an ending as they could each have hoped for, given where they had started from.

"City of Shadows" (Malthouse)

"A song cycle of murder, misfortune and forensics". Quite okay, but lost something in the translation because I couldn't really make out most of the lyrics, which I'm sure would've added a great deal in connecting the songs to the images.

(w/ Meribah and Cass)

Chinatown

Opportunistic Astor viewing in a movie-watching window. Polanski, Nicholson, 1974, noir; good.

(w/ Caroline)

Patrick Ness - More Than This

It starts with a boy dying, and then waking up somewhere strange and strangely familiar. The premise was intriguing, the blurbs on the book ecstatic, and I'm glad they led me to read this pacy, smart, genre-crossing novel - entertaining and interesting.

Neko Case - The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You

Neko Case is just one of those artists for me, woven deep into the personal narrative and mythology that I use to make sense of my own history, musical and otherwise.

It goes back about ten years, though it feels much longer, to 2002, when Blacklisted came out - which makes me 20 years old, third year university. I can't remember for sure, but I think I was put on to her by pitchfork (maybe this review, which does have the tang of familiarity), which I of course read daily at that stage, or either "Deep Red Bells" or "Tightly" (I can't remember which) on a Matador sampler, or maybe a combination of the two; however it came about, I fell quickly and deep for her nocturnal, moody take on americana, aided, no doubt by it being an almost entirely new sound and style for me at that stage.

So anyway, that was the crack, the shock of the new, and I cherished it and kept on listening to it plenty after the initial discovery. And somewhere in there too, probably not that long after, I remember coming across "Mass Romantic" (via audiogalaxy, I think, and played on winamp) and later picking up the great Electric Version, all part of that university period flurry of musical discovery, and incidentally a very different side of the glory of Neko Case.

Extemporanea helps to supply the next bit of the chronology; I can't remember what triggered it but I went and bought The Virginian in late '05 (that would've been the summer between the end of uni and the arrival of the real world, a hazily golden period in retrospect), and soon after that came Fox Confessor Brings The Flood (looks like I was still reading music blogs at that point!) - with which I was infatuated at the time and which, with the benefit of hindsight and distance, remains the high point of her oeuvre, as well as housing my single favourite song of hers, "Hold On, Hold On", which I initially liked plenty but didn't expect to endure in the way that it has; and that prompted me to get to the ace live record The Tigers Have Spoken (bought from Collectors Corner on Swanston Street, I'm pretty sure); of course, all round, she was an integral figure in the soundtrack to my 2006, a year at the tail end of which I also saw her live with the New Pornographers. And I was evidently still riding that wave into the beginning of the new year, 2007, so perfect timing for a show of her own that still counts as one of the most amazing music experiences I've ever had.

I think that was the real peak of it; I worked back to the others of her older records, Canadian Amp and Furnace Room Lullaby, over the next little while, at intervals, and then there was Middle Cyclone in early '09, that last a really quite remarkable album, though on a pretty slow burn for me (I sort of listened to it a bit when I first got it, appreciated it more than I really felt it in my stomach, and then realised at the end of the year while putting together the annual soundtrack, that it had really stayed with me). Also, through that '09/'10 onwards period, the New Pornographers really grabbed hold of me in a big way again - "Hey, Snow White", Twin Cinema, Challengers, Together, another live turn (plus a second, far less great Neko show in there).

Anyway, I'm not sure that that really conveys how ever-present - whether background or right at the forefront of my mind at any particular time - Case's music has seemed over all of those years, or how deeply it's penetrated for me at various points, but the point is, she's big for me. And so this year's The Worse Things Get... is an event, as well as an album that I have no hope of responding to with any approach to objectivity or separation from all of those existing layers.

... you never held it at the right angle ...

At least since Blacklisted, there's been something abstract and oblique about Case's songwriting style - her songs generally neither start nor go quite where you'd expect, with lots of little two and half or three minute slices - and that continues here; like Middle Cyclone, in some ways it feels much more about music than about songs as such, with the odd couple of exceptions like the convincingly surging "Man", which is basically this record's "People Gotta Lot of Nerve". 

... all of you lie about something ... ( ... and change the way I love you ... )

Yet, despite that somewhat unexpected, peregrinatory dimension, everything seeming almost to drift, verses and choruses only sometimes apparent and, even when present generally taking forms that don't resolve in the usual ways, there's also something gripping about the record - the airiness entices, but there's an underlying sturdiness and vision that grounds it, not to mention dozens of mini-peaks, often little vocal moments, sweeping up to the surface when Case hits a particular sweet spot in her always luscious, characterful singing.

... she said get the fuck away from me ... ( ... no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no ... )

With a voice like that, it's no wonder that it's often foregrounded, and indeed sometimes close to a capella, like on "I'm From Nowhere" and "Nearly Midnight, Honolulu" - sometimes used like a cry out in the night, and also capable of immense tenderness (take "Calling Cards"), rousingly emotive calls to arms ("Night Still Comes") and rollingly urgent, anthemically pop tones (closer "Ragtime").

... I wanted so badly not to be me ...

This one took a few weeks and several listens, and even now I can't say it's one of my favourites of hers. But what it is, is a Neko Case album, and a good one, and another staging point in the journey that I've been on with her - one that has a ways to go yet, I suspect.

Patty Griffin - Living With Ghosts

Her first, and that's very much how it sounds - unadorned (mostly just Griffin's voice and strummed acoustic guitar) but the bones of her greatness are there, particularly in the songs themselves, numbers like "Mad Mission" swelling and subtle in ways that would blossom even more fully in records to come.

Chris Thile - Bach: Sonatas & Partitas, Vol. 1

A gift from Kim; in her words, "the dude plays a mean bluegrass". Or, from the liner notes: "Playing these violin works on mandolin is not trickery or deception, of course; it is more like transformation, or translation."

Portland Cello Project - The Thao & Justin Power Sessions

I've always liked cellos in pop music and this one's a winner - some with Thao singing (often slinkily getting her Cat Power on, like on the excellent "Tallymarks"), others with vocals by Justin Power, and some with just the strings. Sort of chamber-folky and atmospheric in a way that doesn't too much err towards indistinctness.

Savages - Silence Yourself

This has been highly touted but it hasn't sunk in for me, with the exception of a couple of the more sharp-toothed tracks like "She Will" and "Husbands" - guess I'm not really in the zone.

Haim - Days Are Gone

Haim! Heard about them through some music magazine or other, picked up in an airport somewhere on the other side of the world or en route back from there maybe; just a little sidebar piece that basically said that they were like Fleetwood Mac with a soul/r&b edge and I figured I'd probably like it, so when I got home I had a listen to their ep (at that stage, all they'd released) and did like it, as I have the couple of singles that've come out since.

So anyhow, here's the lp, and it too is good, for all the reasons that went previously - rhythm & melody & pop. "Forever" reappears (though with a slightly crisper, punchier mix), and likewise "Go Slow" and "Don't Save Me", all still tremendously winning and collectively pretty representative of the pleasures that Days Are Gone has to offer. Also especially ace: "The Wire", "Honey & I".

Community seasons 1-3

Ha, very good. Funny and basically sweet-natured, though with lots of sharp edges, and the strongest and most effectively used meta streak of any tv show that I've come across, not least in the way that one of its key strands is the foregrounding of the conflict between the main characters and their group dynamic as the main theme of the show itself - and clearly genuinely in love with culture, meaning pop culture. Plus, its knowingness plays out in a good understanding and use of appealing narrative structures - war analogues (ie conflict) like paintball, the pillow and blanket fort episodes etc, and also scenarios where characters are picked off one by one. Also, I don't know what the personal psychology is, but I always seem to like smarmy lawyer types (at least when they're on tv or in movies); indeed, it does a great job making all of its characters likeable unlikeable. Also also, Abed's a great character and the actor playing him has some chops (as when he plays Abed playing Don Draper, convincingly in all its layers).

Zero Dark Thirty

Before watching Zero Dark Thirty, I wouldn't have thought it'd be possible for a movie that dealt with torture in the 'war on terror' to do so neutrally - in that the very attempt at neutrality would tend to seem at least a tacit endorsement of its use. But actually I think the film more or less does avoid taking any kind of line on the practice - it becomes one link in the film's overall chain of action/dramatic moments, funnelled along with everything else towards the (in the context of the film as a creative construct) greater goal of story. Film itself is quite good, but as often with this kind of film, didn't leave me feeling as I'd got anything in particular out of it beyond a couple of hours of entertainment.

Immortals

Some impressive visuals, especially of portentous skies and cliff-y landscapes - also, some striking god fighting - but too thin in every other respect to amount to anything. You wouldn't think this kind of film would be so hard to do well...but clearly it is.

The Cherry Orchard (MTC)

Tricky, this one. The tone was a bit uneven, or perhaps difficult to consistently discern, not so much slipping between tragedy and comedy as seemingly partaking of both at the same time throughout (also, the set had something of a sense of the hyper-real); relatedly, the emotional register was a bit unclear, making me wonder if there would be a big payoff in the play's second half - but then, there wasn't (not even a firing of the gun). And yet something about it interested me, made me intuit as much as intellectually understand that there was something going on that was worth engaging with - it felt like good theatre. And, of course, I'm inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt given how good The Wild Duck was - another Simon Stone take on a canonical playwright.

(w/ Cass, Erandathie and Andreas)

Escapism

Someone asked me to recommend some appropriate reading material for escapism during hotel downtime in an upcoming work trip; "GoT worked well last time". So voila.

Well how escapist do you want to go? The best epic fantasy series are GoT (or ASOIAF if you will), Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen (only problem is that book 1 is significantly less good than the 8 that come after it) and Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant Chronicles (nb very unlikeable main character and somewhat meta).

Another good one - bit more existential though - is Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series.

I assume I've tried to foist China Mieville on you in the past? Steampunky fantasy, v.g. The first one to read is Perdido Street Station.

Also, I haven't read it, but Lev Grossman's The Magicians keeps getting recommended - someone described it to me as a hipster fantasy novel.

In a slightly different vein, I very much enjoyed Justin Cronin's The Passage (post-apocalyptic vampires).

Or different again, for amusingly whimsical literary capers, I can't remember if you've read Jasper Fforde (start with the Thursday Next books and read in order, though again, the first - The Eyre Affair - is significantly less good than the rest).

Kira Henehan - Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles

Such a delightfully elusive thing of a novel, owing much of its enormous charm to the curious, wayward voice of its narrator, the oddly displeasing to the eye and plagued by memory loss Finley, determined to carry out her mysterious Assignment to the best of her abilities in spite of a whole host of more or less wholly inexplicable distractions, many of them entirely internal preoccupations. 'Postmodernist existential detective novel' I said last time, which is right, but even though I have a little generic category for it, it's not much like anything else I've ever read.

Monika Sosnowska - "Regional Modernities" (ACCA)

Four pieces in the show altogether, including "Corridor" and "Facade", the former what it says (narrow, though, and complete with doors and lights), the latter a large, suspended, twisted and bent over upon itself black steel structure. Good.

The Brothers Bloom

Catching up with David last Friday night, couldn't find anything on a big screen that was suitable, got through a few minutes of Wings of Desire before I vetoed it on the basis that I just couldn't do something black and white and subtitled in current frame of mind, ended up rewatching The Brothers Bloom. Still a joy, archly full of meaning.

(first time; second time)

Marisha Pessl - Night Film

I remember liking Special Topics in Calamity Physics quite a bit, and this one was enjoyable too. Possibly I've just been completely primed by the recent thinking about literary construction, but the narrative seemed very episodic, one event or character after another appearing and then being checked off in order to advance the plot, and populated by protagonists who, while interesting enough to spend time with, aren't exactly psychologically fleshed out; having said that, its story of disgraced investigative reporter Scott McGrath's pursuit of the dark mystery at the heart of the life and work of reclusive horror film director Stanislas Cordova and recent death of his strangely compelling daughter Ashley, accompanied by plucky girl chancer Nora and broodingly flaky boy-with-a-past Hopper, rendered in McGrath's hard-boiled voice and interspersed webpages, is entertaining to the max, especially once McGrath begins to feel as if he's losing his grip on reality and the suggestions of black magic and dealings with the devil increasingly loom.

Patty Griffin - Flaming Red

Patty Griffin's amazing - there's no other word for it - and working my way through her discography has brought me to this one, from 1998, her second lp. There's a hell of a lot of craft to it, both in the writing and the performing, and it covers a fair bit of stylistic ground while always anchored in a distinctly southern feel, rootsy folk mid-tempo things, sunny pop-rock, genuine rock and roll, and even a jazzily torchy number ("Go Now") all tackled with equal aplomb; occasionally, there's are production or instrumentation choices that would've dated another record (e.g. the background synth/percussion and throbbing bassline combinations that show up on songs like "Christina" and "Mary" - both of which I already knew from their live appearances on A Kiss In Time and which, in those elements, for me fleetingly call to mind the records that Natalie Imbruglia and Tori Amos were also putting out around this same time) but instead are somehow subsumed into, even add to, the classic air of the thing. So many glorious moments...

Stoker

As elegant and visually striking - indeed, out and out beautiful - as they are to look at, I find Park's movies difficult to grasp. Just like Thirst (which I watched pretty recently), and also Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Stoker is compelling in a way that fuses an air of originality with what are actually some pretty familiar structural moves, albeit telegraphed in a way that leads us to second-guess the destinations to which each of those films (and especially Thirst and Stoker) ultimately takes us. A gothic, disturbed fairytale with heavy lashings of psychosexual (both parts of the compound word being important) melodrama, it's slipperily upfront about what it's doing, even as it leads us round in circles down the garden path along the way, aided immensely not only by the director's facility for suspense and imagery but also by the effective performances given by Wasikowska, Kidman and Matthew Goodman.

(w/ Meribah)

The Thick Of It series 1-4

So clearly Malcolm Tucker is a brilliant tv character, but on top of that, the whole thing's super enjoyable and delightfully, inventively profane and knowing, hitting its stride from the beginning and not faltering throughout. The deleted scenes are a nice bonus, too, just as good as the stuff that made the cut and for the most part basically supplementary to the episodes themselves rather than like for like swaps, so that they come to seem like they're actually further fleshing out what actually happened - a sense heightened by the quick-cutting, documentary style of the shooting.

(In The Loop)

The Bling Ring

Diverting enough, but by a fair way the weakest of Coppola's five films, and indeed feels like a superficial mixtape of the four that have come before it; the problem is that The Bling Ring, while about surface, is itself also all surface, lacking the depth of those others.

(w/ Jade)

Terry Pratchett - A Blink of the Screen

A collection of Discworld and other (mostly other) short stories and bits and pieces; far from hard work to read, but nothing special.

"Salome" (Little Ones Theatre @ Malthouse)

A lurid, enjoyable blast. An adaptation of the Wilde play, Salome essayed by a man and John the Baptist by a woman, and that's the beginning rather than the end of the gender-bending in a production that has more than a hint of the burlesque to it, not to mention 80s music interludes (eg Alice Cooper's "Poison").

(w/ Meribah)

"Suburban" (Ian Strange, NGV Australia)

I like art that brings out the shadowy side of the suburban - the obvious reference point here is Gregory Crewdson, and it's an apt one for this set of photo works, a three-screen video installation and some fragments from the painted-on buildings (or, in some cases, literally burning) that feature in them.

Anyway, I liked this small exhibition - the images do successfully tap into something interesting.

(w/ Alice)

Mark Latham - The Latham Diaries

This just felt like something I should read. Interesting, though very hard to know how much of a grain of salt a lot of it needs to be taken with.

Also, random monologue directed at me from scrappy looking middle aged lady in Bourke Street who saw me holding this book the other day: "I thought that man had potential but (waves hands) (indistinct) he couldn't handle the pressure". I didn't express an opinion.

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters

A while ago I started watching Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter but got bored and gave up; Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters is probably in a similar vein, but much more fun...I guess Gemma Arterton and Jeremy Renner fighting witches with a mix of semi-automatic crossbows and guns and hand to hand combat while wearing leather and serious faces will do that.

Frances Ha

Moving pictures about being young(ish) in New York; charming, and believable in the important ways. Being in black and white helped, no doubt, and likewise Bowie's "Modern Love". (Afterwards, I went to the supermarket, bumped into people, felt both footloose and ground-bound.)

Red Riding Hood

Disappointing. Director Catherine Hardwicke of Twilight renown was a plus for me, and Red Riding Hood with the promise of plenty of mood, why not? Plus Gary Oldman and Amanda Seyfried, one who I've liked since high school and the other (a bit surprisingly) good in everything she shows up in. So it's unfortunate that the film itself is so uninspired, not to mention the dire acting by the two boys making up the other points of the love triangle.

Two Marnie Stern albums

This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That (2008) & Marnie Stern (2010)

A short list of things I like about Marnie Stern:
1. The fascinating, intricate, and frequently glorious guitar/percussion/sung-shouted textures of her songs.
2. Especially the guitars!
3. And the climaxes, which often, once they hit, either return and return or just keep on going on and on from first appearance.
4. Song titles like "Roads? Where We're Going We Don't Need Roads" and (appositely) "Female Guitar Players Are The New Black" and fragments of lyrics flying past in similar veins.
5. The way that it really doesn't sound much like anything else you've ever heard, in a good way.

I like This Is It... more than the self-titled, but both are ace.

(The Chronicles of Marnia)

James Button - Speechless

I enjoyed this - the insights into PM&C, Rudd and Button's relationship with his father, and the potted recent history of the ALP, in equal measures. (Also enjoyed that Cass gets a mention in the acknowledgements.)

Thirst

Park Chan-wook's vampire film. Like Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, brutally violent, physically as well as psychologically, and like those others, supremely stylish - stark and, at times, strikingly beautiful. But, also like those others, somehow not wholly satisfying; perhaps too much the intellectual and cinematic exercise, with not quite the depth that could have elevated it beyond that.

Stories I Want To Tell You In Person (Malthouse)

Funny and rather charming, and it was pleasing to see both the Apocalypse Bear and the Hope Dolphin! Also, I expect that Katz karaoke-ing "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" will linger. Not that authenticity was necessarily the name of the game, but it did feel like a rendition of 'the real Lally Katz'; indeed, she / her 'character' reminded me of a couple of girls who I've known.

(w/ Cass, Mehnaz, Paul D and, as a last second sub-in for a scratching, Julian F)

The Dark Knight Rises

Somewhat flawed, okay, but only by comparison to the two that came before it, especially The Dark Knight; still immensely satisfying.

(last time)

Stephen Grosz - The Examined Life

I. Two impulses, perhaps in tension, perhaps not: 1. I'm suspicious of the pat revelations and 'truths' that are peddled by the therapy of popular imagination ('oh, I'm no good at relationships as an adult because I have an unresolved fear of abandonment from my childhood' etc). 2. I've thought plenty of times in the past about trying to find a good psychoanalyst, not because of a desire to solve - or resolve - any particular issues, but because I imagine that it might provide an interesting, and different, perspective and framing way of thinking about my self.

II. During my honours year, I did a subject called "Freud, Fiction, Lacan". Some of the students in the class - there were perhaps 20 in all, maybe less - were thoroughly convinced by the value of psychoanalytic theory. I was not. I recall perhaps the most committed of those others saying to me, over a post-class beer, I think, "Howard, why are you so resistant to psychoanalytic theory?". Having said that, Lacan in particular struck a bit of a chord, and I came away with some useful insights and a desire to grapple with it more.

III. Wei sent me this book a while back (the modern way, via a bookdepository order), and quite deliberately, following some conversations we'd had over skype. Grosz is a practising psychoanalyst, and in The Examined Life, he recounts a series of encounters, mostly with patients, each encapsulating and illustrating some truth about how people make sense - or otherwise - of themselves and their lives. It's a premise that had the potential to be severely didactic and heavy-handed, but instead it really has made me reflect on the way that the stories we tell ourselves, often all unknowing, structure and shape our selves and our lives, including (albeit in a somewhat unformed way) how that may translate for me. I was writing about Siri Hustvedt just earlier today; I can see a similarity of approach and style in Grosz's writing, even though it takes a different form.

Neil Gaiman - Absolute Sandman vol 2

I think these are maybe my favourite storylines in the series - the 'season of mists' and 'a game of you' sequences, and they pop even more vividly to life in these 'absolute' editions. (A side by side comparison leaves the originals looking dull in a way that they never were on previous pass-throughs.) The miscellany at the end is pretty good too.

(vol 1)

The Go-Go's - Beauty and the Beat

Only having heard "Our Lips Are Sealed", I'd imagined that the Go-Go's would be pretty bubblegum if likely peppy with it, but actually there's a pleasing toughness to their sound - more Blondie than Bananarama - and particularly on the bonus live set that accompanies this 30th anniversary reissue (the album originally came out in 1981). And, in fact, Beauty and the Beat is just all-round good. (Plus, I've now learned that Belinda Carlisle of "Heaven is a Place on Earth", "Summer Rain" and "Leave a Light On" - not that I knew the name of that last before coincidentally hearing it in jb just the other day - fame was their singer.)

Siri Hustvedt - The Blindfold

I had the strangest feeling while reading The Blindfold that I had read it before, and even now, having finished it, I'm not sure whether that's a product of an over-hasty read years ago (it doesn't show up on extemporanea, so would have to've been pre-2005) or rather of the hauntedly familiar nature of the text itself, for which my Persona postcard was an ideal bookmark.

In terms of writers of more or less this last extended generation (let's say those starting out from around the 80s, so as to exclude the first wave of postmodernists who kicked off in the 60s/70s - Pynchon & co), there are really four who stand out for me, four particular favourites. There's Donna Tartt, aloof (less than a novel a decade is just ridiculous) and enigmatic but all the more beguiling for it, Haruki Murakami, the dreamer whose world you wish you could live in (and sometimes, in his company, almost feel that you do), Scarlett Thomas, the smart, hip girl for whom you could all too easily fall, but whose brand of coolness you think you recognise and know makes it a bad idea to invest any real emotional energy in her acquaintance - and Siri Hustvedt, who's perhaps most like the wise best friend, deeply insightful, subtle, intelligent and generous of spirit.[*]

So, evidently, whether I've read it before or not, it was high time that I came/returned to The Blindfold, Hustvedt's first. And while it doesn't reach the heights of What I Loved and The Sorrows of an American, it's nonetheless a finely wrought, deeply incisive portrayal of modern urban female identity, selfhood and their discontents, and often chest-tighteningly compelling.

[*] I owe that little piece of fancy to Nicolette, who once told me that, for her, Hemingway was like the secret boyfriend that she was a bit ashamed of, or words to that effect.

Annie - "The A&R" ep

Five cuts of sweetly pulsing, 21st century nostalgic electro-pop, and in fact getting a bit into Saint Etienne territory in places (especially on "Hold On") - nice.

(Anniemal; Don't Stop & "All Night")

These New Puritans - Field of Reeds

An intriguingly abstract record, like the shadowy echo of a mix of Kid A, the back half of Low, and Victorialand, with a bunch more avant garde jazz-y and chamber-type influences mixed in; trumpets float in mournfully at intervals, likewise vocals, both with the air of a haunting. Quite remarkable. Also, the soundtrack to many recent hours in the domed reading room of the State Library, white light streaming in from overhead.

The Box Tops - The Best of the Box Tops: Soul Deep

Alex Chilton's old band, active (at least under the name of the Box Tops) from '67 to '70 - a blue-eyed soul kind of pop, and likeable.

The Lumineers - The Lumineers

Pretty minor, but pretty nice too, as far as contemporaried-up folk-pop goes.

Now You See Me

A good trailer, an appealing cast (Mark Ruffalo, Melanie Laurent, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman - the actors playing the magicians whose exploits are the nominal centre of the film, Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher and Dave Franco, being less of the drawcards, but still a pretty good second-line) - it was enough, and particularly seeing as I was feeling that I should do something luxurious on my unexpected day off today. So anyway, it's a fun entertainment, perhaps inevitably in the shade of The Prestige, but nicely spectacular and plenty enjoyable.

Aim High in Creation (MIFF)

In which a Sydney film-maker decides to fight coal seam gas production in Sydney by making a short film in accordance with the principles laid down by Kim Jong Il for North Korean propaganda films, and travels to North Korea (or the DPRK) to meet the elite of the cloistered state's film-making industry - directors, actors, musicians, technicians - to learn their techniques. I'd been drawn to it by the premise, and particularly the promise of communist kitsch, but in fact what made this film (actually a documentary about the making of the short) so winning was the insight into North Korean society and its people, even allowing for the inevitably tightly controlled nature of the exercise.

(w/ Cass)

The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (MIFF)

An entertaining ride through the operations of ideology, illustrated through analysis/deconstruction of a range of films and filmed material, as seen through the eyes of the amusing Zizek.

(w/ Daniel L and David)

Dirty Girl

I don't quite know why I find Juno Temple so appealing. She's cute and all, but not so much as to explain her particular charisma (and besides, not really in the usual way for me, ie pretty, willowy brunettes) - I guess there's just some kind of movie thing going on. Anyway, whatever the reasons, Temple as the titular 'dirty girl' in a high school-ish film set in the 80s seemed a likely winner, and Dirty Girl is pretty alright - edgy enough, though, like most films of this kind, also possessed of a pretty wide sentimental streak, and while, tonally, it's a bit all over the place, there are some nice moments, an enjoyable if somewhat marginal supporting cast - William H Macy, Milla Jovovich, Mary Steenburgen, Dwight Yoakam, the first three in particular amusing because of the past roles that I associate them with - and a solid performance by co-star Jeremy Dozier, plus a cameo by Tim McGraw, not that I recognised him. (Also, a bag of flour called Joan whose texta drawn facial expression changes according to Temple's Danielle's mood.)

Einstein on the Beach

I was wrapped up in Einstein on the Beach from start to finish, but that's not to say that the occasional rogue thought didn't slip in, and one of those came late in the piece, the music having subsided to a single organ-sounding synth line, none of the company on stage, backdrop wholly black except for a large white bar rotating slowly from the horizontal to the vertical; the thought, and its immediate answer, were 'so does the emperor have any clothes?', and 'absolutely yes'.

I mean really, wow, this was an experience beyond words. I've liked Philip Glass for a long time and Einstein, a four hour plus abstract modern opera, must be the high watermark in that regard (a search of extemporanea reveals that I had this to say back in 2010 - ... "Einstein on the Beach" (seeing a good live performance of which remains one of my mostly fondly cherished cultural hopes) ... ) - so I was really anticipating this, and it met those high expectations.

Working on the level of abstraction and suggestion yet tapping into something direct and immediate too...which goes part and parcel with the surrealist imagery (especially that first act with the train, which is like something straight out of Magritte). It is dreamlike, and also intensely human for all of the starkly abstract imagery and repetition; seeing the connection to those images and to the actions of the performers has put Glass's music in a new light for me too. Genuinely a rare, indeed unique, experience - just what one values in art.

(w/ Jarrod, Al and Steph N)