Frothy, forgettable. (Not bad - but I don't think I was really the target audience.) I was also thinking about reading Chris Uhlmann's book at some point, though now probably isn't the time.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Sunday, February 24, 2013
White Night Melbourne, Saturday 23 February
I only decided to go to this at the last minute (around 9pm), but it was worth it. A hot summer night, and the event really did throw Melbourne into a different light (so to speak) - the massive projections on to our iconic Flinders Street buildings being just the most literal and striking example. Lights, screens, illumination and animation everywhere - city square, the back of St Paul's, Flinders Lane, the Yarra and its bridges - not to mention the musical stage set up on the steps of FSS and everything going on at Fed Square and surrounds, and I only saw a small part of it. The city felt like a festival and a playground; familiar streets and locations already laden with associations and impressions cloaked in yet another layer.
(w/ Jarrod, Farrah, and their friends A & A, and I; and then later on Trang, and also Rob and Laura)
(w/ Jarrod, Farrah, and their friends A & A, and I; and then later on Trang, and also Rob and Laura)
Friday, February 22, 2013
Jasper Fforde - The Woman Who Died A Lot
This one didn't quite do it for me. It's not bad or anything, but just lacks the zip of the better Thursday Next books (which tended to be the earlier ones, Fforde having taken things in a slightly direction as the series has evolved).
(previously)
(previously)
Parks and Recreation season 4
More.
(1-3)
(As an aside, I made a rule a couple of months ago that I wouldn't start any more new tv series, but only finish the ones I'm already partway through...)
(1-3)
(As an aside, I made a rule a couple of months ago that I wouldn't start any more new tv series, but only finish the ones I'm already partway through...)
Kill Bill vols 1 & 2
I felt like watching these again after Django, and they're still outstanding. Watch a film enough times (it's the same with reading books), and it can come to feel a bit like a museum piece - you become familiar with all of its parts, and the experience ceases to be as immediate as the first time(s) through, when all was discovery - and that's how it is with these, but they're still great nonetheless, imagery and music (once again, the perfection of the musical choices for the sword-making interlude, and how that whole section fits with the structure of the film as a whole, struck me) both.
(last time)
(last time)
The Raid
I'd read that this was a great action film, and it's certainly full of action. For me, though, the unrelenting violence just got a bit much.
"Francis Bacon" & "We used to talk about love" (NSW Art Gallery)
Also visited up in Sydney last weekend.
Bacon's never really caught my imagination, but as often happens with these career survey-type exhibitions, seeing work from across most of his working life (1940s-80s) has given me a better understanding of what he's about, and more of an appreciation for his work - this was the first time that any of his paintings have really spoken to me, or that I've really recognised his skill.
It's also given me more context for the works/style that I generally associate with him - the distorted, twisted human figures and faces - and it's striking how much continuity there is in his paintings of those subjects, often nude, over time, even though certain aspects, notably his use of colour, clearly did evolve. Actually, the piece that most struck me, "Study of a nude" (1952-3) is, in many respects, uncharacteristic - smaller scale and more overtly metaphorical and symbolic; it was hung with three or four others with a similar air of ghostly, unknowable loneliness.
* * *
"We used to talk about love" - a contemporary photomedia exhibition, similar in style to much of what ACCA tends to put on (including many similar artists - all Australian, I think, or at least the names I recognised were). Interested to see another video work by Grant Stevens - having first come across him just a week or so ago at, indeed, ACCA and then seen another in a similar vein in the foyer at MCA the day before.
* * *
Also worth noting, in the NSWAG's always impressive contemporary section (the large, white-walled rooms a perfect setting for their well-selected pieces - walking through never fails to leave me feeling as if my mind, or perhaps spirit, is being expanded, trite though that sounds), an installation called "Basement Keller Haus u r (Basement cellar house)" (1985-2012). A steel door in the wall, which opens into a series of built rooms - a partial reconstruction of a residential apartment block in Germany, but this one is the cellar, so very dark, narrow passages, low ceilings, blind corners, partitions, mirrors and refuse.
I almost didn't make it past the first chamber and a bit, inching my way around - using my mobile phone for light in exploring what was close to a pitch black short passage - and not realising that there was another passage in the opposite direction behind the door that I'd opened from the first room; I had a dream a while ago in which I was in some kind of contemporary art gallery or installation or somesuch and for some reason it was very threatening - an apt pre-metaphor for the experience created by this one. (I certainly understood why the piece description outside contained so many warnings, including a requirement to tell a member of the gallery staff before going in.) It was genuinely uncanny - a term I use a bit when describing how art operates on me, but accurate.
Bacon's never really caught my imagination, but as often happens with these career survey-type exhibitions, seeing work from across most of his working life (1940s-80s) has given me a better understanding of what he's about, and more of an appreciation for his work - this was the first time that any of his paintings have really spoken to me, or that I've really recognised his skill.
It's also given me more context for the works/style that I generally associate with him - the distorted, twisted human figures and faces - and it's striking how much continuity there is in his paintings of those subjects, often nude, over time, even though certain aspects, notably his use of colour, clearly did evolve. Actually, the piece that most struck me, "Study of a nude" (1952-3) is, in many respects, uncharacteristic - smaller scale and more overtly metaphorical and symbolic; it was hung with three or four others with a similar air of ghostly, unknowable loneliness.
* * *
"We used to talk about love" - a contemporary photomedia exhibition, similar in style to much of what ACCA tends to put on (including many similar artists - all Australian, I think, or at least the names I recognised were). Interested to see another video work by Grant Stevens - having first come across him just a week or so ago at, indeed, ACCA and then seen another in a similar vein in the foyer at MCA the day before.
* * *
Also worth noting, in the NSWAG's always impressive contemporary section (the large, white-walled rooms a perfect setting for their well-selected pieces - walking through never fails to leave me feeling as if my mind, or perhaps spirit, is being expanded, trite though that sounds), an installation called "Basement Keller Haus u r (Basement cellar house)" (1985-2012). A steel door in the wall, which opens into a series of built rooms - a partial reconstruction of a residential apartment block in Germany, but this one is the cellar, so very dark, narrow passages, low ceilings, blind corners, partitions, mirrors and refuse.
I almost didn't make it past the first chamber and a bit, inching my way around - using my mobile phone for light in exploring what was close to a pitch black short passage - and not realising that there was another passage in the opposite direction behind the door that I'd opened from the first room; I had a dream a while ago in which I was in some kind of contemporary art gallery or installation or somesuch and for some reason it was very threatening - an apt pre-metaphor for the experience created by this one. (I certainly understood why the piece description outside contained so many warnings, including a requirement to tell a member of the gallery staff before going in.) It was genuinely uncanny - a term I use a bit when describing how art operates on me, but accurate.
Monday, February 18, 2013
Silver Linings Playbook
I was sceptical about the premise but then I saw the trailer, which made it look great, and the film lives up to the promise - I believed the characters, particularly, and most importantly, Bradley Cooper's Pat and Jennifer Lawrence's Tiffany (I haven't seen a lot of either actor, but both are excellent; De Niro also v.g. in this one), the latter a fairly unique variety of the MPDG, and I believed the way the film developed...it's a film that puts all the pieces together in the right way. It stays offbeat enough that I was carried along by it - it doesn't hurt that it's also very funny - meaning that I wasn't viewing the film through any kind of 'romantic comedy' lens, which in turn meant that the climax and happy ending felt both organic and satisfying, as formulaic as they might well have sounded if you'd seen them written down in advance.
(w/ Jade)
(w/ Jade)
"Anish Kapoor" @ MCA, Sydney
I don't really remember how, or when, art became an important part of my life - how I realised that it could provide inspiration and solace, or how it came to occupy such a large emotional and intellectual space for me. My earliest memories of deliberately engaging with art are relatively late, from maybe mid university - exploring the permanent collection of the NGV, looking at Archibald finalists and various other showings in the Arts Centre, a Dali exhibition somewhere along Southbank - but I don't have any recollection of why I was doing it...it just kind of crept up.
More than almost anything else in my life, I think, the experience of art demands openness; without that, you might as well not bother at all. That goes for all art, and just as much when you go in expecting to like something as when not, or when you haven't any preconceptions at all, and I felt that very strongly with this exhibition of Anish Kapoor's work; it can only be engaged with properly from a standpoint of openness, but in fact, even more than that, his works seem to actively solicit such openness, to invite it - not least in the way that they play, and rely, on the viewer's perception, so that, in many of the pieces, it feels like the work of art is, in a very real sense, constituted (or more allusively, if somewhat misleadingly, perhaps reified), by the viewer's consciousness, through the act of perception.
So there are the three untitled concave fibreglass structures, each circular and perhaps a couple of feet across, painted deep and metallic fuchsia, plum, ox-blood purple, which initially appear flat but then become depthless as you keep gazing into them, until you're no longer sure what it is that you're looking at; and their red rippled companion piece "Wave Torus Red" (2009), also mounted on a wall, which appears to be in motion as you move away from or towards it. Or "My Body Your Body" (1993), which looks at first like a dark blue abstract painting mounted on the gallery wall, portrait orientation, but reveals itself to in fact be another structure, built into the wall, a deep (someone from the gallery said 2 metres) recess at its centre - a kind of reverse depth; where a Rothko painting, for example, is textural and endlessly deep over a flat surface, Kapoor's works in this vein are structured around negative space in apparently flat dimensionality.
But his work is no mere intellectual or optical game. There's a depth to it - an affect, an emotional content that arises from and inherently expands the phenomenological and conceptual terrain that his art traverses. "My Red Homeland" (2003) is maybe an easy example - a massive installation of deep red wax (again, Rothko comes to mind) around which a large motorised steel blade slowly traces, gradually sculpting the thing itself - but it has a visceral punch that I haven't felt from many other works of art that I can think of. And it's truly engaging, too - reflective surfaces, meditative spaces, strange reversals...it felt like everyone there at the exhibition (and it was pretty busy) was having some kind of experience of the art, and not simply passively looking at each one for a few moments before moving on. In other words, what art should be.
(w/ Jade - also ran into Alice at the exhibition)
More than almost anything else in my life, I think, the experience of art demands openness; without that, you might as well not bother at all. That goes for all art, and just as much when you go in expecting to like something as when not, or when you haven't any preconceptions at all, and I felt that very strongly with this exhibition of Anish Kapoor's work; it can only be engaged with properly from a standpoint of openness, but in fact, even more than that, his works seem to actively solicit such openness, to invite it - not least in the way that they play, and rely, on the viewer's perception, so that, in many of the pieces, it feels like the work of art is, in a very real sense, constituted (or more allusively, if somewhat misleadingly, perhaps reified), by the viewer's consciousness, through the act of perception.
So there are the three untitled concave fibreglass structures, each circular and perhaps a couple of feet across, painted deep and metallic fuchsia, plum, ox-blood purple, which initially appear flat but then become depthless as you keep gazing into them, until you're no longer sure what it is that you're looking at; and their red rippled companion piece "Wave Torus Red" (2009), also mounted on a wall, which appears to be in motion as you move away from or towards it. Or "My Body Your Body" (1993), which looks at first like a dark blue abstract painting mounted on the gallery wall, portrait orientation, but reveals itself to in fact be another structure, built into the wall, a deep (someone from the gallery said 2 metres) recess at its centre - a kind of reverse depth; where a Rothko painting, for example, is textural and endlessly deep over a flat surface, Kapoor's works in this vein are structured around negative space in apparently flat dimensionality.
But his work is no mere intellectual or optical game. There's a depth to it - an affect, an emotional content that arises from and inherently expands the phenomenological and conceptual terrain that his art traverses. "My Red Homeland" (2003) is maybe an easy example - a massive installation of deep red wax (again, Rothko comes to mind) around which a large motorised steel blade slowly traces, gradually sculpting the thing itself - but it has a visceral punch that I haven't felt from many other works of art that I can think of. And it's truly engaging, too - reflective surfaces, meditative spaces, strange reversals...it felt like everyone there at the exhibition (and it was pretty busy) was having some kind of experience of the art, and not simply passively looking at each one for a few moments before moving on. In other words, what art should be.
(w/ Jade - also ran into Alice at the exhibition)
Jens Lekman @ "Garden Party", Friday 15 February
Jens Lekman performing outdoors on a balmy summer evening in a sort of pop-up 'mini festival' out back of the Melb Recital Centre - what could be more Melbourne? It was good; he played some songs from I Know What Love Isn't, which I ended up listening to quite a lot over last year, and he played some older ones, including some, like especially "Your Arms Around Me", which I knew even though I've probably only ever heard them that once before, at the last show of his that I went to, what feels a very long time ago.
(w/ Trang)
(w/ Trang)
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Django Unchained
Not quite the awesome experience I'd thought it might be, though actually really pretty much the film I'd expected, so perhaps there was a disconnect there. Good, though - I tend to like most kinds of take on the western, and a blaxploitation-edged Tarantino take was always a solid proposition. Along with the western-ness and the usual extreme heightened drama plus quality soundtrack, Christoph Waltz's dentist bounty hunter a highlight.
(w/ David)
* * *
I have to say, while this is possibly a bit of a superficial choice, the two Kill Bill films are almost certainly my favourite Tarantinos. But then again, it's been a long time since I saw Reservoir Dogs, and Pulp Fiction is one of those that it's hard to see properly nowadays owing to its aura (like looking at the Mona Lisa). Also, possibly I'm still not old enough - and, possibly, never will be - to get the most out of Jackie Brown.
(w/ David)
* * *
I have to say, while this is possibly a bit of a superficial choice, the two Kill Bill films are almost certainly my favourite Tarantinos. But then again, it's been a long time since I saw Reservoir Dogs, and Pulp Fiction is one of those that it's hard to see properly nowadays owing to its aura (like looking at the Mona Lisa). Also, possibly I'm still not old enough - and, possibly, never will be - to get the most out of Jackie Brown.
"Desire Lines" (ACCA)
I kind of just let this one wash over me, drawn into the darkly cavernous interconnected rooms of ACCA, the exhibition itself laid out like the desire lines from which it takes its name.
"Rally: Contemporary Indonesian Art" (NGV)
Actually just displays work of two Yogyakarta (central Java)-based artists. The ones by Eko Nugroho - playful and culturally engaged, a mix of sculptural and largeish scale wall-mounted drawing and mural-type pieces - didn't hugely grab me, though they're likeable. More distinctive were the video works/installations of Jompet Kuswidananto; I can't say I particularly felt I grasped even their textual levels, never mind subtext or context, but they had a depth to them, both intellectual and visceral - ie artistic.
Sunday, February 10, 2013
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
One of those films that's grown in my mind since I saw it, partly because Wes Anderson has sunk in for me a lot more in the years since, and partly because the film itself has an air that made it linger despite its overall unfocusedness. On a rewatch, it loses some of that assumed stature - it really doesn't entirely knit - but the thing with Wes Anderson's world is, once his films begin making sense at all, they tap into something, even if not properly coalesced in any particular film or viewing of one.
Saturday, February 09, 2013
Tegan and Sara - Heartthrob
Tegan and Sara and me - a brief history.
- Late 2005 - heard "I Know I Know I Know", can't remember how. Became infatuated with it. Clearly still was the following year. Really basically still am today.
- Amusing story told me by this sweet guy I knew at uni, MT, about having gone to one of their shows and found it a somewhat uncomfortable experience because of the vibe created by the preponderance of aggressive lesbians. Though, for me, the 'lesbian twin sisters' aspect of Tegan and Sara has always been genuinely completely irrelevant - it just hasn't featured in how I've processed their music.
- Later - heard a few more songs of theirs. Quite liked them but they weren't as good. Figured "I Know I Know I Know" was a once-off, and that probably a lot of the reason why I got so stuck on it was the particular associations that it had picked up for me during that vivid end of uni period.
- A week or two ago (ie fast forward several years) - read a couple of very positive reviews of their latest, Heartthrob, both commenting on the sheer pop-ness of the record, and thought that it sounded a bit of a can't-miss.
- Yesterday morning, first thing - got Heartthrob (itunes). Started listening to it on the way in to work. Realised after a few songs that they were really hitting on a first listen, punchy hooks embedded in synth-led anthems penetrating the morning mental fuzz and actual external background noise.
- Yesterday evening, after work - walking home in the summer heat, finishing the first listen and then starting again, sitting alone on one of those Pitt Street benches facing out towards Rathdowne, feeling it start to sink in.
- Today - more spins (figuratively speaking), and liking it still more. The lyrics all seem to be about heartbreak and/or desire, which fits the music, which can sound variously like Robyn, Metric (sans guitars), Roxette, ABC, Talk Talk, and probably plenty of others. Don't know if I'll keep on listening to it as the months go on, but right now these songs feel like they might stick (early favourite: "I Couldn't Be Your Friend", but only barely - a whole lot of them stand out).
How I Met Your Mother season 7
Maybe it says volumes about my state of mind, or maybe nothing at all, that having bought this yesterday evening, I've finished it less than 24 hours later, with time to spare.
When I started watching HIMYM, a couple of years ago, it resonated - there was, and is, a dual, related appeal in its depiction of this certain time of life, in being able to both identify with it and enjoy what is, given its framing premise (ie the title!), the promise of a happy ending, however inevitably digressively arrived at. (And in terms of (relevant) autobiographical note, the show actually did play some part in shaping my ideas of modern romance at the time; during that initial period, I had found myself fairly newly out of a relationship for the first time in a couple of years - although that didn't last, and then that didn't last, and so here we are.)
So anyway, season 7. Which means seven years that the show's been running, both in our time and in its characters' (the two being the same, of course, a fact emphasised by the frequent references to the year, and indeed times of year, when events are transpiring), though of course I was something of a latecomer. A colleague (who I think of as something of a fellow traveller) mentioned to me yesterday that she's having to move out of her apartment - it's being sold - and it popped into my mind when she said it that this kind of mundane, but actually often large-looming, background stuff in our lives doesn't really get much of a guernsey in shows like HIMYM; but now, 24 hours (+/-) and one watching of season 7 on, I wonder if that was actually right. Just because the issues are rendered more colourful and amusing than in real life doesn't mean they're overlooked - which of course is the appeal of all of this kind of tv right there.
In season 7, the focus seems to be less on Ted's search for 'the one', but the show does seem to be moving to tie off some loose ends - albeit none which give any clues to who the 'mother' may ultimately be, given that the show's foreshadowing through the 2030 narration has already made it clear that it can't be anyone already introduced - with the slutty pumpkin turning out to be Katie Holmes and a fizzer chemistry-wise, the door surely being properly shut with Robin, and Victoria reintroduced but surely heading towards some kind of final closure next season on the one who otherwise would've been the one that got away. And structurally, with Marshall and Lily hitting various major milestones and a wedding between Barney and Robin signalled (though we're also told that something will go wrong), you would think that in whatever comes next, the focus will turn back to what is, after all, the underlying narrative thread of the show.
As to volumes or nothing at all - what I mean by that is that I've flown through the season obviously because it speaks to something in my current situation...but it's done that from the start, and it's thoroughly got its hooks into me, so that I do want to find out what happens to all of the characters, irrespective of how immediate its resonance is with whatever my current personal circumstances may be. So, anyway...
(1-5; 6)
When I started watching HIMYM, a couple of years ago, it resonated - there was, and is, a dual, related appeal in its depiction of this certain time of life, in being able to both identify with it and enjoy what is, given its framing premise (ie the title!), the promise of a happy ending, however inevitably digressively arrived at. (And in terms of (relevant) autobiographical note, the show actually did play some part in shaping my ideas of modern romance at the time; during that initial period, I had found myself fairly newly out of a relationship for the first time in a couple of years - although that didn't last, and then that didn't last, and so here we are.)
So anyway, season 7. Which means seven years that the show's been running, both in our time and in its characters' (the two being the same, of course, a fact emphasised by the frequent references to the year, and indeed times of year, when events are transpiring), though of course I was something of a latecomer. A colleague (who I think of as something of a fellow traveller) mentioned to me yesterday that she's having to move out of her apartment - it's being sold - and it popped into my mind when she said it that this kind of mundane, but actually often large-looming, background stuff in our lives doesn't really get much of a guernsey in shows like HIMYM; but now, 24 hours (+/-) and one watching of season 7 on, I wonder if that was actually right. Just because the issues are rendered more colourful and amusing than in real life doesn't mean they're overlooked - which of course is the appeal of all of this kind of tv right there.
In season 7, the focus seems to be less on Ted's search for 'the one', but the show does seem to be moving to tie off some loose ends - albeit none which give any clues to who the 'mother' may ultimately be, given that the show's foreshadowing through the 2030 narration has already made it clear that it can't be anyone already introduced - with the slutty pumpkin turning out to be Katie Holmes and a fizzer chemistry-wise, the door surely being properly shut with Robin, and Victoria reintroduced but surely heading towards some kind of final closure next season on the one who otherwise would've been the one that got away. And structurally, with Marshall and Lily hitting various major milestones and a wedding between Barney and Robin signalled (though we're also told that something will go wrong), you would think that in whatever comes next, the focus will turn back to what is, after all, the underlying narrative thread of the show.
As to volumes or nothing at all - what I mean by that is that I've flown through the season obviously because it speaks to something in my current situation...but it's done that from the start, and it's thoroughly got its hooks into me, so that I do want to find out what happens to all of the characters, irrespective of how immediate its resonance is with whatever my current personal circumstances may be. So, anyway...
(1-5; 6)
Monday, February 04, 2013
Coriolanus
Not one of W. Shakespeare's better known, and watching this punchy adaptation made me wonder if that might be because its central character, Caius Martius Coriolanus (here, the chimerical Ralph Fiennes as a believably self-contained, snarling soldier), is a rather opaque figure, devoid (at least in this film version) of illuminating soliloquies or clear motivations beyond a tendency towards moral inflexibility and absolutism and a disregard for the good opinion of others, plus an ultimately fatal propensity to be swayed by his mother (played as a formidable matriarchal figure by Vanessa Redgrave)...it actually felt closer to Greek tragedy than any of his other histories or tragedies that I'm familiar with. Anyhow, as a piece of film-making, pretty watchable, with the contemporisation effective, if the plotting/characterisation was a bit truncated-feeling in some ways due presumably to its origins on stage.
Colson Whitehead - Zone One
Literary zombie novel. Comparing it to The Passage, which was particularly well-written genre fiction by a 'literary' author, Zone One feels closer to actual literature with zombie elements; a good example is the several pages near the start in which the main character, Mark Spitz, is being attacked by a group of 'skels' in an office tower, the immediate action intercut with paragraphs-long passages of interior-expository recollection. The prose is melodious, sometimes a bit lyrical, generally very readable, occasionally too flowery; the story is engaging enough; the post-apocalypse persuasively 'things fall apart, the centre cannot hold' even though it opens at a point when the remnants of human civilisation seem to be tentatively reasserting themselves. 7.5 out of 10, in a good way.
Beasts of the Southern Wild: Music from the Motion Picture
One of the many striking things about Beasts of the Southern Wild was its excellent, evocative soundtrack; I thought of Beirut with some americana folk elements and Meribah of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, but those with less impoverished and white-person indie-dominated musical references than us would no doubt have more accurate comparisons, presumably New Orleans-based.[*]
The music is really front and centre in Beasts, from the twinkling music box motifs that generate its dream-like air through the rousing fiddle-drums-horns pieces that evoke the energy of the Bathtub community (the fiddle recurs throughout in a variety of guises) and the slower, more emotive pieces like "I Think I Broke Something" and "The Thing That Made You", and it holds together strongly as a listening experience even without the images it accompanies, mostly in little one or two minute snippets, though the two longest ("The Bathtub" and "Once There Was A Hushpuppy") are two of the best.
* * *
[*] Although, having written that and then done some googling, these interviews with co-composer Dan Romer (the other credited co-composer is Benh Zeitlin, who also directed the film) suggest that its influences are much more varied than simply trad deep south (Rihanna gets mentioned in both).
The music is really front and centre in Beasts, from the twinkling music box motifs that generate its dream-like air through the rousing fiddle-drums-horns pieces that evoke the energy of the Bathtub community (the fiddle recurs throughout in a variety of guises) and the slower, more emotive pieces like "I Think I Broke Something" and "The Thing That Made You", and it holds together strongly as a listening experience even without the images it accompanies, mostly in little one or two minute snippets, though the two longest ("The Bathtub" and "Once There Was A Hushpuppy") are two of the best.
* * *
[*] Although, having written that and then done some googling, these interviews with co-composer Dan Romer (the other credited co-composer is Benh Zeitlin, who also directed the film) suggest that its influences are much more varied than simply trad deep south (Rihanna gets mentioned in both).
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