Lisa Miller - Meet the Misses

Lisa Miller is an artist whose music is heavily bound up with associations for me - Melbourne associations at that. Four times seen live (twice at CERES in summer - the second time especially significant - and in between at an in retrospect poignant Harvest Festival, and also at Readings), a particular song that hit me hard in that period when I was falling into country music and into the end of university and all that entailed and which is still one of my favourites ("Little Stars"), and of course many others along the way (egs 1, 2, 3, 4), stretching back to, was it even high school?, borrowing Quiet Girl With A Credit Card from the local library and having it work its way deep (in retrospect, a precursor of the later country music thing); hearing the excellent "Wipe The Floor" on a triple r soundscape compilation maybe a year or so on, early in uni, during that period where everything, not least (and in some ways especially) music, seemed to be opening up.

Anyway, Meet the Misses is a backwards look for Miller, re-recordings of a bunch of songs from her first two albums, Quiet Girl and As Far As A Life Goes. Some of the strength of those associations I was getting at before is a matter of personal historical happenstance, as is always the way, but just as much is down to the music itself, which, allusive, nostalgic, intimate, and brightly-toned, lends itself to such connections. Her takes on these old numbers on Meet the Misses took a couple of listens for me; they tend to sound initially a bit smoothed-out, maybe even a bit lounge-y (I particularly missed the greater stomp and verve of the original takes on "Wipe The Floor" and "Hang My Head", but the charms of these re-recordings have revealed themselves over a few more listens, putting a new complexion on the ones that I was familiar with, and gently introducing the others, showing what great songs they are, even if done over in a slightly different style.

The Felice Brothers - Tonight at the Arizona

I've had this one for a while, but hadn't listened to it properly until recently, inspired by "Forever Green" (different album, but same artist). It still hasn't much grabbed me, though - on this one, at least, the Felice Brothers' brand of folk-rock isn't touched with anything special.

Christine Fellows - Paper Anniversary

A nice, sparsely twinkling indie-folk record.

Monsters

Boy meets girl amidst an alien lifeform-infested Mexico, done with an arthouse sensibility (some of the shots are stunning, and not just the climactic scene where two of the creatures, beautifully, fascinatingly weird, meet in a gas station lot). I liked this one quite a lot, mainly because of the marvellous cinematography and sense of style to it - at once wondrous and understated.

Constellations (MTC)

He's a beekeeper, she does something that involves quantum mechanics and a pop-science structural-expository lecture(s) on parallel universes, and the play makes much of the existential metaphors offered by those vocations; in that respect, reminded me much of Wild Surmise. The characters seemed like real people - impressive, given that they were performing essentially multiple possible versions of themselves in a series of repeated and chopped-up, varying fragments. But overall it felt just a bit slight; hard to know how much of that was the play itself and how much the production. Either way, while it was peppy enough and did a decent job with the central conceit of portraying those branching alternate paths, consecutively and otherwise, this one didn't quite hit the mark for me.

(w/ Cass)

Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go

This is the third of Ishiguro's novels that I've read, and like the other two (The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans), it's impressed me a lot - not only in that I admire how well it's written and put together, but also in the sense that it's made an impression on me in a whole number of ways.

The difficulty that's posed by unpicking exactly how that impression is made is an indication of how neatly Never Let Me Go is put together...it's a combination of three main threads: (1) the description of the tangled relationship between Kathy, Ruth and Tommy and the costs of their actions; (2) the science fiction high concept of the donations and the mystery surrounding its details, unveiled for the reader in much the same way that the characters themselves learn those truths; and (3) the heightening effect of the predetermined foreshortening of all of their lives - and how deftly they're woven together, all mutually supporting.

There's something about Ishiguro's voice, in this one and in his others; his novels touch on a human level, while at the same time having always a sense of estrangement to them. I still don't know whether that latter is deliberate, a function of the damaged, pained characters through which he tells his stories, but regardless, it works.

The New World

Like The Thin Red Line, the only one of Malick's films that I've seen (albeit that one multiple times), a beautiful, poetic film, shot through with a Romantic yearning for nature unspoiled - humanity included. I found it a bit unfocused, but responded to its overall tone.

Looper

Rian Johnson of The Brothers Bloom and Brick note as writer and director; Joseph Gordon-Levitt; time travel. (Plus Bruce Willis.) That's a good start.

Looper turns out to be solid rather than amazing; I liked its toughness, though there was a certain distancing coolness about the whole affair.

Super 8

A surprisingly engaging monster movie that also reminded me of Stand by Me.

"That's what I'm talking about"

A mix cd from Julian. Downbeat and generally from left-field, and as usual, embedded with a few gems. The Felice Brothers are the sort of band I ought to like, but who've never really struck me before now; their "Forever Green" is genuinely Dylan-esque and all round gorgeous. A couple of uncategorisable dispatches from the underground stand out: "Kruhy" by a Czech outfit called Psi Vojaci, and "I Like the Time" by someone calling himself Balroynigress. Also, folkstress Christine Fellows' elegant "Phantom Pains".

Game of Thrones season 2

Inevitably I watch this series through a filter, or several - I can't help but compare it to the books, and to the extent that it sticks to that source material, to anticipate the twists and turns of the tv version...it makes for a less immersive experience than the books themselves, or, I suspect, the tv series for anyone coming to it without that familiarity. But having said that, this second season maintains the high standards of the first, and, particularly over its second half, stretches its legs a bit, departing further from the events of the books, and doing so effectively, mostly in ways that seem designed to heighten tension or to draw the smaller number of characters and threads together more satisfactorily in the different medium.

(season 1 & again)