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".