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.