Sky Ferreira - Night Time, My Time

A handful of sweetly fizzing pop moments, foremost among them "I Blame Myself", nestled amongst others that are more nondescript.

Nina Simone - Wild Is The Wind

Oh Nina, you never disappoint. Endless.

Interstellar

Another quite magnificent outing from Nolan, working as story, spectacle and mood piece all at once, and in ways that reinforce rather than pulling at each other. Clean construction, great images (the scenes on Earth don't suffer by comparison to the space ones), sustained atmosphere and excitement; high quality actors and acting too.

Wallace Stegner - Crossing to Safety

Humble and in some respects small-canvas, even to the extent of authorially pointing out its own lack of typical dramatic tensions or high points, but with an eye for the substance of what make a life, and what makes a life worthwhile.

The Robert Frost snippet that introduces it, and from which it draws its title, frames the novel aptly:

I could give all to Time except - except
What I myself have held. But why declare
The things forbidden that while the Customs slept
I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There
And what I would not part with I have kept.

Boyhood

Very nice; the film's understatedness of narrative and the simplifying drive of its structure create the possibility of both over and under-estimation, but I feel secure in saying that through whatever combination of design and good fortune, it comes off.

(w/ Kevin)

Shovels & Rope - Swimmin' Time

A raucous good time, skipping through 13 characterful slices that are equal parts swampy folk-country and americana-y indie-rock (artists I've thought of at various times while listening to Swimmin' Time: Mates of State, White Stripes, Laura Stevenson ... though Shovels & Rope are as rootsy as any of those at their grittiest).

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1

Both opens and closes deliberately jarringly, on notes that emphasise the costs of the protagonists' actions, reflecting the film's (and the series') concern with that theme. 'Realistic' might be going too far, but realism-minded maybe isn't. Mockingjay Part 1 isn't self-contained - it picks up where Catching Fire left off, and ends without much resolution, with part 2 in the offing - and that might be part of why it doesn't produce quite the same rush as its predecessors, but that's offset by the pleasingness of its continuing interrogation of those ideas of individual heroism and agency, social dis/order and violent change in a way that's both sophisticated and slickly (in a good way) exciting.

"The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From Sidewalk to Catwalk" (NGV)

This was actually great! Showcasing both couture and pret-a-porter pieces - and, thanks to this exhibition, I now know the difference between the two - across a mix of mannequins (many with projected, moving faces and speaking alternately in French and English, adding a considerable dynamism; some, in the 'Punk cancan' room, on a revolving catwalk) and photographs (figures like Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Lily Cole, all deserving of their iconic status in this context in a way that I rarely grasp or focus on - and, especially, Madonna).

I hadn't known that Gaultier did the costume design for The City of Lost Children, but it makes sense in retrospect; also (separately) I can't remember ever having had my breath taken away even a little bit by a piece of clothing but that's the effect that a long tortoiseshell-print silk satin cape (part of a 'Swashbuckler' collection) had. The bondage room was apt too.

Pacific Rim

I tend to like the idea of giant monsters more than I do the actual thing (well, 'actual'), but giant monsters vs giant robots as done by Guillermo del Toro is a solid proposition and Pacific Rim is enjoyable. Also, Rinko Kikuchi who is now officially in everything (this was the third thing I've seen her in over the last few months, the others being 47 Ronin and Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter).

Haruki Murakami - The Strange Library

A curiosity and a fitting addition to Murakami's oeuvre (in translation - it was published in the original Japanese some years back). Bonus appearance by the sheep man, that unassuming figure of the unconscious. Very nice presentation too.

47 Ronin

Splashily fantastic rendition of historical Japan as a set of magical islands. 6.5/10.

John Green - The Fault in Our Stars

Had this one for a while - been saving it...I'd avoided specific spoilers but pretty much assumed that someone was gonna die and it didn't take too long to figure out who that was going to be. So, well, it's good and reads remarkably like something that could actually have been written by someone aged 16 (albeit a particularly intelligent and articulate 16) - it's a bit affected and clunky in places, but that makes it feel more real. The cancer, the emotion, the argot, the asking of big questions, the True Love - all ring true. Given the reputation that this one has, I'd kind of been assuming that it would leave me basically devastated, at least immediately after finishing it, but for whatever reason it didn't have that effect; still, it was worth the time it took to read (and probably I didn't immerse myself in it as fully as I might have).

Donnie Darko

I suspect not just for me but for my whole generation (at least the relevant part of it), Donnie Darko has such an aura of the landmark to it that it's very difficult to think about - or watch - objectively. 2001 it came out - not sure whether I saw it at MIFF or afterwards, but either way I'd been keenly anticipating it and it didn't disappoint. Oh yeah, and the soundtrack - that version of "Mad World", of course, and "Under the Milky Way", "Love will Tear Us Apart", "The Killing Moon" (all three iconic for me in their own right, but that last now particularly inseparable from this film).

Revisiting it the other night, all these years on, what's most striking is the strength of the film's vision and the vividness of its imagery and iconography, particularly when Frank is on screen. And also the way it achieves its effect through a combination of the direct and oblique, the literal and the poetic, in a way that one suspects Richard Kelly himself wasn't fully in control of; relatedly, the underdeveloped - and, for me, pleasingly cryptic even if not classically coherent - nature of some of its elements (many of which were fleshed out more in the significantly more explain-y director's cut). It's still pretty great.

Sarah Waters - The Paying Guests

Enjoyable but maybe a bit too straight up, almost old-fashionedly so - which isn't to say that I knew exactly what was coming, nor how Frances and Lilian would turn out (individually, or together). Also, I don't typically look to fiction to be educated, but I did feel that I knew more about life in 1920s London by its end.

(Affinity, The Little Stranger)

Digression

"Digression on Number 1, 1948"

I am ill today but I am not
too ill. I am not ill at all.
It is a perfect day, warm
for winter, cold for fall.

A fine day for seeing. I see
ceramics, during lunch hour, by
Miro, and I see the sea by Leger;
light, complicated Metzingers
and a rude awakening by Brauner;
a little table by Picasso, pink.

I am tired today but I am not
too tired. I am not tired at all.
There is the Pollock, white, harm
will not fall, his perfect hand

and the many short voyages. They'll
never fence the silver range.
Stars are out and there is sea
enough beneath the glistening earth
to bear me toward the future
which is not so dark. I see.

Found in the Frank O'Hara selected poems into which I often dip, earlier this evening, savouring a solitary frozen yogurt outside on Faraday Street, listening to Patty Griffin - specifically, her lovely, poignant "Making Pies".

Stop Making Sense

As good as it was last time round, pretty much exactly a decade ago. It's interesting, too, the way that the iconic artists of the past (both canonically and personally iconic, the two categories overlapping a bit but obviously not the same in either contents or intensity) separate out over time - I can't remember the last time I listed to a Talking Heads record all the way through, but Stop Making Sense was a reminder of their quality and also of how their influence continues to infiltrate today.

(w/ David and Justine)

The Newsroom season 2

A bit heavy-handed in places (with Messages), a bit cute in others (with Characters), but The Newsroom is fast-moving, well-acted and appealing - on a number of levels - enough to overcome those flaws. This second season is structured a bit differently from the first, and for the better, and each of the main characters flicks quickly to life - it's hard not to like the ones who we're supposed to like.

(season 1)

David Rosetzky - "Gaps"

Rosetzky's work has interested me the couple of times I've come across it in the past, and this 35 minute video piece (it felt much shorter) had a similar effect - four performers, a choreographed mix of dance (in rehearsal) and speech.

(w/ Julian)

Taylor Swift - 1989

I'm not infatuated with 1989 in the same way that I was with Red, but it's still a pretty delightful, personality-filled pop record, one truly solid song after another, and it still sounds like she just means everything she sings, in a good way.

Bits and pieces, reprises

Found in one of the many small notebooks that I've bought in a miscellany of gallery/museum stores so as to have something to write in, having been caught without the standing 'art' notebook of the time - this one from the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, July 2011:

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary picture is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

It was in relation to Richard Long; also, a reminder of my own Romantic sensibilities, often obscured nowadays by other artistic etc modes of experience and understanding.

* * *

A while ago - maybe six months or a year back - I woke up with a tune running through my head, as if I'd just been dreaming it. It wasn't one of those that slipped wispily away almost as soon as waking life asserted itself, but rather hung around for a day or two - but I couldn't place it, partly because it didn't come with any words. Fast forward to last weekend, Saturday night around 10pm, stopped into Brunswick Street Bookstore for a quick browse on my way out to a drink; I was the only person in the store (apart from the girl at the counter), and it was that song playing on the system..."Body on the Water", it turns out (Luluc - Dear Hamlyn).

Stephen Mills - The Professionals: Strategy, Money & the Rise of the Political Campaigner in Australia

I got this from Readings at the same time as The Gatekeepers and have just finished dutifully wading through it - skimming a bit rather than really reading particularly closely. The subject matter is interesting, but truthfully perhaps only somewhat so - at least as treated here, largely through a blow by blow account of how the roles of the ALP federal/national secretary and Liberal Party federal director (and associated national campaign director responsibilities) have developed and professionalised over time.

Gone Girl

A sleekly effective translation of the equally (indeed, even more so) effective book.

The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet

Gentle and ruminative, T.S. Spivet's as much a love letter to a certain idea of America (witness the series of postcard-worthy shots as the titular character crosses the length of the country from Montana to DC by train) as it is a depiction of T.S.'s journey, character and family. The 3d works well, as could have been expected in Jeunet's hands; the whimsy and imagination are there, but dialled down a notch, while the dark edges and grotesqueness of his early films have almost entirely disappeared.

(w/ Meribah)

How I Met Your Mother season 9, "Once" (Princess Theatre), and a (truncated) review of last weekend

Friday night - end of a long week. Somewhat spur of the moment, went out with BS for a drink which turned into several, so that I got home well past midnight. And then finally started watching this last season, with the full weight of the previous ones behind it.

I've watched HIMYM over three years and change rather than its actual nine, but it feels like I've grown up with the characters nonetheless. And, it turns out, I didn't know how it would end after all.

* * *

Stella in an earlier season: I know that you're tired of waiting. And you may have to wait a little while more, but she's on her way, Ted. And she's getting here as fast as she can.

John Ashbery, as epigraph to Bobcat:

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?

* * *

Saturday.

Richmond in the morning for wedding suit alterations with R's bridal party then lunch with AC, including a character name discussion (his response to MS particularly pleasing).

Waiting for a tram and looking up and down the straight flat length of Bridge Road, I was struck by the sensation that that very stretch had been the setting for a dream from months ago, its outlines still hazily present.  

* * *

NGV in the afternoon.

The "Golden Mirror Carousel" (Carsten Holler) in the ground floor hallway a striking presence and a vivid metaphor at a time when I'm particularly attuned to them.

That familiar Rothko untitled. It's not that I see something new every time I return to it, but rather that, each time, it is something new, and at the same time, a continuing object - integrally, of course, an object of consciousness and experience (in phenomenological terms). Angel Olsen's "Windows" on repeat.

Paul Nash's "Landscape of the summer solstice".

That deceptively simple Magritte ("In praise of dialectics") which I've also visited so many times - windows within windows.

A row of four impressionist paintings along a wall - also familiar - which, after I'd looked at them for long enough, took on the aspect of windows themselves, into other worlds: Pissarro, "The banks of the Viosne at Osny in grey weather, winter", 1883, Sisley, "The Loing and the slopes of Saint-Nicaise - February afternoon", 1890, Monet, "Rough weather at Etretat, 1883, Sisley, "Haystacks at Moret - morning light", 1891.

The abstraction-leaning splash of Gustave Caillebotte's "The plain of Gennevilliers, yellow fields", 1884.

* * *

In the evening, "Once".

After EJ changed her ticket I'd expected to see it by myself, but it turned out that TV was also along as part of the usual complicated multi-party subscription arrangement sorted at the start of the year; AC came out to join us for pre-show dinner, CWS.

And so, anyway. The show was nice. Romantic, not overly sentimental. Good music - very yearning. I didn't know how it was going to end, and I liked how it ended.

Also - it turns out that Cristin Milioti played 'The Girl' in its first stage production, initially Off-Broadway and then when it started its Broadway run - and now, she's the long awaited The Mother, too (henceforth, 'TM').

* * *

Got home; started on HIMYM post-midnight for the second night in a row. A question: how would it maintain interest despite having already seemingly revealed its end game by showing TM at the end of season 8 and framing the whole thing within the day and a half or so of Barney and Robin's wedding?

The answer (it seems): the usual bouncing back and forth in time, a sequential unfolding of how delightful - and perfect for Ted - the mother is (including flash-forwards to their future), and some clever structuring ("that's how Lily met your mother" etc) to build towards the meeting that we now know is sure to take place.

A few laughs (nowhere near as many as in early seasons), a fair bit of drama, those same characters following their paths; it's familiar but welcome territory by now.

* * *

Sunday. A big sleep in.

More episodes during the day. All the big relationships are placed under stress, and in most cases, by the same type that's been the major source of tension in past seasons: Ted's feelings for Robin and her less clear feelings for him; Robin and Barney's mutual attraction and difficulties with honesty and trust; Barney and Ted's friendship amidst all that; Lily's unfulfilled artistic desires vs the stability of her relationship with Marshall. Which, while maybe necessary to generate some dramatic stakes, feels like a bit of a cheat, especially in a ninth and final season and given that we presume that, by now, we know how it's going to end: Barney and Robin married; Lily and Marshall securely happily ever after; Ted finally meeting and settling down with TM...the knowledge of which doesn't particularly diminish my involvement with these long-arcing stories.

Somewhere in there, 'How Your Mother Met Me', starting (again) back in 2005 and telling the story from TM's perspective, including the series of intersections, happenstances and events that will eventually bring her together with Ted. The sad piano music playing as she farewells Max outside is the same as that in season 8's 'The Time Travelers', when Ted talks about how he wants the extra 45 days with her (gaining additional poignancy in retrospect, once the ending has played out).

* * *

Later in the afternoon, out to meet TN at the Abbotsford Convent for a bit. Short walk and bus ride each way; hotter outside than it had seemed. A bit of summer in the air. Travelling between places, a sense of disconnectedness.

* * *

Home again. Only a few episodes left; very much feeling at the end of something. The flash-forwards continue into Ted and TM's future together, for a while essentially in parallel to the present day narrative (which also contains a series of embedded flashbacks, most notably Ted's recovery of the locket via the ex-girlfriend chain of Stella, Victoria and Jeanette).

Near the end, a strange, muted note in 'Vesuvius' with the unexplained sadness between Ted and TM over their (future) dinner at the Farhampton Inn, which is then left hanging --

Nearly every reasonably significant character from the last eight seasons gets at least a small appearance somewhere in this ninth, and many of them are wrapped up in 'Gary Blauman', three or four eps from the end, in a kind of clearing of the decks - Carl, Jeanette, Kevin, Ranjit, Patrice, William Zabka, Zoey, Scooter, Blitz, Blah Blah (Carol), Sandy Rivers, James. And also gives us Ted and TM's first date, which is a reminder of part of why I liked this show so much in the first place - its adeptness and lightness of touch in rendering modern romance.

TM. The Mother. Tracy McConnell. Ted Mosby. &c. 

The two-part finale, 'Last Forever', has a different tone, moving at intervals through the future for all six of the major characters and, shockingly, unwinding not one but two things that we'd been set us for a long time to assume would be part of the ending - Barney and Robin's marriage (the divorce and growing separateness of all of their lives casting a pall that hangs over much of the finale), and Ted and the mother's happily ever after (despite the clue in 'Vesuvius', I didn't see her death coming, which made its emotional impact even greater).

And then, again, at last: Ted and Robin.

* * *

Over the last few days, I've watched the whole season again, this time coloured by the knowledge of how things were going to end - with the mother, and then with Robin.

I don't know how I feel about the ending. The whole nine seasons - almost a decade's worth of character years - leads up towards Ted meeting the mother, and not only that but as she finally draws near, it's made clear that they couldn't be more right for each other, exactly according with the romantic ideal that we all hold somewhere within us. And it's all structured, as I've observed before, around a reassuring logic of that precise happy ending, embedded in the title and premise of the whole thing. So it was a shock to have that rug pulled out from underneath me - to feel, like Ted perhaps, that it had been all too brief a time with her.

And then there's what it means for Barney and Robin, a relationship in which we're also brought to invest and believe over many years of the show's run time and finally culminating over multiple seasons of foreshadowed and then actual, seemingly climactic wedding - and then summarily terminated almost straight away seemingly for no other reason than that Robin's career takes off and takes her constantly overseas; and then the pivot in which Barney finds that the love of his life is his unexpected baby daughter, while maybe consistent with his own absent father, isn't led up to in a way that allows it to be really satisfying, but instead feels abrupt and from out of nowhere.

On the other hand, while the fairytale of Ted and TM proved cruelly not to be forever, there's Robin. The girl who, even if she isn't precisely just-right and perfectly-matched as TM, is the one who, in the show's schema, he loves all the way through, maybe even from when he first sets eyes on her. So there's that.

* * *

I've felt for some time now that I had to finish watching this show - like not knowing how it ended, or maybe more to the point, not having come to its end, was somehow affecting my own life. Irrational, obviously - but still.

Well, it's over. So what now?

Angel Olsen - Burn Your Fire For No Witnesses

I like Burn Your Fire..., but it's a tricky record to pin down, skipping across bases as it does. It opens up with a classic era Liz Phair-styled strummer in "Unfucktheworld" and later calls back to a similar time, except via Sonic Youth, on "High & Wild"; elsewhere, Olsen stomps similarly alt-ily through the punky "Forgiven/Forgotten" and countryish modern blues cuts "Hi-Five" and "Stars" (the latter one of a couple that call SvE very much to mind - like van Etten, she has an arrestingly, raspily beautiful voice capable of a range of types of expressiveness) amidst a bunch of quieter moments. Saves the best for last, too, with the climactic, shockingly lovely "Windows".

Emily Bitto - The Strays

Variously:

1. Recommended by Nicolette a while back, and I've been seeing in it Readings too.

2. The prologue bears some distressingly close similarities to that of my own in-progress, not least with the arrival of a letter driving the (recollective) narrative.

3. It's a well-worn device - the relatively conventional narrator enchanted by, and granted entry to, an exotically fascinating group or milieu and serving as reader's window into same (see also: Nick Carraway, Charles Ryder, Richard Papen). Put to good work here.

4. Mood and setting are particular strengths; the various pieces of Melbourne that make their way in - albeit from either the 1930s or the 80s - don't hurt a bit. The characters are generally well rendered - poignant and crisply defined without being either sentimentalised or caricature (the renditions of Heloise and Evan Trentham, respectively, risking but avoiding those vices).

5. It's very well crafted, which works in its favour. I wonder whether it's maybe too modest - if I would've had a stronger reaction to it had it tried for more. That's probably unfair, though - taken on its own terms, it doesn't do too much wrong, and I did enjoy it.

6. One of those little artifacts - written on a small piece of paper tucked in the back of the library copy that I read (sounds like its author enjoyed the book less than I did ... assuming they were indeed notes for a review of The Strays):

FOR REVIEW:

Comment on child narrator, how complex, that narration, needs to be (present-tense: child's voice)

The structure: acts as a crutch for a story not thought out 

For a trip that crosses Australia, everyone is white, stereotypes stay as stereotypes

Watch the Australian Story 

Something about character's (woman) [couldn't read the next two words]

Cirkopolis (Cirque Eloize)

Modern circus, inspired by Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Pole, juggling, seesaw jumps, floor and aerial gymnastics (definitely no animals), and sometimes just a hint of danger, with good use made of projections, set changes, costume, music, colour; the highpoint was the graceful - grace built no doubt on enormous strength and control - girl in a red dress with what I've now learned is called a Cyr wheel. Enjoyable.

(w/ Caroline plus a couple of her friends - part of the Melbourne Festival)

"Les Miserables" (Her Majesty's Theatre)

Well, you can't go too far wrong with a main stage production of Les Miserables. I could quibble a bit at some of the singing, some of which was too much on the side of expressiveness rather than tunefulness for my tastes, but ultimately this was a lavish mounting of the only musical I've ever particularly known or cared about - while obviously it has nowhere near the complexity or sophistication, I was reminded of the familiarity evoked by my favourite Shakespeares - and it was good.

(w/ Erandathie)

Scarlett Thomas - Monkeys with Typewriters

I do love Scarlett Thomas - even if much of that really arises from just two of her novels in that genius one-two of PopCo and The End of Mr Y- and, more than that, I admire the effect that she creates through her writing, which is distinctively contemporary and arises from something different than mood (not that mood is something to be taken for granted), which was enough to cause me to overcome my disinterest in 'how to write' books and work through Monkeys with Typewriters. (If whatever she's doing is working for her, maybe it'll also work for me.)

It was worth it, too, going through theories and types of narrative and plot - covering the Greeks (especially Aristotle), Propp and others - as well as practical advice on a series of topics all very relevant to me (how to have ideas, styles of narration, characterisation, writing a good sentence, beginning to write a novel).

Stephen Donaldson - "The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant" series

That is, Lord Foul's Bane, The Illearth War and The Power That Preserves. Umpteenth read, although - apparently - the first time all the way through for at least a decade. The original magic of these, all those years ago, was probably a combination of coming to them for the first time and my own (much earlier) time of life, but a small part still lingers.

Rebecca Lee - Bobcat and other stories

Read this again because we ended up doing it for book club, and on this second pass found myself again struck by the writing, which is wonderful not only at a sentence level but also in its structuring and use of imagery and language within each individual story and indeed across the whole collection.

Take the metaphor/figure of the bobcat in the title story, rendered in poetically elliptical terms but arriving with the precisely weighted timing and impact characteristic of the short story form - and its tacit return in another form in the closing piece, "Settlers". Or "The Banks of the Vistula", with its careful, allusive attention to language and its forms and possibilities:

First, of the professors: Occasionally during class you could see hope for us rising in them, and then they would look like great birds flying over an uncertain landscape, asking mysterious questions, trying to lead us somewhere we could not yet go.

Stasselova lecturing: "The reason for the sentence is to express the verb - a change, a desire. But the verb cannot stand alone; it needs to be supported, to be realized by a body, and thus the noun ... This is the power of the sentence ... It acts out this drama of control and subversion. The noun always stands for what is, the status quo, and the verb for what might be, the ideal."

After the narrator, Margaret, burns the propaganda tract whose ideology so initially captures her: I heard about a thousand birds cry, and I craned my neck to see them lighting out from the tips of the elms. They looked like ideas would if released suddenly from the page and given bodies - shocked at how blood actually felt as it ran through the veins, as it sent them wheeling into the west, wings raking, straining against the requirements of such a physical world.

Stasselova, in one of his charged encounters with Margaret, speaking of how the line people draw between the things they consider 'this' and the things they consider 'that' is the perimeter of their sphere of intimacy, and then, a bit later: "This rain," he said then, in a quiet, astonished voice, and his word this entered me as it was meant to - quietly, with a sharp tip, but then, like an arrowhead, widening and widening, until it included the whole landscape around us.

And finally, Margaret's realisation, at her moment of crisis, that Stasselova's lesson is just about the sentence: the importance of, the sweetness of; a new metaphor, the sentence, a longing to leap into the subject, that sturdy vessel traveling upstream through the axonal predicate into what is possible; into the object, which is all possibility; into what little we know of the future, of eternity; and a perfectly underplayed closing image calling back to all of the above (language, what it carries, the arrow, the symbolism of the birds) - Above Stasselova's head the storm clouds were dispersing as if frightened by some impending goodwill, and I could see that the birds were out again, forming into that familiar pointy hieroglyph, as they're told to do from deep within.

Quite something.

(last time, a couple of months back)

Robert Plant - lullaby and ... The Ceaseless Roar

Really likin' this latter-day run of Plant's. Raising Sand keeps getting better and better over time, and Band of Joy is ageing well too - and now lullaby and ..., which retains the gentleness, warmth and exploratory spirit of those other two while pushing into some new directions, knitting a range of folk forms with an eclectic range of other elements, including a touch of that old Led Zeppelin mysticism.

Utopia (tv series)

Yes, amusing.

Bob Dylan - The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan

Sometimes you're only in the mood for Bob Dylan, and this early one is hitting the spot - "Blowin' in the Wind", "A Hard Rain's-A Gonna Fall", "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright".

Paul Kelly - Triumph and Demise: The Broken Promise of a Labor Generation

The narrative on the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd period from 2007 to 2013 is familiar, both because I followed these events closely at the time and because Kelly's perspective on them very closely reflects - indeed is indistinguishable from - that of the News Corp press. Probably through a combination of those things, it comes across as at once a near-definitive account of one perspective on that turbulent period and unlikely to represent a true last word on them, even should such a thing be possible - one feels that there's still much more to be said to give a full accounting, including some that will only be possible with the benefit of perspective lent by greater distance and seeing how this next term or two plays out.

As an aside, while books about/of politics are all too easy to plough through, I suspect it's unhealthy for me to read too many. A couple of weeks ago over dinner, I scribbled a possible 'healthy reading diet' pyramid (like the old food pyramid, the metaphor's mixed and doesn't actually represent ascension towards the apex!) - in which books on politics would only be a small component of what I've called social sciences (also comprising popular economics, behavioural insights, history, etc).

L'Arpeggiata - Christina Pluhar - All'Improvviso: Ciaccone, Bergamasche ... & un po' di Follie

There should always be an element of discovery in listening to music; in finding something new in the sound we do the same in ourselves. And every once in a while comes a record that's at once entirely different from anything that one's heard before and yet somehow resonant, and which then lingers on; a long time ago, there was Tango Ballet (Piazzolla) and Tabula Rasa (Part), and the Heartland appalachian anthology was another - and, like the first two of those (and much other music over the years), All'Improvviso came from Kim.

Even working out what it is is something of an uncertain endeavour; as best as I can tell from the liner notes, some translated from the Italian and some not, it's a collection of pieces based on, inspired by or otherwise related to mostly 17th century, late Renaissance and early Baroque, Italian songs, generally incorporating a form called the ostinato bass. Then again, the whole point is that what it is doesn't particularly matter - that while the style and form aren't at all familiar to me, it's music.

Pluhar seems to be the band leader; she variously plays baroque harp and theorbo (a kind of lute, it turns out). Clarinet appears throughout (piccolo and alto), providing some of the high points, at times jauntily and at others in plaintive tones; also baroque guitar and various other somewhat exotic (because period) versions of more familiar stringed and woodwind instruments, plus a few of the songs feature vocal renditions of traditional Italian texts.

I've listened to this one a bit over the last few weeks, and it's reminded me of the uniquely ineffable nature and experience of music - the way it can summon not only emotion but, even more intangibly, feeling, and that in a way that can't be described nor even really thought about directly...but simply (complexly) felt.

The New Pornographers - Brill Bruisers

Shimmer, chime and crash - the New Pornographers in fine form. As usual, Neko Case tends to steal the show ("Champions of Red Wine", "Fantasy Fools", "Marching Orders"); also especially good is "Born With A Sound", which features one Amber Webber, who sounds rather like Tracyanne Campbell.

Mass Romantic; Electric Version; Twin Cinema; live, 2006; Challengers; Together; live, 2010.

Dark Shadows

I omitted to mention after first watching this film how extremely attractive its cast is, which adds plenty to its considerable enjoyability. It's also reminded me of what a good craftsman and talented artist Tim Burton is, in addition to his always obvious vision and sensibility.

Arrested Development season 4

Been a long time coming - and now twice over, since the structure of season 4 practically demands a second go-through straight after the first. And I have to say, it's a disappointment - while it's nice to visit these characters again (well, kind of - they're older, and maybe less likeable now) and the show's still delightfully unafraid of taboo, it's hard to put your finger on what's missing, but it feels a shade darker and has far fewer laughs ... the show's as layered as ever, but not as funny. The varying episode lengths don't help either, giving it a bit of a baggy feel, and nor does the scattering of the cast across the episodes (driven, I think, by the limited availability of some of them). Seasons 1 to 3, Arrested Development was the absolutely gold standard for judging all tv comedy; alas, the most that can be said about season 4 is that maybe, if it keeps going - the note on which it ends, with numerous unsatisfying loose ends, suggests that the show's creators, at least, intend so - it'll turn out to've been a transitional pivot to something else.

(1, 2, 3; again; again)

I Origins

A difficult movie to describe but I liked I Origins a lot after going into it at the Nova knowing almost nothing about it, like Memento many years ago with Kim and more recently Short Term 12 with Cass. It has elements of intelligent science fiction, or speculative science; it's poetic, allusive, and emotional in its effect - an effect which is present all the way through and culminates in the film's end, "Motion Picture Soundtrack" the perfect soundtrack over the top - "I will see you in the next life..."

(w/ Laura and Rob)

Gideon Haigh - On Warne

I've read a bit of cricket writing in my time (the earliest I can remember was Brearley's The Art of Captaincy), but not generally in more recent years; this is a good one.

Nine Horses - Snow Borne Sorrow

Jazzy, electronic-inflected and periodically interesting, but if I'm being honest, for the most part this one is a bit dull for me - not really to my tastes. A nonetheless appreciated gift from Julian.

What We Do in the Shadows

Droll New Zealand vampire shenanigans. The bits with the werewolves were good too.

(w/ Nicolette)

Brian K Vaughan & Fiona Staples - Saga volumes 1-3

Enjoyably weird and inventive; the flights of imagination, deliberate provocation and straight-out crazy all pull together into a very appealing, cohesive whole, aided by the brilliant art. I don't think I can do much better than this article in picking the eyes out of why Saga is so much fun to read.

Lana Del Rey - Ultraviolence

Pretty, swirly, atmospheric, but ultimately unsatisfying - the songs aren't there.

(Born to Die)

Basil Sellers Arts Prize 4 / "The less there is to see the more important it is to look" (Ian Potter Museum)

The Basil Sellers is an annual prize for sport-themed art - bridging the divide. My favourites were both surfing-related (praps indicative of the fact that I like the colour blue) in William Mackinnon's "The Break" and Narelle Autio's surf-lifesaving series; also a loving rendition of "The underarm bowling incident of 1981" (Noel McKenna), even if it did somewhat resemble a high school poster project!

While "The less there is to see the more important it is to look" collected various Australian abstract pieces from the second half of the 20th C, taking as its starting point a question about whether the narrative of abstraction developing in two streams (Cezanne and Seurat - cubism - geometric and constructivist abstraction / Gauguin - the fauves - Kandinsky - surrealism - abstract expressionism) really holds, or at least continues to hold, into the fragmentation of artistic streams in more recent years. "Is abstraction more than a formalist exercise?" Well of course it is. I have to say, my favourites were the three relatively early pieces at the very start, which were intended to provide context for the recent - John Passmore ("Snow", 1946), Ralph Balson ("Untitled", 1954) and Robert Grieve ("Composition", 1966).

(w/ Trang)

Tangalo @ Paris Cat Jazz Club, Saturday 6 September

Thanks to the discovery of Piazzolla many years ago, tango's been part of the landscape for me for a while. And so, this was nice - they even did a version of "La muerte del angel". (here)

(w/ Trang)

Rob Snarski - Wounded Bird

"Tender Like A Bruise" the first song's called, and tender is the record as a whole; my favourite's "Lay of the Land", which sounds a bit like Elbow and Coldplay even (but in a good way), and also excellent is "The Black Caress" ... they're two of the more dramatic moments on what's overall a very gentle, ruminative album.

Jenny Lewis - The Voyager

So there's this one song. "Late Bloomer". There's not that much to it - it has a chorus/bridge thing that gets repeated a lot and isn't even that catchy, and the story it tells, while evocative, is kind of familiar on the verge of trite and doesn't, y'know, culminate. And yet, I've been listening to it over and over - just like the song whose writer Nancy goes in search of, sweeping along the song's besotted 16 year old narrator, herself furious and restless, possessed of a chelsea girl haircut and a plane ticket to Paris - and I think mostly it's because the verses, and the singing generally, are so damn charming, beguiling, in that Jenny Lewis way ... still a heartthrob after all these years.

Elsewhere, The Voyager is perfectly nice; there's "Just One of the Guys", with that pleasing music video and a tune that's good enough to stand without it, and "Love U Forever", one of those sunnily veering indie-rock confections that I've always liked, and a bunch of other neat songs too. But - "Late Bloomer". Sprightly, characterful, a touch melancholy - that's the one that cuts through.

"Educated folk singers want my soul / Jonathon Fisk still wants my soul": Spoon - They Want My Soul

Even with the benefit of perspective-lending distance, that run put together by Spoon from '01 to '07 - Girls Can Tell, Kill the Moonlight, Gimme Fiction, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga - was straight-up great, and there's not a lot more to be said about that. The next one was Transference, a step in a different and (deliberately) shakier direction, and it didn't sink in in the same way and besides came out back in 2010, so however you reckon it: Spoon, it's been too long.

Which makes They Want My Soul all the more welcome, because it is excellent. There's not another band, I don't think, with Spoon's ability to surprise me into a smile at their musical moves (the New Pornographers, maybe?), and on this record, they've still got it - the rhythm and soul and sonic attitude (Britt Daniel's Adam's apple strut so easy to visualise) that's marked their output since they hit their stride back more than a decade ago, together with some well-judged filligree by way of the odd Cure-y keyboard wash (the glassy groove of "Inside Out"'s a highlight) and even, on "Outlier", sparkly Spanish guitar - though it's maybe the raggedly straight ahead surges of "Rainy Taxi", "Do You" and the title track that are its greatest pleasures. What up!

Bryce Dessner - "St Carolyn by the Sea" / Jonny Greenwood - Suite from "There Will Be Blood" / Copenhagen Philharmonic / Andre de Ridder

Three substantial, engaging pieces by Bryce Dessner of the National fame, plus half a dozen shorter ones from Greenwood's score for There Will Be Blood - all recorded and released under DG's formidable imprimatur.

While the Greenwood pieces are top notch and suitably cinematic in sound, it's Dessner's compositions that really impress, bringing the apparatus of the symphony orchestra effectively to bear in a stylistically varied but integrated trio of pieces which also seamlessly incorporate (well, in two of the three) the Dessner brothers' electric guitars. It's music that captures the attention, and lingers after the fact - dramatic and powerful.

"The Sievers Project" (Centre for Contemporary Photography)

Six early career artists working mostly in photography in response to the photos of Wolfgang Sievers; Sievers' own pieces, luminous black and white studies of people and machines, stood out from the rest.

(w/ Jade)

Guardians of the Galaxy

Very enjoyable! Funny and fast moving.

(w/ David, Daniel L, Rob, Laura and some friends of David's)

"Italian Masterpieces" (NGV)

"from Spain's royal court, Museo del Prado"

Raced through this in about 45 minutes last weekend, dazed and light-headed. 16th to 18th century, and not art that I know much about, have seen a lot of, or particularly respond to (all of those being related to each other, obviously). Still, I quite enjoyed the exhibition, for the use of colour - including in evoking light - if nothing else, as well as adding something to my store of art knowledge, both historical and more generally in terms of visual education.

Election

I've seen most of this in bits and pieces before, but never all the way through. Not a kind film, but a good one.

Reservoir Dogs

Rewatched while eating dinner. The shock of the new that it must have carried back in '92 is long gone, but there's still something to it. Also, Steve Buscemi never fails to reward.

Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49

Some books loom very large, and The Crying of Lot 49 is one of them. On and off for the last few months, I've been feeling that it was about time for a re-read (looks like the last time was a full decade ago) - another in a long line of returns since that first discovery about halfway through uni - and then when Trang likened my current life situation to that of Oedipa Maas, I felt like I hardly had any further choice in the matter.

Over time, I've come to think of Lot 49 as the key that can unlock all of Pynchon's other novels - it's by far his most concise, as well as being the one in which his major themes and animating concerns are most explicit and clearly visible - and the combination of that personal frame with my familiarity with the novel caused me to be surprised by its difficulty, particularly through the first couple of chapters as I re-learned how to read its idiomatic prose. But it was a pleasurable difficulty, as it always has been with Pynchon and I - the complexities of syntax and meaning matched by the rewards of working through their circuitous layers.

And once I'd found my stride again, that old familiar tumble down the rabbit hole was well and truly on, and I was reminded of just how much it can seem to be the key not only to Pynchon's considerable canon, nor even only to the very large and rich stream of literature flowing from those sources, but indeed to the world at large, legible - or otherwise - in just the same way as Pierce's will and its ultimate inheritance. And of how it - The Crying of Lot 49 - really is one of the very few (countable on the fingers of one hand) books that to me seem like they actually capture in a meaningful sense an essential truth about the underlying nature of the world itself. It really is that profound, and that great.

[Edit 3/9: I meant to mention - somehow I never specifically registered before this reading that it starts with a letter (although of course I knew it in a plot sense), doubly meaningful in terms of things purloined and W.A.S.T.E.]

The Immigrant (MIFF)

Darius Khondji on cinematography so of course it looks amazing; I'm sure its palette is actually much wider than this, but the impression I've retained of its version of early 1920s New York is all browny-russet shadows, tinged with gold - though not romanticised, except to the extent that it seeks, I think, to render that time and place with a precise specificity. Marion Cotillard's good (she always is) as the titular Polish immigrant, and Joaquin Phoenix and Jeremy Renner are also effective though maybe a touch more showily; the film commits to dramatic truth through the straight road of character and actions and so there's the ever present risk of boring-ness, a prospect that it narrowly avoids but avoids nonetheless.

(w/ Daniel L and David)

Inception

What a brilliant piece of cinema this is - its vision powerful, its execution unerring, from the (at times literally) skyscraping heights of realised imagination to the uncanny, unnerving, unfinished shadows lurking just beneath consciousness for us all (personified in Mal) and all at such a vividly kinetic whirl. I just finished re-reading The Crying of Lot 49 (more on that later) - 'shall I project a world?' indeed.

(first time, second time)

Brandon Stanton - Humans of New York

Arrived in the post a little while back - from Wei (I think). I was sceptical but it's actually v pleasing. Oh New York. (web)

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Coolly elegant. Fits my image of a spy movie to a tee.

(last time)

The Unity of All Things

Classic MIFF experience really. The most challenging film I've seen in a while, taking in particle physics, much jargon, weirdly dubbed dialogue messing with the affect, a huge jaguar, slippage in time, adolescent homosexual twincest plus plenty of other strange psychosexual dynamics and more in a whole that felt like a more avant-garde, queerer, grainier and more difficult to understand Herzog film.

(w/ Trang and Meribah)

Snowpiercer

Very good - stylish, exciting, mordant, imaginative (including in how it uses its high concept of the endless train), high stakes (it's willing to kill off a significant number of its main cast at intervals throughout the story) and, at times, gruelling ... the fight scenes, and particularly the one with the axes, reminded me of the hammer fight in Oldboy in their viscerality - the director of which, incidentally, Park Chan-wook, produces here. It can't be a coincidence that William Hurt's character is named 'Gilliam', as the influence is writ large, including in the combination of the spectacular and the grotesque. (Speaking of grotesque, Tilda Swinton is memorable, as is Alison Pill's cameo.)

(w/ Rob and Laura - a cheeky Monday night outing)

Parks and Recreation season 5

Parks and Rec keeps on truckin', still good. (As an aside, about two thirds of the way through the season, I realised who Rashida Jones reminds me of - LP.) But in another news, as part of the current round of self-improvement, I was wondering whether tv is overall a force for good or bad in my life at the moment, and figured that switching off my tv and unplugging at the main might be no bad things - which I duly did after finishing this dvd set, and haven't yet turned it back on since.

(seasons 1-3, 4)

Sleater-Kinney - All Hands on the Bad One

By any measure - whether the record's release date (2000) or the time when I was really into this kind of music (probably about the same) - I'm more than a decade late on this one, though I remember liking the title track at the time; I bought it after hearing it playing in Goldmine Records on Nicholson St a few weeks back. Anyhow, it's pretty good, and it's not the kind of thing that I get super into nowadays.

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (MIFF)

Beautifully shot and tonally precise, even as it - deliberately, I think - evades any single frame through which to easily view and understand it. Kumiko, 29 years old in Tokyo and going nowhere, becomes convinced that the suitcase buried by Steve Buscemi in Fargo really exists and sets off to Minnesota in the dead of winter in search of it; the film's far less whimsical than that description makes it sound, though it balances an ambiguous dreaminess with what I thought was a pretty compelling depiction of mental illness (also, it feels impressively like a Coen brothers film in its own right). Played - well - by Rinko Kikuchi, aka the Japanese actress who shows up everywhere - see also Babel, The Brothers Bloom, Norwegian Wood (a pretty good trio).

(w/ Trang and Meribah)

Louise Doughty - Apple Tree Yard

A holiday read recommendation and it turned out to be fit for purpose, even though I ended up finishing it back home. It opens in a court room and sets up as a mystery/thriller while also exploring the psychological and social elements leading to the central crime, as doled out piece by piece by the narrator, 52 year old geneticist Yvonne Carmichael. I read it quickly and enjoyed it - but I don't think I'm looking for the things in literature that this genre offers, as well put together as Apple Tree Yard struck me as being - the plot unfolding in a way that played fair yet revealed a series of surprises as it went, the underlying elements of motivation and character fitting together plausibly, but ultimately the whole proving a good diversion and nothing more.

Balli Kaur Jaswal - Inheritance

Funny how things come in waves; like the last book I read, We Were Liars, Inheritance is haunted by mental illness and more literal ghosts - and just a couple of days ago, there was “The Effect”, too, on mental disorders - although it locates them in a very different setting, namely Singapore, 1970 to 1990, through the eyes of a Punjabi family undergoing traumatic change seemingly paralleling that of the young nation state itself.

Place comes to life; to a lesser extent time; there's a certain amount of telling rather than showing. The characters are cleanly drawn and easy to picture, including as they're coloured in further as time and events progress (Amrit and Harbeer in particular). And there's some nice writing and storytelling, even if both tend somewhat towards the simple and straightforward; all up, a nice novel.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Mainly I just wanted to switch off my brain for a while; mission accomplished. The film's confidence in the quality of its ape effects, evident in its liberal use of close-ups, is merited; the other effects are fine too.

E Lockhart - We Were Liars

Some books you can tell right from the start are going to be good, and We Were Liars is one of them. The first pages and chapters are full of promise, sparkling with short, lively sentences quickly establishing setting and character - particularly that of narrator Cadence (Cady) Sinclair Eastman, as she introduces the Sinclair family, establishing and signalling subversion of expectations more or less at once. How’s this for a first chapter (in its entirety):

   Welcome to the beautiful Sinclair family.

   No one is a criminal.

   No one is an addict.

   No one is a failure.

   The Sinclairs are athletic, tall, and handsome. We are old-money Democrats. Our smiles are wide, our chins square, and our tennis serves aggressive.

   It doesn’t matter if divorce shreds the muscles of our hearts so that they will hardly beat without a struggle. It doesn’t matter if trust-fund money is running out; if credit card bills go unpaid on the kitchen counter. It doesn’t matter if there’s a cluster of pill bottles on the bedside table.

   It doesn’t matter if one of us is desperately, desperately in love.

   So much in love that equally desperate measures must be taken.

   We are Sinclairs.

   No one is needy.

   No one is wrong.

   We live, at least in the summertime, on a private island off the coast of Massachusetts.

   Perhaps that is all you need to know.

The Liars - Cady, Johnny (he is bounce, effort, and snark), Mirren (she is sugar, curiosity, and rain) and Gat (contemplation and enthusiasm. Ambition and strong coffee), whose arrival in summer eight precipitates their formation in the first place (the year when they were all eight; all are nearly the same age, with birthdays in the fall) - are memorable creations, and especially in the context of the wider Sinclair family; the overtones of fable and fairytale throughout are quite explicit and add another layer (which actually, now I think about it, is perhaps partial explanation for why the main characters feely oddly slightly under-developed despite their vividness).

So it works on those levels and also on multiple others: as evocation of young love, mystery story, and (in a way) narrative of self-discovery. And, through all that, it's involving and emotionally affecting - I wanted to know what would happen (and had happened) and the revelations reshaping my understanding of events, when they came, were powerful. There are times when the prose is maybe a little too precious - too YA - but it's as much about the character's voice as the author's and thoroughly forgivable. So, a big yes to this one.

Lucy Prebble - “The Effect” (STC)

This one turned out to be rather timely for me, albeit a bit indirectly - a four-hander playing out the interactions of two participants in a drug trial who fall in love but then can’t be sure whether their feelings are real or drug-induced (and whether it matters anyway), their psychiatrist whose personal history of mental health and romantic difficulties becomes sharply relevant, and her supervisor who holds an evangelical belief in medical science’s ability to treat mental illness.

It was more concerned with dramatising a set of questions than providing answers; obviously these are difficult issues, but I wouldn’t have minded more of an attempt at a ‘line’, particularly given that the play came across a bit programmatic, albeit also quite committed to its characters as real people and not just types mouthpieces for particular views.

(Leaving the Wharf Theatre, I saw a yellow and black sign beside the street: "ART AHEAD"; on the traffic island in the middle of the small roundabout ahead, a red sports car crushed beneath a large grey boulder.)

East coast art hop (Hobart, Sydney, Brisbane)

Down to Hobart on Friday night, and then Mona (‘Red Queen’) the next day - with Trang. Both city and museum felt familiar from my previous visit, the familiarity at times diffuse and at others specific - particularly on re-encountering individual works from last time. I think I enjoyed this return visit to Mona more than the first and got more out of it, probably due to both being more open in the particular moment and more readily able to grasp it on a second pass - although I hesitate over the second of those, as its cluttered and non-linear space and arrangement are very much part of the impact. 

A few slices:

Two pieces partaking of the ancient (I also saw both last time, I think). A small, oval-shaped piece of stone (steatite) - ‘Commemorative Scarab of Amenhotep III’ (Egypt 1379 BCE) - inscribed on its flat face with tiny hieroglyphics which somehow I found very affecting. And Brigita Ozolins’ pyramid dream “Kryptos” (2008-10), an eerily darkened installation in concrete, steel, aluminium, gold and lead, encircling catacomb walls embossed with raised sequences of binary digits interspersed with the occasional word (HIDDEN, FOUNDATION, SECRET, DARKNESS, SUN, RAYS, DEAD, LIGHT, HEARS, SEES, FACE, VOICE, DEATH … ‘death’ was the first that I noticed, in the square central chamber, having just given myself a shock after looking up to unexpectedly see my own reflection in the mirror overhead).

 

David Claerbout’s video installation - actually an extended series of black and white stills - “The Algiers’ Sections of a Happy Moment” (2008) had something special to it. A rooftop soccer game, some birds, and not much more, yet luminously perhaps infraordinary, like some lost naturalistic piece of French new wave.

E: I can’t go on like this.

V: That’s what you think.

(Todd McMillan - “Go On”, 2007 - Sydney staircase, man on crutches)

Others: Tracey Moffatt’s ‘Something More’ series of nine; some Henry Darger (disquieting); various Roger Ballen (very disquieting); Zhang Huan’s “Berlin Buddha”; Balint Zsako’s colourful untitled (it had also jumped out at me last time); Nolan’s two Leda and Swans; Sandra Selig’s ‘Universes’ (spider silk sprayed with coloured enamel paint against black backgrounds); Julius Popp’s “bit.fall” at the ‘entrance’ displaying contemporary words including ‘Ukraine’ and ‘MH17’.

* * *

Sydney, NSW Art Gallery, currently on: the 2014 Archibald Prize, along with the Wynne (landscape painting or figurative sculpture) and Sulman (subject, genre or mural).

I’ve never taken particularly to portrait, which makes me particularly susceptible to responding to and forming judgements about examples of the form to a very large extent based on my well established aesthetic sensibilities - and, indeed, on their surface elements rather than the deeper factors that established those sensibilities in the first place. And so I wonder about my liking of, say, Sophia Hewson’s “Artist kisses subject” (the subject is Missy Higgins, the kiss rendered in glowing pastels and light that I’d be even more suspicious of if the artist were a straight man) and Heidi Yardley’s “Julia DeVille” (moodily on the verge of romanticisation - though I think actually very good).

One of the pleasures of portraiture is the chance to see some familiar faces, but they don’t predominate in this year’s selection, though both Dan Sultan and Cate Blanchett were readily recognisable; also, there was James Powditch’s faux-movie poster “Citizen Kave” (as it’s clearly intended to, making me think what a great film it would’ve been, whether made in 1983, today, or, in fact, never). And one of the more striking - and stronger - pieces was Paul Ryan’s “Rox”, an expressionistic view of Richard Roxburgh (face only).

More of the finalists for the Wynne particularly caught my eye. I liked a couple of the semi-abstracts near the beginning (Steve Burley’s “Hillside landscape” and John R Walker’s “The Darling at Kalyanka”); also, the breadth - at once geometric and natural - of Michael Johnson’s “Oceania high low” (the winner of the prize; the title plaque aptly characterises it as exploring convex space rather than horizontal perspective), Philip Wolfhagen’s small, dreamy “Landscape reinvention no 17” (pink-red scrub, a small strip of blue sky) and Max Berry’s “Goat farm, overlooking Norfolk Bay”, whose lilacs, mauves, light aquamarines and browns add up to a poetic, not overly engineered whole. Plus Alexander McKenzie’s Japanese-inspired “Man moves mountain” - pleasing.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given its scope, the Sulman pieces drew more heavily on pop culture and pop art. A handful especially appealed, for various reasons: Andrew Sullivan’s “T-rex (tyrant lizard king)” with its nice sense of humour and touch of pathos, Cameron Hayes’ teeming, panoplic “Martina Navratilova versus Chris Evert Lloyd” (children, castle towers, things upside down, detailed, large-scale), the straightforward but well rendered “Memory Drift” (Richard Baxter - a wooden house blown off the ground by the wind, with all the archetypal associations summoned by that image; a hare looking up at it, a white cat on the roof, a kite tangled on a telephone wire). And the one I most liked, Jason Moad’s “What death leaves behind”, very Magritte-ean with its view of the reflected image of a succulent seemingly growing directly from an otherwise empty bed in a large circular mirror mounted on a nightstand.

 

Elsewhere, a Sol LeWitt exhibition (‘Your Mind is Exactly at that Line’), including several pieces that I’d seen in past visits as part of the rotating collection; I’ve always thought I should find him more interesting than I actually do, though the large wall drawing of the five floating cubes against grey backdrop, all with different coloured sides, was at least striking.

Then MCA - exhibitions good as always. One, a collection from a Japanese artist called Tabaimo (‘Mekurumeku’), comprising a set of video, projection and animation (hand-drawn then computer animated) works appearing one by one through a series of dark rooms and corridors, in some cases using the corridors themselves for the works. There were six, I think (plus some drawings), all on the short side at around 5 to 10 minutes and all worth the time, playful and whimsical, the imagery at times fantastic and even surrealistic but also seeming to invite and open up rather than hold the viewer at a distance.

To take the first, living up to its title - “Japanese Commuter Train” - by locating the viewer in a corridor on the interior of a distended hexagonally-shaped room, with train carriages extending in either direction: intercut with titles that are both literal and elusive (in ‘Chicken and egg question’, chickens lay eggs which then roll through the carriages, from which various things emerge; in ‘Everybody can be so good material’, people wrapped as sushi rolls are laid on the train floor as giant hands from outside reach in and stuff them into similarly huge mouths), it offers all manner of oddity amidst the normal without any reaction from the train’s other passengers. The others explore different terrain, although a recurring theme is an interest in water and in blurring the lines between the human body and other forms of biology (limbs morphing into aquatic vegetation).

The other was Annette Messenger (‘Motion/emotion’), a French artist working with drawing, photography, needlework, sculpture and installation forms; I think I’ve come across her before. Only a couple stood out, but the two that did, I really liked. There was “Histoire des robes” (1990) (‘Story of dresses’), comprising 17 dresses each in long individual wooden boxes mounted landscape-orientation on a single wall, visible through glass fronts, with the boxes also containing other framed images and words, invoking or gesturing towards possible meanings bound up with the dresses themselves (one, for example, stark: “jalousie”).

And also the installation “Casino” (2005), a darkened room into which billowing red silk blows across the floor from an adjoining chamber; underneath, the illuminated outlines of buildings and less identifiable objects, some gelatinous and vaguely oceanic; the whole evokes the red desert spaces of the imagination, capped by the mysterious black objects, suggestive and alien, that descend to the surface at the end.

* * *

And next Brisbane - first time in more or less a decade - to find a few things going on at GOMA.

“Harvest: Art, Film and Food”: ‘Objects in circulation’ (looking at the movement of food around the globe - including Jonathan Froese’s elegant b&w photos of figs, fish, pawpaw segments), ‘Pop and the vernacular’, ‘A portrait of labour’ (Tracey Moffatt appearing again, with another series of kitschily striking photos, and also a playful 10 minute video, “Lip”, montaging a number of short movie clips of black women serving white) and ‘Imagining another future’, themed around visions of alternatives to the cultural and environmental status quo in food production and distribution.

My two favourites were in that last section - both large-scale. There was Tomas Saraceno’s set of ‘Biosphere’ sculptures (2008-09) - large plastic bubbles attached to ground and walls by webbed rope, about five or six of them across the large, light-filled central space on the ground floor. And Emily Floyd’s “Permaculture crossed with feminist science fiction” (2008) - varnished pieces of timber (circular cross-sections, blocks, longer planks and one burnt egg-like structure at the centre)  laid out on the floor, inscribed with passages from Bill Mollison’s books on permaculture and Ursula Le Guin’s and Doris Lessing’s novels.

“Seen and Heard: Works and Multiples from the Collection”, multiples being (I learned) works conceived and produced as multiple units. The exhibition is around crossovers between popular culture, music, sound and visual art, and includes a bunch of record covers (including some that are iconic for me - Velvet Underground, Joy Division, the Smiths etc), a bunch of Nam June Paik (I liked his ‘TV Cello’, 2000) and various Fluxus/Cage, Robert Rauschenberg’s screen print poster and limited edition vinyl for Speaking in Tongues, and Bill Viola’s visual score to Edgard Varese’s “Deserts”…made me think about the significance that music has held for me in the past and wonder to what extent it’s still current, and may be in the future.

Separately, a nice Hiraki Sawa installation, “O” (2009). Single darkened room, three large screens projecting scenes from central Australia, an abandoned house (along with animated white birds and miniature fairground wheel) and, apparently, the surface of the moon; on the surrounding walls, smaller tv screens each showing a single rotating object (light bulb etc) with sounds projected from similarly spinning speakers mounted on wooden plinths.

QAG I only intended to browse through, and it turned out there wasn’t that much to see. A good de Kooning landscape, a general survey of Australian art 1840-1970 with an emphasis on modernism (Nolan stood out again; also the clustering of Roy de Maistre (one of his also caught my eye at the AGNSW), Roland Wakelin and Grace Cossington-Smith); and my introduction to the glorious colours of Sam Fullbrook (best of all “Pike’s farm at Haden”, 1982-7).