Liking the National no doubt added a bit to the viewing experience, and having just seen them live again didn't hurt either, but the pleasures of this documentary don't particularly depend on familiarity with their music. It's somewhat about being in a rock band, and much more about the fraternal relationship between Matt and Tom Berninger (the former, suave singer of aforementioned outfit; the latter, shambolic metal-fan younger brother wannabe film-maker) on which it is amusingly good.
A pair of relatively indistinct 1981 records, both largely made up of outtakes, I think, from the much more memorable Blue Kentucky Girl and Roses in the Snow.
Browsing the White Night website; maybe I should've done this before going to it, but then again, it's reinforcing the thought I had last night that there'd be no surer way to make it un-fun that to try to be comprehensive about it - far better to take it more or less as it comes.
Like everyone else in the whole of Melbourne, I liked last year's, and this year's return was another hit. Expanding its 'footprint' was a good idea, and meant there while the crowds were still, inevitably, an issue at times, overall there were many more opportunities to spread and break out a bit.
We went through the heart of the city and later back again, and saw bits and pieces there, but spent most of our time in and around the Alexandra Gardens, where we followed the lights to the source of the 'Crepuscular Beam' (striking from afar, but even more so from directly beneath), wandered through the 'Arcadian Reverie' and were struck agog by the sight, first glimpsed from afar, of Craig Walsh's 'Monuments', video projections of five huge faces on to trees on the opposite bank of the Yarra, like some pagan gods and also intensely human, awe-inspiring and moving - the highlight of the night.
Last year was the first time that I'd watched American Idol, and I got into it to the extent that from the time that I discovered how much I was enjoying it (pretty much the start of the top 10, I think) it became pretty much a regular weekly watch for me - the only tv show that I can remember to've ever inspired that kind of commitment from me, at least in my adult life.
And yet, when I saw that it was back this year, I thought about deliberately not watching it this time round - mainly because of a suspicion that the ready gratification that it offers, the individual moments which can literally be spine-tingling, breath-taking (for me there were perhaps ten to a dozen of these over the course of last season), along with the general emphasis on immediate pleasures (ballads, anthems, high notes, crescendos), was likely to be conditioning me to respond to this kind of relatively easy, superficial music at the expense of other, potentially deeper experiences.
Not a music-snob thing on my part, it goes without saying...but art of any kind can ennoble and educate those who engage with it, directly in terms of the depth of our own capacity to experience the art-form itself, and more profoundly (albeit relatedly) in relation to our moral and emotional character - and maybe it cuts both ways, such that if the art we expose ourselves to, the music we listen to, offers the simplest and most straightforward of emotional pay-offs, then through repeated exposure we ourselves lose some deeper sensitivity and capacity to experience. It sounds abstract, but feels real.
Despite those concerns, though, tonight I came in partway through the live performances of the top 10 girls, and I wasn't paying that much attention and then got a phone call mid-show and what I did see wasn't super-exciting anyway and so on - and then there was this girl called MK (Nobilette) singing, second from the end, and all of a sudden something was happening, basically from the first note she sang...she has something. This was a bit wow.
Having now watched/rewatched all of tonight's efforts on youtube, my other favourite performances from tonight are also 'M's - Majesty Rose and Malaya Watson (I'm a bit sceptical about any of these three winning, but for now at least I see that America / the world seems to share my liking of them - as of now, theirs are in fact the top 3 most watched on American Idol's official youtube channel) - and actually most of the others at least have something interesting about them...so what do you know - I guess I'm watching again in 2014.
Tells its story - of DiCaprio's utterly unscrupulous trader Jordan Belfort's rise to riches - with a verve which carried me through probably the longest film I've ever watched in a cinema that wasn't either a Lord of the Rings film or part of a festival (in that latter category, this one comes straight to mind). It's downright funny in places too, not to mention outright grotesque in particular moments that stand out event amidst all of the debauchery and excess. For me, as a whole, this was a film that was more diverting than really a knock-out, but still, nicely done.
Some support cast-y things:
Kyle Chandler, who plays the FBI agent pursuing Belfort, looks exactly like a young Robert Forster (ie Max Cherry in Jackie Brown).
Belfort's first wife is played by Cristin Milioti - I couldn't place her at the time, but google tells me that she not only is the mother in HIMYM (as finally revealed in the last ep of season 8), but also had that memorable cameo in 30 Rock's fifth season as the 'sexy baby' comedienne.
What I knew about Top Gun before watching it on tv last night (non-exhaustive of course, but these are the main points really):
1. Tom Cruise, fighter pilot, Val Kilmer, antagonist.
2. "Take My Breath Away" (good).
3. 80s (see previous).
4. Famously homoerotic topless volleyball scene.
So, really I hardly needed to watch it at all cos it turns out that was all I needed to know. An additional highlight, closely related to #3 above - the hyper-dramatically hazy San Diego, California sunset palm tree shots.
I'd say that the National are pretty well a known quantity for me, at least to the extent that you can ever say that about any artist - I've really internalised Boxer and Alligator and High Violet, and to a lesser extent Trouble Will Find Me too, plus I'd previously seen them live not once but twice - and yet, their show yesterday still added some new dimensions to my experience of their music (the one that's top of mind right now is how great a song "Conversation 16" turns out to be - that's the one that goes "I was afraid - I'd eat your brains - cause I'm evil"; "Graceless" also stood out more than I'd have expected).
So anyway, in about an hour and a half (I think), they got through a fair number of the best songs from their last three albums, and knowing them inside out and loving them as I do it couldn't help but be a good experience (despite the somewhat crummy sound in the grass area, where we were), and it was..."Fake Empire", "Mistaken For Strangers", "Slow Show", "Terrible Love", "Bloodbuzz Ohio", "Sea of Love", etc, etc (not to mention the always welcome "Abel" and "Mr November" from the slightly older Alligator, which I would've liked them to dip into more).
Support from Luluc, who I've also seen multiple times before although only once as a headline act in their own right - their sounds suited for the grassy, expansive surrounds of the
Music Bowl as a baking hot Melbourne summer's day wound down.
An earlier one by the everybodyfields (I've kept on listening to the lovely Nothing is Okay, and in scouring the wilds of the internet for the relatively little that's been written about this wonderful three piece, have discovered that their name is lower-cased). There's a purity to it, arising in no small part from the simplicity of its meldings of voice, acoustic guitar, dobro and fiddle, but also a wracked air - a sense of hurt and striving - that causes it to stick all the more. Jill Andrews sings, heart-in-mouth and heartbroken, on two of the highlights with "The Only King" and "Can't Have It"; Sam Quinn's at the helm for the other, his plaintively scratchy voice just the right fit for the dreamy, end-of-the-river/end-of-the-day feel of "Good To Be Home"'s six minutes-plus.
Call it Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead meets Stranger Than Fiction, plus a heavy dose of tv sci-fi, and specifically (I suspect) Star Trek - a small group of new recruits on the starship Intrepid begin to realise that something is very wrong with their ship, leading them eventually to the realisation that they themselves are minor characters in a not particularly well-written science fiction tv show from 2012, that show having created the (future) timeline in which they're existing, with particularly adverse implications for their likely life expectancies, not being stars of the show (*). It's meta and recursive (as it has one of its characters say) but in a way that always makes sense, and in a way that's only part of the effect rather than being its whole point.
It's a good read, hitting a tone that allows it to be comedic and not too heavy while also generating stakes that feel real enough to be exciting, and achieving some genuinely affecting moments with its three codas, all of which elaborate on the effects of the incursion by those ensigns into the 'real' world from the perspective of relatively peripheral characters.
I have all these Emmylou albums on my hard drive, picked up cheap at one time or another; Thirteen is one of them, from 1986. I wouldn't say it's particularly distinguished, but nonetheless, nice - and, well, listening to her sing, it never gets old. I can hear a lot of Patty Griffin on this one - although, of course, it's actually the other way around, with Griffin's career not having started till the 90s - and the trace of Harris' early career collaborations with Gram Parsons is legible, too, on straightforward but likeable cuts like "Sweetheart of the Pines".
Two quite different records from Miller, several years apart. Cruel Moon came out in 1999, two years after the fantastic Poison Love, with which it has a lot in common including generally being at its best in the moments where Julie Miller's harmony vocals are most integral (songs like "I'm Gonna Be Strong", "Sometimes I Cry" and the title track) and also being rather simple and rather soulful and very, very good. Whereas The Majestic Silver Strings was from 2011, and saw Miller enlisting a whole battalion of additional guitarists and vocalists (Lee Ann Womack, Patty Griffin, Emmylou Harris, Shawn Colvin, others) and covering a fair bit of territory including a couple of downright abstract drifters, not all of which speak to me as much as his more straight-ahead offerings - though the album as a whole has plenty to offer.
Holds The Kindly Ones and The Wake, both quite different in art style from the preceding issues (and from each other) and, like those others, benefiting from the 'absolute' presentation. A fitting ending; this makes it three times that I've read through the whole series (although only the second time that it's been in sequence) and it still holds up on any terms, art, literature, etc.
Was it maybe with Heathers that I discovered or realised that the teen film was a genre that I really liked? If so, that'd be at once apt and not - apt because I was in school myself then and also because I don't think I've come across an entry in the genre since that I've liked more, and yet not because, in retrospect, to the extent that it was the apotheosis of the 80s teen film, it was a genuinely apocalyptic one (albeit exactly calibrated to appeal to my sensibilities at the time).
Anyway, however it started, for me, the teen flick has been a totemic genre since the days when I was the same age as its protagonists and onwards since; in light of which it's again both surprising and not that I've never before seen any of John Hughes' entries in the field (The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink ... I have seen Ferris Bueller's Day Off but for some reason have it filed away in a different category) - surprising inasmuch as they're seemingly canonical in the genre, but then less so given that they were made before my time, whereas much of the appeal for me was the personal identification with the characters, stories, situations.
But I've at last made my way to this one - The Breakfast Club - and found it charming, but lacking in the piercing, poignant quality or sense of recognition that my favourites in the genre have brought in the past. Partly that may be the timing - released in 1985, it feels overly simplistic and innocent, and after all that was close to three decades ago now. But I also wonder whether part of it may be me, my own school years now well and truly behind me. Still, though, I see the appeal - each of the five types is effectively archetypal ... and at last I understand why people always talk about Molly Ringwald as such an iconic teen star and sweetheart.
A sampler that came with something that I bought last year - plenty of the riot grrl and successors (I'd be tempted to put Marnie Stern, represented by "Transparency is the New Mystery" in that latter category, for example) type tunes that I associate with the label. Best, along with those I already knew (the Stern, Comet Gain's fantastic "Why I Try to Look So Bad", Thao's "Bag of Hammers", the Gossip's "Standing in the Way of Control"): the Thermals' "Now We Can See", Mary Timony Band's "Sharpshooter", the Corin Tucker Band's "Doubt" and, more generally, the never unwelcome reminder of how nice 90s alternative rock, done properly, can be.
I liked this one - for me, it just didn't strike any false notes in the way that it tackled its subject. David said afterwards that he wished he hadn't known that the OS's voice was provided by Scarlett Johansson because it meant that he was imagining her when Joaquin Phoenix's Theodore Twombly wasn't; a good point, but perhaps the price of getting a film like this made (not that I'm down on Scarlett as such - in fact, she might well be the best option of the top echelon, fame-wise, of female stars). A nice supporting turn from Amy Adams too, who it's turning out is kind of awesome.
One out of leftfield for me, but when Nicolette texted the day before and said she had a spare ticket, I thought that, given that I was free, in the spirit of openness I ought to go along. Huge auditorium ('the Plenary') in the Convention Centre, MSO playing music from Doctor Who, accompanied by big screen scene montages, sometimes with dressed-up monsters (turns out there are lots beyond the Daleks) roaming the aisles. Emphasis on the last couple - David Tennant and Matt Smith - which meant that I at least knew what they looked like and recognised a couple of the 'companions' (Billie Piper caused an audible collective sigh from the audience when her image came up), and hosted by the fifth doctor, Peter Davison.
Everything I know about Doctor Who I know from pop culture, never having watched an episode all the way through, but the music was pretty good - cinematic - and the accompanying montages seemed to hit some big emotional and other arcs from the recent series, and together they actually did make me feel that I could understand why so many people have such a fondness for the show - it was fun and a good Friday night activity...and now Peter Capaldi's casting might even tempt me to start watching.
It turned out to be a good thing that I didn't know much about Short Term 12 going into it, because that made its impact all the greater. This is one of those little independent films - like Monsters, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Mud - that has a glow to it, sensitively directed and carried along by at least one stand out performance (here, it's Brie Larson's natural, forcefully conveyed central turn). It was like exactly everything that this film wanted me to think and feel, I did.
