Matt Zoller Seitz - The Wes Anderson Collection

One heck of a good coffee table book. Short essays and extended interviews with Anderson himself about each of his films up to and including Moonrise Kingdom, with generous amounts of miscellany - screen shots (including some illuminating side by side comparisons with scenes from films that have inspired Anderson), shooting-related material like early scripts, sketches, concept art and story board outtakes, a range of more tangential but interesting photos and graphics (eg a Cousteau gallery, to shed more light on The Life Aquatic), and some very fitting art by Max Dalton (the double-page spreads for each of the individual films are a highlight). Anderson himself emerges as a thoughtful and humble artist, engaged with his own process but not particularly wrapped up in any kind of auteur mystique; also, the French new wave influence is obvious once it's pointed out!

Clay Shirky - Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

While reading this, I was thinking that while I broadly agree with much of what this book identifies as characteristic of our times, and specifically the shift that's occurred in our engagement with media in today's broadened sense (the analysis early on about the change from what Shirky calls 'Gutenberg economics', driven by the high investment costs of needing to own the means of production in order to produce media, to the click and publish avenues available today, is particularly convincing), I'm more sceptical about the vaguely utopian tinge of the possibilities that it identifies for the use of the new resource of 'cognitive surplus' arising from the existence of copious free time along with the 'means' (technological), 'motive' (drawing on behavioural economics insights about social motivations), 'opportunity' (again internet-based - combinability of information, possibilities for collective action) and cultural context (norms of participants) to create public and civic value (as distinct from merely personal or communal value).

But, having finished the book, I'm open to its thesis, not least because so much of it is so intuitive - and also because I suspect I tend to personally underestimate the transformative/disruptive potential of new technology. And it's presented as analysis of possibilities and as prescription - the task still remains to unlock this potential, which Shirky acknowledges in what he also acknowledges to be the most speculative part of the book (its closing section) while giving a list of ways to improve the odds, including recalling that behaviour follows opportunity (ie we should avoid 'theory-induced blindness' in making assumptions based on past individual/social behaviour in possibly significantly different contexts), basing structures on the assumption that people will differ in how they participate/act (a version of the 80-20 rule maybe), starting small and focusing on effectiveness from the beginning, and the importance of cultural and adaptive elements.

Buddy Miller - Midnight and Lonesome

Right in the Buddy Miller sweet spot.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Oh, very, very good. It has that vision thing, of course - it's unmistakeably a Wes Anderson film, and at this point you have to doubt whether Anderson's even capable of making a film that doesn't feel unavoidably like one of his. But it also shades darker than anything he's done before,[*] as well as, probably more than any of his other films - and he's been moving more and more in this direction over his last few - successfully creating a tone, mood and structuring that brings the viewer in and leaves us in no doubt that we're meant to feel the poignancy and humanity of the film's situations and central protagonists (here Gustave H, and the bellboy Zero).

If Tenenbaums and Life Aquatic laid down markers and set the tenor, The Darjeeling Limited showed off the fruits of a clearer sincerity, Fantastic Mr Fox's mediation via animation and animal characters counterintuitively deepened the immediacy of the affect yet further, and Moonrise Kingdom came close to perfection in its sharp-eyed preciosity and sentimentality, then Grand Budapest seems an apogee of sorts in the development of Anderson's craft, as well as possibly pointing to its future - there's a confidence and ease to the way that it nests its stories within stories, wheels each new character on to stage (invariably with a front-on introductory head shot, akin to a magician's reveal as we delight at the appearance of another old favourite, and only later marvel at how profligate the film can be with actors of this talent and idiosyncrasy, in many cases giving them only the briefest of cameos), whips us from setting to memorable setting, sprinkled all the way through with what we can now recognise as genuine feeling and emotion - moreover, genuineness to which all of the artifice and stylistic staging now seems at least partially in service, and certainly with which there's a true synthesis, rather than the two - feeling and art - appearing, as they've sometimes been wont to do in his older films, in tension.

It moves at a rapid pace, even screwball; the antagonists (primarily Brody's Dmitri and Dafoe's Jopling) are dastardly; all of the characters immediately inhabit their designated roles and more than hold their own amidst the colour and movement and fantasy of the world of the film. It's not 'realistic' - though the only really cartoonish sequence is the chase down a series of winter olympic courses - but it feels real, which is only right and how it should be.

(w/ Jade)

[*] Caveat - I haven't seen his first, Bottle Rocket.

The Newsroom season 1

I kind of knew that this one would get me in the end, especially having seen the excellent, zinging first episode on an HBO teaser disc a while back ... West Wing-associated positive associations + idealism + (a bonus, but a big one) Emily Mortimer, who has indeed, as her character Mackenzie McHale declares in that season opener, gotten hotter with age (at another point, asked about whether she's tired, she replies something to the effect of "I'm exhausted. I've been exhausted since I was 30. We've all been exhausted since we were 30"). Sure, it has its frustrating and indeed somewhat problematic aspects (the somewhat on the trite side interpersonal dramas and love triangles, the uncritical acceptance of the killing of Osama Bin Laden as a unifying American moment, the general preachiness) but it's nonetheless very enjoyable, watchable tv.

The Lego Movie

Slyly - and very overtly - fun. Good voice actor cast, largely populated by SNL alumni and associates (I would've enjoyed the Batman character even more had I known at the time that Will Arnett was voicing him, and same for many of the others). And, also, convincingly Lego-like.

(w/ Cass and Ash)

Janelle Monae - The Electric Lady

Hard to say what it is with Janelle Monae exactly, but however she does it, The Electric Lady is another barnstorming stew of modern/futurist R&B, soul, pop, rock and plenty else besides - veering between and mixing styles with panache, and at least equalling the many pleasures of The ArchAndroid. Across 29 tracks - a number of them 'overtures' or 'interludes' - covering funk anthems, tender ballads and jagged dancefloor numbers, it never flags, each song given a melody to ride and a panopoly of other details that further dress it up. Quite an achievement, quite a listen.

Dum Dum Girls - Too True

I reckon the most even of their outings yet, charging along with one glossily produced and sturdily constructed miniature pop anthem after another. I'm not sure that Dum Dum Girls will ever create a great album, but in the meantime, the straight ahead pleasures of outings like this one are not to be sneezed at.

I Will Be
Only in Dreams
"End of Daze" ep 
"He Gets Me High" ep 

The War on Drugs - Lost in the Dream

I don't know, does this count as Americana? Whatever the boundaries of the genre these days, that's what it sounds like to me - an expansive, spacey take, more Springsteen than Carter Family and dipping into some of the same krautrock wells that Wilco've been known to frequent (exhibit A: the excellent 7 minute-long "An Ocean in Between the Waves"), but still unquestionably a vision of American highways, American dreams, hazy and clear. Sometimes this kind of stuff loses me when it drifts too far into either ambience for its own sake or excessive unfocused guitar noodling (ie too psychedelic) but the War on Drugs stay engaging even when their songs spread and sprawl - there's a drive to them that carries you along...the metaphor is obvious, but Lost in the Dream is a record that takes the listener on a journey. And it's really, really good.

"Neighbourhood Watch" (MTC)

I heard about this in a unique way last year, and it's quite a troika - Robyn Nevin in a Lally Katz-authored play directed by Simon Stone (I only found out that last looking at a poster after the show, but it made sense - the production's stagecraft has his fingerprints all over it). There was always the risk of dullness, slightness, in the premise of a story focusing primarily on one (old, irascible, Hungarian) individual and her relationship with the author-proxy character, but the play avoids that through the strong characterisation of Ana (as written and performed), the quality of the writing and the effective way it uses the stage (including the revolving floor sections) and lighting - shadows (Stone's touch apparent there) - to generate a sense of movement and mood.

(w/ Cass and her friends Andrew P, Amy and Amelie)

Blue is the Warmest Colour

Well, this is a wonderful film and a beautiful one - it lingers well after watching, somewhere in one's stomach and chest. It'd been on my radar for all the wrong reasons - the infamously extended, explicit sex scene and then the suggestions of exploitation of the two female leads, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux - and at three hours into the bargain, I had no plans to watch it. But then I saw the trailer (I can't remember if it was this, Beach House-soundtracked one, but it captures the tone), which changed my mind because it made the film look amazing - which it pretty much is.

Blue is everywhere, of course, at times subtly and at others very strikingly (in the shot in the water, for example), and after long enough, even notably for its absence; in that respect, I couldn't help but think of another film with 'blue' in its title, which I still think of as my favourite ever. Yet for the most part it felt very naturalistic, and the thing that most struck me immediately after was how immersive it was - while I was watching it, I completely believed the story and the characters, including how Adèle was feeling throughout (no doubt the tendency towards close-ups, lingering especially on faces, played a part). There's a powerful phenomenology to it, an interplay between the luminous and the everyday; it felt real, and also like art, in the best kind of way.

(w/ Meribah)