Terry Pratchett - Unseen Academicals

As familiar as his novels always seem to me - even, these days, when I haven't read the particular one before - I haven't come across another writer who seems particularly similar or even comparable to Terry Pratchett...his style and setting are immediately recognisable and Ankh-Morpork in particular is these days thoroughly a familiar place. Unseen Academicals doesn't add anything substantial to the reader's knowledge of the city, its denizens or the wider Discworld, but it's more layers nonetheless, and as always enjoyable.

(last time)

Camera Obscura - Desire Lines

A really very nice album - yet another one. Also, this review is close to spot on.

Jolie Holland - Wine Dark Sea

Have I mentioned that 'Jolie' is the name I've given to one of my potted succulents, sitting prettily outside on the balcony? I've definitely mentioned my infatuation with the music of songstress Jolie Holland, in whose honour said plant was named. And what do you know? This latest record of hers, Wine Dark Sea, is probably her best yet.

It's not an album that can be absorbed inattentively, for its charms become apparent only on careful listening - which is not to say that it's inaccessible, but rather an indication of its depths. There are immediately winning moments, like second track "First Sign Of Spring" (something of a throwback to her earlier work) and the back-half trio of "All The Love", "Saint Dymphna" and "Palm Wine Drunkard", while elsewhere a Velvet Underground-esque rumble, buzz and racket permeates (opener "On and On" and "Dark Days" cases in point) through Holland's thornily honeyed folk-country-blues-soul weave, that voice as beguilingly slurred throughout as always. Pretty much all of my favourite music has always stirred something nameless in me, evoking both the familiar and the ungraspable - and so here we are again.

Escondida; Springtime Can Kill You; The Living and the Dead; Pint of Blood.

Kate Atkinson - Life After Life

Kate Atkinson's were the first novels that I can recall causing me to feel intensely at once sad and happy - or, at least, that prompted me to consciously articulate my responses in those terms. This would've been Behind the Scenes at the Museum and Human Croquet, both of which I blew through either late high school or some time very early in uni; I have a memory of standing in a bookstore with Kim, her excitedly handing one of the other of them to me (I can't remember which) to read its first pages. And there was also Emotionally Weird, which I'd clean forgotten till looking at old extemporanea entries was partly responsible for my decision to drop psychology after one semester and take up literature instead (good choice, 17/18 year old me) - I think maybe one of its more charismatic characters was a lit/philosophy major? And, a bit later, I read a couple of the Jackson Brodie ones and liked them too (1, 2)...

It's been a while since I read anything of hers, though, so discovering that Life after Life was a lovely, fluent, novel of ideas, characters, story and society was like discovering her anew, as well as being a wonderful reading experience in its own right. The concept - Ursula Dodds is born, lives and dies over and over, each time learning from the last - could easily have been distancing, gratuitous, naff, but instead it and Ursula feel real ... I felt the fragility and value of life, the enveloping presence of death, the inchoate and inarticulable terror that Ursula experiences when approaching pivotal moments in her multiple lives, as learned and dimly retained from past go-arounds.

The writing and the craft are important, and there's an easy allusiveness in Atkinson's wielding of her motifs (the snow amidst which Ursula's born in England 1910, the animals and especially foxes and dogs who appear everywhere in substance and in names) and rendition of settings and events (notably the London Blitz, in which Ursula dies over and over). And, as always, her writing affects me - the focus on death and its many forms is far from a structural or technical gimmick but rather integral to the profound thematic concerns of the book. And the ending is just right: Sylvie's practice makes perfect and the wider implications that it suddenly throws open; the re-take on what comprises a happy ending and the kinds of choices that an individual might make to reach one; and finally, Mrs Haddock, ever stranded in her pub, not going anywhere tonight.

Paul Grabowsky and Katie Noonan - Before Time Could Change Us

Dorothy Porter poems, set to music - specifically, jazz. A bit distanced and chilly for mine, but then what do I know?

Amelie

I want to say that I saw Amelie for the first time on Boxing Day 2001 at the Kino, with Laura - would that be right, or just an imagined recollection created after the fact? Maybe I actually watched it by myself, with someone else, a different place, a different time? Last night, after rewatching it for the first time in ages, I took the hazardous step of flicking through my old handwritten diary from around that time to look for clues, but to no avail.

That would've been opening day, which figures - as both possible actual fact and imagined one - seeing as Jeunet was one of my favourites at the time, probably actually my favourite director, mostly thanks to The City of Lost Children (a whole other story in itself) and of course Delicatessen was pretty great too. I'd been excited about it beforehand, having first learned about it through a postcard marketing campaign - those ones that were (and still are) to be found in various likely locations, wire card-stands and piles in music and book stores and the like.

Of course, it was, indeed, fabuleux - it caught me, I think, just at a time when my own sensibilities were transitioning and balanced in the way that the film's are, taking in both the darker elements of Jeunet's earlier work and a far more vividly colourful, whimsically optimistic tone. And so anyway I took it to heart.

I probably watched it two or three more times in the two or three years after that; I cut out one of those little postage stamp-sized reproductions of the poster from an Astor calendar and carried it around with me in my wallet - its reminder of the brightly lit possibilities of life were a comfort when I began doing the rounds of work-related cocktail parties, interviews, seasonal clerkships during those later years of university. And so on - it was a totem, a touchstone, the idea of it treasured even if, over the years, less and less acutely. From extemporanea it seems like I haven't watched it since before 2005, meaning that it's been more or less literally a decade since last viewing - a sobering thought in itself - but my affection for it has endured.

* * *

Anyway, last night - Friday night, end of a long week, and coming back to Amelie was like spending time with an old friend, one who reminds you of times past in a way that's good but kind of bittersweet. It seemed a touch more poignant and sadder in the margins than I recalled - but then I wonder whether actually I always found those things in the film. Of course, I'm older now, so some of the situations resonated with more of an empathetic charge, at times from personal experience; also, even having spent just a week or so in Paris since last watch has reinforced the impact of the film's (luminous, fantastic, romanticised) depiction of the city of lights. The underlying sweetness still comes through just as strongly, along with the sharp little acerbic bits that make it even better - and so basically it's still wonderful and for reasons that aren't all that different from why I thought so on that first go round...whatever else may have changed, Amelie is still a film to keep close to the heart.

Elysium

Pretty good, pacy piece of action sci fi, losing some of the grittiness of District 9 while adding a bit more visual spectacle.

Royksopp & Robyn - Do It Again

Five tracks but it feels substantial, maybe not least because the two book-ends are close to 10 minutes each. Opener "Monument" is electro-spacey, has Talk Talk-seque saxophones and is good; next track "Sayit" is too clubby for me and closer "Inside The Idle Hour Club" a bit too amorphous; in between are two neat dance-pop numbers in the Robyn vein, with the title track in particular worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as past genius moments like "With Every Heartbeat" and "Dancing on My Own" (though without quite the deep melancholy edge that really put both of those predecessors over the edge into greatness), and "Every Little Thing" coming across all Italo disco-ballady.

Rainbow Rowell - Eleanor & Park

Eleanor & Park made me wonder how much of my life has been inevitable, and since when; specifically, whatever complex of historical and personal factors it was that led up to this being a book that would strike me so personally, and how much of that must be shared with others who've had similar reactions to this one.

This is probably an exaggeration but it feels like everything would've been so different had I not sunk into that succession of bands and artists at just the right time - which has, years later, left me primed to remember and completely get it when misfit adolescents Eleanor (red hair, overweight, horrible home life, bullied at school) and Park (Korean mother, almost always in black, tries to be invisible, later starts wearing eyeliner) find each other in Omaha, 1986 and bond over - among other things - the Smiths and other post-punk, swapped mixtapes and all.

Having said that, while the music is important in its own right, it's also a stand-in for something broader and more universal - a wider type of (teenaged) experience, on which Rowell is pitch perfect in her evocation...whichever way it shakes out, anyhow, Eleanor & Park is very fine.

She could still hear that voice in her head - not his - the singer's. From the Smiths. You could hear his accent, even when he was singing. He sounded like he was crying out.

'I am the sun ...

And the air ... '

Frozen

Peppily modern and enjoyable.

The Speechmaker (MTC)

A Working Dog production with some familiar faces including Kat Stewart, Lachy Hulme and others. US political satire; some laughs but not a stand-out - overly broad and not particularly focused in its satire (perhaps more on the farce side).

(w/ Cass, Erandathie, Trang, Al, Steph N and two friends of Cass' - Andrew and Amy)

"the only way out is the only way in: Douglas Gordon" (ACCA) / NGV

Five works/rooms making up this eerily memorable exhibition. You walk in through "Between Darkness and Light (After William Blake)", a large semi-transparent screen with The Exorcist projected on one side and a film called The Song of Bernadette on the other, so that each bleeds into the other; next is a large and appealing room filled with small to medium sized framed photos and mirrors filling up all four walls as well as a central bisecting wall partition, recurring images in a range of scenes and perspectives - some purple flowers, papers being thrown from a city building, an elephant, various gruesome close ups, plenty of others.

Deeper into the darkness, around a couple of corridors, and off to one side is "Through a Looking Glass" - four looped, slightly out of sync large projections of the "are you talkin' to me" scene from Taxi Driver.

Then the highlight, an ominously dark room full of tv screens (about 150 I'd say), all clustered in the middle, facing outwards, arranged roughly on three tiers of stacked milk crates; some silent, some murmuring - images reappearing from the mirror/photo room. Hands holding scorpions, a pair of women's legs elegantly descending a spiral staircase, two flies in separate frames lying on their backs, flames, a man lying with old-fashioned headphones with ghostly Lou Reed and Velvet Underground covers echoing amidst the general low-level muttering white noise audible if you focus on it ("Perfect Day", "Candy Says", "Pale Blue Eyes"), donkeys walking slowly through a stone building, black and white movies, opera, animals' eyes in close up, the Chrysler Building in NYC at different times of day, more. A visceral theatre of mind, imagination and memory.

And, hidden in shadow off to one side (to the extent that a good dozen or so people must have come into the tv room while I was there and none of them even noticed the adjoining chamber), a final, almost pitch black room - "30 seconds text", lit at intervals by a single light bulb, words on the wall about an experiment in communicating with a condemned man's severed head following his execution by guillotine (Languille). I was in there for a few cycles; it was genuinely unnerving after a while.

* * *

Also, two things from a trip to the NGV after: Are We There and specifically "Afraid of Nothing" turns out to be perfect music for the untitled red Rothko in their collection; and the unexpected treat of what I'm pretty sure is a new (at least, I'd never seen it) Olafur Eliasson on display - "Limbo lamp" (2005), the titular lamp beam shining through a circular aperture and then refracted through a suspended set of plastic cylinders throwing a rotating series of coloured spheres and circles around the white walls.

Sharon Van Etten - Are We There

I've only been listening to Are We There for a few days but the word that keeps floating to mind is 'masterpiece' because holy shit this is good. From start to finish, it never lets up - there's a bareness and yet also a richness to it, in the songs themselves, their arrangements and instrumentation, Van Etten's vocals (you can drown in her voice) and the all-round emotionalism of the music, apparent in each of those individual elements and even more so in the record as a whole.

It begins with "Afraid of Nothing", which has made me feel like crying every time I've listened to it - I'm already sure that it'll stay with me in months and years to come. It feels like cheating to draw even tenuous comparisons to others, but if there's one artist to whom a comparison makes sense across Are We There, it's Cat Power and "Afraid of Nothing" is like one part Moon Pix, one part You Are Free, plus a haunting flicker of U2 circa The Unforgettable Fire, and it's as great as that makes it sound.

And then, remarkably, it gets maybe even better with the next two tracks, both of them veering, soaring songs graced with telling details: the Cure-esque guitars that open proceedings over an ominously strutting bass line in "Taking Chances" and then strum ferociously back in later; the pulsating drum fills that run through and underpin the cresting vocals of "Your Love Is Killing Me". And so on and in - at times with one foot still in the atmospherically alt-countryish terrain in which her previous records largely dwelt (like on the horn-punctuated "Tarifa), while at others going well beyond really any recognisable genre (for example, on the beguiling, bruisedly delicate soul-folk-I don't know what it is of "Our Love").

There's a great sense of dynamics throughout - not just loud-soft (although certainly that) nor even just also heavy-soft (though also that) but more subtly in the shades and nuances between those poles. It's there in the rawly swooning drama of both the relatively unornamented piano-led moments like "I Love You But I'm Lost" and "I Know" and in the full-band numbers like "You Know Me Well" and the dream-pop of "Break Me" (that latter bridging into its chorus on a wave of chimes and synths that recalls the Cocteau Twins and Beach House). And, last but not least, then there's the comparatively languid "Every Time the Sun Comes Up" that closes it out, a warmly slurred slide into some metaphorical endless sunrise, the refrain morphing and iterating differently each time round until eventually it rings the whole thing out...

Well anyway, all in all, Epic had promise and Tramp was pretty excellent, but this is something else again - completely immersive, at time (and cumulatively) overwhelming, and just generaly brilliant. And, almost incidentally, easily the best new album that I've listened to so far this year. Oh, it's good to be moved by music!

Peter van Onselen and Philip Senior - Howard's End: The Unravelling of a Government

Basically a blow by blow description of the period from Rudd's ascension as leader of the ALP in December 2006 through to the '07 election; never gets beyond a superficial account of the political tactics and events of the time to any deeper analysis of the significant policy differences between the two sides or the wider politico-social context in which the campaign was fought.

Natalie Merchant - Natalie Merchant

Oh, Natalie Merchant. Like all of her work, this album is elegant, graceful, ruminative, melancholy; it's quiet, but it has a sustained tone and mood to it that pulls me in.

The Long Blondes - Someone to Drive You Home

They nail their colours to the mast with the refrain of opening song "Lust in the Movies", a sing-shouted "Edie Sedgwick, Anna Karina, Arlene Dahl - I just want to be a sweetheart" (though I must admit I had to look up Arlene Dahl), which sets the tone for this knowingly retro-modern pop record from a few years back, equal parts Franz Ferdinand, Blondie and latter-day 60s revivalists like the Pipettes and the Like. For me it's kind of a museum piece - I like it plenty but probably there've been times in my past when this one would've felt much more immediate what with its angular guitars, upwardly corkscrewing hooks, slightly punk-ish girl-singer attitude and general stylishly tossed-off Brit-ness.

(I was introduced to the band by the still kind of exciting "You Could Have Both" via an IMP mix cd back in the day.)