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).