Rhiannon Giddens - Tomorrow Is My Turn

Richly, warmly satisfying, bits of soul, blues, old-time country, Celtic-Appalachian folk, French chanson and more woven across this set of (all but one) interpretations of songs made famous by female artists both iconic and otherwise - in the first category, Patsy Cline, Dolly Parton, Nina Simone, to name three - with several traditional numbers, and Giddens a strong, expressive voice all through.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire & Mockingjay pts 1 & 2

So three things:
1. Jennifer Lawrence is a very good actor. It's particularly impressive the way she so completely is Katniss Everdeen in these movies without that - surely on the way to being iconic, if not already? - character overshadowing, or even being apparently present (except by always unavoidable trace) in her other performances.
2. Mockingjay Part 2 is a perfectly fine ending. I could wish that there was more texture and screen time for several of the characters and their arcs, but I guess that would've made it even longer, and that's probably really the complaint of someone who's enjoyed these films a lot and basically just wants more. And all told it's just as engaging as the ones before it, and it follows through on the harder-edged themes of the series.
3. I do think that the whole series is impressive in the way that it sustains the serious-mindedness of its treatment of its themes of power, oppression and control, spectacle and propaganda, social inequality, compromise, individual choice and agency, and sacrifice.

(last time: Catching Fire, Mockingjay Part 1)

"Ayre" (Golijov) / "Folk Songs" (Berio) - Dawn Upshaw & the Andalusian Dogs

Two song cycles (or at least sets); Golijov's melds Spanish, Arabic and Jewish elements while Berio's are arrangements of traditional songs from around the world (USA, France, Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Armenia, Azerbaijan), with Dawn Upshaw displaying a malleable voice which veers very far in places from her basic operatic style. The Golijov pieces have struck me more, suffused with feeling and, frequently, melancholy. This was a gift from Kim (of course).

Beach House - Thank Your Lucky Stars

Well this is a treat - a second Beach House record released within a few months of the last. Thank Your Lucky Stars is painted in lighter, airier hues than Depression Cherry, and while it's nice all the way through, only a few of the songs particularly stand out - three in particular, "All Your Yeahs" (especially the keyboard line that dances brightly through its close), "One Thing" (guitars winding it up instead - v Galaxie 500-ish), the drone-y "Elegy to the Void".

Carla Morrison - Amor Supremo

A satisfyingly enveloping, richly emotive record, its gusts, swirls and swoops rendered in both Morrison's evocative (Spanish-language) vocals and the lush - yet generally understated - mix of electronic haze and more organic instrumentation that flows through. With this kind of album, there's almost always that 'one song' and here it's track 3 - "Vez Primera". (Some other artists and records that this has called to mind at various points over the last few weeks: Lykke Li, The Magician's Private Library, Amaya Laucirica, Rome (and Little Broken Hearts), Lana Del Rey (kind of).)

Laura Tingle - "Political Amnesia: How We Forgot How to Govern" (quarterly essay 60)

Entirely plausible premise - that a not insignificant factor in the recent troubled experience of government in Australia, at least federally, has been the erosion or loss of political and institutional memory. I do think it's too simplistic to (as people often seem to do nowadays) blame everything on the 24 hour media cycle and its supposed result of a focus on the personalities and practice (at the most superficial level) of politics rather than the substance of ideas, policy and government - at most, that's a symptom of deeper societal change and a compounding factor, rather than an underlying cause in its own right - and Tingle's diagnosis is pretty persuasive. Nor do I think her argument is necessarily conservative - there could no doubt be entirely forward-looking ways of valuing, retaining and activating collective or networked memory, experience, insight and wisdom (I use that last word deliberately) without relying slavishly on traditional institutions and ways of thinking.

"Middletown" (Red Stitch)

A small-scale play with an interest in the universal - its dramatic scenarios verging on the infraordinary, its departures from straight naturalism taking on a tinge almost of hyper-reality (not least because of its totemically small town America - 'middletown' - setting). Not earth-shattering, but nice. And it felt truthful.

(w/ Jon and Erandathie)

An aside

I read an article yesterday which pointed out that 'It Follows' means 'therefore' - a nice point, and what a terrific film it is.

The Assassin

Has an unusual pace and approach to narrative to it - not just in its slowness and ellipses, but also in how the interiority of its central character's motivations is thereby framed. There's something almost abstract about it - all the essential elements of a martial arts film present, but distilled and filtered to emerge as something unusual and elusive. I'm not sure how much I enjoyed The Assassin, but it left an impression.

(w/ Rob)

Richard Mosse - "The Enclave" & Celeste Boursier-Mougenot - "Clinamen" (NGV)

Richard Mosse's multi-screen installation - war-rent Congo rendered on film capturing parts of the colour spectrum not ordinarily visible:

"Clinamen", like a blue version of Kapoor's "My Red Homeland". And, because blue, liquid and musical (porcelain bowls chiming as they meet, moved around the circular pool by subtle currents) rather than waxily earthy and monumental. Liked it very much.
 

Spectre

Entertaining enough, mostly, from moment to moment yet overall kind of uninteresting. Skyfall was much better.

(w/ Erandathie)

Eighties music

A couple of Friday nights ago, dinner with Ruth at Chin Chin and the music seemed to be spot on - Fleetwood Mac when we walked in ("Go Your Own Way" I think), "I Want to Know What Love Is" (actually a really good song - who knew?), it might have been a Cure song next (can't remember which - maybe one of the singles off Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me) - and anyway it took quite a while before I realised that the common element amidst the run of songs that was generating such positive vibes on my part was that they were all from the 80s, which was a touch surprising seeing as the decade most likely to send me (so to speak) must surely rather be the one that followed (ie the 90s, during which I grew up). Anyway, others included "With or Without You", "Billie Jean", "Take My Breath Away", "The Killing Moon", more Cure, etc, etc and plenty more that have since slipped my mind. Altogether very good.

(somewhat a propos)

"Lurid Beauty: Australian Surrealism and its Echoes" (NGV)

A fine exhibition, taking a broad perspective on its subject, from an enjoyable selection across the 30s and 40s (James Gleeson,[*] Eric Thake, Peter Purves Smith, Russell Drysdale, Roy de Maistre, Robert Klippel) through to some thoroughly contemporary pieces - in many cases much more in the vein of 'echoes' of surrealism than being 'actually' surrealist through and through.

[*] As an aside, Gleeson is one of the first artists whose work I can remember striking me - I don't remember which painting it was, but it was probably in the NGV's permanent collection and years ago, long before I'd come across surrealism as an idea or movement or indeed discovered any particular interest in art within myself.

Game of Thrones season 5

Was this season particularly absorbing or was I just paying more attention than to previous ones? It seemed like all of the many narrative threads running through it were equally interesting, with many of them feeling like they got a pretty decent amount of time through individual episodes and across the season (especially Jon, Daenerys, Arya) - the show pretty much nailed its formula from the get go back in season 1, but it's finely honed by now, delivering its dramatic punches with verve (nearly every episode ends with something really bad happening to someone important).

One interesting aspect is the way that, as the show has departed in various ways for the books and, by the end of season 5, in some respects actually gone beyond what the books are up to, the two have increasingly intermingled into a whole that's intriguingly indeterminate - increasingly they seem like aspects of a single story or source, yet the clear inconsistencies between tv series and books make the melding imperfect, so that the 'actual story' has become a particularly fluid notion or entity.

Also, I think that this was the first time that the show has introduced a major-seeming character and killed them off in the same episode - played, it happens, by Birgitte Hjort Sørensen aka Katrine from Borgen.

Rick and Morty season 2

hehe

(season 1)

Beach House - Depression Cherry

A record made not for parsing or analysis, but rather for experiencing in a single continuous stream. Sweetly humming, like aural fairy floss, in the best way.

Black Mass

A gangster movie, aiming for prestige status and well made but ultimately with no point to it - nothing new in the story it was telling, no particular psychological or societal insight, no real connection to wider world.

(w/ Laura M and Andreas)

Patty Griffin - Servant of Love

Another glorious set from Patty Griffin. What an extraordinary artist she is! If I've counted right, this makes nine studio lps plus live record A Kiss in Time, and the run remains unbroken - every one has been excellent. Many of the words that come to mind in describing Servant of Love are elemental - airy, earthy, (quietly) fiery, pelagic - and its songs have Griffin's usual mixture of delicacy and sturdiness and strength in both construction and execution, including a pleasingly jazzy streak that has woven its way through her discography for years (piano and muted trumpet appearing here and there). While a handful of more upbeat numbers are sprinkled throughout, there's a whole lot of wistful here - which, done with such a lightness of touch and sense of liveliness and spirit, is hitting the mark just fine.

George R R Martin - A Feast for Crows & A Dance with Dragons

Enough detail, texture and plotting to still get well lost amidst.

(last time)

Metric - Pagans in Vegas

On the bland side, a couple of good choruses notwithstanding (eg "For Kicks" - which also has Cure-esque guitars at the start to recommend it). Disappointing.

"Swan Lake" (Imperial Russian Ballet Company, Palais)

Quite beautiful, but I couldn't shake the awareness of how much gruesomely hard work and pain goes into the art form (not entirely due to Black Swan).

(with my family!)

"Julie Rrap: Remaking the World" (Potter, Melb Uni)

Two rooms, both dark but in a contrast with each other which actually reflects the conversation between the two.

"Remaking the World: Artists Dreaming":

Whereas "Remaking the World: In Her Image":

Chvrches - Every Open Eye

Another extremely winning record from Chvrches, with probably 10% less joyously unexpected left turn-ness and unpredictability but maybe a touch more overall consistency than the delightful The Bones of What You Believe from a couple of years back. Plenty of emotional melodrama, with melodies carried urgently along by the synths, beats and Mayberry's beguiling delivery and hooks hitting from all directions. It's good to listen to and feels of the moment, but what does that even mean; to take an example, "Make Them Gold" (one of the weaker cuts) could've come straight off 1989, but then it doesn't seem too much of a stretch to imagine that latter as having been influenced, directly or otherwise, by The Bones of What You Believe in Swift's omnivorous reflection-back-to-itself of the pop zeitgeist - who can really say?

Macbeth

Everything about this adaptation is intense - Fassbender, Cotillard, the Scottish landscapes, the sense of stripped-backness, the general foggy glowering atmosphere, dominated by hues of blue and black until the fire-blood red of the final scenes. For some reason that I couldn't quite put my finger on, my response to it was that it was serviceable - good even - but not out of the ordinary, despite not obviously doing anything wrong and indeed getting plenty right (most notably, an interpretive and artistic vision that's coherent both internally and with the source text, as well as reckoning well with the translation from stage to cinema) - maybe, the lack was in the delivery of Shakespeare's language (not glaringly deficient, but not outstanding either) and the way that language is relatively less prominent in this version than in many.

(w/ Andreas)

"Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great" (NGV)

The Hermitage impressed me when I visited a few years ago, in the way that it was stuffed full of art and other objects, seeming to be almost overflowing, but in a way that conveyed not excess but abundance, not ostentation but luxury. This exhibition is specifically about the parts of the collection - and the palace complex itself - associated with Catherine the Great, who reigned from 1762 to 1796, meaning that the art is a mix of Old Masters and at-the-time contemporary which either way falls well outside the compass of my own tastes in art.

Still, as ever, a few pieces seemed invested with something of the numinous (perhaps particularly likely given the striking facility with light that characterises many of those really old oil paintings) or stood out for some other reason, and whether that was adventitious to whatever specific state of mind and perceptual frame that I brought to it today doesn't much matter.

Bellotto - "View of the Zwinger in Dresden" (1752)

Capriolo - "Portrait of a young man" (1512)

 Titian - "Portrait of a young woman" (c 1536) - oddly contemporary seeming

Murillo - "The Rest on the Flight into Egypt" (c 1655-70)

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl depends for its success on the extent to which it's able to find a convincing integration of, on the one hand, its hyper-foregrounded knowingness about the conventions of narrative, genre and cinema that start with its title and play out in the narration, structuring and cinematography of the film itself, and on the other, its desire to present something heartfelt and emotionally resonant - which plays out amidst a specific kind of overtly indie tone and quirk in terms of characterisation and presentation of story.

I think its intentions are good, and it's probably aware of the hazards created by the plot choices it makes (and the misdirections in which it indulges) - but in the end it doesn't manage to resolve that tension in a coherent and authentically emotional (as opposed to sentimental) way, and, in missing that mark, dooms itself to being ultimately unsatisfying. I wonder if, in a different time, I might have responded differently to it - but we can only take these things as we find ourselves when we do so.

(w/ Alex)

Raymond Carver - A New Path to the Waterfall

Unexpectedly, this one's had an effect on me; parts of it have stuck with me at the level of both individual images and, more generally, how these poems made me feel as I was reading them.

As explained in the graceful introduction by Tess Gallagher - Carver's second wife and his intimate collaborator in the book's conception and compilation - A New Path is a late collection, most written by Carver following his diagnosis with lung cancer and in the knowledge that his (untimely) death was near. They tend towards simplicity, with feeling and meaning readily accessible and lit by a spare, tight-joined lyricism and sometimes a verging - traversing - along the boundary between prose and verse, and many take as their subject mortality and death, in a way that highlights how death and life are connected, and only make sense in relation to the other. The overall mood is, while sombre, consistently celebratory and affirmatory, and I found it rather moving - these poems throw out an empathetic bridge to the reader by drawing on both Carver's own very personal situation and its universality.

Interspersed throughout are very short extracts from Chekhov - contextualised in this way, the latent poetry that Gallagher and Carver saw in the Russian's prose is brought out - as well as from others, adding to the overall effect.

(a gift from Anna F)

"The Material Turn" (Margaret Lawrence Gallery) / "TV Moore: With Love & Squalor" (ACCA)

"The Material Turn"

A mixed bag, although it has prompted me to discover what New Materialism is. The two that I particularly liked were the "Chair in Co-operation with Orange (Extended)" installation in three parts (Katie Lee with Andrew Sainsbury) - and Sophie Takach's "Granular Gradation (After Wentworth)", which I initially (wrongly) took to be rather conceptually superficial but became much richer and more satisfying after I spent more time with it and from a range of different vantage points (closer and further away).

TV Moore

I hadn't actually expected to much like this one, having anticipated that it'd be too lurid for my tastes. But it turned out to be enjoyable - satirical, sure, but also inviting and imbued with a welcome sense of fun, starting from the first video "Frat Self SUN SPACE" (animation of frat boy type obliviously taking succession of selfies against increasingly more spectacular and ultimately cosmic backdrops).

(w/ trang)

Natalie Imbruglia - Male

A covers album - songs by men. There are some moments that are nice in their own right (like opener "Instant Crush", originally by Daft Punk featuring Julian Casablancas, and wistfully countryish "Goodbye in His Eyes", with a regendered title for a song originally by a group called the Zac Brown Band), others that are also nice but drawing at least some of that from the good associations with the original versions ("Only Love Can Break Your Heart" and "I Melt With You"), and one that is a surprisingly bluegrassy and surprisingly enjoyable version of "Friday I'm In Love" - but as a whole it's on the bland side, alas.

Inside Out

So Inside Out is very good - completely charming, imaginatively interesting and sophisticated in its metaphorically literal rendition of the inside of a mind, and affecting. Amy Poehler is the perfect Joy (because she is a joy), while Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust all also come to life amidst Riley's wonderfully realised psychological landscape. And it kind of got to me, in a way that was unexpected because the poignancy was so well integrated with the colour and fancy; after all, it is about emotions.

Dan Ariely - Predictably Irrational

Been intending to read this for a while - one of the classics of popular behavioural economics. Breezily illuminating.

"Betrayal" (MTC)

The backwards narrative (1977 to the start of the affair in 1968) held me - I wanted to find out what would happen, despite the dramatic irony generated by the first scene's revelation of how it would end. The betrayals unfold not only on the level of actions (with the central infidelity being only the most obvious example) but also through words and communication (and their failure and lack). I suspect that perhaps the play maybe wasn't best served by this production - there were a few aspects of the performances, and perhaps directorial choices, that detracted from the power of the whole - but it was good anyway.

(w/ Erandathie and Jon)

Lianne La Havas - Blood

Great voice, colourful production, two or three songs which hit a sweet spot of mature, soul-touched pop ("Green & Gold", "What You Don't Do", "Midnight") - although La Havas herself is young. As a whole, though, not super interesting.

"Antigone" (Malthouse)

I tend to be pretty strongly inclined towards 20th century and contemporary art (in the broad sense of 'art')[*] and Greek theatre has never particularly been an exception to that, but this play really struck me when I came across it via Cranlana a couple of years ago. It's difficult to say what it was about "Antigone" that resonated, but resonate it did - something about the interplay between the clarity and simplicity of the way it renders its central conflict between the dictates of the state and of personal conscience and the way in which it, literally, stages that conflict without sacrificing nuance[**] or descending to the merely didactic or pedagogic (much less moralising). Somehow, it felt timeless - in some important sense universal.

... all of which goes some way to explaining why, while there were aspects of this production that I responded to and thought were strong, overall I found it frustrating. While I don't have any objection to contemporary stagings of classic works seeking contemporary resonance (including at the political level - and especially in the deeper sense of what is at stake in politics being the kind of society that we want to live in, as opposed to the shallow sound and fury that so frequently characterises party politics), the drawing of parallels to current debates and particularly the critique (however merited) of the nationalist and even incipiently fascist trends apparent in recent years in various governments globally was unnecessarily overt and repetitive, throwing me out of the inherent drama of what was transpiring between the characters amidst the ever-present (even in absence) 'ship of state' (the state here presented much more as oppressive leviathan than as plausible source of moral unity in the way that I recall it as being) - the play itself is strong enough not to need such window dressing or an obvious slant in perspective.

Having said all of that, while I thought it was ultimately a failure, it was at least an interesting one, in which the outlines of the powerful source material could be clearly seen, and with elements of an arresting production: good set and sound design (not least the river of blood); some interesting - although inconsistent - choices in diction and tone of delivery of dialogue (I would have liked it if the whole had been more consistently either anti-naturalistic, or fluently based in the Sophoclean text - or indeed both); a strong performance from Jane Montgomery Griffiths (who also adapted the script) as Creon; and a turn from Emily Milledge (who I've liked previously - eg) in the central role that left me in two minds but was certainly vivid and well defined).

(w/ Laura F)

* * *

[*] When it comes to theatre, Shakespeare being an obvious exception.
[**] Having recently read this article at Sara's suggestion, I use the word advisedly.

Jason Isbell - Something More Than Free

Looser and a touch less serious than the wonderful Southeastern, this new one offers more tuneful, unaffectedly wistful slices of americana that don't mind soaring a little bit once in a while - a nice listen.

Paul Dolan - Happiness by Design

One of the levels - and there are many - on which behavioural insights and its associated streams of thought appeal to me is the possibility that its insights could meaningfully improve my own life and perhaps even make me a better person via differently constructed choice architectures, greater awareness of my own biases, etc. And so I'd been thinking for a while that it would be great if, in addition to the many about its application to policy-making or more generally about its many interesting general emanations, there was a book about how to apply BI &c to making one's own life (and oneself) better. So it was pleasing when I came across just this one, endorsed by Daniel Kahneman on the front cover no less!

I've now read it a couple of times through over several months, discovered to my amusement that MH had written a letter to its author criticising parts of the book, given a copy of it to someone else and all that, and found it well worthwhile. I wouldn't call it a self-help book, and if it is then it's the first I've ever read - but nonetheless there's a lot in here that I think has been helping me to think about, and act on, things differently.

It turns out that the most interesting bits for me are in its first half, which is about what happiness is, what causes it, and why we aren't happier - the definition of happiness as involving both pleasure and purpose is one of those very simple formulations that, once articulated, seems both obviously true and the source of a large amount of new insight, while the metaphor of the allocation of (the scarce resource of) attention as a production process leading to happiness, where what we pay attention to and how we do so is a vital determinant of happiness is also, for me, an intuitive one - shades, even, of my old friend phenomenology and subjective world-constituting consciousness.

The matrix of types of spillover between different behaviours is also useful - one positive behaviour leading to another ('promoting') or instead to a negative ('permitting' - ie moral licensing), and similarly a negative behaviour leading to another ('promoting' again) or instead to a positive ('purging').

The second section, about 'delivering' happiness by deciding, designing and doing, is also quite good, though there's not a large amount there that feels new - priming, defaults, commitments, social norms - although the emphasis on the attentional dimension is a bit different. But, still, it was worth reading (twice!) and especially for the earlier bits stepping through a pretty concrete and satisfying consideration of happiness itself.

"David Bowie is" (ACMI)

Very enjoyable, and a reminder of what an intriguing, bordering-on-genius figure Bowie indeed is, and more particularly of how many great, truly iconic songs are scattered across his back catalogue. (Low is still my favourite album of his, "Ashes to Ashes" or "Heroes" my favourite individual song.)

(w/ Ash)

Belle and Sebastian - Write About Love

Pleasant if unremarkable; well, Belle and Sebastian are never that far off the mark. Carey Mulligan acquits herself decently, helped by the sweetness of the (title) song that she guests on.

"Capital: Valuing What Matters" (MWF)

Dennis Glover and feminist economist Andie Fox in panel conversation about the importance of society, and economics, valuing things other than productivity, growth and traditional economic metrics and measures including their limitation to conventional paid labour, including discussion of r > g etc. Started slow with somewhat polemical and probably unavoidably relatively simplistic introductory comments but warmed up engagingly as the discussion went on, drawing in many topics near to my heart.

(w/ Daniel L)

"A Social Service" (Malthouse)

Short and sweet.

The Beckett was set up in traverse, and combined with the brightness of the lights, the effect was to make the audience - well, me at least ... in the front row for the second time this season - feel thoroughly complicit in the lack of understanding or awareness displayed by the artist (Nicola Gunn) as she talks blithely about her project-in-residency in a public housing complex without any regard for the needs or existing community of its residents, an effect exacerbated by the knowledge that at least one member of the cast themselves lives in public housing in Victoria (performed on a rotating basis, and playing a resident - reading from a script - who is engaged on a considerably less high-brow community art project of their own in the form of a tiled mosaic bench).

And the complicity extends to the realisation that she - the artist - is in fact a stalking horse for a corporate plan to redevelop the estate to the detriment of its residents, her art intended to serve as an advertisement for the redevelopment to attract private investors and occupants. The play generates plenty of laughs, but also an underlying, niggling discomfort which is entirely intended and apt.

Eilen Jewell - Sundown Over Ghost Town

A laidback offering from Jewell, drifting languidly by somewhat in a haze, but a consistently excellent one - like all of her previous records (Sea of Tears, Queen of the Minor Key, Live at the Narrows).

Kacey Musgraves - Pageant Material

There's a very pleasing modesty to this one, with no attempts at individual show-stoppers - just 13 pieces of unpretentious modern country, none more than four minutes long, and all executed with a warmth and relaxedness that could almost obscure the crispness and strong lines of the songs beneath.

Against Me! - Transgender Dysphoria Blues

Once in a while a song sneaks through and stabs you in the heart.

If you don't pay attention to the lyrics, the first (and kind of title-) track on this record, "Talking Transgender Dysphoria Blues", sounds like a typical enough melodic punk tune - albeit a particularly rousing and catchy one. But then you actually listen to the words - possibly cued by the way the singer spits out some of the most telling of those words - and, in my case at least, the sick feeling of at least the illusion of empathy (illusion because, luckily for me, I can't actually understand how this kind of experience is to live) is throat-clenchingly piercing.

You want them to notice the ragged ends of your summer dress
You want them to see you like they see every other girl
They just see a faggot
They hold their breath not to catch the sick

... which is only added to after learning that the singer/songwriter, Laura Jean Grace, is herself transgender and transitioning to living as a woman (the voice is entirely male-sounding) and this is the band's first album since she came out as such.

The rest of the album covers similar themes, and at a pacy two to three minutes each, never lags over the listen. As a whole, musically, it's listenable rather than distinguished - but even still.

"40-0" (mix cd)

As is quite often the case with mix cds from Julian, many of the songs feel somewhat out of time - they can't be easily placed as having been recorded in a particular time, instead floating as if they could have emerged at any time in the last 40 or even 50 years (a reflection of not only the track selection but also the recombinatory and omnivorous nature of (contemporary) pop music no doubt).

I like a lot of these: Tom Petty's breezily rocky synth-epic "Don't Come Around Here No More", a Golden Palominos cut called "I've Been The One" (a wistfully country-toned cover, vocals provided by Syd Straw, from that ever intriguing outfit), the skeletal indie-pop of "Fiya" by Tune-Yards which follows in the noble lineage of "Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl", a cruisy miniature rock ode with a Korean name which apparently is super famous in Korea (by Shing Jung Hyun), punk rock anthem "Talking Transgender Dysphoria Blues" by Against Me! (sad lyrics, having just looked them up).

The Daughter

Simon Stone adapting his previous - and exceptional - stage adaptation of Ibsen's "The Wild Duck"; the title change perhaps a concession to the more literal sensibilities of filmgoers, perhaps a deliberate artistic choice to enhance the sense of the linked chain of interpretations that the film continues, perhaps both. And it's really good, the sense of dramatic tragedy, with past actions rippling through time to disrupt present and future happiness (hence, 'the daughter'). More emotionally tense or less for knowing how it was going to end (or so I thought), I wasn't sure. Plenty emotionally tense either way.

Ewen Leslie is a stand out amidst the uniformly strong performances, and terrifically Australian (in a completely unaffected way), reprising his role from the stage version albeit renamed from Hjalmar to Oliver - I think possibly all of the names have been anglicised for the film, with the telling exception of Hedvig (Odessa Young, very good). Sam Neill also perfect, with excellent turns all around them (Geoffrey Rush and Miranda Otto the two most well known, with Paul Schneider - Christian cum Gregers (or is it the other way around?) - appropriately the only major role cast with a non-Australian). Landscape and how it's shot also very appropriate, invoking both the Australian setting and foggy - in multiple senses - associations of Scandinavian isolation chill and quotidian existential unhappiness.

(w/ David and Erandathie - MIFF)

Sharon Van Etten - "I Don't Want to Let You Down" ep

Gets stronger over repeat listens and glistens with something of the same depth as Are We There although overall nowhere near as strong as that last (which makes sense if, as I think I read somewhere, these are songs that didn't make the cut of that last lp).

Joel Deane - Catch and Kill: The Politics of Power

I had this in my office - as of yesterday, no longer my office! - for a day or two this week and of course everyone has been talking about / reading it. Bracks, Brumby, Thwaites, Hulls - with Terry Moran and DPC prominent too. Particularly salient given current Victorian government (ie Labor).

Much the interesting read, and I didn't feel as much that it was intellectual junk food (enjoyable while you're consuming it but ultimately not only not nourishing but actually unhealthy) as I usually do with books about and around politics. Ah politics, always the frustrating, unanswerable question.

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation

Exciting and spectacular and fun (and on imax).

(w/ Rob and Sid)

Michael Barber - How to Run a Government: So that Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don't Go Crazy

Highly pertinent. It does read as a playbook for effective government - at the level of implementation and, to a degree, administration, rather than in the more glamorous domains of policy and strategy - and if its ideas seem familiar, that's probably because they've been influential at least in these circles that the last few years have taken me into. (It also touches only very lightly on the vexed questions of direct public sector reform and, particularly, public sector productivity, which has the effect of grounding it even more thoroughly in the practical.) And it's a playbook that I can imagine referring back to myself - which makes it one of a very small number in this kind of field.

* * *

Putting together the pieces, Barber set up and ran Blair's Delivery Unit during his second term as PM (2001 to 2005) and Geoff Mulgan, now of the so-interesting Nesta, was variously head of policy and of the Strategy Unit at Number 10 over an overlapping period.

Eilen Jewell - Live at the Narrows

Two discs recorded over two nights: "raw, biting cold. February, dead of winter, in Fall River, Massachusetts. ... In the din of noise, miscellaneous high-volume assertions, the phony cacophony of chaos that is the world gone wrong these days, it is a blessing to be heard." Laid-back, professional (in the good way), engaged, warm - a reminder of why I like her so much.

(Melb '12)

Calexico - Edge of the Sun

I read somewhere that Calexico's a border town between California and Mexico, which makes this band's name remarkably apt. And there's something of the same liminality to the way that their music has crossed in, then out again, then back into my musical awareness over time; there've been many encounters over the years, but I'm pretty sure this is the first full album of theirs that I've come to, and it's very good, lit with an array of guest vocalists - lead and backing - and with a thread and a warmth running through it that makes it a joy to listen to. Skipping lightly across genres, it all works.

The Falling

Moodily intriguing - inexplicable fainting spells strike rural girls school in late 60s, much intensely sublimated ardour as well as actual sexual activity and even a hint of the mystical (ominous shadowily pastoral folk music and all), with shades of all the usual touchstones in this vein (eg 1, 2 and more recently 3) - but let down by a lack of focus such that its promising components don't come together as they might have. Starring Maisie Williams aka Arya from Game of Thrones.

(w/ Ash and Kai)

"Death and the Maiden" (Ariel Dorfman - MTC)

Three hander set in unnamed post-fascist South American country in which woman encounters and imprisons man who she believes from his voice to be a doctor who tortured and raped her years earlier, with her human rights lawyer husband/partner (just appointed to a presidential truth and reconciliation-style commission) also caught up. Powerful premise and, I suspect, a very good play as written, but the performances and set didn't bring it to life for me.

* * *

As an aside: "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" - one of those songs that's always been there - came on as I was walking down St Kilda Road afterwards, and unexpectedly pierced in the way music sometimes does ... for a few minutes there I felt somehow more clearly myself than in a long time.

Gregory Crewdson

A beautiful, hefty monograph produced by Rizzoli New York spanning Crewdson's entire career to date. Enormously pleasurable. Along with the photos themselves, it includes some fairly redundant short narratives by Jonathan Lethem - one for each series - and the usual sorts of essays (usual but in this case interesting), as well as extended interview extracts with Crewdson and key members of his extensive crew which are illuminating in relation to both the mechanics and the artistic impulses behind these fascinating works.

Early Work (1986-88)

Plenty of signs of the direction he'd later take in these photos taken as a student around the town of Lee, Massachusetts - indeed, many seem like rough takes of images that he'd return to years later.

Fireflies (1996; printed in 2006)

In one of the framing essays in this book, Crewdson is quoted describing how disappointed he was when he first saw how these had come out as, shot naturalistically, they had failed to capture the reality of how he had experienced the fireflies; the contrast, of course, is to the elaborately staged works that he would move to producing later in his career and with which he's most associated. These fireflies ones seem minor to me (but then what would I know), but they're charming too.

Natural Wonder (1992-97)

Taking nature as their subject, these operate very deliberately to denaturalise. Elements of the gothic, and that David Lynch influence very clear.

Hover (1996-97)
 

Twilight (1998-2002)

From the same well as The Mysteries of Harris Burdick.

Dream House (2002)

In the context of Crewdson's work, the presence of actual Hollywood actors - Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, William H Macy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Gwyneth Paltrow - is entirely congruous.

 
Beneath the Roses (2003-08)

The series in which his vision is most fully realised. Also, the various naked figures that appear throughout are even more disquieting after seeing It Follows (which must surely have drawn at least some inspiration from him).

Sanctuary (2009)

(@ CCP a few years back)

Jamie xx - In Colour

I woke this morning with "Loud Places" in my head - the most rave-y 'reach for the sky' moment on this swirled together set of dance-ish tracks which does sit somewhere on an xx-ish continuum while overall setting its controls for something more expansively textured. I basically like songs and so I prefer the xx's self-titled and probably Coexist as well to In Colour, but on its own terms it's at least as accomplished as those other two and a plenty enjoyable listen.

Fiona McFarlane - The Night Guest

Ruth woke at four in the morning and her blurry brain said, 'Tiger.' That was natural; she was dreaming. But there were noises in the house, and as she woke she heard them. They came across the hallway from the lounge room. Something large was rubbing against Ruth's couch and television and, she suspected, the wheat-coloured recliner disguised as a wingback chair. Other sounds followed: the panting of a large animal; a vibrancy of breath that suggested enormity and intent; definite mammalian noises, definitely feline, as if her cats had grown in size and were sniffing for food with huge noses. But the sleeping cats were weighing down the sheets at the end of Ruth's bed, and this was something else.

Now that's an opening paragraph to catch my attention; since reading it in a bookstore, this one's been on my radar - particularly since the blurb text intimated a family resemblance to Persona.

And so I've now read it - foisting it on book club in the process - and it's a strange, sweet, sad novel haunted by loss (the more devastating for being so unspectacular and so quotidian), the Other and empire. I don't think it quite retains its grasp all the way through, but overall, both in terms of overall design (and effect) and in many of its scenarios, it's high quality fiction weaving together psychological thriller, character piece and post-colonial meditation.

Jessie Ware - Tough Love

Maybe it's just my imagination, but Tough Love seems a touch warmer - the emotions running through it closer to the surface - than its stellar predecessor Devotion. And whether or not that's true, it's just as glossily, sleekly elegant and just as good - in fact probably a hair's breadth better.

An odd comparison maybe, but I wonder if Jessie Ware maybe occupies a similar place in the crowded pop-soul field to that staked out by the National under today's big tent of indie-rock - both seemingly relatively unpretentious, unassuming acts that on the surface aren't doing things all that differently from a whole lot of their contemporaries but who, through some unpredictable and unexpected combination of song-writing smarts, talent, pop intuition and zeitgeist-channelling have struck a vein which elevates their music well above the common mill.

Highlights: "Tough Love", "You & I (Forever)" (the record's sugariest, most immediately replayable moment), "Want Your Feeling" (yes, I was surprised too to like what's basically a slinky little disco song so much), "Keep on Lying". Special mention for "Kind Of...Sometimes...Maybe", which sounds more like TLC than anything else this side of 1996.

Holly Miranda - Holly Miranda

A delicious confection, in the (metaphorical, musical) senses both of being a sweet delicacy and a very nicely put together mixture. More organic and, at times, even rugged-sounding than the fantastic The Magician's Private Library, it nonetheless shares a dreamy woodsiness with its predecessor, not to mention Miranda's oddly soulful vocals (odd because her voice is frequently on the thin side, balanced out maybe by its alluringly raspy edge).

Anyway, dreamy yes - the pinnacle on that front is mid-album drifter "Pelican Rapids", which evokes Angelo Badalamenti's Twin Peaks score - but it also has its exultant moments, like the brightly surging "Come On" (which incidentally, like a fair bit of the record's back end, recalls none so much as Sarah Blasko) and the way that opener "Mark My Words" builds to its layered climax. Then, of course, there's the fast-strummed, almost punky "All I Want Is to Be Your Girl", gleefully spinning out lines like "we could fuck in the sun and dance till dawn and all I want is to be your girl" which is the album's most surprising moment and its sharpest shot of sheer pop musical joy.

[* edit 11/7 - "Come On" also has a distinctly Washington-esque tinge]

Mew - No More Stories Are Told Today ...

An interesting listen, coming across like a more abstractly, alternately airily and wirily pop Arcade Fire if Ben Gibbard was their lead vocalist (with the indie-epic feel of both of the above in their starrier moments), but also more individual and creative in approach than that description makes them sound.

Cyndi Briggs (Photography Studies College pop up)

Appealing set of fairytale-composed photos nestled away upstairs in Southbank.

Cyndi Briggs

Sea Life Melbourne Aquarium

One of those places I've been meaning to go for a while, for reasons that are equal parts inherent draw of underwater mystery and dreaminess (blue is my favourite colour etc) and miscellaneous impressionistic movie snapshots (especially Romeo + Juliet and Closer). Pretty satisfying.

(w/ Nicolette and Tamara)

Rivka Galchen - American Innovations

I don't think it's a coincidence that American Innovations, like Atmospheric Disturbances before it, required an immediate re-read, feeling as it did like it had slipped through my grasp on first pass while at the same time intriguing me enough to make me want to tackle it again straight away.

Slipperily metaphysical, these ten stories of contemporary discontents, disquiet and discombobulation (...disturbances...) constantly evade easy understanding at every structural level - sentence often follows sentence seemingly as non sequitur, and while it's possible to say, on one level (indeed, on multiple levels), what the stories they comprise are 'about', there's a sense of endless interwoven layers of about-ness that's difficult to pin down with any precision. It's probably telling that it's as a whole - that is, as a collection of loosely thematically related stories - that these come closest to graspability.

My favourites - I think - are the two at the centre of the collection: "Wild Berry Blue", 'about' a nine year old girl's infatuation with a recovering heroin addict working at her local McDonald's, told in recollection and filled with terrific, vivid, slantways phrases and images (I had no idea what that meant, to OD, but it sounded spooky. "They slip out from under their own control," I heard the manager say, and the phrase stuck with me. I pictured the right side of a person lifting up a velvet rope and leaving the left side behind.) and "The Entire Northern Side Was Covered With Fire", which is really barely 'about' anything. Both of them have killer closing paragraphs too, in which Galchen is unusually overt (and which have much more of an impact in context):

He was my first love, my first love in the way that first loves are usually second or third or fourth loves. I still think about a stranger in a green jacket across from me in the waiting room at the DMV. About a blue-eyed man with a singed earlobe that I saw at a Baskin-Robbins with his daughter. My first that kind of love. I never got over him. I never get over anyone.

And -

Did I then take that movie meeting, all unprepared, after dressing in a way to accentuate my pregnancy, then to downplay it, then changing outfits again to accentuate it? Did I have no ideas? Did I start talking about the Kantian sublime, and about meteors and about love? A transgenerational love story with an old shepherd in Siberia, and a latter-day woman who knits, and a transfigurative event, and the sense that life is an enormous mystery but with secret connections that, you know, knit us all together? I did. All those things I so studiously knew nothing about. Meteors enter the Earth's atmosphere every day. I was betraying so many, I felt so clean.

"Ryan Gander: READ ONLY" (ACCA)

'Conceptual art' I guess, but unusually elegant and lucid both aesthetically/design-wise and in its balance between surface and deeper (nested, referential, implicit, viewer-produced) meaning.

Macarons in the customised flavours of Foie Gras, burning libraries and Evian mineral water prepared at the behest of the artist.

"Ampersand" (2012) is the centrepiece - you sit in an Eames chair and view a series of objects each placed on a plain white plinth as they rotate one after another behind a square window a couple of metres away. On a side table beside you, a printed and bound book - a catalogue of sorts - which elaborates on each of the, it turns out, 66 in all with short descriptions and more extended explanations of sorts as to what, why, how, and in revealing so much serve equally to highlight how much remains unsaid.[*]

A circular convex security mirror with protective visor intended for outdoor use, manufactured in Japan, viewed from behind.

In the far room, very top right corner, "Porthole to Culturefield Revisited" (2010), including a Miles Davis song playing softly:

Which recalled "Two hundred and sixty eight degrees below every kind of zero" (2014), which looks like a black helium-filled balloon that has reached the ceiling of an earlier room but is, in fact, a fibreglass facsimile.

A stack of fifty-four toilet rolls, six each of black, red, green, blue, fuchsia, orange, yellow, purple and brown produced by the Portuguese company Renova.

On two adjoining walls, "It's a Hang! (The things you make they mock you, the things you make they mimic you)" and "The things you make they mock you, the things you make they mimic you (It's a Hang!)", 2012, collectively what seems to be an almost complete, riddling, choose your own adventure series with a series of framed facing pages arranged in a series...the 'almost' being because there's one missing, and also the narrative text is missing, leaving only the choices, instructions and illustrations.

 
* * *

[*] A friendly ACCA person opened up a back wall to show me how it works (at least on the mechanical level - a custom-built conveyor belt, the objects going slowly round each in turn past the viewing window.

Heartless Bastards - Restless Ones

Modern stadium rock wearing the blues on its sleeve, with a dash of power pop and a romantic rootsy streak. There are a couple of stirring moments (eg "Eastern Wind") and the median is decent, but nothing special.

Ryan Trecartin - "Re'Search Wait'S" (NGV)

Four extended, luridly cacophonous and embeddedly queer videos - they feel like an assault somehow without being specifically aggressive, which figures seeing as they play as reflected, refracted, reconfigured and stylised renditions of contemporary (visual/internet) culture and identity.

Torres - Sprinter

I can't help it - this sounds like the 90s to me. In fact, first song "Strange Hellos" reminds me of that first epochal (at least for me) Garbage album. Of course, none of that's a bad thing...jagged, elliptical, soft-loud (sometimes just buzzingly soft), convincingly emotive, guitars sounding like guitars, good songs that frequently sound like suites or soundscapes in miniature. Yes to this one.

The Newsroom season 3

Like seasons 1 and 2, really very enjoyable despite its irritating elements (in this season, the most jarring are the moments when extremely capable and put-together people - almost invariably women, notably Sloan and MacKenzie - behave ridiculously in conducting their personal lives). It never hurts to be reminded - via neatly packaged scenarios and action and absurdly intelligent, articulate and attractive tv stand ins - that we're all right to care so much about principle and making the world better!

Centre for Contemporary Photography

Quick browse through the current exhibitions. Including Sara Oscar's "From Here To Eternity" ("a series of photographic stills taken from the censored love scenes of classic films and projected on an old-fashioned slide projector. They are, in effect, placeholders for sex scenes, replete with innuendo and suggestion.") and Dave Jones' eye catching photographs in which seeds and sprouts are rendered through light paintings (actually light extrusions - using a screen rather than an ordinary light source).

(w/ Yee Fui)

"Love and Information" (Malthouse)

Extremely good, its many mini-scenes building a cumulative effect in a way only possible through the theatrical form - eight actors playing a succession of characters in an array of configurations and sometimes as briefly as only a few moments and half a dozen words of speech.

Love and information - and especially information - are woven through and in dialogue with a great deal of the everything else that shapes and concerns us as individuals in society (the focus is more on immediate human relationships and the self, and somewhat on questions of knowledge, than on wider issues of politics, society, culture and religion), and it's thought provoking and affecting, snappily written and executed but broad and open in its interests and ideas. Also, has a sense of humour.

Very strong cast including a number of familiar faces, some of which I could place and others needing some googling afterwards (the familiar-for-various-reasons included Zahra Newman, Alison Whyte and Anita Hegh). Must be a lot of fun, given the multiplicity of roles assumed by all of them throughout and the dynamically modular but simple set.

(w/ Meribah)

"Exploration 15" (Flinders Lane Gallery)

Ten or so emerging artists being exhibited - this was the opening. High quality all round. There may have been a bit of bias but if so it would only have been very small, but my favourites actually were the Harley Manifold oils (especially the larger ones); also Thomas Bowman's tiny figurines.

(w/ Meribah; Erandathie)

"The Kaleidoscopic Turn" (NGV)

A selection of pieces from the NGV's collection unified by an interest in light, colour and movement, and broadly spanning from Bridget Riley and Op Art through to today, drawing on both international and Australian artists. Given its theme, it was unsurprising that I enjoyed it!

I'd seen a few of these before, but that didn't detract in the slightest, say, from the experience of Olafur Eliasson's beautiful, transfixing, planetary "Limbo lamp" (2005) room (* - amongst other previous visits) or Tomaslav Nikolic's green-framed pink study "3: We all have a dream of a place we belong" (2003) (*).

Also, Sandra Selig's "Heart of the air you can hear" (2011) - a piece which somewhat reverses expectation (or does it? A contemporary art version of the Sicilian's dilemma in The Princess Bride maybe) in appearing from a distance as if it is line drawn on to the wall (a la Sol LeWitt) and only on inspection from close up (or the right angle) reveals itself as a crafty and engagingly dynamic thread installation.

Ben Ambridge - Psy-Q

It's packaged as a series of interactive quizzes to enable the reader/taker to test their 'psychological intelligence', but actually it's a guided tour of contemporary insights into the way our minds work, taking in the suite of cognitive biases, Thinking, Fast and Slow etc. Much of it familiar but breezily digestible (mixed metaphor) and the reinforcement doesn't hurt.

China Mieville - The Scar

Ok - this is the last of the recent stream of genre fiction that I've been reading...time to focus. But - what a pleasure The Scar still is - my favourite of the Bas-Lag three. In Bellis Coldwine, an appealingly sulky central character; in Armada a vivid and endlessly intriguing setting; and all around them a host of monsters, wonders and memorable ancillary characters (the Brucolac has always stuck in my mind).

(last time)

The Very Best of the Mavericks

There's a pretty decent correlation between the extent to which crooning lead singer Raul Malo sounds like Roy Orbison and how much I like these songs ... frequently, that would be: 'a lot'. (Most Orbison-like: "I Should Have Been True".) Smoothly country with classic pop overtones staying always on the right side of lounge, and often quite delightful.

Hugh Howey - Wool

More escapist fiction - post apocalyptic community living in a 144-level class-segregated silo connected only by a spiral staircase. Shades of Snowpiercer. Made me want to find out what would happen next - especially once it showed its hand in terms of twists and seemingly main character killing-off.

Kelly Clarkson - Piece By Piece

Nice enough, with some catchy moments, but the problem is that this album's in no way surprising, which means that it's missing an element essential to even the most straight-up of pop music. Clarkson has been impressively enduring, but this one's not a stayer.

Lorrie Moore - "How to Become a Writer"

However the next few weeks play out, it's about time to give the novel writing another big push, which makes this an apt time to have read this story, a Faber 'single' from Moore's collection Self-Help ... because it's a spikily acute (post-)modernist piece with a distinctive voice of the kind that I admire rather than because of its title and subject which, given the path it takes, are actually rather more on the dispiriting side.

Sooner or later you have a finished manuscript more or less. People look at it in a vaguely troubled sort of way and say, "I'll bet becoming a writer was always a fantasy of yours, wasn't it?" Your lips dry to salt. Say that of all the fantasies possible in the world, you can't imagine being a writer even making the top twenty. Tell them you were going to be a child psychology major. "I bet," they always sigh, "you'd be great with kids." Scowl fiercely. Tell them you're a walking blade.

Lauren Beukes - The Shining Girls

Time travelling serial killer pursued by the one girl who got away; predictably page-turning. Chicago back and forth through the decades also good, and likewise the care taken to ensure that all of the titular girls are not only victims but rather vivid subjects in their own right.

Parks and Recreation season 6

Still charming, if at times leaning a bit heavily on sentiment and beginning to show its age with more of a reliance on formula - both its own and that of sitcoms at large. But, importantly to its appeal, also still ultimately good hearted even if it leans a bit heavily on the ignorance and self-interestedness of the residents of Pawnee throughout, both for comedy purposes and to generate conflict with Leslie's do-gooding.

(1-3, 4, 5)

"Luminous World" / "Weird Melancholy: The Australian Gothic" / "Nature/Revelation" (Potter Museum)

Three different exhibitions, all with at least some nice pieces to recommend them, although the last (on the top floor) was definitely the highlight.

"Luminous World" comprises contemporary works from the Wesfarmers collection, themed around light. One room is mostly black and white and plays more on the theme of shadow (including a couple of Bill Hensons - breathtaking as always - the one below untitled 2009-10), while the other is more obviously 'luminous' and colour-lit.

"Weird Melancholy" stages the Australian bush as haunted house and presents its pieces through Gothic lenses - the uncanny, the repressed (Aboriginal Australians), the haunted land. The reading isn't too forced, but not that many of the works (mostly paintings) especially caught at me; one exception, which I liked a lot, was Boyd's "Spring Landscape" (1959).

And "Nature/Revelation", concerned with enlivening a sense of the profundity of nature, frequently via the sublime, in the context of concerns about anthropogenic climate change. Several striking works here.

Berndnaut Smilde's interior photographs of clouds that he generated himself ("Nimbus II", 2012):

The full wall, life size charcoal-drawn sperm whale of Jonathan Delafield Cook (it even casts a shadow) - 2013:

And several luminously beautiful Ansel Adams photos (eg "Mt McKinley and Wonder Lake", 1947):

(w/ Derrick)

Clouds of Sils Maria

Clouds of Sils Maria seems to carry a lot on its surface, such that in some respects - notably the suggested but never directly determined reflection of the relationship between Sigrid and Helena in that between Binoche's Maria and Kristen Stewart's Valentine, and indeed between Maria and Chloe Grace Moretz's Jo-Ann, the rather obvious metaphor of the Maloja Snake (the cloud formation, in addition to the synecdoche (?) that is Maloja Snake the play) and the somewhat obvious (dangerously close to trite) dialogue about art and movies themselves - it seems decidedly simple, even artlessly so.

Yet, in contrast to that impression, the film as whole registers as profoundly poetic and enigmatic, not least in the satisfyingly elusively real feeling to its rendition of its characters and their relationships and interactions and the spaces between them, legible in what they say (or don't), and how, and also in their physicality (and that latter rarely, if indeed ever, in a way that's explicit or obvious). Curiously, in those respects the film that it most reminded me of was Closer, with which it doesn't otherwise have a great deal in common (at least not on the surface).

And then there's the direction more generally, unexpected cuts and transitions and all, along with the generally undistracting but always intelligent and occasionally outright beautiful cinematography, especially in and amidst the Alps where much of the action - such as it is - takes place.

So really, it's on that deeper, more allusive level that Clouds really does operate, in a way that's integrated with the - increasingly interesting, the more its implications sink in, even without the meta-textual dimension of Assayas' own casting, which itself is, I think, integral - layers of plot, character and theme. For all that it appears to lay out on the surface what its concerns are, there's something altogether more slippery and difficult to pin down going on in its interstices (which, of course, are fundamental to what it, itself, is) - to which there's clue, climax and anti-climax in the ending of the second part and the unresolved epilogue.

Speaking of casting, as an aside, Juliette Binoche is a personal icon essentially entirely because of Three Colours: Blue in ways that have to do with every aspect of her self as an actor including her beauty (still luminous many years on) and Moretz has been a welcome streak of energy through everything that I've seen her in throughout her shortish career, but for mine Kristen Stewart (who I've always said was a really rather good actor) is the stand out, producing an unaffected, naturalistic performance that brings Valentine to life while - ipso facto but this is all too rarely the case in film - also holds within it a sense of unnamed depths and mystery.

(w/ Jade)

Musical slices

Last weekend, North Carlton in the morning, listening to Plant/Krauss on Raising Sand; walked into store and took headphones off to discover Led Zeppelin all around, something from Houses of the Holy or Physical Graffiti I think, but either way a good three decades plus earlier.

Today, Southbank. Cold air and sunshine and green apple ice cream; and, somehow aptly, Belle and Sebastian.

And then, just a few minutes ago, walking home with some groceries after a run around Princes Park, "Dirty Dream Number Two" came on and even after all these listens it brought a smile to my face (...dream two you couldn't see her face, but you saw everything else...).

Inherent Vice (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Jonny Greenwood bits and pieces, other bits and pieces (including Can and Neil Young), all up not particularly much of a listening experience out of film context I don't think ... the one with Joanna Newsom narrating Pynchon prose over musical murmurings good though. 

Dan Gardner - Future Babble: Why Pundits Are Hedgehogs and Foxes Know Best

The argument in a nutshell (the diagnosis is convincing; the overall prescription of a healthy scepticism of highly confident predictions by hedgehogs likewise; the specific sketching of how this might be applied in the context of climate change somewhat less so in being somewhat unsophisticated in treatment of real world implications and opportunity cost):

The world is complicated and not linear.

The illusion of control.

Tendency to see patterns and causation where there is none; difficulty with randomness.

Optimism bias - feeling good about own judgements.

CONFIRMATION BIAS.

Status quo bias: tomorrow will be like today, only more so (tendency to project current trends). Affected by anchoring effect from today's trends. Even more so by availability heuristic: the most recent is always freshest in our mind.

Dislike of uncertainty.

Power of authority; certainty convinces.

We remember the hits and not the misses. Experts' and media organisations' incentives reinforce this.

Cognitive dissonance - actively seek to avoid. Seek a story that avoids confronting a failed prediction.

Hindsight bias: knowing the outcome makes us judge it more likely than before we knew that outcome.

Foxes are better at predictions than hedgehogs.