Music for running

Well, I have a running playlist of 300-odd songs - as many as will fit on an ipod shuffle - and it evolves over time but there a few mainstays: Spoon, always welcome as they are in most contexts; Slow Down Tallahassee, whose music could've been made for this; Bon Jovi, a rather unreconstructed favourite of mine from way back and unusually congruous in this context; Chvrches, whose terrific record keeps on being terrific long after it might've been expected to wear off; Belle and Sebastian, mostly, I think, because their music almost always takes me someplace other than my immediate surrounds; the Pains of Being Pure at Heart (they hit some fairly direct pleasure centres for me); Metric (likewise); and then there's Taylor Swift - when it's one of hers, well, it's like having a friend right there beside me, urging me to keep on going, to keep going for another few minutes again, which is sometimes just long enough.

C J Hendry - "50 Foods in 50 Days" @ The Cool Hunter

This one's from a couple of weekends back - got lost in the recent shuffle: an artful exhibition of finely detailed pen and ink drawings of various food on luxurious Hermes plates, some gourmet and others not so much (I think there were m&ms on one), stumbled across on Gertrude Street.

(w/ Jade and Rob)

It Follows

Well, It Follows has gone straight into the top handful in the (short) list of my favourite horror films.[*] Seriously good.

It works through the interplay of several pieces - the ingenuity and metaphorical richness of its central idea, the unnerving way in which the thing that follows is rendered, the out and out scares, the lushly languid rendition of setting and characters (unavoidably bringing to mind The Virgin Suicides for me) including a deliberately ambiguous sense of period, the easy interweaving of the teenage friendship, detective gang and 'getting out of town' elements (Stand By Me seems, if not a direct inspiration, at least a spiritual predecessor), the heighteningly swooning and ominous synth music that scores it (reminded me of the music in Drive), the overall mood.

In all, just very satisfying, and more as cinema qua cinema than particularly as genre.

(on my own, in a cinema 3 at Nova that seemed remarkably full for a small-name film on a Thursday night)

[*] The only others that I can recall thinking were this good are Let The Right One In, The Others and maybe The Orphanage, and also The Descent (the most straightforwardly, leanly terrifying of the lot).

Jane Gardam - The Man in the Wooden Hat

On the plus side, the writing is surprisingly personality-filled and there are moments of poignancy; on the down, it doesn't feel really fleshed out and I suspect would have been far richer had I read its companion and predecessor, Old Filth.

St Vincent - St Vincent

Some albums you need a bit of time to live with, as well as attention to what they've got going on - this is one of them. For me, St Vincent took several listens to emerge as more than a quirky, occasionally interesting but basically incoherent melange, but at some point I twigged to just how interesting and good it actually is - maybe I needed to get my ear in and learn how to listen to it (often a characteristic of good music and indeed, in similar vein, art of all kinds). Full of personality, melodic and structural left turns, unfamiliar and jagged rhythms, and sneakily tremendous guitar bits, it's terrific!

Maria Katsonis - The Good Greek Girl

I can't say how this would've read to me if I didn't know its author, but as it was, The Good Greek Girl was compelling - an insight in many ways.

Jessica Pratt - On Your Own Love Again

I'm sure there's some very simple explanation for why so much of the best folk-touched music sounds spooky, haunted - something obvious to those who know about how music is put together, to do with tunings or keys or somesuch. It doesn't much matter to me, and whatever it is, Jessica Pratt's beguiling songs are wrapped up in it, while also twinkling with something more contemporary in spirit, all blended very well with her unusual voice (hard to find words to describe it, save to say that it sounds out of time). Simple, and also somehow intricate, and - after enough listens - increasingly memorable in its seemingly quiet way. 

Beach House - Beach House

Their debut, and more murmury and wispy than what was to come (Teen Dream, Bloom, both exceptionally good records - and there was one in between that I haven't got to yet) but already very lovely.

Nina Simone - Sings the Blues

What the title says! 

Robert A Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

Pressed upon me by Rob. I didn't find it hard to read once I got into it, but it didn't especially resonate with me either...felt pretty dated.

"Endgame" (MTC)

Disappointing beginning to the 2015 theatre round. I've grown to love Beckett since my first exposure to him via a very different production of this very play some years back, but this take felt far too literal and straightforward, lacking in the essential spirit that animates his work or any particular interpretive twist (although Julie Forsyth as Nell was excellent - sweetly, suitably pathetic).

(w/ Erandathie)