"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)