Anna Funder - Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

This has been on my radar for a long time despite not being a type of book to which I'd typically be drawn, and I felt in safe hands from the opening epigraphs - one from The Member of the Wedding, another from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the other from an unfamiliar source, namely The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist by Breyten Breytenbach: "The two of you, violator and victim (collaborator! violin!), are linked, perhaps forever, by the obscenity of what has been revealed to you, by the sad knowledge of what people are capable of. We are all guilty."

The writing is good and so is the story-telling; I felt that I learned a lot from reading it, about life in East Germany while the Berlin Wall stood (1961 to 1989), and about people. In some ways what was most striking was the banality of it (not necessarily wholly in that Arendt sense, but maybe partaking of some of it), and the way that the real horrors of life during that period existed despite the worst excesses of, say, Stalinist Russia being absent - i.e. the way that day to day life continued under the surveillance of the state but without the ultimate sanctions of death or indefinite imprisonment seemingly being likely, given the bureaucratisation of the state and nominal adherence to the rule of law.

"Sonja Sekula, Max Ernst, Jackson Pollock & Friends" (Kunstmuseum Luzern)

Sonja Sekula was born in Lucerne in 1918 and moved to the east coast of the USA in 1936, after which she became part of the circle of artists and associates in New York; a heady time, and according to the catalogue notes, "it was much more the moment of transition - from Europe to America, from Surrealism to American Abstract Expressionism, and from literature to visual art - to which Sonja Sekula was dedicated" - an engagement with abstraction, surrealism and expressionism without being bounded by any of them, a preference which the same notes (and the exhibition as a whole) argue was at least partly responsible for Sekula not receiving the recognition and canonical status of many of the contemporaries with whom she shared influences, styles and friendships.

I hadn't come across Sekula before, but on the strength of this exhibition, I wouldn't say that I'm convinced. She comes across as technically sound, and probably conceptually so too - if somewhat protean - and the presentation of her (varied) work amidst that of her more lauded contemporaries both locates her in that milieu and highlights stylistic similiarities that certainly do exist. But for the most part, Sekula's pieces simply don't zip with the same freshness as those others (which include Matta, Newman, Pollock, Gorky, Rothko and Louise Bourgeois - naturally, all welcome encounters), even after some time spent learning how to 'read' them...they're good, not great.

Sammlung Rosengart Luzern (Rosengart Collection, Lucerne)

Each time I come to the work of an artist with whom I've engaged before, it feels like both the continuation of a conversation and a new encounter. As I've reflected before, it's like a friendship, or a relationship of any kind - it continues even in the spaces between one's actual meetings or interactions.

Picasso is one who I've never quite taken to heart; over time, I've come to admire his work, but it's never really struck me. This sizeable collection hasn't changed that, but this time round it felt like I was experiencing his style differently, and more receptively, than in the past. I'm not sure what it was - perhaps a change in my sensibility wrought by a greater empathy for the distortions of his depictions? Anyway, I felt the power of a few of the pieces in particular ("La coiffure", 1954; "Jacqueline in the studio", 1956 and "Woman in the studio" from the same year), not to mention a remarkably erotic "Reclining woman" watercolour drawing from 1969. (The collection has a bit of a lean towards the later work from the 1950s and 1960s.)

There was also a scattering of pieces by other artists starting with some Impressionist pieces (including a lovely Pissarro, "Around Louveciennes, the road", 1871 and likewise a Monet, "Vernon Church, fog", 1894) and a bit of a miscellany from then to the mid 20th century, including some nice Chagalls, a trio of delightful Miros (I especially liked "Dancer II", 1925) and an engaging Kandinsky ("Multiple Forms", 1936).

And, in a series of rooms on the basement level, a collection of 125 works by Paul Klee (who I hadn't realised before was Swiss-German), hung chronologically with no title cards or explanatory notes, creating a sense of immersion that was accentuated by the small dimensions of the individual pieces - and of course always invited by Klee's mysterious yet always legible artistic language. As usual with him, my favourites tended to be those where colour was most in play, but there was a lot to take in and by the end I felt quite overloaded in a way that was far from unpleasant.

"Queen of Hearts", 1922

China Mieville - The Last Days of New Paris

There's a sense in which this is a return to Mieville's previous motif of the divided city. This time, it's Paris 1950, and the detonation of an 'S-Bomb' - an explosion of stored Surrealist energy - nine years previously has released scores of figures from Surrealist art well-known and otherwise made manifest (as 'manifs') in the streets of Paris, amidst which a splinter resistance group wages its campaign against the Nazi occupiers, the war having been protracted (and Paris sealed off from the rest of the world to prevent contagion) and further enlayered by a Nazi treaty with Hell which have led to a summoning of devils and demons to also stalk the city - all treated in a consistently matter of fact way despite the vivid thumbnail descriptions of the various aspects of the fantastic that come into play.

It's an enjoyable read, embedded with Surrealism and the realisation of its revolutionary and disruptive potential (there are examples on nearly every page, and they're documented in a meta-fictional section at the end of the novella), including as a force against fascism. As is sometimes the case with Mieville, the characters aren't as developed as they might be, but the book doesn't suffer too much for that because they're sufficient for the ideas and story to rattle along regardless.

Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 seasons 1 & 2

Sheer delight. I suspect a lot of the appeal of this show is its wish fulfilment - we all want to act like Chloe sometimes in her snark and utter lack of inhibition. Also, she's such an amusingly (if horrifyingly) self-absorbed and charismatic character, so that the echoes of people one knows are all the more amusing (whether as actual momentary analogues or knowing assumers of the role or more likely a bit of both). And then there's the shininess in which it's all wrapped up - the usual televisual dream of NYC with the right amount of actual sharpness. Plus, James Van Der Beek makes an excellent James Van Der Beek. 

Infernal Affairs

Ages well.

(last time)

Zootopia

Scamperingly good, the message of tolerance well delivered.

Haley Bonar - Impossible Dream

It's the guitars, foreshadowed earlier with the briefest handful of notes, rising at 2:18 for all the world like a latter-day echo or escapee from that late 80s to early 90s period that for me largely defines the Cure despite the breadth and extensive greatness of much else they did (Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me through to Wish), that make "I Can Change", emerging as if from the seabed to take over from the throbs and thuds, scuttles and swooshes, that have underlaid Bonar's lorn singing till then.

How did you write/record "I Can Change"? What's it about?
I wrote it one night in my room while all of my windows were open and the wind was blowing around wildly outside. I felt sort of creeped out, in a good way, and conjured the song from the way I was feeling. I felt like a witch, and the words swirled around me and I found the chords and that was that.

And those same guitars emerge elsewhere, sometimes with a windswept feel and in other places with a sharper indie-rock/pop edge that's equally satisfying ("Kismet Kill" is the most enjoyable of the latter type); there's a shimmer to a lot of it which is most clearly expressed in over-the-horizon moments like the drive of "Stupid Face" and mid-tempo "Skynz" (neither of them a million miles away from Metric at that point when they hit their sweet spot a few years back). And then there's "Blue Diamonds Fall", which reminds me of Roy Orbison and "Wicked Games". If all of that makes Impossible Dream sound like a patchwork of others' sounds and associations - well, maybe. But it's terrifically good listening anyway.

Margo Price - Midwest Farmer's Daughter

It would be easy for this kind of contemporarily clean, gently honkytonk country to be kind of dull, but that isn't the case here despite a lack of anything obviously distinctive. Instead, the charms of Price's elegant song-smithing grow over repeated listens, none more so than opener "Hands of Time", which starts off feeling maybe a touch too already-familiar but, multiple listens on, comes to scan more as touched with a hint of the classic as the little touches sink gradually in.

Michelle de Kretser - Springtime: A Ghost Story

The sub-title is important, as both direction and misdirection. Subtle and good.

"How Soon Is Now": Mojo presents 15 tracks of modern independent music

Well the Smiths/Morrissey influence is clearer for some than for others but this is an enjoyable compilation.

There's a new Lush song (!), recognisable from the very first bar (and interestingly sounding more like their first lp Spooky than the ones that came after ... though maybe it's kind of splitting hairs when all of them were basically a full two decades ago), and quite a bit of shoegazey stuff through the mid-section of the compilation (Ian William Craig's "A Single Hope" is particularly majestic).

Also two eccentric singer-songwriter types at the start are ace: Ezra Furman's "Haunted Head" and Meilyr Jones' "How to Recognise a Work of Art". And airy closer Haley Bonar's "I Can Change".

case/lang/veirs

It's tempting but probably too glib to say that I was always going to like this, a collaboration between three artists whose music has been woven deep into my musical and overall life textures each for well over a decade now: Neko Case, one of my out and out favourites since I fell deep into Blacklisted, the record that maybe provided the first real hint to the alt-country road that I was eventually to follow, and provider of some of my most treasured musical experiences (on record and live); k.d. lang, with whose music I've been less deeply enwrapped but nonetheless somehow ever-present (going back to "Constant Craving", one of those pop songs that seems as if it's always been there) and from time to time particularly piercing; and Laura Veirs, whose strains have been endlessly in the air, more or less closely, since that first encounter with "Ohio Clouds" on the radio (triple r) all those years ago and from Troubled By The Fire onwards. Tempting, because that's a lot of very meaningful music and musical association bound up with these three, but too glib because how can you be sure that the pieces will come together in a way that's at least the sum of the whole?

But the truth is that I do like it, a lot, because the combination of these three voices - literally, in songwriting terms, and also more generally in terms of music, arrangement and instrumentation - is as lovely as might have been expected, and strikingly seamless (in that I'm only usually reminded of their individual - strongly defined - identities when I stop to think about it, so well do they flow and meld together across the record); Veirs' off-centre melodies and hooks catch along the way and provide much of the musculature, lang's languorous tones sink smoothly into the ones where she takes lead, and Case's golden voice is restrained to good effect in providing much of the texture and lines to join it all together. Not in the least showy or self-conscious, it's quite something.

"Degas: A New Vision" (NGV)

Like the previous big Degas exhibition I saw a few years back, this one quite impressed me. Degas is one of those few 'name' artists who isn't obviously identifiable with any particular movement, but there's something about his painting, oil and pastel, that stands out. Also: those greens!

(w/ Alex)

Haruki Murakami - Hear the Wind Sing

Been a while between drinks for me and Murakami.

I've read this one before, or at least I'm pretty sure I have - yet there's no evidence of it here on extemporanea and I don't have any kind of sense-memory of reading it in the past. It all felt so familiar. Unnamed narrator and the Rat in their first outing, with much hanging around at J's Bar. His first novel, and so many of the elements already there in sketched form - most enjoyable.