Rivka Galchen - Little Labors

Miniature pieces, sharp as tacks. And delicious (different form, but the quality is unsurprising given how good both Atmospheric Disturbances and American Innovations were).

Like this:

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Things that one was misleadingly told were a big part of having a baby

Diapers. Changing them. Bottles. Cleaning them. Wraps. Baths. Sleeplessness. Cheerios. All these things exist, but rise to consciousness about as often as the apartment's electricity does.

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Or this:

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More babies in art

When the baby was very small, still in what I have often heard termed the "fourth trimester," an out-of-town relative came to visit the baby, and to visit New York, and so one afternoon, the baby was put into the sling and was in this manner transported through a Magritte show at the Museum of Modern Art. The baby's sling consisted of two loops of black fabric, the one nestling into the other, and the baby was still so small that her feet didn't stick out, nothing showed of her save her bald head, and sometimes, a tiny hand gripping at the edge of the fabric. The paintings at the Magritte show included: men whose heads had been replaced by apples, a gathering of legs without bodies, an iris that was a clouded sky. Magritte-type images, naturally. Magritte's stated goal, the museum copy noted, was to make "everyday objects shriek aloud." In one exhibition room after another after another, a stranger would catch sight of the bald head, the small hand, floating amidst a vanishing cloak of sling and raincoat. One stranger after another said of the baby's inadvertent performance art, "That's my favorite piece in the show."

Brian Evenson - A Collapse of Horses

Wiry collection of horror-tinged literary short stories that take uncertainty - in the existential, as well as the experiential, senses - as their guiding motif. Not sure how much they will prove to have gotten under my skin, but they do create a sense of unease as one reads them.

"John Olsen: The You Beaut Country" (NGVA)

He's good on the messy profusion of (Australian) landscape, though my favourites are the overhead paintings - including some dream-like watercolours - of lakes. His most recent work as well, from the last couple of years and made well into his 80s now, is clear eyed and vital.

Nocturnal Animals

Exceedingly sleek (genuinely beautiful to look at, while invoking David Lynch in moments - especially Mulholland Drive), consistently tense (on multiple levels), and impressive in the way that the visceral impact of the physical violence in the 'novel' narrative works with the emotional harms wrought in the film's real world, and also in the way in which, depending on how you read the ending, it maybe offers meaningful and hard-won progress for one or even both of its main characters in its 'real' world. It doesn't hurt at all that Amy Adams is right in the middle of it (quite the one-two with Arrival, and honestly she was the main reason I watched this one) and Jake Gyllenhaal is just as good, maybe better - both are genuinely powerful.

Do Humankind's Best Days Lie Ahead? (Steven Pinker / Matt Ridley / Alain de Botton / Malcolm Gladwell)

Transcript of a 2015 debate in Toronto, Pinker and Ridley for the 'yes' and de Botton and Gladwell for the 'no', plus pre-debate interviews with each of the four and post-debate commentary. A topic that I wonder about from time to time, usually figuring the probabilities lie more with 'yes' than 'no' (as did some 70 per cent of the audience, both before and after the debate).

Certainly a well qualified and interest quartet to conduct the discussion (I hadn't come across Ridley before but the other three are obviously well known to me).

Pinker and Ridley, though coming at it from different backgrounds, both press the point about the material progress that humankind has made on any number of dimensions - Pinker enumerates ten pretty fundamental ones: life itself (lifespan), health, prosperity, peace, safety, freedom, knowledge, human rights, gender equity and intelligence - and what they say is the likelihood that this will only continue.

De Botton, who I often find irritating, presses what I found the least compelling of the positions, arguing 'humanistically' for both a resistance to the impossible pursuit of perfection (not actually the point of this debate) and for an idea of the purpose of human life that is more about happiness and spiritual fulfilment than material progress; I felt that he was both missing the point and glossing glibly (and in an aggravatingly privileged way) over the real improvement in people's lives that has resulted from the many technological, medical and cultural (attitudinal) advances of the period since say the industrial revolution.

Gladwell is much more plausible in arguing that the greater complexity and interconnectedness of modern life has dramatically increased the risk of a catastrophic event (either of the kind enabled by those same advances such as climate change or nuclear event or facilitated by that connectedness such as global pandemic or mass internet failure, none of which are even probably particularly 'black swan' in nature, even if historically unprecedented).

It didn't change my mind, but a good and thought provoking read.

Tracy McNeil & The GoodLife @ Basement Discs

I happened to walk into Basement Discs a few minutes before this in-store was starting, with a free afternoon ahead of me, so that was a piece of luck: an hour of good quality electric guitared modern country, the guitars at times weeping Julie Miller-style.

Regina Spektor - Remember Us To Life

Remember Us To Life is certainly nice, and it has a steadiness to it that bespeaks a well constructed set of songs, but it's lacking any particularly sharp edge or urgency - which means that its most straightforward piano ballads are also its best: "The Light", "Obsolete", "New Year".

(Begin to Hope; Soviet Kitsch & Far; What We Saw From The Cheap Seats)

Honeyblood - Honeyblood

Like everyone ever I tend to think that the time that was my formative period had the best music ever, which in my case means the 90s.

Be that as it may, Honeyblood is super-fun to listen to - I went and took a listen because they get compared to that constellation of acts knitted together by Tanya Donelly (Throwing Muses, Belly, the Breeders) which of course is straight into the sweet spot for me, and the comparisons aren't that far off, the fuzzy-guitared melodicism delivered with a declamatory air that's kind of sweetly rockin'.

As was often the case then, and still turns out to be the case now, the ones I like most are often those with a bit of an upwards swerve to them that doesn't quite resolve - the run-home tempo change of "Joey", the steady chug and then bridging meander and climb (as if its ending gets discovered somewhere in the song's mid-section) of "No Spare Key".

Heide: Georgia O'Keeffe (again) / "A Life in Art: Albert Tucker" / "Making History: Charles Blackman"

A repeat visit for the O'Keeffe, another chance to be immersed in the colour and the light. (previous)

Nolan, Tucker and Blackman also exhibited across the three buildings that make up Heide - a reminder of the sheer forcefulness of their individuals visions and executions of them. Gained something from Nolan and Tucker's association with the property and setting itself, too.

(w/ Andreas + Emma, Laura M and Andreas' friend Adam)

Arrival

Quietly, lingeringly mysterious, littered with stunning alien imagery that gains from its juxtaposition against the familiar-rendered-strange setting of our own world (the hovering craft over the fog-bathed Montana plain is positively Magrittean), wrapping in a thoughtful take on communication and the way that language shapes experience and then pushing that to the next dimension (so to speak),  structured elliptically but designedly around an emotional core of loss, and sustaining several different types of narrative and other tension throughout its two hours, Arrival is wonderful in every sense.

Also - Amy Adams is, as usual, great. In a movie where she's trying to save the world, she's perfectly subtle; she has a knack of inhabiting the characters that she plays (as an actor, she's never distracting) yet leaving a strong impression each time out, perhaps in the way that she finds those little ways to bring out the characters themselves. I don't know if there's another actor going around today who I like more - her turns in The Master and American Hustle are most vivid for me, but extemporanea reveals that she's actually stood out enough in several others that I've seen, including before I really knew who she was (Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Her); also, startlingly, it was her and Emily Blunt who were the leads in Sunshine Cleaning which, now that I know that, seems to deserve a rewatch.

Also also - there are some interesting thematic overlaps with Life After Life. Though in terms of films, the ones that it called to mind were Interstellar, Inception (and again, and again), Monsters and I Origins (a pretty good quartet, to say the least).

BSG, November 2016

Seen at Brunswick Street Gallery today - Colin Staples. About a dozen altogether, large and alluring. Name of series: "Introspective".

Lydia Loveless - Real

Real has a lighter hue than its terrific predecessors Indestructible Machine and Somewhere Else - a much stronger hint of a pop edge than in those earlier records, a clean, bright chime to its guitars that (again and more clearly than ever before) recalls Kathleen Edwards - but there's still plenty of kick and twangy rock and roll to it, and the album contains many pleasures, saving the best for last in its emphatic title track closer.

"Gerard Byrne: A Late Evening in the Future" (ACCA)

The incompleteness of the experience is a deliberate part of it - pieces stopping and starting (and in themselves fragmented even when on) so that any consolidated view of the exhibition is impossible.

Kate Atkinson - Life After Life

Equally moving and equally marvellous in the cleverness of its construction - not just at the level of the repeating and interleaved time periods that it covers, but also in the neatness of how things bridge and foreshadow across them and the way that this carefully both reveals and conceals and serves the novel's purposes - on this second pass.

The jumping backwards and forwards, when it occurs, is used to support the unavoidable linearity of the reader's experience - the first time we reach 1947 and the desolation of survival in that cold flat, for example - and the building urgency of Ursula's growing awareness of the cycle that she is in, life after life, is modulated to perfection, from the dark intimations that increasingly creep over her at crucial moments (gaining an extra charge from the way that we all have such seemingly irrational presentiments of doom from time to time) to her sense, the first time she chooses death over life, that "something had cracked and broken and the order of things had changed", to 'the end of the beginning' amidst the electrifying realisation, seemingly fully conscious for the first time.

'It's a terrible thing,' Pamela said to her. 'But you're not responsible, why are you behaving as though you are?'

Because she was. She knew it now.

Something was riven, broken, a lightning fork cutting open a swollen sky.

And then the lyricism - what feels like a culmination, at the end of that section in which everything seems to race towards its end.

It's time, she thought. A clock struck somewhere in sympathy. She thought of Teddy and Miss Woolf, of Roland and little Angela, of Nancy and Sylvie. She thought of Dr Kellet and Pindar. Become such as you are, having learned what that is. She knew what that was now. She was Ursula Beresford Todd and she was a witness.

She opened her arms to the black bat and they flew to each other, embracing in the air like long-lost souls. This is love, Ursula thought. And the practice of it makes it perfect.

And you follow this progression, by now seemingly teleological, to what must be the best version of that practice towards perfection. Only, to learn in those final pages, it's not - and what is instead (or at least the version of it with which Atkinson, although perhaps not Ursula, chooses to end, is more poignant by far.

He shouted something to her across the pub but his words were lost in the hubbub. She thought it was 'Thank you,' but she might have been wrong.

Other thoughts: Sylvie remains elusive, those sighting in London with another man in 1923 and her familiarity with the imperial hotel in Vienna ultimately unexplained despite the perspective into her inner life and agency that we're granted; Hugh's kindness is a kindness to the reader; it's a clearly feminist book in its rendition of the many violences that Ursula suffers at the hands of men and the ways that her choices lead down better paths; and there's empathy everywhere and not least in the sections in bombed-out Berlin.

(first time)

"Walker Evans: The Magazine Work curated by David Campany" / "The documentary take" (Centre for Contemporary Photography)

The Walker Evans is as the exhibition title says. The candid NYC subway shots at the entrance from the 1930s and 40s are, of course, intriguing (and it's quite lovely to read Evans' sincere effort to sum up his belief that a photograph can capture something unguarded in its subject akin to the undisguised self or indeed - although he acknowledges the imperfection of the term - the soul), while the "Color accidents" shots of painted doors and surrounds mostly from East 85th St, 1958 with their call-outs to Klee and others, and the iconically simple front-on shots of everyday steel tools were marvellous.

While "The documentary take" is a set of contemporary works collated to bring out the relationship between documentary photography and contemporary art, with some direct commentary on/from Evans' work. I must say that the only one that really interested me was Patrick Pound's "drive by (en passant)" (2009 ongoing), which is simply found photos of people in cars - movies, celebrities, private, going back decades and through to today.

Pacific Rim

Good fun. And let's not forget how great Ron Perlman is. (last time)