The Sandman: Overture (Neil Gaiman et al)

The art in this one is really quite strikingly beautiful. An 'overture' in that it retrospectively precedes the main series, telling the story of the events that led to Morpheus' weakening to the extent that he came to be imprisoned at start of that main run, and also in its successful encapsulation of many of the series' major themes.

Atonement

For no particular reason, I felt like rewatching this, and I'd forgotten how visually beautiful a film it is - every shot and every scene is artfully composed and shot with much in the way of lovely images. Also notable is the top notch cast - apart from the principals (Knightley, McAvoy, Ronan, Garai, Redgrave) there's also Benedict Cumberbatch (convincingly predatory), Juno Temple (playing too-young and alluring, so, as per usual) and Alfie Allen (aka future Theon Greyjoy).

(last time)

Art etc

Various things from a couple of hours in the cbd this afternoon.

Rio Ponce (No Vacancy)

Video works all concerned one way or another with (the artist's) body.

Ward Roberts

Via a book in Metropolis. Pastel-y dreamy photos of sport courts in Hong Kong.

NGV Aust

Dan Moynihan - "Sunset Strip" (2016):

Clare Rae via three performatively posed photos that struck me as deadpan wry (and which I liked a lot) - this one is "Untitled (Gallery stool)":

Jeffrey Smart - "Rooftops" (1968-69), Italy. Feel like I've perhaps seen it before, but it made an impression this time:

Peter Purves Smith - "Surrealist landscape" (1938):

Miscellaneous other perspectives:

String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis

Five very enjoyable essays that are genuinely about tennis, as well as several others things all at once.

I recently re-read the Federer one ("Federer Both Flesh and Not") and I've also read the one about DFW's own years as a highly ranked teenage player in the mid-west before ("Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley") but possibly the most engaging is the one from which the collection takes its title, here renamed "Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness" - Joyce having been an American player who made it into the top 100 in the mid 90s with whom Wallace spent considerable time and who emerges paradigmatically through an essay that's both generous and clear sighted (and funny). Also, Sampras vs Philippoussis at the US Open, Athens and Sparta, democracy and commerce, clever and illuminating.

Side note: it's amusing how much he hates Agassi, and finds every opportunity to express it; eg, in a footnote, "Sampras is surprisingly childlike and cute on the court, in person, in contrast to Agassi, who's about as cute as a Port Authority whore".

"Lit from underneath" (2016 cd)

1. Hands of Time – Margo Price

from Midwest Farmer’s Daughter (Third Man; 2016) 

2. Torch Song – Laura Stevenson

from Cocksure (Don Giovanni; 2015)

3. Real – Lydia Loveless

from Real (Bloodshot; 2016)

4. Atomic Number – case/lang/veirs

from case/lang/veirs (Anti; 2016)

5. Kismet Kill – Haley Bonar

from Impossible Dream (Memphis Industries; 2016)

6. No Spare Key – Honeyblood

from Honeyblood (Fat Cat; 2014)

7. Your Best American Girl – Mitski

from Puberty 2 (Dead Oceans; 2016)

8. Sister – Angel Olsen

from My Woman (Jagjaguwar; 2016)

9. I Can Change – Haley Bonar

from Impossible Dream (Memphis Industries; 2016)

10. Tom Sawyer / You Know Where You Can Find Me – Laura Stevenson

from Cocksure (Don Giovanni; 2015)

Through-lines this year: female artists (exclusively, based on this round-up!), countryish bents and callbacks to the 90s. Not new, but striking in its consistency. 

Unusually, there weren’t any individual songs or albums that I became really obsessed with in 2016. But I did find myself coming back to Laura Stevenson’s sugar-sharp Cocksure throughout the year, all evocatively cryptic lyrics and spiky melodies and none better than “Torch Song”, plus the epic (even in its name) “Tom Sawyer / You Know Where You Can Find Me”, the kind of soft-loud with-arms-outstretched anthem that’s so often attempted and so rarely pulled off. 

Meanwhile, two recent favourites of mine put out new records that cleaned up their respective sounds but retained the raw edge and musicality that distinguished them in the first place – Angel Olsen (“Sister”, a wendingly heartfelt electric folk journey), and Lydia Loveless (“Real”, a more concise statement of chiming country-rock yearning). And there was the unexpected gift of a collaboration between Neko Case, Laura Veirs and k d lang, three of the most characterful and best voices in americana etc, and as graceful and interesting together as you’d expect. 

In terms of new discoveries, Margo Price crept up on me with her simple storytelling and arrangements in songs so well-crafted as to transcend their genre trappings, Honeyblood provided a jolt of the closest thing to 4ad-style alternative rock that I’ve heard for a while, right in the sweet spot, and there was the instant classic that was Mitski’s stormy, crystalline “Your Best American Girl”.

But it was Haley Bonar’s shimmering Impossible Dream that was my favourite album of the year. “I Can Change” is the stand-out but “Kismet Kill” isn’t far behind, both in their different ways lit from within by Bonar’s wisp of a voice and gift for gauzey hooks and pop song dynamics (including little post-punk touches), and the whole thing is sheer delight. I didn’t see her coming – but here we are.

- December 2016

The Homosexuals, or 'Faggots' (Malthouse)

Explicitly - or, at least, metatextually explicitly - a farce while at the same time sharply satirical, the elements of the two forms constantly both in play so that the physical and verbal comedy are never separable from the implicit commentary (which is scathing in basically every direction that it looks - if there's a message or moral, it's probably something like the play's final line: whether because of privilege in any of its many forms or through exaggerated identity politics, don't be awful), not least because so much of it is so ridiculously 'non politically correct'. This one didn't strike me as much as the others of Declan Greene's that I've seen in the past but still, it was great, barbed fun.

(w/ Meribah and Tamara - from the front row no less)

The Best Australian Stories 2016 edited by Charlotte Wood

It's hard to know to what extent this reflects the general Australian literary short story story landscape right now and to what extent editorial preference, but the stories collected here definitely tend towards the serious - while not generally tilting into the outright sombre, a moodiness hangs over the collection and there's a distinct lack of humour or, for the most part, levity of any kind. Wood's own take: "If anything unifies the stories in this collection, it might be my own preoccupation, which emerged as I read, with what I came to think of as the trio of ghosts, monsters and visitations."

I tended to be drawn to the stories that most actively seek to imagine different realities (often with a dash of the poetic) and - separate category - those that offer, and deliver, something a bit plot or mystery-driven. Plenty of very established writers are represented, but my favourite is probably "Coca-Cola Birds Sing Sweetest in the Morning" by Elizabeth Tan (who seems to be just getting started), sweet, gentle and sharp and hitting a register that manages to be both familiar and a touch strange; also James Bradley's "Martian Triptych" and, in a different vein, Trevor Shearston's "A Step, a Stumble", which is one of those seemingly unremarkable observationalisty realist type stories that slips under the skin.

[Update 1/3/18: You never quite know which are the stories that will linger. A year on and I find that Fiona McFarlane's colossal (different from giant) squid story "Good News for Modern Man" often surfaces in my mind.]

The Girl With All The Gifts

A pretty faithful translation from book to film. Also - it's not very clear to me why zombies seem to come up so (relatively) frequently in my pop culture consumption. Perhaps they're just having a wider cultural moment.

CCP

We were in the neighbourhood with no firm plans.

Most interesting were the pieces from James Tunks' Elsewhere series. As described by the website:

* * *

Instead of photographing stars themselves, Tunks constructs the photographs using predominately found and accumulated material that is crushed and pulverized to mirror interstellar nebula. This process forms constellations between otherwise arbitrary materials whilst at the same time echoing the history of astrophotography and its pioneers such as Edwin Hubble and EE Barnard. 

Image: James Tunks, Crushed and pulverized 35mm Minolta wide angle lens, still photograph from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, aspirin migräne, coconut, viewfinder prism, paperback cover of Jorge Luis Borges ‘Labyrinths’, found hunting arrow, Icelandic flag sew on embroidered patch, ground espresso, page from Francois Laurelle’s ‘The Concept of Non Photography’, pistachio husks, photograph of lion paintings from Chauvets Cave, dried hibiscus, type-c print, 85cm x 130cm, courtesy the artist.

* * *

The constituent material can't but intrigue and play out the drama of meaning-making (we seek out meaning; it emerges whether or not actually 'meant'; which is in the nature of meaning itself - maybe).

Some of the pieces in the 'Elegy to Apertures' exhibition also had a bit of an appeal, but more surface-aesthetically than in any deep way for me, despite the concept of the exhibition being about the interstitial or portal-like nature of the camera aperture and the way that it limns the taken image - both enabling and limiting and circumscribing it.

(w/ Trang)

White Night Melbourne, Saturday 18 February

"Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again." - A de S-E

It's rather startling to realise that this is the fifth White Night in Melbourne - not just because that means it's now been five years since the first but also because I would've expected to have more distinct memories of each than I actually do. I'm pretty sure this was the first actually cold one, and unfortunately that's the only way in which it was particularly novel - it was nice to look at the lit-up buildings and installations but there wasn't any shock of encountering the new, any charge of excitement.

(2013, 2014, 2015, 2016)

Edge of Tomorrow

I was thinking yesterday, prompted by rewatching (and again liking) Edge of Tomorrow, that it's striking how strong seems to be the intuition that all is not as it seem with human existence, the possibility appearing over and over in popular culture and philosophical thought.

(last time)

Tift Merritt - Stitch of the World

Across an extended series of good to verging on great records (Tambourine in particular still gets plenty of plays),[*] I don't know that Merritt has ever been so consistently sweetly, gently yearning as she is here. There's a bit of straight-up country, a pronounced folk hue, and slices of the americana-styled soul at which she's so adept (most notably the melancholy/triumphant "Heartache is an Uphill Climb"); at the risk of descending into cliche, it's a record that feels like a river, so smoothly does it flow.

A few stand out over the first several listens - "Heartache", the folkily chiming and Raymond Carver poem-repurposing "My Boat" (reminding me inevitably of A New Path to the Waterfall), the clean melodies and clear vocals of "Love Soldiers On", "Stitch of the World" and "Something Came Over Me" - but over time every song comes into focus, as the record as a whole reveals itself. It's a grower; it has a glow.

[*] Bramble Rose, Tambourine, Another Country, See You On The Moon, Traveling Alone

File with: Laura Cantrell, Lisa Miller

Laputa: Castle in the Sky

A sweet adventure story, filled with a sense of wonder both visual and experiential. An aside: I wonder to what extent there's something inherently wistful about anime - at least in the terrain inhabited by Miyazaki - as opposed to that being a set of more personal associations that I've built up over the years.

Graeme Macrae Burnet - His Bloody Project

Interesting on multiple levels - criminological, psychological, historical, metafictional - and page-turningly intriguing in its playing out of questions of what really happened (who committed the act is never in doubt, but why - and what it even means to ask 'why?' - are where the real mystery lie). In its layering of perspectives and truths, it reminded me of the effect had by The French Lieutenant's Woman, and it's slyly effective in eliciting sympathy for the 17 year old Roddy via the presentation of his account of the events leading up to the killing of Lachlan Broad and two others whose identities we don't discover till later, despite some odd lacunae and specifically in terms of sexual knowledge and desire, before throwing doubt that's both factual and epistemological on Roddy's version through the texts that follow.

Game of Thrones season 6

Another go-through. The big question now is really, in the run home, there are any big surprises remaining  - or is it just variations on moving the pieces around and removing the remaining obstacles till Jon, Dany and cohorts team up to defeat the White Walkers now that winter has come?

(previously)

The Encounter (Malthouse - Complicite; dir Simon McBurney)

Managed the rare feat of offering a theatrical experience of a kind that I hadn't had before, while making the novelty - the use of immersive headphones throughout - an integral element rather than a gimmick. 

Some of us are friends ... the face of time ...

Imagining the 1969 encounter between American photojournalist Loren McIntyre and the 'lost tribe' of Mayoruna people in the Amazon and McIntyre's experience of non-linguistic (telepathic) communication with their head man as part of a journey of return to a mysterious beginning which functions - on some level at least - as return to an earlier time, it weaves a 'surround-soundscape' in which the aural layers and lines (present and past, live and pre-recorded, organic and technologically-mediated, real and fictional or imagined, linearly narratival and circular) play out the concerns of the play as a whole, both as staging of McIntyre's story and as a wider playing out of questions about reality, consciousness and time. Mounted as a one man show (an impressive Richard Katz - McBurney's alternate in its NYC run), it was really very good.

(w/ Tamara and Meribah)

* * *

Also, google reveals that McBurney also directed the version of "All My Sons" that I saw on Broadway several years ago, and had this to say in an interview at the time (aptly):

The only reality of the theater exists in the mind of the audience. That audience looks collectively at what is going on on the stage and collectively imagines that this is real. ... But what is more fundamental is the notion that when everybody laughs together or, last night, when I heard people around me collectively sobbing, at that moment we are bound together not by our bodies sitting in the theater but by a collective imagination. At that moment we understand the lie that what we think is only our own, that our internal lives are only our own. At that point our collective imaginations become one imagination and my internal life becomes the same as your internal life, which is what Aristotle understood when he analyzed tragedy. It’s a collective act in which we collectively understand something about being a community together. The moment we understand that, feel it, we feel a kind of responsibility in which we must collectively help and take responsibility for each other. That is part of the definition of our humanity and, if you like, if it’s not a contradiction in terms, our animal humanity. Of course, that is part of what “All My Sons” is about. 

[NYT]