Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons - Watchmen

Re-read. It is good, though maybe the comic form both allows and forces a more straight-up approach to imagery and metaphor (clock-makers, etc). (first time)

Alison Lurie - Women and Ghosts

Nine short stories each featuring a different kind of ghost, all but one having a very definite effect on the world and on the story's female protagonist (the exception being "Counting Sheep" unless, perhaps, the true ghost in that one is either Wordsworth or some version of academic/institutional/patriarchal expectation) and all with no exceptions situating the haunting at some aspect of female experience.

Many of those hauntings could be universal in nature, but have a particular female 'coding' that Lurie works through deliberately (eg the female narrator's haunting by fat people in the story of the same name, or the suggestion of future haunting of the (again female) narrator in "Another Halloween" because of a (objectively definitely not owed) perceived obligation of female friendship not discharged to another woman - the other sites/triggers of haunting being a woman's imminent marriage to a controlling and misogynist man, another's relationship with her house and tradespeople remodelling it, a piece of antique furniture, a reluctance to commit to a man (with jewellery thrown in), pregnancy, and talent and identity). Eminently readable, even if not as terrific as I remember Love & Friendship and Foreign Affairs as having been.

Utako Shindo - "束の間の、つなぎのようなもの - That is, like a brief moment to be filled" / Andrea Gruetzner - "Tantzee" & "Erbgericht" (CCP)

Two enjoyable shows at CCP.

Utako Shindo: a reflective installation of photography, video, sketches and more. Spaces, repetition; lines, mountains; cats, moths; bark on cracks, chair and felt; nature, horizons. Japanese aesthetic; Australian setting, and explicitly located in the CCP itself.

Andrea Gruetzner: especially "Erbgericht", a series of photos of a guesthouse in Saxony, Germany, in which the framing and use of artificially-induced colour flatten out perspective in interesting ways. Below, a full one and some 'details' that particularly struck me.

Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. (Malthouse)

'Galvanise' indeed. A vivid piece of theatre whose jagged staging works in service of its ideas and messages. Some of its sections are more representational (albeit with stylised elements that keep them from being truly naturalistic) whereas others operate at a more abstract, symbolically expressionistic level, put together in a way that's deliberately messy and seething so that the more or less direct addresses to the audience that close it, a melancholy call to action and a final poignant note, cut through all the more clearly. Some of the cast (of five) were more consistently strong than others but all were committed and found the right tone and energy - this was very good.

Paul Tremblay - A Head Full of Ghosts

Absolutely gripping. Possession and exorcism are not subjects that have ever particularly interested me, which means that I'm unfamiliar with most of the roll-call of canonical (the double sense of the word is apt) texts that are called out explicitly and otherwise in A Head Full of Ghosts, or - as with The Exorcist - only aware of them at blurry second-hand, but it doesn't matter either way because this novel punches hard, its careful ambiguity about what really happened with Marjorie (and her parents) and what role Merry played genuinely horrifying in any version of events, and some of the imagery - never mind to what extent falsified by memories, cultural narrative or wilful deceit, are indelible. Phew.

In addition, in the young Merry - at least as rendered by the older (age 23) Merry is a terrific character, and Tremblay is excellent on both her voice and that of the ironic, deconstructive blogger (Karen Brissette) who present a counter-reading of the Barretts's undoing which develops an additional, troubling layer once we learn more about Brissette herself.

Kronos Quartet - Folk Songs

I've been looking forward to this ever since I heard about it, and while it's not as revelatory as I'd hoped it might be given the concept and the principals, it's a nice listen. It's constructed very deliberately: one song with each of Sam Amidon, Olivia Chaney (who I didn't know before), Natalie Merchant and Rhiannon Giddens, an instrumental version of "Last Kind Words" (which also showed up as the opener on Giddens' Tomorrow is My Turn), and then another each, in the same order, with Amidon, Chaney, Merchant and Giddens.

Given the source genre - i.e. traditional folk songs (English, American, and one from France, or at least in French) - it's not surprising that the prevailing mood is one of quiet melancholy, epitomised by Merchant's take on "Johnny Has Gone For A Soldier" (a perfect singer-song pairing which works predictably well), though the lilting and somewhat lighter-hued "Montagne, que tu es haute" (one of Chaney's, and a nice contrast to her other contribution, the long, slow, drawn-out - but quite magnificent - "Ramblin' Boy") is another highlight. The quartet keep their own contributions relatively low key, the strings often humming below and accenting the vocals more than driving the melodies in their own right, which tends to serve the songs well but maybe leaves these versions ending up as less distinctive than they might have been.

The B-52's - The B-52's

Pretty original stuff and must have been even more so in 1979! Their first lp, "Rock Lobster" and all.

Amy Engel - The Roanoke Girls

As much as I raced through it, ultimately I didn't think much of this one. I liked that it got its 'secret' on the table very early on - having dropped enough hints in the preceding pages to make it no longer a surprise - and also appreciated the atmosphere (sticky-hot Kansas foreboding in a kind of contemporary Gothic mode), and I didn't mind the somewhat hard boiled register into which the 'now' sections shift as Lane conducts her own investigation into Allegra's disappearance while grappling with everything that her return to her own originally traumatic site means.

In the end, though, I think that on two, critical beats it's psychologically simplistic or implausible to an extent that it becomes unsatisfying: the powerful allure that Yates exerts over the entire family and how the damage that the family environment does to all of the Roanoke girls plays out in their characters and lives. And I had a similar problem with the short chapterlets from the points of view of each of the individual girls - while I like the concept of providing them with their own subjectivity, the sketches are too thin to achieve the purpose (The Shining Girls did something similar, but to far better effect).

Scarlett Thomas - The Seed Collectors

The Seed Collectors isn't an easy book but it's rewarding. Thomas's experimental edge is thoroughly in evidence, and sharply honed, across the interweaving voices of the messily human, frequently unlikeable and (taking everything into account) impressively vivid characters whose lives, families and desires entangle across the novel's back-story and events; Fleur, Clem and Bryony are all intriguing and real-feeling (although I struggled to empathise with Bryony), and Charlie, Ollie and Holly likewise.

Many parallels are drawn between all of that human-ness and the (unsentimentally survival-driven) propagation of plants in nature, to which Thomas commits particularly in how she treats sex and reproduction - invariably with a flavour of domination and roughness to it, Nietzschean in its drive, heavily cross-pollinated between nearby families, and on occasion taking place between family members themselves. The book teems, and you can feel the craft in it; I've thought she had something brilliant to her since my first encounter with her writing - via PopCo - but this one shows how seriously extremely good a novelist she has become.

An aside: birds figure quite differently from plants, whether in the robin's ecstatic point of view or the transcendence - a loaded word here, given its thematic importance to the novel - that the goldfinches seem to point towards.

Tiffany Watt-Smith - The Book of Human Emotions

Delightful mini-essays on a total of 154 emotions and feelings, some with an English word to denote them and others arising from other languages (and associated societies), and all illuminating something of how we are who we are and the ways that can be enriched and changed.

"Van Gogh and the Seasons" (NGV)

Second visit, deepening the encounters of the first.

(w/ Yee Fui)

Wonder Woman

Everyone was right - Wonder Woman is heaps exciting and all round very good.

(an impromptu post dinner viewing with Tamara)

Henry James - The Turn of the Screw

A classic ghost story; the overwrought language of the governess's account adds a layer to the uncertainty about the nature of the haunting that she experiences. Very much one for reading between the lines, even if it's taken as a faithful record of what actually happened.

Macbeth (MTC; Simon Phillips)

I enjoyed the spectacle and lavishness of this Macbeth, which rang with some similar tones to Phillips's excellent Richard III and also-quite-good Hamlet (both starring Ewen Leslie during that period when he was suddenly everywhere) from a few years back.

It's a handsome - even extravagant - set, in a dark staging that has some strikingly weird imagery for an MTC production and makes a pretty good fist of its various phantoms (although, disappointingly, we don't get to see the woods of Dunsinane advancing on Macbeth's castle), and includes some interesting and effective directorial choices (eg the way the witches haunt the action throughout; the foreshadowing with both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth glancing at their hands before the murders start, and Macbeth's extinguishing of the candle several scenes before he delivers the line).

On the downside, the musical cues were a bit much, which - when taken in conjunction with the blocking of the scenes and overall use of televisual/cinematic idiom, caused the play at times to come across like an unsubtle HBO piece, and the fight between Macbeth and Macduff didn't work particularly well. Some of the line readings landed with a bit of a thud too, though the flip side is that the attempt to render them naturally (as much as possible) generally worked well. The cuts to the text are in service of streamlining the action, and having just refreshed myself on the text itself I see they're not to blame for what feels like far too long around the middle-to-end when Macbeth is offstage and instead we get a whole lot of Macduff, Ross, Malcolm and others plotting, testing each other, having their families assassinated &c.

So all up, not amazing but not bad either.

(w/ Erandathie + her friend Eleanor, and also Cass)

Alison Krauss & Union Station - Two Highways

An early one (her second, from 1989). Interesting listening to it - the fiddling was already great, whereas the vocals, while winsome, hadn't yet acquired quite the magic that it would over time. Of course, Krauss having been basically a prodigy, the record was recorded while she was 17 or maybe 18...

Stephen King - On Writing

People always mention this and how great and no-nonsense a guide to writing it is. It mixes some quite interesting personal memoir, including an account of his near-deadly accident when hit by a car in 1999, with sensible but not very groundbreaking advice about how to write fiction, with a heavy - and unsurprising - emphasis on story. The best little reminder for me: always write with your Ideal Reader in mind.

Life Without Buildings - Live at the Annandale Hotel

Sometimes a band captures lightning in a bottle and that's what Life Without Buildings did when they were going around back in the early 2000s through a bunch of singles and a sole long player. And, happily, this live album, released in 2007 but recorded in 2002 (soon before they broke up) is a cracker, the guitars ringing resonantly out and Sue Tompkins' sung-spoken declaratory repetitions of words and phrases only loosely attached to their regular meanings coming across clearly; they do a barnstorming job with all of those brilliant numbers from that one studio album of theirs, Any Other City - "PS Exclusive", "Juno", "The Leanover", "New Town" (aka 'the looking in your eyes song'), "Sorrow" - and a handful of others (though, of those, I actually would take the studio version of "Love Trinity" - which is probably my favourite, along with "New Town", from the band's small output of songs), interspersed with genuine-sounding enthusiastic stage banter in Tompkins' Glaswegian accent. One a bit from the past, and more a footnote in my own musical story than anything else, but still, pretty great.

David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

A memorable story that manages a great sense of sweep and heft even though the core of it takes place over the course of a single year (that excludes the two short sections at the end that provide closure to Jacob's extended, unconsummated love for Orito). The setting is liminal in more than one sense - 1799 in Dejima, an artificial trading island established in the bay surrounding Nagasaki as a base for the Dutch representatives of the East Indies Trading Company, during what would turn out to be close to the last gasp for the Company before collapsing under mismanagement and corruption - and it comes colourfully to life; it'll stay in the mind, I'm sure.

It's clear - and to the novel's benefit - that, whatever else, Mitchell is unashamedly committed to the pleasures of story: there's romance and adventure; piles of characters (many of whose points of views we get at various points), including seemingly upright sorts who turn dastardly and apparently villainous ones who come through in the end, and often all introduced in a single dump over a page or two; plenty of back story and world-building (often quite shamelessly delivered through dialogue of the "so remind me why X is the way that it is?" variety); humour, including via the many indignities heaped upon Jacob, from being pissed on by a monkey (during his first encounter with Miss Aibagawa no less) to banging his head on too-low entrances to rooms; chapters that tend to begin amidst action of some kind; and even ellipses at the ends of paragraphs to generate suspense that is then resolved straight after.

In different hands, some of that could easily have seemed sloppy - and, indeed, unless I missed something there were just a handful of places where that was actually the case (eg Captain Lacy's multiple belches followed by excuses based on some food consumed or other didn't seem to pay off as anything other than lazy characterisation) - but instead it contributes to a novel that is ferociously readable, aided by the frequently wonderful sentence and scene-level writing, as well as the array of themes that weave in and out. And ends on a well judged emotional note too.

I must say, I don't think The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is at the same (very high) standard as Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green, but it's still quite the feat.

In The Loop

Erandathie's been watching The Thick of It so a rewatch of In The Loop (and my first since watching the tv series myself) seemed in order. It definitely loses a yard when compared to the show, although it gains some of that back via the expansion to the US government, and while the changing around so that many of the actors are playing slightly different - and renamed - versions of their characters from the show may be necessary to avoid all kinds of distortion or retcon type issues given how the show ended, it also takes away some of the joy and built-up depth (and is blurred anyway by retaining Malcolm - not to mention his offside Jamie).

(last time; and The Thick of It 1, 2)

Lily & Madeleine - Keep It Together

Folk-pop, tasteful but a bit boring and mono-paced for the most part; the couple of exceptions, "For The Weak" and "Small Talk", edge more towards (gentle) indie-rock and show might have been.

Why Don't You Play In Hell?

35mm-fetishising amateur film-makers are given the chance to make the movie of their dreams, gonzo style amidst a real live yakuza showdown. Bloody and crazy but has neither the unhingedness nor the (still amazing, at a distance of years) coherence and visionariness of director Sion Sono's earlier Love Exposure.

Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea

Supposedly Hemingway denied all allegorical readings of this one but they're hard to dismiss. Impossible to know whether this is just pre-expectation but it did seem that there was an unusual force beneath the skin of what is, on its surface, a straightforward story of an old man and a very big fish.

Gillian Flynn - The Grownup

An extended short story, in which Flynn gives the Gone Girl treatment to a contemporary Gothic haunted house scenario.

The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes's novel + movie adaptation

The action of the story starts, as it so often does, with a letter - in this case (and, again, not unusually) from a lawyer in relation to a deceased estate, as Tony Webster is informed of the passing of Sarah Hall, mother of Veronica. And much of the story - plot - is driven by a crucially absent (and never revealed) text, in the form of Adrian's diary. So it's of a piece that the unreliability of Tony's memories and the story of his life that goes with them are very much in the foreground, in both novel and film; and, as comes with the territory, there's revelation for both narrator and reader/viewer as layers are stripped away.

The novel, while working a familiar vein, does so in a finely crafted and remarkably concise way, and retains a strong sense of mystery - ambiguity between the lines - not least about what is really going on with our narrator; it brings to mind Ishiguro (who is, I think, the best I've come across in rendering this kind of unreliable narrator at once legible and, fundamentally, unknowable). The film, by contrast, perhaps by nature of its medium presents a more defined perspective, not to mention one that is far less dark and less satisfying. (One thing that it does preserve is the ambiguity about whether Tony may have been Adrian Jr's father, although if that were true in the film version, there's nowhere near enough emotional groundwork for that truth to really land in its implications.)

Also, as an aside, while the performances are all strong (Broadbent, Rampling and Harriet Walter in particular), the film didn't help alleviate my long standing movie star crush on Emily Mortimer one bit.

The Lone Ranger

Actually pretty fun. Although of course I will forgive a lot for a western setting, plus Johnny Depp, the droll Armie Hammer, the always delicious Helena Bonham Carter, and the (albeit sadly unrecognisable) William Fichtner.

David Mitchell - Slade House

I've been looking for novels with ghosts in them, and this was one of the first that came up; I'm a few behind with David Mitchell, but given how much I've enjoyed all of his that I have read (Ghostwritten, number9dream, Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green), it was a no-brainer to pick it up. It's a one-sitting read, Mitchell's knack for summoning characters is undimmed, and the creepiness and what-happens-next are only a bit undermined by the expositiony-ness of a lot of the evil twins' dialogue.

"You have everything necessary to begin": Elizabeth Tan - Rubik

"Coca-Cola birds sing sweetest in the morning" caught my attention in Black Inc's Best Australian Stories 2016 and it reappears in Rubik - part of the kaleidoscopic, discontinuously slipping suite of story-pieces making up this marvellous (first) novel.

Even though it's a very different kind of novel, Rubik brought Our Magic Hour to mind in the specificity (and spot on-ness) of its details and how easily I was able to locate my own experience within it; it's littered with little bits of contemporary Australian-ness and twenty-something lifestyle (which bleeds easily enough into thirty-something...) which translate without any difficulty from its (mostly) Perth setting. In fact, that eye for detail is one of the most impressive aspects of a novel that has many (many aspects, and many impressive ones), doing a lot to bring its short scenes to life; cafes, house party, gallery visits, train rides, school experiences, encounters with strangers - all as if drawn from life.

But Rubik's most striking, and most effective, feature is its structuring into 15 stories which initially seem quite separate, to the extent that they're taking part in entirely different worlds from each other, before the connections emerge between them, at first only tangentially, and by the end, quite thrillingly all fitting together in a way that, without being overly neat or over-determined, is satisfying both narratively and thematically (and symbolically). Resolution in a novel as full of meta- and inter-textuality as this one is, is no easy feat, but Rubik pulls it off, coming together in a way that renders the many intersections meaningful, with form and content knitted together (which ipso facto calls for a degree of openness).

And then there's the command of voice and language in leaping from character to character and from imaginative fancy to fancy (David Mitchell-esque), while maintaining interest within all of the individual stories as well as in the larger mysteries that they set up (not to mention the meta question of how they all fit together), a sharp critique of corporate influence on society along with the occasional raised eyebrow at millennial social mores more generally, the lightness of touch that enables some welcome humour, and the ability to build and sustain mood and pace while leaping all over the place plot-wise (there is indeed a lot of plot going on) - including a piercing poignancy that seeps through the whole.

Inception is invoked, and the (imagined) novel "Seeds of Time" slips through the stories along with many other references, some almost subliminal (cellar door?); and there's an actual Rube Goldberg machine which I think it's safe to assume is both Metaphor and Synecdoche (can it be both at once?). Other things it's concerned with: disappearance, absence, loss; technology; identity - and the interplay between all of them in contemporary life.

Anyway, all told, really exceptional. I haven't read anything that I've liked this much in ages.

***

This also got me thinking about the kinds of (fiction) books that I like - but then I got distracted by wondering which ones I'd actually consider to be my favourites nowadays. Back in 2005 - i.e. basically a lifetime ago - I made a list of my then-favourite books, and it makes for interesting reading now. Anyhow, a list of favourites today would go something like this, in the order - as nearly as I can manage - that I read them (the hatted (^) ones are those that I haven't read for long enough that I'm not sure):

^ Mervyn Peake - The Gormenghast trilogy (*) (1998, 1999ish?)
^ Kate Atkinson - Behind the Scenes at the Museum (maybe 1999 or 2000)
Donna Tartt - The Secret History (*) (~2001?) and The Little Friend (*) (2002 or 2003ish I think)
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities (2002)
Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49 (*, **) (2002)
^ Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being (maybe 2002)
^ John Fowles - The French Lieutenant's Woman (2002, 2003 or thereabouts)
F Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (*, **) (2004ish?)
Haruki Murakami - A Wild Sheep Chase (*, **), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (*) and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (all first inhaled over early 2005)
^ Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita (July 2005)
Virginia Woolf - To The Lighthouse (Dec 2005)
^ Andre Gide - The Counterfeiters (*) (Jan 2006)
Siri Hustvedt - What I Loved (Sep 2006) and The Sorrows of an American (*) (Sep 2008)
Scarlett Thomas - PopCo (Jan 2007) and The End of Mr Y (March 2007)
Carson McCullers - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (*) (Oct 2008) and The Member of the Wedding (March 2010)
Kira Henehan - Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles (*) (Jan 2011)
Lev Grossman - The Magicians, The Magician King & The Magician's Land (started Nov 2013)
Kate Atkinson - Life After Life (*) (June 2014)
Rebecca Lee - Bobcat and other stories (*) (July 2014)

... to which I'm adding Rubik (June 2017!) despite the obvious risk of this being in some large part 'first flush of enthusiasm' recency bias and so on. Oh well, list in haste, repent at leisure, I guess.

Stephen Grosz - The Examined Life

This time I was paying particular attention to the motivations and desires (and beliefs and fears) and how they were manifesting in the behaviour of the patients who Grosz describes. The notes that I made on a few that stuck, some summarising case studies and others more general (many largely verbatim from the book):

Has always been afraid (parents were neglectful). Helps to know he is frightened of something. Can't allow himself to feel weak. Dependence is dangerous. So always turns on other people to alienate them.

Wasn't allowed to come home from boarding school. Voice goes up at end of sentence, even when not asking a question. Wants to hear whether others agree with what she is saying. Makes jokes when hurt/angry - when others laugh, it's a sign they believe her feelings and reality.

Parents had drunken rows; mother had tantrums and hit him. Now imagines a house in France with a 'magic door' that he can open anywhere and be there immediately. Thinks about it when cut off (fears separation), frightened, angry.

Used to wet bed. Mother cleaned up and never discussed with him, nor mentioned to father (who would be furious). Something only they shared. Now tells lies as a way of making a mess and hopes listener says nothing, and so becomes a partner in a secret world.

Sent away to live with grandmother just before younger sister born, and stayed for several months. As a child, feared being sent away again if she allowed herself to feel her own feelings, so she didn't learn to recognise what she really felt. Example of father telling her that she couldn't write a card to her teacher saying she loved her teacher even more than her mother; repeated when her partner makes a comment about how she feels about another person. [there really is a particular pathos to a lonely child]

***

We may never find a way to voice a story that our childhood teaches us, because we don't have the words. But then we express ourselves through other means.

Paranoia may express a need to not be forgotten, overlooked or insignificant. It may be worse to be forgotten than to be hated. 

Lovesickness may be a form of regression - in longing for intense closeness, we are like infants craving our mothers' embrace. This is why we are most at risk when we are struggling with loss or despair, or when we are lonely and isolated.

Haunting makes us feel - makes us alive to - some fact about the world, some piece of information, that we're trying to avoid. ... Scrooge changes because the ghosts unpick his delusion that you can live a life without loss. They undo his delusion by haunting Scrooge with the losses he has already experienced, the losses now being endured around him, and the inevitable loss of his own life and possessions. ... sometimes we change most when we repair our relation to the lost, the forgotten, the dead. [particularly germane to a number of things being sorted through in my mind, and which I've been reading about]

Some people fear being seen as they believe they truly are.

(last time)

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues

Doesn't have the verve of the original but maybe some of that's diminishing returns from what is essentially a repeat of the first, right down to a reprise of the quick escalation (the one way in which the sequel tops the original is in the cameos that it rings in for the fight, not least Kirsten Dunst as the angel who declares the fight commenced).

Rick and Morty seasons 1 and 2

Huge fun once again.

Two particular things this time around.

One - the effective use of music. Notably: the truly melancholy strains of Mazzy Star to set the mood when Rick and Morty replace their dead other-selves (to signal that this is an actually traumatic, weighty moment - at least for Morty); the triumphant burst of “Seal My Fate” at the feel-good near-climax of the alternate reality in which Jerry and Beth discover they’re meant to be with each other; appropriately sinister Blonde Redhead as just-unveiled evil Morty walks offscreen; Elliott Smith’s music as an important plot point (he remains totemic for me even though I’ve never really immersed/wallowed in his music); Rick humming "Baker Street" for no apparent reason; NIN’s original “Hurt” adding some weight to the end of season 2.

Two - Rick’s sheer nihilistic meanness (e.g. the robot whose purpose is to pass butter). And also the way that it’s explained, in terms of the vastness of the universe and the pointlessness of caring about anything in the face of said vastness. And the glee that he takes in it.

(last time: 1, 2) 

Pontypool

In which the virus spreads through language, making this a postmodernist zombie film (well, a more explicitly postmodernist zombie film than they probably all already are). Trust the Canadians! Indeed, it’s set in a small snowed-in town somewhere in Ontario, with the action even more confined by never leaving the radio station from which Grant Mazzy and his production team of two continue broadcasting as the reports - and, eventually, inevitably, the arrival of the infection - grow steadily more alarming (unless you count the extremely odd after-credits epilogue). Anyhow, it’s plenty likeable, and that was augmented for me once I realised that the younger of the two others (Laurel-Ann) reminded me quite a lot of someone I know (SB).

Robert Plant - Dreamland

From 2002, and heading in the direction of the trio of great, rootsy records - solo and with various bands and collaborators - that Plant has put out over the last decade or so (Raising Sand, Band of Joy, lullaby ...) but without the sureness of touch that he'd subsequently develop in mingling his disparate musical interests (rock, blues, folk, world). It's all covers and most of them are carefully but indistinctly done, the exceptions being "Morning Dew" (a Grateful Dead number that finds a good groove over its course), "Song to the Siren" (done ethereally, as if there's any other way) and "Darkness, Darkness" (Jesse Colin Young).

Sia - This Is Acting

Personality and style are tricky concepts in pop music, and you'd have to say that Sia is aware of this as anyone, and on This Is Acting - a collection of songs that she originally wrote for other (mega) artists including Adele, Beyonce etc - that plays out especially interestingly.

Most of these songs are very good, and mostly they sound kind of like Sia and also kind of like plenty of other major pop singers of the moment - especially the most straight ahead ones, which also tend to be the best (i.e. "Bird Set Free", "Alive", "Unstoppable", "House On Fire" (maybe - my radar about straight ahead-ness proves somewhat scattered), "One Million Bullets" - although that's the one exception in that she didn't write it with another singer in mind), though there's also the slowed-down, quirky "Reaper" which is differently ace. Taken as a whole, it's a notch below 1000 Forms of Fear but its better moments would have fit seamlessly on that other, which is telling in itself.

"Every Brilliant Eye: Australian Art of the 1990s" (NGV Australia)

An array, with lots to like. Mostly drawn from the NGV's collection so many were familiar (but still interesting re-presented in this context) and plenty more were new; examples of the former included three of Leah King-Smith's untitleds, one of Bill Henson's cut-ups, Constanze Zikos's "Fake flag", Kathy Temin's "Duck-rabbit problem" and Ricky Swallow's "Model for a sunken monument" (the large melting Darth Vader head). I also felt like I'd maybe seen Susan Norrie's excellent dark-toned installation "Inquisition" before, and likewise A Constructed World's "Player guitar", both forcefully direct but also enjoyably evasive. In addition, I've seen at least a reproduction of one of the pieces from Kristin Headlam's "O rose" series before (as in Blake):

I also liked: Mikala Dwyer's "I.O.U."; Annette Bezor's feminist "No"; and the two glossy Patricia Piccinini photos (I think the first things of hers I've seen other than her memorable cute-disturbing animal-human sculptures).

Spoon - Hot Thoughts

Well hello (or ‘knock knock’), Spoon have still got it. There’s a bit more in the way of electronic elements, a bit more reverb, one song (“Pink Up”) with a ghostly steel drum and vibraphone groove, and a closer (“Us”) that taps experimental jazz, but in its bones this is simply another excellent Spoon record, catchy, muscular and (still!) fresh as always, in which the hits - “Do I Have To Talk You Into It”, say, or “Can I Sit Next To You” - hit as joy-inducingly as ever.

Ernest Cline - Ready Player One

Despite being neither a video/computer game player nor quite the right age to have grown up with the popular culture of the 80s, I was fairly sure I’d like this - and I did race through it after starting it in the Collingwood library, with enough of the references being familiar enough to add a thick layer to my enjoyment of Wade’s/Parzival’s quest to find the ‘egg’ hidden somewhere in the immersive OASIS virtual world that has attained massive popularity in Cline’s quite dystopian version of the 2040s.

Marie Darrieussecq - My Phantom Husband

... or, as it is - more poetically and more aptly - in the French, Naissance des fantomes. 

Which - appositely - makes me think of this, which I came across in a different context the other day: “And in the repetition or return of play, how could the phantom of the centre not call to us?” (JD). (An aside: it’s surprising how few results come up when googling for “absent center” or indeed “centre”.)

It’s true that the - unnamed, I think - narrator does experience her husband’s vanishing, a disappearance which then haunts everything else. But, more than that, the absence colours her experience of the world to such an extent that ghosts of all kinds are indeed born and become present to her perceptions as the familiar ceases to be recognisable. The phenomenology is one of  metaphysical and epistemological destabilisation and slippage, rather than just the psychological uncertainty, anxiety and unhappiness that might directly flow from such a sudden, inexplicable disappearance.

It’s in the first person - the only possible voice - and the past tense works well. A strong sense of the narrator’s personality comes through - in a similar way to in Amelie Nothomb’s books, maybe not coincidentally another French language author - and Darrieussecq does a fine job in bringing the reader into her narrator’s consciousness, using language in a way that demands concentration (sentences change direction mid-way through or have numerous unexpected clauses; metaphor, simile and imagery in general proliferate and take all kinds of paths; commas are frequently used in place of a more expected - and grammatically correct - punctuation mark, as a way of both conveying the flow of thought and throwing the reader out of any familiar way of engaging with it). Less successful are some of the flourishes in the writing, which get just a bit too ornate for me in places, although even those are mostly a matter of degree, given their consistency with the type of mental experience of the world that the narrator is having.

Max Richter - The Blue Notebooks

To give a flavour, Deutsche Grammophon acquired Richter's catalogue a while back and reissued this one in 2014, but it originally came out on Fat Cat about a decade ago. From the liner note, we learn that The Blue Notebooks was:

 ... his first with Fat Cat Records and featured actress Tilda Swinton reading extracts from Kafka. "One of the reasons I sent my demo to Fat Cat was because I heard the first Sigur Ros album and it sounded to me like Arvo Part with guitars" ...

A linked set of short pieces - ranging from just over a minute to about eight and a half minutes at the upper end - taking in piano, electronics, violin, viola and cello, there is an element of minimalism to The Blue Notebooks, but also a dramatic expressionism in the building and repeating lines that run through it which takes on overtones of the spiritual ... which altogether makes Arvo Part a pretty reasonable reference point, with the electronic elements subtle and used only for shading and texture rather than being in the foreground, although Richter's work is maybe more immediately penetrable.

Anyhow, this is pretty great. Contemporary classical I guess but really just music.

(via)