Final Portrait

All in all, a bit of a nothing film, although it slightly grew on me towards the end as I realised that it was a genuine effort at depicting the creative process, its struggles and its stakes; Geoffrey Rush the main attraction, Armie Hammer always enjoyable, Sylvie Testud and Clemence Poesy providing ornamental (but well played) Frenchness.

(w/ Erandathie)

Kader Attia (ACCA)

Quite liked this, including the thread of trauma that runs through the survey of Attia's work. I didn't get a super strong sense of voice (or vision) from the works as a whole though.

(w/ Hayley)

Lilli Carré - Heads or Tails

'Stories by Lilli Carré,' it says on the cover, and that's what these are, ranging from very short to substantial and with an impressive diversity of illustration styles. And they're marvellous - precisely, slippingly poetic, and never more so than in the longest story in the book, "The Carnival", which is one of my favourite things I've read in a long time, in this or any other form.

Feist - Pleasure

Whatever else it is, Pleasure is strikingly personal, in the sense that it feels every inch like an expression of some part of Leslie Feist without regard to saleability or expectation. We know she can write wonderfully warm melodies (not to mention bittersweet ones) and a hell of a chorus when she wants to - never more in evidence than on last album Metals - but on this outing she sticks almost exclusively to a moody, stretched out, slow-burn rockishness that I would enjoy more if it more frequently caught really alight, but nonetheless, has a lot going on.

Arcade Fire - Everything Now

It was bound to happen eventually and now it has: the Arcade Fire have made a bad album. Funeral has stayed great, Neon Bible was a pleasant surprise of a second album, and then I went into each of The Suburbs and Reflektor expecting them to be really not good only to discover in succession that actually they were each excellent, but Everything Now, unfortunately, lands with a thud.

Lots of songs that seem like they're trying to be tight and funky but are actually just dull, only two ("Creature Comfort" and "Electric Blue") that I'd count on the positive side of the ledger (also, "Put Your Money On Me" would maybe beat break-even if it didn't go on for so long), and oh I guess "We Don't Deserve Love" is quite nice too but by the time we reach it at album's end, it's too late. And a first for this band: in "Good God Damn", a song that makes me cringe a bit in embarrassment. 

Eilen Jewell - Down Hearted Blues

How knowing is the seeming tautology in the album's title? Fairly knowing I think, which doesn't detract from the sincerity with which Jewell tackles the titular song, nor any of the other of the twelve all somewhat lesser known blues songs included here (the only one I knew before was "Nothing in Rambling" courtesy of Lucinda Williams' version).

Anyhow, Down Hearted Blues has been creeping up on me a bit. On initial listens it seemed fine enough, but maybe a bit too unadornedly monochrome, with quite a lot of these takes quite clean vocals+electric guitar+sparing drums, without the gleeful variation and dynamism that's created many of the highlights of Jewell's previous records - but it's popped a bit more on the last couple of spins, so perhaps one of those that I need to live with some more...

(Sea of Tears, Queen of the Minor Key, Live at the Narrows, Sundown Over Ghost Town).

Haruki Murakami - Men Without Women

I'm not sure if it might be that I've been away from Murakami for a little while and so I've forgotten a touch what he's like, or perhaps that I've so thoroughly internalised his world that it seems normal, or maybe that there actually has been a discernible shift in his style, but overall Men Without Women, like his most recent novel Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, seemed to me to tend considerably more realistic than has been typical for him in the past.

I'm pretty sure there's only one story, "Samsa in Love", which is out and out fantastic, and it's the weakest; having said that, the one with the strongest sense of the uncanny, "Kino", is by a fair margin the best, and it may not be a coincidence that (apart from the fable-like "Samsa") it's also the most resolved of the seven collected here, albeit with resolution being a somewhat relative term as always when it comes to Murakami.

Bill Willingham and Shawn McManus - Thessaly: Witch for Hire

Lunchtime reading today. Thessaly was always one of my favourite minor characters in Sandman, and this four-issue series takes a lighter road with her and is easy to read, though its resolution turns on an all too predictable language thing (guessable as soon as the oracle tells her that nothing and no one can stop that chaotic creature that's coming for her).

"Rene Magritte: The Revealing Image - Photos and Films" (Latrobe Regional Gallery)

A few photos of Magritte and his family, and more taken by Magritte himself spanning from around his thirties (in the 1930s) onwards, the subjects being some combinations of himself, his wife Georgette, his friends, and one or two family members including his brother Paul, as well as some short 'home video' type movie recordings that he 'scripted' and made in similar vein, including many stagings of scenarios and images that also made their way into his paintings. Nothing life-changing, but the playfulness of it all, not to mention the wholehearted willingness of those close to him to participate in the clowning, is a good reminder that, for all the seriousness and perfectionism apparent in his paintings, there is a strong playful stream of humour running through his work and ideas too.

(w/ trang - company needed for trip out to Morwell)

Anne Lamott - Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

I read this on a recommendation, and it was a good one. Plenty of reinforcements and some new ways of looking at things; a good companion to the Colum McCann one. A resonant extract:

If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it.

And a little summary laundry list of some of Lamott's 'things she knows about writing': Short assignments, shitty first drafts, one-inch picture frames, Polaroids, messes, mistakes, partners, where 'Polaroids' is shorthand for the way that a piece slowly develops as you work on it, its true subject maybe only gradually revealing itself as something very different than where you started with your attention.

Yerma (National Theatre live - Young Vic)

This was exceptional - the first of these NT 'live' screenings that has really made me wish I was there in person. A Simon Stone re-telling - and you can really see his distinctive stamp on it - of a Federico Garcia Lorca play starring Billie Piper and Brendan Cowell, it's gripping from the get go and intensely dramatic in every sense, feeling both universal and symbolic, and contemporary and filled with real people and real actions. "Barren", and of course there's blood by the end.

(w/ Cass)

"Tree of Codes" (Wayne McGregor, Olafur Eliasson & Jamie xx)

It was Olafur Eliasson's involvement that caught my attention and Jamie xx's on top of it that made this a must-see and both of their work comes through very clearly and spectacularly in this context. And because I'm basically ignorant when it comes to dance, contemporary or otherwise, Wayne McGregor's name didn't mean anything to me (I gather he is big), but the dancing, both as choreographed and performed by dancers from McGregor's company and the Paris Opera Ballet (whose collaboration with Alex Prager, incidentally, has brought me some pleasure at intervals over the past few months) is terrific, in part because of all the ways in which it's precisely imprecise, unfluid and out of sync, creating all kinds of interesting effects in conjunction with the mirrors in Eliasson's staging.

So I thought "Tree of Codes" was great even though somehow I struggled to stay 'in' it for the whole time - and it's relatively brief, at only a bit over an hour, at that. Maybe it was just one of those things, compounded by the somewhat limited visibility from our (very close to the stage) seats. But, notwithstanding, overall it was definitely something, with moments that were really sublime - most frequently when there were only a limited number of dancers on stage, two or three or four - and a general sense of joy.

Incidentally, made me think a little bit of that Knife opera "Tomorrow, in a year", also from the Melbourne Festival a few years back - but much more successful (and more focused on the dance aspect).

(w/ trang and Meribah)

Sia - We Are Born

There could be no better sign for a pop record than to have you actually smiling within its first few seconds on a first listen, but that's what the kick-off to "The Fight" did for me. And the album charges on from there, with Sia's sidelong hook prowess and range on full display across its first half, through "Clap Your Hands" (maybe the leanest and most straight ahead of them), "Stop Trying", "You've Changed" (with its repeated expectation upending pause and swoop on '... for the better'), "Be Good To Me" and "Bring Night". It drops off from there, but still.

(1000 Forms of Fear; This Is Acting)

David Bowie - Station to Station

Well, this one is excellent! And excellently enigmatic. Six long songs which defy explanation but grab hold tight.

Lorde - Melodrama

Very good. Space, rhythm and dynamics, with an array of interesting hooks and enough melody to tie it all together.

"The Lifted Brow mixtape"

Well this is fun - The Lifted Brow made a mixtape. My favourites are all basically lo-fi, could-be-bedsit indie-pop - Jade Imagine's "Esteem", Milk Teddy's "Too Old To Cry" and Waterfall Person's "I Really Like This" - plus the impressively smooth and soulful "Sex Appeal" by Pillow Pro, which reminds me of All Saints (in a good way obviously) and Jessie Ware.

Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, Launceston

Various exhibitions when I happened to visit, including one on Frederick Strange, a colonial painter of Launceston (I liked the watercolours more, but it was the oil paintings that drew me more deeply into imagining what it would actually have been like to see and live in 19th century Tasmania), and 'Art Quilt Australia 2017', the main room of which I walked straight through on first pass, so uninterested was I, but on a more careful look, lots of them proved worth the closer examination, with the best being genuinely painterly.

Below: Alison Withers, "Cassidy's gap"; Jill Rumble, "Telling secrets III"; Louise Wells, "Dusk"; Cherry Johnston, "Circles of life"; Brenda Gael Smith, "Flourish".

 

 

 

Peter Høeg - Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow

It's quite something how many little lines, images and scenes had stayed with me from when I previously read this, nearly a decade ago - a testament to the sharpness of Høeg's writing and his ability to find unusual (and evidently memorable) angles on things.

The main reason I went back and re-read it was the first person present tense voice in which it's written, and I must say that while the voice contributes a lot to its distinctiveness, this time round I'm not sure what purpose is served by the use of the present tense in particular; also interesting is the way that the narrative jumps around in time quite a bit, and that Peter often speaks in the present tense.

Other things: extensive use of simile; often funny (Smilla Jaspersen really is a wonderful creation); frequent misdirects (e.g. Smilla internally monologues in one direction and then turns around and says that what's going on with her is its exact opposite) - the last of which are frequently the entry points into a scene, serving treble purpose as backstory-delivery, characterisation and avoiding jumping straight in with either the bluntness of action or the filler-ness of scene description. Also, it's still a great read, pacy, atmospheric, philosophical and human.

"The Museum of Everything" & the collection (MONA)

There's something about MONA - my relationship with the museum is disproportionate to only having visited twice before (admittedly, both extended visits), in 2011 and 2014, and so this trip came with plenty of existing associations, both general and in relation to individual works.

The current exhibition, "The Museum of Everything", is a 'takeover' by the travelling museum of the same name, installing an array of work by artists who are self-taught and outside the traditional art-making system (many with some kind of disability or mental illness); a roomful of Henry Darger in the middle but much, much else too. Not a field ('style' doesn't feel quite right) that has ever much appealed to me, but it does throw up some unusual modes of expressing perspectives and personal truths, as well as some interesting through-lines to the art canon.

In the first of those categories, ones that struck me included Marcel Storr's fantastically detailed cathedrals, William Mortensen's 1920s witchcraft photos and Ionel Talpazan's 'self-powered UFOs'.

And in the second category, notable ones were Hilma af Klint's theosophical watercolours from the 1930s, and Joseph Yoakum's mountain ranges and Anna Zemankova's 'interior botanies' (both from the 1960s).

Also very pleasing: the anonymous 'devil drawings' from early in the 19th century and Louis DeMarco's 'personal aphorisms'.

The presentation of that exhibition is quite conventional in some ways, going room by room according to loose theme - an interesting but, I think, effective choice to present and make some sense of a collection of pieces that (1) don't conform to any particular stylistic patterns or movements and (2) comprise the exhibition's argument for the value or interest of works created by outsiders.

* * *

And then there was the general collection, much of which I'd seen on previous visits, meaning that some of the most striking have taken on a difference valence through familiarity and time, as well as the space itself now being considerably less overwhelming, and either I've just gotten used to it or it actually has veered just a touch more conventional over the years. Anyhow, of note:

• "Kryptos" (Brigita Ozolins) was the one that I most wanted to revisit. It feels like the externalisation of something - some chamber - within myself. Still powerful.
• I visited the 'death chamber' for the first time, having been put off by the queues on previous occasions. Mummy and 'mummy' in a darkened, water-filled chamber through which one moves via a series of steps, a disquieting print on one wall that turns out to be a Serrano. It didn't move me, even though I got to go in alone.
• Took a beanbag for a few songs' worth of Candice Breitz's "Queen (A Portrait of Madonna)". Good for the soul.
• There were several Pat Brassington photos that I don't think were there before - good.
• Another new one: Patrick Hall's "Lure", its spectral faces projected onto fishing lures and morbid accompanying text, is terrific.
• The untitled Jannis Kounellis with the goldfish is sharp.
• Always good to see Nolan in this context, including the monumental "Snake".

Blade Runner 2049

I'm not sure yet where my feelings on this one will land but on a first impression Blade Runner 2049 is impressive, especially in the way it uses visuals to set scene and story, with several of the shots having an immediately iconic feeling[*] - it's one of the most beautiful films to come along in some while - and in the way it handles its relationship with the original: a convincingly similar visual style and mood, coverage of the same themes (perhaps to a fault, to some degree) and building on the outlines of its events,[**] and for all of that neither parodically repeating its beats nor winkingly referential, as its own story, Gosling's K and his trajectory and the way it intersects with the wider arc of replicant consciousness and self-determination, holds the attention.

[*] Maybe not surprising given that the director is Denis Villeneuve, of Arrival and Sicario.
[**] Although it's interesting - even though it's faithful to the themes and enigmas of its 1982 predecessor, including in the details and perspectives that it adds to its story, somehow the original remains very much its own thing rather than being retrospectively altered by this new chapter.

"Experimenta Make Sense: International Triennial of Media Art" (RMIT Gallery)

Sometimes I suspect I'm not a very good consumer of art, and maybe that goes especially for contemporary art, as my tendency is to hop magpie-like through exhibitions (even if going piece by piece, my attention may flit along the way) and seize upon the however many works make some kind of immediate-ish impression on me, even though their effect will often deepen upon prolonged exposure.

Here what that meant was that I didn't really engage with many of the piece in an exhibition whose concept - explorations of what it means to live in the present, today, given the technological, digital and informational intensity/mediation/overwhelmingness that characterises lived experience now - is v interesting but focused on the two that pulled me in, Ella Barclay's "Access Remote Fervour" (2017), the installation notes for which were perfect in both orientating me to the work and opening pathways to further engagement with its two mistily liquid tanks on which blurry projections of swimmers move - The interplay between the physical world and the immaterial world of ideas, data, the cloud and the internet are explored in this work. Taking inspiration from the ways humans store and transfer information - from written text in ancient Mesopotamia to giant underground server farms - the work considers the ethereal nature of data and thought. The two tanks suggest the presence of a consciousness within these watery capsules, pointing to something of the human soul caught in the flux of the electronic transfer of data and light:

and "Eremocene (Age of Loneliness)", Keith Armstrong with Luke Lickfold and Matthew Davis (2017), which presents three literal perspectives on a single glowingly translucent 'object' periodically regenerating, suspended and unfurling in the dark.

Laura Marling - Semper Femina

In which Laura Marling hits upon something of unusual texture and (in the good, unprecious way) delicacy - sinuous and quietly intoxicating, and often with a sneaky groove that flows as much from the odd sung-spoken cadence as from the combined effect of the instruments. Those features work in tandem, say, on "Wild Fire", and when the electric guitar finally arrives in something like full voice on the last track, "Nothing, Not Nearly", it's to equally good effect. And, while I'm only a couple of albums into her discography - I Speak Because I Can, Once I Was An Eagle - she's rarely, if ever, been as gorgeously woozy as on standouts "The Valley" and "Don't Pass Me By".

Flash Fiction International: Very Short Stories from Around the World edited by James Thomas, Robert Shapard and Christopher Merrill

I don't know what it says that my favourites tend to be from the anglophone world despite the breadth of countries covered by the 86 short short stories collected here - personal (culture-shaped) taste, an actually higher overall quality of those ones (perhaps due to either the form being more mature or the best examples being easier to source, not least by all being available in English, possibly via translation), some combination of the two? In fact, although this is almost certainly coincidence, I think my favourite might be the one Australian entry, Josephine Rowe's "The Vending Machine at the End of the World".

The editors deliberately define their scope by feel rather than word length, but in practice the ceiling seems to be around 700 or 800 words, and those that get towards that upper limit feel noticeably longer than the rest. The best do register as a flash of insight or feeling (or both), maybe not exactly out of the corner of the eye, but certainly in motion, and don't rely too much on either the staging of a single symbol, metaphor or image (whether in a more realist/revelatory or Kafka or Borges-type vein), or a final beat, turn or twist that gives the whole thing meaning or shock.

The other stand outs for me: "Please Hold Me The Forgotten Way" by H J Shepard (US), "The Waterfall" by Alberto Chimal (Mexico - the other that might be my favourite, making particularly good use of the short short form), "An Imperial Message" by F Kafka (Czechoslovakia; I've read this one before, and obviously the prohibition on being Kafka-esque doesn't apply to Kafka himself!), "The Baby" by Maria Negroni (Argentina), "Aglaglagl" by Bruce Holland Rogers (US), "Appointment in Samarra" 'as retold by W Somerset Maugham' (England), "The Hawk" by Brian Doyle (US), "That Colour" by Jon McGregor (England).

Reading this made me wonder about the limits of such a short form; the best ones are very good, but I'm not sure whether it's possible to create the same kind of deep effects with so few words that the best 'normal length' short stories can. But: they can probably do something different, which is reason enough.

Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2

Doesn't have the surprise factor of the first one but nonetheless recaptures many of its joys, even if it does hit us a bit too much over the head with its 'family' theme. Some great, colourful visuals too, like paintings come to life (especially on Ego's planet).

Rick and Morty season 3

Yes! There's so much going on in this show that you could nearly miss all the actual character development - the way Morty gradually comes into his own, say - not to mention the perspective shifts and corkscrew zoom-ins on Rick's god-like powers and what this actually means for his humanity and the relationships between him and his family members (and theirs with each other). Anyway, they have definitely tapped into something with this whole show, and season 3 gets deeper and better I reckon.

(seasons 1 & 2)

Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

Quite the feat to find and stay in the unusual register that The Intuitionist occupies for the whole of its length - an extended allegory for race in America in which the central, vivid metaphors (elevators, Empiricism, Intuitionism, the black box) and their associated departures from 'natural' reality never overpower plot, character and direct thematic connection to the world we know (Lila Mae Watson feels real, crucially), although some of the more overtly, and knowingly, generic elements threaten to tip the balance at times (e.g. the entry of Jim and John, and their double act in wisecracking and philosophising) ... where the genre is noir/detective by way of Pynchon and even Auster and steeped entirely in blackness.

Also impressive is the sense of humour, including at the sentence level - 'Even the female students have to wear Safeties, making for so many confused, wrenching swivels that Midwestern's physician christened the resulting campus-wide epidemic of bruised spinal muscles "Safety Neck" '; (of John) 'He's still searching for a concordance between the loss of his virginity (purchased) and an ankle sprain (accidental) exactly three years later, give or take an hour'; 'One young gentleman with grave eyes tendered a blueprint that consisted only of an empty shaft and "an eerie dripping sound". No one was very happy with the high marks Morton received for such frivolity.'

And the way that while there are obvious connections to be made between the novel's key symbols and real world figures - elevators and ascension, Empiricism and Intuitionism bearing relations to whiteness and blackness or perhaps Republicans and Democrats, the black box as both aspiration to perfection and by-definition MacGuffin - the mapping is not too pat or without complexity.

So what is Intuitionism? It is 'about communicating with the elevator on a nonmaterial basis', constructing an elevator 'from the elevator's point of view'. There is another world beyond this one. A way of making sense of the phenemenon, if it exists, of there being a discrepancy between the mass of an elevator before disassembly and after. But then: 'What Intuitionism does not account for: the catastrophic accident the elevator encounters at that unexpected moment on that quite ordinary ascent, the one who will reveal the device for what it truly is.' That which cannot be explained by either Intuitionism or Empiricism. And finally (and it's the visit of Fulton's - black - sister that brings this to the surface of his own understanding): 'Intuitionism is communication. That simple. Communication with what is not-you.'