Call Me By Your Name OST

A nicely evocative soundtrack which called (ha ha) to mind both the film itself and the general air of a Sofia Coppola soundtrack, especially Marie Antoinette: moody piano pieces, early 80s synth-pop hits (only smokily, distantly familiar to me: the Psychedelic Furs' "Love My Way", F R David's "Words", Giorgio Moroder and Joe Esposito's "Lady Lady Lady"; also Loredana Berte's "J'adore Venise" and Franco Battiato's "Radio Varsavia", which are of the same vintage and also both Italian), the two Sufjan Stevens songs I'd already heard, "Mystery of Love" (which I always want to call "Mysteries of Love" because of Blue Velvet) and "Visions of Gideon" and a smattering of others.

Listening to it also led me down the road of thinking about memorable song/scene pairings (obviously a wholly personal list):

• The first that came to mind, no doubt thanks to the 80s connection: "I Ran" in La La Land, a pitch perfect scene, though I think watching it cost me a bit of my heart to Emma Stone
• Enid (that would be Thora Birch) dancing to "Jaan Pehechaan Ho" in her room as Ghost World opens
• Winona Ryder and friends dancing to "My Sharona" in the service station, Reality Bites 
• From the same film, the big dramatic "All I Want Is You"-tracked sequence (the details had blurred before I refreshed my memory with youtube, but the way it made me feel had not)
• Any number from Moulin Rouge, but maybe especially Ewan McGregor singing "Your Song" to Nicole Kidman and its sheer exultant romanticism
• Uma Thurmann in Pulp Fiction to "Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon" (Urge Overkill) - like many of these, encountered at an impressionable age
• Post-party comedown in Marie Antoinette - "Tommib Help Buss" by Squarepusher
• Joseph Gordon Levitt's triumphant walk to that Hall and Oates song in (500) Days of Summer
• "The Killing Moon" in the first scene, and "Under The Milky Way" at the party, Donnie Darko
• "Kissing You", gazes meeting through the fish tank, Romeo + Juliet
• Not a movie, but "Breathe Me" as Six Feet Under ends, wow
• Then there's the "Wise Up" montage in Magnolia
• "The Lonely Shepherd" and Hattori Hanzo's sword in Kill Bill vol 1 (immediately after "Kaifuku suru kizu" no less, which exists in relation to both that film and the amazing All About Lily Chou-Chou)

Excluding:

• Opening and closing credits songs unless they're part of the film itself (a few that leap to mind: Beck's cover of "Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime" at the end of Eternal Sunshine, the Greenhornes' "There Is An End" in Broken Flowers, Anna von Hausswolf's "Track of Time" over the closing credits of Personal Shopper).
• Songs that are totally associated with a film as a whole but not, at least for me, any one particular scene (e.g. "California Dreaming" and that cover of the Cranberries' "Dreams" in Chungking Express, "Non, je ne regrette rien" in Inception, "The Blower's Daughter" in Closer).
• Songs that I've learned to associate with particular scenes through sheer force of watching the film over and over and/or listening to the soundtrack (e.g. Heart's "Magic Man" and Trip Fontaine's locker walk in The Virgin Suicides)
• Karaoke versions (ok, there's only one, obvious example here)

I'm sure I've missed plenty, but those are the ones that have proved closest to the surface.

Deborah Levy - Hot Milk

I decided I liked Hot Milk enough to want to own it (unusual for me these days), and took the opportunity to re-read it. It's just as elusive and vivid a second time through, its poetic cadences as sharp, even reading forewarned about the paths it will take.

(first time)

The Shape of Water

What a beautiful film. It reminded me of earlyish (Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children, Amelie - though that last probably doesn't really count as early any more) Jeunet, especially the opening voiceover-narrated scene and the establishing ones that follow, in its shadowy green-hued palette, fairytale notes and overall structure, and mixing of whimsy, wonder and darkness. (That thought caused me to think about how wonder and longing relate to each other, how our own relationships to both emotions change over time, and how that in turn affects our responses to movies - and other artforms, but especially movies I think.)

I think it's Sally Hawkins' performance - almost entirely voiceless, no less - that really makes it (and the quality of the practical effects creating the aquatic creature), along with del Toro's relative restraint in presenting the story, which allows its emotional high points to land all the more effectively, especially the flooded bathroom. It has an emotional truth and groundedness which meant I never questioned its central fantastic element, or fell into reading it primarily in symbolic terms (although the outsider status shared not only by Elisa but also her friends with the creature is made explicit), and allowed its imaginative force to operate in tandem with an emotional one. I still think Pan's Labyrinth was probably del Toro's high point but this was really good.

The Good Place seasons 1 & 2

I've been a bit under the weather so I caved in and watched this, a show I was sure I'd enjoy given (a) the increasingly ecstatic reviews, (b) it has the same showrunner as the glorious - and gloriously affirmatory - Parks & Rec (Mike Schur), (c) Kristen Bell (always a delight), (d) (to a lesser extent but still) Ted Danson. Also I accidentally ran into a spoiler online the other day, which was a minor pity, but also clued me in that The Good Place is a genuine extended-arc show.

And yes I have very much enjoyed these first two seasons, including the bonuses of all the philosophy (and the show being actually interested in ethics and what it means to be a good person), its willingness to steer straight into the crazy from time to time (eg flying shrimp, unicorn) and the cleverness of the writing (really, all the way through, but the structuring from start to finish of each season, and the zinging opening few episodes of season 2 and its reboots especially stand out). Not sure whether to count the liberal use of cliffhangers at the end of episodes as a bonus, but it certainly adds to the show's propulsiveness, although the amount of plot it crams in would probably have achieved that anyway. And it's nice that it is so sweet-natured and optimistic without ever getting saccharine.

Bell and Danson predictably (but far from boringly) great, in the small gestures (eg Michael's attempt at fist pumping; scores of Eleanor's expressions and intonations) as well as the overall; my favourite of the others would have to be Tahani (Jameela Jamil) and Janet (D'Arcy Carden) though they're all strong. The clean, bright, colourful look of the whole helps with its easy consumability, as does the casual diversity of its cast (main and supporting), both of which also befit the Good Place itself.

Eleanor Davis - How to Be Happy

This collection of graphic short stories seems to have had good reviews but it didn't say much to me. The art is good; the stories are rather too insubstantial. I did like "Stick and String", in which a musician strumming what looks like a lute or maybe it's just a guitar - "zum zumm zumm zum zumm zum" and on and on - finds love in the forest.

Tracy Chapman - Greatest Hits

Things I've learned from listening to this compilation:
1. Tracy Chapman has an awful lot in common with 10,000 Maniacs. Obviously this is a good thing but it's also a surprise!
2. She has a number of good songs beyond "Fast Car" and "Talkin' Bout A Revolution". For example, "Telling Stories", "Change", "Bang Bang Bang", and a neat live cover of "Stand By Me".
3. More of a re-learn but "Fast Car" is genuinely great. I reckon when I was first hearing it on the radio as a child, it already carried a nostalgic charge arising from a combination of the song's intrinsic qualities and the feeling it had of having always been there (it was released in 1988), and that's only deepened with time.

Renni Browne and Dave King - Self-Editing for Fiction Writers (2nd ed)

This one was super useful and very much about the mechanics of fiction writing (and self-editing); I've been selective about the 'how to' books I've read, and this is the first I've come across that I felt I could usefully study. I was pleased to see I've learned to look for many of these things in my own writing (sometimes intuitively and without a name for them - e.g. proportion), giving me a better chance of doing them well, not that surprised to spot other habits to which I am prone but which, pointed out by this book, do tend to weaken my stuff (e.g. as and -ing formulations), and delighted to learn a wholly new concept which I think will help me a lot if I can figure it out (narrative distance).

There are useful short checklists at the end of each chapter but here is a list of ideas, terminology and traps especially helpful as an aide memoire for me.

*

Show and Tell

To write exposition at length - describing your characters' pasts or events that happened before the story began or any information your readers might need to understand your plot - is to engage your readers' intellects. What you want to do is engage their emotions. (10)

Narrative summary has its uses, the main one being to vary the rhythm and texture of your writing. Scenes are immediate and engaging, but scene after scene without a break can become relentless and exhausting ... (12)

Characterisation and Exposition

Point of View

If the first person invites intimacy and the omniscient narrator allows for perspective, the third person strikes a balance between the two. ... the third-person point of view as a continuum, running from narrative intimacy to narrative distance. (47)

Allowing your characters' emotions to steep into your descriptions also lets you use description more freely. ... When description also conveys a character's personality or mood, you can use it to vary your pace or add texture without interrupting the flow. ... The emotions have to go somewhere, and the language of your descriptions is a good place for them. (50-51)

Proportion

Fiction writers [today] are much freer to use ellipses, to leave more of the mundane, bridging action up to their readers' imaginations. (68)

Properly proportioned does not mean textureless. There is always room for philosophical asides that reveal the narrator's character, subplots that may resonate with the main plot, forays into odd corners of background that make the fictional world more three-dimensional. The trick is telling the difference between digressions that harmonise with the story (even in odd and mysterious ways) and those that hang on the story like limpets. ... ask yourself what interests you the most, what really comes to life, what involves and intrigues. What moves or fascinates or disturbs or pleases you? ... If most of what you enjoyed doesn't obviously advance your plot, then maybe you need to change your plot. (74-75)

[Y]our viewpoint character's interest at the moment should control the degree of detail you put into your description. (77)

Dialogue Mechanics

Resist the Urge to Explain. (84)

See How It Sounds

[H]ave your characters misunderstand each other once in a while. Have them answer the unspoken question rather than the one asked out loud. Have them talk at cross-purposes. Have them hedge. Disagree. Lie. (104)

Interior Monologue

So what's the right amount of interior monologue? ... The balance you hit depends on what your characters are feeling, how important their feelings are to the story at that point, how you want the scene to flow, and, especially, how evident their feelings are in other ways. (122)

[G]aining control of your narrative distance can open the door for all sorts of effects, and this is even more true when you work interior monologue into the mix. (131)

Easy Beats

[B]eats allow your readers to picture your dialogue taking place. ... Where you want the tension high ... pare the beats down to a bare minimum. (149)

Breaking Up Is Easy to Do

Once Is Usually Enough

Reread your manuscript, keeping in mind what you are trying to do with each paragraph - what character point you're trying to establish, what sort of mood you're trying to create, what background you're trying to suggest. In how many different ways are you accomplishing each of these ends? (188)

Sophistication

Both the as construction and the -ing construction ... take a bit of action ("She pulled off her gloves") and tuck it away into a dependent clause ("Pulling off her gloves ..."). This tends to place some of your action at one remove from your reader, to make the actions seem incidental, unimportant. (193)

[Only use poetic figures of speech where you want to draw the reader's attention. (202)]

Voice

[M]ost of the great stylists have developed their style in service of their stories. (219)

When you take the time and energy to capture precisely a particular state of mind, make sure it's a state of mind that's worth capturing - a turning point in your main character's life, a moment of realisation ... (222)

When you come to a sentence or phrase that gives you a little jab of pleasure, that makes you say, "Ah, yes," that sings ... try to absorb their rhythm or fullness or simplicity or freshness or whatever made them sing to you. What you've been reading aloud will represent, for now, your voice at its most effective. (228)

... those passages that make you wince or that seem to fall flat ... Is the writing flat? Strained? Awkward? Obvious? Pedestrian? Forced? Vague or abstract? (229)

Call Me By Your Name

Quite lovely. If I were to quibble, I'd say the generosity of Elio's parents and his 'girlfriend' Marzia stretches the limits of plausibility but this is a film not to quibble with, but to sink into. I certainly felt it.

(Compare and contrast: Blue is the Warmest Colour)

NGV Triennial (second visit)

This time, went through the rest of the ground floor.

Paulina Olowska's paintings were the clear highlight. It was the joyous splash of colour of "The Lepidopterist" that first caught my eye and the attractive-in-every-way triptych of "Mysteria" which was most directly in my strike zone, but it ended up being the less obvious but beautiful and deep "The Painter" with which I spent the most time, and which I find lingering with me this evening.

I also liked Pascale Marthine Tayou's "Coloured Stones" (2015), referencing social unrest, Shilpa Gupta's black-in-darkness microphone sculpture and sound installation (2012-15) which you could maybe say takes some shortcuts to the sense of immensity and near-sublimity that say Anish Kapoor often achieves but is effective anyway, and David Altmejd's "Mother 1 (Relatives)" (2013), which wins the prize for best curatorial decision, confronting one in all its uncanny, emerging-from-the-subconscious China Mieville-esque weirdness and glory suspended from the ceiling immediately as you turn the corner from Gupta's untitled, echoing piece.

(first visit)

"Dion Horstmans: Particle Fever" & "Richard Blackwell: 0, 0, 0" (Flinders Lane Gallery)

Was passing by FLG so popped in for a quick look.

East West Street: A Song of Good and Evil (Arts Centre - Hamer Hall)

A performance mixing readings from Philippe Sands' book of the same (pre-subtitle) name by Sands himself and a female actor with songs for piano and voice that were somehow meaningful to the figures in the story told in the readings, of the Nuremberg trials - principally Hans Frank, Governor-General of occupied Poland, Hersch Lauterpacht, one of the lawyers involved with the British prosecution and originator of the concept of crimes against humanity, and Raphael Lemkin, who advised the American prosecutorial team and pushed the idea of genocide into international law (Lauterpacht and Lemkin both lost nearly their entire families at the hands of Nazi Germany).

There is, of course, an inherent great gravity to its subject matter and these 90 minutes did prompt reflections. In artistic terms, I wouldn't say it was anything to write home about - the story-telling is fine but nothing extraordinary, the stagecraft minimal, the voice acting so-so, the singing maybe not top notch. (The music was varied, including Prokofiev, Richard Strauss, Beethoven, Bach and more ... not to mention Leonard Cohen's "Anthem".) But as a story that needs to be told, I didn't fault it.

(w/ Jarrod)

Black Panther

There was a moment early on in Black Panther when I found myself wondering whether superhero stories, and specifically movies, might fill a similar space - in my imagination, psyche, what have you - as the fantasy genre sometimes has for me in the past, and specifically the sense of wonder and other worlds; I think that came partly from the sense of interlocking universes that comes with these 'filmic universes' (on which I have only a shaky grasp even though I've seen a fair number of the individual films across both Marvel and DC) and partly from the set-up of Wakanda itself here. In any case, I thought this movie was great, its engine built equally around action of both the physical (ie fights and explosions) and the political sorts, with good human-sized moments and a very thoughtfully-developed antagonist. (And almost casually filling its ranks with a bunch of excellent female characters incidentally too.)

Margo Price - All American Made

Boy, this is terrific, better even than the itself pretty great Midwest Farmer's Daughter. In its unassuming country lines, humble and almost plain, it reminds me of the way Laura Cantrell's music sneaks up on you, so that by the time you realise how marvellous it is, you're fully enveloped (e.g.). That goes just as much for the relatively more sprightly numbers as the slow ballads which, if I'm honest, do provide my personal highlights: "Learning to Lose", an affecting duet with Willie Nelson, and the more folk-shaded "Loner" (though I did notice that one's the only song not credited to Price herself, but instead written by Jeremy Ivey, who also co-writes with her on about half of the album's other songs).

Jónsi - Go

Considering how much I loved Agaetis Byrjun back in the day, it's a bit surprising that I haven't followed Sigur Rós and the various projects of their bandleader and singer Jónsi more closely. (And, as an aside, these kinds of things are all too easy to observe nowadays, but that album came out nearly 20 years ago (!) - 1999 - and it was about a decade ago that I saw them live, with Ruth, at Festival Hall, and the way I already felt about them by then was pretty much as I still do now.) Anyhow, Go is good - bright, soaring, epic (of course) and with a bit of a pop surge. 

Scarlett Thomas - PopCo & The End of Mr Y

There are the books I think of as my favourites (conveniently recently compiled here) and then there's a subset of those which are most inspiring for my own writing, and PopCo and The End of Mr Y have sat snugly amidst those since I read them in succession now nearly a decade ago. It's both of those capacities that have led me to re-read them back to back over the last few weeks, and what a pleasure to find that they hold up.

Re-reads of favourites can go a few different ways. Sometimes the book's significantly less amazing than it once was, for whatever combination of then/now circumstances and the qualities of the book itself (Brideshead Revisited was like that when I started trying to re-read it a while back), while when it is still great, that can be in ways which have evolved since the last read (for me The Great Gatsby is the clearest example) or in ways that are fundamentally still the same as what draw me to it in the first time - and both of these two of Scarlett Thomas's are very much in that last category.

So here are a few things I remember liking or noticing about them last time which stood out again (in some cases with further observations this time round):

• Both have great openings - exciting in an unusual way that is immersive and makes me want to read more. It's mostly in the voice and perspective, but also in the strongly visual sense of mystery and uncertainty that both create: Alice at the train station at night as her perceptions go a bit wonky in PopCo; Ariel evacuating her office as a nearby building collapses ground and then stumbling across the mysterious book in The End of Mr Y.
• First person present tense. So good! But, I suspect, also a limitation which contributes to Thomas's use of various crutches across both books, especially PopCo: extended exposition (often via interior monologue); dialogue which can be very explain-y (even though that's consistent with the characters' backgrounds); long slabs of back/side-story (pirates etc). There's also the accumulation of often quite banal descriptive detail, but I think that's more a feature than a bug in relation to the books' phenomenological approaches.
• The extended intellectual excursions - about homoeopathy, cryptography/cryptanalysis, mathematics, quantum physics, consciousness, phenomenological existentialism, theories of hyper-reality, the 'linguistic turn' and more - which don't have anything direct to do with story or character (but are important to the whole) are another crutch, but probably not due to 1stPPT. 
• Related to the two points above - part of why the plotting of PopCo is so unusual is that there's not much plotting there ... at least not in the present-day of the book's narrative. (This is one that I only noticed this time, although the line from a review in my edition's inside front has always appealed to me: "No heroine this year was more beguiling than Alice in Scarlett Thomas's PopCo, a character so wayward that she went to bed with her homoeopathic remedies for much of the book until she felt like joining in the plot again.")
• In their different ways, these books are also pretty much about the meaning of life or at least the nature of reality, in a way that's much more overt than most novels allow themselves to be, especially The End of Mr Y. Which is excellent!

And a few other things:

• This time Alice from PopCo and Ariel from The End of Mr Y were more distinct from each other in my mind than last time, even though they definitely have a bunch of similarities in terms of how they perceive the world and their interests and habits they have (generally bad habits stemming from worse impulses beyond their own control but of which they are very aware).
• I don't remember noticing the (obvious) pun in the title of The End of Mr Y before, although maybe I did and just forgot, not least given that Ariel literally uses the phrase "the end of mystery" at one point.
• Their unabashed contemporariness is still something I like about them - the way they are so explicitly located in the modern world, technologically and otherwise. But the world moves at a ferocious rate. Ten years ago in The End of Mr Y, one (older) character finds it remarkably postmodern that his (younger) lover has an ipod; today it feels anachronistic to still use that same device.

Unsurprisingly, the flaws in these two novels stand out a lot more now, I suspect more because I'm a decade older myself than because these have been second reads. The three biggest ones are the tendency towards long, usually ideas/concept-driven explanations of things, the rubberiness of the plot and character trajectories, and (to a lesser extent) the tendency towards thinness in the characterisations in general.

But, just like last time, those are all things that I notice without them particularly detracting from my enjoyment; somehow, both novels feel like they're always racing forward despite their unconventionality. (Her more recent novels are an interesting compare and contrast. I admire both Our Tragic Universe and The Seed Collectors more than I like them - although The Seed Collectors in particular is really excellent - but in both I can really see the way she is deliberately putting pressure on conventional uses of narrative and characterisation towards interesting ends, whereas in PopCo and The End of Mr Y it feels like the unconventionality is more a consequence of the - fascinating - high concepts with which she started.)

So there it is. How I relate to these books has evolved, but they remain as totemic as ever.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Ok this one was actually exciting, and however much of its gravity was earned in its own right as opposed to tapped from the foregoing franchise, it had weight, with both excitement and gravity kicking in from the opening scenes as the rebel forces flee their erstwhile planetary base. I'd forgotten that Rian Johnson directed this instalment, and while who knows how much of a personal stamp he got to put on it, it's tempting to credit him with a fair bit of what makes The Last Jedi effective, including the way its plot and character pieces snap so neatly yet not-overly-deterministically together. Also amidst a cast in which there aren't too many space-fillers, Adam Driver is really terrific, as is Laura Dern.

(lately: The Force Awakens and Rogue One)

Phantom Thread

Partway through Phantom Thread, I remembered that Paul Thomas Anderson also directed The Master, of which this most recent one reminded me a fair bit. I think it's mostly the way that the characters don't lend themselves to easy analysis or understanding, whether through surface or naturalistic expressiveness or easy story-telling, so the psychology of their interactions is revealed much more through their actions ... and doesn't that psychology turn out to have some corkscrews in it! No doubt there is plenty more at work there too - the constant close-ups, eccentric (but terrific) framing, the effect of the music - and it's every inch a PTA film including in its beauty (he really is a great director).

Anyway there are layers to this one and I didn't feel I fully understood it. You can trace back Woodcock's intense - and developmentally arrested - insistence on having everything just so to his relationship with his mother, and the notion of the curse is made just textual (as opposed to sub-textual) enough but not too much, and there is an interesting story with his sister there too (a terrific performance: Lesley Manville), but there's still a lot that doesn't give itself up so easily. We never learn anything meaningful about Alma's background or circumstances, as far as I can remember, which is also interesting and, combined with Woodcock's very male and privileged way of conducting his life also gave me some pause. For me though, ultimately that doesn't detract from the density of its depiction of the central relationship; we do learn a great deal about Alma's character and see her asserting herself and her self-respect all the way through. This feels like a film of weight that will linger.

(w/ Erandathie)

Waxahatchee - Out in the Storm & Ivy Tripp

Names can be misleading. I'd always assumed based on Waxahatchee's that her music would be on the inaccessible side, but that turns out to be 100% wrong, as these two albums - I came to them backwards, 2017's Out in the Storm then 2015's Ivy Tripp - are actually brim full of anthemic power-pop steeped in some of my favourite alternative-y textures from the 90s (and therefore from any period full stop).

Throwing Muses and Belly are huge reference points for me, but also it seems for a whole lot of whatever-indie-music-is-these days artists right now (see eg Honeyblood) and if a dash of Helium's jagged guitar sound finds its way in there too and there's some haunting in moments by Siamese Dream, well so much the better. Out in the Storm is the more densely electric guitared and studio-produced and fuller-tilt of the two, with more prominent woo-ooh-oohs, and so maybe it's not a surprise that it's the one I like more - but on the other hand Ivy Tripp has a bunch of gorgeous fraught quieter songs in the borderlands between Kim Deal and Lisa Germano, so, that's pretty good too.

Also: another realisation of how much Taylor Swift has colonised my brain - I was well-disposed towards "Sparks Fly" just because of its title even before I heard it.

NGV Australia miscellaneous

Images only. 'The Pool' exhibition (good luck to catch the part of the video that was about Fitzroy Pool i.e. Aqua Profonda and all); Louise Paramor - Palace of the Republic (paper and plastic, whee!); Mel O'Callaghan - "Ensemble" (not pictured); Helen Maudsley - Our Knowing and Not Knowing.

Jeff VanderMeer - Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction

Good stuff. As VanderMeer's introduction promises, this 'how to' book slants towards imaginative fiction - sci-fi etc - but is applicable to fiction generally (though I mostly skipped the world-building chapter), and the hook of extensive and interesting illustrations is used well. And it was broken up nicely with little pieces from people who (like VanderMeer) ought to know what they're talking about like Neil Gaiman, Lev Grossman and George R R Martin.

I picked up plenty from an afternoon's read-browsing, including the idea of the scar or splinter - "some initial irritant, some kind of galvanizing and enduring impulse, [combining] with the need to communicate, to tell stories ... often the memory of a loss, a disappointment, a perceived great wrong that continues to create an agitation, an irritation, or at times an agony."

NGV Triennial

The first of what will be multiple visits, so I felt free to wander without any aim of seeing it all.

Xu Zhen's monumental "Eternity-Buddha in Nirvana, the Dying Gaul, Farnese Hercules" (etc - the full title is extended) (2016-17) was a fine introduction, continuing the NGV's habit of using that large space effectively, and I liked the way the level 2 pieces were installed amidst the permanent collection. I liked Jean Epousteguy's "Death of the Father" (1967-68) and its distorted marble bishop-mitred heads and central crouched (supplicating?) figure, though it turns out it wasn't technically part of the Triennial, also Brodie Neill's "Gyro, table" (2016) (ocean plastic-adorned, and blue of course being the colour of distance, here in a different sense while still referencing water and its expanse).

Ron Mueck's "Mass" (2016-17) struck me as tender and beautiful in the vulnerability of the skulls, their individuality and collectivity and of course all in death; I always find his stuff moving. Guo Pei's fantastic - in multiple senses - dresses from her spring/summer 2017 'Legends' collection were stunning too. And Pae White's untitled 2017 colour room installation (they look like thread but are actually acrylic cord, and the use of painting and mirrors on surfaces adds to the effect) offered both immediate and deeper pleasures, eluding any sense that it had been completely grasped no matter where within it one stood and viewed it from.

(w/ Hayley)

Ryan Adams - Prisoner

Came out last year and the reference points are writ large: eighties heartland rock (not exactly rare in contemporary rock'n'pop but not exactly ever unwelcome either) and Adams's own back catalogue, with the odd bit of Johnny Marr-ish jangle. Nothing blazingly revelatory, but all entirely listenable in that way of melancholy, pretty, medium-build Ryan Adams-esque roots-rock anthems.

"Water + Wisdom: Australia India" (RMIT Gallery)

This would've been good even if it just made me reflect on our relationship with water. The particular focus is on waterways and their management (or stewardship) in Australia and India, with a healthy proportion given over to customary - in Australia, meaning indigenous - practices and knowledge.

My favourites, not unusually for this kind of exhibition, were some of the photographs: Victoria Lautman's evocative Indian stone stepwells, many (all?) in Rajasthan; Clare Arni's b&w photos taken "In the islands of the Sundarbans, lost in the vast muddy estuary of the Ganga", which caused me to have a serious moment of reflection about transience and beauty in there at lunchtime today; and Cop Shiva's documenting of Indian water tanks as decorated by locals ("water tanks are recognised as symbols of cohesion and acceptance by the civic body; once a tank is provided to a slum area, the wellbeing of residents is seen to be acknowledged"). Turns out they're all of India, so possibly my tastes are skewing a bit according to the subjects.

Also fun: the "Augmented Reality Sandbox", a literal sandbox in which you can shape the sand and create 'clouds' by hovering your hands over the landscape, and it craftily updates with coloured contour lines and simulated rain. Yes, I drew my initials in it because evidently I would be a terrible planet-maker (not pictured).

First Aid Kit - Ruins

No surprise that this is a fairly lovely, sunnily plaintive record. Only thing is that it's also on the indistinct side, despite the various interesting little signs of possible new directions (which often register more as loose ends than anything else).

The standouts are the first two singles, "It's A Shame" and "Fireworks", both accompanied by very charming videos (the latter in particular nails it in grafting an 80s high school prom aesthetic on to the 50s-into-60s pop of the song), and moody closer "Nothing Has To Be True"; in between, things tend to be nice but unmemorable, lacking those terrific melodic twists (or, for the most part, hooks in general) that have particularly distinguished their last couple of albums.

(The Big Black & The Blue, The Lion's Roar (and again), Stay Gold)

Marni Jackson - Don't I Know You?

Well of course the premise appealed to me. (From the blurb: Rose McEwan is a struggling writer who keeps having strange encounters with famous people. In this engrossing, original novel-in-stories, we follow her life from age seventeen, when she takes a summer writing course led by a young John Updike; through her first heartbreak, witnessed by Joni Mitchell; through [her] marriage, divorce, and a canoe trip with Taylor Swift, Leonard Cohen and Karl Ove Nausgaard.)

And two parenthetical asides on the first page convinced me I should read it. (First sentence: 'The Doon School of Fine Arts occupied the former summer house of Horatio Walker, a modestly-celebrated (there is no other kind) nineteenth-century Canadian painter.' And start of next paragraph: 'I had just turned seventeen. My parents, eager to encourage my precocious "way with words" and my "flair for art" (I excelled at drawing horses in profile) had signed me up for summer courses - one week of Introductory Oil Painting, followed by a week of Introductory Creative Writing.')

And, well, it's unfailingly fun to meet a new famous person - or two - in each story, and something of a balm, a kindness to the reader, that all are depicted in sympathetic terms which seem consonant with their public personae (even if Bob Dylan does somewhat outstay his welcome at Rose's lakeside holiday cottage). The theme interests me, too, as captured in the author's note that 'Their [the celebrities'] presence in these stories is meant to represent the powerful and intimate roles that famous people sometimes play in our ordinary lives'; as an aside, it amused me to realise that of the smorgasbord who do appear, Taylor Swift is actually the most significant for me, albeit probably only just shading Dylan and Neil Young. And Jackson's prose, especially on a sentence through to scene level, is clean, unobtrusive and occasionally rather lovely.

In the end, though, the novel (or collection of stories) is overwhelmed by the concept. Rose herself is a thin character, emerging as something of a (privileged, white) everywoman but without enough differentiation or strangeness - by which I mean the everyday kind that marks all of us - to convincingly anchor the stories as a whole. And that thinness is characteristic of the story and plotting in general - I didn't get the sense of depths between the lines that really fine fiction produces (exceptions: the first one, with Updike, the last one, with the canoe trip, and to lesser extents the Bill Murray, Charlotte Rampling and Adam Driver ones). So, by no means a bad book, but not a stayer either.

George Saunders - Tenth of December

I was moved to re-read this swiftly on the heels of my first go-through and it's at least as good on a second read. Unsurprisingly, on a second read I noticed some of the details more, or at least more consciously - like another parallel between "Victory Lap" and "Tenth of December" being the way the two main characters in each story (Alison and Kyle, Robin and Don) both save each other, and the contrast to "Puppy" and how that makes the latter heartbreaking, or like also in "Tenth of December" that both Robin and Don are unable to find the right words sometimes and the way the different reasons for that are baked into their characters and stories, or the interestingly large number of child protagonists and characters, or the way Saunders has of finding the perfect gesture (direct yet not too heavy-handed) on which to end each story. More surprisingly, but wonderfully, their effects are just as pronounced on what have now been, for some, multiple re-reads. All of these ten stories have sunk in deep.