Midnight Special

Good film. Thrums with imminence all the way through - helped by the atmospheric soundtrack - and even had some shades of Melancholia albeit summoned in large part by Kirsten Dunst's presence, though it's a much tauter kind of sci-fi / hints of the end of the world type film. Nice to see Michael Shannon in a sympathetic (though by no means easily likeable) role, I also liked Joel Edgerton and Adam Driver, and that's the kid from It! 

Isle of Dogs

On the one hand, very charming, and these days I probably don't give Wes Anderson films enough credit for their lightness of touch, humour and whimsy - having internalised his distinctive mode and style to such a degree - and especially in this more recent phase of his career (say from Fantastic Mr Fox onwards), in which optimistic tones tend to predominate over the more mixedly sombre hues that characterised his earlier films. (Having said that, I wonder if I might have oversimplified about his trajectory - re-reading what I thought about The Grand Budapest Hotel, I see I was struck by its darkness at the time.)

On the other hand, as enjoyable as Isle of Dogs was, it might have been my least favourite of his to date, which I think is mainly because it didn't really touch me and stir up my feelings in the way that pretty much all of his others have. It was nice, but in the end minor. Also, complicated questions around the film's/his treatment/appropriation of Japanese culture and gender; the latter strikes me as more problematic.

(w/ trang, Sara, Julian, Andreas, Jarrod, Farrah and Sheila, plus Rob and Laura for dinner before ... a bit of a posse resulting from my deciding that I wanted company to see this one and relying on the old 'email a bunch of people and see who says yes' approach)

Sunshine Cleaning

I've been meaning to go back and watch this since realising that its two leads are Amy Adams and Emily Blunt, two of my latter-day faves, and inevitably that was one of the main lenses through which I rewatched the film, as to which: Adams is as steely-vulnerable convincing here as she is in everything, while Blunt manages to project at least some charisma and genuine feeling from underneath some fairly thankless makeup and character-attitude (and they really do not look like sisters).

I reckon I already felt this a bit last time, but this time the film's soulfulness - not quite the right word, not least given how white Sunshine Cleaning is - touched me a bit more, though I again felt the pieces didn't quite coalesce ... I think what could've really made the film sing, rather than being merely nice, would have been the secondary characters' narratives punching through a bit more, in their own rights and as stronger counterpoints to Rose's and Norah's arcs (including the loss of their mother) - their father Joe and Rose's son Oscar especially, but also the other, less developed characters.

The Villainess

I nearly stopped watching this after the first seven minutes, which is a relentless, close to first person-view knife fight/slaughter as our heroine first shoots, then slices and stabs her way through a henchman-filled series of corridors and rooms - spectacular, but also wearying. But I persevered and so I can report that The Villainess is a fairly complicated, backstory-heavy, violent film with some surprising moments of lightness and a few striking images. Oh and it's South Korean, from which plenty of this kind of well-made genre seems to come.

Rachel B Glaser - Pee on Water

Well I've read and re-read "Pee on Water", the title story for this collection, and it continues to be a marvel. I reckon it's the most sheerly original short story I can recall reading, at least out of those that are also actually good (never mind great), and its rhythms have gotten stuck deep in my head. It's some kind of magic.

Cars come close to smashing. Flags paraded around, then stuck on the moon. A little sister orders her baseball collection by cuteness. Wild animals have no more room. Land gets so full of buildings, when town girls and city boys escape into the open, ‘God’ is waiting in the fields. Cars smash, glass in a crowd of shards. Huge ambivalent teen models lounge across highway billboards. Dust gathers between VCR remote buttons.

So it was an impossible two prongs; I suspected "Pee on Water" must be a one-off (if for no other reason than how could she tell another history of the Earth, emphasis on humankind, in eight and a half pages or so?), yet at the same time I kind of hoped for more of something like the same, whatever that could possibly be. And, while reading it, I did feel something stir in my stomach - my brain? - when I encountered a story which used language in some similar way, especially "The Sad Girlfriend" and "My Boyfriend, but Tragic".

But in fact there are a whole bunch of strikingly odd, successful modes operating in Pee on Water, with many of the best slipping through time and space not just from paragraph to paragraph or even sentence to sentence, but in at least one case - in the outstanding "McGrady's Sweetheart", which is a war story and so much more - within a single sentence itself. The writing throughout feels a little wild and at the same time thoroughly controlled, with many of those satisfying little 'ah' moments emerging as Glaser's sidelong-experimental style opens up something new and true. 

Restoration: The Songs of Elton John and Bernie Taupin

Elton John was one of those artists to whom I grew up a bit, but exclusively through the 2-cd 'very best of' that my parents had, so while I know only some of the originals that are re-done here, I know the ones that I know very well. And, seeing as this set's made up entirely of contemporary country acts - there's a companion 'pop' one that I haven't listened to - unsurprisingly I also know some but not all of the artists on here.

So, honestly, for the songs I do know, these melodies are just so good that it's hard to muck them up, and I do especially like Little Big Town's "Rocket Man" (spacious), Don Henley and Vince Gill's "Sacrifice" (lazy in a good way) and Lee Ann Womack's "Honky Cat" (a good trick - kind of sparse and funky like the original, but different-sounding at the same time); Dierks Bentley's "Sad Songs (Say So Much)" is nice but a bit too similar to Elton John's own cut of it.

And others that have grabbed me: Chris Stapleton's "I Want Love" (slow and sentimental), Kacey Musgraves's "Roy Rogers" (helped along by her recent favourite-ness status over here, but I think I would've liked its winsome lilt regardless; it reminds me of Kirsty MacColl, who I hadn't realised had sunk in to that degree), Rhonda Vincent and Dolly Parton's "Please" (which is extremely bluegrass!), Rosanne Cash and Emmylou Harris's "This Train Don't Stop There Anymore" (it sounds like a classic, although probably most anything dueted by those two would).

"Entre Nous: Clare Rae and Claude Cahun" / "I can see for miles" (CCP)

This was the first time I'd seen a bunch of Rae's photos all in the one place - and there are heaps, in a generous show - and it's only affirmed how terrific I think her work is. I'll need to go back and take a proper look, not only at hers but also at those by Claude Cahun, to which they're a response.

(w/ Angela)

The last 50 cds, or more or less the most important music of my life

In the end, I decided it would make me happier to keep a handful of cds rather than getting rid of absolutely all of them (Cf), and when I realised that the number that gave me a real twinge to think about was in the vicinity of 50, I couldn't resist the round figure.

They're arranged chronologically by when they came into my life - as nearly as I can remember or reconstruct - and that winds up telling a pretty accurate story of how my tastes have developed over time.

The 50 tilt heavily towards my formative music-listening years, for any number of predictable (and good) reasons; it's pretty close to being my actual 50 favourite albums/cds, but there are a few from the early years whose 'personal historical' significance is what has made them keepers now.

School years

Music wasn't an insignificant part of my life before then, but this story really begins in about 1997 - year 10 - which I started aged 14, and continues into '98.

I can't remember which came first, the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack or Garbage, but I do remember a period of feeling like everything on commercial radio seemed just slightly too fast, off-tempo, and then one day hearing "#1 Crush", probably on Fox FM, maybe triple j, and it being so exactly right; that was one beginning.

Probably I'd heard "Only Happy When It Rains" and "Stupid Girl", and I'd got the idea that the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack was meant to be good, so out came my pocket money for both, at the local Target I think; Garbage's whole aesthetic was spot-on for me just then (and, of course, Garbage's), while R+J turned out to be a pocketful of all kinds of interesting alternative acts and genres, some of which would loom large for me down the track.

I got to Pearl Jam and Nirvana quickly after that, chasing music that reflected how I saw myself, at a time when grunge still hung heavily over the landscape. Pearl Jam were always closer to my heart, starting from those huge Ten anthems ("Alive" especially had already been just hazily present enough in background radio that when I actually focused on the song and realised how great it was, it already felt like a classic that had always been there), but Nevermind looms so large, and already did then, in that period of personal taste-formation, that it seems right to hang on to it too.

I'm hazy on the chronology, but several other really big ones had come into my life by the end of '98:

• Automatic for the People, which I remember walking around listening to at school during lunchtime, and also during many long night-time walks
• Throwing Copper, whose anthemic and slightly mystical rock drama just hit the spot
• from the choirgirl hotel, which I found my way to via the glorious "Spark", which hit me like liquid magic, and which precipitated what, in retrospect, seems both a very unlikely and very fortuitous love affair with Tori Amos's music
• Post, which still sounds stunningly modern whenever I listen to it, and of course I'm still not really over "Hyper-ballad", which is where it all started
• U2's 1980-1990 best of, a Christmas present from my parents, which I think feels like it belongs in this company through equal parts sheer quality of the songs, expansiveness, and sense of having always been there and being likely to always be
• and, of course, OK Computer, the biggest landmark of them all when it comes to personal worldview-forming and distilling, zeitgeist-capturing and everything else.

Given what had already come, Siamese Dream, Grace and The Bends were probably all inevitable, but what wasn't inevitable is how much I've returned to each over the years since; Grace in particular gets better and better with time. Drifting over the radio waves, "Glory Box" and "Roads" sounded like transmissions from another planet, and so did Dummy, and it still does. All of those came some time during that 1998 or 1999 period.

Year 12, 1999, was also when I really started discovering how much 'old' music had to offer. I began dipping into that great trio of the Cure, the Smiths and Joy Division (though it was during the first bit of uni that I went deep into them). For the first two, it was those best-ofs that were my introduction, and which I listened to over and over before discovering the riches of their back catalogues (but, also, they were both such great singles bands!), while with Joy Division, it was the sonorous Closer that first really sunk in.

Uni

Uni, the era of all kinds of discoveries, not least secondhand cd stores and more disposable income to spend on music! Again, the exact chronology escapes me a bit but I reckon first year, 2000, took in most if not all of these:

• Kid A, which was definitely 2000, and which I remember riding back up to uni along Elizabeth Street with on the day it was released, on a tram on which every second passenger seemed to be doing the same thing, then everyone's minds blowing more or less in unison from the music itself, which we'd been warned by the reviews was different and it sure was
• to venus and back, another jewel-like offering from Tori, the live disc as good as the studio one
• Homogenic, Bjork's best album in a back catalogue where that really means something
• Low, which I think I listened to early courtesy of one of the uni libraries (ERC or Rowden White), though I only properly discovered its greatness on a slow burn over many years, and maybe the ultimate 'pop music as art' record for me
• New Adventures in Hi-Fi, which has somehow always been one of several sentimental favourites across R.E.M.'s many genuinely great albums, maybe because it's just the right era of fm radio vibes for me
• Tabula Rasa, the most enduring of Kim's many dispatches from beyond the world of popular music, and wired straight to my spine right from the beginning

Amnesiac came out in 2001, still during the period of uncritical Radiohead adoration and intense listening to every second of every song, and that was also the year when I tumbled into the orbits of My Bloody Valentine (and especially Loveless, what an edifice) and, even more headlong, the Cocteau Twins and 4AD in general. MBV I can probably thank pitchfork for, but, aptly enough for such a mysterious band, I haven't the faintest idea how the Cocteaus came on to my radar. There was that marvellous best-of Stars and Topsoil, then the dive into their many records, many of which still stand out and glimmer, Treasure and Blue Bell Knoll the brightest. Of all my favourites over the years, theirs remains the music most beyond words.

(Somewhere in there I got to The Velvet Underground & Nico, but I can't remember when, which seems of a piece with the outsized effect it seemed to exert in general, all the way from 1967...)

Blacklisted was released in 2002 and that's probably when I got it. I could tell at the time it was something out of the ordinary; I wouldn't know how much it would ripple through my own musical history until much later. And it was also in 2002 that I became wrapped up in Belle and Sebastian; I'd heard Fold Your Hands... but it was "Lazy Line Painter Jane" on the radio that made me fall in love, and then the pinpoint joys of Tigermilk, Sinister and Arab Strap from there.

And oh Aimee Mann. Who knows if I've remembered this right, but my recollection, anyway, is seeing the cd in the library, never having heard of the artist, liking the cover, and the rest is history; that was summer 2002/03. I'm not sure I have a single favourite album these days, but last time I did, Bachelor No 2 was it.

2003, fourth year at uni, and things were finding a different shape by then. That was the year Hail to the Thief came out, and was that the one for which we queued up at HMV Bourke Street at midnight? I was still deep in the Cocteau Twins and Belle and Sebastian, and of the many others who seemed to radiate out around them, Belly (all three of Star, King and Sweet Ride, really) and the Sundays (Reading, Writing and Arithmetic) hit me the hardest and have most lingered. And when I swooned for Summerteeth at the end of that year and into the next, it was seemingly out of nowhere, as fondly as I'd remembered "Can't Stand It".

The other huge album that came into my life somewhere around here, but it might have been much earlier, I don't know, was Moon Pix - another that seems completely out of time. Maybe it was 2004, because I'm sure I was still as immersed in musical discovery as at any time before, yet the only other that seems to have remained from then - and it's a big one - is Soul Journey, yet another into which I fell one summer (2004/05).

Then that extended coda, honours in 2005, and the memories are sharper here. Funeral at the start of the year, whose greatness I didn't realise at the time but which has stayed with me and sunk in deep. Alt-country, folk and americana opening up before me, Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams (especially Car Wheels) and Laura Cantrell a bit later (Humming By The Flowered Vine has lost none of its charm), and so many more. The Forgotten Arm (*) over the year's second half, which totally soaked me from the start.

And then, post-uni but pre-workforce, very early 2006, Neko Case's triumphant Fox Confessor. It's chance that it wound up in that position, but I can't think of many albums that could have better served - as it did in retrospect - as both last hurrah and a kind of bridge to what came next.

And beyond

Unsurprisingly, the pace slowed after that, but there have been a few that feel like stayers:

• In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, further into 2006, which I came to late and with wild surmise
• Boxer, in 2008, which had an immediate air of greatness that wasn't at all misleading
• a whole heap of Patty Griffin, starting in 2008 with Children Running Through and continuing to now, amongst which Impossible Dream (listened to in 2013, the year I was particularly flattened by Griffin's greatness) also stands out although at least a couple of others are nearly as transcendent
• and most recently, Sharon Van Etten's Are We There, as recently as 2014, but it hit me hard then and shows no signs of going away...

Footnotes

The most totemic acts that didn't get a guernsey: Mazzy Star, Manic Street Preachers, Neil Young, Saint Etienne, Jolie Holland. Maybe Powderfinger, Goldfrapp, Throwing Muses, Galaxie 500. Or any Sofia Coppola soundtrack!

And the other recentish albums that I came closest to hanging on to: Raising Sand, xx, both Bloom and Teen Dream, Lydia Loveless's Somewhere Else. I wonder about The Weight of These Wings too, if it might turn out in retrospect to encapsulate a moment in time.

Siri Hustvedt - The Blazing World

It was a bit over a hundred pages into The Blazing World when I first felt the uncanny shiver that Hustvedt is so adept at producing in her novels - especially that great pair of What I Loved and The Sorrows of an American - and it came when Harry's friend, Rachel Briefman, is describing an intense conversation between them and the dreams she has afterwards. I don't think it's coincidental that Rachel is a psychoanalyst (and psychiatrist) - that is, I don't think it's coincidental to my response ... I'm certain that her profession isn't coincidental to the role she plays in the book! - nor that dreams were involved.

The Blazing World is a demanding novel, and then again it's not. It's demanding in that it requires attention - due to the numerous and sometimes competing texts and perspectives that compose it, the fragmentary nature of some of Harry's journals in particular, and the heaviness, both intellectual and emotional, of the whole. And yet it's also, in many ways, a breeze to read, made so by Hustvedt's wonderful sentence level writing, the intensity of the plotting and its many mysteries, the threads that run through it and ultimately pay off in more or less satisfying and unexpected ways (including Harry's relationship with her parents, Ethan's oblique presence, and the role of the Barometer), and the dense emotional centres around which the whole thing is built, especially some of the central relationships, not least Bruno's and Harry's. (Also, I think it's a little piece of novelistic genius to bring back Sweet Autumn Pinkney in the way that she does - a kindness in so many ways.)

This novel has a power and urgency that pulled me through it, and a craft that impressed me. And Siri Hustvedt was already an iconic writer for me. I don't know quite how, or whether, it will linger, but finding out over time promises to be a pleasure.

"The shape of things to come" (Buxton Contemporary)

Great to have a new contemporary art gallery in Melbourne, and interesting that it's from a private collection (I wonder how much, and what kind of, public/government support it's had in being established).

This inaugural exhibition includes an impressive array of contemporary Australian artists, some familiar and others new to me; the first category included Patricia Piccinini, Pat Brassington, Ricky Swallow, Mikala Dwyer, while the ones I liked most from the second were:

 Nadine Christensen - "Prospector" (2007) - very mysterious!

Shaun Gladwell - "Maximus swept out to sea (Wattamolla)" (2012-13) - actually I'm pretty sure I've seen his stuff before (video work), but none of it had really stuck till this one

James Morrison - "Freeman Dyson" (2008) - this is only one of its five panels, and it really needs to be seen as a whole for the full, teeming effect

Francis Upritchard - "Straight in front" (2009) - I liked all of Upritchard's stuff, both the models and the prints, all depicting these kinds of comic-poignant figures

Also, multiple pieces by Diena Georgetti (my favourite is the painting in the middle, "I don't think, I don't feel because I know nothing's real" (2006)), with their multiple references to 20th century art - among others, Malevich, Kandinsky, the Futurists, even Mondrian? - and design seeming, to me, to reclaim the former a bit from the latter while integrating them both.

And Peter Booth, whose name I didn't recognise but whose style I did. Powerful stuff.

"Risographica 4" (Lamington Drive)

Opening of a fun exhibition of 'risographic' prints, 48 artists each allowed only two printing ink colours but no other constraints (which somehow yielded several depicted potted flowers - I wondered if there was a conscious or unconscious turn to the classical art still life subject given the contemporary/pop/animation-illustration flavour of the form and the artists themselves).

I was there in support of Julian, whose piece I thought was the best in show (who cares whether that's bias talking), and Sara came too.

The Death of Stalin

Funny and enjoyable, and I realised in retrospect how impressive a balance of tone and perspective the film had struck, given the actual horror of what it depicts and the way it finds humour in it, without being intrusively didactic or uncomfortably glib. The use of their natural accents was a good call too. And Steve Buscemi, he's been bringing me joy for so long now and this was another jewel in his repertoire.

(w/ Erandathie)

Colder (Red Stitch)

Pretty good, and raised some themes that I'm very interested in - notably absence and gaps in people's lives and between people - but I would have preferred if there was more of a structure (or, perhaps, a clearer perspective or take) to it. I did like that the seven year old David's disappearance was 'only' for a few hours, and never explained in its details.

(w/ Cass; Anna also there)

Romeo Is Not The Only Fruit (Malthouse - Melbourne Int'l Comedy Festival)

Excellent! Definitely the best, not to mention most, and almost certainly only queer Asian female musical theatre piece I've ever been to. I haven't laughed so much at a show for ages. Terrific, sharp, knowing writing, good songs, and engaging performances made this an all-round winner.

(w/ trang)

Kacey Musgraves - Golden Hour

You know those albums that just keep stealing over you, more and more the longer you keep listening to them? Well, I think Golden Hour might be one of those. At first I thought it was just kind of nice, nothing special, but as the days have stretched on I've found myself keeping on listening to it and discovering its many aptnesses - the way album opener "Slow Burn" is what its title promises, no unnecessary grandiosity but instead an unforced opening out, the exactness and simplicity with which one-of-several-highlights "Happy and Sad" earns its title, and of course the way the whole thing is, indeed, golden.

I remember thinking there was something nicely modest about Pageant Material, and the same quality shows up here - a trust in the material and the listener's ability to appreciate it without any trickery or flourishes. True, this sort of country/pop/adult-contemporaryish is right in my lane - at different points, this album has made me think of golden period Sheryl Crow, likewise Natalie Imbruglia, and even latter-day Taylor Swift - but, like all of those, there's enough in the way of surprises, individuality and real feeling to avoid descending into undifferentiated smoothness (the most impressive thing about, say, the way banjos and vocoder voice effects come together in "Oh, What A World" is that it's all in service of a melody that goes directly down the spine).

NGV Triennial (fourth visit)

More time spent with my favourites from previous visits - Candice Breitz's "Love Story" and its satisfying mix of head and heart and sense of inexhaustibility, Ron Mueck's "Mass", the life-ness of which I've kept thinking about since last time, Paulina Olowska's magazine/fairytale paintings, Guo Pei's spectacular 'Legends' dresses.

And first looks at, or first proper engagements with, Yamagami Yukihiro's "Shinjuku calling" (2014), video projections on to finely drawn pencil on plywood, Myoung Ho Lee's poetic 'Trees' (which made me think of Magritte, as many things do, in the way it intervenes, dream-like, in ordinary perception), and Nendo's wonderful manga chairs, both playful and deep (the animated video was delightful too).

(first visit; second visit; third visit)

(w/ Yee Fui)