Rachel B Glaser - Paulina & Fran

Unsurprisingly, there are some marvels of sentences and paragraphs - surprising, cutting and darkly funny - throughout this novel of two art school friends and their discontents, including into adulthood; sneakily, Glaser also manages some feeling along the way. Paulina & Fran is slippery and operates differently than the typical novel working in this terrain, particularly in relation to character, but even allowing for that, it remains a bit insubstantial. Still, interesting; I'd read more of hers.

(Pee on Water)

The Good Place season 3

More in a similar vein. I enjoyed this third season plenty, but not quite as much as the first two - maybe partly because some of the novelty's worn off and also because I watched most of it week-by-week as new episodes were released, rather than in the concentrated way more common for tv nowadays?

NGVA

Quick repeat visits to some of the Ken Unsworth pieces (still enjoyable but not madly so [*]), the Polly Borland exhibition (likewise) and the Rigg Design Prize shortlist comprising ten interiors responding to the theme of domestic living. My favourite: "Take it Outside" (Amber Road studio).

(w/ Jon)

"Escher x nendo: Between Two Worlds" (NGV International)

It was always going to be enjoyable to see a whole bunch of Escher prints (including linocuts, woodcuts and lithographs) and drawings at once but what made this exhibition particularly enjoyable was the installation and design by nendo, with its repeated black and white motif of the house throughout.

"Castrovalva, Abruzzi" (1930) - I liked a lot of the landscapes from around this period, many exaggerating perspective in ways that only became apparent with time

"Still Life with Mirror" (1934) - the famous optical illusion and impossible drawings were all here, but the charm of this one was the match of the most well-known others

"Three Spheres II" (1946)

"Reptiles" (1943) - it's nice he also has a playful side

Not pictured but intriguing: the early geometric abstraction of "Clouds above the coast" (1919-20).

(w/ R)

Lorrie Moore - Birds of America

Snippy conversations, unhappy marriages, disappointing dinner parties, animal infestations; death and its debris. Compared to the earlier stories in Self Help (published 1985), these are denser, richer and more sprawling, with longer stories to tell and less reliant on the sharpness of the lens chosen through which to tell them - although also maybe just a yard less sheerly enjoyable. Best in show is "Dance in America", I think, or is that just that it's amongst the most concise and immediate?

(along the way)

Kusama: Infinity

Interestingly straightforward and low-key biographical approach to documenting Kusama's colourful art and life. It draws a link between her mental health challenges and her art without offering a particularly strong perspective on its exact nature (though there's something there in the way her art appears to be seeking an expression of the experience of being overwhelmed), and takes a similarly lightly suggestive approach to the question of how she became the person and artist that she ultimately did (there are interesting hints from her childhood and family background, including of some kind of trauma experienced in a field of flowers). Also interesting were the bits about the struggles Kusama faced in the white male dominated art world of the 1960s, including - the documentary argues - having her ideas ripped off by more established peers, and the curious relationship she had with Joseph Cornell.

(w/ Kim)

Stranger Things 2

I was always going to watch this after racing through the first season.

Robyn - Honey

Pretty good but hasn't caught fire for me. Maybe it's a bit more subtle? I like the first two songs a lot - "Missing U" and "Human Being" - and the others all blur together.

ABBA - ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits

It certainly seems, from the vantage of 2019, that ABBA's style of pop music deserves to be called timeless. Growing up in the 90s, for me they were the quintessential cheesy, slickly insubstantial pop group, but tastes and perspectives change and listening to this greatest hits now it's striking how terrific it is, and how direct a line can be drawn from them to all kinds of more recent pop; basically the only difference between many of ABBA's songs and the best moments of a band like Girls Aloud, say, is the production (and even that's not so different a lot of the time). 

Lucy Dacus - Historian

I'm not sure whether this is a lazy comparison but Historian reminds me of Are We There - there's a similar grasp of dynamics apparent in its electric guitar-girded rock and sinuously direct songwriting, and it's also very good. Dacus has a knack for creating songs that build and resolve in a range of different ways (she doesn't mind a bit of soft-loud but is far from limited to it), including a deft touch for using varied instrumentation to generate interest and drive. A lot of these songs are excellent, but the particular stand-outs are "Addictions", "Nonbeliever", "Timefighter" and "Next of Kin".

Stranger Things season 1

What a joy - along with the eighties-on-blast aesthetic and ringing of the childhood-nostalgia bell (all that bicycle-riding!) and tapping into later-adolescence high school iconography, the show commits early to its 'monster' and 'more things in heaven and earth' elements and is the better for it. It's exactly the right amount of actually dark and creepy. The Stephen King call-out is deserved. Bonus: Winona Ryder hasn't looked this good in years. 

Eighth Grade

Eighth Grade is ace. It's funny and involving, staying very close to its protagonist Kayla's experience, with the blaring soundtrack coming across like the sound of Kayla's own emotions as they rise and threaten to overwhelm her at times of excitement, stress and uncertainty - all of which are plentiful. Of course the audience is going to root for the quiet girl who doesn't fit in, but there are some nice touches in her characterisation to reinforce that, especially the way she determinedly tries to push through her fears and go after what she wants, giving her meaningful agency despite all the teenage confusion and anxiety. The plot isn't much more than one thing happening after another; the film pitches deliberately very contemporary in highlighting the central role of phones and social media in (teenage) life today, and it's totally convincing in how it draws its school-aged characters and how they speak and interact.

(w/ Erandathie)

Gregory Maguire - Wicked

An iconic book for me, which I haven't read for years. It's still good.

(last time)

Geelong Gallery

Bits and pieces in this small-medium sized regional gallery. The major temporary showing is "There is no there - Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano", two video works including the one giving the exhibition its title (performers interpreting single images from contemporary newspapers and inspired by the 'living newspapers' of a 1920s/30s state-aligned Soviet theatre troupe called the Blue Blouse collective; 2015).

(w/ R)

"The Garden of Forking Paths: Mira Gojak and Takehito Koganezawa" (Buxton Contemporary)

A well-matched pair of artists, neither of whose work I'd seen before. Gojak's were especially appealing, in their uses of blue - including references to Yves Klein - and otherwise.

"Herd of unending blue" (1998) 

"Consolation" (2006) and "Mountain" (2018) 

Various 

Takehito Koganezawa - "Paint it black and erase" (2010)

(w/ Penelope)