Lucy Dacus @ Northcote Social Club, Friday 29 March

Warm, high quality show, pretty much one hour flat but that was enough time to hear all the best bits from her small discography to date, plus a couple of unrecorded ones. Dacus's neatly constructed songs and story-telling lyrics came through well in the live four-piece (including Dacus herself) band setting, and likewise the lovely timbre of her voice, while she herself seemed empathetic and unaffected.

The highlights were basically the songs that have settled into being my favourites from Historian, "Addictions", "Nonbeliever" and "Night Shift", also (with the benefit of her explanation that it stemmed from her decision that social protest was a good thing to do) "Yours and Mine", plus "Green Eyes, Red Face" and "I Don't Wanna Be Funny Anymore" from No Burden, and an up-tempo, guitar-propelled version of "La vie en rose".

(w/ R)

Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda - Monstress - Vol 3: Haven

Still good and possibly getting better. Characters proliferated over the first two volumes, with the usual questions about how they all fit together and how powerful they each are, but this third volume feels like a bit of a consolidation without diminishing the sense of scope and sprawl. Some of the story's lines appear quite traditional (modern) fantasy, while others are more out of the box, and the comic's commitment to fully-realised, messy female characters across the board is evidently baked in and provides some of its most enjoyable aspects.

Michael Carr-Gregg - Surviving Step-Families

Quick read. In the way of these things, most of it scanned as common sense.

Captain Marvel

Middlingly to quite good, with most of its distinction - and this is far from nothing - coming from its centring of a female superhero, the shading-in it does to highlight that her personal quest includes fighting to overcome patriarchy (some of it quite clever, e.g. the hackneyed injunction from more experienced mentor to talented tyro to 'keep your emotions under control' plays differently when delivered by a somewhat condescending man to a woman), and the avoidance of at least one pitfall by not having a romantic interest for her. Brie Larson is fine, but not as (figuratively) incandescent as she's sometimes been before (most notably in Short Term 12).

(w/ R @ IMAX, 3d)

Captain America: The First Avenger & Captain America: The Winter Soldier

A bit of catch up in my hopscotching watching of Marvel movies. Nice to fill in some of the blanks and both of these are entertaining.

Neko Case @ Melbourne Recital Centre, Wednesday 13 March

Good, if with less energy than might have been the case in less buttoned-down surrounds. She ranged across her formidable back catalogue, with a natural and not unwelcome focus on Hell-On, which reminded me how deep and great that back catalogue is, what a country singer she always has been and still is, and how wonderful it is to re-encounter classics like "Deep Red Bells", "Margaret Vs Pauline", "Hold On, Hold On" and "This Tornado Loves You" live. And it taught me how great some of those songs can sound with up to four or five guitars on stage (not even including bass) - especially "Man".

Hell-On continues to stand up to the best of her previous albums, and songs like "Last Lion of Albion", "Halls of Sarah", "Bad Luck", "Curse of the I-5 Corridor", "Gumball Blue" and "Oracle of the Maritimes" all punched through while feeling of a piece with the highlights she picked from further back, which included "Look For Me (I'll Be Around)", "Maybe Sparrow", her cover of "Loretta", "The Pharoahs", "Calling Cards" and (set closer) "Ragtime".

Support from Laura Jean, who seemed v.g. and appealingly real.

(previously live in 2007 and 2010; longer history here)

(w/ R and Hayley + Hayley's friend Kate, who it turned out I also knew slightly)

The Hate U Give

An 'issues film' for sure, and quite talky, but a good one, and I liked that it was child (or teen) centred in a realistically adult world. 

Sharon Van Etten - Remind Me Tomorrow

Remind Me Tomorrow is a marvellous album, not better than Are We There but different, most notably in the greater use of electronic trimmings. The songwriting and singing are as strong as ever, so the effect is that Remind Me Tomorrow feels like it satisfyingly builds on what's come before, retaining the strengths while doing something a bit new.

I've mentioned Sharon Van Etten and the Cure in the same breath before, specifically re: "Taking Chances" from Are We There, and the comparison has floated to mind again while listening to this album's "Jupiter 4", on which the prevailing atmosphere isn't a million miles from that early trio of Seventeen Seconds, Faith and (the more downbeat end of) Pornography. It's a brilliant song, and one of several that also swims in the starry seas adjacent to Beach House.

I've also been thinking about Tori Amos, a real old touchstone for me. The musical similarities are sometimes there - especially vis a vis from the choirgirl hotel and to venus and back - although not enormous, but the general tenor of intensely emotional and charged confession (maybe together with an oceanic quality) is what really ties together how I respond to both artists' music. Personal history counterfactuals are always kind of meaningless and this one's no exception, but still: I can imagine, if I'd encountered SVE in my teens, her impact on me might have been utterly enormous.

Here are a few bits of the album I particularly cherish:

• First track "I Told You Everything" opens, I'm pretty sure, with the exact same piano chord that kicks off "Afraid of Nothing", itself the first track of previous album Are We There. And then it turns into an equally immersive and beautiful mope.
• There's plenty of stomp and slink scattered throughout, including some ace fuzzy bass. "No One's Easy To Love" (another Beach House-y one), "Comeback Kid" (brattier, good), "You Shadow" (with actual funk/soul, which she's shown she can do before and is welcome here as always).
• I already mentioned "Jupiter 4".
• Also, "Seventeen", even before she starts screaming towards the end.
• The way it all flows of a piece, winding up with "Stay" on a note that leaps forward without overstaying. No wonder I've so often been finding myself cuing it up to play again as soon as I've finished listening.

(also: Epic, Tramp, "I Don't Want To Let You Down" ep)

Hotel Mumbai

Depicts the 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai and specifically the luxurious Taj Hotel. On a technical level it's well made, and the familiar faces (Dev Patel, Armie Hammer, Jason Isaacs) and charismatic ones I didn't know were a bonus. And the angle of the hotel staff's dedication to their work leading to their willingness to risk their own lives to protect those of their guests was interesting. But despite liking the way their pride in their work and bonds to each other drove that heroism, I found it hard to forget the enormous disparity in wealth and privilege between the guests being protected and the Mumbai residents doing the protecting. With pre-screening discussion with director and co-writer.

(w/ Hayley)

At Eternity's Gate

Good and not undemanding in its attempt to place us within Van Gogh's experience of the world (including lots of blurred focus and saturated colours), though the editing and cinematography sometimes tipped into overly showy for me. Intense and sombre, and structured around dialogues between the artist and others who he met at Arles and Saint-Remy which get close to real philosophical heft at times. I didn't need the Jesus analogies, but Dafoe's performance is probably as close as anyone's could be to selling it all.

(w/ Erandathie)

The Clock (Christian Marclay, ACMI), 3.40 - 4.30pm

This time went by very quickly. It's easy to see how the installation could be mesmerise - unusually, by drawing attention to the passage of time rather than causing the viewer to lose track of it (although, perhaps, it does both, by destabilising one's usual experience of marked time). It made me think about my relationship with time, and it also turns out to be about cinema, including by drawing attention to how scenes are shot and cut. Plus, there's the pleasure of recognising films and faces, as well as the through-lines that are set up via reappearances of films and actors, and clusters of settings and types of action.

(w/ R)

The Wandering Earth

Spontaneous Saturday night viewing at the Chinatown Cinema; I'd heard about this Chinese-made space blockbuster through an Economist article about the ways it reflects a Communist Party worldview, and watched through that lens it was quite interesting (as pure entertainment, it was ok but a bit baggy and unclear at times, as well as being under-characterised, although I recognised that style, and the relatively disposable approach to heroes, as one that's characteristic of Chinese epic storytelling).

(w/ R)

Two Hearts (Laura Lethlean / The Anchor @ Butterfly Club)

Third floor of an old townhouse in Carlton ...

This three-hander had some nice elements, and I liked the way the 'floating' third character turned out to be related to the (post-breakup) crisis faced by the two protagonists, but I felt it struggled with the weight and seriousness of the type of play it was attempting to be (and showed flashes of) - it wasn't unpromising, but felt young.

(w/ R)

"William Wegman" (NGV)

"No other breed that I am aware of is as conducive to the illusion of transformation as Weimaraners. Weimaraners are called 'grey ghosts'. Their fur gives off an almost iridescent glow. They inhabit their forms in a strange way, never appearing to solidify into themselves as, say, a lab, a collie or a bulldog does. When you photograph a collie, you get a collie." - William Wegman

An aside: his first was named Man Ray; later he got a female named Fay Ray.

"Madam Butterfly" (1997)

"Uphill" (1990)

"Contact" (2014)

(w/ R)

Jenny Offill - Dept. of Speculation / two books I thought I'd like but abandoned

Just as marvellous as I thought it would be. While its form - a series of sometimes oblique, and obliquely connected, paragraphs with white space between them - is the first thing to strike the reader, followed closely by its wit and sharpness on a sentence level, what pulls you through is the account it gives of its narrator's marriage and the cataclysms it faces, with the associated unmooring of her mental state (the last of those plays out, among other ways, through the shifting point of view and perspective, from the intimate "I" and "you" through successively more distance of first "my husband" and later simply "the wife" and "the husband").

//

Recently abandoned, in both cases some 150 to 200 words in: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (I was quite sure I was going to like this one, including after reading the first twenty or so pages in a Barnes and Noble in Chicago a few months back, but couldn't get past the eventlessness and general anomie) and Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami (I got some momentum on this one but started feeling it was just spinning its wheels - I've read this novel by Murakami before).