Rhiannon Giddens with Francesco Turrisi - There Is No Other

Interesting, wide-ranging and well-crafted, like everything Giddens does. This one hasn't really grabbed me as a whole, though the closing "He Will See You Through" is stunning.

Joan Baez - Baez Sings Dylan

It's striking how sweetly melodic these are - recorded in the 60s, so from the earlier part of Dylan's career. As much country as folk.

John Wick & John Wick: Chapter 2

These have made a surprisingly large and positive impression on the cultural landscape - enough to overcome my usual boredom about movies which are 99% about action and cause me to watch them. And they are good! Keanu is convincing, so are the many other enjoyable actors who bob up (I especially like John Leguizamo), and the action scenes are basically non-stop but in a way where most of the non-direct action bits involve build-up and also flesh out the sense of an intriguing larger world within which this is all taking place (unlike say The Raid, another often held up as an exemplar of its type).

"Indies & Idols" (Australian Chamber Orchestra, Hamer Hall)

An enjoyable program mixing pieces by three Polish modernist composers - Witold Lutoslawski, "Overture for Strings" (1947), Krzysztof Penderecki, a short piece in Baroque style (1964) and "String Quartet No 1" (1960) and Karol Szymanowski, "String Quarter No 2" (1927) - with compositions by three contemporary composers in Bryce Dessner ("Reponse Lutoslawski"), Sufjan Stevens ("Suite from Run Rabbit Run", by way of arrangement by Michael Atkinson) and Jonny Greenwood ("Suite from There Will Be Blood" - the only ones I'd heard before). My favourites were Dessner's and the sprightly Sufjan translations, but all were - in some ways surprisingly - enjoyable.

(w/ Hayley)

Storm Boy (MTC)

Nice set (including the projections), I liked the puppets (penguins, snake, pelicans), and the performances were fine. But the play itself is gentle to a fault - very ho-hum.

(w/ Erandathie and trang)

Fleabag seasons 1 & 2

Tremendously appealing and emotionally pungent, and darker and deeper than I'd expected. Season 2 in particular is a marvel; the moment when the priest notices her asides to 'us' is electric, and the way the show develops the significance of those performatively conspiratorial comments to camera over the rest of the season, including in illustrating her development across the two seasons, is remarkably clever and at times uncanny. The stakes feel high, and real, especially in their flirtation. There are laughs too, and by the end mercy for all its main characters as well. I had a lot of feelings while watching Fleabag, and admired it very much it.

Assorted thoughts:

• Straight after seeing it, I expected my defining image of her character - and her monstrousness - to be the scene where she gigglingly sneaks up with a knife on her drip of a boyfriend in the shower. That by the end it's been replaced by not one but several others is a testament to the show's depth and its layering of her character and our understanding of it.
• So many of the people in her life are just terrible. Olivia Colman as her mother-in-law to be is particularly something.
• Her relationship with her sister Claire is right up there with the very best bits of the show.

Meg Wolitzer - The Female Persuasion

One of those well put together novels that feels just a bit too well put together. It starts off as a campus coming of age story (making me think of The Idiot) before sharpening, not too many pages in, into being also about feminism at the levels of the personal and the political - and, as the novel's cast and plot expand, its transmission across generations and the attendant conflicts - and eventually kaleidoscoping further outwards to encompass sections told from the perspective of not just Greer but also her high school boyfriend Cory, her best friend Zee, the second wave feminist icon she encounters Faith Frank, and the venture capitalist Emmett Shrader to whom Faith is connected.

Through it all, it remains interesting - persuasive in its depictions of characters and situations (and arcs), and dovetailed in a way that doesn't feel too neat although it veers very close. Yet it never felt in any way surprising, either at the level of story (I guessed the plot-turning death early; all the main characters ended up somewhere more or less linearly predictable given where they started) or how it worked up its themes (although I did like the way it tied Greer's coming into her own self and voice with her betrayal of Zee, and the way it patterned a couple of at least arguably more noble - or differently so - paths in Zee's and Cory's as part of Greer's own progression). 

Sharon Van Etten @ Hamer Hall, Arts Centre, Tuesday 11 June

Very nice show, built mostly around Remind Me Tomorrow, opening with "Jupiter 4" (exceedingly gothy including in the red and white lighting and smoke and pulsatingly exciting, the band having aptly walked on stage to another reference point in Portishead), then going straight into the clatter of "Comeback Kid" and then the stomp of "No One's Easy To Love".

All the Remind Me Tomorrow songs punched through, with the most new light for me shed on "Memorial Day", which I hadn't realised before is another on the goth/dream-pop spectrum (though more in the 'early Cocteau Twins' vein), and she dug way back for a handful of older songs - I would've enjoyed more, but time is fleeting - including "Serpents" from Tramp and a charmingly laid back "One Day" from all the way back to Epic.

Support act: BATTS - great voice, so-so songs, sweet cover of Gillian Welch's "Everything Is Free".

(w/ R)

Tess Lea - Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts

A timely read, and frequently enjoyable and illuminating, though I found myself skimming after a while - an anthropologist's perspective on the policy-makers, program managers and public health practitioners involved in the NT's Indigenous health system, the human and social dimensions of the systems of the state, the 'magical' quality of the policy process (in the sense of the qualities attributed to various rituals and artefacts of the process - workshops, inductions, strategic policy statements, etc), and its self-perpetuating nature in its framing of problems and interventions at the interface with Aboriginal communities, experiences and health outcomes.