"Shea Kirk: Vantages" + other pieces, Centre for Contemporary Photography

Shea Kirk's portraits were strong, black and white and many of the subjects photographed in a way suggestive of queerness and/or gender fluidity/non-binarism.

"Dale Robertson (left and right view)" (2019)

Of the others, Michelle Tran's photos were my favourite, especially this one:

"Madison and Shauna" (2019)

(w/ R + L & Carmel)

Lauren Groff - Florida

Florida has hung alluringly before me since it came out last year, the combination of "Ghosts and Empties" (the lead story in this collection) and Fates and Furies making me pretty sure I'd like it - and I do.

For a collection of 11 stories originally published over several years, there are some striking recurrences - storms, snakes, and the state of Florida itself, that last emerging as state of mind and state of being almost as synecdoche for the wider world, not to mention recurrences of situations, the most notable being flawed women who have chosen to isolate themselves in settings which prove inhospitable and depictions of what arises from the discomfort they then face. This obsessiveness is a strength, not a limitation - it adds to the sense that all of the stories are being told through the lens of a distinct vision, coupled with the general atmosphere of teeming, barely contained threat coexisting with the everyday difficulties experienced by her protagonists.

You can't read Lauren Groff without noticing the language, especially at a sentence level. At times it slips into being too ornate; that seems to have been the major obstacle to at least a couple of people I know's enjoyment of Fates and Furies (although, in that novel, it becomes apparent by the end that the overt 'literariness' of the register in which it's written is part of the point). But Florida shows how controlled she is as a writer, the stories mostly moving forward in clean, punchy sentences and paragraphs, and while she's unafraid to try out new formulations, which sometimes leads to a brief false note, the flourishes are more frequently present illuminating new ways of seeing the things she's writing about.

I also like how much of a sense of story there is to most of the pieces, with some stretching across an entire lifetime, either proportionately in time or with one or two large leaps - there's a confidence to the way Groff both immerses us in her characters' minds and pulls us forward through large pieces of plot, often littered with seemingly incidental events and observations that add a lot to the whole. I'm not sure I have favourites; in some ways they all run together a bit. But all told, Florida is quite something.

Gangs of New York

Rewatch. (last time)

Solaris (Malthouse)

There's a lot to like about this adaptation - I'm not sure whether it's been framed as an adaptation of the original novel, Tarkovsky's 1972 film version or the 2002 Soderbergh take through which I first came to Solaris - including its convincingness in immersing the audience in its space station setting via set, sound (often bouncing from all around), stage lighting and projection and the way it escalates the emotional stakes as it goes. It doesn't completely hit its emotional marks, nor does it achieve the immensity and sublimity of last year's Melancholia staging, but nonetheless, very good.

(w/ Hayley, Cass and Kim)

Rocketman

I figured that if nothing else, at least the music would be good. Rocketman makes an effort to bring some colour and zing to its telling, and does a reasonable job at giving a sense of the person who became the outsized star, but ultimately the story - musical prodigy who was always a bit different hits it big and runs into trouble with drugs and predatory music industry people and finally makes peace with who he is - just isn't especially compelling.

(w/ Erandathie)

Bruce Springsteen - Western Stars

The man's nearly 70, so if anyone deserves to record a mellow modern country album, call it 'Western Stars', load it up with songs with names like "The Wayfarer" and "Chasin' Wild Horses" (both good songs btw), and put a whole lot of strings on it, it's him. Even better, it's good - high points coming deep into its gradual burn at tracks 10 and 11, "Stones" (the "those are only the lies you told me" song) and "There Goes My Miracle", which is maybe actually too simple, but such an earworm of an anthem that it doesn't matter. At times his vocals remind me of Eddie Vedder, at others Nick Cave, but also, he sounds the way you'd expect Bruce Springsteen to sound at 70 (69 actually).

Wake in Fright (Malthouse)

Adapted (and directed) by Declan Greene into a one-woman - the woman is Zahra Newman - show that starts with the uncanny spectacle of a bear (suit) adorned in 'Lead Council of NSW' hat and t-shirt stumbling unhealthily across stage, transitions into Newman directly addressing the audience and telling a story about encountering racism while talking about the lead poisoning of children in Broken Hill, and then slips into the suffocating story of Wake in Fright itself, deliberately anachronistically rendered with its 60s setting preserved (as evident in the references to pounds and shillings) but the music, projections and some of the acting choices - eg Newman's use of Usain Bolt's thunderbolt gesture - calling attention to the play's contemporary staging, as well as aspects of the direction which highlight black-coded imagery, adding another layer to the critique of toxic white Australian masculine culture. It's quite a tour de force.

(w/ R and Cass)

Zadie Smith - Feel Free

Sometimes it feels like I'm always reading Zadie Smith (like - incompletely - here, here and here).

More than any other writer, I think of her as having been a companion throughout my reading life from the time when I could (generously) be called an adult, dating back to White Teeth's publication in 2000, and while her novels have never been right at the top of the heap of my favourites (although NW has become better and better in my memory of it), I find her varied short non-fiction hugely nourishing for my spirit.

Feel Free collects pieces originally published from 2010 to 2017, possibly including a few which appear for the first time in it, and so is a sequel of sorts to Changing My Mind. I'd read and enjoyed at least a couple of these before, including her riffs on Joni Mitchell, Anomalisa (*) and dance lessons for writers; and I'm skimmed or skipped a few, where their subjects didn't quickly draw me in (but I expect that I'll return to them over time).

Throughout there are so many delights - insights articulately carefully and aptly, often in a way that's marvellously illuminating. The ones that made the strongest impression on me:

• "Generation Why?" - on Facebook, The Social Network, identity, and the way software reduces humans and 'locks us in'
• "Killing Orson Welles at Midnight" - on Christian Marclay's "The Clock" and, inevitably, fiction, cinema and time
• "Getting In and Out" - on Get Out, blackness, being biracial, engaging with the question of artists depicting suffering that is not theirs, and what she calls '[t]he real fantasy ... that we can get out of each other's way, mark a clean cut between black and white, a final cathartic separation between us and them'.
• "The Bathroom" - about family. 'It's only years later, in that retrospective swirl, that you work out who was hurt, in what way, and how badly.'
• "Man Versus Corpse" - art, reality, nature, perspective, death
• "Love in the Gardens" - a particularly charming account of two times and places in Rome whose real heart is Smith's relationship with her deceased father

In general, I liked the pieces she's written taking pop culture works that I'm familiar with as a jumping-off point, and those mining questions about the nature of being human and alive today, and am less drawn to the ones that are more explicitly engaged with contemporary politics and the state of society (where she is maybe a bit less original in her thinking).