NGV Triennial

Highlights from a first pass through. As a wide-ranging celebration of contemporary art focused on established and well-known artists - international and Australian - there was plenty to enjoy. It didn't seem as densely teeming, nor to have any with the same wow factor, as elements of the previous one in 2018, which would be understandable if true given the circumstances, but might also reflect that we only made it through the southern section of the ground floor and most of the pieces interspersed among the collection on levels 1 and 2 (and along the ramp).

Sarah Waiswa - "Seeking to belong" (2016), from a series of a an albino woman photographed in the Kibera slums in Kenya

Alicja Kwade - "WeltenLinie" (2020), a disorienting and at the same time aesthetically engaging walk-through experience which messed around with my perceptions as much as it did everyone else's in terms of uncertainty about which were empty spaces and which mirrored

Lee Ufan - "Dialogue" (2017), a series of individual marks combined to appear like a single brushstroke (previously)

Cerith Wyn Evans - "C = O = D = A" (2019-20)

Angela Tiatia - "Narcissus", 2019, in which "Behind the kneeling self-absorbed figure of Narcissus, which specifically references Caravaggio's Narcissus, 1597-99, a cast of forty Narcissi performs acts of self-worship, ritual, joy, love, lust, complacency, despair and disregard" in an era of social media - made me think of a more overtly contemporary (albeit with much older reference points) Alex Prager

(w/ Hayley)

(previous Triennial: visits 1, 2, 3, 4)

Valeria Luiselli - Lost Children Archive

There's something elusive about Lost Children Archive, arising from its many effacements - the namelessness of the family whose road trip across America it focuses on, the slipperiness of the present tense in which it begins and the story-telling mode into which it shifts, the elisions inherent in its use of short sections and intertexts, the deliberate absence of the migrant children whose journeys from the 'northern triangle' of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to the US-Mexico border are set up as the book's nominal subject. The elusiveness is apt, though, and of a piece with the mysterious, poetic tone in which it works. 

I never entirely sank into it, nor loved it as much as I'd expected to - and I found it slightly jarringly over-determined in the way all of its plotting and much of its characterisation connected more or less directly to its themes - but still it held many pleasures, and that central concern, and the way it deals with the worlds of children, together with the power and delicacy of many of the individual scenes, go a long way.

2020: "Potential"

In line with this year's general blurriness, it felt like I was listening to a lot of this music all the way through 2020, give or take. Jason Isbell and Margo Price were the big ones - two excellent albums from two consistently excellent artists. Although maybe Fetch the Bolt Cutters sounds the most like 2020 to me, and it was also, by the end, somewhat slyly a year of Phoebe Bridgers.

(on spotify)

1. Dreamsicle - Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit
Reunions (Southeastern, 2020)

2. Held Down - Laura Marling
Song for Our Daughter (Chrysalis, 2020)

3. Circle the Drain - Soccer Mommy
Color Theory (Loma Vista, 2020)

4. Shameika - Fiona Apple
Fetch the Bolt Cutters (Epic, 2020)

5. Love Song - Miranda Lambert
Revolution (Columbia, 2009)

6. I'd Die for You - Margo Price
That's How Rumors Get Started (Loma Vista, 2020)

7. This Is Me Trying - Taylor Swift
Folklore (Republic, 2020)

8. Me in 20 Years - Moses Sumney
grae (Jagjaguwar, 2020)

9. Graceland Too - Phoebe Bridgers
Punisher (Dead Oceans, 2020)

10. Sunblind - Fleet Foxes
Shore (Anti-, 2020)

11. Idoru - Grimes
Miss Anthropocene (4AD, 2020)

The Letter String Quartet - All the Stories

Elements of minimalism and folk, organic and treated, with vocals. A gift from Kim.

Bendigo Art Gallery

First gallery trip in many long months.

The exhibitions had a strong Indigenous theme running through them - not all but most.

Void

Contemporary Indigenous art speaking to the theme of 'void'. Two of the most striking had a superficial resemblance to notable Western art movements of the 20th century in Op Art and Land Art while actually arriving in a very different space.

Doreen Reid Nakamarra - "Untitled" (2006) - designs associated with the rockhole site of Marrapinti, west of Pollock Hills in WA, the tali (sandhills) and puli (rocky outcrops) that surround Marrapinti

Hayley Millar-Baker - "Meeyn Meerreeng" (Country at Night) (2017)

Also James Tylor's photos (2013-14) with their dark geometric excisions, and Mabel Juli's iconographic night sky "Garnkiny Ngarranggarni" (2006).

Paul Guest Prize 2020

A prize for drawing, which seemed broadly defined with many of the works having drawing as only one component of themselves.

Richard Lewer - "2020" (2020)

Zoe Amor - "Architecture of a Dream - The Gift I + II" (2020)

David Sequeira - "Song Cycle" (2020) - each one is titled, eg "Song for Arvo Part", on sheet music paper

In addition, "Piinpi" - contemporary Indigenous fashion exhibition - which I didn't engage much with.

(w/ R)

Blade Runner 2049

Not exactly subtle, but strong-lined and persuasive, and graceful with what it is. A particularly impressive feat is the emotional weight it wrings from the relationship between K and Joi.

(last time)

I, Tonya

This is a snappy take on Tonya Harding and 'the incident', foregrounding class, competing stories and human fallibility. Good performance by Margot Robbie goes a long way to rendering Harding if not exactly entirely sympathetic then certainly recognisable as a product of circumstances as well as individual choices. Alison Janney indelible as the mother too.

The War on Drugs - Live Drugs

The War on Drugs are a band whose music is made for the live format - large, expansive, sweeping rock and roll with long builds and extended climaxes and outros - and they come through strongly on this set, which was compiled across multiple shows as is often the way. 

There's a few songs from each of Lost in the Dream and A Deeper Understanding, including several of their most exciting - "An Ocean Between the Waves", "Pain", "Strangest Thing", "Red Eyes", "Thinking of a Place", "Eyes to the Wind", "Under Pressure", "In Reverse" - and an older one ("Buenos Aires Beach") and a cover of Warren Zevon's "Accidentally Like a Martyr" in the middle. 

No revelations in these versions, which are pretty faithful and just a touch more earthy and organic, but a general slightly new perspective on all of them, with a few bonus little details like the clarity of the "be the writer of your own story" refrain throughout "Strangest Thing" and the airy grandeur of the saxophone wherever it shows up.

Munich

Meets the minimum requirement for any work dealing with the Israel-Palestine conflict, which is to recognise the situation's complexity - moral and otherwise - and the cycle of violence that accompanies it. I did feel a bit morally queasy during Munich's first hour or so, until it became clear that the film's program did indeed extend in that way, after which I was able to give myself over more fully to the suspense of its plot and the growing toll taken on Eric Bana's Avner by his actions as he faces questions of conscience, family and home in pursuing the plotters of the titular massacre.

Drive-By Truckers - The New OK

A pretty good all-round Drive-By Truckers record, released this year, that never gets to really great heights except on the soulful "Tough to Let Go" which really nails it.

The Big Lebowski

I never watched this one before somehow. I guess I'm too late to it; I found it diverting but not much more.

Tenet

As distinctively Nolan-esque as all of his films - in style, theme and treatment - and with some of the strengths of his best, Tenet nonetheless didn't completely do it for me. 

Hard not to compare it to those others, and by that yardstick, Tenet doesn't have quite the interlocked high-concept and character-based (emotional) dimensions of The Prestige, Inception and Interstellar, the combination of sheer excitement and moral texture in his Batman films, the satisfying neatness of Memento as well as a couple of those others, or the same sustained sense of stature and charisma about all of its characters. The one I haven't mentioned there is Dunkirk (my memories of Insomnia are vague), which I still look back on as an impressive but maybe my least favourite of his; interestingly, it - like Tenet - is also an overt take on genre, in that case war as opposed to spy.

Having said that, it was still a very good watch, with plenty of intrigue, a lot of action, some characteristically great set pieces, an intricate - and difficult to follow - construction, and plenty of uncertainty about where it was going and how it would get there, with all of its central performances highly watchable (especially charming is Robert Pattinson - it's a bit remarkable that the two principals of Twilight have turned out to be two of the most interesting, and maybe best, of their generation of actors). 

(w/ R)

Jessie Ware - What's Your Pleasure?

Takes aim for the dancefloor, and while there's bits I like, there are no real standouts in the vein that each of Ware's three excellent previous albums offered.

(Devotion; Tough Love; Glasshouse)

The Dark Knight Rises

Unsurprisingly a bit thinner after multiple rewatches but then again there's a reason I've been moved to watch it that many times!

Inglourious Basterds

As suspected, not as good on a revisit as I'd come to think of it as over the years since I previously watched it, but still packs something of a punch - and maybe watching on a big screen might have made a particularly large difference with this one.

Fleet Foxes - Shore

On initial listens, Shore suffers by being so evidently a Fleet Foxes album (years after I last listened to a new record of theirs, it's like they never went away) and also by being so uniform in its texture and quality - both of which tend to cause the individual songs to blur together. Luckily, on repeated listens, it turns out to be excellent, and if there aren't any real individual stand-out moments (closest are maybe "Sunblind" and "Maestranza"), that matters less when the whole is sustained at such a high level of quality.

The Nice Guys

Is there something about the 1970s, and especially its seedier elements, that makes the decade especially conducive to cinematic look-backs? Think Boogie Nights, American Hustle, Inherent Vice - a trio of truly great films, with two of them admittedly having the leg-up of being directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. The Nice Guys isn't in their league, but it shares with the two PTA ones a Los Angeles setting, and with all three a mood which feels just very suited to the movies. Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe are a good double act, with both showing pretty fair comic moves; Margaret Qualley shows up in what in retrospect could have been an audition for her turn in the 1969-set Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; and scenes are stolen by Angourie Rice as Gosling's precocious PI daughter.

The Irishman

Much craft on display in this gangster film that acquires some heft - even beyond the leg-up that a 3 hour plus running time always offers - despite what initially presents as a lack of psychological backstory or insight into the inner life of De Niro's Frank Sheeran but gradually comes to appear more a depiction of a person whose interiority is in fact completely bound up with his external life and actions. Indeed, the narrative - moving back and forth through time - stages a series of decisions that Frank makes, revealing him through his choices, none more so than when things come to a head between his two primaries in Al Pacino's Jimmy Hoffa and Joe Pesci's mob boss Russell Bufalino.

Maria Konnikova - The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

This is just a great read all round. I've liked Konnikova's writing whenever I've encountered it - I like what she writes about (decision-making, cognitive biases, psychology, personality, behaviour and general interestingness) and I like the way she writes about it (clearly and engagingly) - and The Biggest Bluff's premise is a cracking one, namely, Konnikova herself taking up poker from scratch with the aim of playing in the Main Event at the World Series of Poker in one year's time.

Of course, as she lays out along the way, her aims were deeper than just that surface motivation, and so is this book. The 'hook' is how far her background in psychology - when coupled with coaching from a living legend of professional poker, Erik Seidel, together with what's clearly a formidable intellect and capacity for focus and hard work - would take her in a hyper-competitive world dominated by maths-y and aggressively masculine types. But there's an equally compelling narrative line built around the inquiry that her training and experiences with poker enable her to make into the respective limits of luck and control in determining outcomes (in poker and in life), with a third strand comprising the investigations into Konnikova's own insecurities and psyche prompted by her experiences in competition.

She's excellent at opening up each of those through-lines, while at the same time introducing the rules, strategy and culture of high level poker and its attendant circuit and players, and there's also a built in narrative tension associated with her overall improvement arc and performance in individual tournaments along the way. Impressively, the connections she makes to lessons for life never feel forced - taking in both really direct applications of particular disciplines and skills that she hones in poker, and broader mindsets and orientations which can help make sense of life's challenges and how to navigate them.

Noelle Stevenson - Nimona

Quite charming and quite good 'monster girl' graphic novel.

Ted Chiang - Exhalation

More of Chiang's clean-lined and thoroughly thought-through excursions into 'what ifs' that always also illuminate the world we actually inhabit. 

Some of these do feel a bit 'thought exercise'-y, their animating ideas and how those are worked through dominating the story structures housing them. But the best are exceptional, especially the title story, in which a species discovers they're living inside a self-enclosed sphere within which their breathing will eventually create entropy through a complete equalisation of air pressure everyone in their closed universe, and "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom", in which portable divergent-timeline creating devices have been invented, allowing their owners to communicate with their other-timeline self and other counterparts, and one of the ones in which Chiang's moral concerns are at the forefront.

(Stories of Your Life and Others)

The Quick and the Dead

I'm fond of westerns, and The Quick and the Dead might have been the first I ever saw, a long time ago. 

It stands up okay, I guess - it's not difficult to watch anyway, aided by the inherent drama of the gunfight competition that structures it, the range of acting talent of various kinds on display (Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, and a host of fairly memorable others in supporting roles), and the flashes of visual flair in the direction and cinematography.

Tony Kushner - Angels in America

I'd been feeling like revisiting Angels in America, and now that I have, I can speculate about why that was - a feeling of Zeitgeist in the air, the sense that an end of times of sorts is approaching, questions of law and justice and the difference between them unavoidable, a growing urgency in the tension between stasis and progress coupled with increasingly yawning fault-lines in the notion of progress itself, and America at the heart of it.

I encountered the play through the National Theatre 'live' version a couple of years back, and this time I found myself reading the play text and watching the 2003 HBO miniseries with its murderers' row of talent across many of the key roles (notably Al Pacino as Roy Cohn, Meryl Streep as Hannah and Ethel Rosenberg, Emma Thompson as the Angel, Mary-Louise Parker as Harper, Patrick Wilson as Joe, and James Cromwell in the smaller role of Cohn's doctor) in parallel with each other. 

Prior, Louis, Harper, Joe, and the monstrous Cohn are characters who linger in the memory, their personalities and actions reverberating with a force that's individual to them and not just referable to the lofty themes with which they're woven - some of which I mentioned earlier, along with desire, prophecy, theory, history, responsibility and love. It's human at every turn, while convincing in its rendition of angels - and funny, too, while never sentimental. The play is a true modern classic, and the HBO version maybe comes as close to doing it justice as could be imagined.

Birds of Prey

This movie is a colourful. vibrant, violent mess, and all up it's actually pretty good. Margot Robbie is fun, Mary Elizabeth Winstead is funner.

Triple J Like A Version 15

Best:

AURORA, "Across the Universe" - I guessed from the vocal style before looking her up that she was Scandinavian.

Skeggs, "Here Comes Your Man" - apart from a drop-in from the Velvets' "I'm Waiting for the Man" at the start, a basically faithful version that plays up the always at least latent surf-rock elements of the original, and a good excuse to revisit a classic song in fresh clothes.

Cosmo's Midnight, "Sing It Back" - it turns out this is one of those songs that's so good that any fairly recognisable version of it can still be good in much the same way as the original, and also that this (Moloko's) might have been a sleeper classic in its own right.

GRAACE, "Complicated" - which is cool and, with its up and down melody, sorta-mournful piano arrangement, folkish flourishes and emotional vocal, would've fit in seamlessly on folklore, which in itself is a pretty cool realisation in a layers-on-layers sort of way. Also, it seems all-caps artist names became fashionable somewhere in the last few years.

SAFIA, "No One Knows" - successfully preserves the QOTSA drama while stripping the song to bare bones.

Jack River, "Truly Madly Deeply" - as I said above, a good and fairly faithful cover of a great song is an excuse to revel in the greatness of that song. What makes this take even better is that Jack River herself is also clearly revelling in what "Truly Madly Deeply" has to offer, most evidently in the liberal use of saxophone.

YUNGBLUD, "I Will Follow You into the Dark" (Death Cab for Cutie) - this is just an all round sweet song.

Thelma Plum, "Young Dumb & Broke" (Khalid) - a chirpy earworm.

Cub Sport, "When the Party's Over" (Billie Eilish) - this one is just a dark star of a song and it's made me properly a bit interested in Eilish for the first time.

BROCKHAMPTON, "Un-thinkable" (Alicia Keys) - soulful.

Ruby Fields, "The Unguarded Moment" - another of those that strongly summons the joys of the original, and in this case hits its pleasure centres if anything more crisply.

Thandi Phoenix, "Glory Box" - which finds the party in this song while remaining true to its spirit.

Snow White and the Huntsman

Number of highly charismatic leads who were a large part of why I watched this again: Two (Kristen Stewart, who even here finds ways to bring subtle interesting twists to her role, like the hunched way she rides into battle, and the way she plays the scene when the wicked queen is dying, and Chris Hemsworth)

Number of bonus impeccable villains: One (Charlize Theron)

Number of dwarves she meets in the forest: Eight (played by an impressive array of well known British actors)

Number of dwarves left alive at the end: Seven

Number of times I was struck by how overwhelmingly white this movie is: Many

(last time)

Zadie Smith - Grand Union

Expectation is a demon, and maybe it's why so many of these stories felt to me like exercises - workings-through of concepts rather than the you-know-it-when-you-see-it red meat of the real thing. Almost without exception, they're unquestionably well crafted, but somehow mostly a bit too controlled-feeling (even when they're clearly written to unravel), their high concepts too apparent even when the stories themselves are constructed to be oblique, their ending points too close to being pat even when pleasingly abrupt. That that sense of control - combined perhaps with a close attention to the world - is the closest thing to a unifying voice is a problem.

But, you know, maybe I would've responded to these differently if I'd encountered them individually - three of them, "Just Right", "Meet the President!" and "Now More Than Ever" (the latter, about cancel culture, one of the stronger ones), I had, but also already through the frame of being 'Zadie Smith stories' - and out of context, or would I even then have felt that each was in the thrall of some other writer or style, whether that being one I specifically recognised or more broadly in its nature.

I read the whole collection, and I'm not hesitant about abandoning books - maybe particularly short story collections - so that's a recommendation in itself. And there are some good ones in here - but somehow all too few that truly came to life. The ones I liked most were "The Dialectic" (but it's like a more programmatic Lydia Davis), "For the King" (this one made me think of a more warm-blooded Rachel Cusk), and two which are primarily about character and story and maybe those are ultimately Smith's strengths - "Sentimental Education" and "Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets".

Neil Young - Homegrown

Recorded in 1974/75 and only just released, Homegrown hits the spot - Neil Young from his classic era, in fine form.

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Greatest Hits

If you'd asked me to name a Tom Petty song before I listened to this greatest hits (covering the period from the beginning of his career in the late 70s through to 1993), I couldn't have named one, but it turns out there are at least a couple that I would've recognised - in "Don't Come Around Here No More" and "I Won't Back Down", both memorably melodic and also not particularly characteristic from what I can tell - and a few others that have the sound of familiarity, though I can't be sure whether I'd actually heard them before or whether that's just the way they sound (eg "Refugee", "Here Comes My Girl", "You Got Lucky", "Free Fallin' "). And in fact that familiarity of sound is striking across this greatest hits, shedding light on why Petty gets mentioned so much as an influence on the heartland rock sound that artists today continue returning to.

Freeman

Amazing story about an amazing person, but despite those advantages and the innate drama of being structured around the lead up to the Sydney Olympics, this documentary was really only so-so in quality. The one thing that does justify its existence, apart from its subject and the timely reminder of what Freeman's victory meant - and could have meant into the future - and the context of the Reconciliation movement at the time, is the comments from Freeman herself, telling her story.

Zadie Smith - Intimations

Short meditations on the present moment, written during the early lockdown period. Predictably clear-sighted, light of touch, and profound.

The Vast of Night

I was pretty sure I was going to like this one from about five minutes in, as the camera swoops along behind and beside fast-moving teenage radio DJ Everett Sloan and his rapid-fire, slang-laden patter into and through a local basketball stadium, then back out into the night-time streets, sweeping up similarly aged switchboard operator Fay Crocker and her new tape recorder along the way - the setting, 1950s small town New Mexico. 

It basically starts in medias res, leaving the viewer to catch up as they can, and the off-kilter tone intrigues from the outset; the film continues to groove as it goes along, building its Cold War era vibes of paranoia and possible alien invasion through score, mounting mood and tension, and some spectacular scenes, especially Fay at the switchboard as the fear mounts, on a trajectory towards its ending that's neither wholly predictable nor arbitrary-feeling.

Artists

The artists I've spent the most time listening to since itunes came into my life in around 2007 or 2008:

I've done this before, in 2016. 

Rush

James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) vs Niki Lauda (Daniel Bruhl), F1 1976. Quite good and the racing scenes work surprisingly well, but never truly elevates beyond the conventional.

Wasp Network

Assayas is always interesting but Wasp Network misses the mark. The premise is intriguing enough - a network of Cuban Castro loyalists infiltrating the anti-regime movement operating from Miami in the 90s - and the cast talented and good looking (including Penelope Cruz, Gael Garcia Bernal and Ana de Armas) but the movie doesn't gel into anything in particular.

Taylor Swift - folklore

A low key super lovely contemporary pop record, built on twinkling melodies and arrangements, songs which are equally gentle whether downbeat or mildly anthemic, and that Taylor Swift feeling running through it all. On folklore, Swift moves airily between and integrates genres more than ever before (admittedly, I've missed her last couple) and the result is dreamy. I haven't fully absorbed its 16 tracks but there's a pair just after the album's mid-point - "This Is Me Trying" and "Illicit Affairs" that I think is particularly good. Also "Epiphany".

Brandon Sanderson - The Way of Kings, Words of Radiance, Edgedancer & Oathbringer

This is the first three 'main series' books out of a projected 10 - plus a fill-in novella to flesh out the back story of a key character, Lift - in what is, of course (given that description and the books' titles), an epic fantasy series, and the most promising mainstream fantasy series I've come across in a long time at that. 

It's very page turny, but one of those that feels good to race through, while also rewarding a bit of attention to what's actually on the page. The craft of it is quite exceptional - it starts fast, with a few major characters amidst the action, and their connections to the main thrust of the story quickly apparent. The way it follows a small number of major characters - Kaladin, Shallan, Adolin, Dalinar - and brings them together keeps up the interest (with secondary characters also nicely fleshed out - Jasnah, Szeth, Taravangian, various of the bridgemen), combined with ample use of relatively short flashbacks that track through time to meet the present.

Sanderson is good at keeping the reader oriented without too much exposition every time a new character, place, event, idea etc is introduced, and he uses interludes to introduce other characters whose significance is often initially unclear - in their own right or caught up in larger machinations and events? - but which adds to the richness of the world and often presses into the main narrative over time without detracting from the overall momentum. 

Also notable is the way that the obligatory introductory quotations at the beginning of each chapter are used to actually advance plot and build suspense, not just 'worldbuild' and provide historical colour, as are the illustrations, which sometimes provide important info and are interestingly diegetic (eg Shallan's drawings).

The characters are sturdy enough, especially by the standards of the genre, and rarely fall into cliche or shortcut characterisation (Shallan's wordplay is distractingly arch at times, but what Sanderson does with her character via Veil and Radiant pretty much makes up for it), and the narrative, while somewhat standard issue, holds the attention. Familiar motifs - knights, magic, spirits, monsters, talking swords, humans as invaders, ancient and powerful beings - are given a do-over that's impressively thought-through and integrated. It's not overly dark but it does have a sense of stakes, and manages some striking images, like the scenes with the men carrying the bridges into battle to lay them across the chasms, and the 'cognitive realm' of Shadesmar with its oceans of small dark beads.

I don't know how much this series really has up its sleeve, but it's plenty well enough done for me to continue reading.

Hamilton

Great to watch a second time around, and this time - from the vantage of this filmed version - with the benefit of seeing the actors and set close-up, and with the words in subtitles so as not to miss anything, not to mention the original Broadway cast including Lin-Manuel himself.

(on stage)

Miranda Lambert - Four the Record

Has some good tunes and a few interesting flourishes up its sleeve, but overall one of the less distinguished in Lambert's back catalogue.

Joe Abercrombie - Best Served Cold

 Pacy enough, and convincingly gritty and lived-in, but on the thin side.

Haim - Women in Music Pt III

A peppy outing from Haim, as always, with a bit of evolution in their sound. Good, but largely not that exciting. Best songs (and exceptions to the not being that exciting): "The Steps", "Gasoline" and closer "FUBT".

Jenny Odell - How to Do Nothing

Odell's central argument is simple: that we must reclaim our attention from the many manifestations of neoliberalism and late capitalism that are actively seeking to occupy and commodify it - hence the book's subtitle, 'Resisting the Attention Economy'. 

And the way she develops it is supple and nuanced; she works with recurring ideas like the importance of resistance (or refusal) without disengagement, of attentiveness to context, place, communities and ecologies, of historical awareness and physical space, and the political possibilities that such an orientation opens up, developing and illustrating them through a series of hermeneutic readings of artistic works, historical figures and events, local initiatives, contemporary trends, and, of course, specific places, often in her home state of California, including her own experience of them.

I've been at How to Do Nothing for a few months now, and reading it has been equal parts consoling and energising; it's also been a little bit inspiring, in that way of books that give us language as a tool to make sense of what's happening all around and how it's possible to be different and better.

More or less as an aside: the chapter on 'Ecology of Strangers' is introduced by a quotation from Gary Snyder - who's been described as the 'poet laureate of Deep Ecology' according to wikipedia - which sheds light, whether via direct connection or more obliquely (but very appositely), on one of my icons:

There are more things in mind, in the imagination, than "you" can keep track of - thoughts, memories, images, angers, delights, rise unbidden. The depths of mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now. I do not mean personal bobcats in personal psyches, but the bobcat that roams from dream to dream.

Phoebe Bridgers - Punisher

Nice. High points: "Kyoto", "ICU", "Graceland Too".

"The Line" (The Public Theater)

The unavoidably lo-fi nature of this performance - live streamed and recorded as an intercut set of seven monologues by medical and health workers who were effectively first responders to the crisis of COVID-19 in NYC, from their own homes - worked in its favour, buttressing the sense of realism that already came with its concept and form. The workers are actually actors, but playing real people (not composites), telling stories of the pandemic, the response to it, and the systemic failings that it highlighted. 

It's an excellent piece of 'recorded theatre', ultra-contemporary in subject and depiction, and highly convincing, with most - not quite all - of the performances persuasive about the reality of the people behind them, and the political messages delivered in a way that, again, felt true because unforced.

(live streamed and recorded; w/ R and - virtually - Hayley)

Annabel Crabb - "Men at Work: Australia's Parenthood Trap" (Quarterly Essay 75)

Been meaning to read this for a while and hadn't realised it was already on our bookshelf via R!

Annabel Crabb is always good and this is lucid on the way that social and institutional expectations about men's roles shape attitudes, laws (notably availability of paid parental leave), behaviour and ultimately happiness (the last is more sketched than argued, but difficult to disagree with) in relation to parenting. 

By centring men and the costs to them of these patriarchal structures, Crabb brings a less commonly explored perspective to the issue, perhaps with the potential to persuade some who mightn't otherwise be? Hard to say how many of those are reading quarterly essays or adjacent enough to be caught in any resultant attitudinal headwinds. I suppose some might say that this issue shouldn't be made about men - but both as a recognition that feminist concerns are inevitably engaged with effects on all members of society (not just women) given that patriarchy is produced society-wide, and as a tactical intervention, this angle made a lot of sense to me.

As an aside, the examples of paid parental scheme were one case where examples from other countries were particularly compelling in throwing Australia's approach into contrast. I was also struck by Jenny Macklin's take on the political acceptability of publicly-funded parental leave at minimum wage vs Tony Abbott's 'gold plated' model at full pay.

Greyhound

Very focused Tom Hanks WWII battleships and U-boats movie.

Gillian Welch & David Rawlings - All the Good Times

It's always quality with this duo, and while All the Good Times lacks any transcendent moments, it's still more than fine.

The Old Guard

An excellent character-led superhero-type movie, headlined in every way by the always compelling and always beautiful Charlize Theron.

Margo Price - That's How Rumors Get Started

From Midwest Farmer's Daughter and All American Made, I already knew Margo Price was one of the best, so I had high hopes for That's How Rumors Get Started. 

It is excellent, as well as being a marked turn towards rock in a British Invasion meets Americana kind of way - yet its final song, "I'd Die For You", is still one out of the box, feeling like a modern rock classic with its combination of simplicity, urgency and a soaring hook. It reminds me of "Maps". And it's far from the only terrific song here.

In My Blood It Runs

This is a wonderful documentary, its subject Dujuan Hoosan and his voice at its centre - with so much for white Australia (me included) to bite down on. More here.

Moses Sumney - grae

A spectacular melange of genres which collages and flows in a way that reminds me of Endtroducing..... but, unlike that other, is built around the artist's voice. There are some obvious skyscrapers across grae's 20 tracks - "Virile", "Me in 20 Years" and "Bless Me" among them - and earworms at every turn, be it the dropped-in title hook of "Conveyor", the moody piano and electronics of "Gagarin", the crystalline carefulness of "Two Dogs", or any of a host of others. Sumney's unique as far as I know, but other artists this album has brought to mind include Anohni, Thom Yorke, Blonde Redhead and Jamie xx.

Miranda Lambert - Revolution

Another good one from the back catalogue - this one from 2009. One thing about Revolution is that my favourites are stacked towards the end, starting with "The House That Built Me" (track 10; big ballad), then "Love Song" (track 11; big anthem and all done in less than three minutes), and also the closing trio of "Sin for a Sin", "That's the Way That the World Goes Round" and "Virginia Bluebell".

The Magnetic Fields - Quickies

Continuing the Magnetic Fields' tradition of themed albums, this one's 28 songs ranging from less than 1 minute to a max of 2 1/2 minutes; unfortunately. the songs are nearly universally too slight to provide much, either as a whole or individually.

Waxahatchee - Saint Cloud

I haven't got into this. It has some grace and craft, but I'm finding it a bit dull - I much prefer the glossier, rockier pair of records that she released before this one.

Lucius - Wildewoman

Lucius are going for a joyous noise indie-pop thing but it doesn't fully land most of the time. Best song: "How Loud Your Heart Gets".

Sicario: Day of the Soldado

Aims for the same intensity and moral unmooredness as its predecessor, but isn't as good.

Miranda Lambert - Platinum

I've been enjoying Miranda Lambert lately and this is a dip into her back catalogue. 

Platinum is from 2014, and came before The Weight of These Wings, but by this stage in her career (it was album number five) she was basically already fully formed, and where a song sounds familiar it's generally as a welcome addition to an existing category of Miranda Lambert songs rather than, as sometimes happens with these trips backwards through an artist's discography, a less satisfying earlier take on a style later perfected. 

It doesn't flag across 16 tracks; mid-tempo more-pop-than-country anthem "Automatic" is one highlight, duet "Somethin' Bad" with Carrie Underwood is another, amidst many other good ones.

Elizabeth Tan - Smart Ovens for Lonely People

Rubik arrived at just the right time for me, and I've enjoyed the several of Tan's short stories that I've read along the way, most of which have made their way into this glittering collection - "Mounting Sexual Tension Between Two Long-time Friends; Tom Knows that Ant Is a Spy but Ant Doesn't", "Excision in F-Sharp Minor", "Shirt Dresses that Look a Little Too Much Like Shirts so that It Looks Like You Forgot to Put on Pants (Love Will Save the Day)", "Lola Metronome and Calliope St Laurent Having a Picnic at the End of Civilisation as We Know It" (what about those titles), but not the one about people falling asleep in the bed store, which was probably my favourite of those along with "Excision".

And Smart Ovens for Lonely People doesn't disappoint, its stories arriving like dispatches from alternative futures that are also refracted (broken mirror) versions of the present. Most involve one notable element of the fantastic - sometimes an intrusion into a world that otherwise seems like ours, sometimes in a way that more suffuses everything - but all are about the stories they're telling rather than just the high concepts that provide their jumping-off points and much of their verve; these stories hum with implications and contemporaneity.

Their inventiveness is delightful in its own right, displaying the rare ability to render a piquantly distinctive perspective, like the view from a lens jammed sideways between the cracks in our ordinary world. And that creativity is even more impressive in the way it operates as the means through which the stories penetrate rather than being an end in itself; recurring motifs and themes include therapy, trauma, conspiracy, obsolescence, consumerism, 'cute' and loss.

Sicario

What a great movie. (last time)

Rick and Morty season 4

This season seemed kinder than the ones before it, while just as creative.

(1 & 2, 3)

50 Contemporary Photographers You Should Know by Florian Heine and Brad Finger

Including:

My personal big three: Eggleston, Gursky,[*] Crewdson.

Others who I've liked when I've encountered them but not engaged so deeply with: Candida Hofer, Jeff Wall, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Cindy Sherman (by whom I'm increasingly intrigued), Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Rineke Dijkstra, Richard Mosse.

Anton Corbijn, who occupies a different space in my awareness thanks to his various iconic pop music portraits, including Control.

Two very big names who I've never focused on, for different reasons: Annie Leibovitz and Nan Goldin.

And others either only glancingly or not at all familiar to me. Genres well represented in this category: portraits, fashion, nature, street.

Candida Hofer - "Deichmanske Bibliothek Oslo II", 2000

Tina Barney - "Mr and Mrs Leo Castelli", 1998

Hiroshi Sugimoto - "Ligurian Sea, Saviore", 1993 (Italy)

Sally Mann - "Virginia at 9", 1994

Cindy Sherman - "Untitled Film Still #21", 1978

Rinko Kawauchi - Untitled (from "Illuminance"), 2009

[*] Link is to first, more ambivalent encounter.

Weiner

A study in lack of self-insight and, probably, of both private and public honesty in a public figure. At least as interesting as the main story are the behind the scenes looks at Weiner's interactions with his then wife Huma Abedin and his campaign in the 2013 New York mayoral election.

It: Chapter Two

This return to Derry 27 years on plays similarly to 'chapter one', though more mystical - which is fine as far as it goes, but means that it feels (at over 2 1/2 hours to boot) like a bit of an exercise in hitting its marks rather than a true deepening of the first film's themes or characterisation. It's telling that the best bits generally involved the flashbacks to scenes from their childhoods, although to be fair, these were integrated in a way that did serve the two films' integrity as a single whole.

Cathy Park Hong - Minor Feelings

... 'minor feelings' being, as glossed by Hong in this remarkable collection of linked essays:

the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one's perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed. ... minor feelings of paranoia, shame, irritation, and melancholy.

... these emotions do not conform to the archetypal narrative that highlights survival and self-determination. Unlike the organizing principles of a blidungsroman, minor feelings are not generated from major change but from lack of change, in particular, structural racial and economic change. ... the literature of minor feelings explores the trauma of a racist capitalist system that keeps the individual in place. It's playing tennis "while black" and dining out "while black". It's hearing the same verdict when testimony after testimony has been given.

... minor feelings are "non-cathartic states of emotion" with "a remarkable capacity for duration."  ... Minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance. ...

Minor feelings are also the emotions we are accused of having when we decide to be difficult - in other words, when we decide to be honest. When minor feelings are finally externalized, they are interpreted as hostile, ungrateful, jealous, depressing, and belligerent, affects ascribed to racialized behavior that whites consider out of line. Our feelings are overreactions because our lived experiences of structural inequity are not commensurate with their deluded reality. 

There's so much to Minor Feelings, dealt with so deftly and with such focused anger and insight. For me, it's most impressive at four inter-related levels: 

1. In the way it brings together the underlying issues surrounding race (political, economic, social, historical, cultural), what it is to 'be' Asian American, and the specificity of Hong's own experience; 
2. Relatedly, in its interrogation of the idea of 'we' that underpins any writing about race - "I feared the weight of my experiences - as East Asian [Korean], professional class, cis female, atheist, contrarian - tipped the scales of a racial group that remains so nonspecific that I wondered if there was any shared language between us";
3. In the incisiveness and clarity of its analysis - particularly the impossibility of separating any of what she writes about from the operations of capitalism and imperialism - and its mode of presentation, which has the force and directness of the best polemic and a nuance and acknowledgement of complexity that the form often sacrifices in pursuit of its advocacy aims; and
4. In its structure - multi-faceted in a way that feels like not only the most ethically sound way to approach such a multi-faceted topic and the challenges of writing with and about the experiences of others, but also the most effective at the level of both craft and argumentation.

In a way, Hong's method is hermeneutic, taking a series of historical and personal events as texts to be interpreted and illuminated - so we get the 1992 LA riots, Richard Pryor, seminal writer and artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (and her rape and murder in 1982), Yuri Kochiyama and her life in activism before and after the photo of her cradling Malcolm X's head after he was shot dead in 1965, and more, each elaborated in its wider significance and entwined with Hong's own life experiences.

(from a piece of Cha's, but the image is of her sister not herself - something that Hong unspools in her own portrait of the artist)

But actually my favourite individual section - the essays themselves are so well-connected thematically that it makes more sense to think in terms of sections than in terms of the nominal essay delineations - is the extended one about Hong's college friendships with two other Asian American women, both artists.

I heard about this book through Jia Tolentino's typically spot-on review of it.

Killing Eve seasons 2 & 3

Season 1 passed me by, but seasons 2 and 3 are delightful - funny, unconventional, sharp on gender, strongly characterised, and poised nicely on the verge of complete psychological implausibility without quite tipping over. The thing with Villanelle is that while she's not a sympathetic character, often the show brings the viewer to something like empathy by situating us within her perspective, abetted by the performative - theatrical - way she often telegraphs her responses to situations.

Ben H Winters - The Last Policeman

Diligent detective investigates what he suspects isn't the straightforward suicide that it looks, in the looming shadow of a giant asteroid that will collide with Earth in mere months - in an existential pre-apocalyptic semi-hardboiled procedural. Quite good, but in a way that sent me to wikipedia to read the plot summaries of the following two books in the trilogy rather than sending off for the books themselves.

The Lockdown Monologues: Part One (Malthouse)

A great initiative - three live-streamed mini monologues of about 7 or 8 minutes each, performed by the actors in their own homes, all on the theme of the current lockdown. 'The Clown' by Tom Holloway and performed by Daniel Schlusser, 'Ping' by Jean Tong and performed by Sophie Ross (my favourite, maybe because it was the most relatable, albeit fairly distantly at this point), 'Cocooning' by Jane Harrison and performed by Harry Tseng.

Kiki's Delivery Service

I tend to like the grander Miyazakis more - in terms of breadth of imagination and visual spectacle - but Kiki's Delivery Service, while very much down the more modest end of things, is pretty impossible to fault in its all round loveliness and twining of narrative and theme. So winning.

Jack River - Sugar Mountain

This is a strong album, with some particularly good moments ("Fool's Gold" and "Constellation Ball" are the best for mine), but it's a hard genre - broadly, dramatic alternativeish but essentially mainstream pop - to really stand out in; I often feel while listening to Sugar Mountain that Sia already did this, and overall a bit better. But maybe that's unfair - there's much to like here on its own merits.

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit - Reunions

By any normal standards, Reunions is outstanding; in the context of Isbell's recent discography it's merely very good, a sustaining of the high standard he's set in that run since Southeastern. Whether on crisply written, richly layered and thrumming singer-songwriter fare like first three songs "What've I Done to Help", "Dreamsicle" and "Only Children", guitar-to-the-forefront rock songs like "Overseas" and "Be Afraid" (which bring to mind both the War on Drugs and Isbell's old band the Drive-By Truckers) or mellower moments like "River" and "Letting You Go", it all resonates; for modern Americana it doesn't get much better than this.

Stephen King - 'Salem's Lot

I've had a fondness for Stephen King going way back - a testament to the power of story-telling, I think, as horror has never particularly appealed to me as a genre (although I don't mind occasionally dipping into it). 'Salem's Lot was his second novel, vampires in small town Maine. While I got through it quickly, some of the elements that make King great weren't as fully developed at this stage of his career as they would be later - in particular, the way things would go is very telegraphed, taking some of the tension and sting out of the story, and the sense of creeping dread that he'd later master is also a bit nascent (although apparent). On the other hand, his ability to draw a large cast of engaging characters is already apparent to a large extent, as are the story-telling instincts.

Georgia O'Keeffe (ed. Tanya Barson, Tate Publishing)

This book was pitched pretty much exactly at the level I would've wanted for an exploration of Georgia O'Keeffe, one of my very favourite artists: many large colour reproductions spanning all important parts of her body of work, six mid-length essays going into aspects of her work (including its reception and the context in which it was made) in just the right amount of depth, and some shorter interpolated pieces and extracts mostly from contemporary reviews of O'Keeffe's work. Most of the works I've encountered before, and a lot of them in person, but all are always welcome, and some were new as well.

Black, White and Blue, 1930

The two strongest through-lines are her relationship to abstraction - as traced, for example, through the development of her 'black place' series, a striking stretch of hills some distance northwest of Ghost Ranch - and the role of gender in how her work has been received and interpreted over time, including the role that Alfred Stieglitz played in creating and disseminating a heavily feminised reading and how that fit with Modernist art currents in America at the time.

Black Place III, 1944

There are some illuminating perspectives on abstraction in particular, and how this relates to the sense of infinity in O'Keeffe's work. In relation to the 'patio' series (the door of her patio in Abiquiu that she painted over and over), for example, and Barnett Newman: "Newman developed a heightened sense of the 'sublime' or - more applicable to O'Keeffe - the 'infinite'. This he achieved not by perpetuating traditional 'sublime' subjects, but by making the moment of aesthetic perception of his expansive, 'present' canvases an overwhelming emotional sensation ... O'Keeffe transformed the patio wall motif into an intangible, metaphysical vision".

White Patio with Red Door, 1960

I also found the discussion about how O'Keeffe was influenced by photography interesting and persuasive - the pathways it opened to abstraction, including the techniques of close ups and unusual perspectives, and the emphasis on negative space. (And again, in that case, in interplay with Stieglitz.)

Deer's Skull with Pedernal, 1936

"It is the abstracting - as with the flowers, the bones, the simplicity - that should be the example, the abstract continuity of unseen patterns and clues, culled in perhaps unrecognizable form at first, but revealing when examined, a simple clarity, wholeness" - Christine Taylor Patten

Pelvis Series, Red with Yellow, 1945

Maria Gainza - Optic Nerve

With many books I've liked, there's a moment, often early on, that makes me certain I'm going to like it a lot - a passage, scene or image that arrives with a sense of opening up, both in its own right and as an indication of the kind of depths the book contains. (That's true of tv series too - e.g. - which suggests an interesting parallel given that's the only other form to which this applies.)

Alfred de Dreux - "Deer Hunt" (unknown date; 19th century)

Optic Nerve I enjoyed from the get-go, and I could tell that its layered, oblique disclosures and inter-connections had plenty going on, but that moment arrived just shy of halfway through, in the chapterlette (neither 'chapter' nor 'story' feels quite right for the shortish sections in which the book's organised) about Gustave Courbet, his "The Stormy Sea", the narrator's periodic visits to an old stone house in the coastal city of Mar Del Plata, and the narrator's older cousin who walks the house's hallways at night. It's a section that could have come from A Field Guide to Getting Lost, even before its last paragraph: "My cousin was also called Maria. And only recently has it come to me that our name has the sea in it - mar - embedded like a lure, like a foretelling."

(1869)

The way those four main elements are woven together through just 13 widely spaced pages reflects the approach of Optic Nerve as a whole - the life of an artist and a particular work (often one held in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires) in conversation with an aspect of the narrator's own life and her experience of the world, which is 'in character' given how important a role art plays in her life. The book is full of moments of recognition in the face of art, only once (I think) made fully explicit, when her eye is caught by a painting that recalls her own 11 year old self. As she says early on, you write one thing in order to talk about something else.

Augusto Schiavoni, "The girl sitting" (1929)

There's some great writing about art here - about individual pieces, and about the powerful subjective experience of encountering art. How's this, for example: "But when Rothko felt anxious, he became talkative - overly so. And this in turn led him to overlook the fact that often the most powerful aspect of any work of art is its silence, and that - as they say - style is a medium in itself, its own means of emphasis. Perhaps there is something spiritual in the experience of looking at a Rothko, but it's the kind of spiritual that resists description: like seeing a glacier, or crossing a desert. Rarely do the inadequacies of language become so patently obvious." In the Rothko 'chapter' (or what have you), the narrator visits a doctor's surgery after "several days' of a constant vibration in my right eye", sees a Rothko poster, and slips abruptly in its final section via "My husband fell ill twice" into a densely reverberant passage wrapping in life, death, eros, class, humanity (via her encounter with a prostitute who walks the wards at night), the spiritual, red, and black.

(1955-57)

Also great is the closing bit on El Greco, a painter who's come into my life in a couple of ways lately. As she says, his "View of Toledo" is "easily expressionistic enough to belong to the twentieth century". Looking at it now, it's genuinely amazing to think it was painted somewhere at the end of sixteenth century instead. And her description of his "Christ in the Olive Grove" is even more descriptively intriguing, as well as revealing a great deal about the narrator herself, in the context in which it appears (at its most surface level - in a museum during a visit to her estranged brother who has chosen to remain outside): "A piece I have a weakness for. Not its theme - in fact I have little idea what the scene is supposed to signify - but rather the way in which everything in it seems suspended in the air. In it, gravity functions in reverse: something draw the figures skywards, sucking them in the direction of the clouds, like the lava lamps of my adolescence. The correct way to look at it, I thought, would be while doing a handstand; forget about the figuration and simply appreciate the scandalous sensuality of the brushstrokes strewing the oils this way and that across the canvas. Aldous Huxley must have been thinking similarly when he claimed that El Greco was such a visceral painter that, had he lived to see ninety, he would have ended up producing abstracts. Such were my thoughts as I looked up at the sky in the painting. A portentous sky, the kind beneath which only terrible or solemn events may occur, like a family member leaving home, or the erection of a cross."

(1596-1600)

(1600-1607)

The writing about art is pleasurable in itself, but much more so is the effect of its interweaving with character and theme. When I started Optic Nerve, the first reference point that came to mind was Rachel Cusk, in the way much of the external action occurs through the narrators' interactions with others and what we learn about those others, combined by razor sharp observations of those same other people. But we learn far more about the narrator here - Maria - than we ever do about the Outline trilogy's Faye, and while the reader needs to work to put the pieces together, the picture of a character and a life, situated in her particular familial, social and historical context, emerges clearly, both through the mediation of (her thoughts on) art and otherwise. And the rewards from the light it sheds on what it is to live - today, and earlier - are greater still.

(Discovered via its deep run in this year's Tournament of Books)

Three playlists

Just like last year, Rob, David and Julian all shared playlists in earlyish 2020. Mainly because I don't really listen to spotify, it's taken me this long to listen to them.

On Rob's - my favourites are Slotface's "Telepathetic" (I see they are 'punks' from Norway), K.Flay's "This Baby Don't Cry", the Jack River songs, and Alex the Astronaut's "I Like To Dance" (even though / including because that last one sounds super First Aid Kit).

On David's - Phantom Planet's "BALISONG" (good to hear they can still knock out a rousing rock anthem, and that someone can) and "Mercy Mercy Me" (Eddie Vedder, the Strokes and Josh Homme) plus of course "Seventeen" (SVE) and "The Barrel" (Aldous Harding; I've eventually been won over by it after repeated exposure).

On Julian's - amidst a predictably more esoteric mix moving across prog, jazz, folk, electro-industrial and power pop, particularly beguiling are Prefab Sprout's 22 minute "I Trawl The Megahertz" and Cechomor's "Bosilecky zvony" (according to the internet, they're a Czech band who play traditional songs in rock formats).

The Strokes - The New Abnormal

Well, this is easy to listen to although not very remarkable. I don't think I've listened to the Strokes really since First Impressions of Earth came out, except maybe the occasional revisit of a song or few from that memorable first album, and I was never ultra excited about them in the first place, but, yeah, fond memories.

Moneyball

Yale, economics, baseball. Also Brad Pitt and the bonuses of Chris Pratt and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

(previously)

Phoebe Bridgers - Stranger in the Alps

Previously known to me as the least interesting - or so I thought - member of boygenius and the female half of Better Oblivion Community Center, Bridgers finally came on to my radar proper when Penelope recommended "Scott Street", which is an epic slow-build of the melancholy kind, in the best way.

That one's the highlight of Stranger in the Alps but there are a lot of other good songs here, Bridger's reedy voice and the at times gossamer instrumentation and production belying the songs' frequent forcefulness and the ground they cover under the cloak of that overall wistful-sounding air; "Smoke Signals", "Motion Sickness", "Funeral" and "Georgia" are the most distinct.

Bob Dylan - Love and Theft

From 2001; best songs "Mississippi", "Po' Boy" and "Cry a While" (all very relaxed); good all round.

Hayley Williams - Petals for Armor

Crisp, heartfelt pop that sounds equal parts of the now and the nineties (those two currently being blurred to begin with) from the former Paramore singer. 

300: Rise of an Empire

Absurd, gratuitous, entertaining - especially thanks to Eva Green.

William Eggleston: Portraits (Phillip Prodger)

Normally I like photographers whose work is highly composed, often to the point of evident artifice upon closer inspection - Crewdson, Gursky, some Jeff Wall, Cindy Sherman. William Eggleston is an exception, his photos presenting as slices of everyday life, but - as the introductory essay and closing interview with Eggleston in this book more clear - that doesn't mean he was about seeking to represent the world in a straightforward or documentary way. Rather than seeking to capture some defined or self-contained sense of his subjects or the world they inhabit -

It has often been said that Eggleston is at war with the obvious. But the obvious is one area in which the camera excels. Duchamp demonstrated how a thing can be thought of as something other than what it appears to be. Eggleston took this a step further, by showing that the camera, with its unparalleled capacity to record information in exacting detail, does not have to be used for representational purposes, nor do photographs have to be taken at face value. Some early critics expressed frustration that Eggleston's photography reveals little of consequence about Memphis and its environs. But this was precisely the point. Eggleston has never aspired to create social documents or conduct visual surveys. Like Duchamp, his pictures present the banal and the everyday; but unlike Duchamp, they are usually transitory and frequently unsettled, like momentary realisations, or flashes of memory.

This book accompanies the British National Portrait Gallery exhibition which came to the NGV in 2017, and I remember many of the photos clearly, especially their vivid colours, as well as the tension between their focus on people - many of them family members and other intimates of the photographer's - and Eggleston's insistence that his photos of people did not express any particular psychological or formal relationship (such as of empathy or expression of worldview) between their human subjects and himself.

Frankenstein (National Theatre live)

With Benedict Cumberbatch as the creature and Jonny Lee Miller as Frankenstein. This was good but I wasn't fully immersed; I think maybe the nature of the play/production didn't lend itself to being filmed as much as some of the others I've seen. 

The Little Drummer Girl

Quite good spy series but maybe less than the sum of its parts given that those parts included Park Chan-Wook, Florence Pugh (relatively new to me but clearly excellent) and Michael Shannon.

Mama Kin Spender - Golden Magnetic

Good natured blues-roots.

Laura Marling - Song for Our Daughter

Another great record from Marling. This one's more acoustic than 2017's exceptional Semper Femina - after the assertive start of "Alexandra", "Held Down" and "Strong Girl' (the first two of those are among her best ever), it turns and stays quiet, requiring attentive listening to find its many rewards.

The Traveling Wilburys - Traveling Wilburys Vol 1

A low key good time. The best bits are (a) "Handle With Care" (of course) and (b) all the bits with Roy Orbison.

Hans Rosling - Factfulness

The subtitle tells you what this book is about: 'Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You Think'.

Its initial quiz makes its point effectively - most people are systematically and significantly wrong in their understanding of the overall state of the world as measured by facts like the percentage of girls finishing primary school in low-income countries, the trend in numbers of people living in extreme poverty, global life expectancy, and infant vaccination rates. I got 5 out of the 12 questions right - excluding the global warming one. Each question had three options, meaning I barely beat what Rosling calls the chimpanzees, ie what would be expected if someone randomly guessed the answers; Rosling's point is that most people, including (and maybe especially) those who are highly educated actually do worse than the chimpanzees due to those systematic biases.

There's plenty in Factfulness that I agree with - for clear and critical thinking, the list of 'dramatic' instincts which organise the book (the gap instinct, the fear instinct, the destiny instinct, the blame instinct, etc) are useful, in many cases combining cognitive biases of the kind laid out by Kahneman, Ariely et al with reminders about the way statistics can mislead if not used properly. And there's no arguing with Rosling's central call for us to know and understand the facts about our world, including being aware of the ways in which we're making progress.

I have one disagreement with the book's premises, and it's a big one. I think the book assumes that facts about things like educational attainment, immunisation rates, etc are an accurate indicator of global wellbeing, ie if those data points are going in the right direction, then the world is getting better. And of course these kinds of statistics are an important part of the story here.

But his argument doesn't reckon with two important and related things: the fact (of a different kind) that the price of these improvements has been immense consumption of natural resources since industrialisation and, at the same time, catastrophic climate change, and the (more contestable but I think true) point that the post-industrial scientific and technological boom has probably made the world a net more unequal place, with the gains from scientific progress unequally shared and especially once you factor in the disproportionate costs of climate change being borne by basically the whole world that doesn't fall within Rosling’s very wealthy 'level 4' group of countries.

Put those things together, and especially the point about environmental resource consumption and degradation, and it starts to look like Rosling might - ironically - have fallen victim to his own 'straight line' instinct in assuming that past progress on material needs will be sustainable without a different (and more equitable) way of doing things.

This also made me think of the Pinker/Ridley/de Botton/Gladwell debate about whether humankind's best days lie ahead.