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.