2021: "All those little pieces"

This year's soundtrack - on spotify. 

1. Highwomen - The Highwomen

The Highwomen (Elektra, 2019)

2. Hot & Heavy - Lucy Dacus

Home Video (Matador, 2021)

3. Robber - The Weather Station

Ignorance (Fat Possum, 2021)

4. Every Time I Hear That Song - Brandi Carlile

By The Way, I Forgive You (Elektra, 2018)

5. Keeps Me Running - Esther Rose

How Many Times (Father/Daughter, 2021)

6. Nightflyer - Allison Russell

Outside Child (Fantasy, 2021)

7. Kokomo, IN - Japanese Breakfast

Jubilee (Dead Oceans, 2021)

8. Hard Drive - Cassandra Jenkins

An Overview on Phenomenal Nature (Ba Da Bing!, 2021)

9. Bloodshot - Julien Baker

Little Oblivions (Matador, 2021)

10. Errors in the History of God - Biffy Clyro

The Myth of the Happily Ever After (Warner, 2021)

11. Searching for the Truth - Katie Pruitt

Expectations (Rounder, 2020)

12. Harmonia's Dream - The War on Drugs

I Don't Live Here Anymore (Atlantic, 2021)

13. I'm Through - Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit

Georgia Blue (Southeastern, 2021)

14. Go Your Way - Robert Plant and Alison Krauss

Raise the Roof (Rounder, 2021)

Brandi Carlile - as a member of the Highwomen as well as via By The Way, I Forgive You - and Julien Baker have been the biggest artists of my 2021, both more or less on constant rotation throughout a year in which I listened to a lot of music. Ignorance has been there all year too, though it was only recently that I learned "Robber" was a metaphor for capitalism, making it even better. Every song on this playlist, and the albums they came from, has sunk in deep, but amongst them, "Hard Drive" stands out as a genuinely magical, hypnotically entrancing and - if I can claim this for what's still in the end just a pop song - ultimately healing moment in a year where such was very needed.

Samanta Schweblin - Little Eyes

Schweblin's ability to unnerve is on display from the very first of Little Eyes' short chapters, as a teen girl works out how to communicate with her 'kentuki' only for things to go horribly wrong now that the robotically controlled stuffed toy's user ('dweller'), anonymous behind the internet somewhere in the world, can reach more directly into the 'keeper' 's life. 

The book never returns to that first vignette; it's structured with a combination of similar stand-alones and chapters forming parts of longer narratives, all showing different ways in which the kentuki technology is either used for malign and harmful purposes or, despite initial promise, is unable to offer real liberation from the material and spiritual impoverishment of the physical world and - in Schweblin's telling - the darkness of human nature. It's inventive and propulsive, and to the very end I wasn't expecting that every single thread would end badly - it's a slippery, layered book that has a strong, dark vision but doesn't at any point feel gratuitous. It's powerful.

(also - Fever Dream, which increasingly feels like an out-an-out modern classic)

Lee Lai - Stone Fruit

I thought this was good - its truthful messiness translated into a story that appears simple on its surface while containing depths.

(see here)

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss - Raise the Roof

I don't know what it is about these latter day Robert Plant records that strikes such a chord with me; maybe it's something about the combination of the British folk + rock and roll elements, plus the eclectic other sources that find their ways into the mix. Where it started was Raising Sand, which has turned out to be one of those albums that just hasn't gone away, years on, and Raise the Roof is the first time that he and Krauss have returned to collaborating. It's not as great as the first one, but it's good still; favourites are the really quite folksy "Go Your Way" (Plant on mournful lead vocals) and "It Don't Bother Me" (Krauss over the top of a forceful thrum), also a jaunty version of "Can't Let Go".

Lesley Chow - You're History

The project is feminist, with its close readings of key records by popular but - Chow contends - still underrated female pop artists. At the same time, it's about taking the music and sounds of pop music, and their effects on the listener, seriously, and challenging the assumptions about what constitutes 'quality' music (eg the literary lyrics of Bob Dylan) that tend to prevail in music writing and among 'educated' music listeners. I skimmed the chapters on most of the artists I didn't already know, while enjoying the overview essays and many of the individual chapters; artists including Kate Bush, TLC, Neneh Cherry, Taylor Swift, Shakespears Sister and more.

Rick and Morty season 5

I've lost the thread of this a bit in watching it at pretty long intervals, but Rick and Morty has become one of those shows with enough comforting familiarity - plus it has the fizzy feeling of creativity, even if I'm not always sure what it's in aid of or how it all fits together - to be watchable anyway.

Natasha Brown - Assembly

So good. This tightly condensed slice of fiction sent a shiver through me.

Army of the Dead

Zack Snyder netflix zombie heist movie.

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit - Georgia Blue

Isbell and friends covering songs by Georgia artists, including some utterly iconic ones - "It's A Man's, Man's, Man's World", "Midnight Train to Georgia" (both sung by Brittney Spencer), "I've Been Loving You Too Long" (a bold one to take on that Isbell treats with sincerity and his own style), a celebratory rave-up version of "Cross Bones Style" sung by Amanda Shires, two R.E.M. bookends ("Nightswimming" complete with Bela Fleck on banjo and "Driver 8"), all of which work well. 

My favourites are an epic version of what was already an epic song in Brandi Carlile's version of "Kid Fears", complete with backing vocals from Julien Baker (thereby bringing together probably the two most important artists of my 2021 with a big song from my pretty distant past), and Isbell's take on a yearning Vic Chesnutt song called "I'm Through" - plus probably that "Cross Bones Style" take.

It all hangs together surprisingly very well - something about the quality of the songs and of the covering artists, and maybe the way that a lot of the songs/artists being covered have seeped into the contemporary americana-plus sound of Isbell and co, so that covers in those styles end up being apt, and completing a circle of sorts.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner - Fleishman Is In Trouble

It's tempting to be a bit snobby about this book, to dismiss it for its readability and (on the surface) familiar themes and perspectival shifts for contemporary literary fiction (re: the perspectival shifts, an obvious reference point is Fates and Furies; another, that came out in the same year as Fleishman, is Trust Exercise). And I do think there's something to that response, which I felt in myself the whole time I was reading it. 

At the same time though, there is real penetration and insight in it - especially in the way that Libby emerges as the most interesting character as Toby recedes a little and Rachel has also come to the forefront. Fleishman has something real to say about marriage, women's experience and modern society, as well as about identity and individual and social psychology and the gaps in people's understanding of each other, and much of it lands properly in the novel's later stages, with the 'reveal' of Rachel's side of events and, in parallel, with the shift in understanding on Libby's part and shading in of her life. The twists are twists and shifts in perspective, not in plot exactly, and they're pretty strongly signalled - which is a good thing in this case.

Just how well it works depends - and how much credit to give the book - depends on how seriously one takes the metafictional gesture near the end when Libby is revealed as not only the narrator, which we've known all along, but also the possible 'author' of the very book we've been reading ... which in turn brings into play all the unreliabilities that we might expect from her character, telling the story of these characters, based on the evidence of the text itself. The more seriously we take that, the better the book becomes - and it's impossible to know (aptly?) how seriously that should be.

Courtney Barnett - Things Take Time, Take Time

Courtney Barnett's got an x-factor - her previous stuff makes that clear - but this album doesn't.

Other Worlds Than These edited by John Joseph Adams

An anthology including both 'portal fantasies', a la through the wardrobe into Narnia, and 'parallel worlds' stories inspired by quantum physics. Consistent high quality across the collection is impressive. 

MVP is Kelly Link's "Magic For Beginners", an exceptionally well crafted long story that's about stories in a way that's meaningful, fresh and emotionally resonant - not to mention magical, with a strong undercurrent of threat and the sinister. (good analysis here)

There are a lot of clever stories here, many of them unpredictable and satisfying in their reversals and landings, and it was nice how many of them ended with versions of a happy ending (or at least not a specifically dark one). Over and above that, a few that felt to me like they had some of the real stuff: Seanan McGuire, "Crystal Halloway and the Forgotten Passage"; Pat Cadigan, "Nothing Personal" (one of the only ones that made me wish I could read more about its characters, weary detective Ruby Tsang and interdimensional interloper Rafe Pasco); Joyce Carol Oates, "The Rose Wall"; Paul Melko, "Ten Sigmas" (not actually that profound but just so well done with its repeated splitting-offs to follow diminishing numbers of possible selves as their probabilities diminish through the choices they make in attempting to save the girl), Yoon Ha Le, "Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain".

Into the Inferno

Werner Herzog and volcanos, though the Cambridge volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer who functions as guide is just as important a figure in the documentary. Vanuatu, Antarctica, Ethiopia, Iceland, North Korea, and back to Vanuatu.

Lydia Loveless - Daughter

Middling, especially when (inevitably) compared to the heights she's reached before.

Biffy Clyro - The Myth of the Happily Ever After

A real roaring rock album, and as close to hardcore as I'm likely to get; reminds me of Cave In. Every song's an anthem and a bunch of them hit particularly hard. Special mentions to "DumDum", "A Hunger in Your Haunt", "Errors in the History of God" (the 'we are trolls' song) and "Haru Urara".

Aaron Lee Tasjan - Tasjan! Tasjan! Tasjan!

Not especially notable singer-songwriter fare with retro overground 60s/70s folk stylings. "Up All Night" is good though.

"A Miracle Constantly Repeated: Patricia Piccinini"

Taking advantage of the reopening of the Flinders Street Station ballroom and the corridors and rooms connecting to it, an installation of around 20 of Piccinini's distinctive works, some of them substantial ie occupying entire rooms.

It's good, of course - the art, the setting, and the interaction between them. A bit of a sentimental streak running through several of the pieces that I hadn't noticed in Piccinini before but in retrospect is pretty clear - and also not necessarily at odds with the ideas that she's working with, including the relationships between humans and the worlds we live in (ecological, technological, scientific, familial).

The descriptions and explanations provided by Piccinini (audio tour or in writing via app) were illuminating too.

"Sapling"

"No Fear of Depths" - the child is modelled on Piccinini's daughter

"Celestial Field"

"La Brava", in the foreground of the actual ballroom

(w/ R, J & H)

Strong Female Lead

This really brought back that time in Australia's political and social history and brought home again how appalling the treatment of Julia Gillard in public - and private - discourse was.

Tori Amos - Ocean to Ocean

I enjoyed checking back in with Tori after so many years, and there are some pleasures here - "Addition of Light Divided", "Speaking With Trees", "Spies", the general reminder of how great she is and how large a part of my life those first half dozen albums of hers have been.

Taylor Swift - Red (Taylor's Version)

When it comes to Taylor Swift, Red is the big one for me. This re-recording is overall a bit more organic sounding - which means a touch less shimmer and production, which takes the tiniest bit of sparkle from tracks like "State of Grace" and "Red" (though of course I'm biased towards the versions I've come to know so well) but gives a subtly new, more grounded dimension to others like "I Knew You Were Trouble", 'We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" and "Holy Ground". Also interesting hearing the changes in Swift's voice in the nine years since its original release.

Also included is a generous selection of Red-era songs which I'm not enough of a completist to spend a lot of time with, but I enjoyed "Better Man" (an original not a Pearl Jam cover) and the 10 minute version of "All Too Well" (although I think the more concise original cut does a better job in conveying the song's drama, with its clearer and more conventional builds and peaks).

The War on Drugs - I Don't Live Here Anymore

I Don't Live Here Anymore is a marginally cleaner-sounding and more concise version of the War on Drugs, but really only marginally. If not quite so epic as Lost in the Dream and A Deeper Understanding, it's still plenty widescreen, and good.

Pistol Annies - Hell of a Holiday

Pistol Annies have released a Christmas album and somehow it's a natural fit; nothing groundbreaking but a good time.

Faye Webster - I Know I'm Funny haha

Woozy country 'n' lounge sounds.

Lauren Groff - Matrix

There's a mystical quality to Matrix which is apt given its surface subject - the life and works of visionary 12th century abbess Marie (in England, though born in France), from being sent to the abbey as prioress at the age of 17 by Queen Eleanor of Aquitane to her death many decades later, having overseen the abbey's growth and flourishing over that time, often in defiance of both Rome and the crown. 

But that mystical quality, of mystery, ellipsis and sliding truths, arises more from the combination of style and setting that Groff produces, in an impressive departure from the thoroughly contemporary mode of Fates and Furies and her short stories - the novel sustains a third person present tense voice in which Groff's characteristic flights of language are part of the structure, at once defamiliarising and evocative, for rendering an alien historical and cultural setting legible,[*] and more to the point the vision (of another kind) that it creates of a female-centred society, kept apart from the rest of the world and constructed as an extension of Marie's own will and self, and the associated - chewy - ideas it therefore puts into play, around female-ness, power, and the construction and costs of the uses of both.

I found it very easy to become lost within Matrix. I never knew exactly where it was going - although her late-in-life realisation about her own pride was a mild disappointment in its familiarity - but it has a strong sense of story and Marie's inner life is clearly depicted. I imagine there are plenty of anachronisms in its depiction of its historical period, but that seems besides the point given the nature of the act of imagination that the novel enacts. It feels a bit like a fable - aphoristic maybe - and it's unafraid of nuance; I wondered whether there would be a reckoning for how Marie treat Avice and her pregnancy, and the novel is explicit about the ecological cost of the various massive engineering projects that the nuns complete in consolidating their power. I also found it pretty moving, especially Marie's relationships with the various significant women in her life (Eleanor and Wulfhild in particular).

[*] A possible compare and contrast, and a book that it slightly reminded me of, is The Buried Giant - although Matrix's setting is in fact several centuries more recent, being the time of the Middle Ages, the Crusades, Richard the Lionheart vs the post-Arthurian Dark Ages)

Ursula K Le Guin - The Lathe of Heaven

A man finds that some of his dreams - those he calls 'effective' - are changing the world, not in small ways but comprehensively, by rewriting the entire course of history (human at the very least, seemingly planetary also, and very possibly beyond even that if the iterating appearances of the aliens are anything to go by - although the strange insight they appear to possess into this effective dreaming is a wrinkle suggesting a different character to their subjectivity) to create a new present-day, with no one other than Orr himself being aware of the replacement. The novel moves through its scenario and its ideas and implications without any unnecessary texture, as Orr's treating psych Haber discovers what is happening and seeks to use the phenomenon to better the world, and successive attempts succeed or fail to lesser or sometimes very much greater extents. It's an older style of sci fi I suppose, and it's effective.

Brit Bennett - The Vanishing Half

The Vanishing Half never stumbles as it moves back and forth between decades and points of view, beginning with a seemingly external omniscient perspective that centres twins Desiree and Stella - or, at least, their absence - and opening out as it goes, and ultimately organised more around Desiree's daughter Jude more than any other individual, as well as the effects of racism, trauma and male violence. 

I'd avoided it because the kick-off premise - two twins leading separate lives, one passing as white, the other living as Black - seemed too pat. But Bennett brings it to life and does much more with it besides.

The Beths - Jump Rope Gazers

Jangle, fuzz and melody, that old trio. From NZ, which figures. Best is the title track which is probably the purest pop song on here.

Vika & Linda - The Wait

One word that comes to mind to describe The Wait is 'convincing'. The songs are written by a cast of well known Australian songwriters - Kasey Chambers, Bernard Fanning, Glenn Richards, Mick Thomas, Paul Kelly and more - and span genres, but in the execution they're all Vika & Linda's and it's pretty glorious, from stirring opener "Raise Your Hand" all the way onwards.

S.G. Goodman - Old Time Feeling

Not bad but there's a lot of this type of thing going around. Title track is quite a blast.

Katie Pruitt - Expectations

This is a good one - brightly anthemic songwriter stuff with a familiar combination of rock, electrified folk, grown up pop and countryish sounds, but done with a verve and sense of feeling that sets it apart. The high points - "Wishful Thinking", "My Mind's A Ship (That's Going Down)", the Haim-ish title track, "Loving Her") are much higher than the rest but it never drags, more fades a bit into the background at times at worst.

29/10: With continued listening this one has kept getting better. Two things in parallel and reinforcing each other - the more subtle melodies and pleasures of the less obvious songs emerging, and paying attention to the simple but moving lyrics, which dwell heavily on feelings of being on the outside while growing up and later coming into one's own (and coming out) and finding love (of self and with others), adding greater weight to the culmination of penultimate track "Loving Her".

Lilly Hiatt - Walking Proof

A nice clean electric guitar sound and a few good hooks but in the end nothing remarkable.

Lord Huron - Long Lost

A fair bit of Fleet Foxes, smaller amounts of Roy Orbison and Calexico (and, on "Twenty Long Years", a sizeable dash of the National), let's go with that. It's an agreeable, croony confection.

Charles Yu - Interior Chinatown

It's funny, it's political and it's got heart. 

What looks like a gimmick - being written in the form of a tv/film script - turns out not to be a gimmick at all, but instead a case of form serving content, as Interior Chinatown smoothly blurs the tv series in which Willis Wu performs and the 'real world' he lives in, which is in turn in service to the novel's wider points about the performativity and constructedness of racial identity and roles in America. And all of those formal and structural gambits somehow contrive to at least not obscure, and often illuminate, the human-ness of the stories that Yu is telling. 

It's a breeze to read, and clearly deliberately so, and unabashed in being obvious about what it's saying about the (American) world and the experience of being an Asian male within it, as well as its prescriptions, and at the same time sophisticated and rich in insight. Quite an achievement. (Little wonder about this; its universality of appeal is striking.)

Siri Hustvedt - Memories of the Future

Hustvedt's great themes are consciousness and identity, along with art, and over this latter part of her novel-writing career (The Summer Without Men, The Blazing World, this one), the female experience and patriarchy have been equally to the fore; the blurb copy on my edition declaring her the 21st century's Virginia Woolf feels only mildly hyperbolic, if at all.

In its staging as a book being written by a woman with many similarities to the 'actual' Hustvedt, looking back on her younger days in 1970s NYC and littered with multiple intertexts including the diary and novel-in-progress of that younger self, Memories of the Future actively invites reading through the lens of both what one might imagine one knows of Siri Hustvedt, the author, and one's own experiences - and, subsidiarily, the intersection between those two, ie one's own experiences of Hustvedt's previous writing. For me, that goes back at least 15 or so years (but maybe, unwittingly, longer) and takes in a couple of gigantic milestones in What I Loved and The Sorrows of an American (*) as part of an ongoing engagement. 

And in some ways Memories of the Future feels like a culmination of her novels to date - not because it's her best, but in the way that it draws together so many threads that have run through her writing/life specifically from the vantage at which she's now arrived ... making it all the more impressive that it's so compelling in its own right, and that it finds a way to end in a way that conveys a leaping forward into the future. 

The prose is as good as ever, with the sections containing the big set pieces suffused with a sense of build-up and portent (especially the assault in her apartment and the dinner party scene that culminates in her outburst) and the threads of mystery and female-ness across the multiple layers of texts meaty and satisfying; especially good is the representation of multiple types of meaningful female relationships (mother-child, sister-sister, friends-in-twenties, induction into the mysteries of collective older feminine experience via Lucy and the witches). Whatever it is that Hustvedt has been tapping into and deepening for so long, it's still there.

Wussy - Attica

What a rush! Noisy electric guitar-based rock with multiple vocalists - Lisa Walker (she) and Chuck Cleaver (he), alternating between and within songs - and a heavily strummed countryish streak that's to the fore on songs like "Halloween" and "Gene, I Dream" and sits comfortably alongside the rockier surgers like "Rainbows & Butterflies" and "To The Lightning" which call to mind bands like ... Trail of Dead. The odd airier songs work well too, landing with emphasis along with their lilt - I'm thinking of "North Sea Girls" and closer "Beautiful" ("I'm not the monster that I once was..."). And then of course there's "Teenage Wasteland" at the top. I'd never heard of Wussy before Julian's playlist a few weeks back; they're very impressive.

Sarah Jarosz - World On The Ground

Warmly mingled roots; a bit of folk, a bit of country, a bit of bluegrass, a tiny jazz sway. I like it.

Lucy Dacus - Home Video

Seems like Lucy Dacus might be in it for the long haul; this is a low-key excellent singer-songwriter record that feels in conversation with the listener. I like Historian more but Home Video is different and, if anything, more easeful-feeling while equally grounded in observational detail and personal story-telling.

Neil Gaiman - American Gods

Great high concept and the commitment to story-telling pulls it through. Baggy and manifestly imperfect but engaging even in its digressions and cul de sacs.

Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda - Monstress - Vol 4: The Chosen & Vol 5: Warchild

It's the usual problem, reading serial graphic novels at long intervals and in short bursts, and Monstress is at least as complex and difficult to keep track of as any. Good though.

Natalie Imbruglia - Firebird

I don't hold it against her that, on this album, Imbruglia sometimes sounds like Taylor Swift - never more than on opening track "Build It Better" - because almost who doesn't these days? But Firebird reaches no great heights.

Emmylou Harris and the Nash Ramblers - Ramble in Music City

Newly released 1990 concert; music city = Nashville. Harris is so pristine both live and on record that there's often little difference except in the textures and nuances. Much good stuff.

Kacey Musgraves - star-crossed

At this point, Musgraves has found a real sweet spot of contemporary, pop-swirled cosmic-ish country-ish. Her previous one, 2018's Golden Hour, turned out to be a massive one for me - probably the last album to've entered my personal pantheon - and while star-crossed isn't at that level, its best moments, heavily front loaded, especially "good wife" and "justified", are striking.

Big Red Machine - How Long Do You Think It's Gonna Last?

Given who's involved - Aaron Dessner and Justin Vernon, and a fair smattering of their talented friends including Sharon Van Etten, Fleet Foxes, Taylor Swift and more - you'd think this would be good, but instead it's boring, ultra mainstream-indie easy listening where they neglected to bring any good songs.

"To Howard, From Julian 2021" (playlist)

These days they are most definitely playlists and no longer mix cds - not even virtual ones.

This one's particularly good. First to land was "Teenage Wasteland" by Wussy, from 2014 but gesturing at the 90s with its mix of fuzz and melody, and urgency and resignation, plus a title and anthemic compactness that puts it in a lineage of teenage experience-referencing classics eg "Teenage Kicks", "Teen Age Riot" (the latter compact even at 7 minutes).

Other favourites: "Some Small Hope" by Virginia Astley, "Small Talk" by Scritti Politti, "London" by Benjamin Clementine (which at first I thought was too fey but changed my mind about after more listens).

Was it deliberate that the lyrics of the last three songs all prominently feature foreign cities? London, Vegas ("Meet Me In My Dream" by Marc Almond), Winnipeg ("One Great City" by the Weakerthans). Sign of the times, maybe.

Michelle Branch - The Spirit Room

20th anniversary of this debut album. I'd never heard more than "Everywhere" and the acoustic version of "Sweet Misery" that DP put on a mix cd once so it's nice to encounter such a jam-packed record of high quality pop-rock soarers even if such a long time after the fact.

Ballboy - A Guide for the Daylight Hours

Long known to me via the version of their song "I Lost You, But I Found Country Music" recorded by lead singer Gordon McIntyre with Laura Cantrell, but without any other context. This 2002 album turns out to be a bit of a charmer, albeit very much of a certain slice of its time - an indie pop record from Scotland at the turn of the millennium, and only just (but nonetheless) on the right side of overly precious, with some good tunes dialled up by melodically noisy fm-radio style instrumentation into low-key epics.

Lake Street Dive - Obviously

Not easily categorisable but partaking of plenty of familiar sounds, Obviously only really hits its strides on a few songs near the middle, but it's easy listening.

Liz Phair - Soberish

It sounds like Liz Phair, plenty of years on, but Soberish is undistinguished. 

Vika & Linda - 'Akilotoa: Anthology - 1994-2006

Warm, characterful and frequently singalong. Many quickly lovable discoveries.

Loki season 1

A colourful and pretty fun MCU product - the charm of Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson goes a long way.

"Becoming You: An incomplete guide" (Immigration Museum)

71 snippets of coming of age stories told by diverse Australians. Enjoyable.

(w/ Siobhan)

"French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston" (NGV)

It wasn't one of my first loves, but I came to love impressionism some time back. It's the artists' interest in rendering their experience of the world (phenomenologically) and their resultant interest in light, form and perception, and it's the way this has frequently beautiful results. To the extent that I'm drawn to their subjects - landscapes, famously - it's because they lend themselves to such treatments and because my own experiences of them arrive similarly in an immediate perceptual sense, making for that always-to-be-cherished sensation of recognition writ large when the same appears in art.

This exhibition is a roll call of big names, centred on the most canonical of the impressionists - Pissarro, who I used to find overly decorative but no longer, Renoir, about whom I'm always a bit ambivalent because of how verging on saccharine he can be but whose paintings' out and out beauty are self-evident, and Monet (especially Monet, in every sense) - and with a proportionately lesser representation of those less in that core stream but still somehow part of it (Cezanne, Degas, even and maybe a bit incongruously a Van Gogh), plus some important early influences and predecessors.

Some of these I saw when visiting the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston what was only three years ago but feels much longer. Then as now, the gathering of Monets was stunning.

Eugene Louis Boudin - 'Fashionable Figures on the Beach' (1865)

Paul Cezanne - 'Fruit and a jug on a table' (c 1890-94)

Camille Pissarro - 'Two Peasant Women in a Meadow (Le Pre)' (1893)

Monet - 'Meadow with Poplars' (1875)

Monet - 'Seacoast at Trouville' (1881) - I like the Japanese feel of this one

Monet - 'Road at La Cavee, Pourville' (1882)

Monet - 'Grainstack (snow effect)' (1891)

Monet - 'Water lillies' (1905)

Japanese Breakfast - Jubilee

Bright, indie-ish tunes that spin through shoegazey, twee and electro pop elements if these kinds of genre descriptions mean anything these days. Highlights are "Be Sweet" (R accurately observed this is a highly motivational song) and the sugar-charming "Kokomo, IN".

Natalie Zina Walschots - Hench

Zippy and fun and also pretty hard-nosed. It's not as razor-focused as say The Other Black Girl but nor is it difficult to see what Hench has on its mind when it comes to capitalism, celebrity, patriarchy, state violence, and the ills of the contemporary world - funnelled through the lens of an alternate universe populated by villains and superheroes plus of course their henches and kicks.

C Pam Zhang - How Much of These Hills Is Gold

Here's the section that made me really certain that I was reading something 100% worth my time - good in isolation, and far better in the context of the associations that, by page 42, the novel has already set up to resonate when activated here.

They've nearly reached the foot of the mountains, one week later, when the rib in the sky thickens. Wolf moon, rarest kind. Bright enough that after sunset and star rise comes moonrise. Silver pries their eyes awake. The blades of grass, the bristles of Nellie's mane, the creases of their clothes - illuminated.

Across the grass, an even brighter glow.

Like two still sleeping they rise from their blankets and walk. Their hands brush. Did Sam reach across? Or is it a coincidence of strides grown similar thanks to Sam's new height?

The light comes from a tiger skull.

It's pristine. The snarl untouched. Chance didn't place this skull; the beast didn't die here. No other bones surround it. The empty sockets face East and North. Follow its gaze, and Lucy sees the very end of the mountains, where the wagon trail curves to the plains.

"It's -" Lucy says, heart quickening.

"A sign," Sam says.

Most times Lucy can't read Sam's dark eyes. Tonight the moonlight has pierced Sam through, made Sam's thoughts clear as the blades of grass. Together they stand as if at a threshold, remembering the tiger Ma drew in the doorway of each new house. Ma's tiger like no other tiger Lucy has seen, a set of eight lines suggesting the beast only if you squinted. A cipher. Ma drew her tiger as protection against what might come. Singing, Lao hu, lao hu.

Ma drew her tiger in each new home.

Song shivers through Lucy's head as she touches the skull's intact teeth. A threat, or else a grin. What was the last word of the song? A call to the tiger: Lai.

"What makes a home a home?" Lucy says. 

Sam faces the mountains and roars.

In some ways, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is deceptive. There's a surface flashiness to it, in the present-tense, image-rich argot through which it's narrated (to start with, by Lucy, age 12) and the self-reflexive myth-making it wears on its sleeve, mega-buffalo and tigers roaming late Gold Rush California and refracted through the prism of its Chinese-American experience. And then there's the apparent simplicity of its high concept - the two lost sisters with their Chinese parentage, seeking opportunity in an America whose frontiers are still seemingly untamed, but already haunted by the ghosts of western 'progress'. But in truth those elements are strengths, and wrapped together by the control that Zhang exerts over her material so that the symbols and motifs operate as plot as well as theme. It's very satisfying, and very good.

Natalia Lafourcade - Un Canto por Mexico, Vol 2

A lot of music comes heavily pre-contextualised, by the superstructure, personal expectations, and everything in between - especially after a lifetime spent listening to a great deal of music of certain types. By contrast, while for me the music on this record summons plenty of associations, I have next to nil exposure to its underlying sources - the traditional Mexican songs that Lafourcade contemporises to wonderful effect - so it arrives as something of a revelation, and absent ready reference points, which makes it only the more enjoyable, which it is, very.

Robert Finley - Sharecropper's Son

This record has a roar to it. I can't really assess the the authenticity of its blues and soul lines but it has the ring of truth to me.

Allison Russell - Outside Child

Quite the mixture, roaming across a range of roots and folk streams. It ties together well - there's depth to it.

Zakiya Dalila Harris - The Other Black Girl

This is ferocious and good. It's focused in its rendition of race and racism, in the broad and with specificity, and page-turning in its plot, structure and sentence-level writing. Doubtless it reads differently, and deeper, to Black readers but it scans strongly for me regardless. I could quibble with some aspects - especially the way some of the secondary characters and background plotting feels underdeveloped - but the overall energy of the novel carries it easily over those things.

Art

Some discoveries via last year's and this year's (to date) Metropolitan Museum of Art desk calendars which have been part of my home work space - along with others, including many existing favourites - over the last while.

Janet Fish - "Raspberries and Goldfish", 1981

El Greco - "Christ Healing the Blind", 1570

Utagawa Hiroshige - "In the Kameido Tenjin Shrine Complex", 1856

Leon Bibel - "Brooklyn Bridge", 1938

Camille Pissarro - "Rue de l'Epicerie, Rouen (Effect of Sunlight)", 1898

Amedeo Modigliani - "Jeanne Hebuterne", 1919

Winslow Homer - "The Bather", 1899

Walker Evans - "Subway Passengers, New York City: Two Women in Conversation", 1941

Kerry James Marshall - "Untitled (Studio)", 2014

Leonora Carrington - "Self-Portrait" , 1937-38

Ruth Chaney - "The Writer", 1935-43

Martha Marlow - Medicine Man

Ornate, faintly Disney-ish singer-songwriter pop in the vein of Natalie Prass's debut. Has some nice hooks, but not the songs to lift it above the throng.

The Wolf of Wall Street

What struck me on this watch was how well The Wolf of Wall Street conveys the distastefulness of its main characters - both DiCaprio's and Jonah Hill's. Champagne film-making. (last time)

Derry Girls seasons 1 & 2

Part of what makes it so great is how little there is of it - just 2 x 6 episodes of 20 minutes each, so it never runs the risk of outstaying its welcome or repeating itself while also displaying a nice modesty. The brevity also probably contributes to its sense of having captured lightning in a bottle - all its bits coming together just right.

(previously)

Jack Ingram, Miranda Lambert & John Randall - The Marfa Tapes

Relaxed and dusty session-y sounding record, including a prompt - by way of a more unadorned version - as to how actually great "Tin Man" is, a fact somewhat obscured by its placement amidst a double album, The Weight of These Wings, that's full of actually great songs.

girl in red - if i could make it go quiet

This is kind of fun but I guess I'm too much not the target audience - it has no stickiness at all for me.

Kathleen Edwards - Total Freedom

Turns out it was eight years between Edwards' previous album Voyageur - which has had real staying power - and Total Freedom, which dropped last year. Flashy it isn't, but its high quality is unforced, and it still sounds like her, just eight years or so on.

Star Trek, Star Trek Into Darkness & Star Trek Beyond

Disposable but well made entertainment, with a light enough touch and sufficiently believable stakes.

Previously: 1, 2, 3.

The Great season 1

The easy formulation would be The Favourite (with which it shares a creator) crossed with Marie Antoinette but The Great develops a more layered human-ness than those - excellent - predecessors over its 10 episodes. For all of the colourful world-building, present-to-past anachronism, zippy dialogue ('huzzahs' and 'indeeds' galore) and outright grotesqueness, it feels almost like the show can't help itself in fleshing out the characters and relationships at its centre as it goes - especially between Elle Fanning's Catherine and Nicholas Hoult's Peter, who are both wonderful creations from actors who evidently know what they're about in performances that are both deliberately mannered and seemingly natural in a way that makes them recognisable.

Julia Stone - Sixty Summers

Jumps around across styles but never quite lands. Best is the somewhat oddity of the French version of "Dance" at the end.

Kishi Bashi - Omoiyari

When you know that an artist is capable of a perfect song, and especially by working basically their standard vein rather than through some kind of out of the box different mode - and Kishi Bashi is, as evidenced by the joyous "Manchester" - it's hard to not hope for a reprise ever after. Omoiyari doesn't have any individual heights to match that earlier peak (from 151a), but it's fairly terrific in general - sweetly melodic, textured, lightly orchestrated pop music which I enjoy most in its most dramatic and violined moments.

serpentwithfeet - Deacon

♫ "Me and my boo wear the same size shoe" ♫  Great song.

Cassandra Jenkins - An Overview on Phenomenal Nature

Seven songs and a bit over 30 minutes of space-ily jazzy folkish singer-songwriter art pop - without any sense of being fussed over or preciousness. 

"Michelangelo" is noteworthy, riding one of those melodies that seems to be all a single line, with lots of little arrangement bits to keep it interesting, and all round pretty lovely. All the other songs are good too and quietly intriguing.

But can we talk about "Hard Drive", which is something else, spoken and sung, ineffable, and with a spirit that reminds me of some of those other one-off classics that come along only so often, like "Mimi on the Beach", or "Body's in Trouble", and I'm not sure there are any others really. It feels dropped in from a sideways dimension, arriving in waves.

The Social Dilemma

Not really eye-opening at this stage but sobering nonetheless.

Perfume Genius - Set My Heart on Fire Immediately

Kind of an epic record; my favourites are mostly the faster tempo ones.

Taylor Swift - evermore

More in the general vein of folklore.

Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - Carnage

Eight of Cave's heavy hymns, arriving as if through a storm - just as likely a purely interior one as external. It's not easy listening, but its musical pleasures are real.

Esther Rose - How Many Times

The lilt and delicacy of Rose's singing, and the cleanness of her arrangements, is misleading - the songs themselves are sturdy, muscular even. I would call this country music, albeit with a contemporary pop-inflected sensibility, and it's very charming. It reminds me of Laura Cantrell (high praise) while being enough its own thing too - and has the good trick of being able to throw in little sly hooks and melodic surprises with some regularity.

The 40-Year-Old Virgin

This one had slipped by me until now despite the large mark it made on the culture. It's pretty pleasant, buoyed by committed performances and a deep batting line-up of supporting and minor actors.

Cowboy Junkies - Pale Sun, Crescent Moon

From the distant year of 1993 - an era rich in this kind of thing. For me, only now coming to this album gives it the air of a lost classic, a dispatch from another time - yet I suspect it always had something of that air, even back when it was first released. I never went deep into the Cowboy Junkies beyond The Trinity Session and Rarities, B-Sides & Slow, Sad Waltzes (both iconic enough in their own right) but they cast a long, wispy shadow.

Brandi Carlile - By The Way, I Forgive You

"There are reasons why the body stays in motion / At the moment only demons come to mind" ... Carlile hasn't lost her way with a couplet that's for sure, and nor has she lost her facility for Americana warmth and melodicism combined with vocal rawness and well placed drama. All were there in 2007's The Story and 2012's Bear Creek and presumably in the other albums she's released too along the way to this one, from 2018 and her latest. 

By The Way, I Forgive You is full of good stuff, ranging across lots of ground. The first three songs - "Every Time I Hear That Song", "The Joke" and "Hold Out Your Hand" - are all excellent in strikingly different ways, respectively nailing relaxed country, anthemic folk-rock power ballad (she's done this kind of thing before, eg "The Story", and it might be her sweetest spot), and Rilo Kiley-esque country-rock / power-pop. And there's plenty to come after that - the build and release of "Whatever You Do", the pep of "Sugartooth", the rise of "Harder To Forgive". Quality.

Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

Early on in re-reading Fates and Furies, I had a feeling similar to that of re-reading The Secret History - something about the novel's intrinsic story-ness and texture (including a well fleshed-out world, vivid characters, and memorable events and scenes along the way), and something about the pleasurable sense of re-entering a novel with those qualities. And maybe something about the mythic - or quasi-mythic - register, with explicit call-outs to the ancients and a Grecian interest in character at its centre, including, as Richard Papen puts it early on, 'that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life'. It's a memorable novel all round, and well executed - although not quite as good as I'd retrospectively elevated it to being, with the first section certainly benefiting from having previously read the second, but some of the rest of its charge lost on a revisit.

Quan Barry - We Ride Upon Sticks

The 1989 Danvers High School Falcons field hockey team, Massachusetts, taps into something of the same powers that animated the Salem witchcraft accusations some 300 years previously and finds not only success on the hockey field beyond their wildest imaginings - all the way to States - but also, more importantly, their own fullest selves beyond the strictures of patriarchal (heteronormative, white-supremacist) control. 

Proudly we pimp walked back to our beachhead. The football team watched us roll by. Even through their helmets you could hear them sniggering, though on a lower frequency you could smell their teen-boy fear. We laughed in return because it was obvious their own coaches were getting ideas and that they'd all be running Deering Stadium sooner or later.

Eleven girls-to-young-women (ages 17 to 18) making up the team, narrating in the first-person plural of "we" - Mel Boucher, Sue Yoon, Julie Kaling, Heather Houston, Little Smitty, Becca Bjelica, Boy Cory, Jen Fiorenza (and the Claw), AJ Johnson, Abby Putnam and Girl Cory - and all given equal prominence, which is done with an impressive ability to bring them all to life beyond the one or two traits that most strikingly signals each of them. 

We ran off the field like a bunch of frenzied maenads carrying aloft the head of some poor slob that we'd recently torn off his shoulders. When Little Smitty got home to Smith Farm, she was still so pumped, she reached over and punched her dad when he asked how her day had gone.

It doesn't make for the strongest narrative drive, though there's some intrigue arising from the heavy foreshadowing, along with the basic sports narrative arising from their progressing from game to fame and, later, the investigations of intrepid student reporter Nicky the Chin which threaten to reveal all - but ultimately We Ride Upon Sticks is more about horizontal texture (also writ large in the loving 80s detritus scattered throughout) than forward momentum ... other than the strong feminist drive towards self-realisation, taking a different and differently intersectional form for each team member, including a nice pay-off with the final sections 30-years fast forward.

We should have loved her back, openly and without apology, but between the teen heart and the teen brain, only so much gets done.

Among other things, Barry is a poet and it shows - again, impressively - in the close control of language and in the absence of any floweriness or overt reliance on showy cadence and rhythm, in a voice that serves her story well. Plus - it's a bonus, but also integral to what makes the novel a success - it's funny.

Just as the two reporters turned and started walking away, the Claw screamed, We're red freaking hot!

Charlie Houlihan stopped in his tracks. "What'd you say?" he said.

 "Nothing," said Jen Fiorenza, soothingly patting her hair the way one might try to calm an overly excited lapdog, her head in profile same as Lincoln's on the penny.

The Highwomen - The Highwomen

Amanda Shires, Brandi Carlile, Maren Morris, Natalie Hemby - Carlile's the only one of this country supergroup (see also: Pistol Annies - who are good but the Highwomen are better) who I really know, and even then only from earlier in her career, but that doesn't matter because the quality on display speaks for itself.

There's soul here, right from the get go with "Highwomen" the song, along with mid-tempo melody ("Redesigning Women", "Crowded Table"), a good line in ballads when they want to ("My Only Child") and a repertoire of enjoyable upbeat variations on country, roots and Americana styles among which the blues/rockabilly "Don't Call Me" is my favourite. And it's an explicitly feminist project too, beyond even the simple fact of these four highly capable women coming together in a vein and genre traditionally dominated by men.

Daniel J Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson - No-Drama Discipline

A 'whole-brain child' approach to discipline; 'connect and redirect' based on brain development science and a reminder that discipline is about teaching. Seems sound to me.

Julien Baker - Little Oblivions

The force is strong with the boygenius troika just now, with their respective most recent albums turning out to be among my very favourite of the last few years - Lucy Dacus's Historian, Phoebe Bridgers' Punisher and now this one.

Little Oblivions is the first time I've listened to Baker in any sustained way and it has a heavy punch along with the glittering melodies and cathartic crescendos that drew me in. In songs like "Hardline", "Relative Fiction", "Repeat", there's a weight that's of a piece with the surface enticements and the album as a whole grips.

I read an interview by Jia Tolentino recently where she said that, when she was a child, she has this idea that "Unchained Melody" and "I Love You Always Forever" were the two perfect pop songs that existed, and, in a different vein, a piece by Amanda Petrusich in the New Yorker about the end of genre, both of which seem relevant, somehow - maybe in the way that Baker et al continue to forge forwards, drawing on elements familiar while creating something new.

Lucy Dacus - 2019 ep

Three originals (all quite good; none knockouts) and four covers of which "La vie en rose" is the standout, "Dancing in the Dark" also worth the listen as covers of "Dancing in the Dark" generally are.

Moxie

Well meaning and clearly on the side of right, and bends over backwards to be intersectional and inclusive, if also very cheesy and totally lacking any of the punk spirit that it invokes via the Bikini Kill inspiration of present-day high school feminist action. Then again, I'm probably not the target audience. Also you could draw some interesting lines between Mean Girls (2004; Tina Fey) and this one (2021; Amy Poehler - and Netflix).

Nina Simone - To Love Somebody

The title song is the star, although there's much more grit elsewhere on this set. From 1969.

Shovels & Rope - Busted Jukebox Volume 2

I liked their album Swimmin' Time and the prospect of covers of songs like "Joey", "Epic", "The Air That I Breathe" was intriguing, but I found the actual album quite charmless - too heavy handed and monochromatic.

Archie Roach - Let Love Rule

In its combination of country, soul, percussive folk and piano-led balladeering, Let Love Rule reminds me of no one so much as Nick Cave (it's also only one word away from a Nick Cave album). But it's its own thing too, twined around Roach's characterful voice - he's one of those singers you believe when listening to - and songs of love of different kinds, at least some of them being love of country and land. There are some beautiful songs here.

The Weather Station - Ignorance

A sinuous and slyly oblique singer-songwriter record that doesn't skimp on the melodies. Like more than a few others going around at the moment (eg Weyes Blood) she seems to look back to the 60s/70s in producing a set of woodsy and folk-touched yet also distinctly digital-sounding songs that move in waves. I'm liking this.

Yesterday

The best thing about this film is the way it allows the songs to shine - a reminder of the Beatles' true greatness.

The second best thing is the concept - what if the Beatles were erased from history instantaneously and no one had any memory of them other than one extremely struggling singer songwriter?

Maybe Yesterday should have done more with those two elements but even as it is, and even with some problematic bits (especially the romance), it's a feel good film ultimately just as it aspires to be.

SAULT - Untitled (Black Is)

A melting flow of styles and textures - Black music and very good music.

Big Thief - Two Hands

Forceful stuff. "Not" is an outlier, with the rest of the album veering more electric-folk but it all hits hard.

Wonder Woman 1984

I gather this wasn't universally liked in the way its predecessor deservedly was, but I enjoyed it. I like the way it has a different shape from most comic book movies, taking its time in setting up and lingering in her loneliness and self-imposed isolation at the beginning and working in some nice character moments with both Barbara Minerva and Steve Trevor, and finding a genuinely lovely sequence in the fireworks over DC as they take off in the invisible jet. The movie seems to care just as much about who its characters and and what it's about as it does about its action scenes. Gal Gadot is the same empathetic figure she was last time, and Kristen Wiig and Pedro Pascal both hit the mark for me, including via the latter's embodiment of the 'greed in the 80s' theme that runs through the plot - providing a neat interlock with the period setting and the contrasting sacrifice that WW makes and the way she literally saves the world at the end by reaching the whole world and persuading everyone to act for the greater good. 

Nadia Reid - Out of My Province

Smooth and lonely (but not too lonely) contemporary folk; voice and songs both strong. Best are "High & Lonely" and the more propulsive "Oh Canada".

Promising Young Woman soundtrack

This is one where the music is integral to the film, and so the soundtrack unsurprisingly stands up.

Most memorable are Charli XCX's still terrific "Boys" (in lightly remixed form), Donna Missal's brooding "Nothing's Gonna Hurt You Baby" and "Angel of the Morning" (the Juice Newton version - one of those songs that's somehow endlessly present in popular culture).

Also, surprisingly, the Paris Hilton song - "Stars Are Blind" - is really quite good, in a throwaway kind of way. Listening to it of course brought to mind that scene where they dance to it in the pharmacy, which plays at the time as a classic date-cute moment with an extra layer from his implied sensitivity based on his knowledge of such an out and out pop song's lyrics and willingness to sing along to them, and later with much darker undertones flowing from Hilton's status in our culture, ie becoming famous due to a leaked sex tape.

Juno

Ripe for rewatching and stands up well. It was clearer to me this time how deftly it sidesteps the pro life / pro choice argument by centring Juno's own decision; also the contrast between Juno's growing maturity and the Jason Bateman character's stuckness-in-adolescence and general jerkishness, and the validation of both single parenting and blended families and the implicit mirroring of the non-mainstreamness of Juno herself and the relationship between her and Michael Cera's Bleeker. Also a reminder of how good an actor Page was from the beginning, both interesting and believable.

(last time, in 2008)

Kate Atkinson - Big Sky

A more recent Jackson Brodie book. I read the first couple, Case Histories and One Good Turn, but haven't followed the rest and I suspect Big Sky would've been a fair bit richer if I had. Nonetheless, it's an easy read, and Brodie hasn't lost his tendency to reference country singers at every turn, especially the women. (I wonder whether his reflections are deliberately - on Atkinson's part - generally quite hokey? I wouldn't put it past her.)

He had Miranda Lambert on his headphones. She was his absolute favourite. She was blonde and curvy and sang about drink and sex and heartbreak and nostalgia and he suspected he would be slightly nervous of her in real life. But she was still his absolute favourite.

Belle and Sebastian - What to Look for in Summer

A live album and a peppy one at that. The first proper song is my latter day favourite B&S song, "Dirty Dream Number Two", and they do it justice, and there are plenty of classics across its 23 tracks, among which "Beyond the Sunrise" stands out for the way this rendition elevates it and gives it new texture and "The Fox in the Snow" and "My Wandering Days Are Over" stand out for just being such completely great songs. Plus there are a couple of newer ones I hadn't heard before along with a couple from Write About Love, which I never really internalised. Two from way, way back when in "Dog on Wheels" and "Belle & Sebastian". And it all fits.

Promising Young Woman

Very good. Plenty of both style and substance, and the two are complementary. For me it ended the right way - a film as much about the effects of trauma inflicted on women by male violence and patriarchal oppression as this one needed to stay the course, and it did. R told me about a podcast she listened to where one of the presenters was saying they wouldn't recommend it because of the moral dubiousness of Cassie's actions in taking revenge upon the perpetrators (including those complicit) and because the ending wasn't empowering for victims (survivors) of sexual assault, but to me both are, while reasonable, beside the point - the film's concern is with depicting the effects of such assault and the institutional and cultural structures that enable it, not with making a moral argument about how victims ought to or could respond. Carey Mulligan is great, and so is the casting of a cavalcade of 'nice guys' and the women who enable them.

(w/ R)

Boogie Nights

A long time since I watched this one, and I wonder whether I ever sat down and watched it all the way from start to finish before. It's lively and human, and PTA's flair was already well in evidence at this stage even though some of the depth wasn't quite yet. The warmth and optimism of the 70s, followed by the crashing fall of the turn to the 80s, and something of a happy ending for those left standing, wrapped up with a bit of a theme of 'family' which sits naturally with the porn industry setting when taken together with the lostness of the people who find their way to it.

Robin Barker - Baby Love & Katrina Bowman and Louise Ryan - Twins

Getting ready.

"2020 MIX" / "2020 in short"

End of year mixes from David and trang. One big standout on each - "Not" by Big Thief and "Wildfires" by Sault, each my introduction to that artist.

iTunes most played

I'm switching from iTunes to Spotify as my primary music player, so here's a final record of the songs I've listened to the most times over the iTunes part of my life, circa 2007/08 to now.

Accompanying entry from a few months ago: most-listened to artists over that same period.

The Queen's Gambit

The Queen's Gambit is a fantasy. Shall I count the ways? The trail of defeated boys and men, including those characterised as notably arrogant, condescending and dismissive of women - which rings true to my lay stereotype of elite chess players - left by Harmon as she ascends, ultimately all helping her towards her ultimate triumph (their individual aid is forgivable on a story-telling level, the way they all band together at the end much less credible). The her celebrity and rockstar-like treatment (the association for me was crowds mobbing the Beatles) in Russia during that ultimate tournament is depicted as emanating from what she stands for as a successful woman, implied clearly by the way the crowds of cheering fans seeking her autograph after each victory are overwhelmingly, if not wholly, made up of women. The respectful recognition, and indeed celebration of her victories, that she is accorded by her Russian opponents at the end - both the ageing champion Luchenko and her main adversary Borgov. 

But it's a beautifully put together fantasy. Not just on the obvious level of how it looks - although it looks sumptuous, and its stylishness across an array of settings and set pieces, as well as in its fashions, makes it very appealing in a way that reminds me of Killing Eve (the parallel is reinforced by the implacable, often opaque figure at its centre in Beth Harmon). And there are some striking visuals, made even better by their connection to story, character and theme (rather than being there for their own sake) - especially the imagery of the looming chesspieces overhead when Harmon visualises moves. 

But it's also well assembled on the level of story construction - it feels aware that many of its own moves strain credulity and makes an effort to maintain at least enough suspended disbelief (eg the various type of obnoxiousness displayed by other defeated men in that climactic tournament in Moscow). Another example is the character of Jolene, whose speech asserting her own agency and framing it in terms of family - the latter especially clever given that the women had met as girls in an orphanage - in making the choice to return and rescue Beth at a critical moment gets close, but doesn't quite get the show over the line for reproducing what looks awfully like the trope of the magical black person saving the white hero.

I suppose another beautifully put together fantasy is the character of Harmon herself. I don't have any trouble accepting the idea of a chess prodigy - that particular figure lives in our culture and in reality. Nor with the idea of a female one. The notion that childhood trauma and addiction may both underpin her extraordinary successes and be the greatest barrier to them, likewise, is familiar from this broad genre - as is the structure of escalating success, setbacks, and ultimate triumphs with its inherent suspense as seen in many a sports film. The less believable bit is how extremely glamorous she is - which hopefully doesn't reflect my own sexist beliefs about how extremely capable women should, or can, look, but is more disbelief that anyone playing such a demanding game at such a high level could look that way. But that can be overlooked in a tv series, of course. 

What's more important is how compelling she is, as played by Anya Taylor-Joy. There's something uncanny in her appearance, which serves the character well, with all those demons in her psyche and the extraordinary way her mind works, and both her composedness and the way it's broken down by drugs and alcohol are of a piece in Taylor-Joy's performance. (In terms of the typical spiral of out-of-controlness, it's refreshing how matter of fact she is about sex without that matter of factness itself being particularly pathologised.) The supporting characters, too, have a bit of fizz - especially her adoptive mother (a poignant figure and a counterpoint in terms of the limitations placed on women at the time, and their consequences) and rival turned supporter Benny Watts (played with huge swagger by Jojen Reed from Game of Thrones), while there are some nice dramatic moments generated by the way several of them disappear and then return at crucial moments.

In the end I don't think this was a great show - it has too many flaws and at its heart is too straightforward. But it's a very entertaining one that doesn't outstay its welcome, and put together in a way that its best and most interesting aspects (which are considerable) are able to shine. I'm glad I watched it.

NGV Triennial (second visit)

This visit took in the 3rd floor and I've now seen most - not quite all - of what this Triennial has to offer and it's confirmed the impression that I had from my first visit that this instalment isn't of the same high standard as the inaugural one in 2017. Still, there were plenty of pleasures across the many pieces of contemporary art and design gathered and thoughtfully installed as part of the exhibition.

Veronique Ellena - "Santi Luca e Martina, Rome" (2011) - from a series showing the poor and homeless amidst the splendour of ancient city buildings

Susan Philipsz - "A single voice" (2017), a video and sound installation in which the sound of the first violinist playing the score of a film (Aniara, a sci-fi tragedy) is separated from the rest of the score, deconstructed into its twelve separate tones and played through individual speakers around the darkened room

Daniel Arsham - "Falling clock" (2020)

JR - "Homily to Country" (2020), one of several installed in a pavilion outside drawing attention to the environmental and human harm arising from the degradation and drying-out of the Darling river system

(w/ Jade)

Netflix

A few things incompletely watched over the last year or so:

• Archer seasons 1 to 7 and a bit - a cynical, crude and extremely fun piece of animated action tv candy, enlivened further by a surprising ability to flesh out its characters into something more than just cartoons.
• 3% season 1 and a bit of season 2 - enjoyable Brazilian semi-dystopian future show in which members of the living-in-poverty majority get one chance each to win their way to the pampered land of the elite (the 3%) through an allegedly merit-based series of tests and contests, like a less blood-thirsty Hunger Games but with the political commentary equally - if anything, more so - up in lights. 
• Warrior Nun - two or three episodes only before losing interest.
• Bojack Horseman season 1 - this show hasn't landed with me in the way that everyone on the internet had led me to expect it would (maybe that comes with more perseverance?) but its first season shows at least flickers of greatness, with one episode in particular, "Say Anything", punching pretty hard in the stomach in the way it unwraps Princess Carolyn's situation.
• The Forest of Love - I got through about half of this movie before giving up and scrolling forward to find out what happened at the end, which required some synopsis reading anyway given the significant twist. It was hard going - too nasty for me and without the bubblegum pleasures of the director's Love Exposure. 
• New Girl - I think I'm about halfway through season 1 of a show that I can't imagine going deep on, but offers the lightest of entertainments at times when such is called for.

Ted Chiang - Stories of Your Life and Others

I felt like re-reading "Story of Your Life" and finished this collection with a renewed sense of how good they are - I'd call this book a modern classic. This time, "Tower of Babylon" especially impressed me.

(last time)

Brooklyn Nine-Nine seasons 1-7

Seven seasons of pretty consistently joy-bringing television. More than anything, the show's consistent kindness stands out, along with its diversity and wit.

Spotlight

Rewatch and liked again. 

(last time)

Brandon Sanderson - Dawnshard & Rhythm of War

The next novel plus extremely full-length novel in this series. Reading these, and Rhythm of War especially, had me thinking about what it is that I read genre - and (including) literary fiction - for. There's a relatively heavy emphasis on character here, and particularly on mental illness and disability, in a way that's impressive for a fantasy novel but would be only passable in lit fic - along with the depth of the world (and universe) being built, and the moments and crescendos of excitement and intrigue. I'd like it if Sanderson went a bit darker, in a way that was hinted at in parts of the first in the series, but that's a matter of taste rather than a reflection of quality. All told these continue to be pacy, richly imagined stories told in a way that doesn't insult the intelligence (at the level of both prose and characterisation), and a good way to escape for a time.

(previous entries in the series)