Having drugged myself into a familiar, dazed drowsiness with these three hefty volumes for the better part of the time since that last paper was handed in, I've been wondering just why I read (and re-read) fantasy. The genre was pretty significant in the development of my reading habits - I remember Victor Kelleher's Master of the Grove making a huge impression at some point which must've been no later than grade 4, since I have a distinct memory of reading it in the library of my old primary school, and at around that time there were also those godawful 'choose your own adventure'-type books (I can't remember the series title, but they had bright green covers and were written by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone [sp?])...and then, I think, it was David Eddings (and Terry Pratchett) from grade 6 and Stephen Donaldson the year after, in AAP (again, distinct memory of reading and being amazed by Lord Foul's Bane on the way up to camp). I'm pretty sure that Eddings was the first author whose books I was reading from the 'adult' (as opposed to 'junior'/'teenage') section of the library...somewhere in those early years I also read Tolkien and was suitably awed.
At the time, and even (especially?) through high school, I loved the genre because it was so epic - it held the promise of richer, more magical worlds, and, at its best, had such heft and sweep, and my teenage years were stormy and black enough (or, at least, so they seemed at the time, which is of course what counts) that the sheer escapism must've been alluring (though I don't think I ever thought of it in quite those terms). It's really hard to articulate, and I don't think I could've done so properly even at the time when I really felt it.
The thing is, though, that I don't feel it any more, not really, which brings me back to where I started: why do I read these books? I guess that in part it's indolence - they're so easy to read, and an enjoyable escape (even if they no longer make my spine tingle, or at least not as much as they used to), and if I'm going to read anyway, why not? Not really a very good answer, but maybe it wasn't a very good question in the first place.
As to the "Song of Ice and Fire" series itself: Well, this one I only read last year (well, read up to its current state, anyway - it's not yet finished by the author), I think, or the year before at the very earliest, and it struck me at the time as one of the best epic fantasy series out there. Simply put, it's gripping. It has gravitas and the all-important epic sweep, but it also has well-drawn, interesting characters. There's political intrigue a-plenty - much moving of pieces around the board (fates of nations and individual consciences both at stake), unexpected reversals of luck and loyalty, marriages promised and broken for the sake of alliances...the great families bound to one another by a complex merry-go-round of arranged marriages, children of enemies warded in foreign lands, imprisonments, ransoms, escapes, recaptures, characters flung together in strange configurations as they jostle and are jostled for position. But the battle and action scenes are also well done, and Martin doesn't stint on the characterisation either (witness Catelyn's complex emotions, or Tyrion, or the arc followed by Jaime Lannister, to name just a few), nor on the surprises (the first time I read these books, I was astonished when Eddard Stark died, and again when Robb met the same fate). Nor does he go overboard with the magical or fantastic elements - they become gradually more prominent as the series goes on. One of the glowing comments on the back of the books references the War of the Roses, and I reckon that's exactly right. On this re-read, it's slightly less excellent (unsurprisingly) but still pretty darn good.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Alison Lurie - Love & Friendship
I can be a boy of obscure whims; one such, of a little while ago, was the desire to be complimented on some item of my wardrobe (it didn't really matter much which item) so that I'd be able to reply, 'Oh, this old thing?'.
As I said, obscure.
Anyhow, this book reminded me of that passing thought, for its characters - middle-upper class university academics and their wives in a secluded New England university town, some time in the 1950s (as far as I could gather) - are just the sorts to utter such words. Take this passage, for example:
Or this one:
One interesting thing about Lurie's writing - apparent in that first passage - is that she writes, self-consciously or otherwise, in much the same voice as that adopted by her characters ('but she did not care for it'). In part, this is because the narrative voice is almost exclusively that of one or the other of the characters (that is, it's presented as the thoughts of one of the characters - in conventional third person prose, though, rather than Joycean stream of consciousness), sometimes in the form of letters. There's an amusing little digression in there somewhere in which Holman reflects that Emmy's use of intensifiers ('perfectly horrid', 'terribly thoughtful', etc) actually indicates a diminution of feeling/opinion - I wonder whether that's an entirely fair appraisal, though (not that Lurie necessarily endorses Holton's p.o.v., etc, etc). Much use made of adverbs in general, sometimes as qualifiers ('rather delightful'). (These examples aren't actually from the book itself, but they might as well be.)
So, the milieu is academia (university lecturers and administrators; not students except at the margins) in a very particular time and place, mostly the humanities - not a microcosm for the rest of the world because, as one of the characters notes, all of the violence and irrationality has been abstracted (besides, most of the world doesn't make passing references to Keats, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hobbes, classical mythology, Arthur Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, and so on in casual conversation), but still a fascinating study, at least for me.
Focuses on the little intrigues and maneuvers (both academic and personal), and the petty and major disasters (again, across both dimensions) of the town's inhabitants, tracking them through dinner parties, faculty meetings, clandestine encounters in parks, chance run-ins at supermarkets. Social dynamics strongly determined by class and other traditional indicia of social status, filtered through and inseparable from the university hierarchy. Cast of nouveau riches, frightfully well-bred old money types, 'picturesque' (Lurie's description not mine, and a good one) arty semi-bohemian types, drifting musicians, struggling young instructors, boorish/feared senior professors, inept and mildly corrupt administrators, and their wives (who are very much active subjects in their own right) and children. Much time spent on the merits and otherwise of the divisive 'Humanities C' course. In some faint way, put me in mind of The Great Gatsby. Often very amusing, albeit more in a 'wry smile' than 'laugh out loud' way.
All of which should be more than enough to explain why I like this book so much.
* * *
As I said, obscure.
Anyhow, this book reminded me of that passing thought, for its characters - middle-upper class university academics and their wives in a secluded New England university town, some time in the 1950s (as far as I could gather) - are just the sorts to utter such words. Take this passage, for example:
Feeling rebuked, Emmy removed herself. This time she went upstairs and began to straighten out Freddy's closet. All I have to do to keep Mrs Rabbage quiet is to insult her now and then, Emmy thought to herself, and she gave the kind of cheerful laugh that might be supposed to go with this kind of cheer, but she did not care for it. She was chagrined to think that she had spoken rudely to a servant.
Or this one:
'Hateful thing,' Miranda said, kicking the stove. 'And do you know, when we first moved in here I was completely enchanted with it. Oh, lord!' She snatched the coffee-pot up just as it boiled over. 'I'm so sorry. That just shows you. Do you still want some?'
One interesting thing about Lurie's writing - apparent in that first passage - is that she writes, self-consciously or otherwise, in much the same voice as that adopted by her characters ('but she did not care for it'). In part, this is because the narrative voice is almost exclusively that of one or the other of the characters (that is, it's presented as the thoughts of one of the characters - in conventional third person prose, though, rather than Joycean stream of consciousness), sometimes in the form of letters. There's an amusing little digression in there somewhere in which Holman reflects that Emmy's use of intensifiers ('perfectly horrid', 'terribly thoughtful', etc) actually indicates a diminution of feeling/opinion - I wonder whether that's an entirely fair appraisal, though (not that Lurie necessarily endorses Holton's p.o.v., etc, etc). Much use made of adverbs in general, sometimes as qualifiers ('rather delightful'). (These examples aren't actually from the book itself, but they might as well be.)
So, the milieu is academia (university lecturers and administrators; not students except at the margins) in a very particular time and place, mostly the humanities - not a microcosm for the rest of the world because, as one of the characters notes, all of the violence and irrationality has been abstracted (besides, most of the world doesn't make passing references to Keats, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hobbes, classical mythology, Arthur Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, and so on in casual conversation), but still a fascinating study, at least for me.
Focuses on the little intrigues and maneuvers (both academic and personal), and the petty and major disasters (again, across both dimensions) of the town's inhabitants, tracking them through dinner parties, faculty meetings, clandestine encounters in parks, chance run-ins at supermarkets. Social dynamics strongly determined by class and other traditional indicia of social status, filtered through and inseparable from the university hierarchy. Cast of nouveau riches, frightfully well-bred old money types, 'picturesque' (Lurie's description not mine, and a good one) arty semi-bohemian types, drifting musicians, struggling young instructors, boorish/feared senior professors, inept and mildly corrupt administrators, and their wives (who are very much active subjects in their own right) and children. Much time spent on the merits and otherwise of the divisive 'Humanities C' course. In some faint way, put me in mind of The Great Gatsby. Often very amusing, albeit more in a 'wry smile' than 'laugh out loud' way.
All of which should be more than enough to explain why I like this book so much.
* * *
Something was wrong with the game, though. 'But they're all blindfolded!' Emmy objected.
'Yes,' Miranda said. 'They like it better that way.'
Monday, November 21, 2005
Alison Krauss + Union Station - New Favorite
All the accoutrements of this elegant modern bluegrass-styled music - most notably, Krauss's voice - taken together make for a really nice sound, guitar and Dobro more prominent than banjo, fiddle or mandolin. There's a pleasant airiness to proceedings (especially on songs like "The Lucky One" and "New Favorite", not coincidentally two which I already knew), with neither the 'mountain' nor 'melancholy' (obviously not opposed to each other) aspects of these stylings pushed too strongly, and the record hangs together well. Still, I haven't yet taken this one to heart - maybe that'll come with time, or maybe it's a function of my approaching it from the pop end of the spectrum rather than the bluegrass/folk. That said, I'm writing this after less than a day of repeat playing, and have probably spun it about a half dozen times already, liking it a tiny bit more each time, so who knows?
Minutiae: (1) Amusingly, I found it in the 'jazz' section at the library (and labelled as such); and (2) the title track was written by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.
Minutiae: (1) Amusingly, I found it in the 'jazz' section at the library (and labelled as such); and (2) the title track was written by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.
War of the Worlds
Of all the early sci-fi/adventure novels by Verne, Wells and co, a large number of which I seem to've read somewhere along the line between primary school and now, The War of the Worlds has always stood out, even though my memory of it is fairly vague. I saw one of the 1950s versions on video when quite young (I think there was a whole series, and I happened to watch the first one) and it left a strong impression - it was frightening. The book also left me quite uneasy, in part because of what I recall as being its somewhat distanced, clinical air of reportage (though I presumably didn't think about it in quite those terms back then). And I also knew the story of the whole Orson Welles radio broadcast thing, which added to the intrigue surrounding the book.
So, when I came to watch this adaptation, I considered it auspicious when the introductory prologue (after the pull-back shot from microsopic view to universe) consisted of an old-fashioned montage and reassuringly sonorous male 'historical' voiceover. The film proper gets off to a good start, too - I didn't mind that it focused on Tom Cruise and his family, rather than depicting Pentagon generals or fighter pilots or their ilk...in fact, this seemed a good approach given that, in the end, it's the air itself which brings the invaders undone rather than any technological might or scientific nous on humanity's part (though Spielberg can't resist giving us the sight of the military shooting down one of the tripods after its shields fail, complete with suitably vanquished - ie, dead ('the only good alien's a dead alien!'; wrong movie, I know...) - alien emerging at the end).
The scenes of destruction get the job done, and there's a pervasive unsettling feeling to much of the film (eg, the ghostly shots of the family's faces early on, the menacing fellow who takes Ray and Rachel into his basement, and particularly the culmination of that encounter), which is suitable. But the character arcs are predictable and not entirely convincing, and with the focus on the individuals and not on larger-than-life heroes, that proves to be a telling flaw. As a film crit might say, three stars out of five.
So, when I came to watch this adaptation, I considered it auspicious when the introductory prologue (after the pull-back shot from microsopic view to universe) consisted of an old-fashioned montage and reassuringly sonorous male 'historical' voiceover. The film proper gets off to a good start, too - I didn't mind that it focused on Tom Cruise and his family, rather than depicting Pentagon generals or fighter pilots or their ilk...in fact, this seemed a good approach given that, in the end, it's the air itself which brings the invaders undone rather than any technological might or scientific nous on humanity's part (though Spielberg can't resist giving us the sight of the military shooting down one of the tripods after its shields fail, complete with suitably vanquished - ie, dead ('the only good alien's a dead alien!'; wrong movie, I know...) - alien emerging at the end).
The scenes of destruction get the job done, and there's a pervasive unsettling feeling to much of the film (eg, the ghostly shots of the family's faces early on, the menacing fellow who takes Ray and Rachel into his basement, and particularly the culmination of that encounter), which is suitable. But the character arcs are predictable and not entirely convincing, and with the focus on the individuals and not on larger-than-life heroes, that proves to be a telling flaw. As a film crit might say, three stars out of five.
Saturday, November 19, 2005
Neil Young with Crazy Horse - Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
Well, the three famous songs - "Cinnamon Girl", "Down By The River" and "Cowgirl In The Sand" - are the three most memorable, and together comprise more than half of the running time of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. As to the others, the title track is one of those jangly mid-tempo semi-rockers that Neil does well, and is indeed quite good, "Round & Round (It Won't Be Long)" is a slow, not unpleasant but basically forgettable tune, "The Losing End (When You're On)" comes back to the mid-tempoisms, and "Running Dry (Requiem For The Rockets)" comes across as a kind of drunken dirge (it could be the strings).
As that summation suggests, this record is, for me, one of two parts - the three songs I knew, and then the rest. In fact, those three basically orient the album, which is bookended by "Cinnamon Girl" and "Cowgirl In The Sand" and seems to cohere around "Down By The River" at its centre. So, while I suppose that it must be good, it's hard for me to listen to it as a whole because, depending on how I'm listening to it on the particular occasion, either the famous ones or the ones I hadn't heard before tend to 'bulge' out as a group.
As that summation suggests, this record is, for me, one of two parts - the three songs I knew, and then the rest. In fact, those three basically orient the album, which is bookended by "Cinnamon Girl" and "Cowgirl In The Sand" and seems to cohere around "Down By The River" at its centre. So, while I suppose that it must be good, it's hard for me to listen to it as a whole because, depending on how I'm listening to it on the particular occasion, either the famous ones or the ones I hadn't heard before tend to 'bulge' out as a group.
Hem - Eveningland
Gentle, sighing, soughing folk music. The singer (Sally Ellyson) has one of those heart in her throat type voices, and the full range of instrumentation that one would expect is around it - twangy and acoustic guitars, mandolin, banjo, piano, strings, assorted percussion and orchestral effects - and it's all very sweet and nice. It's kind of end-of-day music ('eveningland', I suppose) - graceful, delicate and finely-wrought - but with more of a tendency towards highlighted, upswooping choruses and occasional baroque ornateness than I'd expected, sometimes pulling the songs more towards the melancholy, downbeat end of country than the folk streams in which they're rooted.
It's very sincere, and more trad than, say, Azure Ray (and neither better nor worse than that duo by virtue of it - just different)...and is on Rounder rather than Saddle Creek, which pretty much tells the story. It's a bit strange listening to it, though, and reflecting that it must be closer to the origins of this kind of music than those who've become more popular with variations on it, but hearing bits of outfits like Azure Ray (not that they've yet become immensely popular), Mojave 3, the Sundays, even up-to-and-including-Surfacing Sarah McLachlan (especially, in relation to that last, on "Redwing"). I prefer the more mournful-sounding numbers - "Pacific Street", which I'd heard before, is my favourite.
It's very sincere, and more trad than, say, Azure Ray (and neither better nor worse than that duo by virtue of it - just different)...and is on Rounder rather than Saddle Creek, which pretty much tells the story. It's a bit strange listening to it, though, and reflecting that it must be closer to the origins of this kind of music than those who've become more popular with variations on it, but hearing bits of outfits like Azure Ray (not that they've yet become immensely popular), Mojave 3, the Sundays, even up-to-and-including-Surfacing Sarah McLachlan (especially, in relation to that last, on "Redwing"). I prefer the more mournful-sounding numbers - "Pacific Street", which I'd heard before, is my favourite.
Pure Movies
It was seeing Björk's name on the front which caused me to pick this up, and not recognising the song's title, "Play Dead", which caused me to buy it, coupled with the roll call of famous film songs that it contains (every last one of which I'd heard before - including, it turns out, the Björk cut...but I'm pretty sure that I don't have it on cd anywhere else, and it's a good song, suitably dramatic). The flavour of the thing can be appreciated by way of some thoughts about a few of the songs:
- "Love Is All Around". The first song on the compilation - enough said, really. Others in the 'enough said' category: "How Deep Is Your Love", "Up Where We Belong", "Lady In Red", "Unchained Melody", "I Just Called To Say I Love You", etc, etc.
- "Stuck In The Middle With You". This song has reminded me of Dylan in the past.
- "Blaze Of Glory". Some days I'm sorry that I taped over that old Bon Jovi best of. I mean, I probably replaced it with some Pink Floyd album or other...seriously, which one would I more often want to listen to? Bon Jovi'd win hands down.
- "I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do". And all the Concretes, Shangri-Las, etc must be having an effect, 'cause I've been quite enjoying this one. So this is what they mean what they talk about slippery slopes...
- "Nights In White Satin". Well, next time I feel like listening to this song (ie, come next blue moon), I'll be able to do so on cd instead of firing up the groaning old laptop, I guess. Here, it's the triumphant set closer.
Bonus! There's an East 17 song! Wow, that Kalifornia soundtrack must be pretty weird.
- "Love Is All Around". The first song on the compilation - enough said, really. Others in the 'enough said' category: "How Deep Is Your Love", "Up Where We Belong", "Lady In Red", "Unchained Melody", "I Just Called To Say I Love You", etc, etc.
- "Stuck In The Middle With You". This song has reminded me of Dylan in the past.
- "Blaze Of Glory". Some days I'm sorry that I taped over that old Bon Jovi best of. I mean, I probably replaced it with some Pink Floyd album or other...seriously, which one would I more often want to listen to? Bon Jovi'd win hands down.
- "I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do". And all the Concretes, Shangri-Las, etc must be having an effect, 'cause I've been quite enjoying this one. So this is what they mean what they talk about slippery slopes...
- "Nights In White Satin". Well, next time I feel like listening to this song (ie, come next blue moon), I'll be able to do so on cd instead of firing up the groaning old laptop, I guess. Here, it's the triumphant set closer.
Bonus! There's an East 17 song! Wow, that Kalifornia soundtrack must be pretty weird.
Tim Winton - The Turning
Well, the best way to describe this collection of linked short stories would have to be 'Wintonesque' - they're so recognisably written in his voice, and set in the small town Australian milieu which he's made his own. It'd be easy to dismiss his imagery and symbolism as heavy-handed and obvious - 'literature for people who don't read literature' is the slur I might sling, if I were minded to do so - but, when Winton's name comes up (as it often does), I more often find myself arguing the opposite. I feel that his writing is very honest - unadorned without being plain...it's as if he, as a writer, is producing these books and saying 'well, this is what my writing is - take it or leave it', without any attempts to distract or cozen the reader. But simplicity is not always lack of subtlety or craft.
The Turning, then. More bruised, battling types, trying to make a go of things, poised between failure and contingent success (which only ever, in this world, seems to mean 'survival'). It's delicately done, though - the characters emerge and re-emerge as they cycle through the stories in different guises and are seen from different perspectives, and different parts of their individual and collective histories come to light. I'm not intimately familiar with his previous work, but I got the sense that these were maybe a bit less mysterious, less touched by grace, less filled by those minor key redemptive (or maybe 'affirmatory') moments. Good, though - I sat up nearly all night to finish it.
The Turning, then. More bruised, battling types, trying to make a go of things, poised between failure and contingent success (which only ever, in this world, seems to mean 'survival'). It's delicately done, though - the characters emerge and re-emerge as they cycle through the stories in different guises and are seen from different perspectives, and different parts of their individual and collective histories come to light. I'm not intimately familiar with his previous work, but I got the sense that these were maybe a bit less mysterious, less touched by grace, less filled by those minor key redemptive (or maybe 'affirmatory') moments. Good, though - I sat up nearly all night to finish it.
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
The axe for the frozen sea inside us: Summer reading list
Well, university is all over bar the handing-in tomorrow, so I thought that I'd make a partial summer reading list, composed indiscriminately of books that people have given me, books which I've bought but not read, books on one of my various lists of 'books to read' lists (some based on recommendations, some because I came across them while doing research for my literature essays, and some for no reason that I can recall), new and forthcoming books by favourite authors, books which I've been meaning to re-read, and academic books which I don't seriously think I'm actually going to get through. In no particular order:
Günter Grass - The Flounder
Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls
Alasdair Gray - A History Maker
Joseph Heller - Catch 22
Kazuo Ishiguro - The Remains Of The Day
Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire
Tim Winton - The Turning
Marcel Proust - Swann's Way
Raymond Queneau - The Bark Tree
Italo Calvino - If On A Winter's Night A Traveler
Thomas Pynchon - Mason & Dixon
Ian Watson - Chekhov's Journey
A S Byatt - Possession
Aragon - La Mise à Mort
Gérard de Nerval - Aurélia
Louis Guilloux - Le Sang Noir
Amélie Nothomb - Antechrista
China Miéville - Looking For Jake
Terry Pratchett - Thud
George R R Martin - A Feast For Crows [though I'll probably have to go back and read the earlier ones first, to refresh my memory]
Zadie Smith - On Beauty
Jacques Derrida - Of Grammatology
Edmund Husserl - Ideas
Also, a couple of names: Alison Lurie and Ivy Compton-Burnett.
Anyway, obviously I won't read all of those (and, conversely, will read many not on the list), but I can't help but feel that the making of a list like this is an optimistic gesture, in ways which extend beyond just reading and literature.
Günter Grass - The Flounder
Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls
Alasdair Gray - A History Maker
Joseph Heller - Catch 22
Kazuo Ishiguro - The Remains Of The Day
Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire
Tim Winton - The Turning
Marcel Proust - Swann's Way
Raymond Queneau - The Bark Tree
Italo Calvino - If On A Winter's Night A Traveler
Thomas Pynchon - Mason & Dixon
Ian Watson - Chekhov's Journey
A S Byatt - Possession
Aragon - La Mise à Mort
Gérard de Nerval - Aurélia
Louis Guilloux - Le Sang Noir
Amélie Nothomb - Antechrista
China Miéville - Looking For Jake
Terry Pratchett - Thud
George R R Martin - A Feast For Crows [though I'll probably have to go back and read the earlier ones first, to refresh my memory]
Zadie Smith - On Beauty
Jacques Derrida - Of Grammatology
Edmund Husserl - Ideas
Also, a couple of names: Alison Lurie and Ivy Compton-Burnett.
Anyway, obviously I won't read all of those (and, conversely, will read many not on the list), but I can't help but feel that the making of a list like this is an optimistic gesture, in ways which extend beyond just reading and literature.
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
On perfect albums (and a list of my current top 20 favourite albums ever)
Listening to "American Flag" this afternoon and remembering why it's so great, I got to wondering about how I make sense out of my 'favourite' albums. Thinking about the lps which I do think of as my favourites, it's striking that I wouldn't consider any of them to be flawless or perfect (even to the extent that these are meaningful concepts when applied to pop records) - the closest are probably Loveless and Treasure, and in that respect it's probably telling that they're likely the two most distinctive-sounding records on the list (see below) and so perhaps the easiest to think of as 'perfect'.
Take Moon Pix, for example. I love this album, and definitely consider it to be one of my favourites, but for me, after the opening-in-glory that is "American Flag", it doesn't really properly hit its stride again until the run home, starting with track 7, "Moonshiner". So what's with that? It's one of my favourite albums and yet I reckon that it hasn't really 'hit its stride' for the better part of half its running time? Or take Funeral (admittedly an atypical one in that it's only been part of my life for a span of months, rather than years): there are really only two songs on that album - "Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels)" and "Rebellion (Lies)" - which I out and out love (though obviously any record on which cuts like "In The Backseat", "Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out)", "Haiti", etc, can be 'second tier' has a lot going for it), and yet right now I'm definitely counting it as a 'favourite'.
Some of it may be down to how 'high' the high points are. Plus, some of us are just wired to respond to the sound of certain albums. And it's never wise to underestimate the effect of the right record coming along at the right time...
Another important part of what's going on here is that 'perfection' and 'flawlessness' must be, to some extent, relativised to the particular album. Kate B once opined that Tigermilk was a perfect album, and I pretty much agreed (and still do), at least to the extent that it's a perfect album on its own terms...and this despite my thinking that Sinister (and maybe even Arab Strap) is probably 'better'. But how does that work? There's got to be an interplay between, on the one hand, the way in which every album - like every work of art - in some sense sets its own terms, and, on the other hand, the overall framework within which we make these kinds of value judgments, right? So where does that leave us?
Well, with another variation on the old subjective/objective thing, I suppose. In other words, it's ineffable.
* * *
1. Bachelor No 2, or The Last Remains of the Dodo - Aimee Mann
2. OK Computer - Radiohead
3. Loveless - My Bloody Valentine
4. Treasure - Cocteau Twins
5. Blue Bell Knoll - Cocteau Twins
6. The Velvet Underground & Nico - The Velvet Underground & Nico
7. Moon Pix - Cat Power
8. On Fire - Galaxie 500
9. New Adventures In Hi-Fi - R.E.M.
10. Summerteeth - Wilco
11. Homogenic - Björk
12. Isn't Anything - My Bloody Valentine
13. The Queen Is Dead - The Smiths
14. The Bends - Radiohead
15. Psychocandy - The Jesus and Mary Chain
16. Closer - Joy Division
17. Funeral - The Arcade Fire
18. Disintegration - The Cure
19. f#a#∞ - Godspeed You Black Emperor!
20. Blacklisted - Neko Case
Take Moon Pix, for example. I love this album, and definitely consider it to be one of my favourites, but for me, after the opening-in-glory that is "American Flag", it doesn't really properly hit its stride again until the run home, starting with track 7, "Moonshiner". So what's with that? It's one of my favourite albums and yet I reckon that it hasn't really 'hit its stride' for the better part of half its running time? Or take Funeral (admittedly an atypical one in that it's only been part of my life for a span of months, rather than years): there are really only two songs on that album - "Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels)" and "Rebellion (Lies)" - which I out and out love (though obviously any record on which cuts like "In The Backseat", "Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out)", "Haiti", etc, can be 'second tier' has a lot going for it), and yet right now I'm definitely counting it as a 'favourite'.
Some of it may be down to how 'high' the high points are. Plus, some of us are just wired to respond to the sound of certain albums. And it's never wise to underestimate the effect of the right record coming along at the right time...
Another important part of what's going on here is that 'perfection' and 'flawlessness' must be, to some extent, relativised to the particular album. Kate B once opined that Tigermilk was a perfect album, and I pretty much agreed (and still do), at least to the extent that it's a perfect album on its own terms...and this despite my thinking that Sinister (and maybe even Arab Strap) is probably 'better'. But how does that work? There's got to be an interplay between, on the one hand, the way in which every album - like every work of art - in some sense sets its own terms, and, on the other hand, the overall framework within which we make these kinds of value judgments, right? So where does that leave us?
Well, with another variation on the old subjective/objective thing, I suppose. In other words, it's ineffable.
* * *
1. Bachelor No 2, or The Last Remains of the Dodo - Aimee Mann
2. OK Computer - Radiohead
3. Loveless - My Bloody Valentine
4. Treasure - Cocteau Twins
5. Blue Bell Knoll - Cocteau Twins
6. The Velvet Underground & Nico - The Velvet Underground & Nico
7. Moon Pix - Cat Power
8. On Fire - Galaxie 500
9. New Adventures In Hi-Fi - R.E.M.
10. Summerteeth - Wilco
11. Homogenic - Björk
12. Isn't Anything - My Bloody Valentine
13. The Queen Is Dead - The Smiths
14. The Bends - Radiohead
15. Psychocandy - The Jesus and Mary Chain
16. Closer - Joy Division
17. Funeral - The Arcade Fire
18. Disintegration - The Cure
19. f#a#∞ - Godspeed You Black Emperor!
20. Blacklisted - Neko Case
Raymond E Feist - Prince of the Blood
Have done some serious damage to my sleep patterns in the last few weeks, to the extent that it's now difficult to sleep any time before 4, with 5 or 5.30 being more common (it's always a worry when you're trying to fall asleep as the sky outside is beginning to grow lighter).[*] Some nights, I can more or less push on with Heidegger pretty much till then (albeit not as efficiently as at more sane times of day/night), but on other nights, this leaves me with some dead time between shutting up shop for the night and actually being able to fall asleep. Last night was one such, and I really needed a break from the paper-writing to allow my thoughts to settle and take shape, all of which is to explain why I sat up and re-read what is really a particularly mediocre entry in the Feist oeuvre (I picked it up about a quarter of the way in, having read the first quarter or so relatively recently) - an oeuvre which is, incidentally, not particularly mediocre as a whole, as far as it goes - mainly on the basis that it'd be thoroughly undemanding and I didn't already know it absolutely inside out (unlike most of the other undemanding books on my shelf).
* * *
[*] Actually, I suspect that there are a host of other factors bleeding into this inability to sleep, but they all kind of aggregate and compound in - or are compounded by - the brute fact of not having slept properly in recent times.
* * *
[*] Actually, I suspect that there are a host of other factors bleeding into this inability to sleep, but they all kind of aggregate and compound in - or are compounded by - the brute fact of not having slept properly in recent times.
Sunday, November 13, 2005
"And death shall have no dominion": Solaris
[Edited 14/7/19 to remove some personal content]
Actually, this time round it seemed more of a sci-fi film than a metaphysical one (and no, I'm not trying to draw bright lines between the two). I've never been much of a reader of sci-fi, but I've dipped in from time to time, and once in a while a book in the genre (I don't really remember names, but I think that Greg Bear may've written one or two) has given me a strange, dislocated sort of feeling, as if I really am reading about a kind of refracted reality - plausible but distorted (perhaps the word I'm looking for is 'uncanny' - unheimlich), making me feel as if the ground is shifting beneath my feet. Anyway, Solaris made me feel like that.
See, the first time I watched the film, I was thinking more in terms of it exploring the nature of reality and its interaction with consciousness (phenomenology again, though this would've been before I formally studied 'phenomenology and existentialism', I think), but this time round, Solaris seemed more like a 'sci-fi' concept around which was built a recognisably humanistic moral and rational core (again, not that this and 'metaphysics' are mutually exclusive).
The mood it creates is really something, and it looks and feels exactly as it should. It's artfully done - the way that memories and perceptual streams are shot as formally disconnected yet fade into each other (the device of the visuals dropping away while dialogue continues is an effective one) and also the structuring of the film as a whole, particularly the repetitions...all quite dream-like, or memory-like, or maybe simply everyday experience-like, when you stop to reflect on it.
The sci-fi and the metaphysics are hard to disentangle; the Sistine chapel moment near the end strikes me as a pivotal scene, one way or another. This is such a strange thing for me to write, but I somehow felt in that final scene (the one in Kelvin's apartment, I mean - not the Sistine chapel one) as if I might almost be able to believe in something like heaven, in principle, perhaps - but in the realm of sci-fi or that of phenomenology? Well, that's the question, I guess.
Actually, this time round it seemed more of a sci-fi film than a metaphysical one (and no, I'm not trying to draw bright lines between the two). I've never been much of a reader of sci-fi, but I've dipped in from time to time, and once in a while a book in the genre (I don't really remember names, but I think that Greg Bear may've written one or two) has given me a strange, dislocated sort of feeling, as if I really am reading about a kind of refracted reality - plausible but distorted (perhaps the word I'm looking for is 'uncanny' - unheimlich), making me feel as if the ground is shifting beneath my feet. Anyway, Solaris made me feel like that.
See, the first time I watched the film, I was thinking more in terms of it exploring the nature of reality and its interaction with consciousness (phenomenology again, though this would've been before I formally studied 'phenomenology and existentialism', I think), but this time round, Solaris seemed more like a 'sci-fi' concept around which was built a recognisably humanistic moral and rational core (again, not that this and 'metaphysics' are mutually exclusive).
The mood it creates is really something, and it looks and feels exactly as it should. It's artfully done - the way that memories and perceptual streams are shot as formally disconnected yet fade into each other (the device of the visuals dropping away while dialogue continues is an effective one) and also the structuring of the film as a whole, particularly the repetitions...all quite dream-like, or memory-like, or maybe simply everyday experience-like, when you stop to reflect on it.
The sci-fi and the metaphysics are hard to disentangle; the Sistine chapel moment near the end strikes me as a pivotal scene, one way or another. This is such a strange thing for me to write, but I somehow felt in that final scene (the one in Kelvin's apartment, I mean - not the Sistine chapel one) as if I might almost be able to believe in something like heaven, in principle, perhaps - but in the realm of sci-fi or that of phenomenology? Well, that's the question, I guess.
Saturday, November 12, 2005
Background music, and studying
I think that it was only really this year - or maybe '04 at the very earliest - that I admitted that working with music on is distracting. If I really want and need to think hard about something - which was rarely the case until the final stages of my uni career - then silence is the way to go, the exception being when I'm really pushed (say, on the night before a paper is due) and need some kind of background stimulation to prevent me from just subsiding into total inactivity and/or falling asleep. Since it's been all about writing and, consequently, actual thinking this year (as opposed to the largely automatic grind of studying for law exams), and because I've been taking arts seriously, this has meant that a fair amount of my working time has been sans music.
Still, in this twilight period of ten days (post-Thesis/literature papers but pre-final philo paper), I've found myself mostly writing/thinking with music on, and doing so reasonably productively, which I think is attributable to my having gotten into the right sort of zone for absorbing and thinking about philosophy over the last, say, month or so (though it's really probably been cumulative over the course of this whole year, and particularly the last semester). It's strange how one's mind shifts into different configurations over time, according to the influences to which it's (ahem) subject - although I guess that the strangeness inheres more in those shifts and resultant configurations not being directly accessible but rather only becoming apparent in their 'outputs' (as thoughts, ideas, conversational modes, etc), than in the idea of the shifting itself.
So anyway, mostly this background music has involved:
- Year of Meteors
- Humming By The Flowered Vine ("What You Said" is my favourite at the moment)
- Wilco (mostly A Ghost Is Born and the first disc of Being There)
- Eva Cassidy (uh-oh, adult contemporary beckons)
- Cat Power's rather stunning newie, "The Greatest" (is Matador the best label in the world these days?)
Still, in this twilight period of ten days (post-Thesis/literature papers but pre-final philo paper), I've found myself mostly writing/thinking with music on, and doing so reasonably productively, which I think is attributable to my having gotten into the right sort of zone for absorbing and thinking about philosophy over the last, say, month or so (though it's really probably been cumulative over the course of this whole year, and particularly the last semester). It's strange how one's mind shifts into different configurations over time, according to the influences to which it's (ahem) subject - although I guess that the strangeness inheres more in those shifts and resultant configurations not being directly accessible but rather only becoming apparent in their 'outputs' (as thoughts, ideas, conversational modes, etc), than in the idea of the shifting itself.
So anyway, mostly this background music has involved:
- Year of Meteors
- Humming By The Flowered Vine ("What You Said" is my favourite at the moment)
- Wilco (mostly A Ghost Is Born and the first disc of Being There)
- Eva Cassidy (uh-oh, adult contemporary beckons)
- Cat Power's rather stunning newie, "The Greatest" (is Matador the best label in the world these days?)
Friday, November 11, 2005
Talulah Gosh - Janice Long session, 7 August 1986 & Peel session, 11 January 1988
I've been listening to these for a while, but just now thought that I might as well remark upon it (y'know, for future reference and all that). Talulah Gosh were a simply fabulous indie outfit from the eighties who became quite famous in certain circles with their straight-ahead but clever bubblegum pop (funny how I always seem to end up using that descriptor 'bubblegum' in a positive way) - sort of one part 60s girl group melodies and vibes, and one part ny punk attitude and buzzy guitars (no bass, but plenty of backing vocals and handclaps!)...two-minute songs galore (all about boys, and sung by girls, of course).
These radio sessions were more or less my introduction to the band (though I'd heard some of their stuff on last.fm as similar music to the Sundays, or Lush, or Belly, or the Shangri-Las, or summat) and they're wonderful. Favourites: "Looking For A Rainbow", "Talulah Gosh", "World's Ending", and "Spearmint Head", all concentrated blasts of sweetness. Stand by for the inevitable spending of too much money to import their best-of...
Also, pitchfork recently ran a feature on the whole c86/twee movement, which was good for two reasons: it allowed me to feel superior at being ahead of the curve (ha!), but it also gave me the pleasant sense of being part of a wider community of taste...so, the best of both worlds, really.
The Janice Long one is here and the John Peel one is here.
These radio sessions were more or less my introduction to the band (though I'd heard some of their stuff on last.fm as similar music to the Sundays, or Lush, or Belly, or the Shangri-Las, or summat) and they're wonderful. Favourites: "Looking For A Rainbow", "Talulah Gosh", "World's Ending", and "Spearmint Head", all concentrated blasts of sweetness. Stand by for the inevitable spending of too much money to import their best-of...
Also, pitchfork recently ran a feature on the whole c86/twee movement, which was good for two reasons: it allowed me to feel superior at being ahead of the curve (ha!), but it also gave me the pleasant sense of being part of a wider community of taste...so, the best of both worlds, really.
The Janice Long one is here and the John Peel one is here.
Laura Veirs - Year of Meteors
Much as I like the charmful Laura, I didn't race out to buy her latest, Year of Meteors, as soon as it hit the stores, several weeks ago now. There were two main reasons for this: the previous one, Carbon Glacier, while rightly (if somewhat surprisingly) embraced by the masses, had quite literally left me just a little bit cold by comparison to Troubled By The Fire (so I liked it rather a lot, and if anything considered it to be a step forward from TBTF, but didn't find myself really feeling the record); and I'd listened to and liked but again not really loved the samples which were up on Veirs' website (although that's such an unideal way to listen to music that I didn't place much stock in it...).
Anyhow, the other night I made a flying visit to uni to photocopy/borrow some Heidegger stuff, and stopped off at Readings in the expectation that a brief browse would be likely to improve my (not particularly poor to start with) state of mind (plus, I'd been struck by this weird dizziness, possibly born of lack of sleep + general being in a slightly weird headspace, and thought it might not be the world's worst idea to try to shake it off before driving home); ended up leaving with Gillian Welch's Time (The Revelator) (well, it was cheap), The Nightmare Before Christmas, Fear and Trembling (Kierkegaard not Nothomb, although I did read somewhere recently that there's a new Nothomb in translation which will be out soon - good news), and this cd.
I suppose that hoping that Veirs will record another "Ohio Clouds" or "Midnight Singer" is a bit like hoping that Radiohead will do another "Fake Plastic Trees" or "Street Spirit", although, like that latter hope, it's not entirely implausible if one is willing to accept that the resultant 'doing of another' would come wrapped in a fairly different sonic cloak. And, on its own terms, Year of Meteors is pretty fine. It continues in the direction indicated by Carbon Glacier, but it's a bit less distanced and cool, if equally echoey and vibey. Electric guitar is much more prominent (my fave moment on CG is still "Salvage A Smile", short as it is) and it's overall a bit more upbeat and drifty - 'oceanic', as is often the case with music I like, isn't too far off the mark (so okay, not that upbeat). It's actually a really neat sound overall, the folk strands are still very much there, and the electronic bits integrate well, and I'm not sure that anyone else is really doing a similar thing right now (Beth Orton, sorta...and there's a faint-but-definitely-there edge of New Adventures in Hi-Fi to its vibes, too).
Opener "Fire Snakes" is pretty cool, and likewise second track "Galaxies" (surely the first single, if any get released). "Magnetized" is the sort of gorgeous slow-burner which floats along and then suddenly gives you the chills, and somewhat recalls her older stuff, but it's probably the boppy "Rialto", complete with handclaps and that tasty wavery ragged crunchy guitar sound, which is my favourite; also particularly like "Parisian Dream", which slinks in on a slippy viola line and shuffles back and forth over the top of it for the rest of the song.
A few other scattered thoughts:
- After couple of listens, I realised that the familiar-sounding descending scale which features prominently in "Where Gravity Is Dead" has also been used in the Muses' "Honeychain", and hence the familiarity.
- Speaking of "Where Gravity Is Dead", I wonder if there's a vague kind of concept to the album, a thought prompted by a corresponding lyric from "Galaxies": "gravity is dead you see/no gravity!/ all I need is beating red/no gravity! ...".
- Also, one corollary of getting into all these singer-songwriters is that an increasing number of the records I own have pictures of the artist's face on their covers; I can live with this as a seemingly necessary evil, but I'm really not at all down with it. (Q: Would it make a difference if they were all extremely good-looking? A: No, that's completely not the point.)
Anyhow, the other night I made a flying visit to uni to photocopy/borrow some Heidegger stuff, and stopped off at Readings in the expectation that a brief browse would be likely to improve my (not particularly poor to start with) state of mind (plus, I'd been struck by this weird dizziness, possibly born of lack of sleep + general being in a slightly weird headspace, and thought it might not be the world's worst idea to try to shake it off before driving home); ended up leaving with Gillian Welch's Time (The Revelator) (well, it was cheap), The Nightmare Before Christmas, Fear and Trembling (Kierkegaard not Nothomb, although I did read somewhere recently that there's a new Nothomb in translation which will be out soon - good news), and this cd.
I suppose that hoping that Veirs will record another "Ohio Clouds" or "Midnight Singer" is a bit like hoping that Radiohead will do another "Fake Plastic Trees" or "Street Spirit", although, like that latter hope, it's not entirely implausible if one is willing to accept that the resultant 'doing of another' would come wrapped in a fairly different sonic cloak. And, on its own terms, Year of Meteors is pretty fine. It continues in the direction indicated by Carbon Glacier, but it's a bit less distanced and cool, if equally echoey and vibey. Electric guitar is much more prominent (my fave moment on CG is still "Salvage A Smile", short as it is) and it's overall a bit more upbeat and drifty - 'oceanic', as is often the case with music I like, isn't too far off the mark (so okay, not that upbeat). It's actually a really neat sound overall, the folk strands are still very much there, and the electronic bits integrate well, and I'm not sure that anyone else is really doing a similar thing right now (Beth Orton, sorta...and there's a faint-but-definitely-there edge of New Adventures in Hi-Fi to its vibes, too).
Opener "Fire Snakes" is pretty cool, and likewise second track "Galaxies" (surely the first single, if any get released). "Magnetized" is the sort of gorgeous slow-burner which floats along and then suddenly gives you the chills, and somewhat recalls her older stuff, but it's probably the boppy "Rialto", complete with handclaps and that tasty wavery ragged crunchy guitar sound, which is my favourite; also particularly like "Parisian Dream", which slinks in on a slippy viola line and shuffles back and forth over the top of it for the rest of the song.
A few other scattered thoughts:
- After couple of listens, I realised that the familiar-sounding descending scale which features prominently in "Where Gravity Is Dead" has also been used in the Muses' "Honeychain", and hence the familiarity.
- Speaking of "Where Gravity Is Dead", I wonder if there's a vague kind of concept to the album, a thought prompted by a corresponding lyric from "Galaxies": "gravity is dead you see/no gravity!/ all I need is beating red/no gravity! ...".
- Also, one corollary of getting into all these singer-songwriters is that an increasing number of the records I own have pictures of the artist's face on their covers; I can live with this as a seemingly necessary evil, but I'm really not at all down with it. (Q: Would it make a difference if they were all extremely good-looking? A: No, that's completely not the point.)
Thursday, November 10, 2005
The Nightmare Before Christmas
This one had managed to get by me until now, and it was as much of a treat as I'd always anticipated in that vague way of mine. One thing that I hadn't realised - and which would've sharpened that anticipation - is that it's a musical (in the way that animated films often are); another thing which I hadn't known is that Disney is the studio behind the film. But of course the main event here is the Tim Burton thing, and on that score it's exactly what I'd expected - deft morbidity and grotesquerie, splashed with colour and wit and general vim, and populated by characters who are all recognisably human, even if they also happen to be skellingtons, stitched-together dolls, or other escapees from the menagerie of our collective nightmarescapes (ha, ha).
Writing this is making me think, though, about just what it is about Burton characters (at least his central protagonists). They always feel real, in a way that the characters in a film like, say, The Royal Tenenbaums only kind of do. One feels that there are actual emotions and feelings driving them - for all of their (literally, in this case) cartoonish appearances, they never seem opaque or truly alien (whereas I find a lot of people I know in real life to be quite alien, for example, including some with whom I get along really well).
A'course, that's not to say that Burton's characters are somehow more truthfully rendered than Anderson's. Truth is a multi-faceted thing, and I thought that there was a lot of truth in the characterisations in another film about extremely opaque people which I saw earlier this year, Intolerable Cruelty. There's a difference between understanding someone in terms of 'getting' what's going on 'inside', and understanding them in terms of knowing how they respond to certain stimuli (a 'black box' picture), and I'm not sure that the first is necessarily more profound than the second. But I think that what I mean to say, maybe, is that I can always quite directly identify with Burton's main protagonists (and, let's face it, this is what I'm talking about when I talk about truth, right?).
So that's not going to surprise anyone, least of all me. Am I surprised that this principle should also operate in relation to an animated film - and not one with any notable aspirations to realism, at that? Not really, but a little bit. Emotional responses to animated films are nothing remarkable - for me, this goes at least back to primary school and An American Tail (did I spell that correctly?) - but direct identifications are perhaps just a little bit so (Daria?). Then again, Jack Skellington is a character outline in pretty broad brush strokes, so how much of myself do I really see in him? Maybe it's like reading one's horoscope in the newspaper and being astonished by its accuracy. Then again, maybe the animation form allows a distillation of what's always going on with any identification with Burton characters, or even cinematic characters period.
Anyway.
The Nightmare Before Christmas is very sweet and amusing and made me feel better about everything. The tunes are a bit unmemorable but there's not much else to criticise, and besides, it's the sort of film that one doesn't want to criticise. I liked the trick-or-treaters, and basically everything else about it. And okay, I did identify quite a lot with Jack. So there.
Writing this is making me think, though, about just what it is about Burton characters (at least his central protagonists). They always feel real, in a way that the characters in a film like, say, The Royal Tenenbaums only kind of do. One feels that there are actual emotions and feelings driving them - for all of their (literally, in this case) cartoonish appearances, they never seem opaque or truly alien (whereas I find a lot of people I know in real life to be quite alien, for example, including some with whom I get along really well).
A'course, that's not to say that Burton's characters are somehow more truthfully rendered than Anderson's. Truth is a multi-faceted thing, and I thought that there was a lot of truth in the characterisations in another film about extremely opaque people which I saw earlier this year, Intolerable Cruelty. There's a difference between understanding someone in terms of 'getting' what's going on 'inside', and understanding them in terms of knowing how they respond to certain stimuli (a 'black box' picture), and I'm not sure that the first is necessarily more profound than the second. But I think that what I mean to say, maybe, is that I can always quite directly identify with Burton's main protagonists (and, let's face it, this is what I'm talking about when I talk about truth, right?).
So that's not going to surprise anyone, least of all me. Am I surprised that this principle should also operate in relation to an animated film - and not one with any notable aspirations to realism, at that? Not really, but a little bit. Emotional responses to animated films are nothing remarkable - for me, this goes at least back to primary school and An American Tail (did I spell that correctly?) - but direct identifications are perhaps just a little bit so (Daria?). Then again, Jack Skellington is a character outline in pretty broad brush strokes, so how much of myself do I really see in him? Maybe it's like reading one's horoscope in the newspaper and being astonished by its accuracy. Then again, maybe the animation form allows a distillation of what's always going on with any identification with Burton characters, or even cinematic characters period.
Anyway.
The Nightmare Before Christmas is very sweet and amusing and made me feel better about everything. The tunes are a bit unmemorable but there's not much else to criticise, and besides, it's the sort of film that one doesn't want to criticise. I liked the trick-or-treaters, and basically everything else about it. And okay, I did identify quite a lot with Jack. So there.
Monday, November 07, 2005
Cocteau Twins - Twinlights EP
I haven't listened to the Cocteau Twins so intensely this year, but they still have a pretty fair claim to being my favourite band ever; so, I've been looking for this ep for a while and recently came across it here. It's a bit of a curio, being made up of extremely stripped back (mostly just piano and voice) versions of Cocteaus songs - "Rilkean Heart" and "Half-Gifts" from their final lp, Milk & Kisses (though I think the deal is that Twinlights actually came out before Milk & Kisses), "Pink Orange Red" (off the Tiny Dynamine ep), and one, "Golden-Veins", which seems to've been written and recorded specifically for this ep (though there's also a version of it on their bbc sessions cd)...
Anyway, they're all very much of a piece with one another, delicate, hushed and pretty - and notably different from anything else the band has done (the closest reference point is Victorialand, but that's not very close). I prefer the versions with which I'm more familiar over the ones on this record, unsurprisingly (representative microcosm: the vocal flutters which chime "Pink Orange Red" out comprise one of my favourite moments in the Cocteaus' extensive back catalogue of wonders - in fact, the song is one of my very favourites, along with "Lorelei" and "Heaven Or Las Vegas", and maybe "Musette And Drums" and "Pearly-Dewdrops' Drops" (and "Blue Bell Knoll", and "Carolyn's Fingers", and ...) - and the more subdued fluting we get here is, while in keeping with the set's overall tone, just immeasurably less magic), but these versions have a modest, unobtrusive charm of their own.
Anyway, they're all very much of a piece with one another, delicate, hushed and pretty - and notably different from anything else the band has done (the closest reference point is Victorialand, but that's not very close). I prefer the versions with which I'm more familiar over the ones on this record, unsurprisingly (representative microcosm: the vocal flutters which chime "Pink Orange Red" out comprise one of my favourite moments in the Cocteaus' extensive back catalogue of wonders - in fact, the song is one of my very favourites, along with "Lorelei" and "Heaven Or Las Vegas", and maybe "Musette And Drums" and "Pearly-Dewdrops' Drops" (and "Blue Bell Knoll", and "Carolyn's Fingers", and ...) - and the more subdued fluting we get here is, while in keeping with the set's overall tone, just immeasurably less magic), but these versions have a modest, unobtrusive charm of their own.
Friday, November 04, 2005
Re-reading the subject: The White Hotel (and the increasingly short run home)
I've reflected before on the way that our relationships with works of art have a continuing existence beyond our particular encounters with them - the relationship that I have with a novel, say, continues in the spaces when I'm not actually reading it - and that the nature of those relationships can shift quite markedly in the spaces between the encounters. One good example of this for me has been The White Hotel, which has really opened up for me over the course of the semester, and particularly over the last week or so, during which time I've had it on the 'back burner' of my mind, allowing it to simmer as I've had Lacan &c in the foreground in the hopes that the twain would meet somewhere in my half-thought thoughts. Anyhow, have just browsed through the text itself; reading very much framed by the demands of the particular paper that I plan to write about it and the time constraints under which said paper-writing will need to proceed (as to which, see below). But finally, I like this book. I really wouldn't have expected to at all (after my first reading), but I do.
Right, this is how the (university-related) big picture looks right now:
Thesis [7 November]: 8400 words (/10 000). This is the major worry at present - I made a bit of a dent in it today (Thursday) but am still pretty far off from wrapping it all up into a decent argument. Plus, that 8400 is nowhere near as concise as my academic writing normally is, meaning that in effect it's somewhat less than that figure (though, circumstances being what they are, a bit of flabbiness in my prose may not be such a bad thing, as it'll bring me closer to the required word length).
Contemporary Historical Fictions [7 November]: Basically finished. Although I haven't had the time to pull all of its threads together, I'm pretty happy with the way this one has turned out.
Reading The Subject [7 November]: 1800 words (/4000). Well, this is what they call 'progress', I guess. After really struggling with the bloody thing, I've managed to carve out a reasonable recapitulation of the Seminar and plot an approximate narrative for my own paper (looks like it's going to be three of three English papers I've written this year in which Derrida gets a guernsey). The plan is to finish this tomorrow (well, today, but it counts as tomorrow once I've slept on it) so that I'll have two full days and nights, plus whatever of Monday I need, to do the Thesis.
Recent European Philosophy [17 November]: 0 words (/5000). And this is what they call (planned) 'lack of progress', I know.
Right, this is how the (university-related) big picture looks right now:
Thesis [7 November]: 8400 words (/10 000). This is the major worry at present - I made a bit of a dent in it today (Thursday) but am still pretty far off from wrapping it all up into a decent argument. Plus, that 8400 is nowhere near as concise as my academic writing normally is, meaning that in effect it's somewhat less than that figure (though, circumstances being what they are, a bit of flabbiness in my prose may not be such a bad thing, as it'll bring me closer to the required word length).
Contemporary Historical Fictions [7 November]: Basically finished. Although I haven't had the time to pull all of its threads together, I'm pretty happy with the way this one has turned out.
Reading The Subject [7 November]: 1800 words (/4000). Well, this is what they call 'progress', I guess. After really struggling with the bloody thing, I've managed to carve out a reasonable recapitulation of the Seminar and plot an approximate narrative for my own paper (looks like it's going to be three of three English papers I've written this year in which Derrida gets a guernsey). The plan is to finish this tomorrow (well, today, but it counts as tomorrow once I've slept on it) so that I'll have two full days and nights, plus whatever of Monday I need, to do the Thesis.
Recent European Philosophy [17 November]: 0 words (/5000). And this is what they call (planned) 'lack of progress', I know.
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
Stop Making Sense (Talking Heads/Jonathan Demme)
David lent this to me without any particular provocation, and I sat down to watch it last night in the interests of procrastination (a recurring theme, though less so these last few days as I've been trying to make sense of the Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter' and so on). I've had a copy of the associated cd for a while, so I was already pretty well familiar with the music; the interest lay in seeing if it lived up to the hype (on the cover of the dvd: "The most extraordinary rock movie ever made" gasps Uncut; "The Citizen Kane of the concerts movies" burbles The Face). And, well, it's pretty cool, and it's fun to see a young, hyper-skinny (look who's talking) David Byrne strutting his stuff and especially with the whole band and associates getting into it - "Life During Wartime" is a particular highlight - and the music is fab of course and obviously the Heads were a great live band and I was feeling the joy and the craziness and I was hanging out for the "my god, what have I done?", but I don't know, maybe I was just taking it for granted that it'd be like that because somehow I only sort of enjoyed it as if from a distance (not so uncommon for me these days, that). Gotta watch this one again when the fires are burning a bit more brightly.
Emily Haines - Cut In Half And Also Double
This courtesy of That Girl Needs Therapy. I hadn't heard of Haines before; seems that she now sings in a band called Metric (as to which I also draw a blank), and is somehow associated with the whole Broken Social Scene...uh...scene (then again, isn't everyone these days?), and this is a somewhat obscure recording of hers from a few years back.
The sound is basically indie-rock female singer-songwriter w/guitar - useful reference points here being, maybe, the Breeders and Throwing Muses/solo Kristin (the vox in particular sometimes being reminiscent of the fraughtness of that last), though more lo-fi than any of those, and less immediate to boot. I'm quite liking it, but it's not going to set my world on fire; best song for mine is opener "Dog".
The sound is basically indie-rock female singer-songwriter w/guitar - useful reference points here being, maybe, the Breeders and Throwing Muses/solo Kristin (the vox in particular sometimes being reminiscent of the fraughtness of that last), though more lo-fi than any of those, and less immediate to boot. I'm quite liking it, but it's not going to set my world on fire; best song for mine is opener "Dog".
Monday, October 31, 2005
Jenny Traig and Peter McGrath - "Traig & McGrath, Shut-In Detectives"
Spent a while this afternoon reading through these strange little 'detective' narratives. For some reason, they strike me as having a faintly Gorey flavour - could be the surreal edge and bizarre 'logic', not to mention the intimations of metaphysics at the edges, and maybe the self-contained, puzzled eccentricity of the shut-in detectives themselves, Peter and Jenny (there's also a wee bit of Dorothy Parker in some moments) - but the whole point is the contemporary settings, of course. It goes something like this:
And here is an example:
* * *
#22: The Case of the Lonely Detectives OR Why Doesn't Anyone Ask Us Out?
Status: Solved
One evening, after drinking more than is their habit, the Shut-Ins found themselves in a maudlin and introspective mood. Draining his second Brandy Alexander, Peter asked, "Why is it, dear cousin, that no one ever asks us out? You, in particular, are what they call a 'catch.' If your mood swings are any indication, you are still fertile, and your uncommonly wide midsection suggests you'd bear children easily. And yet no man has snapped you up. How can that be?"
"I could ask the same about you," Jenny replied. "You are fun company. Those deeply carved lines around your mouth and eyes suggest you laugh easily and often. And yet, here you sit, alone." Peter shook his head. "It's a mystery, indeed." What was the cause?
"Perhaps it's because we so rarely leave the house," Jenny suggested. Peter countered that this often heightened one's allure. Wasn't Greta Garbo the most pursued woman in the world?
Well, then, perhaps astrology was to blame. Peter disagreed. "We're different signs. We can't be under the same bad star. But maybe the problem is bad feng shui." Jenny dissented. "That can't be, either, because feng shui is a load of crap."
The cousins were stymied. But a few hours later, as they settled into late-night TV, the mystery solved itself. As a talk show reminded the detectives, people are often single because they are too hot. "The answer, in a phrase, is that we're too sexy for our shirts," Jenny announced. Peter nodded in agreement. "There's a perp, all right, and it's our own damned attractiveness." The Shut-Ins toasted each other's tragic allure before falling asleep in their respective chairs, where they remained, snoring delicately, until morning.
* * *
But really the case studies need to be read as a whole for maximum effect - cumulatively, they're v. funny.
Traig & McGrath, Shut-In Detectives
Last year, Jenny Traig and Peter McGrath, cousins, left their jobs to become self-declared shut-ins. They quickly discovered that even the shut-in's life is full of many small mysteries. Inspired by the great tradition of housebound detectives, they resolved to become investigators themselves. The following are cases from their files.
And here is an example:
* * *
#22: The Case of the Lonely Detectives OR Why Doesn't Anyone Ask Us Out?
Status: Solved
One evening, after drinking more than is their habit, the Shut-Ins found themselves in a maudlin and introspective mood. Draining his second Brandy Alexander, Peter asked, "Why is it, dear cousin, that no one ever asks us out? You, in particular, are what they call a 'catch.' If your mood swings are any indication, you are still fertile, and your uncommonly wide midsection suggests you'd bear children easily. And yet no man has snapped you up. How can that be?"
"I could ask the same about you," Jenny replied. "You are fun company. Those deeply carved lines around your mouth and eyes suggest you laugh easily and often. And yet, here you sit, alone." Peter shook his head. "It's a mystery, indeed." What was the cause?
"Perhaps it's because we so rarely leave the house," Jenny suggested. Peter countered that this often heightened one's allure. Wasn't Greta Garbo the most pursued woman in the world?
Well, then, perhaps astrology was to blame. Peter disagreed. "We're different signs. We can't be under the same bad star. But maybe the problem is bad feng shui." Jenny dissented. "That can't be, either, because feng shui is a load of crap."
The cousins were stymied. But a few hours later, as they settled into late-night TV, the mystery solved itself. As a talk show reminded the detectives, people are often single because they are too hot. "The answer, in a phrase, is that we're too sexy for our shirts," Jenny announced. Peter nodded in agreement. "There's a perp, all right, and it's our own damned attractiveness." The Shut-Ins toasted each other's tragic allure before falling asleep in their respective chairs, where they remained, snoring delicately, until morning.
* * *
But really the case studies need to be read as a whole for maximum effect - cumulatively, they're v. funny.
Traig & McGrath, Shut-In Detectives
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Returning to the texts: Beloved and V. (and the run home)
Last night, skim-read Beloved, scouring it for themes, connections and quotations in light of the general argument of my soon to be written (fingers crossed) paper; presently at page 157 of about 500 in V., doing the same. Obviously a different mode of reading from the more leisurely dégustations in which I engaged first time round this year, but the fundamentals still come through - Beloved made my insides churn, gave me the chills, and clutched at my throat, while V. is dazzling me once more and choking/surprising/forcing lots of laughter on my part. One thing I'll say for honours (and there's much to be said, but I won't say it here) is that it's well and truly put reading and literature back to the forefront of my life.
Anyway, this is where it stands:
Thesis [7 November]: 6800 words (/10 000). Still not in great shape, but after meeting with François today, I feel that I ought to be able to pull it all together with a bit of application (ha ha, hermeneutics pun).
Contemporary Historical Fictions [7 November]: 1800 words (/5000). I'm pretty happy with the exposition and initial theoretical critique - ie, these 1800 words - but talking it through with Sarah yesterday made me realise that I still need to do a bit of work on this part. That should be fairly manageable, though, and once I've finished going through V., the textual part, browsing of secondary sources for citatory window-dressing, and closing (anti)metaphysical gesturing shouldn't be too difficult. Aim to get this one done fairly soon, I think.
Reading The Subject [7 November]: 0 words (/4000). Not seriously worried about this yet, but beginning to get just a bit nervous that I still haven't settled on a topic. Intend to read Lacan's reading of Poe's "Purloined Letter" soon (then Derrida's reading of Lacan's reading) and maybe reevaluate the uses of Lacan for literature a bit more sympathetically (and less foundationally) - someone (Liz?) said, after my presentation in class on Tuesday, that my outline sounded like a thesis more than a coursework paper, and they were dead right. Probably do The White Hotel rather than Mrs Dalloway.
Recent European Philosophy [17 November]: 0 words (/5000). Needless to say, haven't given this any thought at all. It's gonna be a Heidegger-filled 10 days or so, which could be really good, but could also get pretty ugly...
Anyway, this is where it stands:
Thesis [7 November]: 6800 words (/10 000). Still not in great shape, but after meeting with François today, I feel that I ought to be able to pull it all together with a bit of application (ha ha, hermeneutics pun).
Contemporary Historical Fictions [7 November]: 1800 words (/5000). I'm pretty happy with the exposition and initial theoretical critique - ie, these 1800 words - but talking it through with Sarah yesterday made me realise that I still need to do a bit of work on this part. That should be fairly manageable, though, and once I've finished going through V., the textual part, browsing of secondary sources for citatory window-dressing, and closing (anti)metaphysical gesturing shouldn't be too difficult. Aim to get this one done fairly soon, I think.
Reading The Subject [7 November]: 0 words (/4000). Not seriously worried about this yet, but beginning to get just a bit nervous that I still haven't settled on a topic. Intend to read Lacan's reading of Poe's "Purloined Letter" soon (then Derrida's reading of Lacan's reading) and maybe reevaluate the uses of Lacan for literature a bit more sympathetically (and less foundationally) - someone (Liz?) said, after my presentation in class on Tuesday, that my outline sounded like a thesis more than a coursework paper, and they were dead right. Probably do The White Hotel rather than Mrs Dalloway.
Recent European Philosophy [17 November]: 0 words (/5000). Needless to say, haven't given this any thought at all. It's gonna be a Heidegger-filled 10 days or so, which could be really good, but could also get pretty ugly...
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Living life like an island/(before it even started)/crowds of people: Soundtrack to the end of the affair
What I'm particularly taking to heart right now:
Natalie Imbruglia - White Lilies Island
Aimee Mann (especially "Stupid Thing")
Neil Young - On The Beach
Natalie. Enough of the "what more did people want from their mainstream pop" already - this is a lovely album on any terms, damnit! Somehow apt that I should've cycled back to liking her again at this stage in my life...maybe a new cycle is about to commence, entropy having set in inescapably with this last some time ago.
Aimee. Still glorious...sometimes she sulks, sometimes she burns.
Neil. After the final Historical Fictions class (Tuesday) - a nice one - myself and a few of the others drifted on to the area outside the postgrad lounge (a regular haunt for me in the last fortnight or so) for a drink and I got into a music talk with Peter, in the course of which he picked out Zuma as his favourite Neil Young album. I responded that On The Beach was mine, and though I don't think I'd really stopped to think about the question before, as intuitions go it was dead on...lately I've found myself listening to the record over and over; particularly feelin' the title track but really it's all quite perfect for my now.
Natalie Imbruglia - White Lilies Island
Aimee Mann (especially "Stupid Thing")
Neil Young - On The Beach
Natalie. Enough of the "what more did people want from their mainstream pop" already - this is a lovely album on any terms, damnit! Somehow apt that I should've cycled back to liking her again at this stage in my life...maybe a new cycle is about to commence, entropy having set in inescapably with this last some time ago.
Aimee. Still glorious...sometimes she sulks, sometimes she burns.
Neil. After the final Historical Fictions class (Tuesday) - a nice one - myself and a few of the others drifted on to the area outside the postgrad lounge (a regular haunt for me in the last fortnight or so) for a drink and I got into a music talk with Peter, in the course of which he picked out Zuma as his favourite Neil Young album. I responded that On The Beach was mine, and though I don't think I'd really stopped to think about the question before, as intuitions go it was dead on...lately I've found myself listening to the record over and over; particularly feelin' the title track but really it's all quite perfect for my now.
Monday, October 24, 2005
Lone star statements
Time magazine recently published a list of the 100 best English-language novels published since Time first hit the presses (1923). I reckon it's a pretty good list, actually, though of course every single online article I've read or skimmed which mentions the list has just hated all over it. On that note, came across a very funny compilation of one-star amazon.com reviews of books which made the list. These are some of my favourites:
* * *
A Clockwork Orange (1963)
Author: Anthony Burgess
“In the first 20 pages, Alex and his lackies beat a guy senseless and rob him; they steal a car and trash it, they get into a vicious gang fight; they attack a couple at their home, destroy the husband’s life work (his book, A Clockwork Orange), beat him and his wife senseless, and rape the wife. This really ticked me off.”
* * *
The Great Gatsby (1925)
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
“It grieves me deeply that we Americans should take as our classic a book that is no more than a lengthy description of the doings of fops.”
* * *
The Lord of the Rings (1954)
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien
“The book is not readable because of the overuse of adverbs.”
* * *
Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
Author: Virginia Woolf
“The only good thing to say about this “literary” drivel is that the person responsible, Virginia Woolf, has been dead for quite some time now. Let us pray to God she stays that way.”
* * *
1984 (1948)
Author: George Orwell
“Don’t listen to anyone who tries to distinguish between “serious” works of literature like this one and allegedly “lesser” novels. The distinction is entirely illusory, because no novels are “better” than any others, and the concept of a “great novel” is an intellectual hoax. This book isn’t as good as Harry Potter in MY opinion, and no one can refute me. Tastes are relative!”
* * *
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
“In the novel, they often speak of a planet called Tralfamadore, where he was displayed in a zoo with a former movie star by the name of Montana Wildhack. I thought that the very concept of a man who was kidnapped by aliens was truly unbelievable and a tad ludicrous. I did not find the idea of aliens kidnapping a human and putting them in a zoo very plausible. While some of the Tralfamadorians’ concept of death and living in a moment would be comforting for a war veteran, I found it relatively odd. I do not believe that an alien can kidnap someone and house them in a zoo for years at a time, while it is only a microsecond on earth. I also do not believe that a person has seven parents.”
* * *
Plenty more where they came from: here.
Ha! So many brands of moronic logic and plain wrong-headedness on the one page...
* * *
A Clockwork Orange (1963)
Author: Anthony Burgess
“In the first 20 pages, Alex and his lackies beat a guy senseless and rob him; they steal a car and trash it, they get into a vicious gang fight; they attack a couple at their home, destroy the husband’s life work (his book, A Clockwork Orange), beat him and his wife senseless, and rape the wife. This really ticked me off.”
* * *
The Great Gatsby (1925)
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
“It grieves me deeply that we Americans should take as our classic a book that is no more than a lengthy description of the doings of fops.”
* * *
The Lord of the Rings (1954)
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien
“The book is not readable because of the overuse of adverbs.”
* * *
Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
Author: Virginia Woolf
“The only good thing to say about this “literary” drivel is that the person responsible, Virginia Woolf, has been dead for quite some time now. Let us pray to God she stays that way.”
* * *
1984 (1948)
Author: George Orwell
“Don’t listen to anyone who tries to distinguish between “serious” works of literature like this one and allegedly “lesser” novels. The distinction is entirely illusory, because no novels are “better” than any others, and the concept of a “great novel” is an intellectual hoax. This book isn’t as good as Harry Potter in MY opinion, and no one can refute me. Tastes are relative!”
* * *
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
“In the novel, they often speak of a planet called Tralfamadore, where he was displayed in a zoo with a former movie star by the name of Montana Wildhack. I thought that the very concept of a man who was kidnapped by aliens was truly unbelievable and a tad ludicrous. I did not find the idea of aliens kidnapping a human and putting them in a zoo very plausible. While some of the Tralfamadorians’ concept of death and living in a moment would be comforting for a war veteran, I found it relatively odd. I do not believe that an alien can kidnap someone and house them in a zoo for years at a time, while it is only a microsecond on earth. I also do not believe that a person has seven parents.”
* * *
Plenty more where they came from: here.
Ha! So many brands of moronic logic and plain wrong-headedness on the one page...
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Neil Gaiman - Sandman: The Wake
Speaking of endings...
Well, I reckon that Gaiman's earned a send-off like this for the dream king, and he does it in style. The first three issues, detailing the wake itself, are the real elegy; the final three are more of a coda. Collectively, they have about the impact that they ought to, which is to say that they involve you emotionally, and leave you feeling sad and also kinda hopeful...
"Omnia mutantur, nihil interit" indeed.
Well, I reckon that Gaiman's earned a send-off like this for the dream king, and he does it in style. The first three issues, detailing the wake itself, are the real elegy; the final three are more of a coda. Collectively, they have about the impact that they ought to, which is to say that they involve you emotionally, and leave you feeling sad and also kinda hopeful...
"Omnia mutantur, nihil interit" indeed.
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Aimee Mann - Live at St Ann's Warehouse
Mmm...recently, I haven't been so intensely feeling music in general, including this one's, mostly because of the current severe oppression being caused by Thesis and coursework.[*] At this particular moment (a moment which has extended over the last couple of days), though, I'm in no state to be doing any substantial writing or thinking, and so it's an opportune time for this live dvd/cd set, made up of performances from a three night stand somewhere in Brooklyn, New York, to have arrived in at Basement Discs for me (some weeks after I first started stalking/awaiting it there). Last night I sat down and watched the dvd, and while it's pretty bare bones (shot on digital video, unadorned show footage, not much cutting or editing), I enjoyed it muchly and fell in love with the music afresh (and, to the extent that I'm in love with her, with Aimee, too).
Actually, there's a rather good review of this set which I read a while ago: here. The opening paragraph sets the tone and is worth the price of admission in its own right:
As to specifics, the dvd and cd set lists overlap closely but not perfectly. I'd heard this version of "Long Shot", and it was that which made me certain that this would be worth listening to all the way through; it's probably the highlight, with Mann and her band really ripping it up in style. Of all the songs on the set list, it's the most markedly different from the original studio version (though "Red Vines", which appears on the dvd is also subtly stripped back). Also, have been reminded of something I already half knew - that "Stupid Thing" is great. And enjoying the "Wise Up"/"Save Me" double; the glorious fragility of both comes through extremely well in the live performances.
It's actually notable how similar these live takes are to the studio recordings - they're not similar in the sense of being facsimilies [sp?] (which is, say, how I felt about the Interpol live concert experience), but more in that the underlying elements come across very strongly, most notably Mann's singing, which is almost note perfect. Listening to her sing 'live', too, has made me realise how expressive a singer she is - it's striking how clearly that expressiveness is reproduced.
I mostly wanted the cd, really - I was very much of the attitude that I could take or leave the dvd. But it's actually kinda neat to be able to see the musicians, even if they're basically just standing in place and sometimes shuffling-shaking-swaying a bit - it's nice to see Mann singing the emotional bits with her eyes shut, and to witness the swapping of instruments that goes on (realising, say, that she's on piano in "King of the Jailhouse", at least in these concerts/recordings), and to be able to hear the banter (including a nice line in self-deprecation on Mann's part, regarding the habitual subject matter of her compositions). Plus the extras are pretty endearing, especially the interviews with Mann and band.
* * *
[*] [ Edit 22/5/17 - more than a decade on, having just re-read while listening to this year's (2017) Mental Illness, edited to remove several paragraphs of more personal reflections for housing somewhere more appropriate. ]
Actually, there's a rather good review of this set which I read a while ago: here. The opening paragraph sets the tone and is worth the price of admission in its own right:
I love Aimee Mann in ways you could never understand. I love her big blinking frog eyes and her reedy skeletal body and her white suit coat and the metallic sky-blue tie she wears. I love the creepy deep lines that are gathering around her mouth and connote a certain unfriendly kind of Wasp woman--you can see her elderly mother frowning with disapproval at Christmas dinner. And most of all I love the mini-sized blue-eyed-soul melismas that make every Aimee Mann song an adventure in irony.
As to specifics, the dvd and cd set lists overlap closely but not perfectly. I'd heard this version of "Long Shot", and it was that which made me certain that this would be worth listening to all the way through; it's probably the highlight, with Mann and her band really ripping it up in style. Of all the songs on the set list, it's the most markedly different from the original studio version (though "Red Vines", which appears on the dvd is also subtly stripped back). Also, have been reminded of something I already half knew - that "Stupid Thing" is great. And enjoying the "Wise Up"/"Save Me" double; the glorious fragility of both comes through extremely well in the live performances.
It's actually notable how similar these live takes are to the studio recordings - they're not similar in the sense of being facsimilies [sp?] (which is, say, how I felt about the Interpol live concert experience), but more in that the underlying elements come across very strongly, most notably Mann's singing, which is almost note perfect. Listening to her sing 'live', too, has made me realise how expressive a singer she is - it's striking how clearly that expressiveness is reproduced.
I mostly wanted the cd, really - I was very much of the attitude that I could take or leave the dvd. But it's actually kinda neat to be able to see the musicians, even if they're basically just standing in place and sometimes shuffling-shaking-swaying a bit - it's nice to see Mann singing the emotional bits with her eyes shut, and to witness the swapping of instruments that goes on (realising, say, that she's on piano in "King of the Jailhouse", at least in these concerts/recordings), and to be able to hear the banter (including a nice line in self-deprecation on Mann's part, regarding the habitual subject matter of her compositions). Plus the extras are pretty endearing, especially the interviews with Mann and band.
* * *
[*] [ Edit 22/5/17 - more than a decade on, having just re-read while listening to this year's (2017) Mental Illness, edited to remove several paragraphs of more personal reflections for housing somewhere more appropriate. ]
Monday, October 17, 2005
Kingdom of Heaven
I always watch these epics just in case they turn out to be good, and I thought that there was a better than average chance that this one would be, seeing as it was directed by Ridley Scott (who, most relevantly, directed Gladiator, which was one of the good ones). In the event, watching it was a bit of a frustrating experience, for while it was stirring in parts, I felt as if it really needed more space in which to sprawl for it to find its natural, expansive shape; as it is, the pacing of the film seems a bit off, and it never quite coheres. Adding to the problem is that while Orlando Bloom fills the central role effectively enough, he doesn't have any genuine presence or stature; moreover, the love interest is pretty weak (in most senses of the word) and, in fact, several of the secondary characters cry out to be better developed. So, good in patches but mildly disappointing.
Saturday, October 15, 2005
F Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
Given the variety of ways available to us for marking off significant periods in our lives, perhaps the surprising thing is that we're so little, rather than so much, aware of them. Some of these are largely shared - the passage of days, weeks, months, years, decades (to name the most obviously prescribed and linear ones), and then there are seasons, of course - while others are more individual but nonetheless widely recognised (birthdays being the obvious example). But I reckon that the really interesting ones are more idiosyncratic - organising one's life history in terms of relationships, say, or friendships, or the music of the time, or key books read, and so on. And naturally all of these can and do coexist.
One such for me, perhaps not as significant as some but still looming reasonably large, is the Review's Annual Dinner. This isn't the place to excavate everything associated with that event, but I'm remembering one conversation I had at last year's, with Ros C, the Dean's wife, about literature and life and the rest of the usual, and in particular her saying that she thought that The Great Gatsby was a book which was particularly prone to reading differently each time one returned to it at a different stage in their lives. I think that I'd read it fairly recently at that stage, but what she said immediately made sense to me and it's stayed with me.
As it turns out, I've re-read the book sooner than I'd expected, inspired by the making of that list of favourites, and while no single interval of a little over 12 months - during which my external life has slowed to almost a complete lull - is likely to effect a dramatic change in my perspective on things (literature and life &c), this past year has, I suspect, seen more change than most.
Returning to Gatsby, though, I've been struck anew by how it glitters - how every page is scattered with cynical bon mots and wry witticisms - and (the other side of the coin) by how it shimmers with sadness lying just beneath the bright, shiny surface. I was also (ahem) reflecting, as I read it, on how nice it was to be reading prose which wasn't afraid to reach for the lyrical - and, moreover, which succeeds in that aim - and generally loving the 'literariness' of it all, the facility of the writing and the way that images and themes emerge and work themselves through.
...how it glitters. A lot of the appeal for me lies in the marrying of the glib, mannered, cynical cleverness of its protagonists with their rich inner lives; how fragile and beautiful and doomed they are. Only it isn't really beauty so much as attractiveness, and of that kind that could never endure (moths drawn to the flame of their time). I would have liked to live in that time, I think, romanticised though it may be in the writing of Fitzgerald et al.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
One such for me, perhaps not as significant as some but still looming reasonably large, is the Review's Annual Dinner. This isn't the place to excavate everything associated with that event, but I'm remembering one conversation I had at last year's, with Ros C, the Dean's wife, about literature and life and the rest of the usual, and in particular her saying that she thought that The Great Gatsby was a book which was particularly prone to reading differently each time one returned to it at a different stage in their lives. I think that I'd read it fairly recently at that stage, but what she said immediately made sense to me and it's stayed with me.
As it turns out, I've re-read the book sooner than I'd expected, inspired by the making of that list of favourites, and while no single interval of a little over 12 months - during which my external life has slowed to almost a complete lull - is likely to effect a dramatic change in my perspective on things (literature and life &c), this past year has, I suspect, seen more change than most.
Returning to Gatsby, though, I've been struck anew by how it glitters - how every page is scattered with cynical bon mots and wry witticisms - and (the other side of the coin) by how it shimmers with sadness lying just beneath the bright, shiny surface. I was also (ahem) reflecting, as I read it, on how nice it was to be reading prose which wasn't afraid to reach for the lyrical - and, moreover, which succeeds in that aim - and generally loving the 'literariness' of it all, the facility of the writing and the way that images and themes emerge and work themselves through.
...how it glitters. A lot of the appeal for me lies in the marrying of the glib, mannered, cynical cleverness of its protagonists with their rich inner lives; how fragile and beautiful and doomed they are. Only it isn't really beauty so much as attractiveness, and of that kind that could never endure (moths drawn to the flame of their time). I would have liked to live in that time, I think, romanticised though it may be in the writing of Fitzgerald et al.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Friday, October 14, 2005
Wrapped up in books
On a cheerier note, on Tuesday I got to talking with a girl from my Historical Fictions class - one Sarah - and the conversation turned, naturally enough, to the iconic books in our lives. Hers were all Dostoevsky and Faulkner and a whole lot of French writers of whom I'd never heard before, but she said that she'd make a fuller list and I promised to reciprocate (not ever needing much of an excuse to indulge in this kind of list-making) and so voilà:
Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities
Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being
-
Mervyn Peake - Gormenghast trilogy
Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
Kate Atkinson - Behind the Scenes at the Museum
Donna Tartt - The Secret History
Gregory Maguire - Wicked
John Fowles - The French Lieutenant's Woman
F Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
Haruki Murakami - Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
-
Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights
Jeanette Winterson - Gut Symmetries
David Malouf - Fly Away Peter
Umberto Eco - Foucault's Pendulum
Evelyn Waugh - Brideshead Revisited
The first three are the ones which are really 'iconic' for me - the ones to which I return over and over, and within which I always find something new and truthful and real. The next lot are, I guess, the rest of my favourites - I love all of them, but my response is slightly different to them than it is to Lot 49, Invisible Cities and The Unbearable Lightness of Being...one way of putting it might be to say that I don't feel as if they really map out a whole design or manifesto for life in the way that the first three do. But each, in its own way, has left a deep mark on me which goes far beyond mere liking of the book.
And as to those last five, well, they're five which I don't really love any more but which also marked me very deeply in their time - indeed, each probably more deeply than any of the 'favourites' bar the Pynchon, Calvino and Kundera works. Each of them is such a huge landmark and so feels as if it's in its own place, and for some of them, I don't really know how I'd feel if I were to re-read them today. I haven't read Wuthering Heights or Fly Away Peter since high school, and quite possibly not Gut Symmetries either (though I was still into Winterson for the first couple of years or so of uni, as I've recorded elsewhere on this blog). Re-reading Foucault's Pendulum earlier this year was a disappointment - it was still good, but no longer amazing - and when I started to re-read Brideshead Revisited (probably last year, maybe '03), I found myself not enjoying it at all and hurriedly put the book down rather than risk tainting it, meaning that I've still only read it the once...
Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities
Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being
-
Mervyn Peake - Gormenghast trilogy
Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
Kate Atkinson - Behind the Scenes at the Museum
Donna Tartt - The Secret History
Gregory Maguire - Wicked
John Fowles - The French Lieutenant's Woman
F Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
Haruki Murakami - Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
-
Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights
Jeanette Winterson - Gut Symmetries
David Malouf - Fly Away Peter
Umberto Eco - Foucault's Pendulum
Evelyn Waugh - Brideshead Revisited
The first three are the ones which are really 'iconic' for me - the ones to which I return over and over, and within which I always find something new and truthful and real. The next lot are, I guess, the rest of my favourites - I love all of them, but my response is slightly different to them than it is to Lot 49, Invisible Cities and The Unbearable Lightness of Being...one way of putting it might be to say that I don't feel as if they really map out a whole design or manifesto for life in the way that the first three do. But each, in its own way, has left a deep mark on me which goes far beyond mere liking of the book.
And as to those last five, well, they're five which I don't really love any more but which also marked me very deeply in their time - indeed, each probably more deeply than any of the 'favourites' bar the Pynchon, Calvino and Kundera works. Each of them is such a huge landmark and so feels as if it's in its own place, and for some of them, I don't really know how I'd feel if I were to re-read them today. I haven't read Wuthering Heights or Fly Away Peter since high school, and quite possibly not Gut Symmetries either (though I was still into Winterson for the first couple of years or so of uni, as I've recorded elsewhere on this blog). Re-reading Foucault's Pendulum earlier this year was a disappointment - it was still good, but no longer amazing - and when I started to re-read Brideshead Revisited (probably last year, maybe '03), I found myself not enjoying it at all and hurriedly put the book down rather than risk tainting it, meaning that I've still only read it the once...
Neil Young - After The Gold Rush
In fact, I think that my enjoyment of After The Gold Rush has been diluted by similar factors to those which have prevented me from really burrowing into the bluegrass set - things are kind of hard right now, and the days hang heavily. In another time, the album might well have been a balm, and it probably will prove to be so at some point(s) in the future - it's that kind of record, gentle, tired, introspective - but it's not quite having that effect at present...my weariness is grey rather than mauve or anything more brightly hued. Oh, but nonetheless it's really good - I know it - and I've listened to it quite a lot, and it makes me feel and want to sigh, just a little.
Can't You Hear Me Callin' - Bluegrass: 80 Years of American Music
A huge indulgence, this - laying down $70 for a four cd set tracing the development of bluegrass from its recorded origins in the 1920s through to the present day - but indulgence isn't always a bad thing, and sometimes it's positively necessary (ie, indulgent in the particular instance, necessary in the overall scheme of things...incoherent or not?). There's something like five hours of music across the set, and even after the better part of several weeks I don't feel as if I've absorbed it all properly; times being what they are at present, though (that is, tiring, flat and unconducive to listening to music), I don't see this changing much in the near future, and hence the present writeup.
A couple of the songs were already familiar to me, to greater or lesser extents ("I'm A Man Of Constant Sorrow" and "Keep On The Sunny Side" through O Brother, Where Art Thou?, "Poor Ellen Smith" through Laura Cantrell's version of it, "Orange Blossom Special" thanks to Johnny Cash, Alison Krauss + Union Station's "So Long, So Wrong", Rhonda Vincent's "Is The Grass Any Bluer" and Mark O'Connor's "Soldier's Joy"), but I was struck by a sense of familiarity which lingers through all of the music collected here, and which owes much, I think, to the continuity of sound that seems to have been preserved in the genre from those early days through to now (so that the earliest cuts, by artists like Bill Monroe, Charlie Poole, the Carter Family and others, have more in common than not with the more contemporary bluegrass currents with which I'm more familiar). I feel that there's so much to be explored here - perhaps will have more to say once Thesis and coursework have been negotiated.
A couple of the songs were already familiar to me, to greater or lesser extents ("I'm A Man Of Constant Sorrow" and "Keep On The Sunny Side" through O Brother, Where Art Thou?, "Poor Ellen Smith" through Laura Cantrell's version of it, "Orange Blossom Special" thanks to Johnny Cash, Alison Krauss + Union Station's "So Long, So Wrong", Rhonda Vincent's "Is The Grass Any Bluer" and Mark O'Connor's "Soldier's Joy"), but I was struck by a sense of familiarity which lingers through all of the music collected here, and which owes much, I think, to the continuity of sound that seems to have been preserved in the genre from those early days through to now (so that the earliest cuts, by artists like Bill Monroe, Charlie Poole, the Carter Family and others, have more in common than not with the more contemporary bluegrass currents with which I'm more familiar). I feel that there's so much to be explored here - perhaps will have more to say once Thesis and coursework have been negotiated.
Sunday, October 09, 2005
The Proposition
Given that this was a Nick Cave-penned film set in mid-nineteenth century frontier Australia, The Proposition was almost exactly what I'd expected, and fully self-actualised as such - spectacular, gritty, violent, visceral, morally ambiguous and occasionally poetic. It wasn't exactly a fun film - Serenity, which was the other option, would've been a markedly different experience - but it was gripping and convincing, gaining a kind of cinematic-documentary feel from the combination of the graininess of its picture style and the panoramic landscape shots.
I thought that all of the actors were really good (Guy Pearce and Ray Winstone, as the real centres of the film, in particular), including those in relatively small parts or cameos - David Wenham, who's usually very good, was the only one who struck the occasional false note. And it had a very distinctive aesthetic - as an exercise in mythologising, it's effective (although, as may well always be the case with myths, much of that effectiveness comes from the extent to which it taps into archetypes which we already possess), and I wondered afterwards just how accurate a picture it gave of life in that time. It's not particularly preachy - Captain Stanley's determination to civilise the land is taken seriously, just as are Charlie's choices, and though the aborigines aren't ignored, the film seems unselfconsciously neutral in its stance towards the questions associated with those issues. Nor is there any shying away from the brutality and casual bigotry of the times.
To some extent, it's concerned with family and the bonds between people, but primarily, I feel that The Proposition locates its moral compass in extremes, and is a film 'about' human nature, extremes and extremity - what we find in people when they're pushed to their extremes, and how the choices that they make in those circumstances reveal and shape what they fundamentally are. Cave's vision is a brutal, harsh, near apocalyptic one - I always think of his music, especially the earlier Bad Seeds stuff, as very 'Old Testament' - but he's always thinking in terms of ambiguous redemptions and saving graces (his language, I think, not mine). One feels that he's carving a vision out of the Australian wilderness and history just as the Captain Stanleys and Charlies sought to do in their time, in building the idea of the nation.
I thought that all of the actors were really good (Guy Pearce and Ray Winstone, as the real centres of the film, in particular), including those in relatively small parts or cameos - David Wenham, who's usually very good, was the only one who struck the occasional false note. And it had a very distinctive aesthetic - as an exercise in mythologising, it's effective (although, as may well always be the case with myths, much of that effectiveness comes from the extent to which it taps into archetypes which we already possess), and I wondered afterwards just how accurate a picture it gave of life in that time. It's not particularly preachy - Captain Stanley's determination to civilise the land is taken seriously, just as are Charlie's choices, and though the aborigines aren't ignored, the film seems unselfconsciously neutral in its stance towards the questions associated with those issues. Nor is there any shying away from the brutality and casual bigotry of the times.
To some extent, it's concerned with family and the bonds between people, but primarily, I feel that The Proposition locates its moral compass in extremes, and is a film 'about' human nature, extremes and extremity - what we find in people when they're pushed to their extremes, and how the choices that they make in those circumstances reveal and shape what they fundamentally are. Cave's vision is a brutal, harsh, near apocalyptic one - I always think of his music, especially the earlier Bad Seeds stuff, as very 'Old Testament' - but he's always thinking in terms of ambiguous redemptions and saving graces (his language, I think, not mine). One feels that he's carving a vision out of the Australian wilderness and history just as the Captain Stanleys and Charlies sought to do in their time, in building the idea of the nation.
Saturday, October 08, 2005
She Will Have Her Way: The Songs Of Tim & Neil Finn
The first I knew of this was hearing New Buffalo's "Four Seasons In One Day" on the radio one morning, and I immediately became quite excited about the record (the operative word in that phrase being 'quite' rather than 'excited') - Tim and Neil Finn songs, covered by female Australian and New Zealand artists, and an impressive roll call of artists at that. It was the sort of cd that I didn't particularly want to buy but really wanted to hear; luckily, then, Beck C soon lent me her copy.
For me, it's mainly about the Crowded House songs - I haven't heard much Split Enz or solo Finn work but, like everyone else, I internalised Recurring Dream at some point in the distant past so that it feels as if it's always been there. Throughout, a real love for the source material comes through, which is (ahem) only natural, for doesn't everyone love Crowded House? I was initially nervous that it might be a bit embarrassingly earnest, but actually listening to the record all the way through made me realise what a silly thing that was to think in relation to these songs - they're all about honesty and feelings in the first place, and it'd ill behove me to hold the simplicity or straightforwardness of an interpretation against the interpreter.
The New Buffalo is, of course, a highlight, and in fact the best song of the set - "Four Seasons In One Day" is one of my favourite Crowded House songs, and Seltmann does it over in her own style while keeping it suitably bare and preserving that rare combination of directness and allusion which made the original so great. Almost as good is Clare Bowditch's take on "Fall At Your Feet" (another favourite), which opens the set - wavering, restrained, slightly haunted, and so exactly how the song should be done.
As to the other Crowded House numbers, Kasey Chambers' "Better Be Home Soon" is about exactly what you'd imagine that it would be (ie, earnest but good), Sarah Blasko deconstructs "Don't Dream It's Over" and does rather a good job of it, Renee Geyer successfully funks up "Into Temptation", Brooke Fraser stays pretty faithful to "Distant Sun" (and with a song like that one, staying faithful means you can't go far wrong...I think that it might be my actual Favourite of theirs), Holly Throsby reinforces my growing good opinion of her with a sensitive take on "Not The Girl You Think You Are" (which I've never been that keen on), and Natalie Imbruglia (hurray) does a by-the-numbers-but-sturdily-so "Pineapple Head".
As to others of note, the Lisa Miller contribution - "I Hope I Never" - is less wonderful than I'd have hoped (given that it's Lisa Miller) but still rather wonderful (honestly, she could sing anything and make it sound good), Missy Higgins releases another pleasant but unexciting song (I don't know...I want to like her, but her music's just kinda dull), Little Birdy are energetic and, to my surprise, quite good with a song called "Six Months in a Leaky Boat" (I don't know why I always expect to dislike them these days!)...elsewhere, Amiel, Stellar*, Sophie Koh, and a couple I hadn't heard of, Sara Storer (whose "Won't Give In" is another highlight, a light, delicately tripping bit of sweetness) and Goldenhorse (aw, no Bic Runga?).
In general, I tend to enjoy covers, though for every fairly good one there's at least one terrible one, and the great ones are pretty rare. The covers which annoy me tend to be those where I like the original a great deal but, on this cd, I basically like all of the Crowded House ones, while my responses to the other songs tend to be more muted. The mutedness is probably due to my being completely unfamiliar with the originals of the Split Enz and other stuff, meaning that they might as well be originals as far as I'm concerned; as to the liking of the Crowded House ones, well, maybe it just comes down to the melodies being so strong that these kinds of covers can't help but work.
For me, it's mainly about the Crowded House songs - I haven't heard much Split Enz or solo Finn work but, like everyone else, I internalised Recurring Dream at some point in the distant past so that it feels as if it's always been there. Throughout, a real love for the source material comes through, which is (ahem) only natural, for doesn't everyone love Crowded House? I was initially nervous that it might be a bit embarrassingly earnest, but actually listening to the record all the way through made me realise what a silly thing that was to think in relation to these songs - they're all about honesty and feelings in the first place, and it'd ill behove me to hold the simplicity or straightforwardness of an interpretation against the interpreter.
The New Buffalo is, of course, a highlight, and in fact the best song of the set - "Four Seasons In One Day" is one of my favourite Crowded House songs, and Seltmann does it over in her own style while keeping it suitably bare and preserving that rare combination of directness and allusion which made the original so great. Almost as good is Clare Bowditch's take on "Fall At Your Feet" (another favourite), which opens the set - wavering, restrained, slightly haunted, and so exactly how the song should be done.
As to the other Crowded House numbers, Kasey Chambers' "Better Be Home Soon" is about exactly what you'd imagine that it would be (ie, earnest but good), Sarah Blasko deconstructs "Don't Dream It's Over" and does rather a good job of it, Renee Geyer successfully funks up "Into Temptation", Brooke Fraser stays pretty faithful to "Distant Sun" (and with a song like that one, staying faithful means you can't go far wrong...I think that it might be my actual Favourite of theirs), Holly Throsby reinforces my growing good opinion of her with a sensitive take on "Not The Girl You Think You Are" (which I've never been that keen on), and Natalie Imbruglia (hurray) does a by-the-numbers-but-sturdily-so "Pineapple Head".
As to others of note, the Lisa Miller contribution - "I Hope I Never" - is less wonderful than I'd have hoped (given that it's Lisa Miller) but still rather wonderful (honestly, she could sing anything and make it sound good), Missy Higgins releases another pleasant but unexciting song (I don't know...I want to like her, but her music's just kinda dull), Little Birdy are energetic and, to my surprise, quite good with a song called "Six Months in a Leaky Boat" (I don't know why I always expect to dislike them these days!)...elsewhere, Amiel, Stellar*, Sophie Koh, and a couple I hadn't heard of, Sara Storer (whose "Won't Give In" is another highlight, a light, delicately tripping bit of sweetness) and Goldenhorse (aw, no Bic Runga?).
In general, I tend to enjoy covers, though for every fairly good one there's at least one terrible one, and the great ones are pretty rare. The covers which annoy me tend to be those where I like the original a great deal but, on this cd, I basically like all of the Crowded House ones, while my responses to the other songs tend to be more muted. The mutedness is probably due to my being completely unfamiliar with the originals of the Split Enz and other stuff, meaning that they might as well be originals as far as I'm concerned; as to the liking of the Crowded House ones, well, maybe it just comes down to the melodies being so strong that these kinds of covers can't help but work.
Friday, October 07, 2005
Natalie Imbruglia and White Lilies Island
I remember "Torn" - that was where it all started. It came out at more or less the same time that I began taking serious notice of pop music (in the broad sense) generally, as opposed to just having the radio on all the time, which was also the time at which I began to become aware of music videos, and I remember waking up early on Saturday mornings in order to catch it on rage - it was a huge hit, and so there were a few weeks there where it would reliably be on at the time when the program got up to counting down the ARIA top 10 (am I just imagining-misremembering this, or was it held off number 1 by Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On"?). Part of the appeal unquestionably resided in the video clip, an elegantly sparse thing depicting the gamine Natalie in a state of arty despair, but mostly it was an infatuation with the song itself. I can't even begin to imagine why it gave me such a rush - these things are always a bit ineffable - except by surmising that it was (and remains) just one of those perfect pop songs, delivered (and produced) just right, breezy and sweet and sad.
I must've bought Left of the Middle fairly shortly after, even though at the time each cd purchase was still a major decision, and I imagine I must've spun it plenty, though memory, ever unreliable, fails to supply on this point. Circumstantial evidence provided by this rather embarrassing 'single review' from a magazine that Tim Watson and I put together for a school project in high school:
* * *
Smoke - Natalie Imbruglia
Smoke is the standout track from a fine debut album, and if Natalie had as much sense as she has looks and talent, she would have released it immediately after smash hit Torn. As it is, Smoke is the fourth single from the album, and most likely won't do as well as it deserves. Anyway, the track itself is a heart-felt ballad with slightly better lyrics than a typical such song.
* * *
Ah, the callowness of youth!
Anyway, I'm pretty sure that it was one of the first cds that I ever bought (other early ones that I can recall were the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack, Garbage, Tragic Kingdom, (What's The Story) Morning Glory, Ten...). And it was a nice enough album, and still is, with decent songs and state of the moment production, and I've never for a second regretted its purchase. But things were moving quickly for me at that time, and it wasn't long before I got into Radiohead, and from thereon in everything else was kind of inevitable, and Left of the Middle and Natalie naturally enough slid by the wayside.
Fast forward about four years and comes the release of White Lilies Island. By now, I'm second year university, and it was probably all about the Smiths and the Cure (not to mention Radiohead!) at this stage, but still I download the album just in case (back in the days when audiogalaxy was a thing of wonder and before we knew - or at least before we were particularly aware - that downloading music was illegal), and it strikes me as faintly pleasant, just enough so to linger on my hard drive indefinitely, which it does. Now fast forward about another four years, and we reach today, with my just having finally bought the album and found myself liking it heaps. I don't usually mention it here when I buy albums which I've already listened to properly, but since I don't think I've really written about Natalie before (and certainly not on extemporanea), well, why not?
You know, I don't understand why White Lilies Island wasn't a huge hit. Often when people say that kind of thing, they mean it rhetorically; often when I say that kind of thing, I mean it rhetorically. But in this instance, I really don't understand it - it just seems so good. Not great by any stretch of the imagination, sure - but the kind of good that I would've thought would be eminently palatable to the masses, especially given that Left of the Middle had been such a massive seller.
Perhaps I'm just giving the masses - and the record label execs and radio djs who basically determine the tastes of aforementioned masses - too much credit for good taste, though. And/or perhaps White Lilies Island is rather more 'indie'-sounding than I'm registering, not being particularly conversant with top 40 of the last (relevantly) four years or so. But damnit, this album is just so pretty and jangly and mildly epic in all the right sorts of ways - like the Sundays, but glossier - one great tune after another, no rough edges to speak of...what more did people want from their mainstream pop? I can imagine "That Day" throwing people off - it's a good song, but its choruslessness may've made it a bit difficult to digest out there in radioland, and admittedly not that many of the songs on the album really seem made for chart domination, for all of their immediacy. So maybe the natural audience for this album would've been more the 'adult album alternative' crowd, which would've completely overlooked it because of Natalie's putative pop star status, meaning that it fell through the cracks. But still, it's a crying shame that more people haven't taken White Lilies Island to heart, because it deserves a larger audience.
Well, in any case, there you have it...
I must've bought Left of the Middle fairly shortly after, even though at the time each cd purchase was still a major decision, and I imagine I must've spun it plenty, though memory, ever unreliable, fails to supply on this point. Circumstantial evidence provided by this rather embarrassing 'single review' from a magazine that Tim Watson and I put together for a school project in high school:
* * *
Smoke - Natalie Imbruglia
Smoke is the standout track from a fine debut album, and if Natalie had as much sense as she has looks and talent, she would have released it immediately after smash hit Torn. As it is, Smoke is the fourth single from the album, and most likely won't do as well as it deserves. Anyway, the track itself is a heart-felt ballad with slightly better lyrics than a typical such song.
* * *
Ah, the callowness of youth!
Anyway, I'm pretty sure that it was one of the first cds that I ever bought (other early ones that I can recall were the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack, Garbage, Tragic Kingdom, (What's The Story) Morning Glory, Ten...). And it was a nice enough album, and still is, with decent songs and state of the moment production, and I've never for a second regretted its purchase. But things were moving quickly for me at that time, and it wasn't long before I got into Radiohead, and from thereon in everything else was kind of inevitable, and Left of the Middle and Natalie naturally enough slid by the wayside.
Fast forward about four years and comes the release of White Lilies Island. By now, I'm second year university, and it was probably all about the Smiths and the Cure (not to mention Radiohead!) at this stage, but still I download the album just in case (back in the days when audiogalaxy was a thing of wonder and before we knew - or at least before we were particularly aware - that downloading music was illegal), and it strikes me as faintly pleasant, just enough so to linger on my hard drive indefinitely, which it does. Now fast forward about another four years, and we reach today, with my just having finally bought the album and found myself liking it heaps. I don't usually mention it here when I buy albums which I've already listened to properly, but since I don't think I've really written about Natalie before (and certainly not on extemporanea), well, why not?
You know, I don't understand why White Lilies Island wasn't a huge hit. Often when people say that kind of thing, they mean it rhetorically; often when I say that kind of thing, I mean it rhetorically. But in this instance, I really don't understand it - it just seems so good. Not great by any stretch of the imagination, sure - but the kind of good that I would've thought would be eminently palatable to the masses, especially given that Left of the Middle had been such a massive seller.
Perhaps I'm just giving the masses - and the record label execs and radio djs who basically determine the tastes of aforementioned masses - too much credit for good taste, though. And/or perhaps White Lilies Island is rather more 'indie'-sounding than I'm registering, not being particularly conversant with top 40 of the last (relevantly) four years or so. But damnit, this album is just so pretty and jangly and mildly epic in all the right sorts of ways - like the Sundays, but glossier - one great tune after another, no rough edges to speak of...what more did people want from their mainstream pop? I can imagine "That Day" throwing people off - it's a good song, but its choruslessness may've made it a bit difficult to digest out there in radioland, and admittedly not that many of the songs on the album really seem made for chart domination, for all of their immediacy. So maybe the natural audience for this album would've been more the 'adult album alternative' crowd, which would've completely overlooked it because of Natalie's putative pop star status, meaning that it fell through the cracks. But still, it's a crying shame that more people haven't taken White Lilies Island to heart, because it deserves a larger audience.
Well, in any case, there you have it...
Thursday, October 06, 2005
A writeup: Gillian Welch - Soul Journey
Thesis temporarily put to one side, current object of 'procrastination from' is Contemporary Historical Fictions paper on Pynchon, Morrison and historiographic metafiction; in interests of said procrastination, finished writing up an old epinion on Gillian Welch's wonderful Soul Journey:
"Dusty yearnful at-peace cosmic americana".
"Dusty yearnful at-peace cosmic americana".
Feeling unsure and catastrophic: Blonde Redhead - Melody Of Certain Damaged Lemons
I'm not quite sure how to put this, but after listening to Melody Of Certain Damaged Lemons, I feel as if I like the idea of the band more than the band itself; perhaps another way of putting it would be to say that I like their sound more than their songs...but even that's not quite right - maybe another way again would be to saying that I like the various parts of their songs more than the songs as wholes, but that too doesn't really capture it.
This split response reflects my experience of the album, and of Blonde Redhead's music generally (or at least what I've heard of it to date). I love the sound, the shivery uneven refractive swoony cinematic fraughtness of it all. There's a very distinctive aesthetic at play, clattering yet pretty, stop-start in any given moment but ex-centrically oriented around a kind of guiding internal momentum, melodies seemingly dialed in from some other dimension, working its way through differently in the various individual songs. I can't really pick any 'best songs', because every one is really good...
Which is kind of 180 degrees from what I thought I was saying earlier, but maybe the best way of thinking about these two ways of expressing my thoughts is as two sides of the same coin. The tunes of these songs seem different from what I'm used to in pop music (even indie-type art-pop); structurally, too, the songs have an air of uniqueness to them. And that difference is what makes it problematic to think about Blonde Redhead's music in terms of 'songs', at least insofar as that presupposes comparison to more typical examples of the category (even though these obviously are pop songs, at least in some sense).
But in any case, it's really good.
This split response reflects my experience of the album, and of Blonde Redhead's music generally (or at least what I've heard of it to date). I love the sound, the shivery uneven refractive swoony cinematic fraughtness of it all. There's a very distinctive aesthetic at play, clattering yet pretty, stop-start in any given moment but ex-centrically oriented around a kind of guiding internal momentum, melodies seemingly dialed in from some other dimension, working its way through differently in the various individual songs. I can't really pick any 'best songs', because every one is really good...
Which is kind of 180 degrees from what I thought I was saying earlier, but maybe the best way of thinking about these two ways of expressing my thoughts is as two sides of the same coin. The tunes of these songs seem different from what I'm used to in pop music (even indie-type art-pop); structurally, too, the songs have an air of uniqueness to them. And that difference is what makes it problematic to think about Blonde Redhead's music in terms of 'songs', at least insofar as that presupposes comparison to more typical examples of the category (even though these obviously are pop songs, at least in some sense).
But in any case, it's really good.
Speak Low: Kurt Weill: Songs & "Die sieben Todsünden" (von Otter / Forsberg / Gardiner)
Weill's is one of those names which comes up a lot, but he and his art have always seemed sort of just off in the horizon, rather than being on the verge of graspability. I suppose that I'd been put off by my hazy sense that he was a kind of High Art - maybe Modernist, maybe postmodernist (but in either case, Difficult) - type, which is all very well in some fields, but not so much when the starting point is 'classical' music (given my own background, I mean).
A little while back, though, I was haunting the local library looking for something new and noticed a recording of his stuff; thought I'd give it a go, and it turns out to be very listenable indeed. The key thing here, I think, is that the pieces gathered here - his 'ballet chanté' "Die sieben Todsünden" and various other songs - really are songs in the natural sense, voice-focused and with melody lines almost always carried forward by a single instrument when the voice is absent. As a result, I can enjoy the tunes and the drama and the sense of humour, and get a handle on the genre-crossing that's going on, and realise that it's neat-o.
A little while back, though, I was haunting the local library looking for something new and noticed a recording of his stuff; thought I'd give it a go, and it turns out to be very listenable indeed. The key thing here, I think, is that the pieces gathered here - his 'ballet chanté' "Die sieben Todsünden" and various other songs - really are songs in the natural sense, voice-focused and with melody lines almost always carried forward by a single instrument when the voice is absent. As a result, I can enjoy the tunes and the drama and the sense of humour, and get a handle on the genre-crossing that's going on, and realise that it's neat-o.
"La révolution de spunk"
Label samplers are always fun, but this one's somehow less fun than it ought to be. A lot of good indie stuff seems to funnel into Australia through Spunk (the 4ad acts are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head, but there are plenty more) and, given that, I would've expected a Spunk sampler to be good value (value for time, if the nature of the value needs to be specified - given that it was free, I can hardly quibble on the basis of value for money!), but instead it's kinda boring.
It's in the nature of these cds that one doesn't listen to them closely - instead, it's left up to the songs themselves to leap out and demand attention. Here, though, none of the 18 songs have really done so. Apart from Sufjan's "Chicago" and the Arcade Fire's "In The Backseat", which I already knew, the only ones which have left any particular impression are:
* Akron/Family - "Running, Returning" (post-millennial, post-Kid A indie-rock; I kind of got over it after the first couple of listens, but it seems to be growing on me again)
* Smog - "I Feel Like The Mother Of The World" (fairly good, but you know, so far so Smog)
* Holly Throsby - "As The Night Dies" (better than most of the current crop of Just Another (Female) Australian Singer-Songwriters, from what I've heard of them - not the sort of song to be transcendental, but the album might be good)
* Antony & The Johnsons - "Fistful Of Love" (the first Antony & The Johnsons song I've heard since the spectacular "River of Sorrow", and hence my first since they burst into the alternative mainstream a while back and everyone started talking them up - it's nice, and I like it)
The rest of it is fairly nondescript 'of the moment' indie - quite samey in a lot of respects (one surprising element of the samey-ness being a folk current running through the cd). Not unpleasant - just not particularly good. Still, I'm not complaining - it'd be churlish to whinge about free music!
It's in the nature of these cds that one doesn't listen to them closely - instead, it's left up to the songs themselves to leap out and demand attention. Here, though, none of the 18 songs have really done so. Apart from Sufjan's "Chicago" and the Arcade Fire's "In The Backseat", which I already knew, the only ones which have left any particular impression are:
* Akron/Family - "Running, Returning" (post-millennial, post-Kid A indie-rock; I kind of got over it after the first couple of listens, but it seems to be growing on me again)
* Smog - "I Feel Like The Mother Of The World" (fairly good, but you know, so far so Smog)
* Holly Throsby - "As The Night Dies" (better than most of the current crop of Just Another (Female) Australian Singer-Songwriters, from what I've heard of them - not the sort of song to be transcendental, but the album might be good)
* Antony & The Johnsons - "Fistful Of Love" (the first Antony & The Johnsons song I've heard since the spectacular "River of Sorrow", and hence my first since they burst into the alternative mainstream a while back and everyone started talking them up - it's nice, and I like it)
The rest of it is fairly nondescript 'of the moment' indie - quite samey in a lot of respects (one surprising element of the samey-ness being a folk current running through the cd). Not unpleasant - just not particularly good. Still, I'm not complaining - it'd be churlish to whinge about free music!
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
JJ72 - JJ72
This is one those albums that bought in hope more than in expectation - hope that the Fairly Good Single one remembers from a few years back will turn out to've been indicative of a Fairly Good Album without having any particular confidence that this will in fact be the case. The FGS in this instance was "October Swimmer", and the album, well, call it two parts Placebo and one part post-Sunburn Muse but, aforementioned single aside, not as catchy as either, and it's about as good as that description suggests (ie, Not Really Very Good At All). You could say that, to save myself the possibility of some private embarrassment in the unlikely event of my doing an about-face in my opinion at some point down the track, I ought to've listened to JJ72 more than once before writing this - but really, there'd seem to be little point. Oh well.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - The Communist Manifesto
She spoke in dialect I could not understand
But one thing that she made clear
There was no coming on to her
There was no intellect
That she could respect
If it couldn't see
That the girl just wants to be
Left alone with Marx and Engels for a while ...
* * *
I hadn't read this before - parts of Capital, and various other bits and pieces, but somehow never the famous manifesto. Picked it up last night, and have since read it in gaps and on buses ...
[7/9/17: actually, I still quite like what I wrote about this all those years ago. But probably the internet doesn't need to retain a copy of what my university self thought about The Communist Manifesto!]
Saturday, October 01, 2005
Porco Rosso
A Miyazaki. About a jaded pig who is a legendary sea-plane pilot bounty hunter. And has an awful lot in common with Humphrey Bogart's character in Casablanca. With a supporting cast of bumbling pirates, a beautiful, faintly melancholy childhood friend, a preternaturally gifted, cute-as-all-get-go younger girl, and an array of others odds and sorts of the endearingly grotesque variety. Whimsy, spectacle, humour. What more is there to say, really? Don't get me wrong - I'm still not lined up with the ranks of the anime-lovers. But this was pretty good nonetheless.
Friday, September 30, 2005
A mix cd: "...music from a film"
I haven't mentioned my own mix cds here before, and usually don't bother flagging them in my hand-writtten journal either. But I put one together last night and polished it up today, and it came out so well that it seemed to merit an exception:
* * *
Side A
1. "Sight" - Takeshi Kobayashi
2. "I Lost You (But I Found Country Music)" - Gordon McIntyre & Laura Cantrell
3. "Wayfaring Stranger" - Emmylou Harris
4. "Comes A Time" - Neil Young
5. "Seven Year Ache" - Rosanne Cash
6. "I Kicked A Boy" - The Sundays
7. "In Love With A View" - Mojave 3
Side B
8. "Why Not Smile" - R.E.M.
9. "Theme For A Trucker" - Whiskeytown
10. "The Color And The Light" - Jennifer O'Connor
11. "So Long, So Wrong" - Alison Krauss + Union Station
12. "Tabu" - Kronos Quartet [Margarita Lecuona; arr. Osvaldo Golijov]
13. "I'm Not Afraid To Die" - Gillian Welch
14. "Song Of The Liberty Bell" - Mark O'Connor
* * *
Not sure why I like it so much - it just seems to fit together just right (I'm going through a period where I value consistency of mood more than show-offy eclecticism in mix cds). I conceived of it as the soundtrack to an as yet unmade film; sides 'A' and 'B' are more for effect than anything else, figuratively breaking the mix up and also highlighting the way in which the two halves mirror each other in certain respects.
Without wanting to indulge too much in exegesis, I think of "I Lost You (But I Found Country Music)" as establishing a motif for both soundtrack and film, and all else sort of follows from there; the songs were chosen mostly because they seemed to make sense rather than because they're particular favourites of mine at this very moment. As I said before, this film hasn't been made (and nor have I written it), but I think that I can see its outlines anyway.
* * *
Side A
1. "Sight" - Takeshi Kobayashi
2. "I Lost You (But I Found Country Music)" - Gordon McIntyre & Laura Cantrell
3. "Wayfaring Stranger" - Emmylou Harris
4. "Comes A Time" - Neil Young
5. "Seven Year Ache" - Rosanne Cash
6. "I Kicked A Boy" - The Sundays
7. "In Love With A View" - Mojave 3
Side B
8. "Why Not Smile" - R.E.M.
9. "Theme For A Trucker" - Whiskeytown
10. "The Color And The Light" - Jennifer O'Connor
11. "So Long, So Wrong" - Alison Krauss + Union Station
12. "Tabu" - Kronos Quartet [Margarita Lecuona; arr. Osvaldo Golijov]
13. "I'm Not Afraid To Die" - Gillian Welch
14. "Song Of The Liberty Bell" - Mark O'Connor
* * *
Not sure why I like it so much - it just seems to fit together just right (I'm going through a period where I value consistency of mood more than show-offy eclecticism in mix cds). I conceived of it as the soundtrack to an as yet unmade film; sides 'A' and 'B' are more for effect than anything else, figuratively breaking the mix up and also highlighting the way in which the two halves mirror each other in certain respects.
Without wanting to indulge too much in exegesis, I think of "I Lost You (But I Found Country Music)" as establishing a motif for both soundtrack and film, and all else sort of follows from there; the songs were chosen mostly because they seemed to make sense rather than because they're particular favourites of mine at this very moment. As I said before, this film hasn't been made (and nor have I written it), but I think that I can see its outlines anyway.
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Tegan & Sara - "I Know I Know I Know" (and other current favourites)
Alright, I just have to write about this song.
I've been listening to it for the last month or so, and every time I hear it, it's a little bit more delightful - for goodness sakes, I even had a 'Tegan & Sara' moment a little while back, driving with the windows down and "I Know I Know I Know" soundtracking my sense of a momentarily snatched freedom. What to say? It's just the most irresistibly (and why would you want to resist it?) goshdarned gorgeous thing - totally cute (love their voices and the way that every note of the music is just right) and shamelessly sweet and über-melodic (in a 'takes you over almost without you realising' kind of way) and all that stuff ("Stick your hands inside of my pockets,/Keep them warm while I'm still here..."...it's all in the way that it's sung)...it makes me happy. If there was any justice, this would've been a number one hit on pop charts all over the world.
You can - and should - download it here.
* * *
Well, I've put my head down a bit with this Thesis business lately, so there hasn't been as much music listening as usual, of either the 'proper' or 'background' varieties...it's been more short, sharp bursts, which usually translates to individual songs rather than albums. But, in any case, leading the charge with Tegan & Sara have been Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's simply splendid "Upon This Tidal Wave Of Young Blood" (here), Sons and Daughters' "Dance Me In" (here) and various Neil Young (plus snatches of Humming By The Flowered Vine); also, the other night I downloaded some Stars (have lost the link, though), and am particularly liking "Celebration Guns", which reminds me a lot of the wonderful "Anthems For A Seventeen Year Old Girl" (easily the best song on You Forgot It In People, an album that was, incidentally, way overrated).
I've been listening to it for the last month or so, and every time I hear it, it's a little bit more delightful - for goodness sakes, I even had a 'Tegan & Sara' moment a little while back, driving with the windows down and "I Know I Know I Know" soundtracking my sense of a momentarily snatched freedom. What to say? It's just the most irresistibly (and why would you want to resist it?) goshdarned gorgeous thing - totally cute (love their voices and the way that every note of the music is just right) and shamelessly sweet and über-melodic (in a 'takes you over almost without you realising' kind of way) and all that stuff ("Stick your hands inside of my pockets,/Keep them warm while I'm still here..."...it's all in the way that it's sung)...it makes me happy. If there was any justice, this would've been a number one hit on pop charts all over the world.
You can - and should - download it here.
* * *
Well, I've put my head down a bit with this Thesis business lately, so there hasn't been as much music listening as usual, of either the 'proper' or 'background' varieties...it's been more short, sharp bursts, which usually translates to individual songs rather than albums. But, in any case, leading the charge with Tegan & Sara have been Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's simply splendid "Upon This Tidal Wave Of Young Blood" (here), Sons and Daughters' "Dance Me In" (here) and various Neil Young (plus snatches of Humming By The Flowered Vine); also, the other night I downloaded some Stars (have lost the link, though), and am particularly liking "Celebration Guns", which reminds me a lot of the wonderful "Anthems For A Seventeen Year Old Girl" (easily the best song on You Forgot It In People, an album that was, incidentally, way overrated).
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Joni Mitchell - For The Roses
I've thought before that while Joni may well be a great songwriter, she's only a moderately good singer - all that upper register fluting can be pretty distracting, especially in conjunction with the frequent wordiness of her lyrics - and this album strikes me as a neat illustration of that principle. I found the first few songs on the record in particular to be quite hard to get into, with Mitchell's vocalisations sometimes feeling kind of like a curtain obscuring the melodies, dissolving it all into a drizzle of (a) high-pitched vocal flutters and (b) well, other bits. But by the second half of the album (say, from the title track onwards, it being one of my early favourites), she's well and truly hit her stride, and songs like "You Turn Me On I'm A Radio" and "Blonde In The Bleachers" show her at the top of her form, the songs benefiting from a more restrained vocal performance (and also being somewhat fuller musically than most of the others, which may mean that they'd be less beloved of the Joni purist). (Also, "See You Sometimes" is the first Joni song that has made me understand, in a more than intellectual way, the incessant comparisons that Tori draws to her.)
Anyhow, it's relatively early Joni - For The Roses was released in '72, the year after Blue - and quite piano-driven, but beginning to experiment and innovate more than on her previous recordings, including showing hints of the jazz influence that was later to become much more prominent (oh no, a saxophone!). She still comes across as perhaps somewhat too much the naïf at times, but it's not too intrusive and generally I think this is a pretty solid album, and maybe a bit of a transitional one. (Also, Joni records have a habit of suddenly speaking to me some time after I first listen to them - things need to be in their right place for her albums to find their voice with me.)
Anyhow, it's relatively early Joni - For The Roses was released in '72, the year after Blue - and quite piano-driven, but beginning to experiment and innovate more than on her previous recordings, including showing hints of the jazz influence that was later to become much more prominent (oh no, a saxophone!). She still comes across as perhaps somewhat too much the naïf at times, but it's not too intrusive and generally I think this is a pretty solid album, and maybe a bit of a transitional one. (Also, Joni records have a habit of suddenly speaking to me some time after I first listen to them - things need to be in their right place for her albums to find their voice with me.)
Kronos Quartet - Nuevo
They're pretty reliable, Kronos; as a collective, they seem to have a really good ear for what will work, and so their experiment-collaborations with disparate musicians and musical traditions from around the world all seem to come off. This one's a Mexico-inspired record, featuring (as far as I can work out) the quartet reworking a mix of traditional/folk songs written between the 1920-1960s and a few more recent compositions, and it makes for a consistently enjoyable, interesting, rewarding and immediate listen (very diverse, too, which makes the sustained quality all the more impressive). Pretty lively for the most part, waltz/tangoish tempos and colourful, textured instrumentation and dynamics oft punctuated by effects including wolf-whistles, gunshots and general clatter - really good all over. My favourites are the slide and swirl of "Se Me Hizo Facil" ("It Was Easy For Me"), the minor key Morricone-isms of "Perfidia" ("Perfidy", natch), highlighted by musical leaf solo, and the slink and scuttle of "Tabu" ("Taboo").
Neil Young - Decade
About half of this double cd set was already familiar to me - mostly the middle half - but I'm on enough of a Neil Young kick at the moment to be happy to repeat-listen to the discs all the way through notwithstanding.
From what I can gather (from the liner notes), the early songs are a mix of tracks written and recorded with and around the margins of Buffalo Springfield and CSNY and a few that Young wrote and laid down entirely on his own. It may just be the perspective from which I'm looking at them (ie, a retrospective one, comparing them to what came after), but they seem a bit unformed, the ideas and sound rather inchoate; they're mostly fairly nice (though I'm not getting "Broken Arrow" at all), but I have a feeling I'd give them fairly short shrift outside the context of a Neil Young collection. Then come all the songs that I know, interspersed with a few others; of those that I didn't already know, I particularly like "Winterlong" (Young's take on 60s girl group pop, complete with 'sha la la las', echo-commenting backing vocals and fade-out ending!), "Deep Forbidden Lake" (though its melody reminds me of that Bee Gees song "Words") and "Campaigner".
A provisional 'top 10 Neil Young songs' list (not limited to those on Decade), rendered particularly provisional by my not having explored large parts of his back catalogue:
1. Only Love Can Break Your Heart
2. Revolution Blues
3. Cowgirl In The Sand
4. Cortez The Killer
5. Helpless
6. The Needle And The Damage Done
7. On The Beach
8. Southern Man
9. After The Gold Rush
10. See The Sky About To Rain
Strikes me as quite a wimpy/soppy list, but then we don't listen to Neil to be macho, do we?
From what I can gather (from the liner notes), the early songs are a mix of tracks written and recorded with and around the margins of Buffalo Springfield and CSNY and a few that Young wrote and laid down entirely on his own. It may just be the perspective from which I'm looking at them (ie, a retrospective one, comparing them to what came after), but they seem a bit unformed, the ideas and sound rather inchoate; they're mostly fairly nice (though I'm not getting "Broken Arrow" at all), but I have a feeling I'd give them fairly short shrift outside the context of a Neil Young collection. Then come all the songs that I know, interspersed with a few others; of those that I didn't already know, I particularly like "Winterlong" (Young's take on 60s girl group pop, complete with 'sha la la las', echo-commenting backing vocals and fade-out ending!), "Deep Forbidden Lake" (though its melody reminds me of that Bee Gees song "Words") and "Campaigner".
A provisional 'top 10 Neil Young songs' list (not limited to those on Decade), rendered particularly provisional by my not having explored large parts of his back catalogue:
1. Only Love Can Break Your Heart
2. Revolution Blues
3. Cowgirl In The Sand
4. Cortez The Killer
5. Helpless
6. The Needle And The Damage Done
7. On The Beach
8. Southern Man
9. After The Gold Rush
10. See The Sky About To Rain
Strikes me as quite a wimpy/soppy list, but then we don't listen to Neil to be macho, do we?
Linda Lê - "Voice Crisis"
trang gave me this story to read a while ago, but I neglected to do so until now, put off by the dense, unparagraphed, quasi steam-of-consciousness styled prose. Sample from the first page:
However, being conscientious about these things, and also always appreciative of recommendations, I'd left the photocopy on top of one of the more visible piles of paper in my bedroom, the better to serve as a constant reproach, and yesterday finally got round to reading it. I was very much a sceptic at first - I often find destructured, apparently (and/or actually) rambling, self-consciously experimental writing to be lazy and unsatisfying, and not worth the effort of the deciphering. Having read "Voice Crisis", some of that initial scepticism has dissipated; I appreciate the craft of it, and I think that it's effective and largely successful in its phenomenological representation of the world as given to a particular individual consciousness (one for which the differentiation between self and other is, to some extent, dissolved in a schizophrenic Septimus Smith kind of way). But while I can appreciate the writing on that level, I didn't really like the story, mainly, I think, because it doesn't particularly speak to me - my own world and internal narrative logic are very different from that of the piece's 'narrator', and while that's not always an insurmountable problem, in this case it is.
She gets up, wanders down the hallway, comes back toward me, I'd like to remember you, I hear, I'd like to dismember you. She sits back down, leans against me, her whole body trembling, I'm afraid, We're in prison here, We're going crazy, There are bad influences.
However, being conscientious about these things, and also always appreciative of recommendations, I'd left the photocopy on top of one of the more visible piles of paper in my bedroom, the better to serve as a constant reproach, and yesterday finally got round to reading it. I was very much a sceptic at first - I often find destructured, apparently (and/or actually) rambling, self-consciously experimental writing to be lazy and unsatisfying, and not worth the effort of the deciphering. Having read "Voice Crisis", some of that initial scepticism has dissipated; I appreciate the craft of it, and I think that it's effective and largely successful in its phenomenological representation of the world as given to a particular individual consciousness (one for which the differentiation between self and other is, to some extent, dissolved in a schizophrenic Septimus Smith kind of way). But while I can appreciate the writing on that level, I didn't really like the story, mainly, I think, because it doesn't particularly speak to me - my own world and internal narrative logic are very different from that of the piece's 'narrator', and while that's not always an insurmountable problem, in this case it is.
Saturday, September 24, 2005
Terry Pratchett - The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
Seeing as today was the first day during which I approached actual productivity in working on the Thesis, I let things take their course after reading the first few pages of this one, having pulled it off the bookshelf to fill a spare few minutes with some familiar, pleasant words...it's a good 'un alright.
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Monday
A Japanese movie, on just before midnight last night, directed by one 'Sabu'. Starts off with a man waking up in a hotel, dressed in a dark suit; it's Monday morning and he's unable to remember anything of his weekend. In a series of flashbacks, the sequence of events gradually comes back to him...so far, so generic.
Except that it's really not generic at all. The first flashback sets the tone - showing a small wake, eight guests plus mother and sister of the deceased (who is in a coffin at the front of the room), all dressed in dark suits, it's excruciatingly uncomfortable and increasingly surreal and hilarious, beginning with the stilted conversation amongst the kneeling participants, followed by the phone call from the doctor informing them that the deceased's pacemaker is still on and must be turned off before cremation lest the body explode, and culminating in the opening of his body to cut the wire, along with the high tension attendant upon the question of which wire to cut (they're both red!). It's deadpan and absurd and I squirmed and laughed all the way through.
To be honest, that's probably the high point as far as individual sequences go, but the film doesn't flag much from there on in, becoming positively Kafkaesque as the salaryman whose trajectory we follow drifts into a murky, increasingly bizarre nocturnal underworld - and really, really funny (the scene in the toilet, say, or the way in which he holds the yakuza and women hostage with forced laughter).
Then, about two-thirds of the way in, comes the revelation, and suddenly Monday shifts into 'message' mode, only the message is distinctly muddled. It has something to say about guns, and alcoholism, and state power, and the responsibility of the individual (and why does he have those fits of uncontrollable laughter? To be honest, I could empathise with them a little bit...), but I'm not sure exactly what. I'm inclined to think that its message is anti-gun - at least, that's what seems to be coming through in the extended probably-fantasy sequence which almost closes the film. But the ridiculousness of the way in which everyone divests themselves of their guns and celebrates suggests that Sabu may actually be satirising the mindset that sees an easy fix in just doing away with guns (and all that they stand for). But that in turn appears to be flipped on its head by the way in which the central protagonist (I can't remember his name) then meets his demise.
I suppose that to some extent it depends on how you read the devil-figure and the effect of the alcoholism, and their relationship to the main character. He blames both the devil and the gun, rather than himself, suggesting that the drunkenness allowed the devil to get inside him. If we perceive him sympathetically and take this to be accurate, then the film seems more open to an 'anti-gun' reading - some things are out of our control and we should not surround ourselves with the means of facilitating destruction when those forces take us over. But such a reading is rendered a bit problematic by his alcoholism, for surely this is something for which some moral blame must accrue to him, and for which he must take some responsibility? (A further layer is the 'coercive power of the state'/justice issue which comes up.)
The very final scene is kind of annoying, but it was always on the cards, I guess - it's rendered extra ambiguous by the suggestion it brings that this is a moment of choice.
So, pretty strange. But in a good way.
Except that it's really not generic at all. The first flashback sets the tone - showing a small wake, eight guests plus mother and sister of the deceased (who is in a coffin at the front of the room), all dressed in dark suits, it's excruciatingly uncomfortable and increasingly surreal and hilarious, beginning with the stilted conversation amongst the kneeling participants, followed by the phone call from the doctor informing them that the deceased's pacemaker is still on and must be turned off before cremation lest the body explode, and culminating in the opening of his body to cut the wire, along with the high tension attendant upon the question of which wire to cut (they're both red!). It's deadpan and absurd and I squirmed and laughed all the way through.
To be honest, that's probably the high point as far as individual sequences go, but the film doesn't flag much from there on in, becoming positively Kafkaesque as the salaryman whose trajectory we follow drifts into a murky, increasingly bizarre nocturnal underworld - and really, really funny (the scene in the toilet, say, or the way in which he holds the yakuza and women hostage with forced laughter).
Then, about two-thirds of the way in, comes the revelation, and suddenly Monday shifts into 'message' mode, only the message is distinctly muddled. It has something to say about guns, and alcoholism, and state power, and the responsibility of the individual (and why does he have those fits of uncontrollable laughter? To be honest, I could empathise with them a little bit...), but I'm not sure exactly what. I'm inclined to think that its message is anti-gun - at least, that's what seems to be coming through in the extended probably-fantasy sequence which almost closes the film. But the ridiculousness of the way in which everyone divests themselves of their guns and celebrates suggests that Sabu may actually be satirising the mindset that sees an easy fix in just doing away with guns (and all that they stand for). But that in turn appears to be flipped on its head by the way in which the central protagonist (I can't remember his name) then meets his demise.
I suppose that to some extent it depends on how you read the devil-figure and the effect of the alcoholism, and their relationship to the main character. He blames both the devil and the gun, rather than himself, suggesting that the drunkenness allowed the devil to get inside him. If we perceive him sympathetically and take this to be accurate, then the film seems more open to an 'anti-gun' reading - some things are out of our control and we should not surround ourselves with the means of facilitating destruction when those forces take us over. But such a reading is rendered a bit problematic by his alcoholism, for surely this is something for which some moral blame must accrue to him, and for which he must take some responsibility? (A further layer is the 'coercive power of the state'/justice issue which comes up.)
The very final scene is kind of annoying, but it was always on the cards, I guess - it's rendered extra ambiguous by the suggestion it brings that this is a moment of choice.
So, pretty strange. But in a good way.
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