A play (The Darjeeling Limited redux)

And now for something a little bit different...

Not everyone got into The Darjeeling Limited, or at least not all in the same way. In Tamara, for example, the film produced a string of questions to her friend Jamie - questions which, when reproduced for my benefit and taken out of context, struck me as notably existential and oddly apposite (apposite to what, exactly? It doesn't matter)...so much so that I decided to write a mini-play taking said questions as my jumping-off point - and so here we are. Not the most substantial thing I've ever written (it was pretty much all done over the long weekend, while watching the cricket and listening to triple j's hottest 100), but it did come out pretty close to how it initially looked in my head - a rarity.

(Apart from Darjeeling itself, traces of Closer, Juno and Mrs Dalloway may also be apparent, depending on how you look.)

* * *

DANCES

(a play in five short scenes)

* * *

SCENE ONE

“Jamie, I don’t get it”

Two rooms, roughly equal in size, separated by a wall. Sonic Youth’s “Superstar” plays softly in the background.

One room is completely dark. JOCELYN, a young woman, sits in the other, holding a telephone to her ear. She curls her hair distractedly between her fingers as she speaks. If you look closely, it seems possible that she’s just been crying.

JOCELYN: Jamie, I don’t get it. It all seemed to be going so well.

(Pause.)

JOCELYN: It’s been almost a week now.

(A longer pause.)

JOCELYN: No, that’s not how it happened at all. Esther told me all about it. You see, they met at a party...

(Lights come on in the other room as those illuminating JOCELYN dim to darkness. Judging by the shadows flickering on the back wall and by the noise, the room must be full. ANTHONY and ESTHER stand about a metre apart, not quite looking at each other.)

ANTHONY: Nice, isn’t it?

ESTHER: They’ve used the space well.

ANTHONY: It’s never looked better.

(ESTHER looks over at a grandfather clock standing in the corner of the room, and ANTHONY steals a glance at her while she is distracted. He begins to speak, stops, starts again.)

ANTHONY: So, how long has it been? Three years? Four?

ESTHER: (Ambiguously) Yes.

(Pause.)

ESTHER: Well, we’re here now.

ANTHONY: (Uncertainly) Yes.

(Another pause, then they both make as if to speak at once. Their eyes meet.)

ESTHER: (Diffidently, but smiling now, and speaking all in a rush) Shall we?

ANTHONY: (After half a beat) I thought you’d never ask.

Blackout

* * *

SCENE TWO

“Why are they going there, then?”

An aquarium.

Brightly coloured tropical fish dart inside a large glass tank. Light streams in from overhead. ESTHER and ANTHONY, holding hands, are watching the fish from the other side of the tank.

ANTHONY: They make nice patterns when they move, don’t they?

ESTHER: Yes, if you watch them for long enough.

ANTHONY: Like clouds.

ESTHER: Or waves, in the ocean.

ANTHONY: Though these wouldn’t last five minutes in the ocean.

ESTHER: Well, like you said before, everything has its place.

(Pause.)

ESTHER: Do you think — do you think that they’re aware of us?

ANTHONY: It probably wouldn’t make any difference to them even if they were.

ESTHER: (Practically) Well, they might never have ended up here.

(They both watch the fish for a while, peaceably. ANTHONY taps on the tank and tries to catch the fishes’ attention, with no discernible success.)

ESTHER: (Gesturing) You know, I read somewhere that it’s bad for fish to be directly in the sun like that, even under water.

ANTHONY: Why are they going there, then? There’s plenty of shelter.

ESTHER: I suppose they just don’t know any better.

Blackout

* * *

SCENE THREE

“And what did he do with those feathers?”

A hotel room.

ANTHONY finishes fixing ESTHER a drink and then walks over to join her on the sofa.

ESTHER: (Laughing) And what did he do with those feathers?

ANTHONY: No one knows. That was the last we ever saw of him.

ESTHER: I’m sorry I ever asked! Poor Andy. Still, I’m sure he’s happy, wherever he is.

(A companionable silence.)

ANTHONY: (With an air of summing up) Well, that wasn’t so bad.

ESTHER: It was alright.

ANTHONY: Are you okay?

ESTHER: I’m fine.

(Pause.)

ESTHER: I felt a bit disoriented at the start, though — when everyone was standing around in the lobby and waiting for something to happen.

ANTHONY: (Nodding) Still, your family certainly saw the old man off in style. He would’ve liked it.

ESTHER: (Non-committally) Yeah...

(ESTHER fiddles with a ribbon (black) on her dress (likewise), glances at her watch and then at ANTHONY, and then stands up. Wordlessly, they walk towards the door together.)

ESTHER: (Turning to ANTHONY with a sudden smile, just as they are going through the door) So you really don’t know what happened to the feathers? Well, you know what? I don’t believe you for a second.

Exeunt

* * *

SCENE FOUR

“And where’s Natalie Portman gone?”

A busy city street.

ESTHER is standing on her tiptoes, peering ahead, while ANTHONY looks around with a slight air of impatience.

ESTHER: It’s no good. I can’t see a thing over all these people.

ANTHONY: I guess we’re not going anywhere for the moment, then.

ESTHER: No. The street’s completely closed and no one’s moving at all. All this fuss for some movie star.

ANTHONY: Is she even there?

ESTHER: She must be. They said they were going to be shooting all afternoon.

(A bird flaps by overhead.)

ANTHONY: Pooh, how boring.

ESTHER: (Archly, but with a hint of irritation) Remind me again whose idea it was to come and try to get a glimpse of her, then?

ANTHONY: Oh, whatever. Don’t take it out on me that we can’t get through to —

(He breaks off at the sound of a crash and a car going by. The unseen crowd murmurs.)

ANTHONY: What happened? And where’s Natalie Portman gone? That must’ve been her — all those people in front wouldn’t be so excited otherwise.

ESTHER: I don’t know. I wasn’t looking. Do you think it was anything important?

ANTHONY: (Shrugging) Who knows? Well, at least the press is clearing. Come on, let’s go.

Exeunt

* * *

SCENE FIVE

“And why don’t they like each other again?”

An expensive restaurant, night-time.

ESTHER and ANTHONY are sitting across from each other, empty plates, wine glasses and cutlery on the table in front of them.

ANTHONY: (Musingly) Did you see that coming?

ESTHER: No, I never would have imagined.

ANTHONY: And why don’t they like each other again?

ESTHER: Your guess is as good as mine.

ANTHONY: You think you know someone, and then...

(Pause. The lights around them gradually begin dimming.)

ESTHER: (Softly) Anthony?

ANTHONY: Yes?

ESTHER: I was going to say that that couldn’t ever happen to us.

(ANTHONY’s expression is unreadable; ESTHER’s is wondering. By now, only their faces are visible in the failing light.)

ESTHER: (Continuing) But I guess you never can tell.

Blackout

Juno

I was excited about this one, and it's as good as I'd hoped. Juno is a bit like a messier, better version of Garden State - less realistic and more real than that other (the fact that its protagonists are about five or ten years younger than those in Garden State is really neither here nor there).

At first, in the initial flurry of quirk upon quirk, I feared that the movie was trying just that little bit too hard, but it completely won me over as it went on. The trick is, I think, the entirely sweet-natured character of the film - given its nature and many of its characters and set pieces, Juno could easily have been quite dark and acerbic, and yet it never shows more than a hint of such elements, and is a better film for it.

It's one of those unexpectedly subtle films that wraps up the sympathetic viewer and brings them into its own world for its duration, and then releases them with a feeling of wanting to hug somebody. Plus, there are two Belle and Sebastian songs on the soundtrack ("Piazza, New York Catcher" and the classic "Expectations"), the marvellous If I Were A Carpenter cd gets a shout out, and the film-makers find room for the whole (I think) of Cat Power's "Sea of Love" over a tender moment - gold.

Comet Gain - City Fallen Leaves

Has a certain musicality which belies the simplicity of the strands on which it draws - indie, garage, a bit of girl group, a hint of punk - but doesn't lift the record above the run of the mill. Nothing here's as good as "Why I Try To Look So Bad", a spectacularly clangorous earlier single of the band's.

Band of Horses - Everything All the Time

I've thought of "The Funeral" as an indie-rock "Lightning Crashes" before, and I'm standing by that - but it was a nice surprise to find that there's a fair bit more to Band of Horses than just that one song (lest there be any confusion, I like "The Funeral" a lot). The obvious comparison is My Morning Jacket, as much for the spacy acoustic vibe as for the reverb-y vocals, but Band of Horses' songs are tauter than MMJ's, and their stuff has clearer alt-rock overtones (another reference point would be Siamese Dream era Pumpkins in some alterate universe where the Pumpkins were just a bit lighter and Corgan just a bit less self-absorbed). The songs are good, balancing melancholy with optimism, and so are the melodies, and it's just about the right length.

Stars - In Our Bedroom After The War

A bit of a middling album, to be honest. I had no real expectation of it being a great one, and would have been satisfied with two or three really good songs on the level of "Elevator Love Letter", "One More Night (Your Ex-Lover Remains Dead)" and "Celebration Guns", but In Our Bedroom falls short of even those moderate hopes - there are no real standouts, and the record as a whole tends towards being a bit indistinct.

Terry Pratchett - Going Postal

Not a laugh out loud Pratchett, but a good un (as all of his latter day ones are). The second time I've read it, or maybe the third? I lose track.

(ah, the last time: here. This must be only the second time, then.)

Gangs of New York

A real Scorsese epic, sweeping, full of striking action set pieces, blessed with a tops cast at the top of its game, and in this instance not shy with a message, either. (This is the second time I've watched it.)

The Complete Black Books

Deliciously tart and frequently surreal, Black Books is hilarious. Each of the three main characters - misanthropic, vice-riddled Irish bookstore owner Bernard Black (Dylan Moran), his supernally capable and eternally oppressed long-haired assistant Manny (Bernard has an endless array of insulting handles for him, 'Genghis' and 'Lord of the Rings' being just two), and their friend Fran (surname: Katzenjammer), who drinks like a trooper and stumbles from one misadventure to another but by and large does her best to keep up appearances for all of them - is a treat, and the array of mishaps that they bring on themselves and on other people is delightful. A bit of a wish fulfilment show for me, I must say.

The Smiths - The World Won't Listen & Louder than Bombs

Lately, I've been listening to the Smiths again, but I listen to them differently these days. Until recently, going right back to the beginning in high school, their music has always been overlaid with a sense of tumult and urgency - a feeling of drowning or at least drenchedness - but something has changed, and now it's more the surging, slightly giddy, perfectly weighted pop joy of their music that predominates, songs like "Girlfriend in a Coma" and "Shoplifters of the World Unite" taking on a new life and freshness. Anyhow, I haven't listened a great deal to these two compilations, but I'll dip into them in time - I guess the Smiths aren't going away for me any time soon.

Robert Jordan - The Wheel of Time books 1 to 11

Phew. As I got towards the end of this massive series (wikipedia says that, in their most widely available paperback editions, they range from 704 to 1024 pages each), or at least as much of it as has been written so far, I began to wonder what I'd do with the sort of post-11pm ish parts of my evenings that they'd largely consumed in recent weeks (not that reading was restricted to those times, of course). Having said that, I suppose it goes without saying that these are darn good - possibly the most epic series going around today in a genre for which 'epic' is practically the raison d'etre, and just as good on the intimate scale. I read up to book 7 back in high school - as far as Jordan had got at that point - but never followed through because it was getting a bit boring, but no such problems here.

(There's one book to go - Jordan passed away between completing Knife of Dreams, the most recent, and the projected 12th in the series, but apparently he left detailed notes and someone else is going to finish it off down the track.)

* * *

The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, The Dragon Reborn, The Shadow Rising, The Fires of Heaven, Lord of Chaos, A Crown of Swords, The Path of Daggers, Winter's Heart, Crossroads of Twilight and Knife of Dreams

Jean-Dominique Bauby - The Diving-Bell & The Butterfly

There is something called 'locked-in syndrome', a condition in which one is almost completely paralysed and therefore rendered unable to communicate in the usual ways. In J-D Bauby's case, the only movement available to him was the blinking of his left eyelid, and it was in that way that he 'dictated' this series of short musings, anecdotes and recollections, composed after he suffered the massive stroke that brought on the syndrome.

In its whimsy and gentle discursive swoops of the imagination, it's recognisably French, and the writing has a flow which makes it easy to read; for all that it's concerned with J-D B's life post-stroke (both inner and outer), there's not a self-pitying word in the book. To be frank, it didn't give me much beyond two or three hours' diversion (it's an impressive accomplishment given the circumstances of its composition, but in itself that's not enough), but I didn't begrudge the time spent reading it, either.

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss - Raising Sand

One of the most striking things about Raising Sand is the way that Krauss and Plant, both distinctive vocalists in their own right, generally sound so little like themselves while singing these songs. It's an effacement, and a blending, which is emblematic of and integral to the record's achievement - which is to create a contemporary American roots album of genuine quality. Plant has a background in the blues evident to anyone who's listened to any Led Zep, while Krauss draws deeply from the bluegrass tradition, but the music they create together is, while enriched by both of those streams, not wedded to either in parts or as a whole.

This is apparent, say, in a fantastic run near the end, which in the space of three songs goes from a lovely dusty folk-country shuffle ("Stick With Me Baby" - a real old harmony duet), to a ferociously slow-burning Townes van Zandt cover done by Plant in full-on "The Rain Song" epic mode with Krauss' menacing plugged-in fiddle cutting through and above the layers of electric guitar (all of the songs are covers, actually, coverees including Tom Waits, Sam Phillips, the Everly Brothers and others), to a honkytonk-infused country-rocker in which Krauss takes her best shot at singin' just like Plant did in his prime and which is actually rather like Alison Krauss covering Led Zeppelin at their jauntiest ("Let Your Loss Be Your Lesson" - the most sheerly delightful song on the album)...they cover a lot of ground, taking both musicians in lots of directions both individually and together, but it's held together by the spirit of the thing (not to mention T Bone Burnett's characteristic production style).

All told, it's a real winner - Raising Sand may not quite be one for the ages, but on its own terms it doesn't put a foot wrong.

Foo Fighters - The Colour and the Shape

Exactly the way I imagined it would be - that is, a bunch of slightly less catchy versions of "Monkey Wrench", "My Hero" and "Everlong", plus "Walking After You". Not that I'm complainin'.

Hero

What's surprising about rewatching this one is how little advance knowledge of the twist actually affects the way that one watches the film - a testament, no doubt, to the elegance of how it unfolds and of the fight scenes. Also, it struck me that there's a hint of Invisible Cities to Hero.

D.E.B.S.

This time, there was no doubt in my mind that Devon Aoki was the best thing about D.E.B.S. - she's completely incidental to the story, but has nearly all of the best lines. But it's all still just as much fun a second time round, really. (It ended up lying around because I'd recommended it to Penny after our trip to the Blockbuster downstairs to satisfy her desire for a re-watch of Mean Girls was stymied by that one being out - D.E.B.S. seemed a reasonable substitute.)

(the first time)

Constantine

Loses a bit when you know what's coming (the deaths, the details, the debonair-ness, the (melo)drama, the devil-out-of-the-machine at the end) but still convincingly comic-book diabolical, and all the good things about it are still good.

(the first time)

Chuck Norris facts

Hey, I never knew there was a whole website of these. Good clean fun.

The Oxford Book of French Short Stories edited by Elizabeth Fallaize

Unusually for me (when it comes to multi-author short story collections), I went nearly all the way through this from start to finish, with very little skimming and only one skip (Simone de Beauvoir's dense, barely paragraphed "Monologue"). There's something about French literature in translation - the writing seems always so lucid and clear, transparent somehow. I don't know exactly what it is, nor whether it's intrinsic to 'French writing' or rather something which occurs in the translation into English, but that quality makes the writing a pleasure to read, and it's present to a greater or lesser extent in nearly all of the stories collected here.

It's an impressive collection, both in terms of authors (it seems that every second French writer of note in the last 200 years is represented - Balzac, Flauberty, Stendhal, Zola, Sade, Huysmans, Colette, Sartre, Camus) and quality of the stories; the chronological arrangement gives a sense of the development of the form (complete with splintering into different national/racial backgrounds in recentish times), and Fallaize includes a useful historical and thematic introduction.

I've read bits and pieces of a few of these authors before, but only one of the stories (Sartre's "The Wall") was already familiar to me. My favourites tended to be 20th C; the ones that I liked most:
* Villiers de l'Isle Adam - "Gloomy Tale, Gloomier Teller". One of several which are directly concerned with the acts of story-telling and narration, and a nicely barbed account of an account of an account of an account of a duel to the death (and, for the outer layers of 'accounting', a dinner party) in which pretensions are laid bare without any apparent interposition by any of the narrators (including l'Isle Adam).
* Joris-Karl Huysmans - "Knapsack at the Ready". Comes across like a French Catch 22, and it's just as ridiculous and as funny as that other. Following the adventures of a dissolute soldier during the Prussian War (he spends much more time in various hospitals and wreaking havoc in towns than actually en route to battle, never mind seeing actual combat, which never occurs at all) and slipping between present and past tense from sentence to sentence, it's a treat.
* Georges Simenon - "The Man on the Street". A Maigret detective story which at once plays by the rules and turns them upside down, almost Austerian but also an honest-to-goodness crime mystery with an eventually clear resolution.
* Christiane Baroche - "Do You Remember the Rue d'Orchampt?". A misty, allusive wend through memory and the present which also has some interesting things to say about character and relationships. Unfortunately, the only thing of hers that's been translated into English!
* Monique Proulx - "Public Transit". At about 1000 words, more of a vignette than a story as such: a man saves a woman from being hit by a train and discovers that he has won a live televised test of everyday heroism - ending with a deliciously acerbic aside.

Roxy Music - Roxy Music

Yeah! This is great - an unholy mix of glam, prog, rock n roll, and saxophone, it doesn't sound much like anything I've heard before, though there are flashes throughout (a flavour of Bowie here, a dash of what might become Talking Heads there, even sometimes hints of something that might've made the lads from Joy Division sit up and take notice, such as on "If There Is Something", say). Heavy as all get go in places, and seemingly barely grounded in others, it's a vivid concoction and very listenable.

Natalie Imbruglia - Glorious: The Singles 97-07

Two reasons why I bought this despite already having all the albums (Left of the Middle way back when, White Lilies Island[*] and Counting Down the Days): it includes five new songs, and it comes with all of the music videos. Anyhow, I haven't got around to the videos yet; as to the songs, "Glorious" is a sunny, slightly breathless Imbruglia tune, much like many of her others but good with it, while the others explore moodier possibilities.

Coeurs

... shot on a soundstage, on sets that never pretend to be anything else. But it's a cinematic experience in every way, a delicate, melancholy and graceful film about shared space - literal and metaphorical - and universal longings.

It's about proximity and coincidence, crossed paths and overlapping relationships, but it's also about the distance between people, the gap between what they have and what they want. ...

People are constantly in search of something: whether it's a new flat or a new relationship, or something that they can't even quite define. They aren't always what they seem, and they don't always give their real names, and they don't always tell the truth to the people they are closest to. ...

Small revelations occur but don't always clarify things; sometimes, they create further problems or indecisions or disappointments.

Coeurs could appear slight in its carefully calibrated combination of warmth and chill, its formal grace and apparent simplicity, its exploration of confined spaces and confined lives - but its transparency and ease are misleading. It's a film unafraid of uncertainty or sadness; to the very last moment it feels not only assured and deft, but also mysterious and unresolved.

I don't think I've ever read a review which has more effectively enticed me to watch a film than Philippa Hawker's of Coeurs, from which all of the above is taken; to me, everything in that review suggested that Coeurs would be exactly the kind of film I like, not least in the way that much of it could literally have come word for word from my own notes towards API.

The film itself, though, didn't live up to those hopes (well, expectations). It's obvious that the people who made it know what they're doing - the film is impeccably put together, every scene carefully framed and subdivided, every line of dialogue well weighted and pregnant with multiple meanings, every interaction balancing and adding to the whole, and overlaid by a motif of snow which goes a long way to tying it all together, and yet -- . And yet -- it's very human for all of its chill, and yet -- it doesn't quite breathe, it doesn't shiver and resonate...somewhere, amidst the elegant subtleties of Coeurs, the true heart of the film is submerged. It's pretty fine, but it could have been so much more.

The Darjeeling Limited

Two ways of describing what The Darjeeling Limited is about spring to mind: one, it's a film about the 'spiritual journey' undertaken by brothers Francis (Owen Wilson), Peter (Adrien Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman), initially on the Darjeeling Limited, a cross-country train running through India, and then, unexpectedly, off the rails (so to speak); and two it's a film about the things we do to ourselves, the things we do to other people, and the things the world does to all of us (and, in all of those veins, it's more than a little about family, too).

Whatever else it may be, The Darjeeling Limited is certainly a Wes Anderson movie - it has the hyper-coloured magic realist flourishes and deadpan surrealist touches, and also the desire (and many of the tools) to be a genuine character piece. But it's more serious than The Life Aquatic or The Royal Tenenbaums, its deliberate absurdities marginally more muted, its yen towards the universal clearer (which hinges mainly on the montage near the end showing all of the characters riding that there train), its message more overt by film's close.

I wonder, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was better on a second viewing, too. There's something very pleasing about Darjeeling that's difficult to pin down - a sort of elegance. (The one outright hilarious scene had all of us laughing out of all proportion to how funny it actually was - though admittedly Brody and Schwartzman doing straight-faced slapstick was always likely to be pretty great - which I reckon was due in no small part to the cumulative effect of the film, both its humour and its seriousnesses.)

Also, film proper was preceded by a two-handed (Schwartzman and Natalie Portman) short, Hotel Chevalier, which is excellent in its own right, and adds considerably to one's appreciation of what comes after.

(w/ David; Patrick and Simin also coincidentally there)

k d lang - Hymns of the 49th Parallel

An elegant and lushly autumnal collection of covers of songs by other Canadian songwriters - it was "Helpless", playing over the end credits of Away From Her, which caught my ear and then brought Hymns to my attention, and lang also does "After the Gold Rush", "A Case of You", "Hallelujah" and others, all pleasantly.

No Country for Old Men

People are hailing this as a masterpiece, but I'm more inclined to say, a bit grudgingly, that it's merely very good. Unremittingly tense and grimly existential, and at the same time a careful study of character and evil and a thorny-edged love letter to the American Western, graced by performances which invoke and undermine archetypes in a way that one doesn't notice at all while watching, it's impressive but just not a film that I can love.

(w/ Wei and Julian F)

"IMP November 2007"

Is it wrong that my favourite song on this mix, apart from those that I already knew, is by Michelle Branch? Anyway, this is a mellow, cafe-ready set - "The Blower's Daughter", "Right To Be Wrong", Frou Frou, Sigur Ros, etc (plus two in a similar vein which I both know and like a great deal - Powderfinger's "Passenger" (ah, the memories) and Cary Brother's "Blue Eyes" (off the Garden State soundtrack)) - and, if a bit middle of the road, still nice to listen to.

(from Jeff in Boulder, CO)

"Listen, again"

A mix from trang whose avowed purpose is partly to familiarise the unfamiliar while defamiliarising the familiar; it also flows as, to quote, "a piece of dreaming and nostalgia and longing". The unfamiliar is made up of traditional Asian (mostly Vietnamese) music; the familiar (whether or not I already knew the particular pieces well) is mostly misty, wistfully melodic pop from the western canon (Nancy Sinatra's "As Tears Go By", "God Only Knows", the Velvets' "I Found A Reason", etc). It's all very nice, but the real revelation is Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face", which I suppose I'd heard before, but never really listened to - it's slow-burning, soulful and quietly wondrous.

Mean Girls

It's a teen movie and it has claws, though they're largely retracted in the film's closing stretch - Heathers it ain't, but one thing that Mean Girls does well is temper the more saccharine, formulaic tendencies of its genre with a pretty sharp satirical edge (evident from the title, if from nothing else).

It's a cure premise - Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), home schooled all her life and having spent the last several years in Africa with her zoologist parents, starts at a public school for the first time in her life and becomes entangled with the ruling girl clique, 'the plastics'...cue many analogies between the law of the jungle and schoolyard practices (including amusing fantasy sequences of students acting out animal kingdom jungle behaviour) and some impressively mean behaviour all round. Lohan, who I haven't seen before, is good (and reminded me of someone I know who I suppose I shouldn't name), as is the rest of the ensemble (special mention to the long-suffering maths teacher, Tina Fey (who actually wrote the screenplay); also, Lacey Chabert has grown up and is completely unrecognisable; and, of course, Amy Poehler is always welcome). Liked it.

Underworld: Evolution

Underworld: Evolution looks and plays exactly like a video game - which is, of course, exactly what I wanted. Nearly every minute drenched in blue and black, and with cracking action sequences and back story revelations coming hard on each other's heels throughout, it never slows from the get go. There isn't much to it (although it does have Derek Jacobi up its sleeve), and the actor who plays Michael, Scott Speedman, is still a curiously charisma-free zone, counter-balancing Kate Beckinsale's dramatic (if not exactly demanding) 'hot vampire death dealer' turn, but the film does what it promises.

(Underworld)

The Golden Compass

Much like the part of Hogfather that I saw a couple of nights ago, The Golden Compass sticks fairly close to the letter of its source text, and in doing so comes up with something which quite satisfyingly imparts something of the pleasure and feel of that source without coming near to its magic. Everyone's well cast, everything looks right (down to the slightly hazy edges surrounding everything), and it sticks reasonably close to Pullman's novel, but it comes off as a bit choppy and ungrounded, leaping from one apparently deus ex machina moment to another (apparently d.e.m. because the background is insufficiently fleshed out to convince). But impression definitely overall positive, and fingers crossed that the next two get made.

Roald Dahl - The Witches

Eek! This book freaked me out when I was a kid, and the film was even worse. Good though, innit?

Pony Up! - Make Love to the Judges With Your Eyes

Somewhere between wry and wide-eyed is where these popsters stake their camp, and just about bring it off, too. Not an unqualified success, nor fully living up to the promise of "The Truth About Cats and Dogs (Is That They Die)", but good enough to get by on.

"Pretty girls keep growing up": Don't You Know Who I Think I Was? The Best of the Replacements

Maybe you had to be there. I like this kind of stuff well enough, and sometimes I can almost feel how it could really take someone, but somehow it never really quite takes me. You can certainly hear the influence their melodic-anthemic punk-rock had, indirectly or otherwise, on any number of others who came after them - Buffalo Tom and Foo Fighters being the two most obvious for mine.

Hogfather

Only caught the second instalment of this two-parter, and regretted not seeing the first - it wasn't perfect, but it was possibly as good as one could've hoped for, given the difficulties needed to be overcome in bringing a Pratchett to screen. It's pretty faithful to the book, though it inevitably loses much of the nuance and sheer joy - even allowing for Hogfather probably being one of his darker novels...a darkness which happily comes through in just about the right degree - and most of the characters look about right (Susan being particularly important, seeing as she's (1) the central character in this one and (2) one of my favourite Discworld characters, along with Vimes, Vetinari and (it goes without saying) Death). If they make more of these in a similar vein, I will be very well pleased.

Star Wars: A New Hope

I don't think I've ever watched this all the way through before! Anyhow, watched out of its historical context, it's more than a little hokey, but still okay for all that.

Roald Dahl - Kiss Kiss

Revisiting these for book club (we're doing The Witches and an at the moment ill-defined assortment of short stories), they haven't stood up particularly well. Part of the problem, I guess, is that I can pretty much remember the 'twists' in each of the stories - not that they're all dramatic blind-siders, with many being more in the way of straight up, if unanticipated, plot turns or events. But a bigger part is possibly that I don't have such a taste for this kind of under-the-skin, more than a little nasty style of story - though that doesn't explain why I like John Collier so much. Oh, and some of them have morals, some don't...

Bruce Springsteen - Nebraska

Barren and resonant, like everyone says it is. But in the time that I've been listening to it (months now) I haven't yet been moved to give the album the close attention that I suspect it requires to reveal itself deeply.

Spoon - A Series of Sneaks

Heck, this one's good too. More wiry (even more wiry) than their latter-day records, and more likely to drop in familiar-sounding rockisms, but, as usual, filled to the bursting with Spoon and all that - indeed, though they've continued to refine their sound with each successive record since this one, they seem to've emerged pretty much fully formed.

Boa - Love & Honesty

Apparently Boa is the most popular k-pop artist going around, but on the strength of Love & Honesty, she's nothing to get excited about - glossy and hyper-produced (which is to the good) sub Michael Jackson-esque (distinctly not to the good) dance-pop belted out by Boa herself.

Joss Stone - Introducing Joss Stone

Her latest, title notwithstanding - a bit more of a contemporary feel, but still recognisably the same artist as that behind Mind, Body & Soul. It's come more to life for me since seeing her live but still hasn't made a large impression.

Saint Etienne - Sound of Water

Pretty atmospheric / atmospheric pretty, but I haven't had a 'Saint Etienne moment' with this one yet, even after a few months of background - and sometimes foreground - listening. Still, if past experience is anything to go by, it's only a matter of time.

Kelly Clarkson - Thankful

Best songs: "Low" and "Just Missed The Train" - which are, truthfully, kind of the same song, but hey, who's complaining? The kind of song that is, incidentally, is the usual rocky sort of pop anthem, in which the soaring chorus is the name of the game but it's the little things surrounding said chorus which really make the song. Elsewhere, there are other things to like - "Miss Independent" and "Beautiful Disaster" come to mind - but the more straight up pop (or slightly soul-infused numbers) tend to be a bit boring. Not a patch on Breakaway, but not too bad either.

Only the Bones: Deborah Conway's Greatest Hits

Hey, guess what? "Only The Beginning" is actually a lot like "Just Like Heaven"! Apart from that, no revelations in this set, though it's much stronger and also more interesting than I would've expected, had I ever stopped to think about what a Deborah Conway greatest hits might be like.

Amanda Palmer @ the Spiegeltent, Thursday 13 December

[snip]

I was at a show last night that I think you would have enjoyed, actually...you may have heard of the Dresden Dolls? Anyway, one of their members (there are only two, I think) - Amanda Palmer - did a midnight gig at the Spiegeltent, and it was excellent - a sort of art-punk-cabaret-performance amalgam (much like the Dolls' stuff)...many goth kids in the audience completely losing their minds with excitement, particularly when she came down off the stage and walked through the crowd, still singing (never mind the capering, heavily made up performers who ran amok throughout).

(Also, she did a cover of "Creep" (w/special guest), and one of "Hallelujah". It really all was very good - dark and romantic and more than a bit baroque, shades of This Mortal Coil.)

(w/ trang, and two of her friends - E-L and a David)

Joss Stone @ the Forum, Sunday 9 December

One thing's for sure - Joss Stone is a sensational live performer, possessed of a spectacular voice and great presence, and backed by a five star supporting cast (especially the three harmony singers) which seems straight out of Memphis, and that alone made this a good show. But I felt about it as I do about her recorded material (Mind, Body & Soul, and the bits and pieces I've heard of the other two) - she is much better than her material, which tends to be pretty average...the best moments are those when she's able to really pour herself into the music, which means mostly the slightly rockier songs and the near-ballads (which even come close to torch on occasion). All up, though, was worth checking out.

(w/ Steph)

Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

From: Choo, Howard
Sent: Thursday, 6 December 2007 11:25 AM
To: [WL; AC; AB; CM; KC; DP; JF; TV]

Subject: the thieving magpie - exhuming book club


Hallo all,

I think the last consensus date for book club was this Saturday (the 8th), but with that date almost upon us, how is everyone for Saturday the 15th? Assuming the weather holds up, I was thinking perhaps a picnic-y thing beginning early afternoon (say 1pm and make a lunch of it) at the Edinburgh Gardens, but other suggestions are most welcome.

For anyone who has - quite forgivably - forgotten, the current book is Murakami's "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle", which is about solitude, memory, loss (also society, perception, and discoveries), and pasta. It also features metaphysical sex, snatches of opera, recollections of wartime atrocities, a really deep well, beautiful women, near-death experiences, one of the weirdest villains ever, much contemporary anomie, sundry unexpected disappearances, and of course several wind-up birds…all wrapped up in a steam train of a story, natch. What's not to like?

Howard

* * *

(last time)

FreeRice

A vocabulary game that helps to feed the poor - try it.

freerice.com

(The highest I got to was level 46, and I tended to hover around 43 to 45. You can't play for too long, though, or the words start to repeat.)

Little delights

1. Today I learned a new word: autology. Hurray!

2. This year's Turner prize was won by a video of a guy dressed up in a bear suit.

3. And Scarlett Thomas's website is still the cat's meow.

The Bangles - Greatest Hits

Back when I was less generally sanguine about things than nowadays, there were a handful of songs frequently making up my winamp playlist for night-time gloom - music for playing over and over in fits of inchoate despair...well, most of us have been there in one way or another. Anyhow, the point is that "Eternal Flame" was one of the mainstays ("Strong Enough" and "I'll Stand By You" being the other two which have particularly lingered), and so I've got a soft spot for the song a mile wide - no cynicism here!

But I always had an idea that that big ballad wasn't characteristic of the Bangles, and this greatest hits shows their style to be much more a minimalistic, tuneful rock-pop thing replete with quiet (but immediately apparent) charms. Their take on "Hazy Shade of Winter" is easily the best thing on the cd, though "Manic Monday" is also particularly liable to charm me.

Feist - The Reminder

For me, there aren't any real standout songs on The Reminder, nor any especially show-offy ones; what there is instead, is an elegant, understated, coyly soulful twist of a thing, with plenty of depth as well as a pleasing airyness which stands up well to repeat play...

Robyn - Robyn

Finally, this one gets a local release, and it just about lives up to expectations, too. "Konichiwa Bitches" and "Be Mine!" are still the bomb, and "With Every Heartbeat" is just as good; "Who's That Girl" is another big fave of mine. As usual, I end up thinking that it doesn't get much better than Scandinavian pop - some things don't change.

Rilo Kiley - More Adventurous

Pretty good - Rilo Kiley have a very listenable quality even during their least inspired, and while there's little on More Adventurous that's really striking (the exception - and it's a big one - is "Portions for Foxes", which is still too, too delightful...it's just everything that a pop song should be) it's still plenty engaging for all of its surprising modesty.

Also: when I trotted up to the counter with this cd in hand a couple of weeks ago, the record store girl glanced at the back of the cardboard slipcase and was moved to exclaim, of Jenny Lewis, "Hey, she's cute!"...which is, of course, perfectly and incontrovertibly true.

"Space & Sci-Fi mix" (IMP October 2007)

An entertaining listen from start to finish, this, and some good stuff on it. High point is 14-minute mix closer "2001" (a prog-jazz-disco rewrite of / elaboration on the "2001" theme by Phish); "Space Oddity" sits dead centre; elsewhere, Ornette Coleman, Gnarls Barkley, Calexico (with a song tres cool, "Attack Robot Attack"), the Flaming Lips, and a host of others less well known jostle for space.

(from Sean in Albuquerque, NM)

Into the Wild

I've gotta say, I respect this film in a way that I didn't think I would before I saw it - there's something magnificent about the thing, all two and a half hours of it, and there's no doubting how well it's crafted, following the wanderings of the fiercely idealistic Chris McCandless (it's based on a true story; it aspires to be a true story), who finishes college with great prospects and promptly gives all of his savings to charity and breaks off all communication with his family and old life to test himself in the wilds of America, winding up in what seems to him the purest possible embodiment of that ideal - the climax of his wanderings - alone in Alaska, subsisting on whatever he can shoot or forage, encountering a succession of marginal and outsider types en route.

It's a film that deepens as it goes along, in parallel with the deepening of our understanding of (or, at least, perspective on) its central character. I had thought it was going to be something like On the Road crossed with Walden, and this fear was only increased when the opening epigraph (bad news, that, in a film of this kind - an epigraph of any kind, I mean) came from that arch-Romantic Lord Byron, but it turns out to be considerably more complex than that, finally making its point about meaning and happiness explicit just a few minutes before its end.

Like I said, I respect the film, but in the end, I don't really rate it. It's heartfelt, sure, and quite impressive on its own terms (on those terms, I think it needs to be 2 1/2 hours long - to say that it's too long, as I was initially tempted to do, would be to miss the point)...but it didn't move me, and nor did it inspire me to re-evaluate my own life or beliefs, which would be a great example of criticising something for falling short of impossibly high standards, except that, by its very nature, Into the Wild sets itself up to be judged against just such standards...

(w/ Steph, who won the free tickets which were the only reason we went to see it)

Stephen King - The Dark Tower series

The Gunslinger, The Drawing of the Three, The Waste Lands, Wizard and Glass, Wolves of the Calla, Song of Susannah & The Dark Tower

* * *

Inspired by Robert Browning's poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came", it's obvious that this series means a lot to King; indeed, judging by the prefatory and closing remarks which appear in most of the volumes (not to mention the content - and the massive length - of the series itself), he seems to have come to regard it as his magnum opus - the central work in his massive ouevre and imaginary.

Above all else, it's a Western, tracing the gunslinger's weary progress towards the Tower, accompanied by his companions, and that predominant thread is woven through all of the books' other elements. And it's also structured as an epic, constructed around a plot with the highest of stakes and spanning huge distances and times - but this is where it falls down a bit, for while the story is strong, it doesn't compel in the way that the best books of this type do (which is not to say that the overarching narrative isn't plenty gripping - it'd have to be, to keep me reading through seven books at, on average, some 600 or 700 pages each!).

One of the striking things about the series is the extent to which each of its constituent books is limited to a particular part of the overall arc (which is not to say that they're in any real sense self-contained) - Wizard and Glass (largely devoted to Roland's relating of the story of his coming of age in Mejis) and the Seven Samurai-esque Wolves of the Calla particularly come to mind. The first in the series, The Gunslinger, is the most interesting, and, I reckon, comes closest to the spirit of Browning's poem in its cryptic, tersely poetic series of fragments, but it's not until The Drawing of the Three that King really hits his stride and things begin to take the shape they'll more or less hold for the duration.

To be honest, I was disappointed that it wasn't darker - I read the standalone short story "The Little Sisters of Eluria" a while back, and was very struck by its intensity and darkness, but the same isn't to be found in the series at large, which is more oriented towards action and (necessary, I suppose) exposition - and its central protagonist, Roland himself, not more solitary...but all up, while I don't think I'll be re-reading any time soon (probably not ever), it's eminently readable - and the last few pages make a killer ending, too.

Smokin' Aces

Smokin' Aces ain't half as cool as it wants to be - taking its cues from Tarantino & co, jive dialogue, comic book archetype villains and heroes, bloodbath climax, 'twist' ending and all, it ends up being far short of the colourfully violent film geek mainstream-cult piece for which it shoots. In the end, I think, the problem is that one just doesn't care about any of the characters, nor about the plot, and even the style isn't anything we haven't seen before.

The Descent

Not to put too fine a point on it, this movie scared the shit out of me. Six women go spelunking, get caved in, and find out that there's something alive down here; of course their group has its own pre-existing tensions, and once things go wrong, they go very, very wrong. One interesting gambit is the film's decision to show the monsters quite clearly (albeit with a tendency to drop shockingly suddenly into frame); another (maybe relatedly) is for the women to give a pretty good account of themselves when fighting for their lives against their subterranean hunters. It's all set up very economically, and almost from the outset is throat-clenchingly tense, punctuated by abrupt 'shock' moments, and ends well too. pfah!

Kylie Minogue - Impossible Princess

Impossible Princess was going around at about the time when I really started getting into music, and I have distinct impressions of all four of the singles (including their videos - unusual for me), all of which got plenty of radio play at the time, and each quite different from the others: "Some Kind Of Bliss" (cruisey pop-rocker and truthfully quite blissful - yearny and sort of shut-eyed-in-the-sunshine happy), "Did It Again" (groovy, and catchy as all hell), "Cowboy Style" (techno-cowboy funk) and "Breathe" (mellow and fluid).

The album, then (I've been meaning to buy it for years and years, but have only managed to do so just now): a pleasant, electro-inflected pop album with a few hints of indie stylings, but in the end a bit too repetitive to be really interesting.

Pixies - Bossanova

Hey, hey, this is excellent - love the demented surf-rock thing they've got going on here. It's deliciously, deeply pop, too, and though it seems off-handed, almost tossed-off, it's pretty great in a 'just below the surface' sort of way (a bit like the Breeders' Pod, say).

Emmylou Harris - Roses in the Snow

On paper, it's impeccable - Emmylou Harris doing a bluegrass record - and that's pretty much the way it is on record, too. 'Pristine', the liner notes call it, and aptly (though the album's lively, too, when it ought to be) - simply put, everything works.

"Voicing Emily" @ Beckett Theatre, the Malthouse

A so-called 'lieder-opera', this show combines elements of both those forms ('lieder' being 'art songs', and 'opera' being, irreducibly, opera), mixing them in with spoken word interludes both pre-recorded and live, and a stream of visual images projected on to screens behind the performers - three singers, all dressed in white, representing different stages in the life of their subject, Emily Dickinson, and three musicians (piano, acoustic guitar, cello) - to produce an impressionistic-thematic account of Dickinson's life and work (the 'libretto' is a setting to music of her poems, including some of her most famous), organised thematically rather than strictly chronologically or biographically ("death", "home", "Susan", "nature", "Samuel", "immortality").

Described like that, it probably sounds a mess - but actually it was quite wonderful. Dickinson is my favourite poet, and this performance rung true - it reminded me of many of the reasons why I fell in love with her work in the first place...above all else, she felt things so intensely, and through her poetry we are at once brought into the presence of something true and larger than ourselves and reminded of its fundamental unknowability. There's a mystery at the heart of everything she wrote, and yet it speaks directly to us.

(w/ trang + Arthur)

* * *

There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself -
Finite infinity.

Princess Mononoke

Many of the sequences in Princess Mononoke, and particularly some of those painting the landscapes through which Ashitaka travels between his home town and the land of the Iron town and the forest, made me wish that I lived someplace where there's more space - not just physical but also, I suppose, metaphysical (in this instance, the two are related)...someplace where people can properly be, heroic or villainous or some combination of the two, in a way far larger than that allowed by my own current circumstances...another sense in which it's a fantasy, I suppose. That aside, this is a pretty sweet film (ie, I liked it) - it's technically very impressive, which translates into a seamlessly immersive viewing experience, and has a nice blend of lightness and weight...

The Drones - Wait Long By The River And The Bodies Of Your Enemies Will Float By

One from Jon, who went so far as to describe this band's music as transcendent one Friday afternoon. Now, transcendence is always contingent and particular (or have I precisely missed the point?), but having listened to this album pretty solidly over the last few days, I think I can see his point, at least out of the corner of my eye...because although it initially feels like just another rock album (albeit one tied together by some extremely solid songs and tight playing), there's more to Wait Long... than meets the eye - I can't put it better than to say that the record has a sense of depth which sets it well apart from the run of the mill. ("Shark Fin Blues" is the one that I listen to over and over, but I get the feeling that it may be an entry point in more ways than one.) I was walking around listening to the album today, and it just felt right.

Joss Stone - Mind, Body & Soul

Puts me in mind of nothing so much as a smoother Janis Joplin, with more of an emphasis on the 'soul' and less on the rock and roll - although, it has to be said, not approaching Joplin's work on either count. That's the thing about the similarities - to a point, they work in Stone's favour, because I like Joplin, but inevitably Mind, Body & Soul also suffers by comparison, 'cos as I've said before, Janis Joplin was basically a goddess. Still, this is a pretty listenable album, and a couple of songs - "Security" and "Sleep Like A Child" are extremely good.

Elliott Smith - XO

David and I used to half-joke that, when we're 30, all we'll listen to is Elliott Smith (a designation including ES himself but also using him as shorthand for a certain kind of music); well now, not yet 30 but here we are - Elliott Smith indeed. I've listened to "Waltz #2" a lot over the years, but on my first proper listen to XO, while I pricked my ears up at that one, it was much deeper into the record, at the appearance of a mournful electric guitar figure, that I found a thought fully formed in my mind: "oh, glory". Melodramatic yes, but that's how the response came to me - and damn it, it is a glorious moment.

That moment came about midway through "Bottle Up And Explode!" - it's still one of my favourites, but the effect was in no small part due to its positioning after the sparenesses of what comes before, lines upon lines of Smith's acoustic guitar and expressive but unadorned singing, embellished unobtrusively by minor chamber-pop elements, wrapped up into little two or three minute songs. So far, I like this album rather than loving it, but there's a real charm and piquancy to it, not to mention (in light of his biography) an incipient (well, more than partly realised) sorrow.

Fleetwood Mac - Rumours

Pleasant, but yet to reveal anything to me which would justify its status as a classic - so far as I can see, it's just a fistful of nice tunes (admittedly including, in "Dreams", an honest to goodness genius moment) and a couple of other less memorable ones. Maybe my expectations were too high.

Stephen King - Cell

Man really is a great storyteller. I read him despite not having any especial fondness for horror or for adventure novels (those being the two main genres within which his work sits) because his writing has that quality that can't be faked - it pulls like a steam train (it also gets under my skin and often leaves me a little unnerved). Of course, it doesn't hurt when, as in this one, an apocalypse is in the offing (anything he writes in that vein will always be in the shadow of The Stand, but it has to be said that he's attempting something a little bit different here, and the way in which the victims of the 'pulse' evolve collectively is really quite interesting)...

Infernal Affairs

Taut and cool, and great dynamics everywhere one turns. Didn't see where it was going; indeed, was too involved in each moment to even attempt to guess at any point. Next up, The Departed.

"Nick Cave: The Exhibition" @ the Arts Centre

Liked this, but feel it would have a lot more to offer the genuine hardcore Nick Cave fan than a passer through like myself. That's not to say that his music doesn't loom pretty large for me - there was the No More Shall We Part period and the The Good Son phase, and then there are the heavy associations which come with "The Ship Song" plus moments with many others of his songs (including, recently, "Do You Love Me?"), and of course there's always "Shivers" - but rather that I've never been a lock and stock devotee in the way that he inspires in many. It is pretty neat the way the centre of the room is laid out like Cave's office (and it was interesting to read about the importance of the idea of the office to his creative process/imagination); all up, I think the exhibition gives a pretty good sense of the man, by which, of course, I mean the myth - ie, it was very (latter-day) 'Nick Cave'.

Resident Evil

Goddamnit, I got hustled into renting this by the trailer for the latest one but had clean forgotten that I already saw it; it wasn't any good this time round, either, and yet I watched it all the way through...go figure.

The Royal Tenenbaums

Felt much about this as I did the first time, perhaps a bit less into it this time round.

21st century fairy tales

The Guardian has three very pleasing "fairy tales fit for the 21st century", written by Hilary Mantel, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Audrey Niffenegger. Best is the one by Mantel, who I like every time I come across her by way of fragments like these - I'll need to check out one of her books...

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Fittingly, the finest moment in this epic film, all two and a half hours of it, is the assassination scene, James, Ford and his brother Charley moving around and taking their appointed places in James' sun-filled sitting room as if propelled by slowly unwinding clockwork, Cave and Ellis' melancholy score coiling and redoubling upon itself all the while, until at last, the gunshot, the long deferred end towards which everything else to that point has been a single extended dying fall - at its best, Assassination is slow burning and magnificent.

A western but then not, with shades of a character study but ultimately inclined to leave its central figures undeciphered, oriented from its very title towards a single, inevitable action but content to take a series of divergent, meandering paths along the way, shot through with some of the most astonishing landscape cinematography I've seen in a long time, it's soaringly ambitious - and almost, almost pulls it off. That it doesn't quite get there can only be attributed to something ineffable - a subtle failure to completely coalesce, somehow - but even so it's a real achievement.

Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck dominate affairs, whether when onscreen or by their absence, their uneasy relationship the tense central spring from which the narrative derives much of both its immediate and ongoing drive, but the film doesn't play as a two-hander; rather, a whole cast of others move prominently through events, appearing and recurring at intervals. Indeed, those supporting characters are a huge strength of the film - they're uniformly economically but effectively written and drawn, portrayed and inhabited by an understatedly brilliant cast (though, not really a propos, I must confess to being disappointed that Mary-Louise Parker and Zooey Deschanel, two of the cutest female actors going around today, didn't get more screen time).

Scienceworks

Kind of an unlikely excursion, but Andrew L and Lily wanted to go, and it's not like I ever say no when people invite me to these things. Anyhow, it was kinda fun, but you know, not all that much. Shame we didn't get to see a planetarium show (sold out), though - that would've been a highlight for sure.

"Game Over" (IMP August 2007)

I suspect that there's some kind of concept to this mix, but it's beyond me what that concept may be.

The cd leads off with seven heavy metal/hard rock tracks in a row, by outfits so famous that I've even heard of all but one (the exception being Gojira, which I choose to believe is Japanese for 'Godzilla'; having watched one or two of the Japanese Godzilla films in my time, I don't think that this is completely impossible). The two which have left most of an impression on me are "Phantom of the Opera" by Iron Maiden (live, no less - sadly not a cover of the Lloyd Webber show tune, but equally dramatic) and "Sleepwalker" by Megadeth - both catchy in that riffy kind of way - and, for old times' sake, a live version of "Head Like A Hole" is also welcome.

Then, a glammy 90s-sounding rocker (harmonies and all) by a band called the Wildhearts ("Bi-Polar Baby" - pretty good) and a more meat-and-potatoes hard rock tune from Terrorvision (previously known to me only through their rousing cover of "Forever & Ever"), after which we get, in order, a cover of "Hazy Shade of Winter" by the Bangles (v.g., of course), the theme from "Enter the Dragon", something by the Music, a cool Moloko song ("Fun for Me"), "Central Reservation" (still affecting, and in much the same way, after all these years), a dreamy Ash guitar ballad, an acoustic guitar romance (no vocals, anonymous artist), and then a live Joan Baez weepie. It's all quite surprisingly listenable, but like I said, I don't get it as a whole.

(from Matt in Bournemouth, England)

Rome (season 1)

Satisfyingly very - blood, sex and speeches in equal quantities. The show begins with Caesar's final victory in Gaul, Pompey wielding power from the Senate in Rome, and in the space of this one season covers the overthrow of both amidst the machinations of dozens of others, including many known to us through Shakespeare and the history books - Mark Antony, Brutus, Cicero, Cleopatra...indeed, that's my main quibble with Rome, which I enjoyed a great deal (if a second season was made, I'll definitely seek it out): the way that everything seems to happen so quickly - major events, shifts, upheavals, all take place in the span of a 40 minute or so episode, and so something of a sense of scope is lost.

That said, one of the show's strengths is the emphasis it gives to the stories of the other personages making their way through Rome and its empire - particularly the centurion Lucius Vorenus and his family. And it deals well with translation issues, giving the viewer a largely unjudgemental take on society of the time and its mores...it's made me interested to learn more about all of its characters and the events it depicts - though I'll be surprised if I get beyond wikipedia in that regard...

(lent to me by Gian, ages ago)

M.I.A. - Kala

Arular was pretty good at the time, and M.I.A. live showed a bit too, but still, I didn't expect her second album to be good at all, and hadn't listened to it properly until a few days ago; well, I sure got that one wrong. Kala is a large step in a whole range of different directions and, in its totality, a vivid pop album which doesn't sound much like anything else out there.

"Boyz" is the standout - I hardly understand a word of it, but that's no hinderance to recognising its genius. Particularly like "$20" too; like all of the tracks on Kala, it strikes an ideal balance between beats and melody, busy-ness and structure, sounds and song. We already knew that the girl had talent - now, it's beginning to seem as if she might be the real thing.

Stephen Donaldson - Fatal Revenant

Never mind objectivity, I left behind any semblance or possibility of even critical distance about this series years ago. This is the new one, and it's good; there are two to go; that's all.

(previously in these 'last chronicles': The Runes of the Earth)

Alice (dir Jan Svankmajer)

'Inspired by' Carroll's Alice rather than being a direct adaptation, this is a film I've wanted to watch for years - ever since I read about it somewhere on the internet ether. It's a little surrealist gem, bizarre motifs repeating and many (most) of the oddities of Carroll's original tale translated across directly if refractedly. Grotesque and even gruesome in places, but also delightfully (albeit darkly) whimsical and enough so to provoke laughter, surprised out of me by unexpectedly cognate allusions and suggestivenesses, it hints at overarching interpretations of both itself and its source text, but never stumbles into anything so facile as an explanation. Faintly unsettling, but not quite in the way provoked by the darker explorations of Ozon, say (I'm thinking especially of Criminal Lovers, though with something in common with those plumbings of the unconscious - there's a bit of the uncanny to it, and maybe an aspect of the 'uncanny valley', too, in the changeable and somehow frangible figure of Alice herself as she appears, ramified, throughout.

Neil Gaiman - The Sandman: Endless Nights

A couple of days ago, the words as near as I can remember:

PENNY: I saw someone reading that on the tram the other day.
ME: Really? This exact one?
PENNY: Yeah.
ME: (Having thought this over for a second) What did they look like? Pasty and nerdy, or dark and interesting?
PENNY: Neither. Thirty-something.
ME: Oh... (A pause. Then, in tones of scorn) Trendster.
PENNY: It was only a question of the appropriate sneer, wasn't it?

Not so! Indeed, I don't think I would've sneered at either of the two types I named myself, come to that. But true it is that I surprised myself with a certain preciousness about Sandman, and as to who else ought to (or could) 'really' read it; not surprising at all, really, it having been brought to my attention - but even so.

I didn't get to Endless Nights first time through, so the thrill of the new fizzed through my reading of it. What's being attempted here is a sort of deepening - a bringing to light of other facets than those apparent from what has gone before - coupled with an extension of the known story both forwards and backwards in time, by way of one issue/story focusing on each of the Endless, each illustrated by an artist specifically selected by Gaiman for the complementarities existing between their style and the nature of the particular member of that strange family whose tale they render. The only of these illustrators who I knew, Glenn Fabry of Preacher fame, seemed aptly matched with Destruction given his other work, but the affinities between artist and subject are obvious in all of the others, too. My favourite's the Delirium one.

The Sadies - In Concert volume 1

I know the Sadies as Neko Case's tour band but it turns out there's much more to them than that. All country twang and bluesy rock and roll, it's ace - you can feel the energy and rawness as well as the rock-solid musicianship and sympathy with what they're channelling and creating.

Best of Luna

The band that Dean Wareham made after Galaxie 500 was no more, and to my ears a pale reflection. Luna's music has the same reverberating dazedness but, more mellow than that of Wareham's earlier outfit, is commensurately less necessary and compelling; it doesn't sear, and too many of the songs sound all the same.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali - The Caged Virgin: A Muslim Woman's Cry for Reason

The subtitle isn't adventitious - the central strand in this book is a call for the insights of the Enlightenment, and most particularly the primacy it accords to reason, to be brought to bear on Muslim thought and society, both from within and without. Essentially, it's polemic - ferocious and engaged, if not all that sophisticated - in that cause, wedded to an uncompromising argument for an integrationist approach in Western societies and a particular concern for the position of Muslim women, illustrated with often horrifying anecdotes of female mutilation and oppression.

Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia and raised a Muslim, but now resides in the Netherlands, where she's a member of the national parliament and (though I'm not entirely sure about this) no longer identifies as a Muslim; she had also collaborated with Theo Van Gogh on a film before he was infamously shot and killed on the street by Islamic extremists. I don't for a second doubt that she knows that of which she writes, but I was nonetheless nagged by a couple of misgivings while I was reading The Caged Virgin.

The first was that, despite the vast disparity between her background and experiences, and mine, Hirsi Ali is, for many relevant purposes, essentially the same as me - by which I mean that she has absorbed and internalised the basic values of the West and Western society. One may well argue that these are in some meaningful way the 'best' set of values now or historically available to us - I suspect she would argue this, and I'm sure from reading this book of the scorn she reserves for 'moral relativists' (unsurprisingly, a term she doesn't clearly define or grapple with, but what she means by it is clear enough from the context) - but nonetheless I felt that, as a result of that shared intellectual heritage, I wasn't being pushed enough to accept the basic premises of the book; what I really need to read is an intelligent defence of a contrary position to hers, written by someone steeped in Muslim values and not taking Western assumptions as a starting point. (Forgive the waving around of broad-brush ideas like 'Western values' here - there's nothing to be done about it at this high level, and besides, they're useful shorthand at this high level, we all know it.)

My second cavil is equally fundamental, and builds somewhat on the first (if pulling me in a slightly different direction, and it's this: Hirsi Ali suggests that an important part of the solution is interventionist legislative (+ executive + societal) action to integrate Muslims into the Western societies in which they live - suggesting, for example, compulsory regular checks of all Muslim girls to ensure that they haven't been subject to genital mutilation. At risk of falling into that cultural relativism which Hirsi Ali so abhors (although, let's be honest, I'm not really afraid of this, for reasons already implied above - there are far more sophisticated formulations of the position than those which she seems to assume), the problems with this kind of approach, applied uncritically, are too many and too obvious to bear listing (the cultural violence which it would entail, affecting not only 'culture' but also the individuals implicated in and effected by it to their various extents, not to mention the absolutist streak running through it). I'd be prepared to entertain proposals in this vein, but to me that flavour here is too insensitive and 'slash and burn', as heinous as the prevailing situation may be. There are no easy answers, but that goes both ways - and sometimes the best option of a bad lot isn't the one which seems immediately to move most swiftly to the end result we want.

(a gift from Laura of a while ago)

Bjork - Volta

It's taken me a long time (I've had this cd since pretty much day one of its release) to get past "Earth Intruders", and I mean that literally - it's the first track, and nearly every time I've begun listening to Volta, I've bogged down there and then. Months on, I'm still not really into it (any more than I ever got into Medulla), though its ornate peculiarities are making a bit more sense to me; only "Wanderlust" has really struck home.

Pixies - Surfer Rosa & Come on Pilgrim

Ha, this is excellent! My fears that I'd be underwhelmed, listening to these records all these years on and through an inevitable thick overlay of expectation and Pixies-ana, have proved unfounded. Now that it comes to it, there's nothing much to say - I hate to toe the party line but this is pretty much genius. This music is good for the soul.

Some favourites: "Where Is My Mind?" (of course), "Gigantic" (also of course - and how great it is to be able to put this on repeat play!), "River Euphrates", "Caribou", "Isla De Encanta" (gotta love the Spanish).

"Mix tape" (IMP September 2007)

Kicks off with the Cranberries' "Dreams" and thereafter treads a pleasantly middle-of-the road, roots-influenced path with a bit of a patriotic flavour near the end; multiple songs by the Dixie Chicks (the live "Top of the World" - not a Carpenters cover - is excellent), John Mellencamp, Hem (two songs which I don't know - probably off one of the new albums), and an outfit called Vienna Teng (airy girl vocals - not too bad).

(from Gary in Potomac, MD)

Haruki Murakami - after the quake

Some of these are much better than others, but they do genuinely seem to fit together as a whole; tied together by the titular earthquake, yes, but also by a recurring sense of absence (absence being, incidentally the very fashion in which the earthquake itself is felt in the stories). I think last time my favourite was "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo"; this time, I was particularly touched by "Landscape with Flatiron".

Neil Gaiman - Sandman: A Game of You, Fables & Reflections, Brief Lives, World's End, etc

[the 'etc' being The Kindly Ones & The Wake]

Yep, this is still quite magnificent. A second time through the whole lot, now, this time in sequence and reasonably carefully, and still I don't feel as if I've come close to plumbing all of its depths. Perhaps, once one begins to take them seriously, this is a particular prerogative of graphic novels, with their myriad textual and visual (to name just two) dimensions and possibilities.

This time round: 1-4.

Last time: [5]&[6], [7], [8], [9], [10].

Away From Her

I must admit, when I heard that Sarah Polley had directed a film, it seemed a waste that she'd chosen as her subject the intricacies of the relationship between a pair of old people. I mean, Sarah Polley is plainly wonderful, and I thought that a film made by her could have been another Before Sunrise or Lost in Translation, or something like that, anyway - a generational film, and one to speak directly to me and to take to heart. But what it is instead is something no less worthwhile, I think: a graceful tableau (I know, not still, but it has that kind of air to it, as though every aspect is part of a single self-enwrapped whole) which, with no melodrama or false sentiment at all, depicts a situation which is at once complex and painfully simple, and affective (a real word or not?) in the same ways.

Two particular resonances for me:
* Away From Her is, in a way, like a much grown-up version of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - memory, identity, love (marriage), ice.
* NL was always terrified that she might lose her mental faculties when she grew older. As inapt as the memory may have been (the inaptness is appropriate, hah), it came to me while I was watching this film.

Julie Christie is very good, as is her opposite number (one Gordon Pinsent). And Neil Young drifts through - first "Harvest Moon" playing, wavery on the car radio as they drive to the care home, and then a lush version of "Helpless" by k.d. lang over the end credits.

Angie Hart @ the Toff in Town, Friday 19 October

It's true - Angie Hart has grown up a bit since her (and our) Frente days. Even the voice is less girlish (I suppose the surprise would've been were it otherwise), and the songwriting is stronger, though I much preferred the ones where she actually wrote songs complete with honest to goodness drums and electric guitar, and choruses with words, to the more meandering half-tunes which made up a reasonable proportion of her repertoire on Friday (at her most distinct, she hit a pleasing Clouds-y vibe, but these were interspersed amongst some relative lulls, too). All up, a pleasant show (albeit with an audience populated all too heavily by scene types) and a nice revisiting of a minor figure from my past.

(w/ Cassie)

Chuck Palahniuk - Lullaby

My continuing resistance to Palahniuk notwithstanding, Lullaby went down very easily - apart from one truly disgusting scene which I'll forbear from describing, it wasn't as unpleasant as I remembered his novels to be (this is bearing in mind, too, that I'm a fan of Fight Club the movie), and if it has only a limited number of things to say and a limited number of ways of saying them, well, what's it's saying is at least apposite and wrapped up in an engaging narrative. I'm not sure why I react badly to Palahniuk, to tell the truth - I just do.

[23/10: Oh yes, I meant to mention: Palahniuk's a bit like Vonnegut, isn't he? Only not as good, natch.]

Control

I read somewhere that the director of Control - Anton Corbijn - is a photographer (fashion? rock and roll? both?) - and it shows, in the way that virtually every shot is framed: that is, like a photograph. The black and white cinematography works well (of course an Ian Curtis biopic must be in black and white), as does the music (the guy playing Curtis - Sam Riley - does a good job with the singing; in fact the performances generally, and especially those of the two leads, are excellent).

I don't know how I would have responded to Control were Joy Division not such a large part of my past (let's not overstate this - their impact wasn't/hasn't been in the same league as Radiohead, say, or the Cure...but it was still big), but I think I still would've responded to it; then again, those very responses have been at least partly wired into me by the band and its music themselves.

It feels like a photograph set to life and music. And it also feels real - like this is how it was.

(w/ David, at a triple j preview screening a couple of weeks ago)

Jasper Fforde - First Among Sequels

This was okay but it didn't quite have the spark, somehow. This time it did feel like going through the motions, though I give him credit for leapfrogging Thursday several years into the future and then attempting to partially reinvent her. I dunno, maybe I was just anticipating this too much.

Insight

So things have been busy on the work front lately, which has involved a few late nights, often with Spoon as my companion, and particularly Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. And anyway, I was listening to "The Ghost of You Lingers" and suddenly it hit me - this song must be a homage to Glass's "A Gentleman's Honor". That's all.

All About Lily Chou-Chou

Not as shattering as the first time, but still heartbreaking and astonishing.

(The first time; and then the music...)

A few small revivals

Joy Division and Lush, two bands less dissimilar than they appear on initial inspection - particularly within my personal musical constellation - and two old favourites of mine, have been on high rotation lately, especially Spooky (Lush's first and most crashingly gossamer and stargazingly brilliantine album) and Permanent (the first Joy Division record I heard, and the one which is really burned into me from beginning to end). If I'd been in danger of forgetting the magic of pop music, this is all the reminding I needed.

The Essential Neil Diamond & The Best of the Corrs

As is so often the case for me, it's all about the melodies. Neil Diamond has always been there: my parents listened to him a lot, and so many of the hits are patterned into my earliest memories ("Sweet Caroline", "Shilo", "Holly Holy", "Brother Love's Travelling Salvation Show", etc, etc); a bit later, "Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon" became lodged similarly inextricably thanks to the perfect use of Urge Overkill's version of it in Pulp Fiction; and many of the others on this compilation turn out to be so familiar as almost to have come out the other side. As I said, it's all about the melodies.

With the Corrs, it began with "Runaway". I heard it early one morning, and it carried me away; following that, Forgiven, Not Forgotten was one of the first handful of albums than I owned (it must have been one of the first 20 or so). I haven't really followed their career since, but a smattering of radio singles have penetrated and, you know, there's still something there. We don't shake these early experiences off easily; nor, after all, would we want to.

KT Tunstall - Drastic Fantastic

The good songs on this album are really good - especially "Little Favours" and "I Don't Want You Now", both endearingly chipper, catchy pop tunes with slight indie leanings ("Suddenly I See" is also tops, not to mention familiar-sounding). The rest of 'em are just okay, you know how it goes. Don't know anything about her, but she must be a Brit I think, p'raps one part Catatonia + one part Lisa Loeb + maybe a slight Indigo Girls-y flavour.

"Selecao" (IMP June 2007)

Brazilian music! (Including Seu Jorge, no less.) My favourites are the ones by an outfit called Tribalistas.

(from Steve in Alexandria, VA)

Neil Gaiman - Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes, The Doll's House, Dream Country & Season of Mists

Have been feeling a hankering to re-read these lately ('read' seems not to do the experience justice - in fact, some to think of it, 'experience' in itself might be better), and this time in sequence instead of madly in whatever order I could get my hands on the various books; doing so has confirmed their genius. I've also been struck by how much of the series is taken up by digressions from the main story, and at the same time by how integral these 'digressions' in fact are. Knowing the ending also gives these earlier volumes a greater gravity - a sense of inevitable and yet always [I've lost the word - something like 'circumstantial', 'opportunistic', 'tendentious', but none of those...I mean that it occurs through a series of tenuously linked events, each unpredictable and unlikely in its own right, never mind in the aggregate] gathering tragedy.

Last time: [1] & [3], [2], [4].

Neil Gaiman - Stardust / Stardust (the movie)

Read the book first (admittedly, finishing it with only a couple of hours to spare before watching the film, and only having started because I wanted to've read it before said watching), and it's a darker, starrier thing than its cinematic adaptation. It sees Gaiman attempting, as is his wont, to create something deeply universal - archetypal - by deploying and reworking familiar elements and forms, seeking a synthesis between Story and Self-reflexivity to arrive at something both underlying and new; and, as usual for Gaiman's longer form prose, it shows occasional hints of being something special but never ascends to the heights to which it aspires. There's just something missing - I think that maybe the inversions and deconstructions of fairytale which structure Stardust, while lending the novel much of its interest, also undermine its central assumed narratival drives, without the text proferring a sufficiently satisfying alternative way of reading it.

The film, taken on its own terms (which are more modest), is more successful. It's definitely more whimsical in tone, and highlighted by a number of very pleasing performances (Claire Danes as Yvaine, Michelle Pfeiffer as the witch, Robert DeNiro's pirate (of course) and also the fellow playing Septimus, who reminded me of Steve Coogan); sets and special effects are appropriate (The Princess Bride by way of The Brothers Grimm, and it's appropriately somewhat askew, too, while always remaining entertaining.

(film w/ Michelle - who incidentally found it very satisfying)