The Neverending Story

Some images just stick with you; I was little when I last saw The Neverending Story, but the sphinxes guarding the gate and the crumbling oracle have stayed with me. This seemed a film worth seeing on a big screen since the opportunity had come up (Astor), and while it wasn't magic, the revisiting was still worth the while.

(w/ Julian)

Other Desert Cities (MTC)

I think that I've become quite a hard marker when it comes to theatre, which might explain why I'm not more effusive about this one. I thought it was good all round - performances (Robyn Nevin always stands out, but here all the others held their own), staging (set design by Callum Morton [1], [2]), the play itself (sharply written, funny, avoiding caricature) - but it also felt like I'd seen its story of old family tensions arising from past secrets being brought to light before, right down to the final act reveal about what really happened with Henry. But for all that, still, this was good.

(w/ Cass)

Jo Scicluna - "When Our Horizons Meet" & Lydia Wegner - "Folded Colour" (Centre for Contemporary Photography)

1. (Scicluna). Investigation/disruption of 'landscapes', including their framing and production. Photography and other material - eg clear plastic discs superimposed over images.

2. (Wegner). Created abstraction - brightly coloured objects photographed then treated so that what they are is no longer apparent. (Without the benefit of a description, could have been taken for something done entirely with a computer and a printer.)

Both appealing.

Machete

I do like this kind of thing. If you're going to make a mexploitation film, then there's literally no other possible lead than Danny Trejo...and it's a significant bonus if you can get Michelle Rodriguez, Jessica Alba, Steven Seagal and Robert De Niro (and Lindsay Lohan) on top of that. "Machete don't text" (although, later he improvises).

Joni Mitchell - Travelogue

I've dipped in and out with Joni Mitchell over the years, which means that this 2002 double cd set of reinterpretations of songs from across her long career, set to an orchestral backing mingles the familiar and the unfamiliar in an additional way for me. Truth be told, I've never taken Mitchell to heart in a concerted way, although there've certainly been times when individual songs or records have been important to me, and maybe that's part of why I find this one pleasant - not in any way jarring - but one that only marks me lightly. I've sometimes wondered in the past if I would get to a point - probably a point in my life rather than specifically in terms of my appreciation of music - when her music would resonate more deeply, if perhaps its subtleties aren't yet fully for me...but that point isn't yet now.

Lisa Miller - Meet the Misses

Lisa Miller is an artist whose music is heavily bound up with associations for me - Melbourne associations at that. Four times seen live (twice at CERES in summer - the second time especially significant - and in between at an in retrospect poignant Harvest Festival, and also at Readings), a particular song that hit me hard in that period when I was falling into country music and into the end of university and all that entailed and which is still one of my favourites ("Little Stars"), and of course many others along the way (egs 1, 2, 3, 4), stretching back to, was it even high school?, borrowing Quiet Girl With A Credit Card from the local library and having it work its way deep (in retrospect, a precursor of the later country music thing); hearing the excellent "Wipe The Floor" on a triple r soundscape compilation maybe a year or so on, early in uni, during that period where everything, not least (and in some ways especially) music, seemed to be opening up.

Anyway, Meet the Misses is a backwards look for Miller, re-recordings of a bunch of songs from her first two albums, Quiet Girl and As Far As A Life Goes. Some of the strength of those associations I was getting at before is a matter of personal historical happenstance, as is always the way, but just as much is down to the music itself, which, allusive, nostalgic, intimate, and brightly-toned, lends itself to such connections. Her takes on these old numbers on Meet the Misses took a couple of listens for me; they tend to sound initially a bit smoothed-out, maybe even a bit lounge-y (I particularly missed the greater stomp and verve of the original takes on "Wipe The Floor" and "Hang My Head", but the charms of these re-recordings have revealed themselves over a few more listens, putting a new complexion on the ones that I was familiar with, and gently introducing the others, showing what great songs they are, even if done over in a slightly different style.

The Felice Brothers - Tonight at the Arizona

I've had this one for a while, but hadn't listened to it properly until recently, inspired by "Forever Green" (different album, but same artist). It still hasn't much grabbed me, though - on this one, at least, the Felice Brothers' brand of folk-rock isn't touched with anything special.

Christine Fellows - Paper Anniversary

A nice, sparsely twinkling indie-folk record.

Monsters

Boy meets girl amidst an alien lifeform-infested Mexico, done with an arthouse sensibility (some of the shots are stunning, and not just the climactic scene where two of the creatures, beautifully, fascinatingly weird, meet in a gas station lot). I liked this one quite a lot, mainly because of the marvellous cinematography and sense of style to it - at once wondrous and understated.

Constellations (MTC)

He's a beekeeper, she does something that involves quantum mechanics and a pop-science structural-expository lecture(s) on parallel universes, and the play makes much of the existential metaphors offered by those vocations; in that respect, reminded me much of Wild Surmise. The characters seemed like real people - impressive, given that they were performing essentially multiple possible versions of themselves in a series of repeated and chopped-up, varying fragments. But overall it felt just a bit slight; hard to know how much of that was the play itself and how much the production. Either way, while it was peppy enough and did a decent job with the central conceit of portraying those branching alternate paths, consecutively and otherwise, this one didn't quite hit the mark for me.

(w/ Cass)

Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go

This is the third of Ishiguro's novels that I've read, and like the other two (The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans), it's impressed me a lot - not only in that I admire how well it's written and put together, but also in the sense that it's made an impression on me in a whole number of ways.

The difficulty that's posed by unpicking exactly how that impression is made is an indication of how neatly Never Let Me Go is put together...it's a combination of three main threads: (1) the description of the tangled relationship between Kathy, Ruth and Tommy and the costs of their actions; (2) the science fiction high concept of the donations and the mystery surrounding its details, unveiled for the reader in much the same way that the characters themselves learn those truths; and (3) the heightening effect of the predetermined foreshortening of all of their lives - and how deftly they're woven together, all mutually supporting.

There's something about Ishiguro's voice, in this one and in his others; his novels touch on a human level, while at the same time having always a sense of estrangement to them. I still don't know whether that latter is deliberate, a function of the damaged, pained characters through which he tells his stories, but regardless, it works.

The New World

Like The Thin Red Line, the only one of Malick's films that I've seen (albeit that one multiple times), a beautiful, poetic film, shot through with a Romantic yearning for nature unspoiled - humanity included. I found it a bit unfocused, but responded to its overall tone.

Looper

Rian Johnson of The Brothers Bloom and Brick note as writer and director; Joseph Gordon-Levitt; time travel. (Plus Bruce Willis.) That's a good start.

Looper turns out to be solid rather than amazing; I liked its toughness, though there was a certain distancing coolness about the whole affair.

Super 8

A surprisingly engaging monster movie that also reminded me of Stand by Me.

"That's what I'm talking about"

A mix cd from Julian. Downbeat and generally from left-field, and as usual, embedded with a few gems. The Felice Brothers are the sort of band I ought to like, but who've never really struck me before now; their "Forever Green" is genuinely Dylan-esque and all round gorgeous. A couple of uncategorisable dispatches from the underground stand out: "Kruhy" by a Czech outfit called Psi Vojaci, and "I Like the Time" by someone calling himself Balroynigress. Also, folkstress Christine Fellows' elegant "Phantom Pains".

Game of Thrones season 2

Inevitably I watch this series through a filter, or several - I can't help but compare it to the books, and to the extent that it sticks to that source material, to anticipate the twists and turns of the tv version...it makes for a less immersive experience than the books themselves, or, I suspect, the tv series for anyone coming to it without that familiarity. But having said that, this second season maintains the high standards of the first, and, particularly over its second half, stretches its legs a bit, departing further from the events of the books, and doing so effectively, mostly in ways that seem designed to heighten tension or to draw the smaller number of characters and threads together more satisfactorily in the different medium.

(season 1 & again)

Jessica Rudd - Campaign Ruby

Frothy, forgettable. (Not bad - but I don't think I was really the target audience.) I was also thinking about reading Chris Uhlmann's book at some point, though now probably isn't the time.

White Night Melbourne, Saturday 23 February

I only decided to go to this at the last minute (around 9pm), but it was worth it. A hot summer night, and the event really did throw Melbourne into a different light (so to speak) - the massive projections on to our iconic Flinders Street buildings being just the most literal and striking example. Lights, screens, illumination and animation everywhere - city square, the back of St Paul's, Flinders Lane, the Yarra and its bridges - not to mention the musical stage set up on the steps of FSS and everything going on at Fed Square and surrounds, and I only saw a small part of it. The city felt like a festival and a playground; familiar streets and locations already laden with associations and impressions cloaked in yet another layer.

(w/ Jarrod, Farrah, and their friends A & A, and I; and then later on Trang, and also Rob and Laura)

Jasper Fforde - The Woman Who Died A Lot

This one didn't quite do it for me. It's not bad or anything, but just lacks the zip of the better Thursday Next books (which tended to be the earlier ones, Fforde having taken things in a slightly direction as the series has evolved).

(previously)

Parks and Recreation season 4

More.

(1-3)

(As an aside, I made a rule a couple of months ago that I wouldn't start any more new tv series, but only finish the ones I'm already partway through...)

Kill Bill vols 1 & 2

I felt like watching these again after Django, and they're still outstanding. Watch a film enough times (it's the same with reading books), and it can come to feel a bit like a museum piece - you become familiar with all of its parts, and the experience ceases to be as immediate as the first time(s) through, when all was discovery - and that's how it is with these, but they're still great nonetheless, imagery and music (once again, the perfection of the musical choices for the sword-making interlude, and how that whole section fits with the structure of the film as a whole, struck me) both.

(last time)

The Raid

I'd read that this was a great action film, and it's certainly full of action. For me, though, the unrelenting violence just got a bit much.

"Francis Bacon" & "We used to talk about love" (NSW Art Gallery)

Also visited up in Sydney last weekend.

Bacon's never really caught my imagination, but as often happens with these career survey-type exhibitions, seeing work from across most of his working life (1940s-80s) has given me a better understanding of what he's about, and more of an appreciation for his work - this was the first time that any of his paintings have really spoken to me, or that I've really recognised his skill.

It's also given me more context for the works/style that I generally associate with him - the distorted, twisted human figures and faces - and it's striking how much continuity there is in his paintings of those subjects, often nude, over time, even though certain aspects, notably his use of colour, clearly did evolve. Actually, the piece that most struck me, "Study of a nude" (1952-3) is, in many respects, uncharacteristic - smaller scale and more overtly metaphorical and symbolic; it was hung with three or four others with a similar air of ghostly, unknowable loneliness.

* * *

"We used to talk about love" - a contemporary photomedia exhibition, similar in style to much of what ACCA tends to put on (including many similar artists - all Australian, I think, or at least the names I recognised were). Interested to see another video work by Grant Stevens - having first come across him just a week or so ago at, indeed, ACCA and then seen another in a similar vein in the foyer at MCA the day before.

* * *

Also worth noting, in the NSWAG's always impressive contemporary section (the large, white-walled rooms a perfect setting for their well-selected pieces - walking through never fails to leave me feeling as if my mind, or perhaps spirit, is being expanded, trite though that sounds), an installation called "Basement Keller Haus u r (Basement cellar house)" (1985-2012). A steel door in the wall, which opens into a series of built rooms - a partial reconstruction of a residential apartment block in Germany, but this one is the cellar, so very dark, narrow passages, low ceilings, blind corners, partitions, mirrors and refuse.

I almost didn't make it past the first chamber and a bit, inching my way around - using my mobile phone for light in exploring what was close to a pitch black short passage - and not realising that there was another passage in the opposite direction behind the door that I'd opened from the first room; I had a dream a while ago in which I was in some kind of contemporary art gallery or installation or somesuch and for some reason it was very threatening - an apt pre-metaphor for the experience created by this one. (I certainly understood why the piece description outside contained so many warnings, including a requirement to tell a member of the gallery staff before going in.) It was genuinely uncanny - a term I use a bit when describing how art operates on me, but accurate.

Silver Linings Playbook

I was sceptical about the premise but then I saw the trailer, which made it look great, and the film lives up to the promise - I believed the characters, particularly, and most importantly, Bradley Cooper's Pat and Jennifer Lawrence's Tiffany (I haven't seen a lot of either actor, but both are excellent; De Niro also v.g. in this one), the latter a fairly unique variety of the MPDG, and I believed the way the film developed...it's a film that puts all the pieces together in the right way. It stays offbeat enough that I was carried along by it - it doesn't hurt that it's also very funny - meaning that I wasn't viewing the film through any kind of 'romantic comedy' lens, which in turn meant that the climax and happy ending felt both organic and satisfying, as formulaic as they might well have sounded if you'd seen them written down in advance.

(w/ Jade)

"Anish Kapoor" @ MCA, Sydney

I don't really remember how, or when, art became an important part of my life - how I realised that it could provide inspiration and solace, or how it came to occupy such a large emotional and intellectual space for me. My earliest memories of deliberately engaging with art are relatively late, from maybe mid university - exploring the permanent collection of the NGV, looking at Archibald finalists and various other showings in the Arts Centre, a Dali exhibition somewhere along Southbank - but I don't have any recollection of why I was doing it...it just kind of crept up.

More than almost anything else in my life, I think, the experience of art demands openness; without that, you might as well not bother at all. That goes for all art, and just as much when you go in expecting to like something as when not, or when you haven't any preconceptions at all, and I felt that very strongly with this exhibition of Anish Kapoor's work; it can only be engaged with properly from a standpoint of openness, but in fact, even more than that, his works seem to actively solicit such openness, to invite it - not least in the way that they play, and rely, on the viewer's perception, so that, in many of the pieces, it feels like the work of art is, in a very real sense, constituted (or more allusively, if somewhat misleadingly, perhaps reified), by the viewer's consciousness, through the act of perception.

So there are the three untitled concave fibreglass structures, each circular and perhaps a couple of feet across, painted deep and metallic fuchsia, plum, ox-blood purple, which initially appear flat but then become depthless as you keep gazing into them, until you're no longer sure what it is that you're looking at; and their red rippled companion piece "Wave Torus Red" (2009), also mounted on a wall, which appears to be in motion as you move away from or towards it. Or "My Body Your Body" (1993), which looks at first like a dark blue abstract painting mounted on the gallery wall, portrait orientation, but reveals itself to in fact be another structure, built into the wall, a deep (someone from the gallery said 2 metres) recess at its centre - a kind of reverse depth; where a Rothko painting, for example, is textural and endlessly deep over a flat surface, Kapoor's works in this vein are structured around negative space in apparently flat dimensionality.

But his work is no mere intellectual or optical game. There's a depth to it - an affect, an emotional content that arises from and inherently expands the phenomenological and conceptual terrain that his art traverses. "My Red Homeland" (2003) is maybe an easy example - a massive installation of deep red wax (again, Rothko comes to mind) around which a large motorised steel blade slowly traces, gradually sculpting the thing itself - but it has a visceral punch that I haven't felt from many other works of art that I can think of. And it's truly engaging, too - reflective surfaces, meditative spaces, strange reversals...it felt like everyone there at the exhibition (and it was pretty busy) was having some kind of experience of the art, and not simply passively looking at each one for a few moments before moving on. In other words, what art should be.

(w/ Jade - also ran into Alice at the exhibition)

Jens Lekman @ "Garden Party", Friday 15 February

Jens Lekman performing outdoors on a balmy summer evening in a sort of pop-up 'mini festival' out back of the Melb Recital Centre - what could be more Melbourne? It was good; he played some songs from I Know What Love Isn't, which I ended up listening to quite a lot over last year, and he played some older ones, including some, like especially "Your Arms Around Me", which I knew even though I've probably only ever heard them that once before, at the last show of his that I went to, what feels a very long time ago.

(w/ Trang)

Django Unchained

Not quite the awesome experience I'd thought it might be, though actually really pretty much the film I'd expected, so perhaps there was a disconnect there. Good, though - I tend to like most kinds of take on the western, and a blaxploitation-edged Tarantino take was always a solid proposition. Along with the western-ness and the usual extreme heightened drama plus quality soundtrack, Christoph Waltz's dentist bounty hunter a highlight.

(w/ David)

* * *

I have to say, while this is possibly a bit of a superficial choice, the two Kill Bill films are almost certainly my favourite Tarantinos. But then again, it's been a long time since I saw Reservoir Dogs, and Pulp Fiction is one of those that it's hard to see properly nowadays owing to its aura (like looking at the Mona Lisa). Also, possibly I'm still not old enough - and, possibly, never will be - to get the most out of Jackie Brown.

"Desire Lines" (ACCA)

I kind of just let this one wash over me, drawn into the darkly cavernous interconnected rooms of ACCA, the exhibition itself laid out like the desire lines from which it takes its name.

"Rally: Contemporary Indonesian Art" (NGV)

Actually just displays work of two Yogyakarta (central Java)-based artists. The ones by Eko Nugroho - playful and culturally engaged, a mix of sculptural and largeish scale wall-mounted drawing and mural-type pieces - didn't hugely grab me, though they're likeable. More distinctive were the video works/installations of Jompet Kuswidananto; I can't say I particularly felt I grasped even their textual levels, never mind subtext or context, but they had a depth to them, both intellectual and visceral - ie artistic.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

One of those films that's grown in my mind since I saw it, partly because Wes Anderson has sunk in for me a lot more in the years since, and partly because the film itself has an air that made it linger despite its overall unfocusedness. On a rewatch, it loses some of that assumed stature - it really doesn't entirely knit - but the thing with Wes Anderson's world is, once his films begin making sense at all, they tap into something, even if not properly coalesced in any particular film or viewing of one.

Tegan and Sara - Heartthrob

Tegan and Sara and me - a brief history.

• Late 2005 - heard "I Know I Know I Know", can't remember how. Became infatuated with it. Clearly still was the following year. Really basically still am today.
• Amusing story told me by this sweet guy I knew at uni, MT, about having gone to one of their shows and found it a somewhat uncomfortable experience because of the vibe created by the preponderance of aggressive lesbians. Though, for me, the 'lesbian twin sisters' aspect of Tegan and Sara has always been genuinely completely irrelevant - it just hasn't featured in how I've processed their music.
• Later - heard a few more songs of theirs. Quite liked them but they weren't as good. Figured "I Know I Know I Know" was a once-off, and that probably a lot of the reason why I got so stuck on it was the particular associations that it had picked up for me during that vivid end of uni period.
• A week or two ago (ie fast forward several years) - read a couple of very positive reviews of their latest, Heartthrob, both commenting on the sheer pop-ness of the record, and thought that it sounded a bit of a can't-miss.
• Yesterday morning, first thing - got Heartthrob (itunes). Started listening to it on the way in to work. Realised after a few songs that they were really hitting on a first listen, punchy hooks embedded in synth-led anthems penetrating the morning mental fuzz and actual external background noise.
• Yesterday evening, after work - walking home in the summer heat, finishing the first listen and then starting again, sitting alone on one of those Pitt Street benches facing out towards Rathdowne, feeling it start to sink in.
• Today - more spins (figuratively speaking), and liking it still more. The lyrics all seem to be about heartbreak and/or desire, which fits the music, which can sound variously like Robyn, Metric (sans guitars), Roxette, ABC, Talk Talk, and probably plenty of others. Don't know if I'll keep on listening to it as the months go on, but right now these songs feel like they might stick (early favourite: "I Couldn't Be Your Friend", but only barely - a whole lot of them stand out).

How I Met Your Mother season 7

Maybe it says volumes about my state of mind, or maybe nothing at all, that having bought this yesterday evening, I've finished it less than 24 hours later, with time to spare.

When I started watching HIMYM, a couple of years ago, it resonated - there was, and is, a dual, related appeal in its depiction of this certain time of life, in being able to both identify with it and enjoy what is, given its framing premise (ie the title!), the promise of a happy ending, however inevitably digressively arrived at. (And in terms of (relevant) autobiographical note, the show actually did play some part in shaping my ideas of modern romance at the time; during that initial period, I had found myself fairly newly out of a relationship for the first time in a couple of years - although that didn't last, and then that didn't last, and so here we are.)

So anyway, season 7. Which means seven years that the show's been running, both in our time and in its characters' (the two being the same, of course, a fact emphasised by the frequent references to the year, and indeed times of year, when events are transpiring), though of course I was something of a latecomer. A colleague (who I think of as something of a fellow traveller) mentioned to me yesterday that she's having to move out of her apartment - it's being sold - and it popped into my mind when she said it that this kind of mundane, but actually often large-looming, background stuff in our lives doesn't really get much of a guernsey in shows like HIMYM; but now, 24 hours (+/-) and one watching of season 7 on, I wonder if that was actually right. Just because the issues are rendered more colourful and amusing than in real life doesn't mean they're overlooked - which of course is the appeal of all of this kind of tv right there.

In season 7, the focus seems to be less on Ted's search for 'the one', but the show does seem to be moving to tie off some loose ends - albeit none which give any clues to who the 'mother' may ultimately be, given that the show's foreshadowing through the 2030 narration has already made it clear that it can't be anyone already introduced - with the slutty pumpkin turning out to be Katie Holmes and a fizzer chemistry-wise, the door surely being properly shut with Robin, and Victoria reintroduced but surely heading towards some kind of final closure next season on the one who otherwise would've been the one that got away. And structurally, with Marshall and Lily hitting various major milestones and a wedding between Barney and Robin signalled (though we're also told that something will go wrong), you would think that in whatever comes next, the focus will turn back to what is, after all, the underlying narrative thread of the show.

As to volumes or nothing at all - what I mean by that is that I've flown through the season obviously because it speaks to something in my current situation...but it's done that from the start, and it's thoroughly got its hooks into me, so that I do want to find out what happens to all of the characters, irrespective of how immediate its resonance is with whatever my current personal circumstances may be. So, anyway...

(1-5; 6)

Coriolanus

Not one of W. Shakespeare's better known, and watching this punchy adaptation made me wonder if that might be because its central character, Caius Martius Coriolanus (here, the chimerical Ralph Fiennes as a believably self-contained, snarling soldier), is a rather opaque figure, devoid (at least in this film version) of illuminating soliloquies or clear motivations beyond a tendency towards moral inflexibility and absolutism and a disregard for the good opinion of others, plus an ultimately fatal propensity to be swayed by his mother (played as a formidable matriarchal figure by Vanessa Redgrave)...it actually felt closer to Greek tragedy than any of his other histories or tragedies that I'm familiar with. Anyhow, as a piece of film-making, pretty watchable, with the contemporisation effective, if the plotting/characterisation was a bit truncated-feeling in some ways due presumably to its origins on stage.

Colson Whitehead - Zone One

Literary zombie novel. Comparing it to The Passage, which was particularly well-written genre fiction by a 'literary' author, Zone One feels closer to actual literature with zombie elements; a good example is the several pages near the start in which the main character, Mark Spitz, is being attacked by a group of 'skels' in an office tower, the immediate action intercut with paragraphs-long passages of interior-expository recollection. The prose is melodious, sometimes a bit lyrical, generally very readable, occasionally too flowery; the story is engaging enough; the post-apocalypse persuasively 'things fall apart, the centre cannot hold' even though it opens at a point when the remnants of human civilisation seem to be tentatively reasserting themselves. 7.5 out of 10, in a good way.

Beasts of the Southern Wild: Music from the Motion Picture

One of the many striking things about Beasts of the Southern Wild was its excellent, evocative soundtrack; I thought of Beirut with some americana folk elements and Meribah of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, but those with less impoverished and white-person indie-dominated musical references than us would no doubt have more accurate comparisons, presumably New Orleans-based.[*]

The music is really front and centre in Beasts, from the twinkling music box motifs that generate its dream-like air through the rousing fiddle-drums-horns pieces that evoke the energy of the Bathtub community (the fiddle recurs throughout in a variety of guises) and the slower, more emotive pieces like "I Think I Broke Something" and "The Thing That Made You", and it holds together strongly as a listening experience even without the images it accompanies, mostly in little one or two minute snippets, though the two longest ("The Bathtub" and "Once There Was A Hushpuppy") are two of the best.

* * *

[*] Although, having written that and then done some googling, these interviews with co-composer Dan Romer (the other credited co-composer is Benh Zeitlin, who also directed the film) suggest that its influences are much more varied than simply trad deep south (Rihanna gets mentioned in both).

"You can't plan on the heart" (2012 cd)

In some ways, 2012 was all a bit of a blur - and now, well, it wasn't that long ago, but it's already a whole month into '13 and it feels like the new year is well and truly on. Anyhow, soundtrack cd for the year, possibly thoughts to follow at some point later.

1. The Bad in Each Other – Feist
Metals (Arts & Crafts; 2011)

2. Alex – Girls
Father, Son, Holy Ghost (True Panther; 2011)

3. The World – Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi (feat. Jack White)
Rome (EMI; 2011)

4. Helplessness Blues – Fleet Foxes
Helplessness Blues (Sub Pop; 2011)

5. To A Poet – First Aid Kit
The Lion’s Roar (Rabid; 2012)

6. This Girl’s Prepared For War – Bic Runga
Belle (Sony; 2012)

7. Different Worlds – Brittany Cairns
[“The Voice”; 2012]

8. That Was Was – Dirty Three
Toward The Low Sun (Bella Union; 2012)

9. New Year – Beach House
Bloom (Mistletone; 2012)

10. Circumambient – Grimes
Visions (4AD; 2012)

11. Chameleon/Comedian – Kathleen Edwards
Voyageur (Zoe; 2012)

12. Aeroplane – The Everybodyfields
Nothing is Okay (Ramseur; 2007)

13. Pretty Girl From Chile – The Avett Brothers
Emotionalism (Ramseur; 2007)

14. Illusory Light – Sarah Blasko
I Awake (Dew Process; 2012)

15. I Got Nothing – Dum Dum Girls
“End of Daze” ep (Sub Pop; 2012)

16. All I Can – Sharon Van Etten
Tramp (Jagjaguwar; 2012)

* * *

Previous years

2010 & 2011
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005

List

There are a couple of things I should get done this evening, but really I just feel like lying around and listening to music, and so in the interests of procrastination, the 50 songs that I've apparently listened to the most since the advent of itunes in my life - ie last five or six years:

1. Different Worlds - Brittany Cairns (199 plays)
2. This World Can Make You Happy - Amaya Laucirica (122)
3. It Must Come Through - Jen Cloher & The Endless Sea (115)
4. New Year - Beach House (113)
5. 23 - Blonde Redhead (95)
6. Out Loud - Mindy Smith (87)
7. Coming Home To Me - Patty Griffin feat Julie Miller (80)
=8. Aeroplane - The Everybodyfields (77)
=8. Blue Lips - Regina Spektor (77)
10. Ode To LRC - Band of Horses (76)
11. Godspell - The Cardigans (75)
12. Circumambient - Grimes (74)
13. Even Though I'm A Woman - Seeker Lover Keeper (73)
14. All I Can - Sharon Van Etten (71)
=15. Slow Show - The National (70)
=15. Hey, Snow White - The New Pornographers (70)
=17. I Got Nothing - Dum Dum Girls (69)
=17. Lie In The Sound - Trespassers William (69)
=19. Modern Love - The Last Town Chorus (66)
=19. The Bleeding Heart Show - The New Pornographers (66)
=21. Joints - Holly Miranda (65)
=21. Mexico City - Jolie Holland (65)
23. Alex - Girls (63)
=24. Wishes - Beach House (60)
=24. This Girl's Prepared For War - Bic Runga (60)
=24. To A Poet - First Aid Kit (60)
=24. Fake Empire - The National (60)
28. Helplessness Blues - Fleet Foxes (59)
=29. Let's Get Out Of This Country - Camera Obscura (58)
=29. What I Thought Of You - Holly Throsby (58)
=29. Bloodbuzz Ohio - The National (58)
=29. House of Cards - Robert Plant (58)
=33. Abducted - Cults (57)
=33. Chameleon/Comedian - Kathleen Edwards (57)
=33. Dream About Changing - Sally Seltmann (57)
=33. Heart Skipped A Beat - The xx (57)
37. No Bad News - Patty Griffin (56)
=38. I Am Going But I Am Not Gone - Jen Cloher & The Endless Sea (55)
=38. Ride The Wind To Me - Julie Miller (55)
40. Zip City - Drive-By Truckers (54)
=41. Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) - The Arcade Fire (53)
=41. Breakaway - Kelly Clarkson (53)
=43. That Was Was - Dirty Three (52)
=43. Vomit - Girls (52)
=43 (* with a bullet). State of Grace - Taylor Swift (52)
=43. Chinatown - Wild Nothing (52)
=47. Fall At Your Feet - Boy & Bear (51)
=47. Wichita Lineman - Clouds (51)
=47. Top Of The World - Dixie Chicks (51)
=47. Unless It's Kicks - Okkervil River (51)

Two thoughts:

• Not that this is news to me, but the disproportionate number of female singers is striking. I guess that's just how I'm wired.
• I would be a happy man if I could somehow have this list based on lifetime stats.

(previously - Feb 09)

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Beasts of the Southern Wild is really good, and it feels memorable, but it's difficult to describe exactly why. It has a vision to it; it just is.

(w/ Meribah)

"I sometimes lose my faith in luck / I don't know what I want to be when I grow up": Brandi Carlile - Bear Creek

A likeably diverse alt-countryish record, Carlile doing well with a full gamut of country-folk-rock singer-songwriter styles: contemporary nu-grass ("Keep Your Heart Young"), stormy rockers ("Raise Hell"), pretty Patty Griffin / Dixie Chicks-styled ballads ("That Wasn't Me", "What Did I Ever Come Here For"), melodic modern country-pop ("100", "Rise Again"), warm Rosanne Cash-ish folk-tinged anthems ("In The Morrow"); though then again there's "I'll Still Be There", one of the highlights, which really mainly sounds like Brandi Carlile. (I've kind of dipped in and out of Carlile's songbook in the past, hearing a few songs from her debut and rather liking next lp The Story, but haven't kept up since.)

Bored Nothing - Bored Nothing

A nice piece of guitar-y indie, Australian no less. Somewhat similar to (at various times): the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, early Primal Scream, Elliott Smith, the sweeter end of Big Star's spectrum, Girls, etc. Has that chimingly jangly, brightly faded feel going, and an impressively high ratio of distinctive to generic songs.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Inevitably in the shadow of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and lacking by comparison to those others; it's at once less epic, with a feeling of much less at stake (despite the bits seeded throughout that are designed to foreshadow the events of LOTR), and less tautly paced, so that at times this first Hobbit installment feels just a bit long. Still, of course it looks great, there are some exciting bits, and overall it does a pretty good job of evoking the pathos in the dwarves' situation and quest (the guy who plays Thorin is good) and staging that against Bilbo's progression, and there are far worse ways to spend three odd hours in a cinema, particularly of a Friday night after a long week.

(w/ Cass)

More on Red

A substantial and good, if at points breathlessly and hyperbolically enthusiastic, series of PopMatters pieces about Taylor Swift and Red (even the titles are good), all by different writers:

• "Is Taylor Swift Still Country? Do We Care?"
• "In Defense of Taylor Swift and Gen-Y Pop Music"
• "Indie Love for Taylor Swift's Hipster-Baiting 'Red' "

(Also, a more measured but still positive review from the same site.)

Evidently, still on high rotation over here, albeit mainly the 50% or so of the record that's particularly grabbed me...addictive.

Taylor Swift - Speak Now & Red

I've liked Taylor Swift from the start, which for me was hearing "Love Story" on the radio and immediate purchase of Fearless a few years back (also, her debut), and kept on listening to her, or at least to the songs that had stuck with me, pretty consistently since then.

I'd been aware that she was still going around, and becoming bigger and bigger, but hadn't really followed her career; it seemed entirely possible that I already had all of her music that I needed. But then there were two things that made me think I should catch up: first, it seemed like something interesting had happened with the phenomenon of 'Taylor Swift', whereby not only had she become a full blown pop megastar but a fair degree of critical acclaim had followed; and second, having my attention caught by a music video on tv one weekend morning, spoken word intro, catchy hyper-pop lines, and arresting-looking blonde singer, which I realised partway through was in fact Swift.

So, Speak Now came out a couple of years back, and it's a strong album, building on the strengths of her earlier records and showing Swift's increased facility for anthemic, memorable pop songs, sometimes with a sweetly countryish air and sometimes a bit harder-edged.

But Red is the one that really arrests; the song-writing is stronger and more consistent, and the (stadium/dancefloor) pop elements now fully entrenched and indeed the foundation for many of the album's most striking, and best, moments - the airily driving, U2-esque "State of Grace", title track "Red", "I Knew You Were Trouble" (the one I'd seen the video for) and "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" (the two most obviously state of the moment pop-infused), and late-album entry "Starlight"...impressively, it runs for 16 songs and stays good the whole way through.

It's hard to know just how knowing Swift is in her invocation of youth and dropping of its vernacular throughout; who knows, because it's entirely plausible that most 22 year olds would be just as aware of their own time of life-ness as she is on the song of the same name, "22" (it's tempting to see it as an update on her previous "Fifteen"), while still speaking in exactly the kind of argot that she brings to her lyrics. It probably doesn't matter, anyway - either way, she captures the giddiness and drama of that time of life, as well as the all-round exhilaration, and it's that as much as the catchy-verging-on-ridiculous hooks on which she builds so many of her choruses and bridge transitions, and her winsome, characterful singing (highlighted throughout, but often particularly on the less pyrotechnic tunes like "Treacherous" and "The Lucky One"), that makes Red such a gigantic, and fantastic, pop record. Inevitably there are no doubt any number of elements that have come together to lead to fame, fortune and praise for Swift - but I think the most important is simply that she's really good.

Argo

Very well made. The most striking thing about it is how tense it is all the way through, creating a tight feeling in your stomach from the beginning and keeping it there all the way through (and for a fair bit after, too); in that sense, it reminded me a bit of The Hurt Locker. Some nice humour around the Hollywood machine too.

(w/ Kai)

Paul O Williams - The Breaking of Northwall

There's a story to this one. For many years, I've had the faintest of memories of having read a book - or perhaps it was books - when I was younger, probably late primary school, maybe early high. I remember them from my local library - the Pines - and they were in the young adult section; all I could remember is that they were set in a post-apocalyptic America whose inhabitants had lost the use of technology following some great disaster (presumably nuclear), many years on, that one of them had a cover with a giant ship on it, and that the title had something to do with a wall. Also, the book, or books, or perhaps it was just the cover(s), made enough of an impression on me that I wanted to re-read them.

I think they probably slipped my mind for quite a while after whenever it was that I was exposed to them, probably resurfacing at some point in uni, maybe mid-uni. Thing was, though, no matter how many people I talked to, and even with the bottomless reservoir of information that is the internet, I couldn't find the name of the book/s - what little I remembered just wasn't enough to be able to track them down. So I'd more or less resigned myself to never being able to revisit them and find out what it was that made them linger, albeit in such a trace kind of way, in the first place.

Then, a few months ago, what in retrospect should've been obvious: going to the wikipedia list page for 'fantasy novels' (or somesuch similar) and ctrl+f-ing for "wall" - and voila, 'The Breaking of Northwall' by Paul O Williams. And after all that, it turns out to be only alright, not bad but not captivating either, at least now; I can't remember whether I read this one (I did find the cover image that I'd remembered - book 4 in the series), but in any event don't remember its events at all, and while the story is decent enough, the characters, of whom there are far too many, are on the thin side, and the way that all the different tribes (warring remnants of the country's former population, with no recollection of the time before the 'great fire' whose existence folklore has passed down to them) come to work together is a bit bland. (It's also worth noting that it's quite rigorously 'realistic' - no orcs, dragons or even mutants of any kind here.)

Possibly this is one of those series that takes a while to gather momentum - first books are often fantasy series' weakest, at least unless they go on for too long and bloat at the end - or maybe it was just the concept that captured my imagination enough for it to linger down the years, as whichever one/s I read were probably the first I'd come across to be set in this kind of post-apocalyptic setting - that is, one in which memory of the times before has been lost, while the world's reduced inhabitants make their way surrounded by the mysterious remnants of those former times, Ozymandias writ large; both the imagery and the ideas itself would have struck me strongly, I suspect, such that even if the execution and writing are merely serviceable, some kind of fascination would have arisen. I don't know if I'll read the rest - probably, at some point, maybe.

Music in moments

On the tram, coming home today through Carlton, "Mike Mills" by Air came up on my ipod, and it was like it dropped me straight back into the past - specifically 2004, when I was listening to Talkie Walkie and especially that song. I don't have any strong specific associations or memories associated with the song - the nearest is a faint recollection of Penny, or maybe it was Kate B, remarking that it sounded like a music box, the snippet of conversation snap-frozen for some reason - but those opening chimes really took me straight back with a startling vividity...

* * *

This is a bit different, but I had another sharp, piquant music experience on the weekend - caught drifting slightly aimlessly in the city (unusual in these time-poor times), Francoise Hardy's "Ce Petit Coeur" came on and was immediately the perfect song for that very moment; as music does, it soundtracked and at the same time coalesced the moment itself.

Kit White - 101 Things to Learn in Art School

I don't think I ever aspired to go to art school, but despite its title, this excellent little book has as much to say about appreciating and engaging with art as about actually creating it. 101 short insights, focusing variously on the concept of art, its formal and compositional elements, and its practice, and each illustrated by a line drawing, many of which are 'after' (ie in the style of) an illustrative famous work. I got a bit out of this one, particularly the more compositionally-focused ones, which have given me some new ways of thinking about my own experience of art.

Some examples (somewhat out of context without their elaborating text and illustration):

3. "To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks." - Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 'Phenomenology of Perception'
12. Perception is a reciprocal action.
14. All images are abstractions.
25. Style is the consequence of something being described in the way most appropriate to its content.
26. Abstraction comes from the world.
41. Porosity, not solidity, now defines our view of the world.
54. Time is an essential element in all media.
69. Color is not neutral.
89. Eliminate the nonessential.
92. The shape of an image carries a hidden metaphor.
100. Art is the means by which a culture describes itself to itself.

Batman Begins

Rewatched this in a few sittings, between other things. Struggling a bit lately with bad heat and other-related sleep deprivation. Continues to be v.g. (on the subject of that abbreviation, incidentally, also saw most of Bridget Jones's Diary on tv the other night - as charming as ever)

Les Miserables

So the approach they took with this adaptation was essentially to transpose the stage musical directly to screen, which has pros and cons. Foremost among the pros, given that Les Mis has been the musical as far as I'm concerned since seeing what I'm pretty sure was its last main stage production in Melbourne back in 1998 for a school french excursion (I also read the book extracurricularly, brick of a thing, around the same time), is that it then becomes essentially a glossier, and at least potentially more spectacular, version of the musical, with the bonus of movie stars in the main roles.

Three fairly significant cons, though:
1. As a direct transposition, it drags a bit in places on screen, particularly at two and a half hours long, with the shifts from one scene/song to the next more jarring than on stage.
2. More generally, the suspension of disbelief needed to be really carried along by the spectacle and larger than life-ness of the thing is significantly harder with a movie than on stage.
3. The singing is variable, and extremely shaky in some cases, which was actually surprisingly distracting. (On that front, pass mark for Jackman (though a bare pass), not so much Russell Crowe (just doesn't having the singing chops to sell Javert), Anne Hathaway pretty good, likewise Eddie Redmayne as Marius (also the actor who plays Enjolras); Amanda Seyfried not terrible but a bit shrill; Samantha Barks as Eponine possibly the best of the lot, but then I've always had a particular soft spot for that character).

Having said all of that, even an only so-so adaptation taking such a faithful approach, and with watchable leads and secondaries as this has, was bound to be pretty enjoyable, and this was. The big moments come through and it's stirring and emotionally affecting in places, as it's meant to be - so, all up, while not without its problems, pretty good.

(w/ Cass)

George Megalogenis - The Australian Moment

Enjoyable - essentially a flying chronology of Australian politics, and broad social trends, from Whitlam onwards, read primarily through an economic lens, and based around an underlying argument that a succession of market-oriented and deregulationist reforms have left Australian uniquely well-placed amongst western nations to deal with the economic challenges of the 21st century.

Gillian Welch - The Harrow & The Harvest

Timing is so important. Welch became one of my favourites during that period when I was discovering her music, 2004-05ish, and all of her records to that point, Soul Journey, Time (The Revelator), Hell Among the Yearlings and Revival, really resonated. Then, finally, in 2011 came The Harrow & The Harvest, which I bought almost straight away but still, after more than a year of listening on and off, hasn't spoken to me in the same way as those others. It's a fine record, and in much the same way that Time (The Revelator) in particular is, but it seems that I just haven't been as attuned to Welch's and Rawlings' alluring take on roots/americana as I was back then - perhaps its time will come again, and with it a fuller appreciation of this one.

Krystle Warren & the Faculty - Love Songs: A Time You May Embrace

Hearing Love Songs in Basement Discs the other day made twice that Krystle Warren's remarkable, deep, rich voice had made me sit up and take notice; when I saw that it was her, and remembered how good she was in "Way to Blue" (that having been the first time), I figured that was enough that I should buy the cd.

So - it's a good one, Warren weaving jazzy, soulful sounds in with some folk and even lightly country touches; at times it makes me think of Nina Simone, at others (particularly at her most expansive) of Antony Hegarty. Best are two gorgeous, swooning ballads near the beginning, "Forever is a Long Time" and "Every Morning", and the bare bones, voice + guitar "Love You" that closes the affair; the whole thing is thoroughly, unabashedly romantic.

First Aid Kit - The Lion's Roar limited edition boxset

Compiling my end of year cd made it clear that The Lion's Roar has ended up being my favourite album of 2012 (Bloom was the only other that got close) and being reminded of its loveliness inspired the purchase of this boxset.

Three additional songs - "Wolf" riding a percussively tribal rhythm with vocals to match and representing a bit of a different direction for them, "Marianne's Son" on the indistinct side, and "Just Needed A Friend", on oceanic folk shanty which would've fit right on to the original record. There's also a short documentary with a bit of concert and behind the scenes footage and brief interview grabs, a poster that I'd put up somewhere were the time for putting band posters up not behind me, and a guitar pick that I'd use if I'd played guitar since high school.

Battlestar Galactica

Miniseries + four seasons. Very good, and each season better than the last - once it got going, it really made me want to find out what would happen next and how things would end. Reminded me a bit of Lost - not least in its more metaphysical tendencies - although more tightly plotted. And its focus on choices and their consequences, and the moral elements of the decisions made by all of its major characters is effective, as is (with some caveats re: occasional lack of sophistication) its staging of classic societal and political issues in its sci-fi context of a beleaguered last 50,000 survivors of the human race fleeing their robot antagonist through space in a giant fleet. I wouldn't say this was a truly great show - it's no West Wing, say - but it was plenty enjoyable.

Triple J's Like A Version Anthology: Best of Volumes 1-5

Been a long time since triple j was my listening staple (the last vestige fell away a few months ago when I realised that even having it as my morning clock radio wakeup station was a bridge too far - in a further sign that I'm getting old, I started finding the announcers too loud, too braying, and shifted to triple r instead), but it was Sarah Blasko's lovely take on "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", heard post-play in the Malthouse bar as they called last drinks, that got me to buy this.

With a generalist covers compilation like this, there are some that you want to listen to because of the song, others because of the artist, perhaps a handful because of the particular combination. Here, a few of my favourite songs are in line ("Wide Open Road", done well by the Panics; "There She Goes", ploddingly and unfortunately covered by the Wombats; "Joga" given a dull do-over by Hermitude; "Look at Miss Ohio", faithfully but somewhat more somberly, and overall effectively, done by the Kill Devil Hills); the highlights overall, along with Blasko's version of the Elton John classic, are a typically twee yet urgent take by Tegan and Sara on "Dancing in the Dark" (reminding me what a classic that song is), Bob Evans' countrified spin on Lily Allen's "Not Fair", Evermore's melancholy cover of Little Birdy's "Relapse", and Little Birdy themselves with a straight-up but enjoyably sprightly version of "These Boots Were Made For Walking".

Carl Little - Edward Hopper's New England

Lighthouses, boats, Cape Cod scenes, etc. To some degree, light and composition play a different role in these ones, an important part of Hopper's body of work, than they do in his urban pieces; but like those others, they exactly capture one facet of America as I imagine it.

Yes Minister & Yes, Prime Minister

Very amusing, very cynical; complete satire of course but that doesn't stop it from sometimes having resonance.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Now this was a really sweet film. It combines two of my favourite genres - teen movie and that stream of literature that takes in The Great Gatsby, The Secret History and perhaps most pertinently, Brideshead Revisited - and presents the resulting amalgam in a nostalgically rendered early 90s package, complete with glorious indie soundtrack (Smiths, Cocteau Twins, Throwing Muses, etc).

There were plenty of moments that had the potential to throw the viewer out of the extended moment that the film invokes, but it's good enough - and, of course, completely enough in my personal zone - that it instead carried me straight through; the best example is probably the first tunnel scene, the suggestion that these kids of such great musical taste could have not heard Bowie's "Heroes" and then Emma Watson's Sam's (she's good, as is the rest of the cast) arms-outstretched pose, wind pulling at her as the car races ahead, both potentially risible in a slightly different context but instead combining to create the kind of ecstatic moment that is inevitably rendered nostalgic when played out by people of an age and in a time that is long behind us, but of course would have been experienced as at least potentially bittersweet, albeit perhaps in a different way, even at the time.

(w/ Kai, David + Justine, and Cass)

"Pompeii, L.A." (Malthouse)

I have to say, I haven't found the Malthouse plays that I've been to this year to (collectively) be up to their usual - high - standard...possibly partly a reflection of the last-minute, second half of the season only subscription bit. Having said that, of those that I saw, Declan Greene's "Pompeii, L.A." yesterday was the stand out (I was similarly impressed by his "Moth"). There's more than a hint of Mulholland Drive - of Lynch generally - to its rendition of the internal apocalypse of the Hollywood dreaming that is its subject; a a highlight was the production's bold, fluid theatrical confidence, including a set design that finds room, between its two acts (the first a vivid fragmentation of scenes and identities, the second a hospital-room crawl towards death), for the towing of a battered red sports car out the back of the Merlyn theatre.

(w/ Steph C, Julian, Jarrod + friend (Larissa?), and Cass)

"Jeff Wall Photographs" & "Thomas Demand"

On at the NGV Aust & International respectively, entry on one ticket to both.

Jeff Wall's large-scale photos - most finalised and exhibited as transparencies in light boxes, to be lit from behind - were a mixed bag for me. A few were quite striking, either for their pictorial flair (the last two in the exhibition, "A sudden gust of wind (after Hokusai)", 1993 and "Coastal motifs", 1989, in particular) or for the successful way they metaphorise (or literalise) their subjects' psychological interiority ("A woman and her doctor", 1980-1; "After 'Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue", 1999-2000), but most simply didn't leave much of an impression.

Thomas Demand combines media - he creates paper and cardboard sculpture and then photographs or videos them - in a manner that seems holistic. Scenes like "Copyshop" and "Bathroom" take on an unfamiliar air when constructed, in a way that is oddly undetailed yet wholly familiar, and then preserved via colour print; also notable is his "Rain" video, the raindrops created again using paper.

Sharon Van Etten - Tramp

It starts with the voice - as with Epic, initially a bit of a barrier, mixed high and raspy in a way that seems to push out everything else, but on repeat listens revealing itself as an instrument of considerable power and expressiveness and, on Tramp, subtlety. Tramp is a really good album, interesting to listen to throughout, Van Etten's haunted vocals riding on an shimmeringly atmospheric indie-singer-songwriter-country-rock-ish sound a bit reminiscent of Neko Case, the songs being of the kind that don't obviously conform to conventional structures but instead seem to have distinctive shapes of their own. Tracks 2 and 3, "Give Out" and "Serpents" stand out, but the real show-stopper's "All I Can", unabashedly shooting for grandness and nailing it, cresting on its climactic cry "we all make mistakes".

The Kirishima Thing

A high school movie, done with a very nice touch. The characters come quickly to life, and while their types, relationships and paths are familiar, there is an obliqueness to how the film moves them around, often denying us the expected outcome in a way that seems entirely designed and indeed structural, right down to the unresolvedness of the ending. Being Japanese, it naturally called to mind All About Lily Chou-Chou and Battle Royale for me, but it's far lighter than either of those, albeit still serious-minded in its focus on its (impressively large) roster of characters. There was something very pleasing about it that's hard to define, but I liked it a lot.

(w/ Andreas - part of the Japanese Film Festival)

"Radiance: The Neo-Impressionists" (NGV International)

A nice little exhibition about a movement that I knew very little about before. Beginning in France and Belgium in the 1880s with Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, neo-impressionism took impressionism as its starting point and sought to incorporate the then new sciences of optics and colour perception and theory, using careful dabs of bright colours in a 'divisionistic' style - juxtaposing complementary colours, both at the level of detail and overall picture - with the aim of inducing the intended effects through the viewer's perceptual response to the use of colour and line rather than swift brushstrokes aimed at capturing the essence of a moment in the traditional impressionist style.

By and large, I found the paintings in the exhibition pleasant rather than amazing - they have a tendency to perhaps be a little mannered, at least by comparison to the finest of the impressionist (including late impressionist) style...having said that, a couple by Maximilien Luce were very striking - "Views of London (Cannon Street)" (1892-3) and "The Louvre and the Pont du Carrousel, night effect" (1890), the former dusk and the latter night, both making use of violets, lilacs, greens, city lights on water. And my favourite in the exhibition, Theo van Rysselberghe's "Canal in Flanders, gloomy weather" (1894), is wonderful, done with a vivid blurriness, like a photograph of a memory.

Actually, in some ways, the most interesting thing about the exhibition was the way that the use of colour, particularly in later neo-impressionism, very clearly prefigures that of a range of more familiar movements that would follow in the 20th century - bringing to mind Matisse and the fauves - and the turn towards something approaching abstraction, again in that later part of the movement.

(w/ Trang)

The Red Squirrel

A cryptic, somewhat dreamy, very European (Spanish, actually - part of the La Mirada film festival) tale of love, deceit and illusion. So-so.

(w/ Rob and Jade + Duc)

Dum Dum Girls - "He Gets Me High" ep

One from last year - also good. The highlight is the slashing cover of "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out".

Skyfall

This was very enjoyable - it actually had something of the feel of a Nolan Batman film, shadowy, physical and kinetic, and built around a series of fairly spectacular set pieces. (Incidentally, I think the first Bond film I've ever sat down and watched all the way through.)

(w/ Andreas)

The Master

I must admit, I found The Master rather opaque, much like its two central characters. It's wonderfully made, and there are some truly beautiful shots in it, but all up I wondered if it might just have been a little empty - not really about anything. Having said that, more than the much publicised Scientology element, I think that maybe the true subjects of this film are human relationships and human-ness, in light of which (and in light of the focus on character and identity as performed in those of Paul Thomas Anderson's other films that I've seen), the opacity may well be deliberate. I don't know how much I enjoyed The Master; I even felt a bit bored at times. And yet I'm inclined to watch it again.

30 Rock season 6

The balance of the show seems to have shifted in this latest season. You wouldn't say that 30 Rock is a show that particularly relies on character development, but Liz and Jack in particular have moved a bit - particularly their relationship with each other - over all five seasons, which continues in this sixth (most notably, Liz staying with the same boyfriend, James Marsden's Criss, for a whole season and the way their relationship develops), including a surprisingly touching season opener. Also, several of the regular supporting characters are less prominent (the writers, Cerie - not a great loss; Grizz and Dot-Com - which is a pity; Jonathan has gone altogether - neutral), their screen time taken up by a revolving cast of guest stars, including nearly every single guest or recurring character/actor of any significance from the previous five seasons. Kristen Schaal is a welcome addition; her character is a bit all over the place, but Schaal is delightful. Anyhow, it continues to be an excellent show - still smart, consistently funny, pleasingly meta, and showing the right amount of heart and snark.

"Negotiating this World: Contemporary Australian Art" (NGV Australia)

Some days one is open to art, other days not so much; last Sunday, when I dropped in for this exhibition, turned out unfortunately to be one of the latter. And so, in lieu of synthesis or exegesis, my notes verbatim (these were the pieces that struck me for one reason or another):

* David Rosetzky - "Self-defence (Sarah)" (2005)
- large digital print of a woman, cut out - tree branches
- tv screen - weather atmospherics
- projected on wall

* Tom Nicholson - "Drawing and correspondence 1" (2008-11)
- large charcoal drawing
-- mysterious
-- cave painting?
-- artist's book of emails/archival photos

* Rosemary Laing - "Welcome to Australia" (2004) - large photo - Woomera Immigration Reception and Processing Centre

* Siri Hayes - "Paper bag lovers" (2008) - photo

* Janet Laurence - "Botanical residues"
- colour transparency on transparent synthetic polymer resin
- six overlapping panes
- green, ghostly images of glasshouses

* Bill Henson - "Untitled 2009/10"
- photo of crowd looking at a Rembrandt at the Hermitage
- ghostly, can't tell at first

- another untitled Henson - 09/10 - foggy, island mound surrounded by water

* Mira Gojak - "Sung out of sight" (2008)
- suspended sculpture - wire, steel, copper, wool - automatism - flowing

* John Spiteri - "Hard rain" (2006)
- enamel on glass

Wild Surmise (Malthouse)

This one was quite good - a two-hander adapted from a Dorothy Porter that initially seemed as if it might be overly obvious in thematising/metaphorising its Large Themes through the preoccupations of its two protagonists, astronomy and poetry, but actually steered clear of those shoals and instead developed into a pretty engaging, nicely Melbourne-grounded piece on love, desire and relationships.

(w/ Julian, Jarrod, Farrah, Cass and Trang)

Bored Nothing instore @ Polyester Records

Jon gave me a head's up about this guy and the timing (6pm at Polyester in the city) fit well with how my Friday night was shaping up, so I went and saw most of it with him. Pretty good - reminded me a bit of Girls, although maybe more 90s-ish. Would listen to more.

Norwegian Wood

What I liked about this film: the general mood; the effective way it conjures sadness; the fact that it's an adaptation of a Murakami book; the way that it has a meaningful narrative and character arc for its central character, if not for the others.

What I wasn't so taken with, causing me to be only lukewarm about it as a whole: it's slow...very, very slow (probably unavoidably so given the source material); the occasional jarring editing and music; and, particularly, it doesn't quite pierce in the way that it could have, and maybe nearly did.

The Antlers - Hospice

The Antlers had been highly recommended by a couple of people, but Hospice hasn't done much for me. It has its moments and I like the drama, but overall it just hasn't really struck me.

Sarah Blasko - I Awake

Looking back over what I wrote at the time about each of Sarah Blasko's previous albums, What the Sea Wants..., The Overture & the Underscore and As Day Follows Night, it seems like there's a bit of a pattern - I liked them all in those initial days/weeks of listening, but hadn't yet realised how much the music on each of them would stick with me, haunt me even, over time...her music is the kind that lingers.

And now I Awake, which makes four from four seriously good lps - maybe it's even the best of the four. Delicacy and a clear, strong vision are in perfect balance, and the songwriting is wonderful, confidently ascending to swoons and swirls like those that highlight "New Country" and "Illusory Light" and often bathed in strings and a cinematically dramatic air (say on "An Arrow"); elsewhere, there's a lovely, light touch on songs like the classicist pop of "Fool"...Blasko is something a bit out of the ordinary.

The xx - Coexist

Two things have been a bit surprising about Coexist for me - first, that it's been a bit of a slow burn, taking a fair few listens for me to get into it (surprising because I loved their first one and had high hopes for the follow-up), and second, that what opened up the album to me was playing it loud one day (surprising because the xx's music is so hushed, and would've seemed likely to neither need nor benefit from the volume).

Even now that it has opened up to me, Coexist remains a mistier, more muted record than that astonishing debut, its standout moments quieter, its turns in different directions (say the steel drum-touched, depressed-Knife dance track "Reunion") more subdued. It's good, though, repaying the repeated listens.

Justin Cronin - The Passage & The Twelve

More post-apocalyptic vampires.

(First read of The Passage.)

The Avett Brothers - Emotionalism

I like things to be perfect, enough so that I honestly think it might be a character flaw; that goes for most things, including art, music, albums. Now, Emotionalism, the first Avett Brothers record I've listened to (I saw their name while trying to find out more about their former labelmates the Everybodyfields), is far from perfect - it's over-long and a bit all over the place, and the kind of record that you feel you can see the seams of (deliberately, I suspect). And yet I like it a lot, for a whole lot of reasons but mostly because it's so joyfully full of music and its possibilities, so that the sprawling feel of the record and its very imperfections work to its favour, registering more as the band's ideas and enthusiasm spilling over into any available space rather than as laziness or a lack of discipline or control.

In some ways, all of this is encapsulated in "Pretty Girl from Chile", an almost six minute long country-ish "Bohemian Rhapsody" in three divergent suites: modern banjo-led country ballad; hard-strummed Calexico-styled Mex-americana breaking in at the two and a half minute mark; (answering machine message bridge); electric guitar rock-out finale. Like a lot of other songs on the album, it works both as a genre-defying, stick-in-the-mind-y piece of songcraft, and as something that often literally makes me smile at its wryly humorous musicality and sheer song-ness. (I didn't want to compare them to anyone, but at times they make me think of a far more country Neutral Milk Hotel.)

The Shadow in the North

Pleasant, unremarkable; a thoroughly modern heroine.

(The Ruby in the Smoke)

Doing it for the Kids

Neat Creation compilation, including a nice MBV song called "Cigarette in Your Bed" that I hadn't heard before. I particularly like the Jasmine Minks song, "Cut Me Dead"; the cd also reminded me that Heidi Berry (a) exists and (b) is good via "North Shore Train".

The Cell

Quite the confection, this. It's genuinely visually spectacular - and stylish - and quite unnerving at points; there's not that much to it, narrative-wise, but the imagery is striking enough, and the pacing tight enough (albeit only just), that I didn't notice until thinking about it afterwards.

Girls - Album

Not that dissimilar from Father, Son, Holy Ghost (which came after this one), and similarly good. "Hellhole Ratrace" and "Summertime" in particular are excellent.

"Time will forget your name": The Everybodyfields - Nothing is Okay

It's good to know what you like, but only up to a point - at a certain point, having too defined an idea of what you like becomes an obstacle to openness and to fresh experience, and sometimes I wonder if my own tastes in music are heading in that direction. But there's nothing to shake off thoughts of that kind like hearing something new and great, squarely in the strike zone of 'what I like' - in this case, modern alt-country-folk - but cutting through in a way that reminds me of why I fell in love with the genre in the first place.

It's really first song "Aeroplane" on this 2007 record from the Everybodyfields, hailing from Johnson City, Tennessee, and showing that they've got a way with this kind of genre-straddling americana. Four bars of strummed guitar, then come the fiddles and steel string, a yearning male vocalist (Sam Quinn) joined soon by plangent female harmonies (you can never help but think of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris in this kind of connexion, but they really are both the archetype and the exemplar), and we're off for three and a half minutes of confident, high and lonesome balladeering that struck me, hard, the first time I was listening to it, and doesn't seem to be wearing off at all - it's the kind of song that lodges in the throat and in the chest, that seems like a single falling swoon from start to finish. It's wonderful.

Next song "Lonely Anywhere" is gorgeous too, Jill Andrews taking centre stage on a slow, sad one that falls halfway between Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch, but more fragile and abandoned than either. And the rest of the album, while it doesn't reach the heights of that opening pair, goes on in a similar vein; I mentioned Gram & Emmylou before, but in fact the most immediate reference point for the Everybodyfields is Whiskeytown, if Caitlin Cary had done more of the singing. All in all, a find, and a reminder, and the ideal soundtrack for this time of year, as the year begins to wind down and we fall towards summer.

Bat for Lashes - Two Suns

Two Suns, the first Bat for Lashes album I've listened to, starts very strong, with four memorably spacey, dramatic songs in a row, opener "Glass" the best of them. It doesn't quite maintain that standard thereafter, and its influences (Bjork, Tori Amos, Kate Bush) are writ large, but the music and the artist come through with a strong, distinctive voice - pretty good.

Dum Dum Girls - "End of Daze" ep

Only In Dreams has proved to have a surprising amount of staying power, a measure of the pop sophistication that lay beneath its glossy sheen, and this ep is similarly good, the only mis-step being the dull "Trees and Flowers"; the other four songs are all strong, and interestingly, seemingly heading slightly in a Cults type direction as far as their 21st century 60s girl group quoting pop vibes go.

(I Will Be)

The Prestige

Still good, even when you know exactly where it's going.

(first time [and further]; second time)

"Gregory Crewdson - In A Lonely Place" (Centre for Contemporary Photography)

I've been intrigued by Crewdson since whenever it was that I first came across his work (extemporanea tells me that it was pre-2007, at any rate), and this exhibition, gathering selections from three of his series, was satisfying.

The most striking - and well-known - images were from 'Beneath the Roses' (2003-2008), large scale and full colour, carefully staged and lit vistas of alienation and loneliness from the American unconscious (I think most, if not all, were shot in small town New England, but the location is as much one of collective imagining and association as of specific geography). Some appear to be part of a narrative, while others appear more as single moments in time, but all share a certain frozen quality - an unnatural stillness. The subjects are people, buildings, human-made structures, natural surrounds, but always with an air of the oblique and the unknowable - unmet gazes, unexplained actions, inexplicable configurations (the one of people walking along a long train track, a house on fire in the background, is only the most obvious), submerged histories, impulses and thoughts.

The ones from 'Sanctuary' (2010) have the same air of being like still shots from a dream - abandoned, haunted - though their setting is different, being taken at and around the closed Cinecitta studios in Rome, and being all in black and white. The reference point here is more de Chirico than Hopper, more melancholy than subtly troubling and disturbing, but the mood is ineffably similar.

And, lastly, those from 'Fireflies' (1996) - befitting their subject, they're tiny, all showing little flecks of light against dark, wooded backdrops; it's easy to see why Crewdson was drawn to them given his artistic preoccupations with light and shadow, and captured moments in time.

Laura Cantrell - "Humming Songs: Acoustic Performances from the Flowered Vine"

Pleasant but decidedly inessential; doesn't add anything to the wonderful source record.

Anne Tiernan - Power Without Responsibility

Looks at the role and operation of Ministerial advisers, from a few years back - I came to it after reading something that Tiernan wrote in response to BCA CEO Jennifer Westacott's recent speech about the public service. Its academic origins are apparent in the writing style, but it reads as pretty even-handed, drawing on interviews with a range of frequently anonymous advisers, public servants and others, and ends with some suggestions for filling the 'accountability gap' that she diagnoses.

Aimee Mann - Charmer

Another elegantly great pop record from Mann, continuing the run that she started with Bachelor No 2 and that has since taken in Lost in Space, The Forgotten Arm [*], @#%&*! Smilers and now Charmer.

Musically, it's a turn for the sunnier, although certainly not lyrically; my early favourite, "Labrador", offers perhaps the most vivid contrast, brightly chiming instrumentation (piano and synths especially, those having replaced guitar as Mann's main instrument since Bachelor - though the electric guitar is a highlight when it does show up, as in the second half of other early highlight "Soon Enough"), uppish mid-tempo pop tones, soaring chorus, and an extended metaphor for the singer's inability to change in the face of a hopeless, unhealthy relationship.

Having said that, though, I've spent so much time listening to Mann's music, absorbing the sweet-sourness that's one of its greatest pleasures, that I don't know if I could hear anything recorded by her as uncomplicatedly upbeat, even if, unprecedentedly, it had lyrics to match. And it's also that amount of immersion in her music that makes it impossible for me to tell just how good, actually, Charmer is (though its best moments certainly bear comparison to anything she's done before) - how much of the way that I rate each of her records is driven by my personal receptiveness and associations at the time that I came across them (the more important those elements being, the more likely her earlier albums are to forever remain unsurpassable landmarks in my mind) - of course, the answer is that it doesn't matter, when each new record, and all of the old ones, continues to bring me so much pleasure.

Parlour Games @ Rice Queen

Zoe was in this and it was on Brunswick St on a Sat night, so I went. An enjoyable show that was just what it said it would be: "Think smoky jazz standards, old-school musicals, great crooners, silent films, Parisian nightclubs, Piazzolla tango numbers and more"; apart from the music itself being good, it was impressive how much the show did evoke a sense of the past in its stylings (part of Fringe Festival). [fb]

(w/ Jarrod and Farrah)