200 favourite songs - the list

So, the whole list (nb - the 'last time' links are to generally much more detailed enthusings).

1. Lazy Line Painter Jane - Belle and Sebastian (Lazy Line Painter Jane ep, 1997)
Decidedly messy and imperfect, overflowing joyously at the seams, "Lazy Line Painter Jane" has an appeal that surpasses explanation - it just is. (Last time - #1)

2. Love Will Tear Us Apart - Joy Division (1980 single)
... again ... (Last time - #13)

3. Fade Into You - Mazzy Star (So Tonight That I Might See, 1993)
This song is like a dream that never ends. (Last time - #3)

4. Ceremony - New Order (1981 single / Marie Antoinette soundtrack)
Crashingly, drivingly resounding; whatever you think it means, it does.

5. This Love - Craig Armstrong (featuring Liz Fraser) (The Space Between Us, 1998)
Really, this is all about Fraser's voice, sailing enraptured on that dazzling, lovestruck melody. (Last time - #10)

6. Paranoid Android - Radiohead (OK Computer, 1997)
Every generation gets the symphony that it deserves. (Last time - #8)

7. Teardrop - Massive Attack (Mezzanine, 1998)
Thudding, ringing, ricocheting; Liz Fraser again. "Teardrop" taps into something deep. (Last time - #31)

8. September Gurls - Big Star (Radio City, 1974)
Jangly power-pop heaven. (Last time - #23)

9. Wise Up - Aimee Mann (Magnolia soundtrack, 1999)
So clear-eyed and piercingly sad. (Last time - #18) 

10. Everybody Here Wants You - Jeff Buckley (Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, 1998)
Fiery and filled with the exaltation of being in love; the emotion's both intensified and laid bare. (Last time - #12)

11. El President - Drugstore (featuring Thom Yorke) (White Magic for Lovers, 1998)
Captivatingly dramatic and touchingly intimate, with Monteiro and Yorke both in full voice, "El President" tells a particular tale, but it sounds universal. (Last time - #28)

12. Gorecki - Lamb (Lamb, 1996)
Starrily great and, for me, particularly heavily layered with emotional associations. (Last time - #22)

13. Talk Show Host - Radiohead (Romeo + Juliet soundtrack, 1996)
A stutteringly gliding, lyrical slice of modern alienation, yearning towards something that's still, all these years on, ever beyond grasp. (Last time - #15)

14. Sometimes - My Bloody Valentine (Loveless, 1991)
If pop music has Jungian archetypes, then "Sometimes", the quintessential shoegazer moment, is certainly one - densely buzzing, fuzzy guitar bed, murmured vocals drifting low in the mix, synth lines insistently surfacing and finally climbing to an ecstatic close. (Last time - #20)

15. You're In A Bad Way - Saint Etienne (So Tough, 1992)
Pure pop, and so fine. (Last time - #14)

16. Wrecking Ball - Gillian Welch (Soul Journey, 2003)
This song feels like coming home, no matter that the visions of Americana that it so sharply evokes are known to me only through my imaginings of them. (Last time - #6)

17. Just Like Heaven - The Cure (Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, 1987)
Racing sprightlily along, "Just Like Heaven" holds all of my favourite elements of the Cure in miniature - a slice of perfection. (Last time - #30)

18. In The Aeroplane Over The Sea - Neutral Milk Hotel (In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, 1998)
How strange it is to be anything at all! (Last time - #45)

19. Crush in the Ghetto - Jolie Holland (Springtime Can Kill You, 2006)
[O]ne for the warmer months, as the days grow longer...shadows and sunshine and all that. I must confess, I’m a little bit in love with Holland. - Dec 08

Completely beguiling - Holland's jazzy, heart in mouth singing is perfectly suited to this tender, carefully observed and quietly rapturous account of a sunny morning after.

20. Ashes to Ashes - David Bowie (Scary Monsters, 1980)
Like Bowie himself, endlessly fascinating. Sinuously circling and layered, always both revealing and concealing more of itself at each pass.

21. Little Bombs - Aimee Mann (The Forgotten Arm *, 2005)
More mournfully heartbroken than a song has any right to be. Brings a catch to my throat every time. (Last time - #37)

22. Can't Be Sure - The Sundays (Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, 1990)
There's a great lightness to "Can't Be Sure", which feels all the way through like it could just take off into the sky at any time, and then at last at the end it does, gusted up on Harriet Wheeler's ecstatic cries. Gorgeous. (Last time - #19)

23. 23 - Blonde Redhead (23, 2007)
Mysterious, urgent, and dizzying, it gives me a rush. - Dec 08
The aural equivalent of candy in a thunderstorm, sharp, sweet, lingering.

24. Just Like Honey - The Jesus and Mary Chain (Psychocandy, 1985)
I don't even know where to start with this one. Just one of the most perfect songs ever. (Last time - #5)

25. Hyper-ballad - Bjork (Post, 1995)
Well, I love this song, that's all. (Last time - #2)

26. She's A Jar - Wilco (Summerteeth, 1999) 
Oh Jeff Tweedy, so wise, so brilliant. "She's a Jar" really sings. (Last time - #29)

27. Be Mine - R.E.M. (New Adventures in Hi-Fi, 1996)
What is it about "Be Mine", buried away near the end of one of their most unheralded albums? It's so simple, but so very effective, a love song soundtracking an imaginary Western playing out in the dying days of the 20th century. (Last time - #62)

28. Spark - Tori Amos (from the choirgirl hotel, 1998)
I don't know if it's just because I've loved it so intensely in the past, but "Spark" feels somehow more vivid - more sharply defined - than most everything else around it. Swooning and desperate, lit from deep within. (Last time - #21)

29. Hold On, Hold On - Neko Case (Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, 2006)
It sounds like riding into the sunset, but what it's actually about is anyone's guess; whatever it is, I think it's probably both shadowy and sad. (Last time - #26)

30. Not Too Soon - Throwing Muses (The Real Ramona, 1991)
Woo! (Last time - #51)

31. Pink Orange Red - Cocteau Twins (Tiny Dynamine ep, 1985)
Otherworldly and beautiful. (Last time - #33)

32. Bachelorette - Bjork (Homogenic, 1997)
A fountain of blood in the shape of a girl / love's a two way dream - this is a song that I have dreamt about.

33. Little Stars - Lisa Miller (Version Originale, 2003)
Miller wrote this song for her child, and perhaps that goes some way to explaining how it can be so warmly, richly enveloping - another kind of love song. (Last time - #48)

34. Sea of Love - Cat Power (The Covers Record, 2000)
This is the prettiest, most forlorn-sounding thing. (Last time - #47)

35. Karma Police - Radiohead (OK Computer, 1997) 
Unaccountably brilliant.

36. Torn - Natalie Imbruglia (Left of the Middle, 1997)
I've always assumed that my enduring fondness for this one was a more or less personal idiosyncrasy, but then just last weekend, sitting in the Brunswick Street 'cider house' of a Sunday afternoon, what did I hear playing but "Torn", in amidst a whole suite of alternative and more 'adult alternative' tunes from the 90s (and oh did it sound good), making me wonder if maybe its impact has been wider than I'd guessed - and, if so, well why not, 'cause, melodic and wistful, I do think it's a slice of just about perfect pop. (Last time - #57)

37. Cowgirl in the Sand - Neil Young (Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, 1969)
Ten glorious guitar-y minutes, and compelling all the way. (Last time - #27)

38. Noah's Dove (demo) - 10,000 Maniacs (demo circa 1992 / Campfire Songs compilation)
Dreamily clear. I don't know why, but Natalie Merchant makes me think of Georgia O'Keeffe, Frank O'Hara, even Carson McCullers - she hearkens back to that line of Americans of singular vision. (Last time - #36) 

39. Lorelei - Cocteau Twins (Treasure, 1984)
Magical. (Last time - #9)

40. No Bad News - Patty Griffin (Children Running Through, 2007)
There's a vibrancy to "No Bad News" that fits its affirmatory tone, a strong bright thread that runs through and anchors it. The strumming carries you along, as does the singing; the drums kick it into another gear, and then too the horns; the words shout out that title idea of no bad news - we're not getting out of here alive anyway!

41. Slow Show - The National (Boxer, 2007) 
At their best, there's something hypnotic about the National, Matt Berninger's deep tones the ideal complement to the slow-build undercurrents and elegant depths of their particular brand of indie-rock. And "Slow Show" is particularly compelling, smoothly churning build-up and poetically intoned piano-accented extended outro alike ("you know I dreamed about you ...").

42. Elevator Love Letter - Stars (Heart, 2003)
It's a simple little thing, really, a trilling Stars-style boy/girl indie electro-pop tune, but what can I say, it's lovely. Nothing else to say, I guess; or, as the band puts it with one of those delicious delicate slices of disaffectedness, "my heels are high, my eyes cast low..." - or something like that ... I was at a house party a while back, and I couldn't really hear the music from where I was standing - but for a while, the beginning of every song which played on the stereo sounded as if it was this one. -30/4/06, 25/12/06

43. On The Beach - Neil Young (On The Beach, 1974)
Both specific and universal, I think of this song a lot. (Last time - #50)

44. "Heroes" - David Bowie ("Heroes", 1977)
Surging, searching and exultant, and powerfully romantic, this is the real thing. (Last time - #49)

45. Ride The Wind To Me - Julie Miller (Broken Things, 1999)
There aren't really words for how this brightly, wistfully yearning song makes me feel. (Last time - #54)

46. What You Said - Laura Cantrell (Humming by the Flowered Vine, 2005)
A little bit country, a little bit folk, a little bit pop - and, on this one, with a distinct bluegrass tinge and a melody that neither starts from nor goes where you expect it to but feels exactly right nonetheless.

47. Roads - Portishead (Dummy, 1994)
These kinds of recollections are always unreliable, but as I remember it, this was the first song, way back when, that made me realise that slow, sad-sounding music sung by girls could make me feel something as intensely as guitary alternative rock. But whether or not that's a true memory, "Roads" is amazing - shivering and heartbroken, Gibbons' astonishingly evocative voice drifting above it all.

48. I Know I Know I Know - Tegan and Sara (So Jealous, 2004)
So, so sweet. (Last time - #96)

49. Last Goodbye - Jeff Buckley (Grace, 1994)
Even the way this song begins makes me feel something in my chest. One for the ages.

50. Bloodbuzz Ohio - The National (High Violet, 2010)
[A]ll velvety morose sweep - Dec 2010
You can't but be carried along by this one. 

51. The Ship Song - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (The Good Son, 1990)
Velvety, romantic, deep - a song to be wrapped up in. (Last time - #44)

52. Judy and the Dream of Horses - Belle and Sebastian (If You're Feeling Sinister, 1996)
One of those Belle and Sebastian numbers that finds the poetry and the truth in the small things of contemporary life and winds up becoming something far grander than its subtlety would suggest.

53. Utopia - Goldfrapp (Felt Mountain, 2000)
A lushly, grandly sweeping electro swooner, still utterly modern-sounding. (Last time - #75)

54. Right In Time - Lucinda Williams (Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, 1998)
It's just, you know, one of those songs. (Last time - #40)

55. There Is An End - The Greenhornes (featuring Holly Golightly) (Dual Mono, 2002 - but more importantly the opening and closing credits song to Broken Flowers)
"There Is An End" always had an air of timelessness, like it could've dropped in from almost any time in the last few decades, and so it's not surprising that its low-key blues-inflected rock and roll tones continue to ring down the years, like the echoes of times gone past. (Last time - #72)

56. Out Loud - Mindy Smith (Long Island Shores, 2006)
[I]rresistible in its delicacy and pull ... builds pleasantly for a couple of minutes to the unexpected hook on "Ain't it time we need to change -" and then swirls home on the rush provided by that giddy upsurging wave of sweetness - 10/7/07, Dec 07

57. Daisy Glaze - Big Star (Radio City, 1974)
Brilliant. (Last time - #61)

58. Kaifuku Suru Kizu - Salyu (All About Lily Chou-Chou soundtrack, 2001 / Kill Bill vol 1 soundtrack)
Absolutely devastating.

59. Shark Fin Blues - The Drones (Wait Long By The River And The Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By, 2005)
Epic, bluesy, roaring garage-tinged rock.

60. Top of the World - Dixie Chicks (Home, 2002)
One of those ones where if I'd heard the Patty Griffin version first - Griffin actually having written it, no less - then it likely would've been that one that I took most to heart ... but instead it was the Dixie Chicks' take on this almost unbearably sad country ballad that hooked me, and which is now an indelible part of my musical landscape.

61. Return of the Grievous Angel - Gram Parsons (Grievous Angel, 1974)
Twenty thousand roads I went down, down, down ... these musical trails I've walked these last few years, Gram and Emmylou they largely blazed them. "Return of the Grievous Angel" is a joy, rambling conversationally along with a twang and a lilt - and those harmonies. Call it rock or country or folk or what have you - cosmic american music indeed.

62. Dr Strangeluv - Blonde Redhead (23, 2007)
There's something heightened about "Dr Strangeluv", Kazu Makino's always fraught vocals - yowls and coos - drifting and cutting in and out of a weave that takes in dream-pop, shoegaze, indie-rock to reach a kind of alienated modern soulfulness, all spinning texturality, throwing off lights.

63. Uninvited - Alanis Morissette (City of Angels soundtrack, 1998)
Hugely dramatic, stirringly emotive piano ballad. Gets under your skin and stays there.

64. Cornflake Girl - Tori Amos (Under the Pink, 1994)
I loved Tori for a time, knew her records inside out, puzzled over her lyrics, believed in her visionariness, all that. These days I more feel a kind of distant fondness for her, and for the teenage me who took her so unquestioningly to heart, but in fact particularly with the perspective of time, the curiouser and curiouser genius of "Cornflake Girl" can't be denied, naff whistling, "you bet your life it is" chorus, awesome piano solo bridge and all. (Last time - #85)

65. Hopeless - The Wrens (The Meadowlands, 2003)
Like all the best power-pop, drivingly, muscularly chime-y and melodic, with the kind of guitars that you feel while listening to them could make any song better. Every section of "Hopeless" builds naturally to the next; it all fits together, right up to the cathartic "oh yeah"s and piano strikes that bring it home.

66. I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself - The Earthmen (To Hal and Bacharach, 1998)
Bacharach is always a good start, and "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself" is one of his finest moments besides, but nonetheless there's something a bit miraculous about what the Earthmen concocted with this version, layers of vocals and horns sweetly overlapping and cascading around each other, all the way to the heavenly, crescendo-ing ending.

67. Hoppipolla - Sigur Ros (Takk, 2005)
Just try to not have an emotional response to this one.

68. Good Woman - Cat Power (You Are Free, 2003)
As good as she is at this kind of vividly, melodically mournful moment, once in a while the enigmatic Chan really outdoes herself. (Last time - #84)

69. Cortez the Killer - Neil Young (Zuma, 1975)
A touchstone in so many ways, but for the epically unfurling guitars especially.

70. Via Chicago - Wilco (Summerteeth, 1999)
The unarguable centrepiece of their best album, "Via Chicago" is modern americana rock par excellence.

71. Venus in Furs - The Velvet Underground (The Velvet Underground & Nico, 1969)
After years of listening to it, I still don't feel as if I've grasped this one - not even close. (Last time - #4)

72. Try Whistling This - Neil Finn (Try Whistling This, 1998)
For all of the magic wrought by Crowded House, this is Neil Finn's finest hour, a slow-building under the radar classic.

73. Breakaway - Kelly Clarkson (Breakaway, 2004)
[A] great pop song is a great pop song, and one way or another we’re all gonna empathise with it somehow - Dec 07

74. Glory Box - Portishead (Dummy, 1994)
Scratchy cinematic soulful night-time music. Dummy was so fashionable back in the day, but nearly two decades on, and it's endured - and this deep, deathless cut, still sounding like nothing else, can drop me back into those brooding 90s days quicker than just about any other.

75. Save Me - Aimee Mann (Magnolia soundtrack, 1999 / Bachelor No 2 or, The Last Remains of the Dodo, 2000)
Hard not to take this one to heart. (Last time - #41)

76. Portions for Foxes - Rilo Kiley (More Adventurous, 2004)
Shiny indie poptastic wonderfulness, and how's this for an opening lyrical flurry: "Blood in my mouth cause I've been biting my tongue all week/ I keep on talking trash but I never say anything/ And the talking leads to touching/ and the touching leads to sex/ and then there is no mystery left/ and it's bad news ... " - 14/1/06

77. Lucky - Radiohead (OK Computer, 1997)
Ahhh. (Last time - #35)

78. What's The Frequency, Kenneth? - R.E.M. (Monster, 1994)
Ringing, reverb-y, resonant alt-rock.

79. Fake Empire - The National (Boxer, 2007)
[A] downbeat anthem ... at once totally contemporary chamber-pop influenced indie rock and classicist synthesis of the several pop music strands to be heard wrapped up in its sound ... [It's] about America. It’s moody. And awesome. - 1/9/08, Dec 08

80. Heaven Or Las Vegas - Cocteau Twins (Heaven Or Las Vegas, 1990)
Swirling ascendant into the sky - dream-pop with emphasis on both elements, the dream and the pop. (Last time - #42)

81. Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels) - The Arcade Fire (Funeral, 2005) 
Total Indie Orchestral Grandeur. (Last time - #58)

82. Us - Regina Spektor (Soviet Kitsch, 2004 / (500) Days of Summer soundtrack)
[S]ky-scrapingly dramatic, deeply personal-sounding - 11/11/09 

83. Kangaroo - Big Star (Third/Sister Lovers, 1978)
Halting and fractured, stumbling forward amidst ghostly layers of production noise and occasionally clanging percussion, and all borne on the kind of sweet, tender melody that belongs on a lost classic, which is just what this is.

84. The State I Am In - Belle and Sebastian (Tigermilk, 1996)
It's possible, just, to imagine a world where this song gets played all the time on fm radio and whole generations know and more or less love it, like maybe "Bohemian Rhapsody" in this one...a better world, a beautiful dream. (Last time - #39)

85. Breakfast in Bed - Dusty Springfield (Dusty in Memphis, 1969)
Talk about soul. (Last time - #65)

86. Wichita Lineman - The Clouds (Favourites, 1999)
Combines three of my favourite things in fuzzily distorted guitars, airy girl vocals and a yearning melody (albeit obviously pinched from Glen Campbell) and puts them together in a woozy, bewitching package.

87. Everlong - Foo Fighters (The Colour and the Shape, 1997)
It stands in its own, sheerly, massively anthemic right, but I also suspect that it taps into some more or less subliminal post-grunge aural zeitgeist, a modern rock sonic that we've all been primed to respond to and which "Everlong" completely nails. (Judging by recentish triple j hottest 100 countdowns, I'm a long way from the only one to've held on to this song.)

88. Talulah Gosh - Talulah Gosh (1986 single / Backwash)
The whole thing is a gem, but the moment that best encapsulates Talulah Gosh's theme song is the unobtrusive emphasis with which frontwoman Amelia Fletcher enunciates the key word in the line 'now she is a pop star'. The song just makes me think 'yay!', and so does the band. - 25/12/06

89. American Flag - Cat Power (Moon Pix, 1998)
A left-field classic. (Last time - #34)

90. Pearly-Dewdrops' Drops - Cocteau Twins (The Spangle Maker ep, 1984)
The title of the song and the ep that it's from probably tell you all you need to know. (Last time - #83) 

91. The Bleeding Heart Show - The New Pornographers (Twin Cinema, 2005)
[O]ne of the most sheerly irresistible songs I've ever heard, especially its ending - 15/3/10 

92. Goddess on a Hiway - Mercury Rev (Deserter's Songs, 1998) 
Piano rings it into an opening verse, the chorus hits, everything swirls up, it keeps going - the hiway might as well be the milky way, for the sound is galactic.

93. Let's Get Out Of This Country - Camera Obscura (Let's Get Out Of This Country, 2006)
Seeing them do this at a laneway festival one year, everything about this song was just exactly how I was feeling. 'Let's get out of this country' - the idea itself but also everything it stands for, and all wrapped up in this delightfully tripping slice of indie-pop.

94. This World Can Make You Happy - Amaya Laucirica (Early Summer, 2010)
[A]irily widescreen ... [reminds me of] every girl I've ever been involved with - 13/2/11, Dec 2011 

95. Hey, Snow White - The New Pornographers (Dark Was The Night, 2009)
The New Pornographers specialise in soaring, left of centre anthems - killer bridges and hooks, great dynamics and build-ups, brilliant use-of-voice-and-harmonies-as-instrument - and this has all of the above and then some, with the inclusion of some awesome guitar to drive it home. 

96. Consequence - The Notwist (Neon Golden, 2002)
Continues to resonate; if anything, it makes ever more sense. (Last time - #60)

97. Hands - Ms John Soda (Notes and the Like, 2006)
In one way, this kind of electro-indie-pop is a dime a dozen, but, looked at another way, that makes it all the more remarkable that "Hands" has so hooked me, and over all this time, smoothly, slippingly, elegantly varying.

98. Simple Things - Belle and Sebastian (The Boy With The Arab Strap, 1998)
Breezily, quietly sad. (Last time - #90) 

99. Opus 40 - Mercury Rev (Deserter's Songs, 1998)
This one's like a dream. 

100. Spectacular Views - Rilo Kiley (The Execution of All Things, 2002)
Opens at full tilt and goes up from there, Jenny Lewis hollering for all she's worth over the top of a huge, climbing piece of anthemic indie-rock verse-chorus-verse - she makes you believe, like she ecstatically spits out, it's so fucking beautiful.

101. Hobart Paving - Saint Etienne (So Tough, 1993)
I can't think of a more tender song than this one.

102. Seal My Fate - Belly (King, 1995)
Giddily joyous. (Last time - #25)

103. Modern Love - The Last Town Chorus (Wire Waltz, 2006)
[B]ecause sometimes, mournful Bowie covers is where it’s totally at. - Dec 08
This song was wonderful even at the time, plaintive and plangent, but it's acquired some real meaning for me over the years, so much so that it's hard to listen to. But it's glorious anyway.

104. Where Is My Mind? - Pixies (Surfer Rosa, 1988)
Like something sharp lodged in your cereal, but way more fun. (Last time - #52)

105. The Way We Get By - Spoon (Kill the Moonlight, 2002)
The first Spoon song I ever heard, and still my favourite, Britt Daniel and this awesomely tight yet casual feeling band selling a memorably catchy indie-rock ditty filled with almost-sequiturs - we rarely practise discern indeed, a new kind of dance in a magazine.

106. Fall At Your Feet - Clare Bowditch (She Will Have Her Way, 2005)
A lovely, spectral reading which somehow improves on the original. 

107. Ohio Clouds - Laura Veirs (Troubled By The Fire, 2003)
I remember first hearing this song glimmering on the radio and being caught by the almost childlike simplicity, the prettiness of the melody. In retrospect, this song may well have been the first real gust of breeze nudging me towards the folk, country, etc that eventually washed over me altogether.

108. Nude As The News - Cat Power (What Would The Community Think, 1996)
"Backhand - reversible roles - I know there's someone..." (Last time - #43)

109. Hot Burrito #1 - The Flying Burrito Brothers (The Gilded Palace of Sin, 1969)
A great song, and Gram Parsons sings it so sweetly. Man had soul.

110. Indifferente - Effetto Doppler (Indifferenticieli, 2003)
A monumental rocker, with a bit of a psychedelic edge and some serious power chordage. The fact that it's all in Italian also helps in imagining it as the soundtrack to some end of the world sci-fi western.

111. Godspell - The Cardigans (Super Extra Gravity, 2005)
[A] rush of a melody, hooks both expected and unanticipated, lyrics at once coy and direct, meaningful and obscure, that stick in the mind, delicious guitar jangle, ring and shear, Nina Persson's marvellous voice. - 2/8/08

112. Nothing Compares 2 U - Sinead O'Connor (I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, 1990)
It's in the combination of the chilly, glacial surface and the desperation and feeling just beneath.

113. Testament To Youth In Verse - The New Pornographers (Electric Version, 2003)
The first half is relatively straight up modern power pop, plenty engaging and likeable - but, once the whole thing is done, only really hinting at the greatness that comes with the back end, when Newman, Bejar, Case et al first dial it down and then build it back up as they throw everything into the mix in an amazing kind of harmonised multi-tempo vocal round that does sound, yes, just like the bells ringing "no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no...".

114. Downtown Train - Tom Waits (Rain Dogs, 1985)
It starts chimingly, and as old Tom gruffly chuggs his way through this one, that initial brightness runs alongside too. What a treat.

115. Body's in Trouble - Mary Margaret O'Hara (Miss America, 1988)
[S]tately folk/country-tinged low-key rockism - 21/4/07

116. Green Gloves - The National (Boxer, 2007)
[A] dark, velvet heart ... mysterious, subterranean - 1/9/08

117. The Passenger - Iggie Pop (Lust for Life, 1977)
Bowie's backing vocals over the chorus are the cherry on top, but really this one's just all good, filled with a mordant richness.

118. Shivers - Boys Next Door (Door, Door, 1979)
As with quite a few other songs like this, it has receded some over the years, but I can't imagine it ever really going away. (Last time - #16)

119. Wide Open Road - The Triffids (Born Sandy Devotional, 1986)
Epitomises a certain dream of Australia that we all have within us. (Last time - #93)

120. Recovery - New Buffalo (The Last Beautiful Day, 2004)
[A]ll handclaps and sighs and poignant keys - 17/2/05
This song is wonderful full stop, but it gains even more from the way that the artist behind it, now recording under her given name of Sally Seltmann, has just kept on going, and - to my surprise - become a touchstone for me, especially in how I think about this great city Melbourne.

121. Mimi on the Beach - Jane Siberry (No Borders Here, 1984)
Quel art-pop! (Last time - #79)

122. I Need Love - Sam Phillips (Martinis and Bikinis, 1994 - but I first knew it from the Stealing Beauty soundtrack)
[A] brightly yearnful, jangly, slightly country modern pop tune - 2/6/12
[S]omewhere along the line the Stealing Beauty soundtrack became a bit of a key record for me, carrying a great deal of emotional/affective freight (dreamy, airy, a bit melancholy but also very light - about exactly what you'd expect, given the music) - 21/4/07 
And "I Need Love" is the closing track on that soundtrack, which Phillips sings in a way completely believable.

123. Carolyn's Fingers - Cocteau Twins (Blue Bell Knoll, 1988)
[S]heerly thrilling ... one of the most immediate and immediately great that they ever laid down - 11/5/09
I always do think that this whole record really does sound like bells, and the ringing trills and cascading synthesiser waves of "Carolyn's Fingers" never fail to draw me in, and to remind me why the Cocteau Twins were my favourite band for so long, and why I still so love them.

124. Blue Thunder - Galaxie 500 (On Fire, 1989)
I'm not so completely raw-nerve wired to respond to this kind of thing nowadays, but nor have I completely shaken it off... (Last time - #11)

125. Relative Ways - And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead (Source Tags & Codes, 2002)
As crashingly, fierily undeniable a rock song as when it first burst out at us all those years ago; this, as raggedly declared by frontman Conrad Keely over a bed of just those electric guitars that he's singing about, is basically the song in a nutshell: "This electric guitar hanging to my knees / A couple of verses I can barely breathe".

126. Thursday - Asobi Seksu (Citrus, 2006)
Widescreen fm radio glory, shimmering and throwing out light in all directions the whole time and then catching fire outright as it hits its climax. ... post-millennial starstruck shoegazer sparkle ... exciting ... an immediate visceral rush ... the dazzle and surge of the record, its glorious coruscating swirls. ... skyscraping melodies wrapped in shoegazer thunder and light. - 25/12/06, 23/1/07

127. Marquee Moon - Television (Marquee Moon, 1977)
Best guitar song ever? (Last time - #46)

128. Long Shot - Aimee Mann (I'm With Stupid, 1995 / Live at St Ann's Warehouse, 2004)
It's the live version that I really love, mainly because it's so much more fleshed out by the band, the jaggedness of the guitars slashing through in particular. But either way it's the song itself, this beautifully observed, caustically self-lacerating thing, from indelible opening line all the way through to vivid end.

129. Nobody 'Cept You - 16 Horsepower (Secret South, 2000)
As powerful and intense as this Dylan cover is, it's also a ballad and as sincere a love song as they come, the band's dramatic preacher-style Appalachianism welded with that romantic core into something pretty special.

130. Communication - The Cardigans (Long Gone Before Daylight, 2003)
A sweeping, heartfelt pleader from the Cardigans - very fine.

131. Goodbye - Emmylou Harris (Wrecking Ball, 1995)
On this song - a Steve Earle number, actually - it's like Harris found a new sweet spot between the highest points of her earlier output and this new, spacious, modern feel. "Goodbye" is the sound of travelling down highways, real and imagined, physical and metaphorical.

132. You May Know Him - Cat Power (Moon Pix, 1998)
I don't know what it is about Cat Power, it's like she's singing her secrets just for me.

133. Today - Smashing Pumpkins (Siamese Dream, 1993)
Oh yes. (Last time - #86)

134. Blue Bell Knoll - Cocteau Twins (Blue Bell Knoll, 1988)
With the Cocteau Twins, one can't help but grasp for images, however necessarily fanciful; in that spirit, this one sounds like the surface of a night-dark ocean as it meets land, stars reflected glittering within.

135. Deathly - Aimee Mann (Magnolia soundtrack, 1999 / Bachelor No 2 or, The Last Remains of the Dodo, 2000)
All of the Mann signature elements are here, and this song's all round great, but the wailing guitars, halfway through and then at the end, picking up on and releasing everything that leads up to and around them, are the highlight.

136. Kare Kare - Crowded House (Together Alone, 1993 - though I think of it as part of the Two Hands soundtrack)
This song maybe isn't one of their most obvious, but there's something about it that gets me, a sense of being carried along in some nameless, almost dreamlike state.

137. Black Cab - Jens Lekman (Maple Leaves ep, 1993 / Oh You're So Silent Jens)
The tuneful/morose thing has been done to death, of course, but rarely in such perfect style as here - this is close to the ultimate example of its type ... . It makes you want to sing along from the dainty electric piano that rings the song in and its first words ("Oh no goddamn, I missed the last tram") - and I do - not just because it's so catchy, but also because the sentiments it expresses are so delightfully downcast and on the money; I'd quote more from it but every line is so exactly right, particularly when poor Jens sings it in that sonorous groan of his - 30/4/06

138. In State - Kathleen Edwards (Back To Me, 2005)
Golden summery country-rock, of course touched with the right amount of wistfulness (which is almost a tautology anyway, summer and wistfulness somehow going hand in hand).

139. Back to Black - Amy Winehouse (Back to Black, 2006)
A flat out modern classic, dramatic and human.

140. Ocean Liner - The Lighthouse Keepers (1984 single - but collected in multiple places)
[A song] for which the word 'charming' could practically have been invented ... - 25/3/12
Cute Australian indie-pop that gets under your skin without your realising it. I can never find the words to explain why this one's just so appealing.

141. The Ballad of El Goodo - Big Star (#1 Record, 1972)
"Hold on..."

142. Strong Enough - Sheryl Crow (Tuesday Night Music Club, 1994) 
Another one of those melancholy 90s pop-rock tunes, but one that's always been there for me.

143. Charlotte Sometimes - The Cure (1981 single - for me, one of many discoveries on Staring at the Sea)
You can see the connections to the rest of their work, but "Charlotte Sometimes" also stands a bit apart in the Cure's long line of great singles. It's one of those songs that reminds you of the mysterious alchemy that can make a pop song great, the song itself thoroughly mysterious, as is the way it wraps you up and takes you into its own shadowy world.

144. Aeroplane - The Everybodyfields (Nothing Is Okay, 2007) 
Four bars of strummed guitar, then come the fiddles and steel string, a yearning male vocalist ... joined soon by plangent female harmonies ... 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. - 20/10/12

145. Fall At Your Feet - Crowded House (Woodface, 1991 - plus of course Recurring Dream)
As with so many Crowded House songs, I've always just taken this one to heart.

146. The Sound of Silence - Simon & Garfunkel (Sounds of Silence, 1966)
This is such a heavy song, but so full of light at the same time.

147. Even Though I'm A Woman - Seeker Lover Keeper (Seeker Lover Keeper, 2011)
To me, 2011 sounds like this song, and it's lingered, the mid tempo up and back again lope of the tune matching the lyrics of relationship and disconnection, Holly Throsby doing justice to this Sally Seltmann-penned folkish pop gem, Sarah Blasko's presence in the background.

148. To A Poet - First Aid Kit (The Lion's Roar, 2012)
[D]reamy, meandering ... starts with some pretty 'oooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-oooh'-ing and Joni Mitchell-esque verse trilling, and also shares with Joni (at her best) a captivating compellingness that coexists with the sense that the wending tune is almost being made up as it goes along ... - 26/3/12

149. Burgundy Shoes - Patty Griffin (Children Running Through, 2007) 
In a songbook filled with gorgeously pretty songs, "Burgundy Shoes" may be Griffin's prettiest. When she rises on that first "sun", it feels like the sun itself is coming out.

150. Bells Ring - Mazzy Star (So Tonight That I Might See, 1993)
Hope Sandoval airily breathing indescipherable words while layers of guitar sweetly drone - lovely.

151. Wuthering Heights - Kate Bush (The Kick Inside, 1978)
What a delirious, delicious, great song - where did this come from?! And all the more amazing to realise that it was released 35 years ago. (Last time - #76)

152. There Is A Light That Never Goes Out - The Smiths (The Queen Is Dead, 1986)
Majestic. (Last time - #32)

153. Red Vines - Aimee Mann (Bachelor No 2 or, The Last Remains of the Dodo, 2000)
Clear-eyed, cutting, sympathetic. Glorious melody too.

154. What I Thought Of You - Holly Throsby (Team, 2011)
Downbeat, late afternoon murmurs - feels very Australian to me, and indeed for me this song is all wrapped up with the tail end of 2011, falling into summer, my feelings all in a knot.

155. Losing My Religion - R.E.M. (Out of Time, 1991)
Despite the complete radio ubiquity, genuinely great. (In much more detail: Last time - #7)

156. Rebellion (Lies) - The Arcade Fire (Funeral, 2005)
There's something endlessly exciting and inviting about this one. (Last time - #66) 

157. She Sends Kisses - The Wrens (The Meadowlands, 2003)
I guess a lot of bands have one song kind of like this one - the big, build-to-a-showstopping-climax anthem. But "She Sends Kisses" is what they're all aiming for, something that touches the heart while dragging the listener along in its wake as it does build, getting bigger, louder and deeper at every turn, all six minutes' worth of raw-voiced guitary glory.

158. Colors And The Kids - Cat Power (Moon Pix, 1998)
Has such a clarity that you can practically feel the sadness, held within and coming through in waves. (Last time - #69)

159. Monkey Gone To Heaven - Pixies (Doolittle, 1989)
How do they do it, sound so unhinged while putting together such brilliantly constructed songs? An alt-pop anthem for the ages.

160. King of Carrot Flowers Part 1 - Neutral Milk Hotel (In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, 1998)
Simple, captivating, intriguing.

161. Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us - Robert Plant & Alison Krauss (Raising Sand, 2007)
Mysterious, graceful, seemingly somehow unattached to the earthly, Krauss's silvery tones floating ethereally, counterpointed by hauntingly slow plucked banjo over a dusty bed of thudding percussion, ghostly fiddle and Plant's sighed backing vocals. One of those almost sui generis, perfectly formed songs that seems to exist entirely in its own space.

162. Like A Rolling Stone - Bob Dylan (Highway 61 Revisited, 1965)
A pivotal song for me, for so many others, probably for pop music full stop. Echoes down the years. (Last time - #17)

163. Steal Your Love - Lucinda Williams (Essence, 2001)
Constantly building and never quite resolving, unless you count the lovely little guitar textures that swim upwards together at the end - just one long yearn.

164. Musette and Drums - Cocteau Twins (Head Over Heels, 1983)
A perfect storm. (Last time - #55)

165. Bottle Up and Explode! - Elliott Smith (XO, 1998) 
What makes this one so great is the way that it wraps Smith's ever-present sadness up in a relatively upbeat, fluid package, bursting out - exploding - a bit over halfway through with that surging electric guitar line, cresting to a close.

166. Bigmouth Strikes Again - The Smiths (The Queen Is Dead, 1986)
"Bigmouth Strikes Again" is in many ways the Smiths song, exemplifying all of their best qualities and  capturing that instantly recognisable sound. I liked this one from the outset, discovering Morrissey and Marr & co during my teenage years, and it's held its appeal ever since.

167. Lover, You Should've Come Over - Jeff Buckley (Grace, 1994)
Pure longing. Buckley's greatness only becomes clearer with the passage of time.

168. If It Makes You Happy - Sheryl Crow (Sheryl Crow, 1996)
One that's right in the sweet spot for me. (See also)

169. I Don't Ever Give Up - Patty Griffin (Children Running Through, 2007)
At once sparse and full, swelling with feeling - running and reaching, then soaring.

170. Amorino - Isobel Campbell (Amorino, 2003)
So very plaintive and wistful. Music for solitary autumn afternoons and memories of loves lost.

171. 14th Street - Laura Cantrell (Humming by the Flowered Vine, 2005)
Unutterably sweet, entirely winsome. Walking down 14th Street in NYC myself while listening to this song is one of those little memories that I cherish.

172. Dreams - The Cranberries (Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We?, 1993)
A surging, unstoppable rush - one of those songs that defines the 90s. The appearance-by-cover in Chungking Express doesn't hurt either.

173. Mexico City - Jolie Holland (The Living and the Dead, 2008)
[T]here's something at once golden and shadowy about it that makes me think of long summer days - 15/3/10
At heart this is a pretty simple song - a sprightly country-rock number. But Holland's unique, glorious phrasing sells it and makes it so much more, something golden-hued and sun-edged that goes straight in at the spine and the chest.

174. Midnight Singer - Laura Veirs (Troubled By The Fire, 2003)
Still twinkling, ever-glistening. (Last time - #67) 

175. How Soon Is Now? - The Smiths ("William, It Was Really Nothing" single - 1984)
I really did say everything I needed to about this one before: Last time - #80.

176. There She Goes - The La's (The La's, 1990)
In its unassuming way, a perfect pop song.

177. These Days - Powderfinger (Two Hands soundtrack, 1999)
There are 'favourite' songs, and then there are those that, regardless of how much you feel that you may 'like' them nowadays, will always carry an immense emotional heft; there was a time when "These Days" meant so much to me.

178. Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon - Urge Overkill (Stull ep, 1992 / Pulp Fiction soundtrack) 
My feelings about this one owe a lot to the associations. I saw Pulp Fiction early, and one of the strongest images it left me with, only half-grasped, was the unattainable promise and allure of Uma Thurmann's appearance and the wistfulness of it all (before she o.d.s, that is), and this song still evokes that feeling.

179. Say Something New - The Concretes (The Concretes, 2004)
Urgent, clangorous, warm indie-pop that has just stuck with me.

180. Waltz #2 (XO) - Elliott Smith (XO, 1998)
Waltz timing be damned, this is a classicist pop song through and through, wonderfully constructed and memorably resigned. There was a pretty long gap between when this was on the radio, and years later when I really rediscovered it - but it was the kind of rediscovery that wasn't actually any kind of surprise, because really, it never went away.

181. Love Vigilantes - Laura Cantrell (Trains and Boats and Planes, 2008)
A thoroughly excellent New Order cover, all elegant lilt and melancholy; as usual, Laura Cantrell too lovely for words.

182. Give Him A Great Big Kiss - The Shangri-Las (1964 single, but came to me through the brilliant Myrmidons of Melodrama compilation)
Just a blast, from the declaratory opening lines - "When I say I'm in love, you best believe I'm in love, l-u-v" - and everything that's great about the Shangri-Las in a two minute burst of girl group melody, harmonies, spoken word interludes, tough-girl attitude and miniature symphonic drama.

183. Fake Plastic Trees - Radiohead (The Bends, 1995)
One of those songs that, even though it's receded a bit for me over the years, remains buried so, so deep. (Last time - #78) 

184. With Every Heartbeat - Robyn (Robyn, 2007)
Pulsatingly exciting and excitingly human, this is electro-pop with soul. 

185. My Baby - Janis Joplin (Pearl, 1971)
Janis Joplin is amazing, and "My Baby" is one of her most straight ahead, sky-scrapingly triumphant moments. 

186. Si Tu Disais - Francoiz Breut (Vingt a trente mille jours, 2000)
[A]s lushly romantic as pop music gets ... - 26/5/06
If you've ever had a rainy French movie dream, then you know what this song sounds like, swirling strings, evocative vocals and all. For me, I think it helps that my schoolboy French is enough to pick up fragments of the lyrics while the whole remains basically mysterious. 

187. Your Love Alone Is Not Enough - Manic Street Preachers (featuring Nina Persson) (Send Away the Tigers, 2007)
An impeccably artlessly constructed windswept anthem, sounding like it's coming from the top of a mountain, two of the most charismatically urgent and dramatic singers of our time, the Manics' James Dean Bradfield and the Cardigans' Nina Persson, dueting in a match made in heaven, their voices meshing perfectly with the sweeping guitar lines and all-round epic air of the thing. 

189. Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've) - The Buzzcocks (Love Bites, 1978)
Brilliant slice of melodically punky pop. Many have tried and so few succeeded at getting even close to the combination of wide-eyed sweetness and jagged edge that this song nails.

189. Distant Sun - Crowded House (Together Alone, 1993 - though, like most people my age, I suspect, I know and love it from Recurring Dream)
One of those songs that feels like it's always been there and has just never gone away - timeless pop, at once happy and sad, with plenty of the glorious Crowded House moments.

190. Debaser - Pixies (Doolittle, 1989)
Really, what can you say about this song? Like so many Pixies cuts, sheer genius.

191. Not The Tremblin' Kind - Laura Cantrell (Not The Tremblin' Kind, 2000) 
... there's something inexpressibly delightful about the music she makes, done with a simplicity, warmth and sweetness which is pretty much irresistible. Take the title track and album opener, say - it drops in so unassumingly, all plinking guitar lines and deceptively casual-sounding singing, throws in a few graceful harmonies on the bridge (or is it a chorus? Whichever it is, love the way her voice wavers and reaches on that first "it's alright"...), then drops back to up-and-down repetitions of the verse and an instrumental break which is basically the guitar restating the main theme over again, follows it up with one more iteration of the bridge, then more repetition of the verse...and then it's over and, me at least, well, I'm charmed anew. - 30/3/06
The first song on her first album, and the first of hers that I heard, and everything that you need to know about why Cantrell is so great is right here.

192. Some Kind Of Bliss - Kylie Minogue (Impossible Princess, 1998)
One of those slices of late 90s rock-pop wistfulness for which I have such a pronounced soft spot - it sounds like being swept away, just as the title promises.

193. Candy Says - The Velvet Underground (The Velvet Underground, 1969)
So gentle, so lovely. I don't know why, but the first appearance of the line about watching bluebirds fly gets me every time.

194. Fleur De Saison - Emilie Simon (The Flower Book, 2006)
It's hard to intellectualise why this song is so good beyond just throwing up my hands and exclaiming about how cool it is! Another one in French, and this one I suspect probably wouldn't make any sense even if I did understand the words, but really it's all about the giddy stompy electro-rockist thrill of the thing, not least its offhanded marrying of sharp pop sensibility with genuine strangeness.

195. These Are Days - 10,000 Maniacs (Our Time in Eden, 1992)
Natalie Merchant and the gang in joyous, throw your arms around the world, top of their game form. The folk accents are there, but really this is pretty close to out and out jangling guitar pop, and good with it.

196. Why Should I Love You? - Mike Scott (Come Again compilation, 1997)
You never really know which songs are going to stay with you, but this one would have to be particularly surprising; I enjoyed this EMI compilation (which also included Foo Fighters' "Baker Street" and a host of other treats) plenty at the time, but it was only over years of very intermittent listening that this Kate Bush cover emerged as a favourite of mine. I still don't know quite what it is; as the lyric almost goes, there's just something about it. I find it in my head all the time.

197. See The Sky About To Rain - Neil Young (On The Beach, 1974)
This song sounds just like its title. One of the highlights from what's almost certainly Young's best album, it gets better with age.

198. Tightly - Neko Case (Blacklisted, 2002)
Haunted and imbued with a country soul while holding within itself all kinds of americana-type influences, "Tightly" is in some ways the purest distillation of what Neko Case is about. Little wonder that it's a gem.

199. Maps - Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Fever to Tell, 2003)
A truly epic love song. (Last time - #74)

200. Girls - Death in Vegas (Lost in Translation soundtrack, 2003)
Actually kind of insubstantial, but in a nocturnal, gauzily pretty way that's simply perfect in that oh so moody fashion.

* * *

Edit: In the spirit of clean-up, just gone through and deleted all the entries (10 or 20 at a time) leading up to this top 200. In the spirit of archiving, the associated comments:

3/7/13 (A new project: 200 favourite songs - #181-200): Partly as procrastination from the writing - stalling for all the old reasons - I've been trying to figure my current 200 favourite songs ('of all time') and thought I'd write about them. Many of these were in the reckoning the last time I did something like this, back in '06 - my tastes have shifted a bit over that time, but a lot of my personal canon was already well and truly set by then - so where I feel I've already said all I need to about a particular song, I guess there will be cross-linking and/or self-quoting.
But anyway, throat-clearing done, the first 20 by way of 'countdown', of the 200 songs that I most unreservedly love: ...

8/7/13 (#81-100): Really tearing through these!

10/7/13 (#51-60): So anyway, going by tens from now on seems like a good idea.

11/7/13 (#41-50): Well, obviously I love, love all of the songs on this list. But at this point - last 50 - it really is the pointy end, my favourite favourites, touchstones all. (Another aside - for all of the unfortunate qualities of my current introversion, it does feel good to be at home at night, the Ashes muted on tv, a bottle of red wine, music that I love on headphones.) So here we go...

21/7/13 (#1-10): The end!

"This is Beautiful" (The Public Studio @ Malthouse)

A video/performance piece - three screens, three performers on stage. Dialogue, often overlapping, questioning the nature of beauty and a range of associated conceits. Personally, I wasn't convinced by this one.

(w/ Meribah and Trang)

Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove

The first thing to say about Vampires in the Lemon Grove, a collection of imaginatively fabulistic short stories, is that it interests me - the stories themselves and in particular Russell's writing, which is cleanly modern (in the sense of being contemporary) and at the same time enlivened by a distinctive personality...she's an excellent user of language and prose, adept with meaning and effect.

The high concepts of the stories are uniformly interesting - reformed vampires take refuge in an Italian lemon grove whose fruits partly assuage their thirst for blood, the female workers in a Meiji era factory gradually transform into human-silkworm hybrids with coloured silk bursting from their bodies when immersed in hot water, dead US presidents find themselves reincarnated in the bodies of horses in a barn somewhere in rural America, settlers share a single glass window amongst themselves in vain hope of becoming landowners in their own right while eking out a hardscrabble existence on an unforgiving plain (this last arguably the only out and out horror story in the set and certainly the one that most unsettled me). I didn't find them wholly satisfying - there's something just a bit elusive about them, a bit of a will o the wisp quality that left me feeling like I hadn't entirely grasped them - but, nonetheless, intriguing.

"The Audience"

A National Theatre Live screening at the Nova. Helen Mirren as Elizabeth II, in a non-chronological series of imagined private conversations with eight of her 12 Prime Ministers, including her first (Churchill) and most recent and current (Cameron), impressively - from an actorly point of view - spanning some 61 years. (The others being Anthony Eden, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Gordon Brown. It's rather (and necessarily) broad in its characterisations (veering close to caricature), and to be honest at times in the acting (the cast is great, but the close-up rendition on screen of what is, after all, stage acting, is sometimes unkind given the important differences between screen and stage) - but interesting and enjoyable, and sympathetic to all of the figures it presents, most notably the Queen herself.

(w/ Sunny)

DL - Porn 2.0

So it had been a long time since I'd seen or heard from DL, but he wound up back in Melbourne maybe a year or so back and we've caught up a couple of times since. Turns out that he's been working on the writing in the intervening years, and this is the one he picked to send me to read: "A novella about social media, technology and the end of sex". Pretty enjoyable, and what the description says - an imagining of a future where rampant sexualisation (and its dissemination via the internet and social media) has resulted in a generation with no interest in sex and which in fact reacts with revulsion to people who would today be considered beautiful.

"Lord of the Flies" (US-A-UM @ Malthouse)

Lord of the Flies is one of the great myths to have emerged from the 20th century, claims the director's notes, and it's an intuitively attractive idea ... it certainly sank in for me when I read it for high school English - Ralph, Jack, Piggy, Simon, the conch, 'the beast', the whole powerful set of images and themes. And this production attempts to interrogate both that myth, and notions of gender (and gender politics) that underpin it, by flipping it so that all of the protagonists are played by girls rather than boys (albeit retaining their names and nominal genders in dialogue) and staging the island through a progressively more disrupted, broken-apart domestic setting of wardrobes, chests of drawers, an armchair, a made-up double bed and so on.

Enjoyable though it was, it's left me a bit in two minds. There was a strong energy to it, including in the performances (though the cast as a whole was a bit uneven, the key performances were solid), and an intensity that served it well in highlighting the violence of the characters towards each other. And good use of the set, quite effectively - and at times inventively - drawing out the possibilities of the various permutations of furniture (often pulled apart and in pieces) and other, both as stand-in geography (e.g. the girls crawling under the bed to emerge on another part of the island) and as more or less subtextual reimagining of the setting itself in light of its quasi-relocation into this desert of the (feminine qua domestic) real.

On the flipside, though, I'm not sure how far the production actually succeeds in shedding light on those underlying questions pertaining to gender &c - while 'Lord of the Flies' works well when performed by women (girls), and I felt my own responses to it being conditioned by that gendering, ultimately it seems a very similar kind of story, suggesting that, as is perhaps assumed by Golding's original, the savagery depicted is after all universal. Still, regardless - perhaps partly because - of that, I feel like the images of the (female) actors who inhabited those familiar characters for a couple of hours last night in the Tower theatre have now been added, integrated, as facets of how I imagine the characters themselves, which is something in itself.

(w/ Meribah)

"Persona" (Malthouse)

This was really excellent - the best thing I've seen in quite a while, and I reckon one of the best handful that I've seen put on at the Malthouse down the years full stop (a few others that stand out: Eldorado, Woyzeck, a pair of Becketts - Happy Days and The End - Terminus, the Declan Greene pair of Moth and Pompeii, LA, last year's The Wild Duck). I haven't seen the Bergman film from which it was adapted, but it entirely works on its own terms - working with a core theme of identity (as performance and as permeable), and weaving that in around the forces that structure and drive us, including in relation to others, not least sex and death. It's an arresting production, the white curtained set framed and lit in a way that feels like being in someone's mind, and the whole starkly, fluidly dreamlike. Also, fantastic, committed performances from the two principals, Meredith Penman as Elizabeth and Karen Sibbing as Alba. I think it's going to be a hard one to stop thinking about.

(w/ Kai and Alice + Al's friend Bel)

Days of Heaven

Even having seen a couple of Malick's other films, The Thin Red Line and The New World, Days of Heaven - his second feature, from the 70s (but on at the Nova) - is startling. For me, it's driven by the visuals and the cinematography - the hazily pearlescent beauty of every shot - but it's all of a piece with the elliptical narrative and voice-over narration. It's a film that seems to both invite and resist a thematic reading; it's at the level of experience that it most strikes me.

Scarlett Thomas - Our Tragic Universe

Timely for me to finally read this one. I've worked out that it was about two years ago that things kind of ground to a halt for me on this front - that huge wave of enthusiasm about current literature and ideas slowed to a trickle, while my own writing came to a complete halt. And I think it must have been around that time that I first tried to read Our Tragic Universe, making it most of the way through but frankly not really enjoying it and bogging down completely near the end - which was all the more surprising, not to mention disappointing, given how brilliant PopCo and The End of Mr Y in particular were and Thomas's position at the time as my reigning literary crush.

Anyway, as I said, timely, seeing as I've finally been writing again these last few weeks, meaning that I'm ripe for a return to Thomas, whose writing has particularly struck me in the past because of the effect that she's able to achieve, at times with an air of the infraordinary, while not being shy of the extraordinary either. And timely because Our Tragic Universe is much preoccupied with the nature - and mechanics - of story and of literature (the universe is tragic, in at least once sense, to the extent that it may conform to, or be understandable in terms of, the structures of Greek tragedy).

Near the beginning, my heart sank when one of the characters describes a scene from Aristophane' play The Frogs: "Aeschylus proves that any of Euripides' clever but formulaic stories could be about someone losing a bottle of oil. The point seemed to be that every formulaic story starts with a conflict that's later resolved - like losing a bottle of oil and then finding it again." Because I realised that my own in-progress would, on one dimension, fit that description. But Our Tragic Universe turns out to be far from a simplistic condemnation of formula and conventional narrative and structure; rather, it develops into, while enacting, a treatment of the ways in which stories necessarily draw on certain structures without this foreclosing the possibility of something new and interesting being created. I found out recently that Thomas has put out a kind of 'how to' book for writers - a genre that I've never had any interest in, but would consider making an exception for in her case...though in some ways OTU itself serves that same function.

Anyway, as fiction - literature - I think it is more interesting than really outstanding, to be honest. It's always a bit problematic to make your central character a writer and then load up the novel with her (or him) having lots of thoughts and conversations about writing, even when - as here - it's in aid of a genuine intellectual exploration of the nature and possibilities of story-telling itself. The setting's deliberately mundane...but still mundane. And while there are a range of symbolic figures structuring the narrative - a Beast, a Labyrinth, a ship in a bottle, a prophecy - it has a tendency to feel a bit like an exercise, albeit a serious-mindedly literary one, more than literature itself as such.

Having said that, it clearly made me think and react, and if anything has deepened my regard for the author, even though I enjoyed it less than that great pair of PopCo and The End of Mr Y. Also, like The Unbearable Lightness of Being before it, it made me want to read Anna Karenina (a thought that I'd also had recently, thanks to that snowy train platform scene in The Grandmaster) - the one possible exception to my otherwise blanket ban on serious Russian novels.

World War Z

This was a lot better than you might've expected from the tidal wave of disappointment - or perhaps that was more expectation of disappointment - that has surrounded the film's release. Sure it's perhaps too obviously episodic in the way that it whisks Brad Pitt from location to interesting zombie-resistin' location, and no it's not a true zombie genre movie (like I care), but it's also genuinely tense and exciting, through to a somewhat more low-key and differently satisfying climax than the preceding full-tilt action would lead you to expect (involving a haggard looking Peter Capaldi aka Malcolm from The Thick of It no less). I hope they make a sequel.

(watched this one on my own, Sunday night, imax 3d - ah glamorous bachelor lifestyle)

Mud

Given how much I've always been annoyed by Matthew McConaughey, you wouldn't think that a film being promoted with a poster that just shows him glowering into the middle distance would particularly appeal. But the references in the Nova's weekly email digest to Stand by Me and Huckleberry Finn intrigued me - I'm drawn to coming of age films, and also to renditions of americana (another in this southern, Mississippi stream that recently struck me was the fantastic Beasts of the Southern Wild) - and Mud delivered. Beautifully shot, lingering on images of the river and its foliage and wildlife, as well as the human wreckage (and lives) surrounding it, and has an apt sense of mystery and ambiguity; while it relies on a classic final act crisis and resolution and is maybe just a tad neat in how all the pieces tie together, the ending is satisfying. McConaughey good (this plus Killer Joe forces a reappraisal), likewise everyone else, including the central child actors and the supporting adult cast, not least Reese Witherspoon (ubiquitous to the point that it might almost be surprising that she's an excellent actor) - though it must be said that women do not get a good run in this one.

(w/ David and Nenad)

Arrested Development 1-3

What a truly wonderful show, still richly layered and funny after umpteen watchings (most recently), this one being nominally in preparation for season 4.

Also, pleasingly: I already had a friend who reminds me of Maeby (Zoe) and knew someone else who I have considerably more respect for than the fact that he sometimes makes me think of Gob - still my favourite character - just a little bit suggests (JH - not Jarrod obviously!), but this time round Lindsay, in certain mannerisms, brought Penny to mind at times (who was totally into it when I told her last night).

Underground Lovers - Weekend

For all that their sound owes to several of the key streams flowing through 80s and 90s indie, there's always been something just a little out of time about the Underground Lovers, whether it be in the classicism of pop gems like "Losin' It" or the electronic/guitar vibes of cuts like "Your Eyes" and "Cold Feeling"; their latest - and first for some years - Weekend is no exception. Not especially exciting, but pretty nice.

The Great Gatsby

For the most part, Luhrmann's Gatsby is quite a literal adaptation of the Fitzgerald - which isn't to say that it's necessarily a completely faithful version. The literal-ness comes from the way that much of the overall thrust, and all of the main scenes, from the source text are transposed to screen, and often very much larger than life when it comes to key images - the green light and the all-seeing eyes being the most obvious.

It feels like a sincere attempt to render 'the book itself', which inevitably - given the different medium - involves directly presenting much that comes across more obliquely in Carraway's narration, for all of its apparent detail; unsurprisingly, Luhrmann highlights the spectacular and the dramatic elements of the story, which is mostly effective although sometimes distractingly unsubtle. On the point of 'faithfulness', though, there are a range of departures - from least to most significant, the framing device of Nick's writing the book while in a sanitarium, some narration near the beginning that I'm fairly sure is more overt than anything in the novel, a rendition of Nick's relationship with Jordan Baker that seems to completely omit a romantic element, and a suggestion that Daisy tried to call Gatsby at the very end (that last, small though it is, a fundamental departure).

Taken as a whole, while it was far from greatness so far as films and film adaptations go, I quite liked it; it had something of the original for me, and I think a certain quality in its own right. Also, for whatever reason, I'm not sure those famous final words - So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past - have struck home quite as much on any of my readings of the novel as they did up on screen this afternoon. So that's something.

(w/ Mehnaz)

Steven D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner - Freakonomics

Well, I can see why this was so popular - the discussion is extremely accessible, built as it is on readily intelligible data and a treatment of incentives that draws comfortably on the more 'behavioural' stream of economics (significantly increasing its intuitive appeal), and interesting both in approach and conclusions. It's the kind of book that invites contestation - and, eight years on, I would guess that its huge cultural impact has probably removed much of the novelty that its approach apparently had in the mass market on release - and the regression analysis on which the actual results for which it argues depend is, of course, not presented (and would've been opaque to me, like other lay readers, even had it been included), but having said all of that, nonetheless entertaining and thought-provoking and an interesting, and not clearly off the mark, perspective.

The Grandmaster

A martial arts movie by Wong Kar Wai, and easily the most straight-up genre piece he's done apart from As Tears Go By, from right back at the beginning of his spectacular career. Having said that, it certainly has his distinctive feel, with the allusive and metaphorical possibilities of the genre and its philosophical underpinnings coming richly to life through the film's characters and images. And, like all WKW films, The Grandmaster is preoccupied with the passage of time, piercingly and nostalgically backwards-looking, staging its variations on that theme, along with other familiar motifs of connection and disconnection, reflection and doubling, amidst the frequent fight scenes.

The most satisfying of those set pieces comes about two thirds of the way through, when Zhang Ziyi's (incidentally, a revelation - while she's always an ornament to any film she's in, here she turns in a truly great performance) character, Gong Er, confronts the renegade Ma San (Zhang Jin, who I don't think I've seen before) who had killed her father years (I think) earlier - the silk to his steel, as the narratorial voice of the legendary martial artist Ip Man (played by a weathered Tony Leung with a gravitas befitting both the character and the actor's own stature) had earlier described it. Many of the lush, beautiful settings of the film are only loosely tied to a naturalistic perspective - at times calling to mind that spectacular expressionistic overture to von Trier's Melancholia - but this one, probably the film's highlight, comes closest to pure fantasy, as the two adversaries face off against each other on a train platform as the snow comes down, a seemingly endless train racing by behind them.

The Grandmaster isn't perfect - most jarringly, the character and arc of the Razor (Chang Chen) is oddly undeveloped, and while the director's past form might lead us to expect a certain elliptical unresolvedness, the comparatively straightforward narrative progression of this one leaves the sub-plot feeling more like a loose end than a genuinely illuminating resonance. But all told, it's still rather wonderful - an immersive, involving, poetic film, painting from a vivid palette and anchored by an emotional core. Wong's one of my very favourite directors, and he doesn't disappoint here.

Buddy Miller - Poison Love

One of the many good things about Buddy Miller is that, for someone who does high lonesome so well (albeit not in the 'true' bluegrass sense), he clearly doesn't take himself too seriously, and indeed has a habit of making his more rollicking numbers genuine highlights of his records along with the more yearning tunes that make up much of his songbook; on Poison Love, first song "Nothing Can Stop Me" is a case in point - it brings a smile to my face.

Also, not to get too schmaltzy, but he and wife Julie sure are lucky that as well as being romantic partners - and, going by a piece I read about them in a No Depression anthology a while back, deeply so - their voices, and their musical styles more generally, mesh so perfectly, shown off particularly on this one on the gorgeous "100 Million Little Bombs".

Anyway, for those and many other reasons, this is great.

MV & EE - Space Homestead

Spacy, psychedelic americana-rock sprawlers, harmonica and all. For the most part, more about texture than hooks, though the guitars on "Too Far To See" set it apart.

Slumber Party - Psychedelicate

A long, murmuring, pretty sigh.

"How to give it a name": Jen Cloher - In Blood Memory

So it's unsurprising that In Blood Memory is excellent, seeing as how both Dead Wood Falls and Hidden Hands were both so extremely good - the second of those, in particular, really hit me between the eyes and became quite a meaningful one for me (eg).

A few things about it. For one, overall it has a bit more of a rock feel - on the excellent "Toothless Tiger", say, coming on all Velvet Underground - and it works. For seconds, there are a lot of musical references scattered throughout, from the overtness of "David Bowie Eyes" (with its roll call of iconic outsiders - Morrison, Smith (Patti), Bowie, the Pixies, Kurt & Courtney) to at least a couple of lyrical quotations (Bowie again on the "ch-ch-ch-change me" of highlight "Name in Lights", Cohen's "love is not a victory march") - but in a way that feels natural, an outgrowth of Cloher's love of pop music, rather than in any way programmatic. And it's also a completely unpretentious record, built on what are, in a lot of ways, quite straight-up songs and arrangements, with no trickery to disguise any shortcomings that might have existed - just really well constructed and delivered tunes, from an artist of genuine talent and craft. A really good listen.

Carnage

Jodie Foster, John C Reilly, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz - now that's a quality foursome (particularly nice to see that last in something not by Tarantino). Polanski-directed, this film does a good job capturing the acerbic cuttingness of the play.

The Place Beyond the Pines

A Very Serious Drama about fathers and sons and other familiar dramatic themes. I liked it in places (particularly the seedy-glamorous first bit - 80s-ish in cinematographic style and, I think, in setting - first bit when the focus was on Ryan Gosling's Luke) and thought it was pretty good overall if possibly slightly on the long side - albeit deliberately and structurally so.

(w/ Kai and Mehnaz)

* * *

Incidentally, while Pines was perhaps somewhat on the heavy side for a Sunday afternoon, it was a day to remind me why it's so grand living inner northside, and, for the last couple of years, specifically Carlton. Sleep-in then 5 minute stroll out to a nice brunch (Cafe Lua), hopping across the road to the Nova just in time for the film, and then afterwards another 5 minute walk (via King & Godfree) to visit P, house-sitting for a few days in J's apartment, to spend the rest of the afternoon eating cheese, killing a couple of bottles of prosecco and talkin' about life with her and D on the balcony, before a bite (and more wine) at Shakahari and then back home just a few minutes after finishing up there. Not to be taken for granted!

Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me

It's a good question, whether the mystique of Big Star has played any part in their becoming a touchstone for me - but I reckon not. Because what it's about for me is the sound - tender, ringing, fiery, there's just something about it.

Before watching this documentary (on at acmi), I was only vaguely aware of their troubled trajectory - the distribution and record label problems, Chris Bell's emotional disintegration and early death - and to be honest that back story doesn't at all romanticise the band for me (although who knows, possibly I'd cherish them less if, instead of only ever putting out those first two perfect records, #1 Record and Radio City, and then the clearly falling apart but intermittently brilliant Third/Sisters Lovers, they'd gone on to have a U2-esque decade-spanning stadium career). What remains is still the songs - dazzlingly sharp, bright moments like "September Gurls" and "The Ballad of El Goodo", "Back of a Car" and "Daisy Glaze", along with the hauntedness of Third cuts like "Kangaroo" - and the feeling.

Anyhow, Nothing Can Hurt Me was nice - I'm not normally one for music documentaries (documentaries of any kind, for that matter), but I was in the mood, and it left me with a warm feeling about the band's music. Afterwards, waiting for a friend, I stood out in the rain - this morning, I read that it turned into Melbourne's biggest storm in years - looking up at the Federation Square lights; lightning flashed every few minutes, I felt at once disconnected and still.

Marnie Stern - The Chronicles of Marnia

An intriguing record - makes me want to keep listening to it. Stern's little-girl yowls are possibly an acquired taste, as is the way that they cut in and out and over the top of her zig-zaggy and often ferocious guitar lines in the ten miniature epics making up The Chronicles of Marnia. But tart-sweet, ecstatically, vividly spiralling (say on "Still Moving" and the title track), stop-start propulsive ("Noonan", "Proof of Life"), sometimes fractured indie-lullaby-y ("East Side Glory"), occasionally suggesting a subliminal Life Without Buildings influence ("Immortals") and at other times nailing a punkily melodic indie-rock reminiscent of the great Pretty Girls Make Graves (especially on closer "Hell Yes"), it strikes a chord with me.

Broken

There are very few figures from literature who have really stayed with me - who really feel like they're a part of my life - but Scout from To Kill A Mockingbird is one. And so of course I was alive to the resonance of the name - and character - of 11 year old Skunk in this one (convincingly portrayed by Eloise Laurence), and particularly when she has a Boo Radley-type figure living in her neighbourhood. As the film goes on, it becomes clear that the parallels are entirely intentional, although not exact - and while Broken shares with that antecedent a certain clarity of vision, it's not the same powerful moral clarity, but instead a kind of humanist optimism embodied in Skunk's nature and trajectory amidst an otherwise murkily nuanced set of characters and actions.

There's some pretty tough stuff in this film, and elements of the social realist genre that I generally so dislike, but a deftness of touch (not to mention top-notch performances across the whole cast - Tim Roth and Cillian Murphy being just the two most recognisable, although both are certainly also notably good) and a command of the material that enables the film to work through a frankly melodramatic series of events, particularly at its climax, without actually registering as melodramatic at the time, and to strike the right, hopeful but unsentimental, note in its final scenes. Nice soundtrack too. I wouldn't have chosen to see this on my own, but I'm really glad that I did see it.

(w/ Meribah - and a grand total of two other people in the cinema. I guess it wasn't the most obvious Sunday evening fare; as it was, we were there only because dinner had taken longer than expected and we were too late for the screening of Cloud Atlas that we'd intended to catch)

Monet's Garden (NGV)

"It took me a while to understand my waterlilies." -CM

Monet's grown on me over the years. To the extent that he registered at all, I used to find his paintings all too wispy, pretty, exemplified by the idea that his most emblematic subject was, of all things, waterlilies. But time has brought a different perspective, and this exhibition was a timely chance to see a large collection of his work. It was good, of course; my favourites tended to be the particularly colourfully luminous, dream-lit ones from the 1880s (flowers, fields, cliffs, beaches), and there were also a couple of late-period ones that struck me in quite a different way (a blurry 1919-20 "Wisteria" and poignant 1925-6 "Roses"). Which isn't to say that some of the waterlilies, which of course made up a large part of the exhibition, glowing and vivid, weren't also memorable.

Anyway, circumstances weren't ideal as I was fairly groggy and the gallery was very busy - possibly staggering in mid morning on a Saturday wasn't the smartest in that respect - which may partly explain why my experience of all this wasn't deeper. But I expect to go again, so there'll be at least one more go at it.

The National - Trouble Will Find Me

It's frightening how fast time goes by; it sure doesn't feel like three years ago that I was coming to High Violet, already drunk on the greatness of Boxer and Alligator.

So the thing with Trouble Will Find Me is that it's good - I like it. In a time when rock music is probably less immediately important to me than at any point in the last 15 or so years (ie the whole of my adult life and then some),* listening to it is nonetheless like pulling on a warm winter coat and going for a leisurely walk in the crisp, lovely cold. Several of its songs - "I Should Live in Salt", "Sea of Love", "Graceless", "I Need My Girl", "Pink Rabbits" - are excellent, and all are good. It's graceful, velvety, elegiac, just like those other ones. But, for one reason or another, it hasn't gotten under my skin in the same way as the last three - this one's nice, not life-changing.

(also, Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers, and live, twice)

---

* I say 'immediately' important because of course the years of being immersed in it have marked me deep, even if I don't spend much time day to day listening to the stuff nowadays.

Shovels & Rope - O' Be Joyful

"From the Crescent City to the Great Salt Lake, it ain't what you got, it's what you make."

"Birmingham" is a riot, next track "Keeper" (highlighted by a whole range of excited shouts and whoops) in a similar ballpark and similarly good. Those are the high points, and I like this record most in the moments when it approaches the kind of exuberance that animates those first two. Overall, likeable but probably not a big replayer, I suspect.

"So Real: 15 tracks of the best new music" (Uncut cd)

The Buckley-referencing cd was one of the main reasons why I picked up Uncut rather than some other magazine in the airport on my way back from Sydney the other day, and happily, it's ace. There's no obvious theme or box into which these 15 songs can be put - no bad thing - beyond a certain alt-ish roots/folk tendency to a lot of them and some seriously great use of guitar.

Stand outs, some of which I'll definitely be chasing down more of:

• Mikal Cronin - "I'm Done Running From You". Fuzzily pop-y indie-rock - good!
• Sallie Ford & the Sound Outside - "Devil". Stompy modern rockabilly sounds.
• The House of Love - "Holy River". Mellow, cruisy guitar-rock slider.
• MV & EE - "Trailer Trash". I can't even describe this one. Good textures, really really good strung-out "Cortez the Killer"-style guitars.
• Shovels & Rope - "Birmingham". A girl, a boy, and harmonies. Plus a groove and a twang. Yee-ha! This song makes me smile.
• Evening Hymns - "You And Jake". Sad sad folk-pop.
• Marnie Stern - "Noonan". Jittery, excitable indie, v interesting guitar vibe going on. Reminds me a bit of Laura Stevenson.

Hem - Departure and Farewell

She told me that I'd like it when I was buying it at Basement Discs the other week, and I do. Departure and Farewell doesn't have quite the sustained beauty of Hem's first two, Rabbit Songs and Eveningland, nor any absolute high points like "When I Was Drinking", "Half Acre", "Lazy Eye" or "Pacific Street" from those others (although top "Departure and Farewell" and almost-tail "Last Call" are close), but it shares with them a sheer loveliness in its heartfelt, swoonily pretty melding of folk, country and elements of many other streams. It's a cliche, but Sally Ellyson's really is a voice that I can imagine listening to sing almost anything, and it helps that there's so much space in these songs for it to come through.

Patty Griffin - American Kid

For me, Patty Griffin's music often feels as if it accesses something, connects to something in me, in a way that I haven't felt consistently with any other artist for a long time. The experience is basically inarticulable (it resides in my chest and throat, beyond words); it's a kind of resonance, going beyond emotion to pure feeling. This may sound hyperbolic, but when I've thought about this in the past, the word 'miraculous' often feels about right, especially because those responses are often produced by her most subtle songs.

On American Kid, her latest, it's track 4, the ruminative "Wild Old Dog" that most fits what I'm trying to get at, but all of the first four songs are pretty much perfect, the others being gentle opener "Go Wherever You Wanna Go", the heavier stomp of "Don't Let Me Die in Florida" and then lovely, graceful, mysterious "Ohio", which I'd been listening to a lot in the lead-up to the release of the album - it's reminiscent of the prettiest moments on Raising Sand, and not just because Plant is quietly harmonising in the background.

Overall, it's a quiet record - I read an interview with Griffin a while ago, where she said that she's always attracted to the sad songs that tend to appear near the end of albums, often second from last, and that kind of comes through on American Kid, just as on her previous recordings, maybe most notably the earlier ones. And it's a really good one (not to mention well-suited to my current mood); I have a feeling that it, and her music generally, are going to keep on giving me a lot in the months, and longer, to come.

* * *

Incidentally, I've been thinking lately that just maybe this kind of music - broadly, the kind of Americana/country/folk that I like so much - may actually be my favourite kind of music nowadays. Boundaries are always blurry etc, but it does seem that the music that means the most to me these days - in terms of immediate, as opposed to historical, importance - is more often in this ballpark than the pop and rock that has always been, in various forms, the main event for me. If so, it's been a while coming - but noteworthy anyway, and a real change from the way that I've always seen my own musical tastes.

F Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

It's a cipher for who we are and where we are at any given time in history and our lives. When I read the book in high school, I thought of it as a traditional love story and saw Gatsby as this hopeless romantic, but reading it as an adult, I see it as a tragedy and Gatsby as this really hollow man, not at all in touch with reality.

... so said Leonardo DiCaprio in an interview I read the other day. Not bad, Leo - not bad at all.

Gatsby is, of course, a touchstone for me - for a while there, the one that I thought of as my single favourite novel.* The last time I read it was a fair few years ago, and this time round it read quite differently to me, though I'm not sure I can say exactly how; I certainly read it attentively, but the more important thing would've been the different perspective that the intervening years have brought in terms of how I make sense of the whole, and of the figure of Gatsby in particular.

I think that for me, the tragedy of the character, and of the whole milieu for which he in some ways stands, has always been in the foreground, but on this pass, I didn't get anywhere near the sense of romanticisation or idealisation of that tragedy that I think I had previously; and, maybe relatedly, the novel itself didn't seem to have quite the same savour of greatness that it's always held for me...though I wonder if perhaps it isn't rather that another layer of complexity has opened up in my response to - and understanding of - it...a cipher indeed.

---

* The list in full: Wuthering Heights (late high school to earlyish uni), The Crying of Lot 49 (most of uni), then Invisible Cities (perhaps the very tail-end of uni through to the beginning of work) and then Gatsby (thereafter until, I don't know, maybe a few years ago, when the position of 'favourite novel' became vacant somewhere along the line - not that I'd read it in the intervening period, but then our relationships with novels, or any works of art, don't depend on immediate contact).

The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded & The Matrix Revolutions

I got it into my head that it might be interesting to rewatch these, a fair bit on now. Though I liked the first one at the time, the second and third more or less passed me by, and more generally I was never a huge fan of these films in the way that so many others were. Anyhow, they're not too bad - amusingly pretentious at points, both in terms of the 'philosophy' and the extreme portentousness (Laurence Fishburne in particular, for all that he's nonetheless enjoyable to watch) but in their best moments showing real style.

No

I thought this one was only so-so, to be honest. The account of how the dark arts of advertising were turned to Chile's 1988 plebiscite on democracy/Pinochet was interesting enough, but I don't know, maybe not quite dynamic enough for me.

(w/ Mehnaz)

Natalie Maines - Mother

Well, now this is very nice. I like the Dixie Chicks, Maines' old band, a fair bit, and so I would've expected to like a solo record from her anyway, but what propelled me to pick it up so quickly was seeing that it included versions of two songs from albums that I listened to a lot during my teenage years, "Mother" (from The Wall) and "Lover, You Should've Come Over".

So, as to those two - the first, which also gives the album its title, is reinvented as an acoustically-based lament, while still retaining some of the weird overtones of the original, and done well. And then "Lover...", in some ways a braver cover choice than "Hallelujah" (which has been tackled by plenty of others, post-Buckley) or "Last Goodbye" (the most transcendent moment on Grace - an album, incidentally, that only grows in stature over time - but not as simply, wrenchingly building and sprawling as "Lover..."); I wasn't sure about Maines' version for the first couple of listens - while she conveys the emotion, some of the high notes are slightly beyond her - but it's now fully won me over...the sure way to tell being that listening to it, all 7 minutes, brings a direct connection to the song itself and to what it stirringly evokes, and not just in a subsidiary way in relation to Buckley's magnificent original.

Overall, Mother leans more on the rock side of things than the country  - far fewer harmonies than her old band, for one thing (in some ways a pity, as they were always a high point, but this album represents enough of a different direction that they're not actually missed) - but it's all a continuum, and there was plenty of ecumenicism in the Dixie Chicks' approach too. There's a cover of a Patty Griffin song, "Silver Bell", but it doesn't stand out; opener "Without You", apparently an Eddie Vedder original, does, as do the chugging, mid-tempo "Come Cryin' To Me" (not the only song on the album to remind me of Tift Merritt) and closing ballad "Take It On Faith".

(Taking the Long Way; Fly; Home; Wide Open Spaces & Top of the World (live))

Bored Nothing - "Another EP" ep

More nicely washed-out, lo-fi but crisp guitar/keyboard-based tunes &c. I particularly like "Do What You Want, Always" and "Baby, Won't You Be My Glove?".

(lp)

Throwing Muses - Throwing Muses (2003)

It's about trajectories. Throwing Muses had their heyday (late 80s/early 90s) well before I ever heard of them some time in the early 2000s, whereupon I intensely felt their music for a while (specifically, The Real Ramona) and then didn't really follow on - being drawn more in the Belly / Tanya Donelly direction - and so paid no attention when this one, their second self-titled, came out after, in 2003.

And now, a decade on, it came into my hands and turns out to be not too bad at all, though it took me a few listens to get my ear back in for Hersh's zigzaggy, stop-start, somewhat abrasive songwriting style. For mine, it's unusual for a pop (using that term loosely) album in that it's quite backloaded - most of my favourites are in its second half..."Speed and Sleep", "Solardip" and closing pair "Half Blast" and "Flying", all jaggedly guitary.

My Brightest Diamond - Bring Me The Workhorse

Possibly this is a bit harsh, but this record strikes me as a bit 'sound and fury, signifying nothing'. It's all very dramatic and ornate, but it doesn't feel like there's a lot to it. May be telling that the two covers that brought My Brightest Diamond to my attention ("Feeling Good" and Radiohead's "Lucky") are both much stronger than anything on this album of originals.

Buddy Miller - Universal United House of Prayer

It's nice the way so many of my favourites on the current americana scene collaborate so frequently with each other and generally appear so mutually enmeshed. Take Buddy Miller - for example, and very incompletely:
... he produced Patty Griffin's Downtown Church as well as performing on it,
... a record which, like many of Griffin's, also featured vocal contributions from, amongst others, Emmylou Harris and Julie Miller,
... Julie Miller in fact being Buddy Miller's wife as well as regular musical collaborator (eg),
... unsurprisingly, Patty and Emmylou have both lent vocals to Julie Miller's records (eg 1, 2),
... Emmylou also having, I'm pretty sure, cut more than one record to which Buddy Miller has brought his guitar (eg)
... and then there was that surprising pair of Robert Plant records, Raising Sand (with Alison Krauss and produced by T-Bone Burnett, both legends in their own rights) and Band of Joy (produced by Buddy Miller, with backing vocals from Patty Griffin throughout - it's even been reported in despatches that Plant and Griffin are nowadays an item).

So, anyhow, Universal United House of Prayer is from 2004, it's Buddy Miller's take on an americana gospel record, and it's wonderful. On the subject of collaborators, the gospel singers Regina and Ann McCrary, to whom I was introduced by Downtown Church, are strong presences, and are great, and Julie Miller and Emmylou Harris turn up too, but it's clear that this is Buddy's show, guitar-playing, singing and all-round interpreting all outstanding, on a dusty, crisp, rootsy record with those gospel elements deeply embedded.

The centrepiece, and at the moment for me, the highlight, is a version of a Bob Dylan song called "With God on Our Side" that I'm not familiar with. Whatever its earlier incarnation(s), though, here it's a nine minute odyssey, epic, yearning and eternal-sounding in that folky kind of way - I wasn't surprised, upon looking it up, to find that it dated back to Dylan's earlyish days (1964) - and captivating. Interesting how often covers of Dylan songs are great (to name just two, Lisa Miller's "You're A Big Girl Now" and 16 Horsepower's "Nobody 'Cept You").

Elsewhere, there's a sprightly and sincere update of the Louvin Brothers' "There's a Higher Power" (known to me via the Sadies' energetic live cover), with the rest mostly co-writes, not - least with his wife Julie - their "Fire & Water" is a particular reminder of how wonderfully their voices mesh in harmonies - including one, the charmingly sidelong-cowboyish "This Old World", with Victoria Williams...it's pretty much all good.

Steven Erikson - Malazan Book of the Fallen series

Escapism is genuinely a large part of why the fantasy genre has appealed to me so much in the past and to some extent still does, but it'd be rare for me to have begun reading any novel, fantasy or otherwise, so deliberately seeking escapism as when I picked up Gardens of the Moon for a revisit a few months ago. It was night time and I was (obviously) at home, but beyond that I can't remember the circumstances, except that I specifically felt the need to immerse myself in a different world - in other words, to escape - and that it seemed the ideal way to do so.

I also remember thinking that it wouldn't just be a case of reading that first one, and that maybe I'd just end up re-reading it and the next two, Deadhouse Gates and Memories of Ice, which collectively seem to represent the first stanza of the 10-book series...not that there's a lot of 'just' to that, with each book a pretty sizeable undertaking in its own right. In the end, though, I ended up re-reading the whole lot (this was more or less my third pass), in no small part to continue that immersion - escape - deciding at some point that, once I'd finished it and gotten in my final masters paper (the latter's still to come) it would need to be the time for me to start trying to do something active on the Life front again, after the lull of the last really several months.

Anyway, that autobiographical context aside, it remains compelling on a second re-reading, complicatedly plotted in layers upon layers but pulling together to a massive, satisfying ending, while also leaving plenty of room for further elaboration in the several other books that Erikson and collaborator Esslemont have written alongside and since, only a couple of which I've read. I guess inevitably some of the visceral impact and excitement is gone at this point, but the flipside is that much more of the detail sank in this time through, and both the world and many of the characters felt richer, fuller, not least because, even though I don't know if I've ever consciously thought about them between readings, I've now lived with them for quite some time (the Malazans - all of them - have always been the most memorable character(s), but this time Tavore was really at the heart of it, too). It's still genuinely awe-inspiring, in scope and execution, and completely gripping.

(Previously: [1-8], which is as far as Erikson'd got at that point, and then starting again with [1-3], [4 & 5], [6], [7], [8], [9] & [9 (again) & 10].)

16 Horsepower - Sackcloth 'N' Ashes

Pretty good - their debut album. But Secret South remains the complete summit for me of 16 Horsepower's intense, old testament-style fire and brimstone appalachian rock, and truthfully, I can't see myself returning to this one too often. There's no doubt about it - what they have (had) going on is something unique.

Ryan Adams - Gold & Easy Tiger

From 2001 and 2007 respectively, and wikipedia tells me that Adams released no fewer than six lps between them...which is maybe telling, because my strongest impression across Gold and Easy Tiger is that Adams really needs an editor - ie some kind of quality control. There's some good stuff on Gold in particular, but it's far too long, and tends to descend into a sort of generically country-rock-influenced pleasantness, whereas very possibly it might have been a really solid record if it had been a fair bit tighter. Adams certainly isn't bad, but on the strength of the parts of his solo output that I've come to so far, nor is there anything to him to get really excited about.

(in a similar vein, Ashes & Fire)

Patty Griffin - 1000 Kisses & Impossible Dream

Two older records, both wonderful. Impossible Dream (2004) in particular is astonishing - one of those magical, lump-in-throat-inducing records that just penetrates (sometimes, in moments, actually making me feel like crying) - and 2002's 1000 Kisses isn't that far behind.

It's striking that those kinds of emotional responses aren't particularly generated by 'glory moments' of the kind that you'd find in a typical mainstream pop (or, for that matter, pop-country) ballad, but rather seem to arise organically from the subtle, almost understated musical and lyrical streams of Griffin's songs. And also striking is how off-the-scale marvellous both her songwriting and singing are; for mine, she's probably the best songwriter in the americana vein going around today, and her voice, unforgettable live (I don't know if I've ever seen a better vocal performance in concert), is something on record too.

A fair few of the songs across these two albums were already familiar to me, one way or another - from Impossible Dream, "Top of the World", iconically done by the Dixie Chicks but here given a barer, rawer and maybe even more heart-wrenching reading by its writer, and from 1000 Kisses, several that made their way on to the live record A Kiss in Time ("Rain", "Be Careful", "Long Road", "Nobody's Crying"). And many others stand out, especially, from Impossible Dream, "Useless Desires", "When It Don't Come Easily" and "Florida". Patty Griffin has been a bit of a slow burn for me, but more and more, I've come to feel that she's really remarkable - something special.

(The impetus for going and listening to both of these being the imminent release of a new one, American Kid, whose first single "Ohio" is brilliant.)

Dance of Death (Malthouse)

An English language and no doubt otherwise-tweaked take by Australian playwright Tom Holloway on a free and indeed in many respects oppositional (according to the program) adaptation by Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt of Strindberg's original Dance of Death.

Felt like a Malthouse production, in a good way - traverse stage, fishbowl-enclosed behind perspex walls, blaring music and lights, kinetic use of stage and set (complete with roast chicken piece hurled to splatter against one of those walls), profanity galore, meta-scene announcing ('round 1: the battle before dinner'), &c. All deployed in service of this lacerating and extremely dry depiction of a 25-year marriage of mutual tearing away at each other; it did have hints of Beckett, with its trapped, grotesque figures going around in entropic, destructive circles. Not a play or production to fill its audience with optimism about the human condition, but skilfully, absorbingly done.

Jacek Koman as the husband (aka the narcoleptic Argentine in Moulin Rouge) and Belinda McClory (who has apparently been in everything including, most recently for me, Pompeii, LA) both great and believably horrible human beings; David Paterson as her cousin Kurt, whose arrival precipitates the latest round of blood-letting, also good.

(w/ Alice - amusingly, the name of the wife in the play - and Mehnaz)

Jessie Ware - Devotion

'Classic' is a word that I use charily, but in the case of "Wildest Moments" I think it's not completely inapt - a resonant, pulsing, elegant piece of electro-soul with a pop edge which doesn't pall in the slightest on repeat listens and which cut through despite being in a genre that doesn't normally pull me. Indeed, it was months of listening to it, on and off, that led me to Devotion, which probably inevitably doesn't match the standard set by that first, gorgeous single (although "Sweet Talk" certainly has a something going), although there's a smoothness and a pulse to it that makes for ready listening.

"This summer hurts": Laura Stevenson - Wheel

So easy for me to like, this one. A sort of indie-folk-americana confection, layered with electric guitars that sound as if they've come by way of late 90s indie rock - a good thing, obviously - and charismatically sung by Stevenson in a scratchily immediate voice that puts much of the record into the same terrain as Martha Wainwright. It takes in soaringly epic countrified rock ("Triangle", "Telluride"), giddily veering pop moments like "Runner", "Bells & Whistles", "Sink, Swim" and "Eleonora" (that last particularly bringing Belly to my mind - again, always a good thing), and a bunch in between. Very enjoyable.

Trance

Stylish and never boring to watch, but in the end not particularly interesting either, despite the hypnotherapeutically-connected reversals and blurring of reality. Vincent Cassel as the nominal villain a plus, though.

The Apartment

The 1960 one - a comedy, but with actual sadness mixed in. I must admit, I was prompted to watch it because I saw Shirley Maclaine's character on a list of manic pixie dream girls and was intrigued; she's fetching, but not an MPDG. Jack Lemmon's likeable too, and seeing him as a young man is interesting...I just read that his performance in this film was one of the iconic American roles upon which Kevin Stacey based his character in American Beauty, and I can see it.

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)