Tuesday, July 19, 2022

Live music archive

A long time ago I made a 'Note' on facebook to keep track of gigs I'd been to, which I then dutifully kept on updating even as both my live music attendance and my use of facebook both dwindled over time. Moving it here now and who know, one day I might even go to another gig ever.
(Also, a previous archive here up to 2009)
Not sure if maybe I missed one or two during this period when I wasn't updating ... a fallow period anyway so actually probably not.
2004 and earlier (incomplete)
Pretty Girls Make Graves + Love of Diagrams (November 2004)
Belle and Sebastian + Architecture in Helsinki (23/7/04)
Radiohead (26/4/04)
Tujiko Noriko (18/2/04)
Interpol (7/8/03)
Goo Goo Dolls, Tea Party, Billy Idol + others @ M-One festival (2002)
Beth Orton, Alex Lloyd, Spiderbait, Nine Inch Nails, Red Hot Chili Peppers + others @ Big Day Out (January 2000)
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Sunday, July 17, 2022

Everything Everywhere All At Once

Everything Everywhere All At Once has a high-gloss and high-energy zaniness that's rare; along with the many deliberate thematic touchstone film references that it throws in along the way (The Matrix and In The Mood for Love or really any Wong Kar Wai film to name two), I thought of both Being John Malkovich and Love Exposure early on. At the same time, it has proper narrative momentum and a sense of about-ness that's grounded in the Asian-American and family dynamics with which it leads, and the broader themes of generational despair and personal life choices, regrets and acceptances into which it opens, along with all the crazy. 

In its deployment of what turns out to be a Chekhov's butt plug-shaped auditing award it has surely one of the silliest and funniest fight scene pivots ever filmed, and in its use of martial arts - and of Michelle Yeoh - it has a sincere affection and respect for those aspects of its sources. Not to mention the gift of committed, wily acting from all concerned. The movie takes on big themes, and in some respects predictable ones given its foundational multiversal premise, but stays idiosyncratically specific enough to launch itself towards an earned universality - rather than collapsing into generality. Glad I made the effort to watch this one.

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Kacey Musgraves - Same Trailer Different Park

First major label album - as I'm learning from Her Country, there were several self-released ones before it - and it shows Musgraves was great from the beginning, writing songs that sound like rainbows and land like truth, whether mid tempo like "Merry Go 'Round", faster like "Follow Your Arrow" or ballad-leaning like "It Is What It Is". It does help to be reading at the same time about how she got to this point, and the even greater heights she's reached since.

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NGV Australia

Ron Mueck's "Mass" in a different setting. And a portraits exhibition that I thought I'd be up for but wasn't, although I liked the way it led with the relationship between portrait and land and Country. 


Polixeni Papapetrou - "Magma Man" (2012)

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Charlie's Angels

This Charlie's Angels has some zip and a welcome - needed, really - female lens courtesy of writer/director/actor Elizabeth Banks. Kristen Stewart is the highlight as she usually is, but in this case via her comic touch.

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Wednesday, July 06, 2022

Morgan Wade - Reckless

Personable of-the-moment country. Nothing on it gets near brightly anthemic first track "Wilder Days".

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Saturday, June 25, 2022

Angel Olsen - Big Time

There's a comfort and expansiveness here that envelopes the entire record, continuing Angel Olsen's great run - Burn Your Fire For No Witness, My Woman, All Mirrors and now this one. The warmth of Big Time's first section, leading off with "All The Good Times" and "Big Time", sets a tone and reminds me of Margo Price in its contemporary folk-tinged country, in that way of idiosyncratic personal reference points. And threads of that continue as things get moodier, reaching a mid-album high point with "All The Flowers" which is like an escapee from Roberta Flack's 60s/70s catalogue and "Right Now". All through, in a slow burning way, it's excellent.

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Sunday, June 19, 2022

Minari

A quiet, beautiful film. Korean migrants in Arkansas, family, farming, faith. Perfectly weighted.
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Beach House - Once Twice Melody

Is there such a thing as too lush when it comes to a Beach House album? Once Twice Melody suggests the answer is 'yes'. There's a lot of music here and despite repeated listens it all tends to blur.

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Monday, June 13, 2022

Patricia Lockwood - No One Is Talking About This

It's no easy thing to write fiction in the mode of our very online existences today, but No One Is Talking About This does it as well as anything else I've read - the fragmentary style in which the banal comes to seem aphoristic, the sense of life lived through endless filters and memes, with the personal and the political both in play (including frequent references to the dictator, ie Trump) yet always struggling for purchase against the tidal waves of content and knowingness that make up Lockwood's 'Portal'. Part one is immersive, funny, convincing and human.

How part two - in which real life makes itself unavoidably felt, with the diagnosis and then unexpected survival and birth of the narrator's sister's baby with Proteus syndrome - rubs up against that is the core of the novel, and an unexpected one by the time it arrives halfway in. I found the sections just after the diagnosis very moving, and so too those when the baby arrives and is treasured despite (because) everyone know her life expectancy can be measured in weeks or months rather than years. Each part works on its own; whether - or how - they work together is more of an open question but I think the effect is cumulative. This is a novel about being human today, and the nature of connection as well as grief, with a form that reflects the segment of life that it's about. 

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Friday, June 03, 2022

Maria Gainza - Portrait of an Unknown Lady

The unknown lady is, of course, the narrator - with shades of Cusk to her - who we meet checking into a hotel under a false name, just as much as the mysterious and totemic art forger Renee in search of whose story she goes in her dissolute way. Doesn't have the same remarkable quality as Optic Nerve, but does have some of the same pleasures - the sentences, the slipperiness, the combination of clarity with opacity.

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Saturday, May 28, 2022

Sharon Van Etten - We've Been Going About This All Wrong

I don't know, has Sharon Van Etten ever been more lush and more epic than she is here? 

She's written stunning album openers before, but "Darkness Fades" is right up there, reminiscent of the Cranberries - and rounded off in similar spacious dream-pop style at the end by "Far Away". Also on We've Been Going About This All Wrong are two of her hookiest earworms so far - if not the two hookiest - in "Headspace" ('baby don't turn your back on me') and "Mistakes" ('even when I make a mistake ... it's much better than that') and a bunch of deeper cuts that more than hold their own. 

There's texture and clarity throughout, all confirming that SVE is possibly the best, and definitely my favourite, of the current crop of excellent singer-songwriters drawing from what used to be called 'indie' and before that 'alternative'.

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Miranda Lambert - Palomino

Palomino feels like a throwback to an earlier phase of Lambert's career - a more straight-up country-rock-pop record than either Wildcard or The Weight of These Wings, but benefiting from the refinement of her songwriting that's happened over the years. It's not one of my favourite of hers, and not many songs stand out - the brightest is probably the produced-up version of "Waxahachee" from last year's Marfa Tapes - but still good.

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Wednesday, May 25, 2022

Ocean's Eleven, Ocean's Twelve & Ocean's Thirteen / The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum & Jason Bourne

A pair of 2000s series, both of which I'd mostly if not entirely watched before, both featuring Matt Damon prominently and also Vincent Cassel as a murderous bad guy. Best watched with critical brain disengaged.

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Sunday, May 08, 2022

The Beths - Auckland, New Zealand, 2020

Sounds the way you'd expect a live Beths album to sound.
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Monday, April 18, 2022

Laura Stevenson - Laura Stevenson

From 2021, so-so.
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Kate

I guess it's progress of sorts that a film featuring a woman as an action hero, without making a big thing of her gender, can be as predictable as Kate turns out to be.

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