Philip Pullman - The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass

About 50 pages into The Amber Spyglass, it struck me that this series, which gets better and better as it goes along, is something of an anti-Chronicles of Narnia, and that impression had been considerably augmented by the time the book had raced to its close. The Subtle Knife suffers slightly from middle book syndrome, though it does well enough for itself in introducing some important new characters and keeping the central plot moving forward, but from very early on in The Amber Spyglass, one gets the sense that all the pieces are coming together and converging upon a single point, and the pace never flags from there - an extremely good trick for a 500+ page book! This whole series is fabulous - I'm glad I came across it.

(Northern Lights)

Laura Veirs & the Tortured Souls @ Manchester Lane, Sunday 29 May

Was very excited about seeing Veirs, and had made my (anticipatory) peace with the likelihood that it would be quite a Carbon Glacier-centric set (CG's a very good album, but not half as lovely as Troubled By The Fire). Indeed, most of the songs she played were from her latest, but it was really nice to hear them given a more organic treatment (one of the reasons I don't love Carbon Glacier as much as I do TBTF is that it feels a bit too, well, glacial, as if all of its songs are coated by a thin layer of ice), with Veirs' fabulous voice right out the front.

On that subject, it really was a wonderful experience to hear the charming Laura sing live. Having spent so much time listening to her voice on record, it was odd - in an entirely pleasant way - to hear precisely the same voice coming across while I was in the same room. It made me realise how good the production on her albums is, and how unvarnished her voice is on those recordings, for she sounded pretty much exactly the same in person (and I got a kick out of hearing those familiar enunciations and intonations - that familiar accent, really - in her conversational chatter to the crowd between songs). Plus, she's such a great, unaffected yet memorable singer - how could it go wrong?

Anyway, as I said, most of the songs were from Carbon Glacier, but Veirs did play "Devil's Hootenanny" and "Tiger Tattoos", as well as some new songs (which sounded good - apparently the album's due in August), and I didn't feel shortchanged in that regard (though it would've been nice to hear "Ohio Clouds" and "Midnight Singer" - my favourite of her songs). There was also an interlude in the middle during which the band performed three songs by Tortured Soul Karl Blau (who's doing a full solo show at the Rob Roy next week) - I wasn't really feeling his stuff, but the crowd seemed to be into it...my impressions are vague but I think it was kinda Bright Eyes/Mountain Goats-y, though less harrowing/pretentious.

All in all, it wasn't as amazing as some of the gigs I've been to over the last 12 months or so (Pretty Girls Make Graves and Belle & Sebastian stand out) but, given how much I like Veirs' music, and how familiar I was with most of the songs in her set, I was always going to enjoy this, and indeed it was pretty darn good.

2046

Not sure why, but while normally I feel at least a hint of nervousness or trepidation before watching/reading/listening to something that I've keenly anticipated, somehow it never even crossed my mind that 2046 might be anything less than wonderful; my expectations having (largely subliminally) reached such great heights, then, it's probably unsurprising that my immediate reaction after seeing it was a little muted (well, there's that, and then there's the internal reeling from the sheer, lush romanticism of the film - but more on that later). I suppose that I took for granted that it would be visually spectacular, and allusive and wistful and truthful and wise, and just all round beautiful - and so when all of this was indeed realised, it wasn't the revelation that it might otherwise have been.

With the passing of a bit more time, though, the particular joys of 2046 have begun to sink in. Foremost amongst those, of course, is the swooning romance of it all - the unwavering foregrounding of love and its endless ramifications and reverberations. Unlike many films which resonate with me because I see some part of myself in them, 2046 doesn't strike me as a fantasy (sci-fi elements notwithstanding); it feels like a dream, but like the sort of dream that someone could all too easily live.

Just as we have no access to the world except through our experience of it, so too with love; the thing with Wong Kar-Wai, I think, is that his representations of these experiencings - hyper-stylised, dreamily but sometimes painfully disconnected, and shot through with colour, suggestion and sadness - feel like pictures from my own mental landscapes (though I haven't quite expressed that as fully as I'd like), and perhaps especially in 2046. I don't really empathise with Tony Leung's character in this film, nor with any of the others - they're further along in their stories than I am in mine - but I can see a real continuity between them and myself, for I organise my own world similarly to them, and it makes me terribly wistful, as well as renewing the old question of what will eventually become of me...

The Missing

A bit of a disappointment, this one. It's competently made but feels somehow hollow - not exactly barren (which would have been appropriate given the starkness of the settings and the harshness of the characters' lives), nor particularly 'airbrushed' or 'glossy', but just somehow missing something intangible. At no point was I really emotionally or viscerally engaged - and such engagement is pretty much the sine qua non for a successful entry in this genre, I think.

"The Sound of Painting" @ Arts Centre

A smallish collection of contemporary Australian art inspired by music in a variety of ways. The most striking is Jensen Tjhung's installation, which takes up the entire back wall of the George Adams gallery, the installation being made up of a burned-out 19th century piano; the artist having, with a few of his friends, ceremoniously set fire to it one night (while listening to Johnny Cash, etc) and then done a series of large paintings about the experience. A decent concept, and sounds as if it would've been fun to be part of, but the art itself didn't much speak to me.

My favourites were Cathy Blanchflower's organically formalistic, repetitive 'oil on canvas' patterns, which struck me at the time as having a sort of shifting duck/rabbit effect, although the connection to music eluded me till I came across this, while looking for examples of her work online. Other noteworthy ones were Noel McKenna's cute bird/musical notes pieces, and the two brightly coloured oil paintings by Anne Wallace, one depicting Grant McLennan and Robert Forster (of Go-Betweens fame) and the other, "Showpeople", showing an androgynous figure sitting in an armchair, mirroring the pose of a starlet in a b&w photo in the background.

The Royal Tenenbaums

Expected this to be a lot funnier than it actually was, but it was still rather good. Actually, the film isn't really an out and out comedy, though it's too (deliberately) absurd to properly be called a drama; The Royal Tenenbaums works quite well as some kind of quirky admixture of the two (surely not 'comma', so perhaps 'dramedy', which is itself rather too close to 'dromedary' for me to take it seriously...). Royal's contradictory attitude towards his family seemed an apt sort of metaphor for the attitude of the film as a whole (deadpan/satirical/wavering/ultimately fond) towards its subject(s); in its portrayal of family dysfunctionality, it reminded me a bit of The Corrections (surely it won't be too long before a film version of that one appears?), though the vivid colours and outfits were distinctly cinematic. Quality cast, but Gwyneth stole the show as the most Gorey-esque character I've ever seen on screen (I'm always surprised to be reminded that she can actually act, and yet I don't think I've ever seen her put in a bad performance).

It took me a while to get into this, but it really grew on me as it went on, and I found myself smiling as the closing credits rolled.

Aimee Mann - I'm With Stupid

Delicious - sweetly, perfectly acerbic, like all of her best work. Mann's second solo lp, it's a big step forward from Whatever, if not in the same league as Bachelor No 2; compared to Lost In Space, it seems less fully realised but is, I think, probably the better record. Most of I'm With Stupid is made up of the sophisticated mid-tempo pop songs that are Mann's primary stock in trade, but, as usual, she pulls off the mournful ballads ("Par For The Course" is lovely and amazing) and the upbeat power-pop numbers (I must've listened to "Superball" about ten times consecutively while walking around the city today) equally adeptly...appetite now well and truly whetted for the new album, assuming it ever actually hits local shores.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

In the aftermath of the frantic last few days of doing very little other than writing the draft of my Rationality paper, I dropped by the local video store last night and picked up a few movies, amongst them this one. And really, what's there to say about it? It's still spectacular; I'm so glad that these films were so well made.

forbiddenlibrary.com

Another neat link which made me smile: http://www.forbiddenlibrary.com.

Country Songbirds

More splashin' around in the shoals of the massive ocean that is country music. A few familiar and well-loved names to guide me - Gillian Welch, Lucinda Williams (two of her best cuts, "Passionate Kisses" and "Right In Time", no less), Caitlin Cary, Lisa Miller - and other pantheon types whom I know primarily by reputation/name-recognition (the ilk of Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline - plus Dusty Springfield, Janis Joplin and some other more unexpected inclusions). It seems a remarkably comprehensive double cd set, focused on female 'country' artists of course, and there's heaps to enjoy on it beyond that with which I was already familiar.

It occurred to me that one of the reasons why I respond to this kind of music (apart from the obvious double punch that it tends to be both tuneful and sad) is that often there's a sense of coming in midway through a conversation or continuing story, both lyrically and melodically, and both in the sense that individual songs often seem to pick up a thread as if they'd been going on before the song actually started, as it were, and in the sense that there's obviously a rich heritage stretching back upon which these artists are drawing (and of which they're themselves a part), the particular song triggering that thought being Laura Cantrell's "Not The Tremblin' Kind"...

All of this listening to compilations is beginning to give me a sense for how the genre as a whole fits together, from its iconic figures and songs through to its leading contemporary practisers (Shelby Lynne's "Leavin'", say, recurs on a couple of these sets; Alison Krauss is ubiquitous; and so on)...not sure whether this counts as an organic process or quite the opposite. Either way, it's quite exciting to feel this whole field opening up in front of me, waiting to be explored more fully (and explore it I will, I think, despite some continuing misgivings about the simplicity and lack of innovation of much of this music).

Unsurprisingly, I tend to be drawn to the more contemporary musicians - apart from Lucinda, Gillian, etc, Kathleen Edwards' "Six O'Clock News" is one of my favourites (reminding me a bit of Leona Naess' fab "Charm Attack"), and Julie Miller's distinctly pop-inflected "Ride The Wind To Me" is another high point at this stage (her girlish keen reminding me inevitably of Kasey Chambers); Heather Myles' "Love Me A Little Bit Longer", a marginally more 'country' "Right In Time"-esque rocker is also really good. (That said, my favourite 'new' song across the set is probably Wanda Jackson's 1960 number "Funnel Of Love" - the liner notes say it's 'rockabilly' but to me it sounds more like some kind of crazy spaghetti western theme filtered through vaguely sixties-girl-group-esque pop sensibilities and topped by a wonderfully eccentric, gritty voice and delivery.)

Arabesque: All About Lily Chou-Chou - Original Soundtrack

I simply haven't been able to get this film out of my head - I've seen a lot of really good films lately, but All About Lily Chou-Chou may well be the best of them, or at least the most compelling. I don't know why it's gotten so deeply stuck inside me - normally my cinematic tastes run to the pretty/beautiful or the quirky/stylishly dark, and I don't think that Lily Chou-Chou is really any of those things (though you could make a case for all of them, albeit in a somewhat unconventional fashion)...I'm a bit afraid to watch it again, lest the magic be lost.

Debussy is well represented, as one would expect; the selections' lightness/dream-heaviness fits perfectly. Elsewhere there's some other piano music (delicate and pretty), the song performed by the students in the film, the mournful folk dirge intoned by the guides on the boys' island trip, and various incidental stuff...all extremely listenable, especially when tied to my impressions of the film it accompanies.

In The Mood For Love - Original Soundtrack

A curious mix of styles and stylings, loosely connected by two threads - the film which it soundtracks, and the air of nostalgia hanging over the whole. Like the film, it's sort of kitschy, though in a good way (sometimes I wonder if I'd even recognise 'bad' kitsch any more, so wrapped up am I in my world of happily depthless pomo simulacra...maybe the point is that there's no longer such a thing as 'bad' kitsch)...and in some indefinable sense it's also very 'soundtracky'. It doesn't really engage me to the extent that some soundtracks do, though, possibly because it feels like a series of ephemeral, allusively-related snippets of music rather than a coherent whole.

O Sister! The Women's Bluegrass Collection

A nice little collection, though not an inspirationally good one. It was put out by Rounder, which is apparently quite a well-established roots music label, and holds pretty much the sort of music you'd expect it to, based on its title. As I'm very much a bluegrass neophyte, I can't attest to the 'authenticity' of the cuts (always an important consideration!), but I have my doubts given that they don't, for the most part, feel particularly old-timey...

None of the individual songs really stand out (I tend to listen to the disc as a whole, anyway), and to these pop music-conditioned ears there's not a great deal of variation, particularly tempo-wise, but the Alison Krauss cut, "Every Time You Say Goodbye", left an impression thanks to her wonderful voice, and the melodies of several of the others have gotten into my head. Incidentally, when I stopped to think about it, I had a quiet giggle at the song titles: "Sad Situation", "True Life Blues", "You Tried To Ruin My Name", "Blow, Big Wind", "Comin' Down From God", and so on...comes with the territory, I guess!

Guitar Wolf: Wild Zero

1. Rock 'n' roll will save the world.
2. All you need is love.
3. Quiffs, bikes, sucked-in cheeks, shades worn at night, and leather all round; Japanese guys who look like Elvis and Richard Ashcroft.
4. Zombies. A villain in a hairpiece. And a hella cute transgender.
11. Japanese b-movie heaven.

McSweeney's lists

Just came across this, and am finding it intermittently hilarious: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/lists/...have only dipped into it myself, but I do particularly like "Things Heard During John Cage's Folsom Prison Performance of "4'33""" (unfortunate conjunction of double quotation marks and all).

I'd imagine that the rest of the McSweeney's site is in a similar vein. Ah, Dave Eggers - love him or loathe him (or, as in my case, a bit of both), there's no avoiding the man these days (symptomatically, I read a few days ago that he's somehow associated, presumably as a screenwriter, with a mooted film version of Where The Wild Things Are!).

Umberto Eco - Foucault's Pendulum

Funny. I felt that I understood this book a lot less after this, my second reading, than immediately after the first (two or three years ago, I think). It's also not as good as I remembered it to be, although possibly I'd just built it up to an unreal level in my mind between these two readings; I still enjoyed it, but felt no sense of intoxication or joy in the reading. If circumstances were rather more conducive, I'd think about doing a bit of analysis of, or at least a bit of gesturing in relation to, this novel which, after all, I've in the past considered to be one of my favourites; as it is, though, I'll content myself with the thought that this changed response to Foucault's Pendulum can most likely be, in some measure, mapped on to changes in my own mental landscape in the intervening period.

You Am I - #4 Record

The singles from this album - "Rumble", "Heavy Heart" and "What I Don't Know 'Bout You" - were played a lot on triple j at the time when I listened a lot to triple j (late high school), and so are coloured with a nostalgic hue even though they're not the match of songs like "Berlin Chair" and "Cathy's Clown"; the album as a whole is workmanlike but unexciting.

Just Because I'm A Woman: Songs of Dolly Parton

As is frequently the case with covers albums, the songs with the best melodies come through best, meaning that the immediate standouts on this disc are Melissa Etheridge's slow-burning, hesitant version of "I Will Always Love You" and the "Jolene"-by-way-of-nineties-singer-songwriter-sensibilities offered by a newcomer, Mindy Smith. (I also liked the Kasey Chambers take on a song called "Little Sparrow", though the melody is strikingly similar to that of Chambers' own (rather fab, though perhaps, as it now turns out, unoriginal) duet with Paul Kelly, "I Still Pray".)

I'm not particularly familiar with Dolly Parton's back catalogue, but this cd has been another factor causing me to re-evaluate the caricature buxom blonde overblown good ol' fashioned country singer image of her that I've been carrying around for as long as I can remember, because these songs, as interpreted by an impressive rollcall of female pop/country artists (Alison Krauss, Norah Jones, Shania Twain, Emmylou Harris, Sinead O'Connor and others) are quality, and the respect that all of the musicians associated with the disc obviously have for her is remarkable.

Salyu/Takeshi Kobayashi - Kokyu (music from All About Lily Chou-Chou)

This is the disc made up of music ostensibly by Lily Chou-Chou (performed by a singer named Salyu). The music itself is surprisingly difficult to describe - it's basically pop-electronica, I guess, though not entirely cut adrift from more organic sounds, generally tending towards the drifty/ethereal though at times breaking into soaring choruses and getting downright noisy in other places (sort of Julee Cruise-esque). Overall, the record's a bit uneven, and feels more like a collection of individual songs than an album proper, but I'm liking it. "Kaifuku Suru Kizu" is by a long way my favourite track, and I'm not sure how much I would like the rest of the songs were they not so closely connected with the film - but then that conditional is hardly relevant, is it? The fact is that those connections are there, and my experience of the music is correspondingly enriched.

Harlan Ellison - Alone Against Tomorrow: Stories of Alienation in Speculative Fiction

I'd read "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" before, on the strength of that story's attention-grabbing title, and enjoyed it, but there's not much else in this collection which is up to that standard. I wouldn't say that there are any real lemons, but Ellison's unsettling tales of futuristic nightmare-scapes and - there's no better word for it - alienated humanity tend to pall after one has read a few of them in a row; it's probably telling that my other favourite piece in this collection is one which is actually quite funny and even a bit optimistic, "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman". Still, taken as a whole, these stories are quite gripping and thought-provoking, and humankind is always firmly at the forefront of Ellison's imagination without the writing ever being preachy or overly obvious in its messages.