Letters of Note compiled by Shaun Usher

Has inspired me (maybe) to start writing letters myself again; highlights both the text and the materiality of letters - the latter by reproducing the original, handwritten or typed or even inscribed into clay wherever possible. My favourite perhaps the one from the NASA person responding to a nun's question about how the expenditure on space exploration can be justified in a world of famine and want. Littered with little insights into what it is to be human and how we relate to each other on both an individual and a historical scale, as well as into a wide range of social, historical and cultural happenings large and small. (Started life on the web.)

Lydia Loveless - Indestructible Machine

Her previous and first lp, and also excellent (Somewhere Else has turned to be really outstanding - I haven't been able to shake it). There's a punkier edge to this one as well as some clearer rockabilly elements on songs like "Bad Way To Go", "Jesus Was A Wino" and "Do Right", but the voice and the tendency to jag electric guitar down the middle of a melody is the same, as is the overall songwriting style, and it's clearly recognisable as the work of the same artist. Favourites: "Steve Earle", "Learn to Say No".

"Timeshare" (Malthouse)

The first part (the first day) plays mostly as enjoyable almost-farce, the tone off-kilter but then that's what one expects from Lally Katz and it's entertaining and hints at something deeper, but the second, coming after the reveal about the identity of the narrator, the appearance of the sea turtle (another in Katz's line of magic-symbolic animals) and seemingly climactic events of the first night takes on an increased poignancy as well as throwing the musical numbers and kitsch lightness of the previous day into a new light as Sandy's condition is revealed.

Typically for this most intriguing of playwrights (along with Declan Greene, the clear standout of the current Australian crop for mine), the true nature of the slipping through time, slipping out of the world, isn't clearly resolved but instead - more satisfyingly - is allowed to coexist (perhaps aptly) in something like a perpetual oscillation between a literal and a more fantastic explanation, where both could be 'true' at once.

Anyhow, also, good set, sympathetic direction, strong performances from all four of the actors. Very good.

(w/ Laura F, Erandathie and Meribah)

Emily St John Mandel - Station Eleven

I do love a good post apocalypse, and this is very good - a thoughtful, well-written novel of art, loss, humanity, connections and (somehow unobtrusively despite it being central to the narrative, not to mention the presence/absence of a significant character named Miranda) the enduring power of Shakespeare's work that takes place both after and - in flashback - before the catastrophic flu that delineates its events, and works as effectively as thrilling, kept me up late to finish reading it tale of survival as elegant literary exploration of its themes.

Also, I see, winner of this year's tournament of books.

"New15" (ACCA)

Shakey Graves - And The War Came

Sort of a folkish bluesy mix with some country thrown in there, including nicely crunching electric guitars. Pretty good, though a bit uneven.

John Wolseley - "Heartlands and Headwater" (NGV Australia)

When I was younger - much younger - I liked watercolours. Indeed, they were the first method of painting or making art that I remember being specifically aware of. It's tempting to think that it was the blurry dreaminess that drew me, although it's probably just as likely that that's me projecting aesthetic tastes that only became dominant much later in life onto a younger self who was blissfully far more straightforward. Who can say?

Anyhow, that early affection didn't particularly last into adolescence or subsequently, but I was reminded of it by John Wolseley's exhibition, which tackles his broad subject of Australian landcapes and particularly wetlands using watercolours amidst a range of many other things (below - "A Daly River Creek, NT", far from the most diverse, but also taking in pastel, pencil, charcoal, ink and woodcut).

It's a very nice show, unfolding in layers of painting, drawing, collage and assemblage including - entirely aptly - organic material from nature as well as the effects of engagement with nature (eg via frottage).

Music for running

Well, I have a running playlist of 300-odd songs - as many as will fit on an ipod shuffle - and it evolves over time but there a few mainstays: Spoon, always welcome as they are in most contexts; Slow Down Tallahassee, whose music could've been made for this; Bon Jovi, a rather unreconstructed favourite of mine from way back and unusually congruous in this context; Chvrches, whose terrific record keeps on being terrific long after it might've been expected to wear off; Belle and Sebastian, mostly, I think, because their music almost always takes me someplace other than my immediate surrounds; the Pains of Being Pure at Heart (they hit some fairly direct pleasure centres for me); Metric (likewise); and then there's Taylor Swift - when it's one of hers, well, it's like having a friend right there beside me, urging me to keep on going, to keep going for another few minutes again, which is sometimes just long enough.

C J Hendry - "50 Foods in 50 Days" @ The Cool Hunter

This one's from a couple of weekends back - got lost in the recent shuffle: an artful exhibition of finely detailed pen and ink drawings of various food on luxurious Hermes plates, some gourmet and others not so much (I think there were m&ms on one), stumbled across on Gertrude Street.

(w/ Jade and Rob)

It Follows

Well, It Follows has gone straight into the top handful in the (short) list of my favourite horror films.[*] Seriously good.

It works through the interplay of several pieces - the ingenuity and metaphorical richness of its central idea, the unnerving way in which the thing that follows is rendered, the out and out scares, the lushly languid rendition of setting and characters (unavoidably bringing to mind The Virgin Suicides for me) including a deliberately ambiguous sense of period, the easy interweaving of the teenage friendship, detective gang and 'getting out of town' elements (Stand By Me seems, if not a direct inspiration, at least a spiritual predecessor), the heighteningly swooning and ominous synth music that scores it (reminded me of the music in Drive), the overall mood.

In all, just very satisfying, and more as cinema qua cinema than particularly as genre.

(on my own, in a cinema 3 at Nova that seemed remarkably full for a small-name film on a Thursday night)

[*] The only others that I can recall thinking were this good are Let The Right One In, The Others and maybe The Orphanage, and also The Descent (the most straightforwardly, leanly terrifying of the lot).

Jane Gardam - The Man in the Wooden Hat

On the plus side, the writing is surprisingly personality-filled and there are moments of poignancy; on the down, it doesn't feel really fleshed out and I suspect would have been far richer had I read its companion and predecessor, Old Filth.

St Vincent - St Vincent

Some albums you need a bit of time to live with, as well as attention to what they've got going on - this is one of them. For me, St Vincent took several listens to emerge as more than a quirky, occasionally interesting but basically incoherent melange, but at some point I twigged to just how interesting and good it actually is - maybe I needed to get my ear in and learn how to listen to it (often a characteristic of good music and indeed, in similar vein, art of all kinds). Full of personality, melodic and structural left turns, unfamiliar and jagged rhythms, and sneakily tremendous guitar bits, it's terrific!

Maria Katsonis - The Good Greek Girl

I can't say how this would've read to me if I didn't know its author, but as it was, The Good Greek Girl was compelling - an insight in many ways.

Jessica Pratt - On Your Own Love Again

I'm sure there's some very simple explanation for why so much of the best folk-touched music sounds spooky, haunted - something obvious to those who know about how music is put together, to do with tunings or keys or somesuch. It doesn't much matter to me, and whatever it is, Jessica Pratt's beguiling songs are wrapped up in it, while also twinkling with something more contemporary in spirit, all blended very well with her unusual voice (hard to find words to describe it, save to say that it sounds out of time). Simple, and also somehow intricate, and - after enough listens - increasingly memorable in its seemingly quiet way. 

Beach House - Beach House

Their debut, and more murmury and wispy than what was to come (Teen Dream, Bloom, both exceptionally good records - and there was one in between that I haven't got to yet) but already very lovely.

Nina Simone - Sings the Blues

What the title says! 

Robert A Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

Pressed upon me by Rob. I didn't find it hard to read once I got into it, but it didn't especially resonate with me either...felt pretty dated.

"Endgame" (MTC)

Disappointing beginning to the 2015 theatre round. I've grown to love Beckett since my first exposure to him via a very different production of this very play some years back, but this take felt far too literal and straightforward, lacking in the essential spirit that animates his work or any particular interpretive twist (although Julie Forsyth as Nell was excellent - sweetly, suitably pathetic).

(w/ Erandathie)

Big Eyes

Feels like one from the heart from Burton, playing out as it does - and in relatively straight up fashion - its themes of artistic self-expression and value. Doesn't quite settle into a satisfying tonal shape at any point, and also features both an oddly inwardly-directed performance from Amy Adams (who has been basically captivating in all the other things I've seen her in) and an overly mannered - to the point of caricature - performance from the usually excellent Christoph Waltz (Krysten Ritter is a welcome dash of energy whenever she appears), but still and all, okay.

(w/ Rob)

Inherent Vice

Pynchon, of course, a past icon of mine (although Inherent Vice is something of an outlier - a far less lightly coded, more straightforward version of his habitual literary thickets); Paul Thomas Anderson maybe the best director working in Hollywood today (and I still haven't even seen the so very acclaimed There Will Be Blood).[*] Plus Joaquin Phoenix, who for me has come along a trajectory matched only by Matthew McConaughey from intense dislike to considerable respect and enjoyment.

Add it up, and what you get is a film that succeeds on terms that are at once set by its source material and created by itself - Pynchon's distinctive rhythms, cadences and spirals rendered remarkably effectively (albeit probably only possible with this particular novel of his) not least via Joanna Newsom's affecting narration and appearances, Anderson bringing his usual sublime eye to proceedings while drenching it all in 70s iconography, Phoenix the shambling, human-symbolic figure at its centre, while others whirl in and out and around. Impressively, the off-kilter humour translates too.

(w/ David)

[*] Much as I love Sofia Coppola and do admire the craft and style in her work, my response to her films feels like it arises from something far more personal than in any sense objective.