Friday meltdown
Literature, Music, movies - - Posted on September, 8 at 3:19 pm by Tim
Listening to: Buddy Miller Universal United House Of Prayer. Seriously, just buy this album. Obey my blog.
Watching: Have some free time on the weekend so I’m open to movie recommendations. Tempted by Jindabyne - anyone seen it? Love the Raymond Carver story it’s based on, and loved the treatment of the same story in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts. In fact, I’d rate that as one of my top ten movies of all time.
Reading: Grand Days by Frank Moorhouse. Actually, rereading it so I can read the sequel, Dark Palace, which I never got around to for some reason. I first read Grand Days in about 1993. I really think it is was of the great Australian novels, though it wasn’t considered “Australian” enough when it came out to qualify for various Australian literary awards. What provincial bullshit that was. Highly recommended (read the first paragraph).
Also: read this and discover the difference between class and Coulter.
Posted in Literature, Music, movies |
September 8th, 2006 at 3:34 pm
Jindabyne is a very good film, but I think it trips up on the actual Carver story. In the Altman version, as I recall it, the redneck fishing types are somewhat indifferent to finding a dead body — which is both chilling and also explains why they keep fishing. In this film, they’re not indifferent. Which makes their motivation for continuing to fish very hard to understand, despite explanations that Byrne’s character proffers later in the film. See it for the eerie landscapes though — Australia hasn’t looked this scary since Picnic at Hanging Rock.
September 8th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
Afraid to say Jindabyne is not that good. It is too long and somewhat self-indulgent and the ending is really poor. I sometimes wish Australian directors/films/producers would have the decency to take a short course in editing they really need to learn how to make their films shaper…anyway, I let you be the judge.
BTW check out Michel Houellebecq’s Possibility of an island. The cover is very bad but as we all know we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. It the best book I ever read, truly profound, insightful and thought provoking.
Have a good weekend.
September 8th, 2006 at 4:07 pm
if you want a recommendation for an extremely funny author (well, he is, in my opinion!!), try Chrisopher Brookmyre.
I have read most of his books and am currently re-reading “Not the End of the World.” They can be read several times as the dialogue is fantasic.
September 8th, 2006 at 4:08 pm
Agree with you about Short Cuts, but I thought Jindabyne was a bit of a disappointment. I think that a lot of Australian films overdo the whole landscape as a character thing, often to the detriment of the actual characters.
It’s certainly worth seeing, but an Australian film I enjoyed more was Ten Canoes.
Speaking of music, has anyone heard the latest Lambchop album? It’s got rave reviews, but I was so disappointed with their previous album that I am hesitant.
In a similar vein to Buddy Miller, Jeffrey Foucalt’s Ghost Repeater is worth checking out.
September 8th, 2006 at 4:11 pm
This is all good - I have a FAther’s Day Borders’ gift voucher burning a hole in my pocket!
September 8th, 2006 at 4:24 pm
another recommendation if anyone is interested - this was a recommendation made several months ago on Larvatus Prodeo.
If you are after a good price on books mainly from the UK, although I think they have others - suggest that you try a UK company, called the “The Book Depository” (web-site @ http://www.bookdepository.co.uk).
Don’t know how they do it, but the books are postage free to Australia. I have now purchased quite a few books and they usually arrive about 1 week after placing the order on-line and they are always at least several dollars cheaper than trying to buy here in Melbourne.
September 8th, 2006 at 5:00 pm
Presently reading: The Terror Conspiracy by John Marrs which goes into detail about 9/11 as an ‘inside job’ & the relationship between Bin Laden family & House of Saud…now playing Lisa Germano’s ‘In the Maybe World’…gonna watch tonite recordings of ‘The Daily Show’ & “Wire in the Blood’…settling in w/ a bottle of Chilean Merlot ‘Casillero del Diablo’ & preparing musroom, asparagus & tomato quiche w/ mash & steamed veges topped w/ spicy salsa made from homegrown chillies & herbs…should be one cracker of a nite.
Porr old Brocky tho…one hell of a fella & a fellow vegetarian.
September 8th, 2006 at 5:22 pm
The Buddy Miller-produced new Solomon Burke country album “Nashville” (with Emmylou, Gillian and David, Dolly Parton, Jim Lauderdale) is out on the 26th. Can’t wait.
September 8th, 2006 at 5:43 pm
I’ve bought over a 100 books now from The Book Depository, PeterG. I’m amazed they can send them priority airmail - I get books faster than I could get them from Sydney.
One of the advantages is that you can sometimes get H/C editions which were never available in Oz cheaper than the Oz P/B editions.
September 8th, 2006 at 5:44 pm
“I’m amazed they can send them priority airmail” should be ” …. for no charge”.
September 8th, 2006 at 7:59 pm
I just fainted.
September 8th, 2006 at 11:06 pm
[...] Music has that affect on people. For the philosophical acoustic genius John Fahey, Bluegrass Music Destroyed his life (a book that is bloody hard to find. Will have another go via a UK bookstore I discovered via a comment at Road to Surfdom). [...]
September 8th, 2006 at 11:59 pm
The two Moorehouse novels are I agree ,wonderful reading,and Edith ,the central figure is one of the great women of Australian fiction.
The book is also a vast repository of information about the League of Nations,the for-runner of the U.N.
The book covers the period from the early post-world war 1 period to 1945 and the establishment of the UN in San Francisco.
One of the great works of Australian literature.
Oddly the book was beaten for a major literary prize by of all things the book,of another writer,Helen Demidenko, who was later exposed as a fraud..she being not of Ukrainian origin,but a Pom !.Her book supposedly being about the Ukrainian experience in WW2,and also considered bu some as anti-semitic.
Later the second book of the Moorehouse series “Dark Palace” WAS awareded the prize,which it richly deserved !Perhaps the Judges were contrite for their earlier errors.
September 9th, 2006 at 1:24 am
He thinks he knew…
Enter me as a boy, my mind’s made up
So they tell me, slave to the friends I talk to
It’s all in the dark
The screamin’, it’s heard outa this shell
Sometimes…down alleys
I’m not what they expect of me…
I shrivel before the ghost
The time of raped workers & kingdom come
Blood on my mentor’s hands
w/ a mere look, a chew…a holiday
bona-fide tide of grunting & grrr…
the old, Grandad land of the hunt, the kill, the whisky.
September 9th, 2006 at 1:25 am
I looked out, in the cold, snow reigned freer than…
Listening to the call…echo of random notions, patterns of…
They call it chapters
Predictable
Barely a hitch in the vox popular
The animal, a deer, a look, the other way
the nightmare, predicted scream…the excuse…the manyfold…
I’m cramped…free…multiple mind lives
Unable to not set the ropes of fire
In the dark of the same brand of whisky
The fire, the gut fire, the free from responsibility
September 9th, 2006 at 1:26 am
Next day in the morning more than after
Remember the me…to a child…
The dune, the riverworld, the rendevous, the golden city…
Bring ‘em up…use the soundz to rize
Forgive the five, famous in appearance,
Further than the danger of a galaxy nine…
They took him out, took her out, took the lotta them towards
And I kinda get the stiffness of it all
Watch it enter the heart of us in slo-mo
And we shall dance on the edge of the destroyer
Singularity of all night long control
Lucky
Fortunate…me.
Brrr…gasp…below, the sound below…give it up…
Glide…in…to the….
N’
September 9th, 2006 at 1:36 am
Now listening to:
The Fall
September 9th, 2006 at 9:20 am
I know this has nothing to do with your post but I almost pissed myself laughing last night when the ABC news came on …. there was THE EXACT SAME STORY as earlier in the week, the same Prime Minister, the same flag-bedecked background, the same solemn expression and earnest platitudes, except this time it was Peter Brock not Steve Irwin.
I wonder if he’s pre-recorded a huge library of tributes for any conceivable death?
Let’s hope the Brock family do the right thing and agree to a state funeral.
September 9th, 2006 at 11:25 am
Listening to all the 10 buck ‘best ofs’ I’ve bought lately to make sure I don’t forget the 80s - Joe Jackson, Eurythmics, Pretenders, Prince, B52s, Roxy et al, plus a wonderful Desmond Dekker compilation a mate did for me. And Malcolm Bilson’s Mozart D minor Piano Concerto, just to keep the classical wank quotient up.
Watching (on DVD, cinema a rare treat only when grandparents mind kids) American Splendour (amiable, low key fun), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (brain-achingly good) and still to see Sin City and Gosford Park. V for Vendetta and the Al Gore thing next.
Reading, while drying out from Patrick O’Brian overload, Peter Carey’s Illywhacker (great soaring gusts of prose which often lead nowhere at all but sometimes chime with the trajectory of the book in surprising ways) and now into Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama, which is shaping up as nicely as Lunar Park, which was the best non-Patrick I’ve read in the last year or two. Ugly stuff, but it engages unflinchingly with ‘the way we live now’ and sprinkled with enough black wit to keep you peering thru your fingers.
I sometimes see Grand Days on sale and think ‘I should read that’ but it’s bulk and the memory of struggling thru some smartypants short stories by Moorehouse steers me clear. Plus I have doorstoppers like Infinite Jest and The Corrections still to be read.
So little time…
September 15th, 2006 at 1:23 pm
[...] Reading: The Possibility of an Island by French novelist Michel Houellebecqwxyzkjpbdtt (pronounced smith). Read a review here. He’s kind of predictable, but I like it, if that’s not too strong a word. Thanks for the recommendation, Jessika. Jason likes it too. [...]