It hadn’t struck me until I posted on my Best rock albums of 2009 – I’m losing touch with new music! I did my best but consider the artists I enjoyed:
- Idlewild, Jason Lytle, John Wesley Harding, Paul Dempsey, Grant-Lee Phillips, Conor Oberst and M. Ward have been around for yonks
- Others – Peter Hammill and Mark Olson & Gary Louris from the Jayhawks – might be called venerable
- Jonsi & Alex were new to me but Sigur Ros isn’t exactly a debut band
- The Horrors are as close as I got to fresh faces but Primary Colours was their second release
So bring on 2010 and a hunt for new artists who astound with their vitality and craftsmanship!
I’m a geek who is fascinated by geeks, their ascending (I believe, though many would dispute this) role in the modern world, and whether geeks are ‘better’ moral beings than non geeks (call them jocks, if you like). The topic of geeks is not one easy to pursue tangentially, so not much thinking has occurred on the subject in the last couple of years.
Well, Stefan Sirucek has written an engaging, positive review in Huffington Post of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks by Ethan Gilsdorf, exploring the world of gaming. Despite knowing that geekdom isn’t synonymous with gaming (I don’t game, though I used to and sometimes miss it), this can be my 2010 book to revive musing about the sociology of the group I identify with.
Last year, for the first time, I challenged my book club members to read Roberto Bolano’s 2666, way outside our customary range of size and ‘literary’ nature. Four of us took six months, much longer than anticipated, to master the book. Our discussion, over a red-wine-soaked dinner, proved to be scintillating.
As to why take the trouble, Laura Miller from Salon magazine puts it so well: ‘Read a book you think you’ll hate in 2010′.
I’ve just issued this year’s less daunting Fat Book Challenge. Over the last decade, I’ve consistently read the winners of the Booker Prize, but last year I simply couldn’t make myself tackle Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. Why? Partly the length of 600 pages, but mostly because it’s a historical novel set in 16th century England, a period and place I could care less about. Ever since, I’ve felt guilty because Mantel is one heck of a writer.
Now I will read it. And am looking forward to the challenge.
On November 5, on her radio show, Ramona Koval interviewed Peter Temple, author of the scorching, wonderfully written Truth. I found it most revealing of the man, increasing my admiration even further. Here’s the podcast.
Keeping in touch with what is actually happening with energy – the shifts and battles – is tough. Both the general media and the business press have their distorting prisms, which mostly focus on the sensational rather than the evaluative. So it was refreshing to read this 2009 roundup, published in yesterday’s Huffington Post, from Bruce Nilles, one of the main campaigners against American dirty coal. It’s an encouraging picture: no coal plant construction starts over the year, for the first time in six years; 26 proposed coal plants defeated/abandoned; some massive projects indeed brought down.
2009 was a humdinger of a reading year. Publishers often seem to load up the end of the year with the best stuff, or at least the books that suit my tastes, and this year illustrated that trend strongly. I had to scramble to read enough of those end-of-year books to make sense of the twelve months; even so, there are a few novels unread which might otherwise have figured in this list:
- There aren’t enough superlatives for 2666, the 900-plus-page masterpiece by Roberto Bolano, a dazzling mix of high art, low noir, pungent description, allusion, thematic discourse and insight.
- Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore was his breakout book, in which he took the mystery genre and transformed it into a deep morality play. His latest morality journey, Truth, is as fierce and fast-paced, but if anything, Temple’s style has risen to new lyrical levels
- It takes a brave writer to tackle the Vietnam War and its legacy. Denis Johnson, a renowned, fierce, literary novelist, has done just that, fully head on, with his epic Tree of Smoke. Death, despair and madness expand their grips over the course of the 600-plus pages, yet somehow, as only the best writers can manage, Johnson construes the almighty mess of Vietnam as a triumph, of sorts, of the human spirit. Tree of Smokeis the most exciting, deep novel I have read since Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap.
- Will It Be Funny Tomorrow, Billy?: Misadventures in Music is a memoir by Stephen Cummings, a sometimes brilliant songwriter and always impressive vocalist who achieved brief, incandescent fame in the early 1970s. A series of very loosely linked riffs (the word is apt) on his chaotic life, this is a unique, revelatory recollection of a highly creative soul.
- Peter Carey is always exhilarating to read; Parrot and Olivier in Americasees him at his best, spinning language around a remake of Tocqueville’s journey around America in 1830
- Can you base a novel around an African American who looks like Sidney Poitier and is named Not Sidney Poitier? Madcap satirist Percival Everett has done just that with I Am Not Sidney Poitier, making me laugh but also reflect on the strange world of the United States
- Homeis another gem from the pen of Marilynne Robinson, a slow, reflective tale about a prodigal son and the father and sister who grapple with his return, ruminating about human nature and love and forgiveness. I know readers who find Homejust too lugubrious but Robinson’s lyrical style more than makes up for it
- T. Jefferson Parker has been one of my favourite thriller/mystery writers for years, and as his competitors seem to have lost their mojos, his The Renegades, a perfectly plotted drugs-and-murder tale told in Parker’s pithy yet eloquent style, has ended up as the only traditional example of that genre on my 2009 list
- Eric Maisel’s The Atheist’s Way: Living Well Without Gods is a heartfelt, intelligent, non-gooey take on existential atheism, just the right stuff for these times of increasing fundamentalism
- Part travel memoir, part exploration of psychological ill health, Exposure: A Journey, written by Australian author Joel Magarey, is a superbly written oddity that also set me thinking about the big existential issues
For a stay-at-home reader like me, seeing two films each week, one hundred annually, represents a major challenge, one I’m only gradually tackling. Even a hundred movies a year is barely sufficient for one to aspire to be a film fan. Over 2009, I managed to view 54 current or near-current movies, so I guess I should be disappointed, but I’m not. We do the best we can, I tried hard throughout the year, and 201o will be better, won’t it?
And the films I was privileged to view! From a bumper year of film, here are the highlights:
- The Hurt Locker (see my mini review), written and directed by Kathryn Bigelow, is simultaneously a pulsing thriller, an indictment of the occupation of Iraq, and a very human examination of risk taking
- Surely claymation cannot evince tears? Adam Elliott’s Mary & Max (review), pairing a geeky Melbourne teen girl with a middle-aged, obese Asperger’s suffer in New York, is sad and funny and ultimately redeeming
- In the Loop (review) presents a rapier-sharp satire of the British decision to invade Iraq, raising more belly laughs for me than any other film last year
- Disgrace, directed with great control by Steve Jacobs, is better than the underlying J. M. Coetzee novel. An unsparing window into the harsh reality of modern South African life, it features John Malkovich in one of his best performances
- Blessed (review), partly written by one of my favourite novelists, Christos Tsiolkas, highlights the huge talents of director Ana Kokkinos. A multi-character drama about street kids and their mothers, dovetailed with elegant precision, Blessed moved me enough to make it my favourite film of the year
- Anvil! The Story of Anvil, is one of three terrific documentaries transformed into art via narrative mastery. Director Sacha Gervasi chronicles the career of a metal band that perennially almost succeeds but never does. Who would have thought heavy metal could show the trials and triumphs of creativity so luminously?
- Standard Operating Procedure (review) by legendary documentary maker Errol Morris, a companion to the scorching same-name book by Philip Gourevich, is art and expose (once more of the Iraqi debacle, clearly a 2009 theme for me, isn’t it?) at its peak
- The Cove (review) inserts the tension of a Robert Ludlum thriller into a documentary expose of the baseless, bestial slaughter of dolphins in a Japanese seaside town
- Of the two Coen Brothers films, A Serious Man was displaced by the subversively funny and wonderfully tightly plotted Burn After Reading (review), which elicits out-of-the box performances from John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, George Clooney, Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt
- Maybe I didn’t see enough foreign films but only one, the fascinating, affirming Departures, made my highlights list. A brilliant look at Japanese funeral body preparation
How easy to get swamped by the visual, especially in the age of online plenty! I’ve listened to less than I am comfortable with, but here are the highlights:
- Jason Lytle’s Yours Truly, the Commuter – the return of Grandaddy in more pensive form, chockers with sweeping melody, wonderful keyboards and bass, and societal commentary
- Who Was Changed & Who Was Dead by John Wesley Harding – once hailed as Elvis Costello lite but well beyong that now, Harding (having launched a writing career as well) returns with super catchy, upbeat songs featuring his marvellous wordplay
- Ready for the Flood by Mark Olson & Gary Louris – gorgeous harmonies, crunching melodies, intriguing words . . . during their Australian tour, the Jayhawks founders kidded us that they were a substitute for Simon and Garfunkel, but they’re much better than that
- Peter Hammill’s Thin Air – I’m the Australian audience of one, at least as far as I know, but this is one of the brilliant songster’s most engaging, involving releases in years
- Paul Dempsey’s Everything Is True – the unmistakeable voice, the erudite, observational lyrics, allied to a new batch of songs played entirely by himself, just brilliant
- Monsters of Folk – the self-titled release by a new so-called supergroup containing Conor Oberst and M. Ward, two of my favourite artists, is stunning: varied yet cohesive, beautifully arranged and played, with songs ranging from dusky ballads to anthemic rock
- Grant-Lee Phillips’s Little Moon – I’m not sure he’d like being called a balladeer, and in truth many of his songs are powerfully rocky, but that lilting voice imparts a distinctive ballad-tinged edge to all he writes . . . this is the singer-songwriter at his best
- Jonsi & Alex’s Riceboy Sleeps – atmospheric washes glorify this sublime, introspective ambient release from Jon Thor Birgisson (Sigur Ros) and Alex Somers (Parachutes) is the only electronic release that captured my heart in 2009
- Post-Electric Blues by Idlewild – a welcome return to rockier songs by my favourite Scottish band, full of quality songs turned splendid by Roddy Woombles wonderful voice and poetic lyrics
- Primary Colours by The Horrors – who would have thought I’d fall for a Goth-sounding fallback band but I did, and only because of the two hypnotic, long tracks: ‘Sea Within a Sea’ and ‘I Only Think of You.’
What the heck is The Bat Segundo Show? I must have registered, for I receive a semi-regular email telling me about it. Until now, I’ve binned the emails as products of another of my misguided online expressions of interest, but I read the latest one, and it’s got some potentially fascinating interviews: filmmaker Michael Haneke, authors of books about chocolate and Louis Armstrong, and – the one I’ve downloaded to listen to – journo Ken Auletta (Googled: The End of the World As We Know It), in what is promised to be a ‘hard-hitting colloquy’.
Two minutes of research turns up that this website has author interviews by New York critic and writer Edward Champion. The website is wonderfully piss-taking (‘a cultural podcast in tenebrous standing’) . . . let’s see how good my chosen interview is.
He died aged only 45 (see this Salon post re the news). Described as a folk-rocker, his music was oblique, atmospheric, sometimes almost savage in its bittersweet darkness. But he had a wonderful sense of melody, so his songs often grabbed and attached. I followed him for most of his career but, sadly, neglected his latest releases. So today, at my desk, I honour the man by listening to the free 6-track sampler from his latest two albums, At the Cut and North Star Deserters. Vic Chesnutt: will be missed, yes missed . . .