The exuberance of Ted Leo on ‘The Mighty Sparrow,’ the opening track of Brutalist Bricks, the fifth album from Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, is enough to sweep away all those lingering thoughts of the death of rock. This man goes for it! His brand of punk/pop is old-fashioned, somehow a cross between XTC (in their opening punky incarnation), Green Day and Graham Parker, so the band remains a cult fave and no more. I was daunted when I first listened to Brutalist Bricks – the bass is so furious, the punkiest tracks are raw as anything, and Ted sprays his vocals with such fury! – but soon enough the underlying melodies, the nifty arrangements (especially the cutesy endings, each one a gem) and the erudite lyrics took over. I’ll go out on a limb and say this is my favourite Ted Leo and the Pharmacists’ release. All the tracks are high quality but standouts include the frenetic, keening ‘Woke Up Near Chelsea’; the apocalyptic ‘Last Days’; and the drunken travelogue of ‘Bottled up in Cork’.
At last, a singer who sounds like he means it. Hail Ted Leo. 4 stars.
Rupert Thomson’s Once a Spy is a vibrant spy romp, the genre equivalent of that Brad Pitt / Angelina Jolie movie, Mr. & Mrs. Smith. An American spy, described by a colleague as a natural, begins to succumb to dementia and is saved from a hit squad by his down-and-out gambler son. The book begins at a fast clip and accelerates, the tale taken up by the baffled son, racing with his addled father to save their lives, marvelling at what irregular bouts of clarity reveal about the father he’d always imagined as dull. I hadn’t read any of Thomson’s spy novels before but judging from Once a Spy, he himself is a bit of a natural: the prose sparkles; the author successfully juggles action and sardonic humour; the plot weaves like a manic snake; the bit-part characters are deftly drawn. The imaginative insights into hunter and hunted in the modern spy milieu are especially tasty. It’s all silly stuff, of course, but frivolous spy tales weave their own magic when done well.
Too light-hearted to merit its dust jacket accolades, Once a Spy is nonetheless fresh, fun and fast. 3 stars.
Movies based on comic books are almost always bad, ruined by sappiness beyond even what the original comic stretched to. Nonetheless I’m a sucker to try the ones I recall from a childhood spent nose in comic. Iron Man was in my second tier of action heroes, never original enough to really excite me but a sturdy, consistent creation. I couldn’t make myself see the first Jon Favreau film Iron Man in the cinemas, but my son persuaded my to finally try the DVD. And I’m most glad, for this is a guileless, comic-book-style rendering that somehow feels traditional (Iron Man is such an ancient concept) and modernistic at the same time. You know the premise, a tycoon who encases himself in armour and flies in to save the world, but Favreau slots that premise into modern Middle Eastern warfare. The pace is suitably frenetic, with few ‘groan out loud’ moments, the technology is cool, the action scenes are tumultuous, and the ending worked for me. But the one element Iron Manthat saves it from ho-hum is the razor-sharp, quick-voiced acting of Robert Downey Jr. This actor makes an impression, he somehow gets into the skin of even this comic hero, and I couldn’t get enough of him.
Unexpectedly snappy and entertaining. 3 stars.
I bought Sisterworld, the fifth album by American three-piece art-rock band Liars, because I’d read the band proclaimed itself ‘free of influences’. And an otherworldly cocktail of rock, post-rock, jazz-rock and chamber pop Sisterworld proves to be. Never conventional, the band takes each song down odd, disjunctive roads, alternating dissonance, guitar squalls, moody melancholia and weird choruses. If that description seems forbidding, I did find that after a few spins on the turntable, the Liars present as less Beefheart than Nick Cave backing Tortoise. Some of the songs I never did fall in love with, but sufficiently many impressed to justify the original curiosity. Recommended tracks include ‘Scissors,’ which begins with with woozy acapella vocals and leaps into a noisy chorus; the Henry-Rollins-crossed-with-Peter-Gabriel noisefest ‘Scarcrows on a Killer Slant’; and the claustrophobic ‘No Barrier Fun,’ with upfront bass, clicking drums and tinkling keys.
Sisterworld isn’t for everyone but if you like your rock music to occasionally veer towards the avant-garde, you should take a listen. 2½ stars.
It’s funny how literary fiction often throws up doppelgangers, two concurrent novels whose storylines appear to be twinned. A week after reading Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask (see my review), I found that Jess Walter’s fifth novel, The Financial Lives of the Poets, offers a very similar tale, that of a modern young man heading for career, monetary and marital wreckage. Both are wicked satires, both offer laugh-out-loud scenes, both manage to be poignant windows into a slice of modern life. But while The Ask portrays an artist reduced to corporate begging, The Financial Lives of the Poetstackles the heart of the Global Financial Crisis. Matt Prior, a finance journalist, has launched a no-hoper website combining poetry and financial insight, even as he and his wife, teetering on the edge of marriage breakdown, hock their house to the edge of ruination. The opening scene, where Matt goes out in the middle of the night to buy milk and ends up with two dopesters, is hilarious, and there are plenty more laughs, but the author’s intent is serious. How, he asks, did we get to this point? The characters all bubble with life, the descent of Matt into the low life is well paced, and the frequent interior monologue rants are so, so entertaining. I found the ending curt but quite apt.
Another winning satire with heart. 4 stars.
Sam Lipsyte is one of those authors you discover late and immediately commence locating his entire catalogue. On the basis of his fourth novel, The Ask, he is a virtuoso stylist, capable of funny and sad and serious, often on the same page. His language is worth savouring for itself.
Milo Burke, the hero of The Ask, has just been sacked from a New York university for insulting a potential charitable donor. That’s Milo’s job, to prospect for ‘asks’ from the rich with ‘gives’. An abandoned artistic career, looming mortgage default, a professional wife who is distant, a pre-school son . . . Milo’s life is spiralling into disaster. And then an old school pal surfaces from the past to request Milo as the intermediary for a huge university ‘give’. Salvation beckons; or, as Milo soon suspects, maybe not. Lipsyte has full command: his New York comes alive under his penmanship, he savages his characters yet somehow loves them, and the rollicking plot careens towards minor-key catastrophe. I laughed even as I longed for Milo’s salvation. And Lipsyte’s coruscating, gymnastic style rewards on each and every page.
Brilliant, revelatory up-to-the-minute fiction. 4 stars.
Several friends have been at me for ages to watch Last Ride, the road movie of a violent father fleeing across the vast expanse of Australia with his ten-year-old son, but somehow I’ve felt the need to be in a certain mood to finally rent the DVD. (Far better would have been to see it on its release but its local season was unforgivably short and I missed it.) Well, all the plaudits are spot on. The script, by Mac Gudgeon, is paced to perfection from the opening frame, and Glendyn Ivin’s direction wonderfully combines action, judicious flashback and sweeping cinematography. Tom Harding plays the ardent, confused little boy with great maturity, but it’s Hugo Weaving’s performance that lifts Last Ride from just another edgy Australian drama to something special. His portrayal of a tattooed loser literally unable to bring up his son with wisdom or compassion, but suffused with love for the boy, is heartbreaking. I found the build-up of tension, towards what we always sense will be a harsh ending, a wrenching experience, but somehow the movie manages to infuse the finale with the hope of the young.
Stark, brilliant and worthy of an alt-Oscar. 4 stars.
I’m in a backlash frame of mind, keen after focusing on the high and mighty to indulge in my great genre loves, crime and sci-fi. Luckily the science fiction scene keeps throwing up wonderments to latch onto. None speaks louder than Christopher Nolan’s over-the-top futuristic thriller Inception. What a brilliant concept, straight from the pen of Philip K. Dick! Dom Cobb (intensely rendered by Leonardo DiCaprio, an actor I’m belatedly coming to admire) is a dream thief, an expert at invading the dreams of his targets in order to extract secrets useful in the waking world. But his past holds a consuming tragedy and when a tycoon challenges him to go one step further with dream manipulation, Dom assembles a multi-talented team (rather like a Mission Impossible band, with some excellent supporting acting performances) to construct a dream within a dream within a dream within . . . you get the drift – a plot conceit that could have flopped irretrievably within minutes. Yet Inception pulls it off, blasting the viewer from a stunning opening scene right through its two and a half hours of length. A massively heavy-handed music score, relentless shoot-em-up scenes, brain-twisting plot complexity . . . all these could have derailed the film but instead add to its surreal, clunky grandeur. I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face, so absorbed was I in the sumptuous otherworld I was thrust into.
Like Avatar, Inception is grand sci-fi moviemaking at its best: unbridled Wagnerian pomp that somehow works magically. 4 stars.
I’ve always found the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction a reliable marker of top quality, indeed I can’t recall the last winner that disappointed me. So it pains me to report that this year’s winner, Tinkers by Paul Harding, is ambitious and brimming with literary brio, but ultimately a rather ordinary read. Anchored by the last days of a clock repairer, dying with his children and grandchildren around him, this slim volume oscillates between feverish dementia, minutely detailed memories, and the story of the dying man’s father, who travelled the countryside in his tinker’s cart and suffered epileptic fits of frightening force. With the courage of Faulkner, Harding wheels through different times, tenses and writing modes, digressing at will and indulging in brilliant set pieces of description. The writing manages to impress and puzzle at the same time, a judgement that echoes my overall reading experience. At times I was bedazzled, some sections were hypnotically brilliant, and then disorientation or boredom set in. A tour de force that never quite makes it, Tinkersfails to cohere as a complete narrative.
Impressive but dissipated. 2½ stars.
Paul Mees, passionate campaigner for public transport and researcher into transport planning, is back with his most cogent, convincing work yet, Public Transport for Suburbia: Beyond the Automobile Age. After being sacked by Melbourne University for criticizing Victoria’s archaic, petrol-focused transport bureaucracy, Mees has found a home at RMIT, and a real sense of peace pervades this stately analysis. Mees argues for rational policymaking geared towards what we meekly term sustainability, but which in its essence entails weaning communities off cars and replacing them with lower-carbon alternatives: train, tram, bus and foot. Special scorn is heaped upon those who claim Melbourne is too decentralized to effectively and efficiently cover with public transport; Mees provides counterexamples from diverse places such as Switzerland, Brazil and Canada. The use of faulty statistics is rife in transport planning and Mees punctures a number of canards. The chapters describing beacons of hope – cities like Toronto and Vancouver – are inspirational. Skilfully paced, well written, a judicious mix of sobriety and passion, Public Transport for Suburbia is a delight to read.
Paul Mees should be knighted and Public Transport for Suburbia is his best book yet. 3½ stars.