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RECENT READING
Ian McEwan: Solar
An odd book. Somewhat humdrum affair from McEwan. Engaging in places, funny in places, but curiously lacklustre overall. But McEwan is always worth reading to some extent. (***)Steven Holl: Urbanisms: Working with Doubt
Wonderful projects, beautiful book. (*****)Mary Myers: Andrea Cochran: Landscapes
A glorious book, about glorious work. Cochran's landscapes are pitched perfectly, balancing formal order with controlled explosions of planting, light and colour. It's quite beautiful work, stretching mainly down the west coast of the USA, and so with beautiful landscape to borrow. And the book presents and dissects the work, and the thinking behind it, with equal precision. Wonderful. (*****)Alain de Botton: A Week At The Airport: A Heathrow Diary
Lovely little book describing an endlessly fascinating subject. de Botton on top form when constrained by scope and surrounds. Full review here. (****)Jacques Attali: A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century
Undecided. Fantastic tour through the history of humanity - utterly compelling - and then a projection over the next 50-100 years which is fascinating, insightful and probably spurious in equal measure. Definitely worth a read. (****)Aurora Fernandez Per: The Public Chance: New Urban Landscapes (Spanish Edition)
Absolutely wonderful compendium of urban design and architecture projects worldwide. (I have the English edition rather than the Spanish this link points at.) (*****)- John Birmingham: Leviathan: The unauthorised biography of Sydney
A fantastic read. Thoroughly subjective, impassioned, personal and slanderous. Well researched and hefty, but written with a light touch, it takes apart the Emerald City, revealing it to be both impossibly dark and essentially conservative. Along with The Fatal Shore and a few others, essential reading in terms of understanding the city. (*****) Gary Hume: Toyo Ito: Sendai Mediatheque
As with the Seattle Public Library book in this series from Actar, I've been poring over this over the last year, pulling details and insight into recent work. A good resource, well-produced. (*****)Office for Metropolitan Architecture: Seattle Public Library
Decent overview from the Actar series. I've been using this heavily, along with the Sendai Mediatheque title, in work over the last year. (*****)- Christos Tsiolkas: The Slap
Clever yet eminently readable novel of modern Melbourne manners. Written with the devilishly compelling page-turnability of a good grown-up soap opera, it's also a smartly structured and beautifully nuanced depiction of contemporary Australian urban:suburban society, warts and all. (*****) - Steven Carroll: The Art of the Engine Driver
Lovely evocation of late-'50s Melbourne suburb, and of the railways just before the heart was ripped out of them. Not just a warm nostalgic costume drama, but with rich atmosphere and complex themes rippling beneath the surface. (****) Geoff Dyer: Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi: A Novel
Hugely enjoyable, as ever. One of the finest British writers around. Not autobiography, but autobiography. Fiction, and non-fiction. Travel writing, and not travel writing. Hilarious and occasionally moving, learned and light, warm and bad-tempered, revelling in facile reactions and almost immeasurably deep. A mess of contradictions that establishes a coherent world-view. Which is a contradiction in itself, of course. Beautifully turned prose too, apparently effortless but almost certainly not. (*****)William H. Whyte: The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
Amazingly, I'd never read this in linear fashion, from cover to cover, until recently. Quite brilliant, clearly, and written so well. With humility and grace, wit and candour, insight and experience. Although focused primarily on New York of the '70s, it's still essential. (*****)- David Malouf: 12 Edmonstone Street
Wondrous writing on memory and place in this famous set of short vignettes by Malouf. (*****) - Robert Freestone: Designing Australia's Cities: Culture, Commerce and the City Beautiful, 1900-1930
Not quite as advertised, and solely focusing on seeing the cities through the 'city beautiful' idea, but a good history. The writing could do with a bit more pep, but an extremely useful reference book on a subject that warrants further exploration. (****) David Peace: GB84
Not sure why it's taken me so long to read this, as I'm a big fan of David Peace's writing and this book is set in and around the early-80s Sheffield of my youth. But it was well worth the wait. Peace fictionalises the miners' strike, and the extraordinary events of 1983-85 as Britain teetered on the edge of large scale civil unrest. But it's only just fiction, no matter how brutal it seems. A brilliant evocation of the time, and a social fabric stretched taut to breaking point. (*****)R. Klanten: Data Flow: Visualising Information in Graphic Design
Pretty thorough compendium of examples. (*****)J. G. Ballard: Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton: An Autobiography
Hugely enjoyable read. His life is incredible and humdrum all at once, which explains a fair bit of his writing. You feel there's a lot more he could tell, but his books have rarely outstayed their welcome. (*****)Cormac Mccarthy: The Road
I don't recall being quite so affected by a book before. Absolutely extraordinary, particularly if you read within one day. It left me speechless, shattered and reflective. (*****)Julianne Schultz (Editor): Griffith REVIEW 21: Hidden Queensland (Griffith Review)
Very good issue. Although it pores over the same old ground again and again from numerous angles, it ultimately reveals a fascinating, multiperspectival portrait of a place. Beneath its becalmed, languid easy-going surface, QLD has the scars of an extraordinarily rich half-century of history; a set of stories and characters well drawn out here. (****)
Recent Listening
Washed Out: Within & Without
Appealing. (****)Radian: Chimeric
Crunchy. (*****)Trentemoller: Late Night Tales
Full-on Tex Mex CaliGoth Nordcore. Mulholland Drive vs Copenhagen bike lane. (*****)- Peter Broderick: Music for Contemporary Dance
Rather beautiful. (*****) Bill Callahan: Apocalypse
By turns hilarious and touching. (*****)James Blake: James Blake
A talent indeed. (*****)Marc Ribot: Silent Movies
(****)Shackleton: Fabric 55: Shackleton
Brilliant live mix by Berlin resident Shackleton (maybe the sound of Berlin?) Spooky, paranoid, heavily interior, floorfillers. No escape. (Cracking work music too, btw.) (*****)Alberto Iglesias: Talk to Her (Score)
Randomly ended up watching the film on SBS (again) and couldn't forget the music. Caetano Veloso's "Cucurrucucú Paloma" tipped me over the edge, but the rest of the soundtrack is just gorgeous. (*****)Franghiz Ali-Zadeh and Kronos Quartet: Mugam Sayagi: Music of Franghiz Ali-Zadeh
Kronos Quartet plays the works of Azerbaijani composer Franghiz Ali-Zadeh (who is also pianist on a couple of pieces here). At turns mournful and folksy, shimmering and other-worldly, strident and discordant. Captivating. (*****)Silent City
Kayhan Kalhor: Silent City
Startlingly beautiful album by Iranian fiddle and lute player Kayhan Kalhor and string quartet Brooklyn Rider. The opener, 'Ascending Bird', is one of the most stirring pieces I've heard for a long time, yet the centrepiece is a 30-minute evocation of Saddam Hussein’s poison gas attack on the Kurdish city of Hallabjah. Incredible. (via DJ Rupture of WFMU) (*****)Nicki Minaj: Pink Friday
An album of two halves, in other words, made for unbundling. All the tracks here with rappers (Eminem, Drake, will.i.am (feat. Buggles), even Kanye) are great, as a few others, but a good 4 or 5 can just be deleted. She seems to explode in a reactive situation. Production is just ... OK. (****)- Kuusumun Profeetta: Kukin kaappiaan selässään kantaa
Oldie (2002) but lovely. Gentle, meandering rhodes-flavoured Finnish psych-folk-jazz. As heard on Monocle Weekly via Tuomas Toivonen. Purchase here. (*****) The Flaming Lips and Stardeath and White Dwarfs: The Flaming Lips And Stardeath And White Dwarfs With Henry Rollins And Peaches Doing Dark Side Of The Moon
A few tracks here show what it could've been - a scratchier, driven, almost motorik psychedelic groovefest - but ultimately the whole thing fails to convince. Could do better. (***)- Lido Pimienta: Color
Columbian pop of highest order. More here. (*****) - Das Racist: Shut Up, Dude
Crazy NYC-hip-hop mix from the awesome DR. In their own words: "WEED EDGE/HARE KRISHNA HARD CORE/ART RAP/FREAK FOLK MUSIC TRIO BASED IN BROOKLYN, NEW YORK". Free download (for a while) here: http://www.myspace.com/dasracist (*****) Four Tet: There Is Love in You
Worth the wait, put it that way. Absolutely wonderful. Kieran Hebden at the top of his game. (*****)David Daniell & Douglas Mccombs: Sycamore
A cracking album. Something of Talk Talk at their best (i.e. electric Miles meets loose art-pop). Very good. (*****)DJ Rupture & Matt Shadetek: Solar Life Raft
Top. (*****)Klimek: Movies Is Magic
'Dedications' was one of the albums of the last decade, and this is a supreme follow-up. Breathtakingly gorgeous music. (*****)
