beep boop

cxxxvii. cleaving, julie powell
i loved all the technical stuff about learning to butcher. the moping and the affair and so much personal exposure, not so much.

cxxxviii. the perfectionist - life and death in haute cuisine, rudolph cheminski
this was one of the more detailed and slightly boring books i have read in the category of restaurant non-fiction, perhaps because it wasn't written first hand by someone actually cooking. much more interview/reporting style.

cxxxix. vanity fair, william makepeace thackeray
the first half was hilarious! a sarcastic comedy and farce. then i struggled through the second half and can say that i have read it.

xviv. dame kiri te kanawa, chatswood concourse Apr 14
do performers make a habit of leaving the stage after groups of songs, ostensibly for a drinks break? i've never seen it and it was a little strange. dame kiri still has fantastic high notes and reasonably tight vibrato, i have come to the conclusion i don't care much for canteloube's songs of the auvergne. there was a lot of coughing and almost choking from the audience, often at the worst moments too, ugh. overall great performance from a legend, though.
this is also a new venue that i had not been to before, the design is very similar to angel place city recital hall. however the side boxes come out a bit too far so seats on the balcony at the ends of the rows have quite a restricted view of the stage which was not advised during ticket purchase. acoustics good.

the queen of v

xviii. 31st march 2012 anne sophie mutter with the sydney symphony and vladimir ashkenazy - beethoven violin concerto and shostakovich symphony no 5

did i even mention last time that lisa batiashvili's performance was the first time i'd seen ashkenazy conduct? anyway he should do it more ho ho ho.

what is there to say about anne sophie mutter playing beethoven! i am so glad to have seen her first australian performance. clear gold sound, never dominated by the orchestra, apparent from the very first note. appropriate freedom of tempo and complete mastery of mood. i guess that happens when you play a piece for 35 years. having seen her play in 3D i can now fully appreciate that the slightly raised elbow is in the service of sinuous bow to string contact that is virtually continuous. the chord flourishes are like whips. the shoulder cloth only comes out for the cadenzas. the dresses are john galliano. the encore was bach partita no 2 sarabande.

shostakovich was pretty great esp mvts 2 and 4, and the timpanist was pounding it like no tomorrow at the end, pretty great.

why hello

cxxxv. ethan frome, edith wharton
so bleak, god.

cxxxvi. the remains of the day, kazuo ishiguro
well i mean it was ok; it was well-written and subtle. but ultimately was it gripping and newly insightful? not so much.

viii? this is our youth, sydney opera house drama theatre march 22
this was quite enjoyable now that i think back about it, but at the time i just felt like it was new york/internet snark in person. this was most likely an effect of some people in the audience who found some average lines funny and the good lines hilarious beyond belief. this kind of weird exaggerated response relative to my own was a bit disconcerting! anyway this is quickly becoming a judgy judgement of the audience rather than the play itself, which i enjoyed. michael cera was pretty great in a michael cera way, and while kieran culkin was operating at a higher level they both had stilted monologue patches but were otherwise consistently good.

i have been neglectful, i do not apologise

lxxvi. the artist
it had a lull in the middle that might have coincided unfortunately with my post-prandial somnolence that day. but overall the way it was made makes it fresh and different.

lxxvii. the descendants
oh george clooney, do you really act the same way in every movie to the extent that this slightly more emotional character brought you an oscar nomination? sadly it appears so, not to say that it doesn't work. i want to go to hawaii.

lxxviii. tinker tailor soldier spy
i loved the costumes and many shades of grey as well as the internal workings of large paperwork-based organisations.


cxxviii. the heart is a lonely hunter, carson mccullers
sob
and i haven't even seen the movie yet

cxxix. wild girls aka natalie barney and romaine brooks, diana souhami
i came to this book via a very circuitous route which is gluck's portrait by romaine brooks. overall it was interesting and i wonder whether we are any freer or more liberal today than paris in the 1920s. however on realising that i had previously (~ a decade ago) read souhami's trials of radclyffe hall i couldn't help but feel that the level of narration was at a much more superficial and less intimate level. much larger print and you know what that means. also, what the fuck was up with the footnotes, surely we don't need to be dictated to like small children, with one-sentence wikipedia-level introductions of john singer sargent or f scott fitzgerald like no one has ever heard of them.

cxxx. gertrude and alice, diana souhami
now this one delved much deeper and more personally. i haven't yet decided whether gertrude stein is readable in her own artistic style but i am thinking probably not.

cxxxi. the prime of miss jean brodie, muriel sparks
this was misleadingly sweet and innocent in the beginning

cxxxii. revolutionary road, richard yates
oh my god. i can't believe this could ever be made into a movie for the simple reason that there was so much internal life that couldn't possibly be portrayed. but sigh, pretty great. suitably depressing.

cxxxiii. swamplandia, karen russell
this kinda devolved into a bit of a supernatural mess but overall, good writing

cxxxiv. blood bones and butter, gabrielle hamilton
i would have liked slightly more detail on the actual cooking apart from a description of doing eggs at brunch, but overall the writing puts this into the very top tier of cooking memoir.


xvi. 24th Feb 2012 sydney symphony and lisa batiashvili - thus spake zarathustra and brahms violin concerto
i was worried for the first 2 mins that the orchestra was drowning out the violin solo but then she got into it and it was pretty great.

xviii. 9th March 2012 the marriage of figaro, opera australia, sydney opera house opera theatre
i had theoretical qualms about the marriage of figaro being sung in english, and while it was a little awkward in places overall it did not detract from the music, the uniformly good singing, the impressive stage and set design, and the acoustics. the size and shape of the opera theatre is pleasantly conducive to sound carriage and it was nicely loud, there is nothing worse than straining to hear good singing. overall i was quite impressed! my first proper live opera!

ok let's see

cxxvii. mrs dalloway, virginia woolf
hustle and bustle and life.

going to list this one as an incomplete, the line of beauty, alan hollinghurst
once upon a time a patient walked into my room holding the brick that is 'the stranger's child', upon which i enquired as to its merits and read-worthiness; it was within my general possession at the time, as i had borrowed it from the library. he informed me that he had 30 pages to go and 'not to bother' because he didn't expect it to improve within 30 pages but just wanted to get through it. however he did far recommend 'the line of beauty' instead. so i did not bother bothering with the stranger's child, also in part because of the book's poor portability with regards to public transport entertainment, but i did borrow the line of beauty, which was a mistake. (there is no specific synonym for 'reading'!! this is a problem i can't believe i didn't realise until now.)
are you ready for some vitriol, i don't even care. the beginning lifts the entire premise, basically, of brideshead revisited, and puts it in the 80s with appropriate promiscuity and less innuendo (not in a good way). i hadn't even seen any reviews prior to reading and don't even care so much about brideshead revisited apart from reading it once, and yet even to me it was so blatantly obvious! add to that the fact that there was no interesting, true-personality-revealing crisis to speak of, at least not at the beginning, which seems now to be very important in any kind of good storytelling, and the amount i cared about the spoilt, self-involved characters correspondingly depreciated exponentially.
to conclude, this was one of the few books in a long time that i haven't cared enough to finish.

officially the book with the worst title i have read in a while

cxxvi. the marriage plot, jeffrey eugenides
my expectations were low to begin with after a friend said that it was not worth rushing out to buy. so it actually started well, and compared to the books i read just before it, i read most of the words for real and was drawn along by the pace of writing. i kept looking for something deeper than 'which boy will she end up with?' and realised after the first half that what i thought was going to be the introduction to something further was never going to get there.
let me compare this to jonathan franzen's freedom, since they both have david foster wallace tributes, which frankly i don't care so much about. at least the marriage plot's characters were mostly likeable, whereas freedom's characters were mostly unlikeable. i enjoyed the setting of the 80s more, it seems more like a real book for some reason. i don't really understand why freedom's generation y late 2000s setting and feel was so annoying to me. it felt vacuous like a mcmansion. with the wrong kind of offputting american arrogance. but comparatively the marriage plot was so small in scope. like a nothing much. engaging writing, to be sure, but i expected deeper.
also where are the women in this authorial boys' club? that's what i really want to know.

i love the library too much for a kindle

cxxiii. bossypants, tina fey
this was ok. there were some funny turns of phrase, but given allllll the hype my cynicism regarding mainstream trends and what is considered 'good' has redoubled itself. YES I AM AN ASSHOLE. quality is very important to me, i can't stress this enough. real quality, not just money floating around spilt from the slack-jawed wallets of sheep.

cxxiv. orlando, virginia woolf
now this is real writing. i mean comparatively, not that much happens in terms of plot events and specifics and conversation. who cares, when you can write like that you don't need to keep everyone's attention with melodrama and explanations.

cxxv. veronica and cxxvi. because they wanted to, mary gaitskill
dear mary gaitskill, continuing on from my last review i would like to ask what is it that gives you such insight into the inner lives of dentists at work? i am genuinely curious. to wit: '"he kept heaving back, sort of panting with exertion, and he'd say, in that voice of inhuman dentist calm, 'just a little more...'"' come on. how do you know we're all acting on the outside? it's like you've truly balanced on the edge between the calm façade and the torrential internal stress complete with peppered (self-) encouragements. after that i didn't even care about the rest of the book although it was pretty good.

the ascension of patti smith via the artist robert mapplethorpe

'via' is probably unfair but i wanted something that would rhyme. anyway it is patently obvious that i read cxxii. just kids, by patti smith. really good! 'art' is something that i don't really understand as a lifestyle, but for the few days that i was reading this book i felt like i did. it also almost felt like a more mainstream streamlined version of eileen myles' inferno, in all possible permutations of the word 'mainstream', which is also unfair. but not in a bad way.

quote-rich

some time ago (nov 19th 2011, i forgot to write about it) i saw xv. the australian chamber orchestra play at city recital hall. i love the acoustics of this place, always nice and clean especially sitting up on the balcony. beethoven's pastoral symphony for chamber orchestra - i like it a lot! sure, not the same lush encompassing sound, but a lot more emphasis on wind solos, particularly bassoon, very good. richard tognetti playing wieniawski's violin conc no. 2.. i have mixed feelings about the conducting/turning around to play solo (complete with music stand?!) dual gig, it doesn't feel as focused as a regular solo performance. for obvious reasons. as a solo purist i prefer the soloist to be 'thinking' during down time rather than conducting with his bow.


cxix. mcsweeney's 21
miranda july delights in provoking weird feelings and i like it.

cxx. the secret of scent, luca turin
this guy! as a connoisseur of smells and smelling things (as my family will attest as i smell too deeply anything that i eat) i love his descriptions of scent. and his writing in general. 'like roger moor lifting one eyebrow to signal the highest degree of satisfaction, receptors barely move when fully turned on.' - this about molecular agonists/antagonists. i mean really.
'the lovely smell of gardenia, so perfectly pretty from every angle it almost hurts, like early pictures of audrey hepburn.'
'esters are transparent smells, watercolours for the nose, but they have close relatives that are more akin to pastels: the lactones... the cuddliest smells in all perfumery: almost every one is soft and powdery, sometimes to a fault.'
'..the peach base Pierre Nuyens composed... It is a huge, velvety, fluorescent peach thirty feet in diameter, with fuzz on it as deep as pile carpet, like Magritte's huge fruit inside a room. It is a peach played slowly, an arpeggiato chord that lets you enjoy in slow motion the entire sweep of that astonishing Persian plum from mouthwatering fruity acid, via biscuit-like softness to powdery, almost soapy bottom.' soapy bottom. come on. and i don't even like peach.
there were also no chapters in this book, at least not official ones, just headings starting further down the page. very interesting.

cxxi. bad behaviour, mary gaitskill
i have one more story to go but i have to write this review now for reasons which will become obvious. i can't believe i had never read any of her stuff before. here, have a description of a dentist that i liked A LOT. 'Dr Fangelli had very large forearms... his hands seemed weirdly placed on his wrists, and his unevenly spaced fingers suggested undue activity in impossibly varied directions... His face zoomed at her, and she had the disturbing thought that its happy, porous proximity could unhinge her jaw with the projected, exuberant desire that she open wide... He swiveled violently away.' love it.

tonight i saw david sedaris at the opera house speak like a muppet and tell stories about american airports and the people in them, learning different languages, jokes that people tell him, and how he loves his french dentists because they are his people. if david sedaris came and saw me every 6 months i would die. in fact the 2nd hand hearing about his new implants and periodontal problems has already killed me.

should i get a kindle?!? serious question

cxiv. the fat duck cookbook, heston blumenthal and other contributors
as i have doubtless mentioned before i am a big fan of heston's curved eyewear. he actually gives away all his recipes. i flicked through similarly brick-shaped tomes from ferran adria and noma and they are significantly, significantly lighter on technical detail. i guess that's what heston loves doing.

cxv. a cook's tour, anthony bourdain
take-home message (i hate this conferencey fixture of a phrase): vietnam has pride, man. and alcohol is everywhere. the world is addicted to alcohol.

cxvi. summer blonde; and cxvii. shortcomings, adrian tomine
i like! i like the depressing inconclusive endings and overall cynical tone. and mostly i like the clean lines and easily recognisable characters.

cxviii. complete essex county, jeff lemire
also good, i liked the transitions between times and generations and the linking themes, also the familial facial characteristics. it seems to have much more of a freehand style without getting too cluttered and pencil-liney.