we are seemingly unscathed,

but sooner or later there will be hell to pay.

i was asked on christmas eve morning what the best books i read in 2005 were. i will relate to you what i told this guy, over the course of a couple of posts. i talk a lot.

undisputed number one:
the time traveler's wife - audrey niffenegger
amazing, amazing book. literate, passionate, deeply cerebral, heartbreaking, sexy as fuck. i fell in love with henry in a way i haven't fallen for a character since, dare i say it, gilbert blythe. i can't stop re-reading this book. it's like an addiction. i just wish i could read it again for the first time, with an pre-existing, innate understanding of the time-travel logistics. it's not that niffenegger's theories regarding time-continuum paradoxes are difficult to get one's head around (especially if you've seen back to the future), just that it can be distracting at first. my mother could hardly work it out at all and it just ruined the book for her, which is a damn shame.
the basic premise is a love story. clare and henry are one of those smart, beautiful, indie-ish couples, living in chicago around the present day. they're perfect for each other, that's a given from page one. she's an artist, he's a librarian (and self-described "egon schiele lookalike" - can you blame me?); they have intellectual, abrasive, hilarious friends, go to see the Violent Femmes and are as likely to Fuck as they are to Make Love. they're a fascinating, fun couple with a normally complex relationship and this could be a great book without the time traveling.
but there is time traveling nonetheless. henry has a genetic disorder that means his internal clock periodically resets and he finds himself thrown about the twentieth and early 21st centuries, often to the sites of events that have particular emotional resonance. this is how, when henry (28) meets clare (20) for the first time in 1991, she is already in love with him. several months into their relationship, henry finds himself in a field behind clare's childhood home, and meets clare herself as a child. as the real-time clare and henry have a reasonably normal relationship, meet the parents, get married etc., he finds himself often back in this field, sometimes in his early forties, sometimes his late twenties, where he gets to know the wife he loves so much between the ages of six and eighteen, and she gradually falls in love with her strange and tender new best friend. it's ageless, tragic, original, intelligent and endlessly absorbing. if i still feel this way about this book in two years i will honestly be able to say it's my favourite.

EDIT: oh no. i just found out they're making a movie out of it. let me check the cast... they're talking about having christian bale as henry. i guess i could stand that. laura prepon (donna from that 70s show) as clare? well that depends. has she read madame bovary in the original french? i mean, not like I have or anything, but clare would.

currently reading:
a heartbreaking work of staggering genius - dave eggers (nicked from dana - if i'm going to reference it in my blog i really ought to read the sodding thing). so much better than i ever expected. sadder. i expected a big, metropolitan, light-hearted postmodern romp reflecting on the nature of composition. something a bit like john colapinto's about the author, but spectacularly superior. instead it's devastating but hilarious, and eggers has given his narrator/himself the most amazingly naturalistic voice i've read in a long time, if not ever. i love the big, meandering, tangent-following streams of consciousness. virginia woolf eat your heart out (don't get me STARTED on that woman).

current books on intended reading list:
fear and loathing in las vegas - the indomitable hunter s. (desperate to see the movie, but i promised myself i would never again watch a movie before i read the book after the bridget jones incident. zellweger, get OUT of my head.)
from hipsters to gonzo - how new journalism rewrote the world - marc weingarten (chrissie present, still on the bedside table)
east of eden - john steinbeck (loaned to me by elle, part of my literary self-improvement regime)
the alchemist - paulo coelho (loaned by henry's mum, and ditto)

current tunes: radiohead - i want none of this

the fey and the filthy

if they didn't call it ILLEGAL downloading, it wouldn't be half as much fun.

introducing, in addition to my new favourite variously-obtained tunes, my mp3-blog downloads of the week! these are thanks muchly to kind-of new fave, music for kids who can't read good (consistently giggle-worthy indie blog by a seppo with tops taste, themed loosely around a certain really really ridiculously good-looking man) and brand new favie you ain't no picasso. these boys do their mousework (as opposed to legwork) to find me the best tunes, like, ever, and post them up for sampling purposes only. who knows how long it would have taken me to get into amazing acts such as The Like, Mae, Hot Chip and Of Montreal without online indieheads like these.

new shins! (DL soonish from YANP). you can hear at the beginning that one of the boys (i think it's marty) mentions they're in australia, and judging by the date of the bootleg (the seventh of jan) it was recorded maybe in melbourne? (they played the falls at new years, and syd-er-ny on the 11th, so i'm coming from the south here.) I was utterly, utterly devastated to have to miss both the falls festival and their sydney show, i saw them last feb and afterwards i had to be dragged out of the metro by my friend to stop me gazing, slack-jawed, at the stage somewhere beyond where the roadies packing up marty's keyboards... but newness is the essence of squeeness, and squeeness is the essence of shin-ness.

jose gonzales, "heartbeats". gorgeous, gorgeous, fey, touching scandi-pop. (yes, he's swedish. he's not a sparkly-jacket-wearing caballero.) it conjures images of a lovely, lovely ex-boyfriend stroking your hair while explaining gently how something so beautiful turned into something so sad. this is the one used in the ad for that new bravia TV, i think it's sony, with all the coloured balls bouncing softly down a street. it MAKES that ad. the album's called veneer. get. (coincidentally, we just got one of those TVs, with a Tivo-type thing. hurrah!)

cat power, "the greatest". read this Music(for robots) entry to hear pretty much exactly how i feel about this song. i've resisted the cat power obsession up til now, but this does not bode well for my willpower...

franz, "the fallen". i know it's a little old, but seriously folks... i got the album a week after it came out last year and if it wasn't for the shuffle function in itunes i wouldn't have got past this song. i put this on to psyche me up for any type of town-painting. fight club references, a sneaky rude-word imitation ("kunst", anybody?) and the most sock-rocking line in the short history of modern nervy dance-rock: "what's wrong with a little destruction?" i'm going to print that on a t-shirt for the BDO next week, i am so fucking wired for that day it's not even funny. i am just, like, really T-O'd, you know, because they've put franz on at the same time as end of fashion! you frickin IDiots. mads almost imploded when i told her.

speaking of mads, I must dash, in order to organise that town-painting i mentioned in yesterday's post. hurrah! peace out my lovelies.

*note to any artists (I'm talking to you, mogwai, you sonsa bitches) considering objecting to their songs being posted up with showers of adoring praise - you are not out of pocket here. people who like your music enough to go and spend money on obtaining more of it will do just that. people who do not like your music enough to spend money on obtaining more of it will not do that. as for online sampling resulting in your loss in the form of eliminating the income from people who buy the record on impulse because they like the cover or something but end up not liking it and wouldn't have bought it had they heard any of it first but now you have their money so nah-na-na-nah-nah, well number one, you are a money-grubbing cynic if that's how you think. and number two, all the people who hear the music and THEN buy the record who wouldn't have heard it otherwise will without doubt make up for that tiny loss. now stop complaining, you sons of silly persons.


ANTIPODEAN SUB POP PATROL:

sleater-kinney
-at big days out
-side shows - the kings arms in auckland tonight, the gaelic club the day after the syd BDO, and corner hotel the day after the melboring BDO.
kelley stoltz (see him if you can, he's awesome)
-grace emily, adelaide tonight
-harvest festival in victoria on sunday


current tune: damien rice - cross-eyed bear (buy from itunes)

this will be our year

took a long time to come.

wowee, what a gap. i actually had a REQUEST to post some more, about which i was MASSIVELY STOKED BRO (thanks tom, big up the FL posse), so i'll try and make an effort. i've decided to try and post some of my writing up here sometimes, maybe under the cut so it don't get nicked, or i could do what my fave online scribe mr christian stella does and post it as a pic file... oh well, whatever. anyway right now i'm on my parents' computer, not my own, so i don't have any writing handy. tonight's just a quickie (titter) to get me back in the groove for some serious bloggage to come.

so i'm just treading water at home a ce moment-la, waiting for college and real life to start at the beginning of march. at least now the suspense as to whether i was actually going to get back in or not is over. (i kinda fucked up a few subjects last semester, extrEEEEEEEEEEmely long story.) i plan on killing some time by hopefully getting some catering work (i have three companies promising me some shifts, you'd think i'd have done more than one in the last three weeks), and hanging with me bitches. (Christ, i sound like ali g tonight, innit?) spent some time at elle's before chrissie, painting north sydney scarlet and hanging with her husband (figurative term, though appropriate - they're not quite at the one month mark and when i called her last week they were buying bread and bickering like the goodnatured foodies they are over different grains. ah, henry, ye of stout heart...) and some of their respective syd posses. will be heading to legoland (aka canberra) to visit jess soonish me hopes, and also at some point to hang with my girlfriends from school at ANU. gem and maddy have just been overseas for six weeks, gallivanting about old blighty and the continent, and got back yesterday morning, so shall be hitting one of the limited number of pubs in town tomorrow night to welcome them back in a haze of long island iced teas, them tripping over each other to share hilarious eurotrip-esque anecdotes (which will, ideally, be incest-free), and me listening in bitterly envious silence.

NB: this took me ages to write as i kept having to run off and watch the third set of hewitt versus chela (or as my little sister dubbed him with a brilliant flash of originality, The Spitter). then the fourth set. sob. this only adds injury to the insult of Sir Marat Safin, Lord of my Loins, not turning up.