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Cultural highs - June 2010	04/07/2010

Fiction

Summertime is the final book in J M Coetzee's trilogy that began with Boyhood and continued with Youth. Is Summertime a novel or a memoir? The answer lies somewhere between the two, but quite frankly, who cares. What matters is the strength of the writing and the ideas in the book. Summertime starts out as a conventional narrative then italicised notes start to appear in the text. Eventually the narrative breaks down into transcripts of interviews. It soon becomes clear that Summertime is the "workings" of an English academic's biography of the late J M Coetzee. This is a clever, adeptly-handled device, which allows Coetzee to address many of the criticisms leveled at him during the course of his writing career. Reading this book is, at times like watching someone self-harming - Coetzee continually paints himself as a man both socially and sexually inept. He poses a number of interesting questions too, about the personality of the writer and its relevance/importance relative to his/her body of work. To be a great writer, is a talent for words enough or do you need to be a great person too? There were also some classic stand-out lines. Here's one I particularly liked - 'I wish he had found some other writer, some other fantasist to fall in love with. Then the two of them could have been happy making love all day to their ideas of each other.'

Anne Enright's Yesterday's Weather, the anthology pulled together from her 19 years of short fiction writing, could almost be the female response to James Lasdun's latest collection It's Beginning To Hurt, which I reviewed in May's cultural highs. The writing is equally strong and the insights into relations with the opposite sex, just as acutely observed and delivered with arguably more wit. Enright has a lot to say about aging, motherhood, mourning and loss too. The more I read Enright the more I think of her as the Irish Lorrie Moore... although for me, Enright is better than Moore at crafting beautiful sentences. Try this one on for size. It kind of feels like a metaphor for the whole collection - 'what makes men go and what makes them stay? What do they want, men? It's the great mystery isn't it? What men 'want'? And the damage they might do to get it.'





Films

Usually I run a mile from Ben Stiller films but Noah 'The Squid and the Whale' Baumbach's new film, Greenberg is the exception. It's a clever, thoughtful dramedy about how seemingly innocuous decisions can affect the rest of your life and change you as a person. Stiller and newcomer Greta Gewig play characters who've lost their way in life and it's their emotional vulnerability that brings them together in an unlikely relationship. Watch out for a cameo role from 80s actress, Jennifer Jason Leigh, who co-wrote and produced the film.

A lot has been said about the gratuitous violence against women in Michael Winterbottom's film adaptation of Jim Thompson's excellent crime thriller, The Killer Inside Me. I wouldn't say Winterbottom's film is misogynistic, as many female critics have described it, but it lacks the subtlety Jim Thompson had in spades in handling the violence in the original book. In Winterbottom's hands, the scenes of Lou killing his prostitute lover are excessive, bordering on indulgent. Having said that, there's a lot to like in this film - the cinematography was stunning, Casey Affleck is impressive as the cold, calculating cop, and it's great to see Bill Pullman back on the big screen, if only briefly at the end of the film.

Photography

Sally Mann is probably best known for the controversial photographs of her children in her 1992 book Immediate Family. Her first solo exhibition, The Family and the Land is now showing at The Photographers' Gallery in London and it's something very special indeed - at times like the Cottingley Fairies meet Nosferatu. The show begins with a series of intimate photos of her three young children, which capture the innocence and playfulness of the start of life. It then shifts to ghostly images of the landscape close to Mann's home. The final section of the show is Mann's most recent work called What Remains, which draws on the two earlier themes. This part of the exhibition is a sensitive portrayal of the end of life with portraits of decomposing bodies in effect returning to the land. A must-see. Plenty of time though - the show doesn't close til September.

I also enjoyed Alex Prager's photographs of retro-modern women shot against a Californian backdrop, now showing at the Michael Hoppen Gallery in London. Prager's large-scale techicolour images have a surreal Valley of the Dolls meets Twin Peaks type vibe. Stunning to look at.

Music

She and Him's Volume 2 is the second album from M Ward and the actress, Zooey Deschanel - remember her in the indie film (500) Days of Summer ? I know, actresses and music don't normally mix, but Deschanel, who writes all the lyrics and fronts the band, is the exception that proves the rule. Another perfect album to stick on when the sun do shine. This is carefree and at times unashamedly twee, music nostalgic for the kind of songs you'd hear on the jukebox in a fifties diner. Here's She & Him performing Thieves on a US show recently.

The Dum Dum Girls debut album, I Will Be is turning into my soundtrack of the summer. I can't stop playing the damn thing. Perhaps upcoming albums Amanda Palmer Performing the Popular Hits of Radiohead on Her Magical Ukulele and Jenny and Johnny's I'm Having Fun Now can save me. I Will Be is a fun, sparky indie-pop album with tons of energy, a twisted take on romance and a healthy dose of don't-give-a-shit attitude. Yes, it's a bit derivative - definite echoes of Garbage, Dubstar, Transvision Vamp, Shop Assistants, Fuzzbox - but there's nothing wrong with a bit of retro pop in my view. Below is the Dum Dum Girls psychedelic vid for the latest single Bhang Bhang, I'm a Burn-Out.