Love, music, sex and death

Never having heard of this delightful young woman, though I sure as hell have now, I was mesmerised by this song on the car radio this afternoon, on Adelaide's local ABC.

I used to listen to, and perform, a lot of folk music when I was in my teens and twenties. But I didn't have the analytical skills I have since acquired, in 35 years of reading and thinking about literature and society, to think about these kinds of songs in a way that any educated young woman would automatically think about them now. If someone held a gun to my head and said 'Write a 3,000 word feminist analysis of this song and its narrative structure in the next three hours or you will be shot,' there is no doubt that I would get out of it alive.

But never mind that for the moment -- and you will get the gist at a visceral level anyway. Just have a listen to Sarah Calderwood's filigree musicianship and this haunting tale of commerce and nemesis, impossible to tell convincingly in any but a minor key.

'The next great Russian dancer'

is, they say, Ivan 'Rocket Man' Vasiliev, age 21.



He's currently dancing in London with the Bolshoi and I first heard his name on radio the other day, with an interview. Dancing makes him happy, he says, because it is his element. 'I am fish in water.'

More here.

June 24th, 2010

(Photo: AAP via the ABC website)

Blurb

The part of my job that I routinely most enjoy is the piling-up and eventual ripping-open of bags of new books for review. Today, one of these is a large heavy book with a shiny cover in that hue of heavily-saturated candy pink that unmistakably signifies chick lit. On the back there's a partial plot summary about international travel and intrigue and murders and so on, and among the various blurb lines that follow, someone has said 'It's James Bond for girls.'

Tautology city.

James Bond. For girls.