I’d never heard of CocoRosie before last Sunday night (15th Jan 2006) when I saw them open for Antony and The Johnsons at the State Theatre. The performance they gave was bizarre and surreal but also haunting, disturbing and beautiful all at once. The projected visuals used really heightened the mood: snippets from the Care Bears movie intermingled with graffitied over family portraits and home-made video. It was truly transporting. So much so that Antony, with his muzaky backing band, was a little tame and underwhelming by comparison.

They were selling this album in the foyer after the gig and myself and many other punters took the opportunity to grab a copy. The album seems to stand up to their performance so far.

I’m going to go see Antony at the Sydney festival in January.

Apparently, he played here are part of the Leonard Cohen tribute last year and blew everyone away.

Well, now I’m half way through and I’m completely hooked. This book is one giant, magnificent puzzle – and a subtle one to boot.

The theme of jigsaws which keeps popping up is what gave it away. Each chapter paints a hugely detailed piece of someone’s life or a room in the building that is central to the book. I believe that the list in Chapter 52 that the painter Verlene (?) is the key to arranging the pieces of the novel.

The other cute thing about Verlene’s list is the repeated diagonal letters which run from the end of each line through to the start in blocks of 60. They spell out “ego”.

Even having pulled on these small threads I get the feeling the book is hiding much of itself still. I’d happily go over this book forwards, backwards, or via the indices on a desert island to while away the time.

I’ve read part of Perec’s “A Void” – an ‘e’-less novel – and have read quite a lot about his experimental writing with Oulipou. I’m quite curious to see what this, one of his most famous and well-regarded books, has to offer.

Antony (or whoever he is) has a voice like none I’ve ever heard. Packed with emotion, it immediately caught my attention when I heard it on the radio and I rushed out to get the album.

At first, I found the album a little too melodramatic for my tastes but the more I listened to the lyrics the more I realised the album’s emotional core was a bit more complex than I first thought.

Okay, so I’ve only listened to this album twice now but I can safely say it’s growing on me. I loved Elephant (their last album) for its amazing, punchy riffing. The sound on this album is much fuller and less about killer riffs but it’s still damn catchy. Feels like Jack White has been hanging out with musicians in the Deep South. Especially on tracks like “Little Ghost”. That track sounds like the bluegrass straight from the “Oh Brother Where Art Thou?” soundtrack. Favourite track so far is the mellower “White Moon”.

Having read a little more and a little closer I’m beginning to notice an overall sloppiness to the book. There are many typos (I lost count after six or seven), inconsistencies in tone and generally not a lot stringing the book along.

I still like the book a lot. It raises and answers lots of subtle and interesting questions about probability and what it means. However, some proof-reading and editing would make this a much better book.

A thought-provoking book. Identifying with the hacker archetype, it made me stop and think about the way I live my life and my attitudes to work and creativity.

After a slow and stodgy start (“The Turings could be traced back to the Turins of Foveran … in the fourteenth century”) this book really opens up and tells an incredibly well-researched and compelling story of the life and work of Alan Turing: mathematician, WWII codebreaker and conceptual inventor of the modern computer.

Wow. This guy can argue! Lessig makes a strong case – not against copyright or the idea of intellectual property – but against the extreme forms of legislation that hinder such property ever entering the public domain. Drawing on historical precedents, he shows that the idea of perpetual copyright, which is slowly becoming the norm today, is an anathema to ideas about property when it was first codified in the 18th century.