It's been a busy time, speaking as a cultural consumer. First we watched (as a netflix dvd) the Aussie movie Praise. It's set in Brisbane, about an aimless slacker guy who gets involved with an extraordinarily energetic and demanding (most of all sexually) good time girl, Cynthia, who ends up by completely exhausting him before he manages to extricate himself. Sacha Horler who plays Cynthia gives an amazing performance of a kind of Aussie femininity which is both deeply familiar and unfamiliar: no babe, no bourgeois subject; unaffected and unselfconscious, without an ounce of introspection; she's utterly direct, into pleasure and at home with her body and appetites and yet for all that not quite at ease in the world. She's crippled most of all because she can't actually a form a relationship with the man whom she's dependent on: she doesn't have enough deliberation and reflection for that. At one level the movie's another representation of the Aussie grotesque (the grotesque is a Australian film genre all of its own whose brightest light is probably Jane Campion's Sweetie) but at another level it really does have something to say about a particular generation and class (the lower middle class who haven't gone into tertiary education) and their particular form of what would once have been called their social 'lostness' in the gap between school and 'settling down'.
And then we watched Lars von Trier's Dogville, about which more later.

Some books that ought to be published:
a history of british reception of american jazz 1920-1970
a history of 'the shakespeare really was x' craze
a history of sports clothing
a biography of elizabeth smart
a work in praise of 'assimilation' focussing on german jewish assimilation