and another

My attempt at something a bit more upbeat and easy (I don't think it's as good as the other one):


Pogo - Alice
Ellen Allien and Apparat - Do Not Break
Think About Life - Havin' My Baby
MSTRKRFT - The Looks
Boys Noize - Don't Believe the Hype
Gang Gang Dance - First Communion
Mr Oizo - Ovoma
The Knife - Neverland
Holy Fuck - Milk Shake
Empire of the Sun - We Are the People
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Heads Will Roll (A-Trak remix)


Here:
Danceydancedance


p.s. Happy New Year

oh, what a beginner

It's a playlist I made, all shoegaze tracks bar the last one.
Excuse some really shocking mixing on the crossovers, ugh!

http://www.zshare.net/download/70415827e77d1b5d/

Listen, enjoy.

Track list:

Air France - Collapsing at your Doorstep
Atlas Sound - Quick Canal
Telefon Tel Aviv - The Birds
Saxon Shore - Tokyo 412am
M83 - We Own the Sky
Trembling Blue Stars - Sacred Music
CocoRosie - K-Hole
Deerhunter - Agoraphobia
Lou Reed - PerfectDay

I'm addicted to the Lou Reed at the moment, mainly as it makes me picture little Ewan McGregor falling into the floor boards.



p.s. Merry Christmas (belatedly)

this is very sad

but at the time is was SO FUN








and for the sake of retaining a sense of normality, comparatively..




.. it really is the holidays after all.

Herzog

In the midst of a routine of a 9am-3am working day, beavering away at various Adobe suite programs and pulling my hair out over UHU glue not sticking pieces of perspex together, this film was a beautiful respite.
Herzog narrates a wonderfully light hearted and funny, yet somewhat poignant (in a really unassuming way) documentary on the everyday life of Antarctica in his film 'Encounters at the End of the World'. Best shots involve a rock show with an audience of less than 5 on the roof of a hut, surrounded by a stunning landscape of white as well as a deranged single penguin, waddling wildly towards the mountains and away from its colony and the sea.

-Watch it.

truths?

Santayana-

"we do not merely live but act; we compose and play our chosen character, we wear the buskin of deliberation, we defend and idealize our passions, we encourage ourselves eloquently to be what we are, devoted or scornful or careless or austere; we soliloquize (before an imaginary audience) and we wrap ourselves gracefully in the mantle of our inalienable part. So draped, we solicit applause and expect to die amid a universal hush. We profess to live up to the fine sentiments we have uttered, as we try to believe in the religion we profess. The greater our difficulties the greater our zeal. Under our published principles and plighted language we must assiduously hide all the inequalities of our moods and conduct, and this without hypocrisy, since our deliberate character is more truly our self than in the flux of our involuntary dreams."

I'm not entirely sure if I should feel a bit lame for quoting all this-- but hey, in my utterly exhausted and slightly delirious state.. it was quite lovely to read it.


oh, p.s.:

I've always liked skies.

From the norm





To the torrential










All from my Flickr

Wow wow

Originally uploaded by Emir Ozsahin

I had to blog this.

-That'd be all.

Packing

So I'm moving away from home semi-permanently in 3 days and I haven't started packing. How long does it even take to pack everything you might need for the next 3 months or so? I'm clueless.

In other news I bought a Zenit the other day to replace my bust Olympus, though I do plan on replacing the body of my Olympus all the same-- I think the idea of using a Soviet camera kind of amused me.

Marc Isaacs - Lift

MUST recommend this film short, created by Marc Isaacs.
It's a great exploratory piece- Isaacs films in a lift in a tower block in London for 10 hours a day, everyday-- meeting the residents of the building and prompting them to share various thoughts and opinions with the camera. It's really endearing and at some points even shocking.

Watch it!

LIFT

Hasisi Park

I found a wonderful flickr, well in fact, I found two - one being Hasisi Park and the other Jackson Eaton.

They both share in their photostreams a really intense relationship (between the two) wherein Eaton, a newcomer to Korea, teaching English, meets Hasisi - falls in love - and stays in Korea for three years. It's pretty eye opening- Hasisi takes lovely, if sometimes a little strange, self portraits alongside everyday snapshops. Jackson shows a more intimate insight into their loving relationship, it's really quite captivating!

I think Jackson Eaton is exhibiting his photos in Australia at the moment--

oh +ve is a love story. In 2006 I moved to South Korea to teach English; after only a few weeks, I met Hasisi Park. These photographs document the next three years. They are not only a story of love but also of the search for belonging in a foreign culture, and the difficulties associated with needing one thing to constitute your ‘everything’.

Most of the images that make up this exhibition were originally part of a joint project entitled Jackson and Hasisi Were Never Married. In late 2008, we self-published a book of these photographs and intended to have a show. We broke up a few months later. Truthfully rather than playfully looking back on the relationship, I titled this exhibition oh +ve, a name that suggests two opposing yet equally futile forms of finding answers in relationships. It cynically refers to both the self-directed method of maintaining a positive attitude and the deterministic theory of blood type compatibility. Not knowing my own blood type, Hasisi would tell me that if I were not of type B then we would never get married. O+ is the most common type in Australia. With this exhibition I aim to present some fragments of our intimate, fragile, comical and passionate narrative and invite viewers to piece them together and explore the belief that ‘all you need is love’


A few photos I quite like:

















In other news, I finally have a student bank account. Shame about getting the Student Finance money.. I gave up holding the phone after 27 minutes of particularly shitty music.

I hate money

No really, I wish it weren't so important.

I was sent an enormous list of architectural equipment I'll need in all of two weeks' time, and it's worth a small fortune. Not to mention a very explicit laptop specification that my planned Macbook buying doesn't adhere to (apparently, I need a 15" screen and 13" simply isn't good enough). Great.. so that means what was going to cost me roughly £700 is now skyrocketing to over a grand. Not to mention suggested graphic cards and security locking systems.

And also on the subject of money, I've been temping at an office to scoop up a few extra pounds before university. I spend most of my time browsing flickr to be honest. Here's some finds:





Ohhh Hedi Slimane... (I thought he was a woman until a few months ago, doh-- the photographer that is, not the above model)







Pavlunka photography







"Hello Hand's" photostream



That'll do for now. And I'll continue to mourn over the loss, or imminent loss of money which I'm about to or have just spent.

on a fave.

So here's a bit of a fave image.



There's something so well composed about it. Not to mention the alien-like beauty of the model Sasha Pivovarova.

-Jenny

on tobacco

What IS it about smoking? There is some remarkably good about it.

-Jenny

on fashion hype

If I had the money, I think I'd probably like fashion more. If I weren't surrounded by what is basically, diluted fashion, everyday- I think I'd also probably like fashion more.




For the last few days I've had to walk around in a lurid pink T-shirt endorsing Matthew Williamson's new collection for H&M and yet I'm still asked 'Do you work here ... ??'. And they even wait for me to actually answer, despite having obviously clocked my haribo ensemble. Anyway, so Matthew Williamson... I think I've always admired the red carpet pieces over the last few years, spread over many 'hot looks' pages in various fashion and gossip magazines. But H&M... really? I honestly think 90% of the womenswear at H&M is ugly and bland. And now H&M have probably paid Williamson a fortune for him to produce his 'trademark' styles and patterns and put them onto cheap material. But everyone has gone mad for it. Even that sweaty nylon material dress- however much deodorant you plaster onto yourself, with that nylon you WILL be the sweaty body odour lady for the latter part of the night.

However, having said this. The sweat could be well endured if you could pull it off like this.


(photo credit: WENN.com)

Sigh.

-Jenny

on being at the final stages of a mammoth read

There's nothing quite as satisfying as finishing a good 1000 or so page book. In fact, I think this is probably only the third time I've achieved such a feat. The first was Hugo's Les Miserables, then painstakingly Modern Architecture since 1900 - (it was good.. but painstaking all the same, if only for the shoulder ache it caused for having such a heavy book in my bag) and now Dostoevsky's The Karamazov Brothers.
Admittedly I've been a bit leisurely, and it's taken enough time for me to lose a whole load of the story's momentum and meaning. Sigh- as is life. Either way, I highly recommend it! It's BETTER than Crime and Punishment, by a long long shot.

-Jenny

on cutting books

A few photos from my portfolio:

I think the fact that perhaps this project may have helped me gain admission to university is license enough to cut up literature, especially if it involves Richard Hammond's autobiography and that sequel to the 'Da Vinci Code'...
This on the other hand, I do feel a little guilty about.

It was a gothic German antique volume which I bought for a couple of Euros in Berlin last year. I reasoned that it was unlikely I'd ever read it (German GCSE is hardly adequate) and therefore the best use for it would be to make 'art' out of it. Carving a figure resembling a woman was stupidly mundane and a little cliche- I think I almost resent myself for it.

9 weeks left of work until I leave, the count is on.

-Jenny

obligatory greetings

Hello blogging world. This is my little window to export various elements of my life into for no real underlying purpose or reason.



Despite going to the dentists to find I had an infected gum, I proceeded to be particularly gluttonous and let my good friend Charlotte bake me scones.



These photos are taken with an awful (what an old photography tutor used to call 'snappy snaps') digital camera. I'm hoping I can buy a budget, but better, dSLR soon- though I am unsure on which models are best. I also have a penchant for film based photography, though not so much for the price of film and developing...

Oh, and despite the mentioning in brackets- some more lovely photos from said photography tutor Chrystel Lebas:





Now I shall venture to bed and to ibuprofen.

-Jenny