December 2008
65 posts
“Oh, I’m actually really disappointed. I think Zooey is cool but this is the indie hipster equivalent of the quarterback marrying the head cheerleader. YAWN!”
—Commenter on Zooey Deschanel and Ben Gibbard’s engagement, UsMagazine
“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”
—Jim Jarmusch (via hangmanblues) (via snowblind) (via isthisblood) (via sine-qua-non) (via maddieness) (via bitchville) (via srsly)
"Go to back to school. Then you'll learn some English and understand what I'm saying."
A man said this to me the other day, with absolutely no provocation.
I’ve been spoiling for a fight ever since. Normally I can ignore the “Ni hao” and the “Can you speak Asian?” (I’m sorry, no, but do you speak Caucasian?) and the times my best friend’s boyfriend would call me flat-chested and say “I smell spring rolls— oh wait no, it’s just Cass here.”
Rolling with my friends’ ethnic jokes? I can do that. Sometimes. But right now I’m fighting a sugar hangover and hating on the heteronormative paradigm, and there’s too much cranky in my system to play nice. The next bigot who incorrectly assumes I’m an international student, and therefore easy prey, will find me getting ghetto Asian gangster on their ass. And then I’ll correct their grammar.
(local) people I would like to befriend
- vegan cooks
- male knitters
- tarantella dancers
Imagine the parties we could have!
Listen
dizzee rascal - that’s not my name [ting tings cover]
“You know what’s interesting about the homogenization of “indie” blogs is that somewhere in there it became O.K for serious music snobs to like really poppy pop music, and have an opinion on it.
It sort of worked both ways. Not only did blog rock become mainstream chart fodder, but mainstream chart fodder became the subject of hipster blogs.
It’s not generally a bad thing, it seems that music is being judged more on its merits rather than its genre. Mainstream pop isn’t being shut out of serious music discussion, and some quite obscure indie is making it onto the charts.” —Commentor on Heartbreak No. 3: The Blogosphere As The New Status Quo [Idolator]. Social media platforms, label wars and hipster ‘tude; I am liking this post.
It sort of worked both ways. Not only did blog rock become mainstream chart fodder, but mainstream chart fodder became the subject of hipster blogs.
It’s not generally a bad thing, it seems that music is being judged more on its merits rather than its genre. Mainstream pop isn’t being shut out of serious music discussion, and some quite obscure indie is making it onto the charts.” —Commentor on Heartbreak No. 3: The Blogosphere As The New Status Quo [Idolator]. Social media platforms, label wars and hipster ‘tude; I am liking this post.
a list of nice smells
- rain on hot sidewalks
- warm newsprint
- baking (also: cinnamon toast)
- night air, after the alcoholic stickiness of gig venues
- sunburnt skin layered with sweat and sun-lotion and the sea
Listen
“Nothing In The World Can Stop Me From Worrying ‘Bout That Girl” by Feist
originally by The Kinks
(via everybodycares) (via copycats) (via semisetadrift)
“I’m not sure that the benefit — as a writer and as a citizen — that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression. Learning about so many things that we can’t do anything about. The amount of horror one used to hear about in one village could be quite extreme. But one might not have heard about all the other villages’ horrors at the same time. I just don’t have a big mind, I don’t have a big picture, I am very limited.”
—Sharon Olds in a Salon interview.
I made tea. →
telescopictext.com
Telescopic text. (via morrisonfilm) (via implodr) (via spaceships)
Listen
death from above 1979 // losing friends
‘if I lose my friends I hope I’m told, I hope that someone tells me.’
I was kind of waiting to lose a follower so I could post this. hey tumblr dev team: get on it.
Things I have done in 2008
1. Founded a student paper
2. Resigned from a student paper
3. Featured in a national paper
4. Founded another student paper
5. Topped my writing course
6. Was asked to contribute to next year’s Scope (media department) magazine
7. Scored an internship
8. Went on three roadtrips
9. Lost friends, made new friends, lost them again
10. Got two things wrong, but one thing right.
pretty modest as lists go, but it was a bit of an emotional trainwreck of a year so I’ll excuse the lack of awesomeness in myself. counting the number of gigs I went to, now there’s another challenge.
“This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour cold critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and rewrite tomorrow. But today — explode — fly apart — disintegrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture.”
—Ray Bradbury (via afemme) (via buyhercandy)
“The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses. No one to lean on, rely on, or blame. The gift is yours - it is an amazing journey - and you alone are responsible for the quality of it. This is the day your life really begins.”
—Bob Moawad (via thresca) (via marjchun) (via tuesdayslove)
Listen
Hercules and Love Affair - “Blind”
Tonight’s song for repeating.
García Márquez is writing new novel, says friend | guardian.co.uk →
guardian.co.uk
Fears that Colombia’s Nobel prizewinning author, Gabriel García Márquez, had put down his pen forever were allayed today when a close friend confirmed that the master of magical realism was working on a new novel.
García Márquez’s next book will be a love story, though his friend and fellow writer Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza said today that the author was struggling to come up with a version that he was happy with.
“He has four versions of it,” Apuleyo said. “He told me that he was now trying to get the best from each of them.”
“I do not regard advertising as entertainment or art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product. When Aeschines spoke, they said, ‘How well he speaks.’ But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, ‘Let us march against Philip.’”
—David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising (via copyblogger). Cannot spell, what is wrong with me
“Some things you don’t know you miss until, out of nowhere, you have them back, or have them back but back all wrong…The way, after a dream, where you’ve kissed someone who, in real life, you’ll never kiss again, maybe you’ve never kissed at all, you wake up and realize, in the throbbing pit of your stomach, how impossible it is to live without kissing them again.”
—Jerry Stahl, Perv—A Love Story (via nightmarebrunette) (via sleepanddream) (via finallyseeing) (via marjchun) (via littlemiss) (via srsly)
Listen
No - Me
I choked a little at this, and the entire pronunciation debate. And I think I mentioned this in conversation recently, but I am convinced there is a Melbourne accent that’s distinct from a Sydney one (mine). I think this post proves it? But I don’t know how?
I agree. In this video though we have a two Sydney girls and me - a Melburnian - all talking. What’s funny is we have an upper class Sydney girl, a middle class Sydney girl and me, a working class Melbourne girl. I think Ali’s is definitely a typical Sydney accent where as mine is not common where i grew up in Melbourne and i always have to make a concerted effort to broaden it out when i’m home.
Melbourne has a broader accent simply because, or at least i think, Melburnians do not want to be mistaken for a “Sydney wanker” which of course goes back to the rivalry between the two cities.
“That’s when he discovered peen.” Classy conversations!
Frankly I couldn’t figure out who was who in the class/city stakes, though the difference is noticeable. And, ha, I would have put it down as an urban/rural distinction rather than the old Sydney-Melbourne debate, but it really is unavoidable.
Listen
I was going to make a mixtape, and call it “I know there are plenty more fish in the sea but I’d still like to tickle your belly”, and then for convenience subtitle it “Trout”, but I think this song kind of sums everything up really.
Art Brut // Emily Kane
“
So, what about one place that has everything… Where you can get your opinion-eds with your fashion fix, and both will be worthwhile, intelligent and provocative, and brought to you by emerging Australian writers. A place where editorial content isn’t governed by high paying advertisers, where refinement of thought and sophistication of expression is encouraged and where you can spend hours relishing articles that you will actually remember and take heart in.
It is time to wade out of the mindless, boring and manipulated editorial you are unwittingly swamped in, and make education an everyday thing.
” —Trespass Magazine: “smart gloss”. Recently launched and billed as a new intellectual pop culture site. It was recommended to me by a fellow student media hack whose judgement I usually trust, but I’ll wait for more content before I hold forth on it.
“I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside you. If you never take the time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It’s hollow.”
—From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (via sycamore) (via spaceships)
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.” —W.B. Yeats
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.” —W.B. Yeats
foreword
My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is the one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.
—Joan Didion
