happy monday lou!

Don't you love it when you're walking home late at night and a song comes on and sweeps you up? One that swells further and further to a tipping point before crashing down? That just happened to me, walking home after too many wines. I crossed the road and had to walk down the median strip in the middle of the road, headlights on either side, listening to A Sunday Smile, of course.

technicolour

I spent quite some time looking at these slides from the Library of Congress. I'm amazed at how beautifully cinematic they are. Its rare that we are able to see the depression and war eras in colour, and it usually makes them feel more recent, and real. Simultaneously, though, to me, they almost look like frames from a film, like fictions. The man in the second to last image could be Paul Newman. I'm not sure if I like the way in which my reading of these incredible images is so totally influenced by films and Steinbeck novels...There are so many to look at, and so many I almost put up here, but then felt a bit odd about (images of depression-era families and children, for example). Regardless, they're amazing, poignant and beautiful, and you should have a look at them.

lucky me, no, really

From: HAN 

Sent: Monday, 2 August 2010 3:36 p.m.
To: DAD 
Subject:POTENTIAL CHRISTMAS PRESENT

AHOY DAD

You may or may not be aware that I have started doing Bikram yoga (that’s the hot yoga). Anyway, it’s really good and I’m enjoying it a lot. However, individual classes are $20 each, which is really expensive. A ten trip pass is $160, and I have just found out that if I sign up within a week of my first class (which was on last Wednesday) I get 20% off that, which makes it a grand total of $128 which is only 12.80 per class which is really cheap!! So far I am planning on going twice a week. Maybe even three times if I’m feeling virtuous...

Sadly, payday looms from quite a distance, Wednesday week, in fact, so I cannot afford to take advantage of this good deal. This is where the potential Christmas present part comes in...what are your thoughts? Indeed, if you felt it would be easier, you could just give me the entire chunk of Christmas present money early and gift me an empty card with a nice note in it come December 25^th.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this proposal.

Xxx

Han

-----------------------------------------

From: DAD
Sent: Tuesday, 3 August 2010 8:17 a.m.

To: HAN
Subject:RE:POTENTIAL CHRISTMAS PRESENT

Ahoy there Hannah,

Xmas present put into bank account.  Keep the yoga going.  Love dad xxx 

DAD

----------------------------------------

Picture from here

small things

(and some bigger things) I'm cheerful about:

• The cutting that's been sitting in a champagne flute of water on my desk for a couple of months has grown two healthy twisty roots, I think that's called propogating?
• My hyacinths and daffodils have started to bloom
• My mum's coming to visit in November
• I have a new job - well, it's not especially new, but it is now official
• I have a new home - it's little and sweet and I move in next week, there's two delightful girls and a little garden out the back which I can't wait to fill with flowers and veges
• I'm going to see Laura Marling tonight, I saw School of Seven Bells on Sunday, and last week Here we go Magic and Grizzly Bear, phew! I'm not sure if/when I'll get to write more about those shows but in a nutshell SSB were great, and pretty, and fun; GB was amazing, I like them far better live; and Here we go Magic were incredible, they played all my favourite songs and beautifully...
• Oh, and I finally get to see Boy this weekend

These lovely plants come from Katie Merchant, Lolita, and some tumblrs I unfortunately have forgotten

hello lovely

I'm quite pleased that The Vamoose now has an online shop. Kathryn Blackmore's blog has been a favourite in my reader for a while, partly due to the infrequent posting - I like subscribing to blogs I can actually keep up with - but mostly due to her beautifully currated collections of images, a lot of which are inspiration for her jewellery collections.

I love the simply set crystals and semi precious stones (the turquoise and coral are such beautiful colours). Some of her pieces are already sold out so if you're the type to purchase lovely things online do it now. My bank account is suffering a little at the moment but I have got my eye on some stabilised turquoise or white howlite for future reference...

a fowl feast

On Saturday night I ate Turducken. It was grotesque, a bulging avian feast. An alien bird, a fowl set of engorged matroyshka dolls. So fatty, so totally American, the Turducken epitomizes conspicuous consumption. After spending eight hours in the oven, the outer layer of turkey was dyed a shiny vermilion by the rashers of streaky bacon which had hardened on top. The bacon fat moistened the turkey, the turkey flavoured the duck, the duck fat spread through the chicken. The parsons nose crystallised into a hardened knob, a savoury lindt ball that the birds' juices exploded from, gushing into my mouth. We tore at the meat, picked it off the bones and doused it with gravy, then basked in a post-Turducken afterglow. I felt food-high, fat and sleepy. Giggling uncontrollably, we could not stop talking about the Turducken. It was medieval, primal, ridiculous. Can you believe we ate that? A turkey with a duck with a chicken in it? The mind reels.

Photos from the lusty Tom Jones inn scene, starring the adorable Albert Finney.

FINALLY

Coming my way soon! Gosh, I'm excited. They were made in the 70s and are the "Disco Flare Student" style...Please fit please fit please fit!

today will be a good day

Good luck for your big day, Lou. Bowie pulling a Buster photo from here.

you're lucky han is so good

because I sure haven't been, and to anyone who's noticed I offer my sincere apologies. I have been just a bit busy with, well, life but I can assure you changes are afoot (not to me having a life, but to how and where I live it).

And tomorrow I interview for a job I have done for the past three months, in front of three people I have worked with for over a year, and I'm nervous as all hell.
Please cross your fingers and think savvy thoughts for me, I'll return the favour.

This beautiful time-lapse peony I found here, a blog I have only discovered since the author commented here, and haven't yet had time to truly trawl through, though I'm sure I will enjoy it when that time comes.

would like please

I would like cat lipstick and some houndstooth skinny pants. I would also like a giant American hot-dog with the works.

so charming

Look, its PACEY. He's being charming and is reading aloud from Dawson's Creek scripts at Pacey Con 2010.* He played "I Don't Wanna Wait" on a tiny CD player. He's even wearing a Pacey shirt. He handed out Dawson's Creek fan fiction he wrote himself to his fans. Can you imagine the joy I would have felt, had I wandered past? WHY ISN'T HE MY BOYFRIEND?
Pictures from ontd.


*apparently it was for a funny or die skit but I don't care, its still awesome and I bet it was all his idea, because he's PACEY.

TGIF

Oh my.

Oh my oh my. It has been a long and busy week and I haven't had a chance even to reply to Han's emails let alone write anything worth anything. I've been busy moving bedrooms (though the new one may only be temporary), finishing my 30 day bikram challenge, and working furiously to a few deadlines that mysteriously lost a day mid-week.

I'm off for a well deserved (if I do say so) beer at one of my favourite Fitzroy pubs, the start of what I expect and hope to be a quiet weekend in, working on wedding stationery for friends and reading the Journal which arrived rather late in my mailbox yesterday.

I promise I'll be back soon, and with more to say. I'm going to see Here We Go Magic play on Tuesday night which is very exciting and there's the film festival on too!

i've got soft skin

Its going to be a grey and rainy weekend in Auckland, and this is a nice song to listen to while watching rain roll down your windowpane.
This weekend is going to be a bit of a melancholic marathon, though. There's Black Rebel Motorcycle Club tonight, and on Sunday I'm going to Sherlock Jnr and One Week at the Civic, which are old Buster Keaton films accompanied live by the Auckland Philharmonia. I would love to see The Red Shoes, but considering I have exactly $46.78 in my bank account, I doubt that will happen. Hopefully Saturday will be spent curled up on the couch eating something delicious.
Anyway. Have a lovely weekend. Sorry for the Han-centric week!

bummed out

A bummed-out opera playlist:


1. Vesti la guibba (Pagliacci). Canio discovers his wife has been unfaithful, but has to go and do a clown act. Bummer.
2. Dove sono (Marriage of Figaro). Countess Almaviva wonders why her husband is unfaithful, jealous and angry all at once.* 
3. Kuda, kuda (Onegin). Lensky muses on his impending duel with his BFF. 
4. Un bel di (Madame Butterfly). Madame Butterfly  imagines what its going to be like when her man comes back. He comes back with another lady, so she stabs herself.
5.  Mamicko, Mam Tezoku Hlavu (Jenufa). Jenufa is a very, very sad opera. "Gritty realism" "infanticide" "facial disfigurement". Meep. 





NB: Most of these I've actually put up here before, because I like sad songs. Also: lots of operas are sad.
*Because he's a DUDE.

fleurs

I spent about five hours lying on the couch at my Dad's house yesterday, watching Food TV. I discovered that my taste in cooking shows runs distinctly to country style UK shows, like the ones hosted by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall or Nigel Slater. The Edible Garden, presented by Alys Fowler is my new favourite. Alys says: 


I garden because I am hungry. Or more precisely because I have a hunger, one that can only be satisfied through soil and satiated through fresh growth. I garden because I have to, it is how I define who I am, it is one of the ways I make sense of this world and it is how I pay back my place in it.


The show is so twee and so very British; yet my natural instinct to mock was quashed by my intense envy of Alys' lifestyle and talents.  Alys is a very pretty (not that it matters, really) red-headed gardener with a Keira Knightly accent, vintage clothes and lovely big gumboots. Her show is about avoiding supermarkets and growing everything you eat. Or, as Alys puts it:


Making The Edible Garden has been about finding a way to garden that is as gentle as possible upon the world. A garden that will please and feed me and still be a home for all others that visit it. By choosing to grow my vegetables alongside my flowers in a perfectly pleasing muddle that is polyculture, I have found a way that allows the best of all worlds.


The show follows Alys and she tends her garden, makes lavender biscuits, feeds caterpillars to her chickens and drops off herb bouquets to her friends. She goes camping, makes Elderflower champagne and hangs out with an adorable puppy.* Ye Gods, I wish I could live like Alys. I wish I had the time, the smarts, the space, and above all, I wish I had the giant red hair. 


*I have decided to call my future dog Feckless.


The Edible Garden and its matching book. 

curses!

I have just had the very depressing realization that I probably can't wear my Braveheart top out in public anymore. 
Curse you Mel Gibson! 
Shakes fist.

nature strip

Quite a few Saturdays ago, as I was leaving the house, I noticed an orange dot sprayed on the tree outside. I felt sorry for our tree, having been brought up to understand that trees are generally good and cutting them down is generally bad, and knowing that orange spray paint on a tree more often than not precedes its felling. I forgot about it though, until I came home from work a week or so later and it was gone. In it's place was a stump, which the following morning had sprouted a wilted bouquet of flowers and a couple of candles in memorium (I'll admit the flowers were me, they needed getting rid of and the stump seemed a little more interesting than the compost heap this time, the candles are a mystery though). Over the course of the following week, more trees were chopped, replaced with piles of wood, which I suppose if we had a fireplace that wasn't purely decorative may have been a slight compensation.

Three trees were left alone and I fear for their future, with tops only just clearing the powerlines I imagine they'll be gone within the year, leaving us with nothing. Last week though, I was walking home and passed a baby tree, not in the space of an old one but in between two of the stumps spaced along the sidewalk. The spaces further down the street were punctuated with white rectangles, which I guessed were reserving space for more little trees. I was pleased to be proven right over the next few days.

Our stump eventually disappeared, along with its shrine, in its place a pile of chips and sawdust that found its way up our path and through the house. A few metres to either side, in front of the houses next door, new trees were planted which I think may be Magnolias. They're only my height but I'm hopeful they're mature enough to flower this Spring, so I can send photos to my mother.

Days after the Magnolias, taller, spindleyer treelings appeared down the middle of the road, flanked by thick wooden posts decorated with reflectors. More of those spindley trees were planted on the street, curbside, outside our house and a few others, replacing a parking space with poles for bikes to be locked to. I forgave our city council.

The six or so trees chopped from our block have been replaced with maybe 20 new ones, a few different varieties, possibly as part of the $7.2million 'rescue package' for drought ridden trees in Melbourne which I read recently about in Monocle, but which I may have known about earlier had I paid attention to the newsletters and things that appear in our mailbox on a regular basis from the City of Yarra.

On a similar note: A new park is replacing a car park across the road from my work soon. I might take some pictures because I am quite excited about this transformation. There's really nowhere to go to eat lunch unless you're buying around here and apparently this development will 'double Collingwood's green space' which is interesting (and sad?) because it really doesn't seem that big. Hopefully the wireless from work will reach across the street...

Have you ever heard the term 'nature strip?' in Melbourne it's the name of the strip of grass and trees down the middle of very wide streets. People sometimes hang out and have barbeques on them, and I've seen people sitting alone, reading a book on them too. I'd never heard the term before living here but I like it and its kind of kinky, kind of not -ness. I have adopted it for use when describing a particular pubic hair formation, though that isn't something I describe very often.

The first photo is from a folder on my desktop and I'm not sure who took it, the other two were taken by Alex de Mora, who I think I've posted about before.

signature scent

We all know that some smells are incredibly evocative. My mum wore Estee Lauder's White Linen and Cinnabar in the nineties. Those scents take me back to a very specific moment in my personal history, before I became a child of divorce (weep) and when my Mum was a Country Road wearing, slightly hippyish Remuera housewife. I remember, the year of the separation, my Dad giving us $60 to buy a Mothers Day perfume. We bought her Anais Anais by Carcharel, the bottle with the flower on it. With hindsight, I see how strange that must have been for my still-very-sad Mum; being presented with a perfume you knew your ex-husband paid for, by your three slightly worried looking daughters.

Since then, there haven't been that many perfumes that stood out for me. I used to wear Allure, which, thinking back on it, was probably a bit too mature. My boyfriend smelt it on the breeze in London and called me in the middle of the night to say so. That's why we wear perfume, isn't it? 

As a slightly more grown up person, I've decided that most perfumes aren't for me. I don't like the way that major fashion labels market them, as if Chanel Number 5 is a magical gateway to luxury. I know that I like heady, spicy smells, more often found in men's perfumes than ladies. I have tried light and fresh, but they don't work on me. It's probably to do with my own conception of what a perfume should be - it should uniquely reflect your personality as well as your aspirations. I want to smell exotic, dark and warm.  

So I've chosen Numero Uno by Carthusia. It is a mens' perfume, and is rustic and herbal, intense but totally wearable. It warms on my skin and changes throughout the day. I have a feeling I'll be wearing it for a very long time.

should i stay or should i go

Home and bedrooms and a sense of place. That's what's on my mind right now.

The second photo I think is from here and the last from here, but sorry I've lost the other two.. (Please correct me if I'm wrong!)