This is axiom

Such happy, happy music news today friends!

Well, for me anyway. First, the second best thing to be announced today was that Kanye West is headlining Big Day Out for 2012. This is rad. Personally I was still secretly hoping that Radiohead or even Prince was going to headline but then I realised that Kanye West is a super cool dude just tryin' to be a man and discussing how hard being a man is and shit and I love him. I hope he does a sideshow and I hope he talks during the show and says good things that I can record and turn into sound art.

While this is all very good and great, the BEST THING that happened today, in fact better than most BEST things ever (like instant coffee, or an alphabetically organised CD collection, or deciding as a group to disregard the limit of hotels you can place on properties in Monopoly and then landing on the un-bought dynamo of Mayfair and Park Lane in one turn) was the reveal that BON IVER is coming to Australia!

BON IVER!

COMING TO!

AUSTRALIA!!!!

(THAT'S US!!)

Words cannot describe. I am so excited. I am more excited than I was for Christmas, birthdays and summer holidays between and including the years of 1996-2005. I am more excited than I was when I found out I could purchase Sylvia Plath's entire life's worth of journals (the ones that didn't get burnt) from the Book Depository free of postage. More excited than the time my sister found a pair of Vivienne Westwood shoes at Savers and called me up to see if I wanted them.

I don't really know why I am so excited, to be honest. I first came across Bon Iver when I was really, really sad, and it's not exactly happy fun time tunes (the same sister who found the VW shoes at Savers describes it as 'indie noise'). But I think I found such comfort in For Emma (which I have written about on here before) that I have created this eternal connection to it. I know the album like the back of my hand; its intricacies, the little echoes, bumps, movements that you only pick up when you listen to a piece of music every night for days and days on end. It's a beautiful, beautiful work of art, and the same goes for Bon Iver, Bon Iver, and the same for Deyarmond Edison's early stuff, and the Hazeltons stuff, I just uhibcdjsoakodpjibckzx cannot describe to you in accepted language the effect Justin Vernon has had upon me.

I've always had someone else telling me what music is good and what music I should listen to. Which is totally fine, and I wouldn't change that at all, because if it hadn't been for other people telling me what to listen to I would've grown up listening to crap. I was raised on Counting Crows, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, America, Carly Simon, Janis Joplin - such a healthy, well-rounded upbringing! Then my big sis turned sixteen and started making CDs for us to listen to in the car - another healthy mix of The Stones, Bob Dylan, The Corrs, Killing Heidi...SO good.

But Bon Iver was something I found on my own. I was sad at the time, and I found someone who took the very same sadness (more profound and warranted and mature, of course) and created something from it, something so beautiful, and so reflective and resonant with so many people, and it was like an epiphany. Emotions are emotions but they are also the foundations for beautiful art. I knew this I guess, but it's not until you experience it firsthand that you truly KNOW something. That's what I think, anyway.

...AND HE IS SO PRETTY. 

JUST SAYING.

Bring back 1996

Above are some mediocre screenshots of The Wombats' new video for their song 1996. I really adore music videos (the concept of making something weirdly not even in really existence - sound - visual, it has very deep-set roots within the now-contemporary art world I think). This one is particularly nice, all flowy and slow-motiony with a beautiful boy singer and I highly recommend:

A funny hotchpotch of songs presented themselves to me this evening on the train home as I stood struggling to stay out of everyone's way and consequently becoming a physical nuisance in spite of my best efforts at meekness...meek-ity? Whatever.

STANDING UP ALL THE WAY HOME PLAYLIST:

http://www.mediafire.com/?44ucoid2hpp52

Watch the sky blue

There's a quote from Almost Famous that's been running through my head for a while now:

"If you ever get lonely, just go to the record store, and visit your friends."

I think there's either a huge difference, or a direct correlation, between believing that you're a big jerk, and actually being a big jerk. A difference, in that if you believe you're a big jerk then you're not really seeing yourself from an unbiased perspective, and maybe you're not at all jerky. A direct correlation, in that by believing yourself to be a big jerk your beliefs manifest themselves into a jerky version of you that eventually gets all mixed up into the normal version of you and you just become a really big jerk. I feel like I spend so much time trying to do the right thing, trying NOT to be a big jerk or whatever, I just think about it so much that everything turns into the reverse and by trying so hard to be good I just end up doing the wrong thing, most times. 

So today I actually went to the record store to visit my friends. They get it, they know what's up. They're the friends that understand what it's like to need something so badly, to love someone so completely, they're always around to reflect your misery and turn it into something tangible and real and impossibly close, and to remind you that you're never really alone.

I listened to some really hotchpotch songs today, as screenshot-ed above, while eating a muesli bar and reading silly little poems that I don't even understand and half-heartedly starting things that I don't ever think I'll finish and see-sawing between feelings and throwing a ball for my dog and thinking that at least I'm definitely not a jerk to him, as long as I don't throw his ball under the couch or forget to leave him the crusts off my toast.

Teenage Riot

Above are some pretty photos taken by a friend who I'm sure won't mind me sharing them with you here.

Last night was absolutely wonderful: my Dad took my Mum, my little sister and I to see Kate Miller-Heidke at Weller's in Kangaroo Ground as part of her regional Victoria tour. Kate Miller-Heidke is an Australian classical pop singer/songwriter and a ferociously inspirational artist and musician. Last night, accompanied by her deliciously deadpan husband/songwriter/guitarist Keir Nuttall and supported by The Boat People's James O'Brien, she was in flawless form. I was also very happy to obtain a set list from a very obliging, very friendly roadie friend which Kate herself signed for me. Yeeeeeeah!

I like this photo because it kind of encompasses her presence onstage; ethereal and absurd and intriguing and weird. Kate Miller-Heidke has such intricate control over every aspect of her voice, she can manipulate it to her every whim, producing sounds that could hardly even be considered plausible. I love her, because she is so absurd, but so completely in tune with her instrument: she possesses such musicality, such a pure, beautiful sound - but she shrieks, and screams, and her audience is just completely awestruck. It's close to overwhelming. I LOVE her.

I like the idea of having complete and utter control over your voice and I suppose that's why I've chosen to pursue a classical technique over a more contemporary. Producing sounds that make an audience look at each other in bewilderment and sometimes amusement is really something, don't you think?

I don't know, I don't know, I don't know anything right now. I have two weeks left of my high school life, which is monumentally frightening and terribly exciting in almost equal measure. We are a very close, very small year level, and I think we're all going to feel it very much when the time comes and we really do have to leave and be grown-ups. Or at least try and be grown-ups. For now, we are being troublemakers and indulging in some last shenanigans while we can still get away with them. Below is a picture of my friend Mackenzie and I being hooligans. Bless.

Didn't ask for smooth run, love

The first pictures of the above series were taken today waiting in a McDonalds carpark for my Dad to pick me up. It was twilight and quite nice, in a smelly, dirty, ugly kind of way.

Something I haven't told you, blogosphere, is that every day without fail, I read the public notice in the newspaper. I suppose I feel a kind of duty to do so seeing as I am an active member of the enigmatic 'public' and one day, I may just stumble upon something that actually relates to me, the PUBLIC. Mostly what the public notices consist of are A) competition winners, B) Disposal of Goods notices, C) Name change declarations and D) Prayers of thanks, normally to St Jude. Which leaves my favourite, favourite public notices that are sometimes nestled between The Integracom Management Group's application for a Private Security Business Licence and cancellations of ETU Elections 2011 PMF meetings: MYSTERIOUS LOVE DECLARATIONS. (See directly above).

I guess I'm just a hopeless romantic, unlike most people I know. Most people I know have a significantly higher level of 'cool', which is something I am so severely lacking.

One day, you'll be cool

Saturday night party time on Magic 1278, don't you touch that dial!!!!!!!

 It's 9PM and I'm sitting in my room up to my ears in homework left undone and half hearted lyrics floating around on receipts and train tickets and the back of my hand. I'm crawling back to comfort, watching Almost Famous like I did when I was fifteen and writing essays that I've written a million times before and making vats of spaghetti and dancing to The Cure and Elvis Presley on my own.

S'all happening on Saturday night at the Gilligan household!

Still the beast is feeding

I've always believed that when we love someone we give up little parts of ourselves to them; that we're all just little pieces of everyone we love or have loved once. We are born whole and from then on, we just get more and more broken up with every contact we make. When a loved one is happy you can feel a part of you glow, in much the same way that you feel and inherently know their sadness too. I  guess it's our responsibility to take care of the little bits of everyone else that we've been trusted with. Sometimes, we mess it up. Sometimes, too, parts of us get all broken and can't be fixed. But the wonderful thing about people is that we don't need to be 'whole' to survive, in fact, it is our flaws that emphasise our strengths. 

Sometimes we need to remember that it's impossible to have a say in who gets to keep a piece of you.

I've made a playlist of songs that I've been listening to tonight while thinking about LIFE N STUFF drinking tea and trying to feel something for reasons not completely unjustified. Enjoy. 

STAYING IN ON FRIDAY NIGHT TRYIN'A FEEL SOMETHIN' REAL PLAYLIST:

http://www.mediafire.com/?16z5g03f55ldc

Butterfly in reverse

I took these photos today and yesterday on two separate walks. If there's a way to walk fiercely then I suppose that's what I've been doing these past two days. Not thinking, not talking, not really looking where I'm going in regards to destination, just walking. Clump clump clump. I never usually walk; normally, I run as far and fast as I can, pounding that concrete till everything is just sweaty and panting and making the last kilometre or whatever. But today, I walk!

My hometown is much more beautiful than I tend to give it credit for in my teenage scorn and cynicism and seemingly unquenchable desire for freedom. It really is therapeutic to trample clumsily through the bush in the hilly back blocks around my home with my little dog, then slink back together through the streets of the housing estate down the road, listening to the dulcet tones of vacuum cleaners and chortling husbands and Deal Or No Deal and smell cooking chicken snitzel and freshly mown grass where no one cares who I am if I'm not the rubbish man or the pizza man or Dad getting home early from work in time for dinner.

I keep having dreams about situations where I should be dying, like jumping out of a plane or crashing a car, but I just keep living. I don't really want to think about it, just like I don't really want to talk about most things, just like mainly I want to sit at home and sleep, or watch Friends reruns and take notes about Phoebe's outfits and eat toasted sandwiches and throw balls for my dog.

But no! That's wrong. Gotta get up, gotta get out. So I'm just going to walk. Not run. Walk, for hours, if I have to. It's nothing huge but it's something better than apathy, that's for sure. And with such beautiful surrounds, and such lovely weather, it's certainly a waste if I don't!

Rookie mistakes

I have been working on a music video for my song Party In My Head (download for free here) for approximately six to eight weeks now (for my media class) and it is, thank heavens, now completed and handed in. It is much like this blog, and my hair today, in that all three of the above are absolutely ridiculous. Being what could be politely described as an 'amateur' film maker ('Why is everything black! Why is the camera broken! Help me! Is it on? Is it working? What's this? Help! Why is this thing over the lens? How do I film with this thing on? What's going on?'), I had to work with what was plausible and even then I was pushing it!

The 'cast' (my dearest friends) was so co-operative and so hilarious I pretty much re-wrote my entire 'storyboard' (series of 12 sticky notes with stick figures drawn on in biro) to facilitate to the beautiful comedy I had at my hands thanks to their inspiring enthusiasm. The end result is a hotchpotch of absurd, comedically unconvincing film which, with its ridiculous naivete and unprofessional, earthquake-shaky, so-out-of-focus-you-can't-tell-if-that's-even-a-person camera work, reflects the song's beginnings in my bedroom, on a cheap plastic keyboard, and 15 year old me basking in my own hilarity which now makes me cringe so hard my skin turns into sandpaper.

I guess what I'm saying is I'm happy to close the door on this part of me now. This song is something that has been with me for years and while I am fiercely proud of it, and certainly proud of completing this film which has been exceedingly difficult to create, I am happy to leave it be, certainly for a length of time, until I feel ready to maybe have another look, to rewrite ugly sections, or something like that.

I also just want to thank everyone involved in the process of PIMH. The contribution of others into this work was phenomenal and something I never expected. I was so gratified and humbled by the enthusiasm of the people who helped me out with this and I really owe a monumental volume of THANKS to everyone involved.

I'm in outer space on my side of the bed

This is the view for today: my bedroom as it is. It's very Target, and while there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, it's been the same since I was fourteen and it needs a MAKEOVER. I took these photos as a kind of promise to update and remake and whatnot. I was trawling Tavi Gevinson's blog on the weekend and found these beautiful images of Baz Luhrmann's R+J and I just want to share them because they are pretty and I want to live in a tomb with candles and Mother Marys OK!!!!!!!

I have spent a lot of time in bed today (one of those days) and I have compiled an obscure playlist of songs to listen to when you go to bed when it's light and wake up in the dark. Take note particularly of Little Star and Lovefool - both from the WONDERFUL R+J soundtrack. I want to watch this movie right now. Only Leo could squash his face against glass and still be beautiful. Leo Leo Leo.

FIVE HR NAPTIME/LEO LEO LEO PLAYLIST:

http://www.mediafire.com/?qlapvd3qd83ab

Welcome to the new layout! I guess I did like the old one but I've been feeling inspired of late and in need of change. I have also decided to begin a new, clean slate by hiding my previous posts. I have decided to attempt to be more insightful, interesting, and relatable to the average reader. Rather than write obscure prose about things that make me sad, I have resolved to..well, I guess I'm not quite sure yet. But I promise, the writing that will be on this blog will be of a higher quality than you are used to. Another thing I would like to do is post more MUSIC and KOOL STUFF like pictures of cats and cereal and things like that.

I think you will enjoy this change. I know I will.   

WATCH DIS SPACE

This blog is getting a makeover. Catch ya on da flipside.