Music Monday - Missy Higgins

It's Music Monday time again! Monday's are always easier to get through when there's music involved.
This week I've chosen the new track from Missy Higgins. The tour for her first album, the Sound of White, was the very first concert I ever went to, and where my love of live music first began, so she will always mean something to me. I am very happy that she has released some new stuff after five years on hiatus (she explains the reasons for this very eloquently in her interview with Adam Hills on Gordon St if you want to check it out on iView. That episode also features CAT STEVENS!!!!)

Anyway, I hope you like the song, because I sure do. I really like the spooky opening and the clip has some Kate Bush worthy interpretive dance, confetti and A LOT of hands. Apparently it was made by the same people who did the Gotye clip for "Somebody that I Used to Know" (you know, the one with all the paint and triangles and nakedness), and that kind of comes through at the end with more nakedness and some pretty origami. Love it!
Enjoy! 



Also, as a side note, I've stuck my flag into this little piece of the internet and 'claimed' this blog on bloglovin', so if you're a user of said blogging tool, feel free to have a look and to follow me :) Thanking you in advance lovely people!

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Swap You?

So in the latest issue of Frankie magazine, also known as my favourite magazine of all time, they have a lovely feature about a collection vintage swap cards from the 70's. I was instantly struck by the vibrant colours and retro patterns, not only because they are stunning, but because I knew I had seen them somewhere before! My mother has a very similar collection of swap cards that she had saved pocket money, begged and bartered for in her youth. I showed her the feature, and we both got very excited, unearthing her albums and searching through to try and find ones that matched up with some of the ones in Frankie. There were quite a few! We even tried to count all her cards, but we gave up after we got into the three hundreds!

Anyways, I wanted to share with you a few of my favourites, because there really are some beautiful ones! I love the idea of these little pieces of art being bought from newsagents and milk bars for mere cents, treasured by girls in paper albums and traded in the playground.

 

 

This is what girls did for fun before facebook and twitter and camera phones, along with jump rope and hopscotch and hula hoops! And if you don't know what those are, go ask your mother! (or even your grandmother!)

Word Wednesday - A Long Dress

Word Wednesday! I stumbled across this just now, and seeing it is the last Word Wednesday of World Poetry Month, I thought it extremely fitting. I love the imagery of this piece, when I read it I envision long skirts in dusty corridors with high ceilings, disapearing around corners.  

A Long Dress 
Gertrude Stein 

That is the current that makes machinery,
that makes it crackle,
what is the current that presents a long line and a necessary waist.
What is this current.
What is the wind, what is it.

Where is the serene length,
it is there and a dark place is not a dark place,
only a white and red are black, only a yellow and green are blue,
a pink is scarlet, a bow is every color. A line distinguishes it.
A line just distinguishes it.

Music Monday - Mosman Alder

 Music Monday! This song is by the curious outfit Mosman Alder, and it's full of lovely orchestral and vocal swells, and the beautiful baritone of the lead reminds me a lot of the National. I really like the lyrics of Raisin Heart, the metaphors are quite obscure, so much so that they make me want to do a musical double take. Nothing stale or cliche here!

Anyhoo, enjoy!

Marie Zucker Photography

And now for some photography from what looks like a wamer place than here

I a little in love with these shots by Berlin photographer Marie Zucker. I love that at first glance they come off soft and dreamy, and yet the more you look the more you notice a sinister undertone creeping from the image. I feel this with a lot of her work, and I just want to stare at it for hours.

Songs to accompany these photos would be anything by First Aid Kit or Siouxie and the Banshees

I also love this behind the scenes shot. That eyeliner! That tea cup! That delicious looking cream thing covered in strawberries! Yes please!

Camberwell Market Finds!

As promised, here are some photos of my Camberwell Market Ffnds :)

Here they are in all their glory! All up I payed about $35 for everything.

 I bought this dress from a lovely stall called Rummage Style, who were selling lots of refurbished vintage garments. There are many things I love about this dress, the colour, the fabric textures, the buttons, but what I really love is the fact that's also reversible! It's two dresses in one!

 This is the other side! 

 Pretty wooden buttons on the reverse side. 

 

SideOne! Lovely Green Lace!

 Side two! Pastel Stripes!

I've worn the green lace side once already, to a dinner at Lovely's house that very Sunday night! I had to belt it cos it looked a little sack-like otherwise, but it made so much difference and I now am head over heels in love! 

Rumours by Fleetwood Mac. I was very excited to fiind this, because I love everything about this album. The songs (all of them! there isn't a single bad one), the weird whimsical cover art, the photographs of them playing around on the album sleeve (Stevie Nicks is such a babe!) It's kinda hard to believe they all hated each other by the end of it. But I guess if they were all fine and dandy the songs wouldn't have been nearly as good!

 There are so many record stalls at Camberwell Market, I'm talking literally thousands of records to sort through! I need to go back and see what other gems I can find. 

Vintage Fabric Scraps! These are also from Rummage Style, I bought a huge plastic bag of these for $3! These will be great for making buntings, and I've already used them to make some fabric buttons, which I think are going to end up as a necklace! 

And a Cat Stevens tape, because I can never have enough Cat Stevens. Ever. 

If you have any awesome market finds you would like to show off, or if you have done so already, please link me! I'm such a voyeur, I love looking at other peoples knick knacks!

Word Wednesday - Spaces

Word Wednesday! Here's another poem I wrote yesterday afternoon.  Are you guys doing anything for world poetry month?

Spaces

Warm fingers on cold spines

Of books

Of human bones

Contorting - strange shapes

Reminding me of the origami cranes

We tried to send down the river

Before their wings absorbed the water

Paper bodies torn like wet silk

They sank

To their graves of river stones

And cherry blossoms

I cried
All afternoon
I was only a child

I think of this when autumn comes

When I feel your warm hands reaching from

behind
to envelope my pale frame

Vulnerable as a single pink petal

Limp as damp paper

I think of space

(Instead of that other thing)

And spaces

The stretch from nebula to constallation
The reach from star to star

The distances travelled by man

That span countries, oceans, planets

And then
The air between my parted lips

Pockets that separate my bones

The gap between my left thigh

and my right thigh – a canyon almost

Your hand and my pelvis

It almost becomes easier

If I just keep thinking 

about stars

Knowing that they will carry on

shining so brightly after death  

keeps me safe

Camberwell Markets Round Up

So as you know, last Sunday Lovely and I rented a stall at the Camberwell Sunday Market! We had a lot of fun, and we learnt a lot, but all in all we ended up spending more money there than we actually made. Oops!

Our creations did invite quite a bit of interest, and we did have lots of people stopping by our little table, but not a lot of the interest translated into sales, despite our dropping price points later in the day. Perhaps I need to work on 'closing sales' (bleugh, retail jargon), but I really hate bullying people into buying anything because that is such a huge turn off for me, especially at markets. I want people to want to buy what I'm selling, not to feel like they have to.

However on the whole, the experience was a positive one, it's a great market, and we got to meet some lovely people! And the rush of selling something you've made yourself and knowing that it's out in the world is really wonderful (even if it only happened a few times).

Here are a few things that I learnt from the day, which may come in handy if you're thinking of running your own stall in the not too distant future.

- Know your market! It had been a little while since I had been to Camberwell Market, and in truth I probably should have visited it a little closer to our stall day, because it has gotten HUGE! People really are spoiled for choice there, in terms of variety and pricing.

- Be friendly! Chat to everyone; customers, neighbours, fellow stall holders. Generally people aren't going to try to be sneaky and steal your customers, so there is no harm in being nice! And they will probably be more likely to help you out if your clothes stand happens to blow over!
No one's going to want to approach you if you're all grouchy and complainy about what time you had to get up that morning. Coffee is also defintely a good idea! We were lucky enough to have one of Lovely's work friends bring his family to visit, and he ended up bringing the coffee to us! Hooray! Thanks Claudio :)

- Don't put stuff out that you don't want to be fondeled. I brought my jewellry box to carry my goods and to use as part of my display, and seeing as I had no other place to put all of my jewellry, I thought I would just keep it inside with the lid closed. But before I had even finished setting up, a woman came over, opened it up and just started riffling through it! There was nothing very valuable inside, just costume jewellry and the things I was selling, but still it freaked the crap out of me. I had to physically take it away from her. Yeesh. That's another good point to mention; you get a lot of, how do I put this nicely, 'keen' people, who come extra early looking for a bargain, and they will harass you before you've even set up your stall so they can suss out what you're buying. Some might say they're being industrious, but I just think thats creepy, and a little rude.

- Don't give up! We didn't sell anything for the first couple of hours, but I think that's because the people who come out at 7am on a Sunday morning aren't looking for something pretty, interesting or well made; they're looking for a trash and treasure style bargain! We certainly got a lot more interest and sales later on in the day, and the waiting was certainly worth it for that first-sale-feeling!


All in all, Camberwell is a lovely market, but maybe not the right market for us! That doesn't mean either of us are giving up, in fact this has made me even more determined to find our niche! Etsy maybe?

Anyhoo, I will blog about my spectacular Camberwell market finds a little later in the week, but here are some photos I took on the day. The lighting isn't fabulous because it was so sunny (I think some of the best ones were the ones I took on instagram), but you get the idea!

 This stall was really cool; the table was full of old photographs from the 1900s

How cool is this?! This caravan belongs to the awesome Trish Hunter Finds! I love that she carts around her gorgeous vintage wares in this converted Franklin Caravan, everything has such an authentic retro feel!

This kid was playing a Tallest Man on Earth cover on his Uke! With that combination I couldn't not give him my change.

Music Monday - First Aid Kit

Happy Music Monday! Did you guys follow Coachella over the weekend? I didn't get to see much, but I did stream the whole of Bon Iver's set, which looked and sounded incredible, and caught the end of Florence and the Machine on my way home from work today! Hopefully they will release other sets on youtube so I can catch up on all the amazing artists that played. Man I would have killed to be there. One day....

Anyway, back to the task at hand. Today I want to share with you a song that made me stand up and take notice, metaphorically speaking. I am a huge First Aid Kit fan, and finally managed to get my hands on  their second album, 'The Lion's Roar'. It's a gorgeous record, and yet their voices blend so perfectly and create such a dreamy atmopshere that I find myself bein carried off to another place. This is what happened during the first spin of this particular record, until about halfway through the final song 'King of the World' . There I was being lulled by the warm vocals and soft melodies, and who drops into the final verse but CONOR OBERST! Those of you who have visited this blog before know how much of a Bright Eyes fan I am, so the mere sound of his quivering voice was enough to jolt me out of my folky stupor with a wonderful electric charge. Do you ever get so excited about a song  that you feel like you need to scream about it from the rooftops? That's how I felt when I heard this. I guess Twitter is good for that now!
Another few listens brought the lyrics (and the horns) to my attention, and I realised that even if they got rid of Conor's vocals it would still be SUCH a good song. But I'm super glad he's there.

Anyway, I'll let you make up your own mind. Enjoy!

Sunday Markets

So this Sunday, Lovely and I will be holding a stall down at the Camberwell Market! I'm very excited (and a little nervous), as this is probably my favourite of all the recurring markets I've been to in Melbourne. I will be selling a lot of clothes that I don't wear any more, and my handmade button barrettes, and Lovely will be selling art and clever knick knacks made from Lego!

Here are a few preperation shots of my contributions.

My overly sentimental nature made it hard for me to choose which of my clothes to sell, as so many of them hold memories of my great moments, events and days. But I think it's time to let them go on to new owners who will take them on more adventures than I have been lately.

If you're in the Camberwell area this Sunday, come down and visit! We will be there from 7am (yeesh) until 12:30 pm,  at stall 347! We would love to meet you, and you don't even have to buy anything, unless you want to of course :)

Word Wednesday - Ariel

 So the poetry theme continues for Word Wednesday, but this Wednesday I'm going to share with you one of my favourite poems by one of my most favourite writers, Syliva Plath. I know most people tend to think of her as a rather melancholy or morbid literary figure, which I suppose isn't helped by the fact that her demise and eventual suicide seems to be more famous than her work. However, I choose instead to focus not on the gas oven but on her passion; to me, she was so passionate about life that it eventually drove her mad. And I feel that this poem is a prime example of that.

Ariel
Sylvia Plath

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.

God's lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees! - The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks -

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else

Hauls me through air -
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.

White
Godiva, I unpeel -
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child's cry

Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

Music Tuesday (Tunesday?)

Hello lovely people! I know, I know I'm one day late, but I've been off stuffing myself silly with chocolate and cakey things, and  living it up in domestic bliss with Lovely over the Easter weekend. How was your Easter weekend? I hope you didn't eat as much as me, I'm still feeling a bit ill from it all. Oh well, it was worth it.

Today's new music comes from Kyla La Grange. Vampire Smile is a song that gets me right in the guts from the very beginning; I love the folk element, the harmonies, the lyrics and the fact that she utilises Vampires in a way that doesn't make me want to hit my head repeatedly against a brick wall.
The video is also spooky and beautiful, and for some reason reminds me of the Blaire Witch Project. Enjoy!

Animal House

You know I'm a sucker for mixed media art AND animals, so imagine my excitement at stumbling upon these amazing portraits by Charlotte Caron!

Word Wednesday: Lost Hours

Happy Word Wednesday! I hope you have caught up on your Planet Word episodes! If not don't worry, I'm only up to episode 3; it's all about swears! I'm only 15 mins into it, but so far it's just as facinating as the last!

But on to this week. Did you know that April is World Poetry Month? How exciting! I love poetry, but I have to admit I've been neglecting the genre a little bit lately in favour of short stories. Still, World Poetry Month is as good excuse as any (in fact it's probably the best excuse) to get back into it!

Here's a poem I wrote just now, sitting outside in the lovely cool autumn sunshine, eating cream cheese on crackers and drinking Lemon Lime and Bitters ( I figured one in the afternoon is just a little too early for a gin and tonic). It's my little lament to the death of summer for a another year, although I do love autumn just as much, if not more. I hope you enjoy it!

Lost Hours

It starts to get dark
at the beginning of April
darkness folds around me like the
furling up of orchid petals
like the closing of hands
I'm caught in the dome of some god's
barely touching palms
and though time cannot stray from that ever
continuing line
it feels like there is less of it
to take from each day

the worst thing for a person like me
a young person
is to know that you have less time
we clutch at the minutes, and the hours
and the days as if we were starving
and they were edible
they would taste like red liquorice
pistachios, broccoli and ash
ans we would fill our mouths with time until our
bellies swell and we become cavernous
with no sense of urgency for anything
other than the feast

It is the end of summer
and the habits of those who equate time to
the number of daylight hours
begin to retract
they move quicker, more erraticly
they are less likely to talk to strangers
they don't leave their cars parked out on the street
the old pull the darkness around their hollow bones
to keep out the cold
and the young dive into it, devouring lost hours
they squirrel them away under their skirts and leather jackets
eating them up, saving them for later