vampire weekend

vampire weekend: i hate their name; i love them.

in a world slightly obsessed with pointy teeth and bloodsucking immortals, do we really need a band named Vampire Weekend? that's what i thought when i first heard of them. i also thought they were probably going to be one of those angst-ridden emo bands, so i kept my distance.

but then i heard Horchata. and it made me veryvery happy. and i realised that, despite their uncool band name, Vampire Weekend is actually very cool. i love the way they incorporate so many different styles of music into their songs: in any given song you could hear anything from reggae to kwassa kwassa, punk to electro. i love the way they are unafraid to experiment, and i really love the african influence in most of their songs.

i think it's pretty dang exciting that the world gets to hear african music and musical elements played in a new, creative way. the rich drum beats and guitar riffs add so much to the music - i think it's the coolest thing ever :)

Vampire Weekend makes feel-good, happy music. it's music that instantly lifts your mood and takes you to a brighter, more colourful place. you can't help but smile. you can't help but tap your feet and bob your head along to the steady beat.

(i chose this video because i think music videos distract from the music sometimes)

(i chose this one 'cause it has Jake Gyllenhaal in it. and 'cause it's so darn weird)

you can listen to the full album here

Tina Redman

(posted by roanne)

Tina Redman: your typical everyday girl, except for two things

1) she posseses an uncommon abundence of coolness

2) she can beatbox. like, really beatbox - not this weak drumbeat your one friend can get right on her/his third try.  

This is so insane you may think we tampered with the video- let me assure you, we didn't. i love that feeling you get when you see someone with raw talent and unbelievable potential. it  leaves you elated and amazed; it smears a huge, unstoppable smile on your face; it is just too cool. she is just too cool. here she is:

cool packaging

i saw this the other day and i got a little excited. cool/clever packaging is one of my favourite things, so this Starbucks carrier bag made me smile:

musicANDmuffins

(posted by Hannah)

while randomly looking up something or other on YouTube (a sad habit which has become mine since becoming a varsity student) i happened to stumble across an animated video of Kate Nash's song Nicest Thing, made by someone awesome called musicANDmuffins. i was enchanted… because there is something so sweet and moving about the characters in the animation! so i made haste in looking up all the other animations which this muffinsy-music person had made, and now i will share my favourites with you.

here is the original one i found. can i just mention that Kate Nash is amazing? and that this song is beautiful? i think it appeals to the romantic in many a girl :)

 

this is the awesome muffin person's animation for Coldplay's song Yellow. on top of everything else that is ever-so-sweet about this animation, i love the version of Yellow which has been used! …just thought i'd throw that in there :)

the next gem is an animation of Laura Marling's song Alas I Cannot Swim. i'm ashamed to say i hadn't heard of Laura before i came across these lovely little videos, but i am very much liking her now! extra-specially this song.

 

 

last but definitely not least is my favourite of all my favourites… which, you must know, is a difficult thing for me to say. this is an animation of KT Tunstall's Throw Me A Rope, which is another song i hadn't heard before discovering these darling animations. i find KT's songs - particularly her quieter, more acoustic songs - so haunting and moving, and Throw Me A Rope is no different. i think we can all relate to the feeling of missing someone but knowing that it's important to find our way through that missing-ness. it is bittersweet and beautiful and hopeful. i love the song, and i love the muffinsy person's portrayal of the song's lyrics, and i hope you do, too :)

 

 



imaginary friends

I used to have an imaginary friend. I think that having an imaginary friend is one of the strangest things a person can do, but I the thing is I never chose to have one. She was just there, like a real person. Her name was Katie and she was about my age (which was maybe three or four years old).

I don’t know why I imagined Katie. I did have real friends (really!) and I had more than enough fun playing around with them. Katie was just another one of them… except that no one else could see her.

My gran always tells the story of how Katie told me to hide in her big wooden wardrobe one day. It’s a true story. She was a bit of a trouble-maker, that Katie…  She told me to hide in the wardrobe until someone found me, which seemed to me like the most ingenious idea in the entire world. So the three-or-four-year-old me climbed into the door, sat on some old saris and shoes, and hid with Katie for literally hours. Little did we know (actually, maybe Katie did know, now that I think about it) that downstairs, pandemonium was breaking out as my gran, aunt, cousins, and their neighbours searched the entire house and street, looking for me.  My gran always tells this story, and she always blames me, which I think is a little unfair. After all, Katie was the orchestrator of the shenanigans (I love that word) and even though Katie was a figment of my crazy imagination, I cannot be held responsible for her – she was a loose cannon!

I still think imaginary friends are weird, and I’m kind of embarrassed that I had one. It’s crazy and amazing how the human mind works, even when we’re so young we can hardly form proper sentences.

 I love my imagination. It's one of the reasons I am never bored; it makes the world a much more exciting and beautiful place to live in.

a day in the life of...

(short story by Courtney Weakley)

Today, while I was still sleeping, the world woke up. I would say it happened gradually and with grace. I would compare it to a tired toddler peeping over the edge of the cot, or a swan emerging from a black lake. I would, only I wasn’t there to see it, and cawing hadidas at my window is anything but graceful.

Today was January 16th 2011, and today was a day in the life of an ordinary person. It was an ordinary day in the ordinary life of an ordinary girl. It started when I woke up with cell-phone alarm bell bees buzzing into my ears and stinging my dreams. Today I woke up blinking dusty eyelashes to push back a vision of the moon opening her mouth to swallow a fiery seraph and thinking that if today was a movie, the dream would mean something. It would be an ominous warning to ruin a regular morning , or a subconscious expression of my obscurely hidden emotions. But today it was just a dream.

Today wasn’t ‘a day in the life of a teenage archetype’ or ‘a day in the life of a cliché’. It was not a day of ‘I-know-what’s-going-to-happen-next’. Today was a day of finding sour milk in the fridge and drinking it anyway. It was a day to think ‘I’m starting Grade 10’ and not being traumatized when my parents didn’t care. It was a day to realize that in a matter of hours, it would be gone and then I would see it didn’t really mean anything anyway.

So today I climbed into my navy skirt fatigues and my bodyguard school shoes, and shivered with my bag of icy stationary on my back, because it smelt like potential and potential is so much more delicious than reality. I sat in the car with headphones on my ears and pretended I was silent, when really my head was drowning. I looked out the window as the landscape slipped up on concrete feet, and wished that my whole life came with background music, rather than just my morning car rides.

“How fare thee this morning?” my friend asked, her voice fizzing across a porous cell-phone line. “Why are you talking like that? Stop talking like that.” “I want to lie on pavements this weekend,” she answered, ignoring me. “That sounds funny,” I smiled, “phone me again later, I feel too much like the colour purple this morning.” “The colour purple?” she repeated incredulously, “what does that feel like?” “It feels like I’m hanging up on you now…”

And because it was a day in the real life of a teenage girl, it meant talking to people I didn’t know and asking everyone how they were when I didn’t really care. It meant smiling at things that sometimes weren’t funny, and laughing at things that wouldn’t have been funny in a movie. And I laughed at people that were funny without realizing it, because in real life, people laugh at that instead of pretending it’s par for the course.

Today I opened up a crisp notebook, and succumbed to the divine lure of a blank page. I grasped at half-revealed words and cursed at the shadows they threw on the wall. Today, when I wrote, I dug my fingers into my cheek, because only clichés bite their pencils and pencils don’t taste like inspiration to me. Today I sighed and smiled at the back-to-school reunions, and at the teachers scolding me for not paying attention. Today my thoughts ran away, but they left me behind. Today I wrote out a whole new life in my diary. Today I fell asleep in maths. Today I met a new teacher. Today I cleaned my desk. Today I ate lunch. Today school ended. Today-

Today turned into tonight, and after I waded through the oceans of white and navy to my chariot of rusted metal and squeaky fan-belts, I got home, and released my muscles into relaxed abandon, slashed away the puppet strings. I melted onto the couch and was abruptly held in stasis by the talking box in my lounge. Tonight it was cold, but I have to say that Jack danced around the house, stabbed grappling frosty fingers underneath the door and tried to scratch at my feet, because it sounds better. Tonight, I would say that the sky split apart as if God released his embrace on Heaven and started crying, but really it was nothing more glamorous than rain. Tonight, when I leant my cold cheek to a colder pillow, I tilted towards the sound of drops on my window, because it’s always been my lullaby. Tonight the Sandman snuck up on me, and released handfuls of dust over my head. Tonight was the closing circuit of an electric day.  

And today wasn't an allegory or a metaphor. You won’t find any grapes of wisdom fallen from the prophet's mouth, nor secrets whispered in-between the perfect inky lines. There was nothing more to read than what was on the surface, because sometimes all we are is living and nothing else, and sometimes plot holes swallow us up. Sometimes real life flies past without mattering, and sometimes living it has no meaning. Sometimes real life is only real and nothing else, and sometimes the only thing with any gravity is just living and staying alive.

And sometimes… well, sometimes that's enough.

everything looks better in black and white

here are some more beautiful photos from the awesome Jesse Greaves:

it is my firm belief that everyone looks a million times better in black and white :)