Just some quick housekeeping. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of winter. But it’s never too early for spring cleaning.
In case you didn’t notice, I’ve updated (or, rather, reverted) the blog layout, because the previous one was just too cluttered for my taste and I kind of missed the simple blogginess of the very first one. Also, spent awhile reorganizing my Carbonmade portfolio — you should check it out — and changed the photographia. link back to Carbonmade, because I don’t really like Flickr at all and am sort of debating taking my photos off there in general.
Also have been lurking around Vimeo a bunch today, because I’m taking my photostalking to the next level and getting a Flip camera as an early birthday present as to achieve my dream of never-ending photographs. So I can capture life in motion as well as in still. (as an aside, Nirrimi’s two short films — but they’re more of what I think of as “never-ending photographs” — on there are kind of amazing. oh, what the heck, see one here:)
I’m good at missing dates. authoraiINK’s birthday was exactly one year and 14 days ago, on December 9th, 2009. Yay for a year of procrastination!
Speaking of procrastination, it’s two days ’till Christmas and we just finished building our Christmas tree. Yes, I said building: We have a much-abused, 12+ year-old artificial tree which was looking kind of misshapen because I sort of tossed (read: threw) its pieces carelessly from the box. Then I almost set our carpet on fire because I didn’t realize that one of the large bulbs in our string of lights had shattered.
But anywho. Since I’m on vacation and such, I’ve been engaged in a few of my hobbies which were neglected during school, namely 1) stalking my neighbor and 2) reading. It actually works pretty well; I go to my neighbor’s house, eat her lemon squares, take a pile of her books, and leave. So far I’ve read Crescendo, the sequel to Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick; I’ve caught up on my current favourite manga series Alice in the Country of Hearts; and I’ve gotten angry that I can’t hate the ending to Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments series because it hasn’t actually ended. It makes me angry because it’s like saying a heartfelt goodbye to someone you’re going to miss and then running into them again five minutes later.
Well, happy holidays and such. I have gifts to wrap, movies to see (The Black Swan), and Christmas trees to crush.
About how I feel about midterms, which start tomorrow. Also, there is a dying fly in my room, and I hate its incessant buzzing and the way it stops and rubs its forelegs together and how ugly it is. I killed a fly yesterday and felt bad for a few moments after Blé had told me over the cellular waves how disturbing one of my current rewrites is.
Last night I hung out with my roommate’s friends, skipping dinner to watch 10 Things I Hate About You with seven of us huddled around a tiny MacBook screen. I spent the rest of the night house-hopping and eating other people’s food and wishing I was full until someone new came out with a fresh plate of Christmas tree cookies straight from the oven. I learned that supergeniuses can be dog people and that when karma smiles dumbasses fall into icy rivers and that, sometimes, the only way to save your ailing goldfish is to feed it to a contraband snapping turtle.
I felt like such a bad person last night that I was surprised I was in such a good mood.
‘Allo there! These have been a busy few days. Yesterday I saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows with my buddy El. Since it was a Monday night, there were only a few of us in the theater, so we were able to giggle/ plot explain/ complain about how a specific few of the rumors we’d heard were untrue. But before that I was getting my hair redone (the blonde streak’s gone now… sad face) and before that I was playing the Sims 3 Late Night, where I managed to cheat myself into a corner regarding their new “celebrity” feature. A vaguely amusing note before we journey on to my next topic: my Sims screenshots share a surprising number of aesthetic similarities with my real-life photographs.
Is it not so?
But, anyway, on Sunday Blé came over and we staged a photoshoot, styled and shot by yours truly. And since I was aware of the inevitable criticisms of my photo prof (“She looks so angsty…”/ “It’s so posed!”/ “What is the narrative here?”), I decided to make the narrative “Teenage Angst as Channeled by Poe’s Raven”. So I’d like to see him argue with that.
Well, I’m off for Montréal in a few hours, so there will be no internet/ prolly no posts for a few days. Until then, Happy (American) Thanksgiving — go and stuff yourselves with good food until Karl Lagerfeld will no longer look over the top of your head!
Not that you should — hate me, that is. I’m just reeeealy busy and sort of lack dedication with regularity-type things, or something like that. In case you hadn’t noticed, the friday foofaraw feature kind of died. Well, maybe not died, per se, but it certainly crawled into a hole and went into hibernation for a long while. And for that, I’m sorry. The main problems with being consistent with it were the facts that I’m in schoolio and all and have tons of homework, and also because I often ended up sharing all of my cool interwebsy stuff the day I found it, aka not on Friday.
I’m leaving for (American) Thanksgiving break tomorrow, so I’ll probably have tons of time to procrastinate/ write/ play the Sims 3 Late Night/ finish reading Dark Divine andL’appel du sang, which I obviously haven’t finished yet. But until then, watch some stunt cats on infoMania’s viral video film school while I daydream about watching the new Harry Potter movie.
And! Also! My awesome Threadless t-shirt has officially been shipped. So hopefully it’ll be there by the time I get back!
Sorry for the dearth of posts this past week! I’ve been busybusybusy. Soccer season ended yesterday — we went out with a bang, winning our last game 9-nil. Our coaches even took me out of goal and made me run around in circles (à la headless chicken) on defense. Then I spent my night with a few of my unusually-punked out friends, babysitting and watching A Series of Unfortunate Events and all of its many, many special features.
I spent today hiking up, and down, a mountain. This is actually the first time I’ve sat down in my room since… well, yesterday afternoon? But anyway, I’ve got a bunch of photos taken, none of which conform to my current photography assignment (because of a dearth of inspiration, I’m taking on the 100 themes list). I suppose I could force a few of them into that mold….
suc·cinct [ sək'siŋkt ] : expressed in a very short but clear way.
Like this post, where I know what I want to tell you but I’m too busy to put it into a nice and eloquent form (and I used all of my quick-eloquent-writing skill at class today). So let’s hit the ground running, shall we?
1.
I love Harry Potter. Very much so, actually — I even dressed up and went to the midnight release parties. I also have a soft spot for Alexander McQueen dresses. The combination of these two should be great, but:
This dress was designed by the late Alexander McQueen. It’s rather famous in the fashion world. However, the wedding dress used for Bill Weasley and Fleur Delacour’s wedding might as well have been as well. In the name of brevity, I’ll let you click the link to see the latter — it’s a very pretty, if very similar, dress. Currently the HP costume designer’s strongest argument is something along the lines of “But phoenixes are totally different birds than peacocks,” but… please, Temime, give credit where credit is due.
2.
Speaking of phoenixes, Kanye West’s short film Runaway is a rather pheonix-y affair. For a detailed film-critic analysis you can hit up Jezebel; I just wanted to show you the movie.
3.
This week I stole time during soccer game bus rides and got started on two books. One of them I bought in Montréal, so it’s in French (and I also might’ve purchased another, maybe it was written by Stephenie Meyer and had La Seconde Vie de Bree Tanner in its title – but for the sake of my dignity we won’t speak of it), and the other was recommended to me by one of my teachers. This first book of which I speak is Dark Divine by Bree Despain; you should go check it out in the language of your choice, because even though I’m only on page 63 it’s been pretty good so far. The second is Bonjour Tristesse by François Sagan, which is both really good and much shorter than Dark Divine. What’s ironic, though, is that I’m now reading an originally English novel in French and a French classic in English. My French professor, for the record, shook his head and sighed when I told him.
Well, that is all for now. I’m sorry it was was so brief, but that’s part of the consequences of procrastination. Enjoy your weekend, because I still don’t have one.
It’s totally Friday, everyone! If I went to a normal school, this would mean that I’d have, like, a weekend.
But I don’t. Instead, I decided to start a nice little weekly feature for you Weekenders called friday foofaraw, or interesting things that I found on the interwebs this week. Usually, if I do it right, it will include some fashion news, some audiovisual news, some photography news, some lit-news and something completely random. But since I only came up with this idea this morning, I have no randomosity and some extra photography instead. My sincerest apologies.
But, before we get to that: You might have noticed that authoraiINK. has undergone a rather extreme makeover. Because of this, some things are still quite ugly. Again, my sincerest apologies. Everything will be pretty once again… sometime.
so, without further ado: friday foofaraw, the october 8th edition.
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1. Alexander McQueen Spring/Summer 2010 Prêt-à-Porter Show
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There has been much buzz around the fashion-nets about this show and the accompanying weaved hairstyles it featured (apparently it took about 60 bottles of hairspray to keep all of that hair together). We even mentioned it at French class today; we took a “day off” and watched a few runway shows from Paris Fashion Week. I felt so knowledgeable; while the rest of my class was wondering “Why the hell are we doing this?”, I was thinking, “That’s Coco Rocha! That’s Chanel Iman!” Personally, my favorite was the Dior show, with the Chanel show coming in close second. But you can find images from McQueen’s show here, and the videos for the Dior and Chanel shows hereand here , respectively. On a semi-related note, you should have seen our teacher’s gesture when Karl Lagerfeld came out — it was trés amusing.
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2. The Social Network
Well. The oft-discussed movie about the founding of Facebook came out this week (or was it last week? or maybe even the week before it? blasted boarding school). Anyhow, the reviews for it started coming out in great volume this week. I, personally, want to see it. We all know that it’s not exactly true to the story (that would be boring on many levels), but I’ve heard that it’s both really good and completely terrible, sometimes at the same time. Maybe I’ll be able to see it before it comes out on DVD, but until then I’ll just have to rely on hearsay and other people spoiling it for me.
There is a spread in Numéro, that magazine that I still-have-not-subscribed to, shot by Ben Hassett and featuring the model Cameron Russell. You should click the picture above to view it on Fashionising.com, because it is too glamorous for my mere typographic skills to describe.
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4. A quick note: Super Sad True Love Story
I heard this book mentioned somewhere and its title compelled me to look it up. If they don’t have it at my library, I am going to cry.
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5. And, finally, a quick palette cleanser
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I saw this on Lorena’s site and felt obligated to share it with you. It’s quite refreshing after that rather icky shoot with Terry Richardson, wouldn’t you say?
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So. I hope you enjoyed the first friday foofaraw of, well… ever. With some luck it’ll be back and better than now next weekend.
Also, on the subject of the title: One day, I am going to create a utopian city called Montparscow. It will be Montréal, except with the allure of being Paris, and the inhabitants will all speak French with Russian accents. I will live there, happy forever, and write and photograph and blog for all of you. Blé, I know, will stand in a corner and laugh quietly to herself.
But we will have the best fashion magazines in my Montparscow. That is certain.
Wow. I can’t believe that the first “real” week of school is over — conversely, it seems like we’ve been here for at least a month. So much has happened over the past few days, which is weird to think about because here it’s said here that “nothing that happens before or during the weekend of the first dance even counts”. Of course, the aforementioned saying has nothing to do with schoolwork; if all of the homework I’ve been swamped with the first week of school didn’t count, I would have to shoot someone.
Because I’m the only one in my photography class, I (read: my teacher) decided to have only two classes this week. The first one was to receive my assignment (portraits), and the second one was for him to pick apart my studio portraits because 1) I only used — gasp — one model, 2) even though they were all compositionally very good, they “just didn’t do anything for him”, and 3) he flat-out doesn’t like fashion photography. Le sigh. I spent the next canceled class taking stalker-portraits of passers-by, with which I’m sure he will be very happy.
Once when we were preparing for a photo shoot, Blé joked that I’d found my life’s career in applying other people’s eye makeup. The girls of my dorm seem to believe that as well, as they all made me apply theirs before the dance yesterday. In their words: “Ohmigosh, I’m totes having you do my makeup next dance, too!” In my thoughts: “Ohmigosh, you’d better bring five dollars next time!”
Today we watched Mean Girls. I know it puts me at odds with most American females of my generation to say this, but I strongly disliked that movie. It wasn’t the acting or the plot that did it for me; it was the whole “Girl from Africa” premise. Please, filmmakers of Hollywood, quit your colonialism and remember that FOR THE LAST TIME, AFRICA IS NOT A GIANT EMPTY SAFARI FILLED WITH ELEPHANTS AND POOR, IGNORANT TRIBES-PEOPLE. As someone whose family hails from a country that is both African, metropolitan and one of the most populous in the world, this irks me so much.
On a semi-random style note: I was taking a look at my Pinterest board (yes, I only have one), I noticed that most of my favorite photos are taken my Eastern European, namely Polish, photographers. And while I’d love to chalk that up to Blé’s influence, I think it’s more because so many of them, at least the ones you see on art sites like deviantArt, have a very similar style. I suppose that I try to emulate this very general style, in a way, but I’m better at incorporation than emulation.
That is all. If you read the entirety of this rambling and unfocused post, you deserve a Double-Stuff Oreo.
Yesterday I went to see the matinee showing of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. Realistic it was not, but it was pretty epic — the commercials didn’t lie there. However, it was one of those movies where if you miss one minute of it, you’re pretty much screwed with understanding the rest of it. My favorite lines were, “You punched the highlights out of her!” and “Chicken Parmesan isn’t vegan?” among others.
Also: I’m leaving for Montréal tomorrow. Which means that, seeing as my flat lacks WiFi, if Blé doesn’t post the only chance of anything new being up here is if I sprint with my laptop to the nearest Starbucks. Please try to curb your disappointment. On the bright side (though in my opinion, this whole thing is a brightly shining multifaceted mirror), when I get back I will have lots and lots of photos, and hopefully a slightly more presentable portfolio.
“… but how does being a vegan give you psychic powers?”
