Topshop

Y'know, looking at the Topshop website always leaves me feeling faintly depressed. First of all, the conversion rate from AUD to GBP is pretty crappy, so the price of a garment plus postage is usually more than I can allow myself to spend on one item (that old thift/vintage wearer chestnut!). Plus, because I'm not able to go into the shop to look at the quality of every item that catches my eye, I'm paranoid that if/when I do hit 'buy' and finally receive the parcel, I'll be horribly disappointed.

In any case, I had a look today and as usual, I wanted a million things for Spring and Summer. While I can't have everything, I can at least enjoy looking, so I made a Polyvore set.

Top Shop Picks by deplorable_world on Polyvore.com

Everything I liked I could imagine working well transeasonally. The dresses beg for pretty stockings and the lovely lace and roses would work well with basics all year. We're only really beginning to see the floral/Liberty prints on the high street in Australia, so it's all still novel and fresh to me, and I thought these relatively basic items would transcend trend (providing the fabric and stitching held out that long!) and layer well. The cute black shoes and croc bag are the sort of thing I would keep and wear for years, ditto the recently released Kate Moss collection faux fur.

Fame...

I feel kind of internet-famous right now.

I was casually trawling through a sub-section of a newspaper website when I came upon something that made me pause and then get vaguely paranoid.

In 2007 (nearly 2 years ago), I was a big LiveJournal user and I posted this to my LJ (and never locked it, I might add!). It was a jokey thing, obviously, but I thought the ideas that The Veronicas had evolved from an earlier Australian sister-group called S2S had merit.

As did someone else around the same time, who was clearly a bit confused, but at least not passing off the idea as theirs!

Anyway, so this morning through The Vine, I found a post by someone called SineadMcFly saying basically the same thing I had on my LJ, minus my second step of Jackson Mendoza.

Yeah, it's not a big stretch of the imagination to decide the two (or three) are similar, but I think saying they're the same thing (as I did) is a wee bit suspicious.

I even googled "s2s is the veronicas" out of paranoia and found I was the first and only entry!

So tell me, does this make me internet famous; you know, with my half-baked ideas being STOLEN and passed off as someone else's work a la you thought we wouldn't notice? If so, it was a lot easier than I thought!

"That's peanut butter...."

Not much going on lately- I've been writing an opinion piece on Wikipedia and a web site proposal for school, both of which necessitate a fair bit of time spent on the internet. And to be quite honest, a decent wedge of that has been time wasting.

So these are my two current favourite YouTube videos for entirely different reasons.



This brings back a lot of happy memories of 80s and early 90s animated movies and TV shows for kids- the sort of stuff I grew up on. The fact that it's an ELO song and from a musical also counts in its favour.



Every time I watch this, I suspect it might just be the best thing on the internet. Early Stooges footage with 'square' commentary = sheer awesome!

Hairs and graces

Today, I finally had a much needed hair trim and as it had been a couple of months since I last had an X-TENSO treatment, I had my roots and fringe touched up too. As a result, my hair is now lovely and shiny (and dead-straight), though I had forgotten how off-putting the smell can be!

In celebration of my casting off my split ends, I made a mosaic of some of my Flickr favourites with gorgeous brunette hair.



1. Untitled, 2. Ipso Facto, 3. Curling Experiment: Step 5, 4. and now for something..., 5. Made in U.S.A. (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966), 6. Untitled, 7. Anna Karina Une femme est une femme, 8. Hedy Lamarr, 9. Brunch 002, 10. summertime in tennessee bow, 11. Untitled, 12. Skipper Illustration, 13. Dolly Read, 14. Girls In Their Own Style, 15. IMG_5814 bis, 16. Blair Waldorf, 17. The Awakening, 18. cilla99393, 19. anna, 20. Untitled, 21. Nigella Lawson, 22. Daria, 23. cher and twiggy, 24. Vivien Leigh on the set of GWTW with a cigarette, 25. Catch 22, 26. Follow the trail, 27. Private Detective, 28. Francoise Hardy, 29. snapshot20080607200529, 30. Roger Moore & Jane Seymour, 31. Zooey, 32. Jane Birkin - US Vogue August 1, 1966

This goes with that...

A lot of people finds music triggers particular memories and while I do associate David Bowie's 'China Girl' with the first time Andrew and I kissed, Meatloaf's 'Paradise by the Dashboard Light' with my sister (I sing Meaty and she sings Ellen!) and the Macarena with the discos I went to in primary school, I tend to find that my strongest memories that are attached to certain songs or albums are focused mostly on what I was reading at the time.

I was 12 when I 'discovered' Australian author Isobelle Carmody's fantastic post-apocalyptic fantasy series, 'The Obernewtyn Chronicles'. I read the first three- 'Obernewtyn', 'The Farseekers' and 'Ashling' over and over and was inspired to read Marion Zimmer-Bradley and Mercedes Lackey as a result.



My favourite of the Obernewtyn novels for one main reason- hot Rushton angst!

But aside from being my 'fantasy' phase, it was also the time where I was obsessed with The Corrs. You remember them; that Irish band with the three hot sisters and attractive yet still overlooked brother (poor Jim!). Anyway, I was a huge Corrs fan from about 10 onwards and played their CDs to death.





Two CDs my parents probably wish had never come into existence!

A couple of years later, Kylie Minogue delivered her long-awaited (hey, I know I wasn't the only one anticipating it!) follow-up to 'Light Years'.



'Fever' was the album that brought us 'Can't Get You Out of My Head' and 'In Your Eyes', but Track 2 is the one I remember best- 'Love At First Sight'.

I was still in the (post-apocalyptic) fantasy phase and at that time, I'd been reading Raymond E Feist and Janny Wurt's 'Empire' series and will forever associate Kylie's breathy warbling with Mara and Kevin's tension-filled dealings. Every time I hear that song, I still get indignant over the fact that Mara didn't tell him about the baby!



A must-read series if you're into fantasy.

Two years later, my tastes had changed almost completely. Tired of unexplored sexual tension and craving a more believable yet still distant setting for my fiction, I embarked on my historical romance phase (via 60s spy novels and dystopian classics like '1984') and haven't looked back since. In the beginning, nothing could beat a Victoria Alexander for style, substance and laughs.



Few series could beat Alexander's Effington books- even now.

The Sex Pistols can also stake a claim on style, substance and laughs (depending on who you ask), but in an entirely different way.



'Jubilee' was my first Sex Pistols CD and I still think it's one of the best compilations out there.

It sounds strange to pair punk rock and bodice rippers, but to my mind, there is no better combination to a teenage girl trying to come to terms with the world (punk for the unadulterated emotion and romances for the tenderness and happy endings). Fortunately for everyone I share space with, I have reached the point now where punk rock is a 'sometimes food' rather than the only thing I consumed, but my love of romances is still going strong.

Kate Miller-Heidke

I've been enjoying the quirky musical stylings of an Australian performer recently- Kate Miller-Heidke; a classically-trained alt-pop singer/song-writer.

Her song 'The Last Day on Earth' makes me teary. I saw the video clip for the first time a few days ago and had to gulp back sobs at the poignancy of the lyrics and the randomly tragic video (her tears around the 2:27 mark had me sniffling hard-core). I would give something, probably not my right arm or first born, to know what it's about for her, though I'm worried it's something like some awful Sylvester Stallone movie or something similarly unspeakable.



On a less wrist-slitting note, I loved her 'Can't Shake It' because it deals with something I think we've all experienced- dance floor self-consciousness- and I found her 'accent' very cheerful and warming. Her unique aesthetic is more obvious here than in the last video (though I cannot work out why Aussie video clip producers insist on using flashing colour changes on people's faces at present) and despite my suspicions that she's wearing a nightie here, I must conclude by saying that anyone who describes their moonwalk as like they've stepped in shit is alright by me ;)

Tea time

I took my grandmother out for tea on Friday afternoon. She's been in and out of hospital since the start of May and has been in a nursing home to rehabilitate enough to come home since the start of July, so she has been quite isolated from real life and in dire need of distractions.

I took her to a tea room-cum-porcelain/antique shop in the nearby suburb of Ivanhoe and after she polished off some scones, I was able to rearrange all of the tables and chairs and push the wheelchair around the shop to show her all the china!



Nan had scones- one date, one Devonshire-



and a pot of Earl Grey to wash it down.



I ate a butterfly cake (like an uninced cupcake with 'wings' cut out of the top to make a hole you fill with jam and cream and then wedge the 'wings' into)



and sipped a Coke Spider for energy (it's very tiring hefting a wheelchair in and out of the car and steering it over steps while holding the door open with your behind, not to mention later rearranging the furniture!).

We enjoyed ourselves so much that I have resolved to embark on a regular Friday visit to the tea room for Nan and I- some quality 'girl' time away from my father and grandfather where we can coo over hundred-year-old doilies.

Rock 'n' Roll Evolution

One of my favourite aspects of rock 'n' roll and its offspring is that it's cannabalistic- every new song is influenced by an older one and will undoubtedly inspire future songs. Sometimes, I like to track the progression of certain ideas and stylistic elements through the generations of songs; almost like a '6 degrees of separation project', except often there's not 6 conduits ;)

I can successfully navigate from Gary Glitter to Nine Inch Nails, for example; though that probably sounds abhorrent to some. I shall demonstrate with YouTube videos below:



Step 1- Gary Glitter's 'Rock 'N' Roll Part 1'- the less popular older sister of what most people know as 'The Hey Song' a.k.a 'Rock 'N' Roll Part 2'. Glitter's classics are all obviously influenced by the early rock 'n' roll hits in terms of ideas and lyrics and to a degree, r'n'b through the use of repetitive beats and rhythms, though he brings his own unique seedy edge to things ;)



Step 2- Iggy Pop's 'Nightclubing', which vaguely samples the 'Rock 'N' Roll' riff: the Wikipedia article for Pop's album 'The Idiot' refers to a source as describing the 'Nightclubbing' sound as "a mischievous quote" of the Glitter song, in fact. On an unrelated note, this is one of my favourite YouTube videos ever; those drag queens are gorgeous and the deliberate crudity of the editing is mesmerising.



Step 3- Nine Inch Nail's 'Closer'; which takes its beat from 'Nightclubbing' (according to the 'The Idiot' Wiki). By this point in the string, the shared sound has been sped up a bit, but the relationship with the two earlier songs is clear.

And for a nice, neat end,



One of the best mash-ups on YouTube and an interesting diversion from the path.