Bang, bang

I've been trying to get used to long bangs for ages but to be honest it always drove me nuts, not to mention all the annoying trips to the hairdressers to have them trimmed! I've always appreciated shorter bangs, but do you know how hard it is to get a hairdresser to cut them super short? Sometimes it takes longer than the haircut! I'm hoping that Rooney Mara's super short fringe in 'Girl with Dragon Tattoo' will finally make them "in" enough for hairdressers not to think I'm mentally ill when I want them cut halfway up my forehead.

PS Rooney Mara's various hair do's in Fincher's 'Dragon Tattoo' was one of my favourite parts of the film - no joke. Though not so sure about the bleached out eyebrows though....

Merry Xmas No One!

Lists of Note

David Foster Wallace's Word Lists

Joan Didion's Packing List

Woody Guthrie's New Year's Resolutions 1942

(the first and last via Lists of Note - possibly even better than Letters of Note?)

Fit for a Fortnight

I'm not one for fancy knickers. Truth I used to live in Bonds, with the odd Perele bra thrown in (from my Mum for Gods sake). However the Canadian's have got it right with Fortnight - balconette bra's and high waisted sheer things (we wear them under long johns and unitards atm - just kidding - maybe). Its hot hot hot under all the layers - when its cold cold cold outside. I just dance around to this to keep warm.

PS They have a pop up Etsy Shop till early Jan - just saying.

DRUNK HISTORY

Drunk History Vol. 5 w/ Will Ferrell, Don Cheadle & Zooey Deschanel from Will Ferrell     

I watched all of these yesterday - please do yourself a favour this Xmas - its worth it!

I believe in love! I mean there's gotta be something for people to cling to besides TV right?

It was Gregg Araki's birthday on Saturday. I'm crap with friends b'days, hell my own parents are hard enough, so goes without saying, I totally didn't realise it was Gregg's.  Opening Ceremony did though! They curated a cute little dress in OC x screen cap ode that you can check here.

Seeing Gregg in conversation a TIFF Bell Lightbox was one of my all time fave events of the year - a year which included shaking Whit Stillman's hand, moving to Toronto, spending a month in Thailand with my best gal pal, going on a road trip to Detroit and visiting the Mo-town museum and seeing EMA, Louis CK, Malcolm Gladwell (and bajillion other peeps) live. So you know it was pretty good.

um I'm so super psyched for Lena Dunham's 'Girls', it looks like something from the preppy 1980s dreamland. PS CHRIS EIGMAN

"I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me."

One of Nicholas Ray's best - "In A Lonely Place"

Can someone please give Ice Cube his own TV Show?

Pretty Pls?

I miss laughing.

Home for Actresses from Megan Mullally     

This Funny or Die video with Lizzy Caplan, Lake Bell and Aubrey Plaza is really all I needed on a hangover Sunday.

I'm fucking with your cutie-q

Uh!

We Need To Talk About Kevin

Though it wasn't that long ago I was spouting superlatives about Cafe de Flore, I also just saw We Need to Talk About Kevin this week. I only saw Morvern Callar a few months ago, despite my good intentions. Lynne Ramsey has an undeniable aesthetic, which everyone seems drawn to, she somehow makes things affecting and poignant without being completely devastating and bleak (in a Lars Von Trier or John Cassavettes kinda way). This film is rad and you should totally see it, and read the book, because its awesome (love you Lionel Shriver).

And now we're back together, we've seen a change in weather

Before The Weeknd there was Weekend!

Cafe de Flore

I've been catching up on some of the films I missed at TIFF this year, including 'Cafe de Flore' which totally devastated me. As opposed to "tragic" young love stories like 'Like Crazy', which just make me feel old and five different types of cynical, 'Cafe de Flore' has so much going for it. It had character development and believable relationships - sorry 'Like Crazy' you were just 2-by-4 and all sorts of lame.

'Cafe de Flore' is also relatively free of bad romantic cliches, and instead has a healthy 'mount of bourgey introspection and a lot of 'fate' talk - which I love, yes, I'm a sucker for some of that interconnectedness of the universe guff, so it ticked a lot of boxes for me. Did I mention the fact that the closest they got to star power was Vanessa Paradis and that she couldn't look further from a 'glamazonian'?

The setting couldn't be further from Woody Allen's 'Midnight in Paris' Paris either, despite the touristy, nostalgic title, this is no romantic 'City of Lights' type-of-deal. However it still looks beautiful, I guess its hard to make Paris look ugly.

Though the film's tribute to music feels a bit over earnest at the time, it feels true enough for the cheeseball middle aged club DJ character - yes I swear I did actually like this film. BTW that role was sooooo perfectly cast, from the bad tattoo's down to over-sculpted biceps - and his GF toe rings.

 

The Age of Movies -  Pauline Kael

 

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? - Mindy Kaling

 

Room - Emma Donoghue

Then Again - Diane Keaton

There are so many books I want to be reading right now! I stopped reading around August (right after finishing Life by Keith Richards) and didn't start again till November! I had absolutely zero concentration for anything without surround sound, despite having a bunch of books out from the library that weren't even that heavy going e.g. Black Postcards.  I would read about a page before returning to whatever TV show is owning my life ATM (Bored to Death, Happy Endings you sucking my soul!) I couldn't even read on PT preferring to stare creepily out the window listening to EMA (or similar). I finally broke the cycle with The Marriage Plot however (AKA the best book of 2012) and am finally reading again, and I want to start with all of the above! Though first I have to pay off all those overdue fines at the library for the books I didn't read, bummer.

What I remember about Woody is he was short and cute

Watch Woody Allen vs Manhattan on PBS. See more from AMERICAN MASTERS.

Watch When Woody Met Diane on PBS. See more from AMERICAN MASTERS.

The Woody Allen documentary is so amazing for once, I say the 90 minute rule is off -  I wish this doc was 14 hours or more!

Say it Don't Spray It

Baby its cold outside

Apparently its going to snow today and all I can do is think about is what to wear...

incomparable

I can't believe I ever doubted you J. Schwartz.

(via Kate Jinx)

2 Broke Girls

Max Black's one-liners are what comes outta my mouth in my bitchy dreams.

Being a princess isn't all it's cracked up to be

Photo of Princess Caroline of Monaco by Richard Melloul, 1982.

The weather at the moment is so rainy and changeable. This is exactly how I wish I was dressed every time it rains. Who woulda known she was a princess too?

(via Tomboy Style)

You know what we should do? We should just get in your car right now, and just drive off. Just find some totally new place and start a whole new life. Fuck everybody.

A nice little composite of Enid's amazing outfits in non Clowes formation (via Got a Girl Crush)

Wanna be an Extra?

Oh man, if ONLY!

In a Beautiful Country

 “

A good way to fall in love

is to turn off the headlights

and drive very fast down dark roads.

Another way to fall in love

is to say they are only mints

and swallow them with a strong drink.

Then it is autumn in the body.

Your hands are cold.

Then it is winter and we are still at war.

The gold-haired girl is singing into your ear

about how we live in a beautiful country.

Snow sifts from the clouds

into your drink. It doesn’t matter about the war.

A good way to fall in love

is to close up the garage and turn the engine on,

then down you’ll fall through lovely mists

as a body might fall early one morning

from a high window into love. Love,

the broken glass. Love, the scissors

and the water basin. A good way to fall

is with a rope to catch you.

A good way is with something to drink

to help you march forward.

The gold-haired girl says, Don’t worry

about the armies, says, We live in a time

full of love. You’re thinking about this too much.

Slow down. Nothing bad will happen.

”

- Kevin Prufer,

But something won't let me make love to you.

I can't wait to see EMA live again as soon as possible. This cover in particular holds special place in my heart because of this

These are the the three Amy Poehler alter egos I see in my future

I want a jumper, in which to hide away from the world for a little while.

Richard Brautigan on Coffee:

Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee affords. I once read something about coffee. The thing said that coffee is good for you; it stimulates all the organs.

I thought at first this was a strange way to put it, and not altogether pleasant, but as time goes by I have found out that it makes sense in its own limited way. I’ll tell you what I mean.

Yesterday morning I went over to see a girl. I like her. Whatever we had going for us is gone now. She does not care for me. I blew it and wish I hadn’t.

I rang the door bell and waited on the stairs. I could hear her moving around upstairs. The way she moved I could tell that she was getting up. I had awakened her.

Then she came down the stairs. I could feel her approach in my stomach. Every step she took stirred my feelings and lead indirectly to her opening the door. She saw me and it did not please her.
Once upon a time it pleased her very much, last week. I wonder where it went, pretending to be naive.

“I feel strange now,” she said. “I don’t want to talk.”

“I want a cup of coffee,” I said, because it was the last thing in the world that I wanted. I said it in such a way that it sounded as if I were reading her a telegram from somebody else, a person who really wanted a cup of coffee, who cared about nothing else.

“All right,” she said.

I followed her up the stairs. It was ridiculous. She had just put some clothes on. They had not quite adjusted themselves to her body. I could tell you about her ass. We went into the kitchen.

She took a jar of instant coffee off the shelf and put it on the table. She placed a cup next to it, and a spoon. I looked at them. She put a pan full of water on the stove and turned the gas on under it.
All this time she did not say a word. Her clothes adjusted themselves to her body. I won’t. She left the kitchen.

Then she went down the stairs and outside to see if she had any mail. I didn’t remember seeing any.
She came back up the stairs and went into another room. She closed the door after her. I looked at the pan full of water on the stove.

I knew that it would take a year before the water started to boil. It was now October and there was too much water in the pan. That was the problem. I threw half of the water into the sink.

The water would boil faster now. It would take only six months. The house was quiet.

I looked out the back porch. There were sacks of garbage there. I stared at the garbage and tried to figure out what she had been eating lately by studying the containers and peelings and stuff. I couldn’t tell a thing.

It was now March. The water started to boil. I was pleased by this.

I looked at the table. There was the jar of instant coffee, the empty cup and the spoon all laid out like a funeral service. These are the things that you need to make a cup of coffee.

When I left the house ten minutes later, the cup of coffee safely inside me like a grave, I said, “Thank you for the cup of coffee.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. Her voice came from behind a closed door. Her voice sounded like another telegram. It was really time for me to leave.

I spent the rest of the day not making coffee. It was a comfort. And evening came, I had dinner in a restaurant and went to a bar. I had some drinks and talked to some people.

We were bar people and said bar things. None of them remembered, and the bar closed. It was two o’clock in the morning. I had to go outside. It was foggy and cold in San Francisco. I wondered about the fog and felt very human and exposed.

I decided to go visit another girl. We had not been friends for over a year. Once we were very close. I wondered what she was thinking about now.

I went to her house. She didn’t have a door bell. That was a small victory. One must keep track of all the small victories. I do, anyway.

She answered the door. She was holding a robe in front of her. She didn’t believe that she was seeing me. “What do you want?” she said, believing now that she was seeing me. I walked right into the house.

She turned and closed the door in such a way that I could see her profile. She had not bothered to wrap the robe completely around herself. She was just holding the robe in front of herself.

I could see an unbroken line of body running from her head to her feet. It looked kind of strange. Perhaps because it was so late at night.

“What do you want?” she said.

“I want a cup of coffee,” I said. What a funny thing to say, to say again for a cup of coffee was not what I really wanted.

She looked at me and wheeled slightly on the profile. She was not pleased to see me. Let the AMA tell us that time heals. I looked at the unbroken line of her body.

“Why don’t you have a cup of coffee with me?” I said. “I feel like talking to you. We haven’t talked for a long time.”

She looked at me and wheeled slightly on the profile. I stared at the unbroken line of her body. This was not good.

“It’s too late,” she said. “I have to get up in the morning. If you want a cup of coffee, there’s instant in the kitchen. I have to go to bed.”

The kitchen light was on. I looked down the hall into the kitchen. I didn’t feel like going into the kitchen and having another cup of coffee by myself. I didn’t feel like going to anybody else’s house and asking them for a cup of coffee.

I realized that the day had been committed to a very strange pilgrimage, and I had not planned it that way. At least the jar of instant coffee was not on the table, beside an empty white cup and a spoon.
They say in the spring a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love. Perhaps if he has enough time left over, his fancy can even make room for a cup of coffee.

He's lying, I find that very attractive

Oh Whit Stillman.

This is my Proof

Duane Michals: This Is My Proof, 1974.
Sometimes we find some pretty special things on the internet like this photo-note (also see here from Johnny Cash). It sounds weird (and pretty twee) to say - and I don't know whether its a good thing or a bad thing - but blogs, tumblrs and whatever, totally have helped me to train my eye to see the funny and amazing in all sorts of things I see everyday. I'm not vigilant enough (read = lazy) to take photos of them all to share them with everyone - and sometimes it seems wrong too, like over-documenting and over-sharing life is just a bit weird, but its nice when you find something like the above thats pretty amazing and everyone can 'see for themselves'.
(Via lost.)

She looks for him underneath the sand

Dirty Gold - California Sunrise

This is my song of the summer...while it lasts.

my new hero

Rachel Roy Wears Pajamas To Premiere, Generally Doesn’t Give A Sh*t

Sexy Creepy VIA CK

Before Terry Richardson there was CK.

Well, it's not enough to be - I need your love

Girls - Vomit

Jared Leto - I call her Red

Does anyone else think that the new Girls Video is better suited to Jared Leto's song and the Girls new song 'Vomit' (which I love beeteedubs) would be better suited to this scene in My So Called Life? Jes' sayin.

Blame It On My Wild Heart

I feel like everybody has posted this - and then I realised that means something in blog-land but not in real life. So if you haven't seen this version of Wild Heart , well you'll see. Its at a freaking Rolling Stone photo session no less - the guy actually says at the end Welcome to New York! I die. Please watch.

PS also if you like the above you might like these totes

The type of bitch that make you wish that you ain't never met her

Kreayshawn - Gucci Gucci

Not sure what I think about this. But I definitely think something.

Things usually make sense in time, and even bad decisions have their own kind of correctness."

The Future (Trailer) by tv-prime

The Future - Miranda July

OK. So - I don't love everything Miranda July does, like her book, didn't even finish it. However this doesn't stop me thinking she's a bit amazing. Though I don't like her short stories, I love her dialogue (I lurve it, I luff it - 2 x f's). I love her pacing - both in film and performance - please see here.

I saw 'The Future' last night and had an overwhelmingly physical reaction to some of the lines. There were globs of dialogue that I could almost physically feel in my hand and I desperately wanted to shove in my pockets.

Its so hard to be true and not to be trite. Its so hard to be clever and still be true. Its really hard to make a good movie - and she does it really well. I also desperately want to see one of her performances live v. soon.

PS while googling I found a Sleater Kinney video the she directed for 'Get Up' - its pretty awesome.

"It's really good to be here and as I always say, it's really good to be anywhere!"

I'm currently reading my 10th Rolling Stones book - Keith Richard's 'Life'. I've read Marianne Faithfull's ('Faithfull') which I adore, Tony Sanchez' 'I Was Keith Richards' Drug Dealer' which was kind of trashy fun, 'Mick and Keith', 'The Rolling Stones' (imaginative title I know), and more whose titles escape me - and they are back home in Australia where I can't reference them.

I've always loved the myth of the Rolling Stones more than the music - hence why I own more books about them, than their albums. The Rolling Stones epic journey was always infinitely more fascinating to me than The Beatles, whose story always seemed much more fractured and disparate - though obviously tangential or even parallel depending on your POV.

I remember being truly (retrospectively) saddened (as well as fascinated) by Brian Jones' death - even though he was a bit of a dick -  and the conspiracy theories that still surround it. I also loved the women that surrounded them Faithfull obvs but also Anita Pallenberg and Bianca Jagger et al.

Keith's book has given me new appreciation for their music though and re-inspired me (for zillionth time) to learn guitar. The insight he gives into unconventional playing is totally inspiring, even to a non-player like me. I should also mention though I've joked that I'm more like Mick Jagger than any of the others (and I do love the man - see above), and though Charlie Watts is my favourite Stone, Keith Richards book makes you understand how he got the girls. The stories he tells particularly in the first 1/4  -its a long book - and his little rants, rave and insights, well they just make you think, this guy, this guy would be a lot of fun to get to know.

You've Broken All Our Hearts

Tom Vek - Aroused

Its like 2005 all over again. Nostalgia, its a beautiful bitch.

You've only known me since i've been lonely

Harper Simon "Ha Ha" from American Songwriter on Vimeo.

Harper Simon - Ha Ha

So much Paul Simon in the lyrics, melody and the sound of his voice. It doesn't hurt having a Dad like that sometimes does it?

I remember Marvin Gaye used to sing to me

 

I've been listening to a lot of 2pac this summer (esp Keep ya Head Up). I've always been a Biggie girl but we're a bit past that now post-90s right?

Drive

Finally looks like a Nicolas Winding Refn film I will be able to watch - here's hoping Drive comes out soon.

One thing though - I think Ryan Gosling's voice is too gentle to play a tough guy. He needs to find something more bogan. Is it weird as well how much Carey looks like Michelle Williams in this film? Jes sayin.

GIRLFRIEND! GIRLFRIEND!

Ty Segall - Girlfriend (music video) from High5Collective on Vimeo.

L'Histoire d'Adèle H

L'Histoire d'Adèle H - Francois Truffaut

I watched this movie partly to perve on Isabelle Adjani and Bruce Robinson (he of Withnail and I fame). 

I didn't even realise its one of those amazing unrequited obsessive love movies - my fave! It made me want to read The Sorrows of Young Werther all over again!

If you're looking for a way in.....

...to Fassbinder. I haven't seen an easier film to watch than Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Inspired by Douglas Sirk by way of Max Ophuls and going on to work its magic on Todd Haynes in Far from Heaven. Its one of the sweetest, tenderest Fassbinder films I've ever seen and now for me puts his whole catalogue into perspective. Its weird but now I look at Fox and His Friends and Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant in a whole new light - frailty and tenderness are more apparent - as well as the ugliness and cruelty. However before the latter was really all I could see. 

Fassbinder, he's just so tough with himself - and everyone else.

Mixtapes Not For Johanna (teenage rant style)

So y'all know I like a good mixtape swap right? I'm quite into online mixtapes, as I feel like its perfectly suited to the whole mp3 revival of the single. Also the fact that my CD burner is fried, writing tracklists is boring and how expensive are blank CDs with cases theses days? I don't know, but I reckon they are more than 1 million blank CDs on a wheely spindly thingo.

Though of course we all miss the collage cover art (CDs were good for that) and the the "thinginess" of tapes. No jokes I have a drawer stacked high with tapes from the past decade - some are even spray painted gold. I will never part with them ever!

My friend Carew particularly laments the loss of actual mixtape tapes, because it was hard to skip tracks, and the listener was forced to listen to the entire mix all the way through in the order as the maker (he/she God of the Tape) intended it to be listened to - obviously with CDs/mp3s its easy to skip "dud" tracks. He also never made tracklists - so we really had no idea what were in for - sometimes I'd have to beg him for tracklists when even google wouldn't reveal certain songs to me for my portable mp3 listening pleasure. I've listened to some mixes so many times that even after years when I hear certain songs on the radio, I'm jarred that I don't hear the sequential mixtape song that I'm expecting right after.

He makes a fair point though, right? A mixtape is meant to be from someone you trust not to waste your time, and the point is to expand your music taste and be introduced to new things. Also that person has usually spent hours figuring out the order for maximum listening pleasure and mixtape flow x balance. Or is this just Carew and me?

A mixtape used to also be a way to seal a new friendship. I met a lot of people in my early 20s randomly talking about some band or song we both liked, and then a mixtape would confirm that we both had good taste in stuff a la Rob Gordon and we'd be best friends forever. Its weird to think about now but my oldest friends from my late teens/early 20s were ones I swapped actual tapes with.

Swapping mixtapes with boys I had crushes on always turned out to be a bit of a dud. They usually had crap taste in music and thought I had much the same. Joy! I also never made a mixtape to seduce - its too hard. I'm crap at pretending to like things I don't, and a faker mixtape is probably going to suck anyway - how do you know if its good or not, if you don't like it? I'm all for making mixtapes with someone else's taste in mind though - but it has to be filtered through YOUR taste. Its mixtape LAW dudes. You can't just go to Pitchfork and search for "cool hipster shit" or "obscuro disco track" and download and burn it - totally not the point - unless thats what you do to find music you like I guess?

I also hated making mixtapes worrying that people would think suggestive lyrics would "mean" something. This is a big problem for people who like a lot of slow jam R&B. Taking anything literally in lyrics is just a bit stupid right? The heightened emotion and drama of lyrics enjoyed by a listener is not meant to be automatically translated into action/thought. Otherwise everyone who put a plaintive folky song about feel crap on a tape would have committed suicide by now. Just because I through some R Kells on your tape does not mean that I want to do a young girl or you. It just means R Kells is jam!

I'm sure I could bang on forever about this subject, and it seems that I have a bit,  because all I meant to post was Sean Fenessey (a music critic who writes the keywords you search for on Pitchfork) has made some excellent mixtapes for you to download here.

I've bled all my blood out. But these red pants they don't show that.

EMA - California

Check her her out. She fressssssh.

Saturday Morning Music

Judy Henske - Let the Good Times Roll 

Perfect movie soundtrack music if I've heard such a thing (which of course I have). 

In fact I want to make a movie just to have this on my soundtrack.

Where the Bad Bitches? Huh? Where y'all hiding?

“When you’re a girl, you have to be everything. You have to be dope at what you do but you have to be super sweet and you have to be sexy and you have to be this, you have to be that, and you have to be nice,” she says. “It’s like, ‘I can’t be all those things at once. I’m a human being’.”

- Nicki Minaj

The Film That Changed My Life: 30 Directors on Their Epiphanies in the Dark:

1.) Edgar Wright  on  An American Werewolf in London
2.) Rian Johnson on Annie Hall
3.) Danny Boyle on Apocalypse Now
4.) Bill Condon on Bonnie and Clyde
5.) Richard Kelly on Brazil
6.) Peter Bogdanovich on Citizen Kane
7.) John Dahl on A Clockwork Orange
8.) Henry Jaglom on 8½
9.) Brian Herzlinger on E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
10.) Alex Gibney on The Exterminating Angel
11.) Kimberly Peirce on The Godfather
12.) Steve James on Harlan County U.S.A.
13.) Austin Chick on Kings of the Road
14.) Guy Maddin on L’âge d’or
15.) Michel Gondry  on Le voyage en ballon
16.) Michael Polish on Once Upon a Time in America
17.) Arthur Hiller on Open City
18.) Pete Docter on Paper Moon
19.) Atom Egoyan on Persona
20.) Gurinder Chadha on Purab aur Pachhim and It’s a Wonderful Life
21.) Richard Linklater on Raging Bull
22.) Jay Duplass on Raising Arizona
23.) John Woo on Rebel Without a Cause and Mean Streets
24.) John Landis  on The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
25.) Kevin Smith on Slacker
26.) Chris Miller on Sleeper
27.) Neil LaBute on The Soft Skin
28.) George A. Romero on The Tales of Hoffmann
29.) Frank Oz on Touch of Evil
30.) John Waters on The Wizard of Oz

 Currently Reading. Its a good book.

I can tell I'm going to be watching and rewatching A LOT.

My advice? You probs should too.

“I think a cynic is just a crushed romantic.”

- Jeff Bridges