some points in the dark:

• shaun micallef’s first novel, pre-incarnate, is due in november. aha, reading material! also, have you seen his logies acceptance speech, the one where he delivers lawrence olivier’s honorary oscar speech instead?
• the fujifabric onslaught. unfinished album due to the unexpected death of the songwriter and singer, now finished. a dvd and cd box set, and singles collection are also now available, but handing over my cash in tribute seems empty. masahiko shimura was only twenty nine at the time. sigh.
• the noah baumbach directed feature, greenberg, with ben stiller in the title role. a serious role in the mold of permanent midnight, maybe? at least there will be less facial emoting than usual.
• another film to add to the list for later in the year, the extra man. kevin kline as a dapper gigolo dragging paul dano about town? count me in.
• calvin johnson’s mixtape education, at a good price! for ten us dollars you can buy a short history of a period of music, as selected by beat happening man and k records founder calvin johnson. if only i had a tape deck, i’d pick various female new wave/punk tapes, plus the girls internationale, and soviet era pop music.
• new york times’ piece on shoppers on a diet shows people are finding out for themselves they don’t need that closet full of clothes at all. as someone trying to spend less and pare down my wardrobe, it makes sense that i can actually make do with a whole lot less.
• marissa meltzer asks, where are all the darias? yeah, where is the place of the narky social commentator on the outside these days?

as it is now internet recorded, i want to mention that i spent sunday afternoon hanging around with librarianhoi, eating dried scallops, chocolate and drinking umeshu with lemonade. we had originally planned to get perth twitterers to meet up, but being friday afternoon planning, probably a bit late. and then we had planned to see the last screening of the cat ladies documentary, but had i checked twitter, i would have found out that it had sold out! so much for not pre-booking. so getting drunk on plum wine won out.

I have also had the pleasure of watching the hedgehog (le herrisson) and the runaways in the same week. I had read Muriel Barberry’s book earlier, upon which the film is loosely based. I still had the same feeling, a quiet life based on simple pleasures, like brewed tea, a room full of literature, endless dark chocolate and a big fat grey tomcat. yes if I were like the kid Paloma, I’d want to grow up to be a concierge too, instead of her messed up upper class role models.

The Runaways was an escapist rock fantasy, only you knew that Joan Jett would be the winner in the end, while Lita Ford and Cherie Currie had their moments after adolescence, but history shows… Kristen Stewart makes a very good Joan – please watch this movie to get rid of your Pattinson crush to develop one on her instead. And self-deprecatingly Michael Shannon called himself “America’s hardest working character actor” in an interview, but that can’t be too far from the truth, his potrayal of manager Kim both creepy and surprising.

And as for this week’s link blot:

• this 3d-ish book room/library. wee!
• object press has small well designed novels, and the perfect columned website. on their site they say, “these books are objects for use, objects for reflection”, like a marriage between literature and aesthetics.
• watched this documentary on the australian accent. i think i say “dahnse”, but now you put me on the spot, do i actually say “daaaanse”?
• going to try making these simple cinnamon scrolls using pizza dough
• anja mueller’s home – the blues, the wallpaper, and the knick knacks.

on a cold july monday morning, i need motivation getting up. Zero degrees sometime in the early morning – maybe Perth needs a dash of rain to break the coldness in this dry spell. The covers get pulled up higher for longer!

reasons to get up:

- taking pictures with my new olympus pen ep-1. I finally have one in my hands! long story to get it (at a good price too), but so far this foray into the dark side of digital photography is going alright. I still prefer film for its subtleties, inaccuracies and happy accidents, but this was the camera I’d pick for times I wanted to try something different. Past that digital medium format camera I heard about with the astronomical price tag.

- the “40 years of sunny days” DVD I’m watching at the same time I’m trying to type this with one finger on the itouch. Sesame Street is still just as entertaining as when I was four and mum needed to get the washing done in the background. Oh, cookie monster is still my favourite, the way he enjoys his food loudly and enunciates his sentences with creative grammar. I didn’t want to remember that mr hooper has the hairiest godddamn back. would they make him wax it in 2010?

- I found the cosiest nook under the stairs to watch said DVD.

- “sunspot letters” by leader cheetah. sounds like a quavering neil young, much better than their previous incarnation as the band pharaohs. I still miss dan pash’s other band bad girls of the bible, though.

- it is far warmer at work, than at home.

so here is the end of the thirty days. like suelibrarian, i found that by forcing myself to write during this month of june, sometimes a decent blog entry would result, and other times i’d be struggling to write anything substantional at all. perhaps the old adage applies, if you don’t have anything good (or well written) to say, don’t say anything at all? but then again, if i didn’t have a specified set of boundaries, i might not have blogged during june at all!

i would liked to have commented more on other people’s posts, although i did read them…

and it is also the halfway mark of the year, so now would be a good place to make some new goals (mostly involving making certain food dishes for me though, unfortunately) and anticipating things still in process such as the smRts debut album actually really coming out in a few months. and reiterating that in this moment, i really do have a lot to look forward to.

i think about seven years ago i wrote something along the lines of, girls in their twenties are like sofia coppola, trying everything but not knowing what to become. in fact in the earlier part of this century, an upcoming sofia coppola film was a momentous, anticipated occasion. we would tell each other what we’d heard about it, scroll through pages of on set shots posted on livejournal, and then finally the film would arrive in australia months after its american film festival debut. after watching, we’d debate about the merits (and failings) of the film for months afterwards too. usually once of us would have close to polar opposite view about the film. i watched the virgin suicides continuously, leaving it on my dvd player just so i could see the pictures, and hear giovanni ribisi’s sad narration again. i listened to the soundtrack by air to get me to sleep. i dreamt of visiting tokyo after seeing lost in translation, and discovered the work of my bloody valentine as a result of the soundtrack. but i didn’t like marie antoinette that much. i couldn’t figure out why the film had a seemingly unnecessary obsession with macaroons (though today, i finally know the taste). its pompous protagonist was hard to like, and i felt like it was a ball of fluff i couldn’t recover from. maybe that was the beginning of the end.

sadly, that friendship is over, and my twenties are drawing to a close.

so now that i’ve seen the trailer to somewhere (US release date is december), i can’t help but wonder where i’ll be when i see it. literally, in what frame of mind. will i watch it alone in the daytime, and come out of the disorientated, a good but unnerving habit of mine? or will i choose to share it with someone else? is there still a similarity my younger self who loved coppola’s films? i guess i can’t tell you until the lights go down…

twenty eight things i like right now.

1. having wireless internet at home again. the itouch immediately becomes more useful…
2. putting all the songs in itunes in order of length, and then playing the longest ones (10 mins plus) continuously. next aim: play all the thirty second or shorter tracks continuously until i get annoyed.
3. this picture of asian-american girls in shonen knife mondrian outfits.
4. eating more fruit. chomping on an apple while i drive home.
5. burning candles. the more the merrier – my aim is to burn my bedroom down.
6. tavi guest blogging for jezebel.
7. piles and piles of library books on tables. aesthetically pleasing, as well as educational, once read.
8. how to score with betty white.
9. the ye rin mok print that i have on the way in the mail. i’ve wanted to have one of her photographs on my wall for years…
10. wearing linen dresses.
11. weirdly enough, coming back to a warm car because winter is just too cold for me right now and my house is cold too.
12. this house, their sense of humour and their modernica furniture.
13. the current issue of artlink, dedicated to ‘the underground’, and featuring an essay by vanessa berry and a reproduced zine (“valet of the dolls”).
14. going to david jones to buy new stockings, and being told by the saleslady that i am ‘a beautiful girl’!
15. the lullatone made dropophone app.
16. kim gordon’s performing/guzzling book.
17. wearing my good watch again, the one with the silver and white face and black band, since i finally got the batteries replaced at the watch repairer, who told me his shop had been there seventeen years!
18. coming in to work early on a saturday, eating my lunch and reading a book for a good half hour or so of quiet, before facing the public.
19. turning on the projector and looking at the old tourist slides from hong kong, now browned out but the precious scenes no longer exist.
20. black forest cake, or the anticipation of finding some to eat…
21. the tv series community, which is my favourite kind of quickfire humour.
22. singing this pretty reckless song loudly when nobody’s listening. yeah, i know, manufactured angst with courtney love look, sung by angsty sixteen year old, but i just want to sing this at karaoke one day, because at least it’s in my vocal range, which is rare.
23. the moose shaped pasta at ikea.
24. lee pace in the marmaduke trailer, even though it’s as dumb as heck.
25. still wearing all black outfits.
26. bangs tiger beat album.
27. realising that whatever i do, it has nothing to do with what other people are supposed to do.
28. sleep.

I’ve been trying to read a book called The Happiness Project, preferably quickly as there are two people in line after me. I don’t like quacky but the author, Gretchen Rubin, seems as skeptical of her own project as myself. One of her checklist items, which she fails at first but finds has good benefit overall in the end, is getting more sleep. This I can agree with, though I am I indeed failing. Hence the FAIL blog apology entry. Starting a dvd at eleven o’clock at night is universally a bad idea on a work night. Not only do I fall asleep and have no idea where I was up to in the movie, I am rudely awakened in the middle of the night to the menu music looping loudly, and wake up invariably more tired in the morning.

I got out of my cold house today and went for a walk in town and a late lunch. Walked into the new Perth Apple store, which seemed bigger than it needed to be, repeats of products everywhere. Impressive yes, but I wouldn’t camp out for the opening like I heard some people did. I can’t help thinking if a shop like that only has a few customers inside, it immediately looks ghost town and less impressive. But people will be streaming in out of curiosity for a while. Even if there were no freebies past a t-shirt on opening day!

Okay, I admit it, blogging fail again. So I fell off the wagon, and then I got back on it again. That’s twice this month, and since there are only four days left of June, what are the chances? I would have liked to say I completed the challenge of blogging every day in June with a 10, or at least a 9.8 for difficulty. Anyway how far can I go in this post with metaphors for alcoholism and sport before hitting the brick wall?

I’m writing this in my nice warm bed on an itouch, which explains my capitalization as it keeps auto corecrong most of my typos. I’m not used to Perth being 2,3 degrees at night and it was m-mighty c-cold when we left the cinema after seeing the A-Team. Not my first choice, but if David Stratton can give it three stars, there must be a reason in this chaos of a film. I give the coffee choc top three and a half for flavour, but deduct points for not being optimally frozen enough, which stops it from melting before the trailers. Three for the raspberry frozen coke, and two stars to the person who left their house keys jammed inbetween the side of the seat after the credits.

we’re all buzzing now – it’s quite unavoidable when something of this magnitude happens. i had the day off, but accidentally slept through the announcement that julia gillard was now the prime minister of australia, making her our first female pm. see, new zealand, we caught up eventually! although it was hard to get out of my warm bed, the announcement was repeated many times on many channels, and i had aunty on all morning after that. the blubbering from our now ex-prime minister; to the image of our first female prime minister shaking hands with our first female governor general. it feels as historic as the apology to the stolen generations – things you thought would never happen. despite the missteps in the eyes of the public the last few months, to oversimplify, kevin rudd did a good job in his two and a half years, the apology being the biggest symbol of a step forward from those horrible howard years. still he was a conservative at heart, and i’m yet to see if julia gillard is any different.

but please, not four years of tony abbott, please. julia for pm, again, in the upcoming election!

so flexnib asked, regarding the #blogeverydayofjune project, “what have you thought about this exercise, & are you going to keep blogging?”

i am such an erratic blogger anyway, at least in the sense where i have to compose more than one paragraph, and make sures i am not talking funny and grammar going out window as tiredfulness creeps out… in the past i have been posting about three entries per month max, because it takes me that long to think of some overarching context to which i will link a silly everyday happening with a whole pile of other concepts. maybe. also i am a massive procrastinator, unless i write something along the lines of ‘abolish procrastination’ down. in which case i will have a nagging action list, which will bother me until i make a big fat scribble mark over it.

so, what do i think about this exercise? most nights i have to focus by the time it turns eleven, because i sure aint sleeping until i’ve typed up a new blog entry. who was it that said that completing a task on a regular basis for a month would help form new good habits? some nights i’ve definitely wanted to go ‘ugh’ and pack it in. but i’ve already slipped one day, so anything further would be inexcusable. and because of the strange format of this blog that i’ve chosen (more journal and photolog), i can’t just post two cute pictures, write one sentence, and be done with it. so, regular focus and discipline is good. also good, is getting to know some of my fellow librarians a whole lot more, who also might have blogged sparingly in the past. also twitter is the major influence, since this task was originally suggested there, and daily topics for blogging are also passed around. definitely paying more attention to what is being said in tweets.

speaking of twitter, that’s how i first found out about the “spill“, also known as the gillard/rudd challenge. australia’s first female prime minister? also the better alternative to a horrible opposition? seven o’clock western australian time tomorrow morning, we will soon find out. in the meantime, follow the ex pm’s twitter for entertainment.

and lastly, will i still keep blogging after this? i definitely will be, but the thought of attempting to compose myself three hundred and sixty five days of the year is scary. i’ll see if i can keep up with a few posts per week first…