A note: While I tend to keep this blog fairly light rather than writing about my personal life, there's a little bit of it in today's post. I don't know how comfortable I am with putting this kind of stuff out into the public sphere, so I suppose I'm testing the waters. Still, I think it might be useful for me to put it out there rather than internalising things, as I am apt to do.
The post I had planned to write on Monday:
So things are pretty good with me at the moment.
I had a very nice weekend, the highlights including an old friend's birthday party, hanging out with the boy, fitting into my skinny jeans and dancing with Kat to Dolly Parton at the Cherry bar.
As for uni, I'm in a bit of an I-don't-care-anymore stage, which has its good parts, in that I'm not freaking out about it; and its bad parts, in that I'm not getting any thesis writing done.
I avoided studying on the weekend by reading The Year of Yes, which is a true story about a young woman's adventures when she spends a year saying yes to every date she gets asked out on. It's a great read, and I'm quite jealous of how many people ask her out and the fact that she lives in New York. I would love to live in New York. My only criticism of the book is that I found her I'm-an-extremely-well-read-drama-major-at-NYU schtick a bit tedious, but the great stories and the way she writes makes up for it.
Things are good with the boy. After a bit of a rough patch things are starting to get good again. I think the time I'm happiest is just after we have this amazing sex and everything feels right with the world.
The post I write today instead:
All of the above seems kind of irrelevant today.
It seems I've been dumped.
And I'm not quite sure what to do, or what to say.
Can't be bothered going through your blogroll to see who's updated? The Australian Index is the answer.
The main page of the site lists which Australian blogs have been recently updated, the popular topics of conversation on Australian blogs, and picks out a few posts worth checking out. I'd definitely recommend listing your blog if it isn't there yet.
2. Blogher. As the name suggests, this is a website and network for women bloggers.
I was going to say I really liked their tagline "Blogs are conversations", which I think is true- the community aspect of blogging is one of my favourite parts of it- but they've just changed it to "Websites are conversations", which I don't think is necessarily the case. When I use internet banking I'm not having a conversation with anyone.
Even without the sightings though, anything that empowers women is a good thing in my eyes.
3. Technorati. I'd say Technorati is the metablogging website. They keep track of over fifty two million blogs now, which is pretty incredible considering as recently as 1997 there were only about one hundred blogs in existence.
I mainly use Technorati for finding out who is linking me, and I quite like their list of the top 100 blogs in the blogosphere too.
4. Blog in Space. I don't really understand the concept of Blog in Space. Maybe someone can explain it to me? I've listed my blog there and they email me certificates like this announcing that my blog has been 'transmitted' into space:
But who in 'space' would read blogs? Astronauts? Wouldn't they be busy doing astronaut stuff?
5. My Death Space. This week's number five is quite unrelated to the topic, but it's the site I've been most fascinated with this week, so I think it deserves a mention. My Death Space is similar to Find a Death, but instead of dead celebrities it's about dead MySpace members.
I know it's in quite bad taste, but I find the combination of official obituaries and links to the everyday MySpace profiles of the mainly young victims morbidly fascinating.
Well guess who got in touch to say thanks and send freebies? Mia from Moxie, that's who.
And for anyone who's interested, she told me that 'Moxie' is "an American word that was used a lot in the 30s and 40s, and means cheekyness, sassy-ness, confidence - it was used in classic movies to describe spunky women!"
Well there you go.
*I find it quite hilarious that I've been sighted in an article about optimism. As anyone who knows me in real life will be aware of, I'm very much the-glass-is-half-empty type. Still, I suppose I do try and fight against my type as best I can!
My apologies for the delay in getting this post out there. After a long, cold winter spent mainly inside, I've emerged from the house, blinking, to spend some time outside reading and enjoying the winter sunshine. It's actually been gorgeous in Melbourne lately. Still a bit chilly, sure, but we Melburnians get excited about that first hint of t-shirt weather.
For the uninitiated, Lily Allen is a sassy young London pop star who sings catchy, summery songs about things like not being able to get a mortgage, or wanting to eat spaghetti bolognese "and not feel bad about it for days and days and days." This is her song "LDN":
The MySpace darling was in town recently for a whirlwind tour of Sydney and Melbourne. As one of those who missed out on tickets to the ridiculously small shows, my main beef here is with the politics of hype creation by the promoters. Take this month's hottest and most-talked about artist, put her in one of the smallest venues in Melbourne (St Jeromes), sell tickets at the door only, allow five hundred people to line up on a cold winter's night and let them wait around, only to then announce that only one hundred tickets are being made available to the public, which have now been sold, and stir. Instant hype.
So while in the media she's portrayed as having this DIY ethos, making it big from the ground up through outlets such as MySpace, there's clearly some major hype-making forces going on behind the scenes too.
In an Age article for instance, Web-wise pop star leads a virtual revolution, we have Lily Allen saying "The internet has enabled kids to find music that they want to listen to rather than just buying what they are being fed by the music hype machine." Fair enough, but later in the article, Donovan says of the St Jeromes show, "Organisers underestimated her appeal, as by 7pm more than 500 fans had queued to snap up tickets." I'd say, however, that the organisers were well aware of what they were doing by placing her in such a small venue- creating exactly this kind of hype.
It's all seems suspiciously sophisticated doesn't it?
So where does the truth lie? Is she 'authentic' or just one more cog in the music hype machine? It's probably a bit of both. Can you even be 'authentic' in this day and age?
So here's an attempt to sort out some of the facts of the Lily Allen phenomenon. Of course, I'm well aware that in writing this post I'm adding to the hype as much as being critical of it. Oh well.
On the MySpace thing:
In a recent Time Out interview, she says that while she loves MySpace, she's "not a poster girl for them." She also notes that "as much as newspapers like to say I got signed because of MySpace, I actually signed my deal in September last year and I set up my MySpace page in November."
Her Wikipedia entry still upholds the groundswell idea however, saying that after signing to Regal Records in late 2005:
Despite (alleged) resistance from the label who wanted to send her off to "hit factories" to record her album, she uploaded the tracks she had written (songs that had her signed in the first place) to community website MySpace in November 2005, regularly updating the growing number of visitors with the latest developments in her life. More and more people discovered her profile with links to her tracks being e-mailed around universities and offices eventually reaching UK music publication NME, reviews site musicOMH.com and online music blog Popjustice.
That's right kids, she's a blogger. Well, a MySpace blogger anyway. Here's a sample:
Hi everyone , sorry for being rubbish at blogging , I've been well busy .
So I'll start with last Sunday , I went to do T4 on the beach , which I was petrified of doing . If you saw it on the tele , then you may have noticed that I was slightly out of tune and looked a bit funny . Well as this was my 7th ever gig and for 30,000 people, I was pissing myself with nerves so I thought it would be a good idea to get absolutely plastered . I was on at 11.45 or something so i was pissed by 10 am ( not a good look ) . I got sent home by management at 1pm for being loud and obnoxious . To be fair I couldve [sic] really really embarassed [sic] myself if I'd stayed much longer . So I went back to london [sic] in a floor length ballgown , and fell asleep in the car all the way back . Upon arrival , I found I was locked out of my house , my mum had gone to a wedding and wouldnt [sic] be back for a couple of hours . then [sic] my phone ran out of batteries so I couldnt call anyone for help . I sat on my doorstep lookin like a mental patient on their afternoon out , in a golden princess ballgown , fuckloads of green eye-makeup in the sun , on the pavement in islington [sic]. NICE .
What about the working class thing? Is it for real?
Not really. She's from firmly middle class stock. Of the many schools she attended before finally dropping out at 15, one of them was Beadles, which is apparently one of the five most expensive schools in the UK. She explains her cockney, or rather 'mockney' singing voice by saying:
I live in East London, which is where cockneys come from. People like to think that I am posh, but I left school when I was 15 and worked in bars and restaurants like everybody else.
I had a very miserable time in 2003. I had met the boy who I thought was the love of my life, but he dumped me.
I started to get depressed and anyone who suffers from depression knows that it can soon get so bad that you can't get out of bed.
It was then that I checked into The Priory. That was really tough as I was an emotional mess.
And when I came out of there it took me a while to get my life back on track. I even tried to get back with the same boyfriend, which just shows how stupid we can all be.
When I started writing music, Smile was the first thing I ever wrote. I always thought you should write about what you know, and this guy had taken up so much of my time and my emotions that the words just came pouring out.
Ms. Allen is one of the oddest female artists to emerge in years. She is obsessed with black music, from rock-steady to Jay-Z, but she seems blithely unconcerned with issues of authenticity and appropriation. She sings of shoving girls around at clubs, but has pictures of cute puppies on her blog....
...But Ms. Allen does capture a sense of universal teenage angst with her cinematic tales of bad breakups, club spats and backstabbing friends. She symbolizes a new blogging-age, middle-class girl: cockily ambitious, skeptical yet enthusiastic, technically savvy, musically open, obsessed with public expression and ready to fight back.
I think that listening to Mike Skinner's first album really opened my eyes to how a song can be written." She admits "I realised that it's almost as if the more mundane a lyric is the more somebody can relate to it. At the end of the day people live very mundane lives," she chuckles, "and the people that live mundane lives are the people that buy records.
I'll leave it up to you to make up your mind on Lily. For me, despite all the hype and contradictions- the cockney accent with the middle-class upbringing, for instance- what it comes down to is that I like her music. It's witty, catchy and fresh. And that's what counts.
Want a more scathing account of Lily and her album? This one's a gem.
1. The girl on the tram who offered me tissues and strepsils when I was sniffling and tissue-less. You made my day.
2. Randomly bumping into an old friend at the supermarket.
3. Noticing that the cherry blossom trees are starting to flower, a sure sign that spring is on its way.
4. Being at that perfect stage at uni three weeks in when you're feeling more confident about speaking up in class, are actually really interested in your classes, and it's still too early to start the assignments.
5. Sleeping in and waking up with the boy.
In lieu of the Friday Five this week, you can expect a post about Lily Allen.
This week's five websites are pretty random, so they're all going under the umbrella term "Pop Culture Goodness".
1. "Oh Brother" with Tim Brunero. Yes, I know Big Brother is over now and we can all go back to our real lives, or, alternatively, to the god awfulYasmin's Getting Married, but if anyone out there is having withdrawal symptoms, Oh Brother is great. Tim Brunero from Series Five hosts video podcasts with all the evicted housemates, including the silenced-almost-everywhere-else John and Ashley. The interview with the Turkey slap boys is pretty interesting (and made me remember how much I liked John as a character), as is Tim's humble admission that Vesna should have won his series, when we all know that his loss to Logan Greg was one of the great travesties of Australian television. Well, until Jamie beat Camilla of course.
I'm disappointed Jamie won. He's nice enough, but he didn't deserve it. This always seems to happen. The most interesting and popular characters never win. The exception here would be the sole female winner, the popular Reggie Bird, who made it through, I think, because her, um, intelligence level made her unthreatening. What I would really like to see is someone win who is either smart, like Tim, or a strong female character, like Camilla. I live in hope.
Britney, Britney, Britney... It's all gone downhill since 'Toxic' hasn't it?
I think my favourite part is when she talks about time travelling. Actually all of it is my favourite part.
3. Christina Aguilera. This site isn't that great- apparently a new one is on the way- but I just wanted to say that I'm quite liking Christina at the moment, especially compared to the car crash that is Ms. Britney Spears (see above).
I never thought much of Christina until I read Cameron Adams's interview with her in the Herald Sun last week, and have since gained a new respect for her. She talks about how her recent marriage is no reason for her to tone down her sexuality and how her husband can deal with her being a "strong, successful woman". Good on her.
4. Lily Allen. Oh I love her. I'm jumping on the bandwagon. For the uninitiated, she's a 21 year old from London who almost became a Sugababe, but has instead become the latest MySpace phenomenon.
My favourite song of hers is "Knock Em Out", a Streets-style song about fobbing off guys who ask for her number by telling them she's pregnant or has herpes. I really like "Littlest Things" too.
I'm well keen* to see her at St Jerome's on Wednesday night but I reckon it'll be packed out.
5. Suicide Girls. I just joined the site for a month, partly as 'research' for my thesis, partly for myself and my burgeoning bi-curiosity. My biggest qualm with the site is that if it is as 'liberated' as it claims, why aren't there pictures of guys on it?
