Announcement

This is an announcement of sorts. There are 3 items on the agenda:

1) We have decided to scrap music post Friday, because we discovered that we don't actually have that much stuff to say about music. It is what it is.
2) You should suggest what topics you would like m'colleague and I to discuss.
3) I have a stall at the Auckland Zinefest on August 14th. I made a zine consisting of entries from this blog which is aptly named People and Just People. That, along with a couple of zines Susie made, some other misc zines and of course the main attraction, Subject zine will be available. I don't know if we have any followers that live in Auckland, but if we do, you should come along and say hi. Here is a link to the event.

Now this:

Topic: Fears

#1 - Public Speaking

This semester I have two oral presentations. Every time I think about it I get knots in my stomach. I find it hard because I don't like being the centre focus, all of those eyes on me, I find it completely paralyzing. However, I am not one to want to exacerbate my FEARS, so I volunteered to go first for both presentations. It's not that I want to face my FEAR particularly, it's just that I know that I have to do it so I am brave and I do it. Maybe the word brave seems a bit dramatic, but in the context of my life and my FEARS, it is bravery.

#2 - Social situations

When I go to a social gathering, I experience a large amount of anxiety or FEAR you could say. Often it is quite consuming. It's strange because I know that it goes against all logic but I can't control it. It's almost automatic in a way. I feel like I should write more about this but once again FEAR is holding me back.

#3 - Spiders

This is common and boring enough, but isn't there something so sinister about a daddy long legs, despite the stupid name? This FEAR originated in middle childhood when I was in bed and opened my eyes to find a daddy long legs inches from my face. In hindsight, it could just have been a bit of fluff or something. Anyway, it was enough to start a life-long FEAR.

#4 - Being away from home

I like the feeling of home, which can be several places, and it can even be people. For me, it's my home, my parent's home, my sister's home, family, Sam, and Auckland in general. When I am away from these places, without these people, I usually freak out and, yes, FEAR is often involved.

Susan's babe index

This post was harder than I expected. Turns out I like a lot of pretty boys! Here's my five.

1. Will Sheff. He has this scrawny earnest thing going on, not to mention the fiery beard yet brunette coiffure.

2. Ethan Hawke. Reality Bites. Gattaca. Dead Poet's Society. Before Sunset. In so many of my favourite movies! I love him a lot. He's kinda sexy in that hopeless "change-me" type of way.

3. Alex Kapranos. When I saw Franz Ferdinand play at Falls Festival a few years ago, I was too drunk to remember what precisely went down, but I definitely remember yelling obscenities towards the stage.

4. Gabriel Byrne. He is just really classy and awesome. He plays a German philosopher and teacher in Little Women. I adore his character in that and I will never forget when he tells Jo to "write what you know" instead of her fairy stories. I guess he's not that unconventional, just oldish. Too old for Susans anyway.

5. John Cusack. Guess he's kinda normal looking too, but well. Whatever. He's great. See: High Fidelity, Say Anything (HE IS LIKE THE BEST GUY EVERRR!!!. I suppose those were his best movies. He's actually in some more eighties ones, but just as some sort of background dude.

Also I choose to add a sixth because.. well he was really hot in the eighties and I think he's still mighty attractive.

James Spader. Probably everyone thinks he is sexy after Secretary, but man, how things change..

Not even Zac Efron is exempt from the middle aged paunch.

Questionaire

I thought I would put this here because I'd like to know about the people who read our blog. The idea was inspired by the colour of my love for you. I (and probably Susie) would really appreciate it if you left a comment, and also because I (possibly we) have fears about no one responding, thus diminishing my (our) feelings of self-worth. Feel free to use anonymity if you feel so inclined.

1. Age/sex/location?

2. How did you come across this blog?

3. Are we friends? If no, do you know me at all?

4. Which posts do you like the most?

5. What is the meaning of life?

6. Have you ever been in love?

7. What makes you happy?

8. Recommend us a song?

9. Any other general comments or concerns?

philosophy class

an excerpt from my forthcoming zine!

My philosophy teacher
was nicknamed 'the Doctor'
and class was always
like therapy for me.

We rearranged the chairs
every lesson, to sit
face to face.

That semester I felt
so unlike myself.

A bunch of us
regularly had beers
after class.

I developed a crush
on this mythical man
known by his surname.

He told me he would
just get on trains
and go somewhere.

He questioned
my boring weekends.

I questioned
his baldness.

The one with the bulk bins

Little things make me lose faith in people.
I was at the supermarket by the bulk bins
and eight of the lids had been left open.
I closed them all in a rage
and exclaimed that it is the little things
that make us good people.

I don't want to live a small life

I don't want to live a small life. Open your eyes,
open your hands. I have just come
from the berry fields, the sun

kissing me with its golden mouth all the way
(open your hands) and the wind-winged clouds
following along thinking perhaps I might

feed them, but no I carry these heart-shapes
only to you. Look how many how small
but so sweet and maybe the last gift

I will ever bring to anyone in this
world of hope and risk, so do.
Look at me. Open your life, open your hands.

~Mary Oliver

Babez

1. Kjartan Sveinsson




















2. Mike Kinsella

3. John Darnielle

4. David Tennant



























5. I can't think of anyone else, but I think all of Sigur Ros are pretty unconventionally handsome (although Susie would agree that Jonsi looks a bit like Voldy).

babe index

This week's blog post idea thing is top 5 "unconventional" babes (ie people you think are sexy/attractive but aren't widely accepted as such). I know it's a bit lame, but as with most lame things, it is also quite fun. Please play along at home (a phrase which here means "do the same on your own blog") and leave us a link if you do. I might add that this idea was inspired by my chumette Shu Shu, who plays along rather diligently with most of our Wednesday posts.

Sunday Morning

Sunday morning, there are street cleaners &
people are walking to get their coffee.
I am waiting for the first bus of the day,
with bleary eyes.
It is cold and people are hugging themselves.
Seven minutes until the 305.
Homeless people are drinking bourbon from cans
and trying to shelter from the rain.
I draw a picture of my hat in my notebook
for no reason.
A rainbow appears; despite everything today is a happy day &
I am cold but everything is nice.

Clue

Today I am going to talk about musical beginnings. When I was younger I basically liked the music my older sister liked, which as a child was mainly top 40 and progressed into hip hop and r&b (we call these the dark years, but it's not a racial thing). After this stage was the short-lived crappy rock stage, for example, Linkin Park, Evanescence, and other such unsavoury bands. Then, perhaps I was about 15, I discovered The Strokes, and this opened a lot of doors for me, even if I don't particularly care for them now. An important discovery that led on from this was The Velvet Underground. After that, the floodgates were open. It was hard in high school, because my friends did not have a lot in common with me and used to call my taste in music 'weird'. I was really big into CDs, and used to save every penny to buy them. Music really gave me a lot of joy through high school, because those were tough times. I recently found some of the first mix CDs I made, and I listen to them and remember what it felt like to be a 16 year old. I used to be so open to music and still experimenting. And here I am now, a person of 21 years of age, and I really know what I like and what I don't like. I don't know which is better.

the popular girls

orange monsters snarl,
hair ablaze, leering
                   with zeal.

lemmings,
               behind a lens.




(I obviously finished high school nearly three years ago, but these girls still post thousands of pictures of themselves beaming with giant white teeth, their eyes so completely vacant, still, on facebook. Some of them are nice enough, they are all pleasant I suppose and should I see them in the pub back home they and I will exclaim loudly when we see each other but that's about all it ever has and will be)

This is my photo and poetry post, double time!

the weakest sparrow

Over the past week I have not been able to stop listening to this one song by Pikelet aka Evelyn Morris. I saw her at this Jim Henson tribute concert I went to about a month back. She sang at the very end and then I ran into her in the bathroom. My toilet was lit with only a candle. The video is really awesome and I've kept it open in a tab literally all week (I don't turn my computer off. Does anyone? I just cover up the little breathing light).

Pikelet: Weakest Link from Laura Cashman on Vimeo.

Last night I downloaded *gasp* the Neko Case album Fox Confessor Brings the Blood. And have since been listening to the songs Star Witness and Maybe Sparrow on repeat. I've adored Neko Case since Stacey put two of her songs on a CD for me last year. Stacey has some kind of musical power over me - she was the one who introduced me to Incubus.. and responsible for my two year infatuation with them. I have often thought about whether it's a bad thing that I let people influence me like that but I suppose it just shows that I'm more open to music? But if the next CD contains Katy Perry and Justin Beiber then I'm gonna have to bow out.



Also I realise I have been absent from this blog a bit, and I will do my post about photos soon, but I've been busy reading poetry by Albert Goldbarth, short stories by the Tao Lin crowd (how predictable!) and planning my radio show! [Link to podcasts to come!!] On Bear Parade, read Eat When You Are Sad - the whole thing!! - and a nice Goldbarth poem is The Sciences Sing a Lullaby. Uni starts back next week, so predictably I have started new projects that will distract me from absorbing myself in study. Thank god!

Milky joe

When I was younger I would sit and look through all the photo albums my mother had meticulously put together (in chronological order, with captions). I used to love looking at how things used to be, or how I used to be. When I look at those photos now I feel nothing but happiness. These photographs captured a happy childhood, yet I was a lonely, highly neurotic child. These are the things that family photos never really capture.

I love film camera. Digital cameras are great and all but they just embody modern life; that instant gratification, of wanting everything now now now. I love waiting to get my photos developed, and the fact that you cannot take pictures over again to get them perfect. Because things aren't perfect, and they shouldn't appear to be.

I own 6 cameras, but primarily I use two. One is my standard digital camera and the other is my Holga film camera. I have one ancient, now defunct film camera, one polaroid camera and two barely working film cameras. I like my holga camera because the pictures I take on it have nothing to do with skill and everything to do with luck. I never know how the pictures will turn out, and I like that. I am no photographer, but I do like to take photos. I like to go on mini adventures around the city with my camera. I think I'm just trying to do the beauty of the world justice, in my own daft way.

As for my storage of photos, I am very different from my mum. I have a shoebox full of photos at my parents house, from my teen years mostly, and then there are the rest which are on my computer. Many photos I suppose may be floating around the internet too. Even with my holga film I usually just get it developed straight to CD. We really do live in such a virtual age, physical things are getting more and more sparse. It's a shame, but I am a product of my generation.

I suppose that it's hard for photographs to seem special nowadays, but all photographs are meaningless, and like life, it's the meaning we put into them that counts.

Photos/Photography

This is the topic for this week. Go.

3 Cats

On my walk today,
I saw 3 cats.
One was black,
and was sleeping in the dirt.
One was brown,
and trotted along the footpath.
One was ginger,
and peered at me from a high perch.
I smiled to myself.

Podcasts

Well it is Friday and I've listened to the new National album so much that I couldn't bear to listen to one more second of it. Therefore I've been exclusively listening to podcasts this week, I know it's not music but it is semi related (but not really). The first podcast I ever listened to was The Ricky Gervais Show, and is quite hilarious. It opened up a whole new podcast-y world for me.

Currently in my iTunes under podcasts I have The Collings and Herrin podcast which I love to listen to whilst getting ready, internetting, or doing stuff around the house. It is basically Andrew Collins and Richard Herring talking for an hour about various things such as news, stories and anything that comes to mind. It is not for everyone, but luckily, it is for me.

Next is Comedy Death-Ray Radio, with Scott Aukerman. Every week he has a special guests (such as Sarah Silverman, Zach Galifianakis, David Cross, Greg Proops, you know that crowd) and usually features someone who is impersonating a well-known person, which often hilarious results. My favourite is Paul. F. Tompkins and his impression of Ice T (and to a lesser degree, the cake boss).

I have David Mitchell's soapbox which is a podcast in video form, and I've only seen one thus far; it's just him complaining about things or talking about a certain subject.

Next is a podcast I am very fond of called Doug Loves Movies. He has his comedian/actor friends as guests and they talk about movies and play movie-related games. Always a good listen, and often makes me look like an idiot on buses because I'm trying to hold back the laughter.

A podcast I just downloaded yesterday is Never Not Funny with Jimmy Pardo. I love Jimmy Pardo, I love his voice, humour and loud American-ness (I speak good England). He has guests which are similar to guests featured in Doug Loves Movies and Comedy Death-Ray Radio. It's amazing that most American comedians are all friends. It also has a video component.

Lastly, is the WTF podcast with Marc Maron, which is another recently downloaded one. It goes for about an hour, and he talks to guests, including Tig Notaro who is amazing.

And that is my podcast round-up. What are your favourite podcasts?

Poetry is what

I think that poetry is a special thing, I always have. Yet defining it can be difficult, especially when we talk about what constitutes poetry. Because what we call poetry now is different to what we used to call it. Think back to Shelley, Keats, Byron and the like, when all poetry was written with strict metre, now what has become of that cruel mistress we call iambic pentameter? Now, we are able to be a lot freer in how we use language and verse, wish I guess is why we are even discussing this. Has poetry become so without boundaries that we cannot even distinguish what is poetry and what isn't? Take this poem by Steve Roggenbuck for example, personally I love this poem and I would define it as poetry, but maybe another person would not?

i have two sunflowers wilting on my bookshelf. that’s it


i have two sunflowers wilting on my bookshelf. that’s it


that’s all. the poem is done, get out

I think that poetry is what we choose to make it, and if a person writes poetry and exclaims that it is poetry, then goddamn it, it is poetry.

"I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry." - John Cage

Unlike Susie, I wouldn't define myself as I writer, the way I write can often be disorganized and amateur, but I try. If things were different, I would have liked to study English, but things didn't work out that way. I often wish that I had a better command of the English language, and this often affects my poetry writing. After high school I completed a certificate in poetry, and whilst I learnt a lot about structure, rhyme, metre and all the technical stuff, I still lacked the tools to use this knowledge. I suddenly wish I had paid attention in high school English classes.

In reply to Susie's question about why we like the things we like, I could say that, in terms of poetry, there is sometimes a physiological response when I read a poem. When I read the Tao Lin poem that Susie posted, I felt quite melancholic, and that's how I know that I liked it. If a poem gets you to feel something, good or bad, then it's done it's job.

what is poetry

This week's task is a discussion.

I never really thought about what makes a poem before I joined the Voiceworks committee. I've only just started calling myself a writer (and sometimes I still question that!). So in no way do I think that I'm any sort of authority on the subject of poetry, more of an interested party. Stacey and I have been sort of discussing what makes a poem on another of our posts.

So I thought I would pose the question to the general populace.

What makes something poetry?

Trying to write feedback for people's submissions in Voiceworks is kind of hard (and I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to reveal here) because when a poem is bad, you can tell. The worst ones are mostly self indulgent and cliched. But then there are a bunch of them that are just middle ground. Just okay.

Reading Mike Ladd's musing on the subject helped me somewhat, but doesn't settle upon anything concrete. This reminds me of the religious brochures we get delivered to our house. They're those Jehovah's Witness pamphlets that purport to answer all the questions we may worry about during our lifetime - "Is there a god?" and "Life after death?" for example - and the inside columns say things like "comforting facts" and "true story". Religion's biggest advertisements are the comfort and "we-can-answer-all-your-unanswerables" factors. Anyway my point is that maybe we're trying to define the undefinable. M'colleague Stacey and our inner associates would agree that there are questions about life that we aren't able to answer. Perhaps I'm being too grandiose to suggest that poetry lies on a similar level. But perhaps not. As far as I'm concerned (and I hope I don't put off too many readers), the Bible is another work of fiction. That's a topic for another day though.

Going down another path less traveled (oh HA HA), we periodically spoke about the poetry of language in my philosophy classes. It was brought up that language in its is just an attempt to represent things we see in the real world. You know, all that deconstructionism stuff. I am summarising poorly here - see how I'm struggling! The Mike Ladd essay speaks about the general poetry of language, the way we use metaphor to describe things - he even struggles to explain poetry without employing metaphor and poetical forms, and this is a guy that probably makes a living talking about it!

Perhaps there's just a certain je nais se quoi to poetry. That you just know when you read it and you think.. this is it. You connect with it on a level that you can't really explain. Is that good enough?

I'd also be interested to know what some of our readers think. A lot of people shy away from poetry because it intimidates them. Perhaps because they're not really sure what makes poetry good. Maybe some people don't think in poetical terms? But what are poetical terms.. Lyrical, clever, funny, touching, pretty, annoying, something you can't get out of your head for days? Just ideas or lines..

Two of my favourite living poets are Tao Lin (read a poem written by a bear) and Josephine Rowe - I really want her book How a moth becomes a boat.

Sometimes you just have to think: what's so great about this? And perhaps this brings up the broader debate about why we like the things we like? Is there any reason at all? There's only so far we can come up with concrete reasons for stuff! Please help me out, I'm "not waving, but drowning".

Ginger Cookie Recipe

Ingredients

• 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons ground ginger
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 cup margarine, softened
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tablespoon water
• 1/4 cup molasses
• 2 tablespoons white sugar

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Sift together the flour, ginger, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves, and salt. Set aside.
2. In a large bowl, stir together the margarine and 1 cup sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg, then stir in the water and molasses. Gradually stir the sifted ingredients into the molasses mixture. Shape dough into walnut sized balls, and roll them in the remaining 2 tablespoons of sugar. Place the cookies 2 inches apart onto an ungreased cookie sheet, and flatten slightly.
3. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes in the preheated oven. Allow cookies to cool on baking sheet for 5 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely. Store in an airtight container.

Seriously, these are so good. I just made a batch :)