Wassup Dogs?

Let's start with some culture, today the joy of public art: Love Sculpture - Robert Indiana.

After a crazy night of hip hop and horror movies with the girls, we are all a little fragile here at the Heights today. We stayed up until 3am listening to music, chatting and my sister taught Kit Kat Kate and my friend Lainee some moves on the dancefloor (aka my living room carpet), while I sat to one side and gave critique. That's what friends are for.

By the time we crawled into our beds, my neighbour was banging on the wall shouting at us to stop singing Nelly Furtado - well, he just wanted us to stop singing, I doubt he'd know his Nelly from his Nelbow, to be honest. And of course, we were so over-excited on fizzy pop and hip-pop (see what I did etc) to care. A great night.

This morning we ate chocolate muffins and ice cream for breakfast and lounged around on the couch watching Sunday morning tv; now I remember the great side of being 14. It wasn't all just angst, hormones and constantly growing wobbly flesh, the best things about being a teenager (even at 30, in the rare moments you're lucky enough to recapture the zeitgeist of those years) are the endless conversations about who is the best looking guy in the movie you're watching, spending four hours learning a dance routine, and finding yourself and your friends a source of endless laughter. A big thanks to my sister for reminding me how to just 'hang out.'

My sister introduced me to OK Go this morning, and if you have not heard of their infamous and genius treadmill video by now, you really need to. Check it out at YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkHqBqyHDok

I especially liked another video of the band's called: A Million Ways to Be Cool, and it's the one I've chosen to upload here:



In exchange for OK go, I traded my sister the Dormitory Boys, the two Chinese guys who mime to contemporary pop classics. I think we both went away happy.

I'm keen to see the soon-to-be-released Diane Arbus biopic, starring Nicole Kidman. Arbus was a photographer, who had a fascination with people who experienced life as outcasts and outsiders, and is most known for these pictures of, for example: dwarves, giants, and prostitutes. I don't know much about her work, although I do vaguely remember her receiving the sharp end of Germaine Greer's criticism a while ago, when she described her as a voyeur.

My first Oracle searches yielded the following quotes, though, which I found intriguing:

"Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats."

"A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know."

"What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's.... That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own."

"My favourite thing is to go where I have never gone."

The images I've seen of Arbus' have a haunting quality; the portrait of Jayne Mansfield and her daughter struck me as stunning, a compelling image that evokes a strong response in the viewer. I wonder if Greer called Arbus a voyeur because she makes the viewer feel like a voyeur herself. I would love to see an exhibition of hers and I'll be searching the library catalogue for a biography as soon as my ticket has any space on it again.

Today's Beautiful Things

1. Glastonberry Ben & Jerry's. Oh God, yes.

2. My Bust e-newsletter - where I discovered Diane Arbus

3. Zach Graff. Always beautiful, not really a Thing.