That pink thing is my mothers croc. My dog took it with her when my mom went out for a walk with her, proceeded to walk onto the ice (which is not strong enough to carry humans yet) and dropped the croc there. My dog's a heroe. Material for a MLIA? I think so.
Today I received a disk with pictures of my brain on it in the post (I had a MRI scan made a while ago). At first I didn't want to look at them because I found the idea of looking at my own brain a bit scary, but of course I gave in in the end. I think put like this the pictures actually make a pretty cool design. I should do something with it... Anyone wanna buy t-shirts with my brains on them?
I don't go to cinema Amstelveen that often. It is a small cinema, about fifty seats, and they screen a weird blend of movies. Mostly children's movies and French movies about the sadness of life. The small cinema can only afford it to screen blockbusters months after their release and by then I have usually seen them already. But my father had some free tickets which we had to use before December 10th, so tuesday we went to see Exit Through The Giftshop - The world's first Street Art Disaster movie. I didn't expect too much from it, but felt very cultural nonetheless for going to see a documentary about art.
It's a GREAT documentary (although I'm kind of doubting how truthful the story actually is). Very funny, sometimes I couldn't stop laughing. But that didn't really matter since there were only six more people in the room besides my dad and me.
What's it about?
A Frenchman living in LA Thierry Guetty owns a clothing shop and has a videocamera permanently glued to his hand. When he goes to France to visit his family his nephew has started making little space invader mozaiques and glueing them onto buildings in the city. Through his nephew he gets involved in the French Street Art movement and he starts filming those street artists. Thierry says he's going to make a street art documentary out of those tapes. He keeps hearing about a certain Banksy, a British street artist who does really cool stuff (he placed his own painting in a museum without security noticing it) and decides he wants his documentary to be about Banksy. Eventually Thierry and Banksy meet and Thierry starts filming him. When street art becomes a hype Banksy tells Thierry that this is the right moment for him to release his film to show the world that street art isn't about money. Thierry isn't such a great filmmaker though, so Banksy tells him that he will finish the film and Thierry should just go back to LA and focus a bit on his art (Thierry has started putting up posters too). So that's what the frenchman does, he goes back to LA hires a team of graphic designers who execute his ideas and hires a big building for an exposition. Thierry, who now calls himself, Mr. Brainswash becomes insanely popular. Not really what Banksy meant when he said focus on your art en maybe set up a small exposition.
Anyway, you should see the documentary!
It's cool, funny and you don't even have to be interested in art to like it (but of course the art is really, really cool!!!). Something which made it extra cool for me is that I had spotted a Space Invader mozaique in Amsterdam when I was walking there with friends. I googled it and there should be 26 of those figures placed all over Amsterdam. So I have added something new to my to do list: Find all 26 space invaders in Amsterdam. Maybe something to do in the christmas break?
Yesterday evening I went to see Imogen Heap at the Melkweg, Amsterdam, together with (another) friend. The concert was AWESOME SAUCE, as my friend would say. When I listened to Imogen's latest album ellipse on my laptop I found it a bit boring, but she had given fans the possibility to vote on her website on which numbers you wanted her to play live. So she played a selection of 12 songs "customs tailored for you Amsterdam" which I really enjoyed. Also she was funny, she could have persued a carreer in comedy, in between songs she was telling funny little stories about where she had gotten her inspiration from, "so this song is about a guy which I liked, except for the last verse, that's about a serial killer". Lol.
Later on in the show she divided the audience up into three groups and made us sing the words Just For Now over and over again so that we functioned as her sampler (which she called her parrot).
Just For Now
For the song Earth she brought a Dutch (well she obviously had Asian roots) girl on stage who studies at the University of Amsterdam and plays the cello amazingly well. She had auditioned through youtube or so.
Earth
And when her computer unplanned had to restart she asked the audience whether they had questions for her to fill up the time and this American woman screamed in the most horrible accent I have ever heard "COME BACK TO ATLANTA!". Geez, if I would sound like her I would never open my mouth again, she sounded SO ugly!
But okay, one of the coolest parts of the show was when Imogen took her keytar, put on sunglasses and gave away a solo on it. The best part of it is that a friend of mine has EXACTLY the same keytar, I'm SO going to steal it from him! Only after yesterday I have realized how many sick things you can do with those things, hide & seek is performed with the help of this keytar for example.
Some video's which nice people have put on youtube:
Yesterday I went to London Calling, a festival which is held twice a year in Paradiso, Amsterdam, together with a friend. It was really cool, although I was glad that I had brought earplugs because the music was way too loud.
I had wild plans to stay there uptill 5 o' clock in the morning when the afterparty would be finished, but in the end we were home at five past one. After having seen warpaint my friend and I were both a bit silent because the concert had just been so intense. They were really, really good. If you ever get the chance to see them you should defenitely go! It's just one of those bands you have to experience live..
So after this concert we went up to the balcony to watch on the big screen what was happening in the small concert hall (this hall was too small for everyone and it was 200% full), Beach Fossils was playing there. Judging from the screen it must have been a great party, I enjoyed the music and I think I might start listening to it, but back then I just didn't feel like jumping and partying. Still too impressed by warpaint and a bit tired.
Then Tame Impala played in the big concert hall and we watched from the balcony, but I did not enjoy it. The sound was just way to loud (even with earplugs!) and the music was too much rock for me (psychedelic rock is not really my thing). I leaned with my head in my hands and felt like sleeping.
So after having seen Tame Impala we went home.
We have also seen Yuck (I did not enjoy them, their music was just very loud and the sound quality was very bad), Good Shoes (they were allright) and Lulu and the Lampshades. They were so cute and funny! They used all kind of weird instruments like a typewriter, some kind of harp, bowls and a xylophone. And in the end they performed Cups (see my last post). They make some kind of cute folk music. I'm fan!
This is SO unfair.
Raquel and Chico were just sent home from So You Think You Can Dance after having danced a great tango, having received great comments from the judges and just having danced great performances over the past couple of weeks. I was stunned! This show is propragating to find the best dancer of the Netherlands and Belgium and the best dancers just got eliminated. It makes me want to boycot the show or sign up for a Twitter account (I hate Twitter) just to be able to post all over the internet how much I DISAGREE.
I think there is something seriously wrong with the concept of the show if the best dancers do not make it to the top. I think tonight was just a big failure for the show and that it opened the eyes for a lot of people (including the judges) to what this show really is: just one big popularity contest. This sucks, because contrary to shows like Idols, the candidats go to this show to improve their dancing, not just to become famous. I can go on for ages, but basically I'm just very dissapointed in the show. I liked to believe that this show was different, that it was about real talent. ...
I know that this is not my best speech, but it's late okay? And this just could not wait till tomorrow
I don't recall ever having been a fan of Missy Elliott, not that I have heard much of her music. But ever since I've seen this audition on So You Think You Can Dance I have wanted to listen to Missy Elliott, lots of Missy Elliott. Haven't really gotten around to doing it yet though, but it's on my iPod now so the plans are there.
Last week I went to see Go Back To The Zoo at Paradiso together with two friends. We already bought our tickets in May, at that time I did not know yet that I would see them play at Lowlands festival as well. At Lowlands I thought they were okay, but in Paradiso I enjoyed seeing them very much. The only downside to their performance was that it lasted for only an hour, which is VERY short in my opinion.
They played in the "kleine zaal", the small concert hall of Paradiso, which is very small. My friends and me were standing right in front of the stage which means that if we would have had a good camera we could have made amazing photographs, but we didn't so you'll have to with those and the videos with crappy sound. They are good to show the athmosphere though. And I have never really understood those people who go to concerts and then stand still for the entire concert while they are filming and taking pictures, how can you enjoy it then? Isn't a concert much more fun when you are dancing, singing along and jumping around?
Beam Me Up (check the guy who's crowdsurfing at the end ;) )
After three seasons of Idols I was so done with talentshows. I never watched any of the three seasons of Popstars (although I have to admit that I did watch Popstars - The Rivals in which they formed a girl group and a boy band, but that was back when I was twelf so I should be forgiven). I did not watch X-factor, which was on for three seasons too, neither did I watch Holland's Got Talent.
But two weeks ago my father and I were watching De Wereld Draait Door in which the judges of the new talentshow "The Voice" came to talk about the concept of the show. It was supposed to be an entirenly new concept, all the candidates would be already preselected before appearing in front of the judges which would make sure that they could sing. Then the judges would sit with their back towards the person who is auditioning in order to judge entirenly on the voice and not on the appearance of the candidate. Once they like a voice they will push a button and their chair will turn around, if more than one judge pushes the button the candidate can pick with which judge he or she wants to team up.
The judges of this show are: Jeroen van der Boem, Angela Groothuizen, Nick & Simon and Van Velzen. And it seemed to me that Van Velzen is far-out the most popular judge, because almost each time a candidate gets given the chance to choose between judges he or she will end up with Van Velzen. So last night I watched some videos of the judges on Youtube and I can say that I fully understand the choice of the candidates for Van Velzen. He's the only one making kind of OK music in my opinion.
See for yourself:
Van Velzen. I find him a very funny guy by the way, being so small and all.
Jeroen van der Boom. My brother showed me a video of the original Spanish version of this song, but I don't remembered what it was called.
Nick & Simon. My name being Rosanna people have sung this song a lot for me, nevertheless I had never taken the time to watch the original. Now that I have I can say I find it hilarious, I mean come on, doesn't this sound like circus music to you?
A very old song of Angela Groothuizen.
I like the concept although I do think it has some flaws. Every judge can select 11 candidates for their team in five audition days. But if you have never heard those voices before because someone else did the preselection, how can you know that you pick the best singers? After all you haven't heard everything yet, after you have picked your 11 candidates there might come in someone with a extraordinary voice. That would suck right?
Anyway, since two weeks ago Friday night equals watching The Voice for me and my dad. Because in contrary to shows like Idols and X-factor the candidates in this show can actually sing, and that's a huge improvement!
UPDATE: I added some more pictures of the treehouse to the post titled "treehuggers". Also I am feeling nervous but I'm not really sure what for, I suspect it are the pancakes that I ate for dinner which are now rising in my stomach...
An impression of Lowlands in pictures of my disposable camera. People of Holland who read this, never let Kruidvat develop your pictures, it took them two weeks to develop mine and it was waaaaaay too expensive.
I added some more videos to my previous Lowlands post. Unfortunately no-one seems to have recorded the 3oh!3 performance so we'll have to do with my lousy picture.
Just returned from a reunion of the group we built THIS with during the summer holidays.
Yes, yes, treehouses are awesome. Especially ours! It had six platforms and you could sleep in it. Very awesome! It was a very fun week! Anyway, I'm really tired now, so I'll go to bed, I didn't get much sleep last night..
Interested in going on a summercamp where you build this kind of villas? Visit www.ymca.nl (tag: boomhuttenkamp)
This sure beats the treehouse in your backyard, doesn't it?
My party was very much fun (in my opinion at least). Everyone came dressed up like someon famous. Myself I had a hard time choosing who I wanted to be. In the end it came down to Amy Winehouse or I Blame Coco. More people would probably recognize Amy, but I'm no fan of hers (she does have a great voice of course) and I thought I Blame Coco would be easier, so I ended up being Coco for the night.
Who else attended? Jack Sparrow + Boyfriend, Florence (without the machine), Henk Jan Smits (a judge of the Dutch Idols and X-factor), Audrey Hepburn, Mario (the character from the video game), Britney Spears, Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett. And guess what my friends gave me? A piñata! Hmmmm... Well, your friends are the ones who share the same ideas and thoughts right? Anyway, their piñata was a teddybear stuffed with candy which I had to rip open with a knife while being blindfolded. Apparently I cut him right in the butt, I couldn't see it but my friends thought it was hilarious.
"My" piñata was pink with a picture of Geert Wilders on it and the text "Hit Wilders - Get Candy". I thought it would be nice to stay in the theme of famous people, but then someone famous I do not like. The piñata was a bit too strong though and my friends ended up throwing it through my house in order to break it. Great fun (and a huge mess when it finally bursted open).
Futhermore we had a waterfight, did (extreme) Twister, drank, did puppet shows, danced, laughed and just had a lot of fun. Oh and my cake had a picture of me when I was eleven and dressed-up as a pirate on it! No, eighteen defenitely does NOT mean grown-up.
Since no one who reads this (who reads this?) knows where I live, I think I can safely declare that I'm throwing a party for my 18th birthday (which was a while back) tonight, without all kind of strangers showing up on my doorstep.
I hope it will be just as fun as Katy Perry's 25th birthday looks! She had a big cake and eatable paint fight, now that's the way to celebrate your birthday! :D
I'll let you know how it was. I filled my piñata with candy yesterday, it has a bit of a weird shape but furthermore I think it turned out quite good :)
UPDATE: The party was very much fun. This morning not so much though... But I'm starting to feel better already, now I just have to clean up the house... Expect a post with foto's in the next couple of days ;)
Well at Lowlands people also wore their sunglasses in the morning when there was no sun. Yeah, partying is tough. Not that I did much of it (at night at least). While laying in my tent I heard someone say that there was some kind of rule that people who go to bed at Lowlands before 3 p.m. are gay. So according to that rule I must be very gay.
The most-wearn sunglasses at Lowlands must have been Rayban look-a-likes. I own a pair of those myself. And the minute I walked onto the festival terrain I had lost them. (Later they magically appeared in my tent. Very weird.) So I decided to buy a new pair at one of the stands. And guess what kind I bought? :D
My parents already flinched when they saw them like this. But little did they know that they also can... OPEN!
Yesterday night I returned from Lowlands of which I will post pictures later. I used cheap-ass disposable cameras which I found with still twelf photos left on them to make pictures (always fun to see what pictures others already made (PORN, no probably not)) and at the store they told me that it will probably take uptill Saturday to develop the pictures. Since I don't have a digital camera there won't be any shaky hand-filmed videos of my own making either.
For now my Lowlands Top Five:
5. Snow Patrol / Moss It's a tie between those two. I really enjoyed Snow Patrol, even though I was a bit far gone (I could really feel those vodka-orange juice mixes I had drunken), it really made me happy. And they ended their show by showing Snow Patrol "heart" Lowlands on the screens, so cute! But the final song Moss played was genious (a cover of Silent Shout from The Knife). Check the video at 4:29, unfortunately this was the best recording I could find of it.
4. The Ting Tings After 3Oh3! the best party I had. Shut up and let me go, hey!
3. Mumford & Sons I only went there because my friend really wanted to, because apart from Little Lion Man their music could never really hold my attention. Live they were great however. The entire tent was jumping to a band which has only one bass-drum as beat! Quite an accomplishment! Also the guitarist and the keyboardist were very cute. I am so glad I went. I still think a lot of their songs sound alike though.
2. Yeasayer I had never listened to this band before, but now I'm seriously considering buying a ticket for their concert at the Melkweg to see them again. They were amazing, an amazing live experience!
1. 3Oh3! Although I like the songs L.O.V.E and Don't Trust Me, I actually always skip this duo when it appears in my iTunes-DJ mix. Their performance was the best party of the weekend though, they were full of energy and I had a blast putting my hands up in the air and screaming "FUCK THE DJ".
Marina and the Diamonds, the artist after whose song this blog was named, was a bit of a dissapointment sadly. Her voice was great, but she should think her setlist over again: three slow songs after each other made me loose my enthusiasm. And may I mention that the bass player of The Kooks is very cute? :)
(picture not of the performance I saw)
I'll replacing pictures with videos once they're up on youtube ;)
Have you been to Lowlands and what concert did you like most?
Summercamp last year in Spain. A bunch of crazy people making up sketches and performing those in Barcelona. This photo was taken at our last night at the camping. Two girls had organized a quiz and part of it was a dance battle, we got 5 minutes to prepare ourselves and then we would have to performe our dance. Since we couldn't come up with a dance in such a short amount of time we decided to put on as many weird clothes we could find and performe a striptease to Justin Timberlake's "Sexy Back" (I put on the wrong song however and we ended up taking off our clothes to "Lovestoned"). We did not win the battle (how unfair!) but we had a lot of fun. Good memories. Miss you guys!
Back in February we had to write a song in our music class at school. Since my love-life is kind of non-existant and all songs are about love according to my music teacher, I decided to write a song about crazy Twilight fans. I had recently discovered www.mylifeistwilight.com and was cracking up about all those obsessive fans who would take their cardboard cut-out of Edward Cullen everywhere. So I wrote a song called "Cardboard Cut-Out" about a girl whose entire life is this cardboard Edward doll. I'm not a very good singer so I was quite happy with the grade I received for my song (an 8). Anyway, I immediately thought it would be funny to make a music video for this song. So I made a lifesize cardboard cut-out of Edward, which ended up being a bit smaller than intended, and today I finally started filming with some help of a friend. It felt very random to walk around carrying a cardboard cut-out under your arm and I had no idea what I should do with it, but we did some OK shots at least. It will most likely take some weeks before the video will be up on Youtube because the amount of editing I have to do is horrifying but it's a fun project. Here are some pictures of today:
Eva carrying Edward
Screenshot musicvideo
Edward and I are enjoying the weather (yeah I know he is not supposed to go out into the sunlight, blah blah)
