a postmodern music video

this video is bonkers, but i like it :-)

Festival of Crafts

Hurrah - I got a letter from Farnham Malting on Friday saying I've been accepted for the Festival of Crafts show there in October! It's 17&18 October in the lovely building at Farnham.
I had a fabulous weekend - lots of sun and warmth and activities. My cold is nearly gone, I think, as I've been up for over an hour now and only had to blow my nose twice so far! ha!

I saw a great band on Saturday night - Televised Crime Wave. If you get the chance to see them live, don't miss it! Good indi music with lots of jumping about. They were really nice and friendly too. Plus, if you followed that link, they have a great pic of a cat on guitar as their background image......

Monday again!??!

So it's Monday again...seems almost impossible. I thought it was just Friday. Pf. Well, it's lovely British weather again, ie raining and dismal. It doesn't even remotely feel like it's summer or even near it. However, on Saturday I did get to experience a small sliver of something sort of resembling summer. I very unexpectedly won free tickets from the Guardian to The Great Escape festival in Brighton! I entered the competition on a complete whim and was totally surprised to win. So hurrah for the Guardian! The Great Escape is a music festival in which lots of small (and small-ish) bands play in venues all across Brighton. It's sort of like the Camden Crawl, but no queues. And a bit bigger, I think. In any case, off we went to Brighton on Saturday and lo and behold, there was sun there! So we walked along the beach area and the pier and the Lanes (the windy shopping streets) and we walked into Choccywoccydoodah's Brighton store - if you are unfamiliar with this fabulous chocolate store, do have a look at the cakes on their website! Of course we also saw lots of bands...we saw bands from Japan, bands featured by Artrocker magazine and bands we knew. Of the latter, we saw the KASMS who were fun and good and jumped around a lot. We also saw the Joy Formidable - they were FANTASTIC!! They were so very good that they played and we listened and when it was over I was thinking, what?! over already?! more more more!! They were truly brilliant.

Monday, monday

Fabulous weekend - saw Slumdog Millionaire, which I thought was brilliant. Met up with a bunch of friends and talked lots of rubbish. Planned and sorted out our holiday in June. Ate some chocolate. Excellent :-)
So today it's back to the bench and hopefully a bunch of cuff links and rings will emerge. I struggled with the pendants I was trying to make at the end of last week. I had some problems with the design, they weren't turning out how I'd envisioned, so I need to leave them for a bit and think about how better to do them.
I think I'll listen to my Crystal Castles cd today. I got the cd for Christmas and it is very, very good. Electro-thrash I think they call themselves, but it's not as hardcore as I thought it would be. It's overall quite chilled electronic with vocals and a couple of screamy tracks to get the energy levels up. Excellent album - definitely one of the best of 2008!

Music and stuff

I'm back after a weekend at All Tomorrow's Parties in Minehead in Somerset. It was brilliant, lots of interesting bands and music and people. It was COLD but happily it's all indoors so aside from a quick stroll on a very cold beach the weather didn't affect us. Fun was had by all! The Melvins were brilliant - they played three times, as they were the curators. Each time they were quite different but excellent. So now it's back to work and getting ready for my last craft fair of the season - this Saturday at the Rising Sun arts centre in Reading!
Here's a photo of me on the cold, cold beach:

I just finished labelling my posts. I didn't do the labelling initially because I didn't think it was worth it. But I have written a couple of posts about StumbleUpon, Technorati, and some other social bookmarking sites which could be useful and it was impossible to find those posts easily without labelling. So I labelled all my posts and put a label link list on the right hand side of my blog right above "Links". So, if anyone wants to find old posts, it's a lot easier now!!

I will be looking into some of the other popular social bookmarking sites next week, so if you're interested, keep an eye out for that...

I am going to participate in a craft show on Saturday 26 April at the famous (infamous?) Rising Sun Institute here in Reading. The Art Market will be open from 10.30 - 4.30 so if you're interested, please come visit! The reason I put the infamous in there is that I've seen many a band at the Rising Sun Institute and it can get pretty rammed in there for gigs....I saw Bloc Party, Saloon, and erm lots of other bands whose names escape me at the moment. Anyway, it is a great small venue to see up and coming bands. I'll post more info about the Art Market nearer the time...

Ok, you're going to have to take my word for it, but this is Portishead:


And this is the fantastic Thurston Moore:

And the very impressive F Buttons:

and the boy:

and me:

and it's Monday again!!!! madness!!! had a fantastic weekend at All Tomorrow's Parties music festival. Portishead were even better than I had hoped for! They were brilliant and her voice is completely brilliant. Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth) was also completely excellent, as were the F Buttons. I hadn't heard of them before and they were amazing.
The weather was suitably terrible. The wind was constantly howling and bits of trees were falling off and cars were shaking when parked. That was a good excuse to have a nice long lie-in and that was lovely.
I didn't take a camera, but did take some photos on the phone, so hopefully will be able to upload those later.
Now I'm working on a bunch of orders and hoping to get them done today!! Lots of rushing around!!

it's maybe, maybe a fraction of a teeny amount less dreary today than yesterday. maybe. more exciting post though - a cd from my friend in holland which is a compilation of German music. Some of it is 2raumwohnung, who I think are brilliant (the website is also viewable in English, click top right hand corner). I think he's using a couple of their songs at the beginning of the cd to lure me in and get me into more German music. We'll see if any of the rest is good! ha!

Jewellery-wise, today the plan is to bend some tube. That's not easy. If you just go bent a piece of tube, it will bend but the tube will collapse, like when you bend a straw it gets a kink in it. So much fiddling will need to be done in order to bend it without ruining it. right, well, i'm off to attempt that now...