tell me I'm your national anthem

summer style inspiration from Lana via Jackie O/Marilyn - say what you like about her, girl knows her look

if she tempts you with her charms

Get it! Tennis do The Zombies

travelling coast to coast

new mixtape!

let's take jesus off the dashboard

really into this one, and the new Kathleen Edwards.(pre)summer jams!

also -

I respect a girl who takes style cues from my highschool boyfriend, Stephen Malkmus

fear & loathing in puerto rico

This trailer has many things going for it - the stylings of 1950s Puerto Rico, a semi-fictional account of the birth of gonzo journalism and maybe most importantly, Bruce Robinson behind the camera. In his past life you may have seen him in the background of Zeffirelli's Romeo & Juliet as Benvolio, or being unbelievably beautiful in Truffaut's L'Histoire d'Adèle H. He's a self described failed actor and thank god for that because he went on to gift us with the black gem of Withnail & I, and is back to capture Johnny Depp channeling Hunter S Thompson for the second time around in The Rum Diary. No one makes inspired lunacy quite so appealing as this unholy trinity.

earthquake weather

Ed Ruscha's Every Building On The Sunset Strip

"But the feeling feeling in L.A. that the place was not safe - that hovering earthquake in the air - was why anyone in the trance even came down long enough to learn to thread a camera at all. They had to take their eye off what was probably the apocalypse and invent Theda Bara out of a girl from Cincinatti to make sense out of the light."

(L.A. Woman - Eve Babitz)

Getting my surrogate summer feelings through literary L.A. dreaming with Eve & Joan Didion .

I want to go to there

So after seeing this collection of pictures I think maybe Palm Springs is my spiritual home? (they have MODERNISM WEEK!)

last three photographs borrowed from the swellegent sfgirlbybay

you be Emmylou & I'll be Gram

Got to stalk the ghost of Gram Parsons by proxy on the weekend courtesy of the gorgeous Emmylou Harris and Sydney Festival First Night. I know Emmylou is a formidable talent in her own right, but lying in the grass and listening to her cover Wheels in the near-dark was a pretty heavenly end to Saturday.

oh I wish I had a suntan

Spent the weekend down the coast and oh, be careful what you wish for! The suntan is more of an embarrassing sunburn and I'm feeling far more Jane than Joan in the office at the moment. (so where's my silver fox in this scenario?)

Still I guess I don't regret it too much since there's not much more I'd rather do in the summertime than swim and lie on the beach reading classic California noir from Raymond Chandler. Sandy feet and daydreams of Elliott Gould as Marlowe, yeah, things could be worse. 

never been too good with names but I remember faces

Tonight I found myself unexpectedly at the Metro, reliving teen yearnings courtesy of the seemingly indestructible Evan Dando and The Lemonheads. In the 90s they were pretty much everything you want from your favourite highschool band: 3 minute pop songs, seriously cute slacker-type lead singer, swirling rumours of rock & roll debauchery. And their show was pretty much everything you want from a reformation of your fave highschool band: the record that got me into them 'It's A Shame About Ray' played in its entirety plus all the other hits and finishing with an encore of Outdoor Type with Tom Morgan & Alison Galloway of Smudge (who was the #1 indie pin up girl of choice amongst my male friends as teenagers and still looks enviably beautiful while playing drums).

And ya, he wore stripes.

Initials S.G.

New documentary Gainsbourg & His Girls, plus finally an Australian release for the biopic! It's all about cigarette smoke, seduction and being tres, tres jolie-laide. It's the summer of Serge.

I'm in love with the modern world

Having A Coke With You

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irun, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne

or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona

partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian

partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt

partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches

partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary

it is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be anything as still

as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it

in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth

between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint

you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

                                                          I look

at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world

except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick

which thank heavens you haven't gone to yet so we can go together the first time

and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism

just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or

at rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me

and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them

when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank

or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn't oick the rider as carefully

as the horse

                 it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience

which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I'm telling you about it

    

      Frank O'Hara

There are an awful lot of Marini's Riders out there, but this one's at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and this poem comes into my head every time I see him. You don't get so many echoes of Frank in Sydney.

you know exactly what I mean

WATCHING:

old favourites

bureaucratic nightmares

WANTING:

saturday night dancing (holla, Jingle Jangle)

a Janelle Monae Sydney sideshow, please please please

some people really know how to have a good time

He received letters emblazoned with ten different sets of lips

I know it's been out for ages, but the video for this song is sweet as hell and brings out the summer feelings. Epic highschool fantasies - is there any other kind? - played out next to the lockers by way of Zooey's synchronised hallway dancing and certified dreamboat M. Ward coming over all Trip Fontaine. I'd like to think there's a bottle of peach schnapps hidden in his hip pocket (babes love it).