HOT AND JONZEY

Good god, it is HOT. Not that seductive, slightly perspiring holiday kind of hot but the too-muggy-to-wear sweatpants (ironic, given the name), doing chicken-dance to fan armpit kind of hot. Especially when I'm blogging on the ancient parental PC which is radiating heat as it struggles to open more than four tabs on any one browser.

What's both cooling me down slightly and encouraging me to stay on this retro noughties beast of an electronic engine is the latest offering from The Creators Project, involving Bowlface favourite Spike Jonze. Even before we get to the vagueries of this man having been the inspiration behind Yeah Yeah Yeahs' indie ballad of dreams Maps, he's also responsible for cult film classics such as Being John Malcovitch, Adaption, and all the best music videos. I spent most of my Contemporary American Fiction seminars arguing with my tutor about why his adaption of Where The Wild Things Are is actually incredibly great and not ludicrously tedious and seeing as I am, of yesterday, officially First Class at English Literature (had to sneak that in somewhere), it's got to stand for something, as The Creators Project now recognises. Excellent.

Here's the vid. I've got to go and take a cold shower.

deja vu deja vu

Despite being occupied with new activities daily, namely, dealing with the ever threatening prospect of leaving my beloved Newcastle, the deja vu blog post theme continues. Indeed, the theme is one of such recurring frequency that perhaps I am having deja vu about deja vu in a never-ending cycle... Enough of the metaphysics. This deja vu issues from one Jesmond takeaway pizzeria and yet another comparison to a bizarre early 90s film character. Sounds familiar, non?

Sociology Flatmate and I have developed a tradition over the last three years in which we call each other during our journeys back to the house for various reasons:
a) establishing if the other is in the house
b) discussing the purchasing of food
c) providing necessary chat during walking.
Thus, I should not have been surprised to find myself sitting alone in Mistletoe Pizzeria a good four hours before they expect any of the usual drunken clientele (approx. 18.30 hours) as a phone call of the aforementioned description revealed Sociology Flatmate's pitifully desperate need for pizza. I couldn't go home to such a sad, cheese and dough-deprived, face.

This is Mistletoe Pizzeria's quaint letterbox. I wish it would say 'pizza' instead.

Just as I was dealing with a cocktail of emotions - love for Sociology Flatmate; shame from sitting in Mistletoe Pizzeria at 6.30pm and, mostly, a strange absence of drunk Lancastrian men sporting mullets - the pizza proprietor switched on the sound system as a means of customer recognition. With it came a near-spiritual moment. Granted, it's probably got something to do with my current heightened emotional state, but music seems to be, wait for it, 'speaking' to me. I know, but carry on reading.

For example, a woeful departure from dear friends was accompanied by my i-Pod's shuffle choice of Neil Young's 'Don't Cry', only to be followed by Simon and Garfunkel's 'Only Living Boy In New York', my location as of September. Most than anything it probably shows I need to stop raiding my parents' record collection, but I was a tad spooked.

Add to the mix the following announcement from the pizza sound system: 'Welcome. Welcome to the end. Do not be afraid. The world is changing.' Weird, in many a way, but not in the least when this bizarre 'welcoming' broke into Black Eyed Peas' smash dance hit 'Boom Boom Pow'. Sociology Flatmate's adorable Dutch surname has resulted in our calling of her 'Boom' - the pizza sound system, therefore, was serenading her pizza with her own name.

As for the likeness comparison, the deja vu fails a little in that it emerged not from the Mistletoe Pizzeria, but from Jesmond Tesco's Latest Resident Big Issue Seller. In the past he has tried to persuade me to part with my hard-loaned cash with crude statements and catcalls. However, this time L.R.B.I.S posed a question of sorts so I couldn't just leave it at a withering glance.

Caught off guard, probably trying to buy essential Shreddies milk in so as to expose my homewear for as short a time as possible, I was told that I reminded L.R.B.I.S of someone famous, although he couldn't remember who. I did not suggest 'Superman's Girlfriend'. Necessary dairy products purchased, he cornered me on my way out with the opener 'you know Wayne's World'....

Turns out I look like 'Garth's girlfriend', a.k.a Honey Hornee, a.k.a Kim Basinger. She's blond. Despite this, I'm going to relish the retro-film theme to post the best educational/transformation movie montage of all time:

Fathercraft and other creative ventures

Another bleak morning, another Woman's Hour-inspired post title. It was all good - about Victorian and Edwardian fatherhood; which tapped happily into all the notes on Victorian fiction I threw fairly unceremoniously out yesterday afternoon - until yet another episode of the cringe-inspiring drama attempting to portray the domestic life of a gay couple came on. And off with the radio.

Fortunately, there is a video offering from the Creators' Project to fill the gap left by Radio 4 historians. The Creators' Project being pretty much what its name would suggest: a lovely jumbly showcase of envy-inspiring creative types both established and about to conquer the world. It's quite something to be fronted with of a morning. This video shows Mark Ronson being somewhat blase about 'playing in some New York clubs' as a means of starting out and then making some fun beatbox noises about half-way through. From here I'm gunna check out Pheonix, CSS and maybe Nick Zinner as a kind of Goth-Elf desert. Yum.

Whilst I'd like to say that would merely be the start of a thoroughly creative and successful day, I know that all I'm really going to do is sit in an old lady cafe and maybe see some taxidermy. Still, yesterday turned up a few trumps after the somewhat negative morning prediction. For a start, I managed to complete the grudge shoe buying with relative success; after accidentaly throwing the lid of a lipstick somewhere under a pile of croptops in Topshop and getting odd stares from the assistant in Dorothy Perkins when trying to match my acid yellow dress to any of their mainly horrific shoes I got a cracking five inches of heel for £15 in the sale of a department store I'm too ashamed to name.

What I was most greatly cheered by, however, was the re-appearance of a busker on Northumberland St who, in my mind, is called Carlos. This bulky Hispanic chap is wooing the eldery of the North East with his leather jacket, slicked back hair and crooned out versions of ballads of the fifties. It seems I spend most of my life walking up and down Northumberland Street so I've become pretty familiar with the effect he has on his audience, positioned outside M&S. You can always expect to see some slightly goofy smiles, invariably accompanied with a foot-tap. Sometimes they hide their love for him behind a grandchild, who is rocking out to 'Hound Dog' when The Big C decides to step it up a little. These children often act as a medium for Carlos-eldery flirtation when he bends down and sings directly into their eyes. An unnecessary translation, you may think, but bearing in mind the threatening look on Carlos's wife's face when she turned up in a matching leather jacket, I'd say she was all too aware of the amorous grannies' advances. Anyway, yesterday it was taken to a whole new level, in which the Grannies had clearly won out: crooning 'I can't help falling in love with you' directly into her eyes, Carlos was a mere metre away from one lucky blue rinse. I've never walked into M&S with such a facial expression.

inappropriate family jokes

Blogging Sunday has clearly become Blogging Tuesday. This is because on the Sunday just gone I spent most of the day, albeit situated near the laptop, but otherwise rolling around, moaning, and occasionally lifting my head to eat a pasta bake that should have been thrown out a while ago. See below.

Also, it's because I'm having yet another De ja vu moment from this time last week. Arguably, the weather isn't quite as poor - if anything it's an improvement on the last couple days - but it's still far from the scorching, tightless days of last week, and not in any way encouraging me to leave the house. Unfortunately, like last week, leaving the house and entering the terrifying commercial palace that is Primark is one of my few tasks for the day.

As pure, unadulterated evidence that I am a near-complete failure of a girl, I find the prospect of going out and buying party shoes an utter ball-ache. (Even the fact I use ball-ache as an adjective, despite not having testicles, suggests a femininity flaw somewhere). Cruelly enough, I have enough oestrogen to cause me to recognise that my one pair of party shoes just will not go with the dress I've dragged out of the back of my wardrobe for my Graduation Ball on Thursday - I'm spending money and begrudging shopping trips as a sole result of unavoidable recognition of poor taste. Via the dry cleaners.

Tuesday Blogging again, then, has come to the rescue in the form of necessary distraction from the chores of real life. Like packing. Leaving Newcastle in an ever-shortening number of days necessitates that I shove my overly large and pretentious collection of literature and glossy magazines into some kind of vegetable box (said box was nabbed from the Grainger Market yesterday, under both the guidance and inquisition of two equally charming and mean market stall holders). The box remains empty and propped up against the bannister. Maybe, just maybe, I'll do something about it. Both bleak prospects of shoe shopping (especially on a £20 budget) and packing were only a slightly better thing to wake up to after a threatening dream about a Primavera-style festival in Cuba, with bomb-dropping and me threatening to throw a vintage camera into the sea.

Some things have cheered me up, however. Switching on the radio to hear the dulcet tones of NME's first lady Editor Krissi Murison chat about being a girl in the music journalism industry, for example, was a nice treat. Potentially even nicer than the morning play about the private lives of gay men they had on yesterday. Then the suggestion of listening to Owen Paul's My Favourite Waste Of Time, which can't help but raise a smile, really. In fact, I've embedded it here as a reward for reading this diatribe of self-pity. Just to top it off, naturally, a familial inbox treat reminiscing on local old men who used to come and do assemblies before it turned out he was being convicted of paedophilia. Black comedy is the best medicine, apparently.
Also, as promised, is a sneaky review of Major Lazer's set at Primavera on Thiskindofmusic...seemingly I have achieved something in the last week other than a collection of equally bad tan lines.

Oh blogging, you're my favourite waste of time....

politics in moving pictures

Be pretty wrong for a historical moment like my first ever vote to go past undocumented. Not that I've voted yet, but it's all in the name of building tension. Being surrounded by student media types politics chat is the next most popular variety after dissertation chat, and infinitely the less boring. Cleggmania has got its grip firmly on Newcastle, and Wendy Taylor, Lib Dem PCC for Newcastle East, looks a lot like my favourite ever history teacher, which gives her a few (albeit superficial) points up on the £18 grand food bill expense man Nick Brown.

Anyway, if you've not been religiously following the debates and the constant news coverage and blahabaahahaa, (and it's utterly understandable) to form your decisions on the big day, then it might be worth taking a look at VBS's election series. It focuses on young representatives of all three major parties, and it's super enlightening. There's a moment in the Tory one where I swear the crying girl has been posessed by the spirit of the BNP member who used to prop up the bar in the Shire pub I worked in as a teenager. It's got to be seen to be believed.


On the complete flip side, Alan, who could potentially become the youngest MP ever, is totally adorable.

Not least because his hair matches his campaign colour in being a near-fluorescent orange, but also because he speaks as passionately about being a ginger as being a Lib Dem.

The Labour video shows Mo Iqbal, who is hoping to be the youngest Labour councillor in Greenwich (he's 23), doing some Bollywood Dancing and philosophise about what his dad might say about getting his wheel clamped. It's also an eye-opener.

Happy voting, y'all.

Dinosaur noise distraction

Um, Avatar, yes?

Yes, I know the 'I've-got-so-much-work-to-do' blog theme is getting incredibly tired now. However, as, unfortunately, Bowlface is musings on everyday activity and having too much work is current everyday activity, it's not going to change for a couple weeks. Yawn.

I'm currently blogging because I'm too distracted by the over loud dinosaur noises emitting from the room next door. My flatmates must have purchased the newly released Avatar DVD and are celebrating. By playing it, rather than making dinosaur noises. Although, having never seen the film (bit like Diana Vickers' Once it sort of passed me by. I was getting excited about Tim Jonze's Where The Wild Things Are and couldn't take any mythical creatures that hadn't been made out of paper mache and fluff) I wouldn't be an expert.

Added to the fact I've sat outside Newcastle's finest independent cinema, The Tyneside, drinking tea with various different friends, all afternoon and that essay on identity and narrative myth is really not being written.

On the cinematic theme, however, VBS have released another Vice Guide To Film (those busy little beavers) and it's on North Korea! My dad travelled to South Korea a bit when I was a kid, and I always confused the two, only realising in the last decade how totally mental it was as a country. Scrap that, only in the last couple years, and only since watching this did I realise how small my knowledge was on the whole affair. My knowledge being that Kim Jong Il was its crazy president who my sister thought was cute after Camp America's recreation of him. He is also a film director though. You should probably watch his monster movie Pulgasari afterwards.

Eye bags

of the guilty kind. From staying up too late drinking. Then too late working because of staying up too late drinking. I know, poor little me.

Summer terms at University comprise of three weeks of poorly attended, half-hearted lectures, insanely repetitive conversations about dissertations/deadlines/stress/ and a simultaneous attempt to squish in as much student fundom before the maturity of graduation arrives. As a result, I'm averaging six hours of sleep a night and suffering. To go from the luxurious slumber and overeating of Shire existence to rolling in and out of bed , surviving on lunches of pick n' mix and greggs sausage rolls and dinners of pitta bread and gin, is a rough slide.

Furthermore, Newcastle is beautifully sunny but deceptively cold. I've been powercycling around just to keep warm after foolishly leaving the house without a coat.

As a result, this little nugget of niche fashion goodness on Vice Style caught my eye. The only similarity being that of the headline theme. However, sleeplessness has clearly been a good thing for Ruth Hogben - give it a couple of months of this fatigue-induced stupor and I'll be taking over the world.

Bowlday Sweat

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Believe it or not, it's a year today since the first ever bowlpost. I know, gone fast, huh? No better way to celebrate, I thought, than reporting from the front line of post-run sweat. Mmmm. Birthday sweat for Bowlface, in honour of guilty pleasure song extreme Jeremih, 'Birthday Sex'. I think I'm pretty much the only person who's not fourteen and potentially 'gangsta' who wishes this was my ringtone, but hey, it's Bowlface's birthday and I can make it cry if I want to.

So, up-to-the-minute reportage on the Shire sheep front. I'd say unnervingly placid, but also present were a couple tractors and farmers. So maybe they were on good behaviour. Otherwise, there have been some lamb reshufflings, with new tiny baby lambs in field number three, and bleaty mcbleat lambs having mysteriously enlarged since Monday in field number six. The story continues.

Yesterday, however, saw my feelings to such livestock weaken as a gatecrashing of Stowe (stately home/mega public school) gardens resulted in some suitably posh lamb activity. They were fluffy, apparently innocent and did all the right kind of bleating, as in for their mums, rather than at me. Fortunately, when it came to scrambling over the Ha-Ha (if in doubt, there's an appropriate wiki entry here) there were no sheep nor official National Trust-looking types about to bleat, so a shred of dignity was maintained.

In a similar mode of 'days out', a.k.a, how best to avoid urgent deadlines in the name of family quality time, today the Bowlface family embarked upon Fulham Palace Gardens. Sad to say, no ancient wall activity was involved as it is entirely free and legal to enter the aforementioned, apart from perhaps those doing community service in the flowerbeds. Lambs replaced with small mini-Boden babies, and a fancy cup of tea in an oversized Georgian room later and I was all set for being Jane Austen in a breton top for the rest of the afternoon.

One last birthday treat for Bowlface regulars (because I'm guessing you can't get Jeremih's greatness out of your head) is another fantastically off-the-wall video launch from VBS's Vice Guide To Film.
Basically, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia's film-makers went freedom crazy after 60 years of state-approved Socialist Realism. Now known as Parallel Cinema, VBS's Shane Smith travelled to Moscow to interview its founders. There's a lot of pretending to be animals (probably what I've been doing for the last week, judging by the high sheep content) and booze, and as well as being a nice way to pass the time you can impress film geeks in the pub with all your new found knowledge.

Online relief for Bank Holiday boredom

Oh my, a whole week in the Shire and so little blogging. The activities have been multitudinous, too. I mean, even if being encountered by a field of terrifying P.E teacher-esque (and not the fun Sue Sylvester type) sheep baa-ing at me during a run; being the most outspoken person in a room full of women-only Oxbridge college alumni and having the insides of someone's mouth flicked at me with a cotton bud whilst serving them behind a till weren't enough, I've also done some quite credibly cool stuff too.

But enough of that. That's not what Bowlface is for. If this blog actually showcased all the fun flea markets and male model-stalking and literary festival and top knot discovering I'd been doing to give me a load of cool points then the apparent charm of these vanity-inspired splurgings would disappear, right?

As a result of the above, temping in various high-end retail outfitters all week, and, more to the point, a load of really distractingly awesome stuff going on with the Vice site, Bowlface has been neglected. The Noam Chomsky interview was pretty brutal to the pile of real work I had to do, but this chappy really has caused some problems. It's mainly because I'm part-boy that this ticks boxes, as I'm not really one for the bulging muscles, but '>VBS meets...David Haye is like BBC2's Who Do You Think You Are but with a boxer and Senegal and it's much more interesting than working in retail.

For the rest of me, which is part-girl, Vice has launched a new style-dedicated site, which is ace, even if I didn't so love torturing myself by looking at pictures of beautiful people I will never be. So, any of you who still keep claiming it's sexist/producing porn for scene kids can eat your hats. Or buy better ones, after having a look at it... (although there still are a load of tits on show).

Get excited for a full Bank Holiday Shire report, Bowlfans!

Spending time with documentaries and onesies: Valentine's Day

Not unsurprisingly, I am entirely ambivalent about Valentine's Day. Not bitter, not angry about consumerism, not miserable, nor loved-up, but entirely ambivalent. It's surely just another day, made into a giant beast of pink and red trash which results in a whole load of disappointment, not least when you walk past reduced boxes of Milk Tray and bunches of roses. Why the hell should I contribute when I am, in general, a well-rounded and happy person?

So, as a result, I carried on as if it wasn't happening. Spent a few hours on a train with some mini eggs and postmodern literature, got home, got into a ONESIE and watched the latest VBS documentary about heroin addicts in Swansea. The perceptive of you out there would appreciate two links in the last sentence. That's because there are two really ace things in it.

Yes, the onesie dream has finally come true. Months of wishing, hoping and dreaming has resulted in around 300 grams of ribbed jersey pleasure, making me feel like a giant baby able to conquer the world. It was only fair that I spent Valentine's night with it. If Bowlface was a style blog, which would involve me:

a) having far more hair
b) having far less podge
c) being given free clothes
d) feeling comfortable with taking photos of myself and writing about them

then I'd post the photo taken in pure joy and excitement by my buddy in the American Apparel changing room.

However, none of the above apply, so you'll have to make do with the previous link. That's clearly what I look like in it. The till-man asked repeatedly if I 'could rock it', which I don't quite understand, but yeah, I'm in love with it, and turned down drinks last night just so the onesie and I could have a little more special time.

The other bit of ambivalent romance came in the form of the aforementioned Swansea Love Story. I remember trying to look at the photos of this on the library computers a little while back. They were so awesome they made the computer crash. I don't even want to know what watching this on them would do...possibly corrupt the entire university network with its brutal honesty and load of cool that the average Newcastle type probably wouldn't know what to do with. Then I'd get a massive fine and wouldn't be able to pay it and not graduate. So yeah, watch, get a onesie, and stay away from the library.