so, since august

so, i went to bestival, where i experienced mud, rain, and too many people in a two-man tent with my friend olivia:

and i met charlie, who's pretty neat:

and up until now have spent an unbelievable amount of money travelling to and from manchester to dance and have fun:

so i've decided to up sticks and move back up north, especially since getting a job in london is harder than it sounds, and much harder when you don't live there and can't bother people with your CV in person.
i plan on spending the next few months finding out whether there's something i actually want to do career-wise, or maybe trying instead to write, or start a small business of my own. don't they say that everyone has a book in them? and i can sew, so i've decided i should try harder to be independent of office work or corporations, or generally relying on a manager for my self-worth. i've got no problem with a shop job to earn me some money, but i'm finding it harder to believe the accepted wisdom that you should aspire to a 'success' defined by faceless business. a lot of the people i knew at uni are now in offices, throwing away the individuality and creativity which a university degree nurtures as a measure of merit. career complacency is my enemy.

in the meantime i'll be listening to this band a lot. i missed them in leeds last year because of work, and really hope i get to see them again soon. one of the things i'm most excited about moving to manchester is that i get to see live music within walking distance again. a two-day oxford-london commute to see interpol one night and suede the next, while totally worth it, was completely exhausting. deaf institute is 20 minutes walk from charlie's flat - can't wait.

HOW

i have a habit of cutting the bottom, sleeves or cuffs off almost every piece of new clothing i acquire. as a result, i've got a lot of bits of fabric kicking around, so recently i've been putting them to good use making scrunchies. here, for your pleasure, is a quick how-to of scrunchie-making. i use my sewing machine, but it really doesn't take that much longer with a needle and thread.

you will need:
bits of fabric
elastic (about 50mm wide works best)
needle and thread/sewing machine

1. cut a piece of fabric about 10-15cm wide and 25cm long.

2. turn the long sides together with the pattern in the middle (not on the outside). then, sew the long edge together, leaving about 3cm unsewn either end (you'll need this later).

3. turn the fabric right-side out, so the pattern is back on the outside and the seam you've just sewn is on the inside. then, feed your elastic down through the fabric. it's easiest to hold the fabric up and drop the elastic down through the hole in the middle.

it will look like this when you've finished this step:

4. sew the ends together with the patterned sides together. keep the elastic out of the way while you do this.

it will look like this when you've finished this step:

5. now tie a knot in the elastic.

6. sew the last seam by folding the frayed edges of each side over and sewing them together.

DONE!

bethany you are cool

this is bethany cosentino. her band is called best coast. her boyfriend is wavves. i've been listening to best coast's first LP 'crazy for you' nonstop since i got it yesterday and i l o v e it. i think i like it so much because she's pretty direct in her lyrics, basically saying either 'i love you', 'i hate you' or 'i'm sorry' without any of the pretentiousness which some bands have gotta be embarassed to repeat show after show (hiya white lies). the other thing i love about bethany is her cat, snacks. cover star of both 'crazy for you' and wavves's 'king of the beach', snacks gets around a scene which he probably doesn't even realise is happening right in his own home, and seems pretty chilled out about the whole thing if you read his twitter @snacksthecat.

okay, i've got a facepack cementing to my skin and my dad's singing karma police really badly in the kitchen. time to sort my face out and go to work.

no sunlight

i'm supposed to be working my way through my 8 page reading list for my master's course, which starts far too soon for me to get through it all. of course the result of feeling the need to do homework is doing nothing, and i definitely made it worse this week when i convinced my brother to go halves on a second-hand playstation 2. what this means is that we've been able to play all of the ps1 and ps2 games which have been left incomplete since his original ps2 gave up the ghost a year ago (tho saying that he's totally been going behind by back and completing games on his flatmate's ps2 at uni..)

as a result of this purchase i've been ignoring the (sometimes) lovely weather and holing up in my bedroom with final fantasy XII:

just me, my cat and my playstation. alf's particular favourite is the battle music, even though it freaks him out and wakes him up. you'd think he'd just go and find another bed to chill on but he doesn't think like that - he's a sucker for gaming, too.

here are some other sweet games which have/will be keeping me busy:

1. hotel dusk: room 215

this is an insanely underrated game for nintendo ds. you play a washed up former detective called Karl Hyde and solve the mystery of hotel dusk by snooping around and talking to shifty characters in their hotel rooms. the best thing about it is the way it looks like a comic, and that the characters move like they're on pages being flicked through. our hero hyde is also a complete badass: he's got a backstory, he's quiet and brooding, he wears a slick suit and a trench coat - basically he's much cooler than your average game detective, and in the process of finding the above image i found out that he's got a lively internet following complete with fan art, which makes me like the game that much more: 

2. pandemonium

pandemonium is a really old platform game for ps1. i remember being obsessed with this and getting annoyed that i couldn't do the levels where you get chased by a giant ball of electricity because i wasn't quick enough with my thumbs. in it, you play nikki, a sassy sorceress with jazzy tights, and spend the game being annoyed by her sidekick fargus, who is apparently a jester, though it's never really explained why (his jester's stick as boomerang is one of the more imaginative weapons i've seen). for some reason, when we were about 10 my brother and i agreed to swop our copy of this game for our cousin's copy of the (waaaay inferior) pandemonium 2, and it hasn't been seen since, but i live in hope of finding the original in a charity shop someday. i once found a picture disc edition of final fantasy 8 in oxfam for £4.99 so charity shop miracles do happen.

3. star wars episode 1: the phantom menace

i'm not going into this too much because anything i say about the phantom menace film not actually being that bad usually results in a combination of abuse and terrible jar-jar binks impressions. however, i love this game. it's not a straight playthrough of the film but there's enough ewan mcgregor-as-obi-wan soundbites to keep me happy. also, most other star wars video games are either rubbish or far too difficult, so i'm definitely into one which isn't too boring/hard.

4. the fifth element

this is basically tomb raider with milla jovovich instead of angelina jolie, but since the fifth element is waaaay cooler than tomb raider i definitely prefer this game, even though it is THE MOST DIFFICULT GAME IN THE ENTIRE WORLD (apart from the SNES game of home alone 2, but that is genuinely off the scale). i would really like to meet someone who's completed it, but just in case this never happens i figure having the means to play it again is a good reason to have another crack at it. 

5. final fantasy VII

this is officially my favourite game ever. which is weird because i've yet to actually complete it, despite having played it through to the final boss twice. it's one of those annoying games where you get to the end fairly easily then realise you've got to train up a hella lot before you stand any chance of beating the final baddie, and you've already completed the story up to there so there's nothing to interest you while you train, resulting in an incomplete game. it's the only videogame that's ever made me cry, and also the most frustrating game ever because when we first played it there was a rumour that you could gameshark your ps1 and bring the dead character back (untrue - and one you've gamesharked your ps1 it's never the same again). as i write this my brother is just finding out that our save game right before the final boss has been wiped off his memory card, taking me that much further away from my reading list for the rest of the summer...

hot chicks that you can't even touch

girls in bands are simultaneously cooler and hotter than any other girls on the planet. i think that's a fact. so while i've been been rearranging my music on the new ipod i got for my 22nd birthday, i've been compiling a list of the coolest girls in bands. here are my top 5. in the words of katy perry, they're all "fine, fresh, fierce."

5. régine chassagne

originally from haiti, régine is married to win butler, frontman of canada's arcade fire. she plays millions of instruments on-stage: violin, accordion, organ, xylophone, and can perform the impossible-sounding feat of simultaneously playing a violin and singing. her voice on songs like 'in the backseat' (from debut album 'funeral') can send shivers up your spine.

4. alison mosshart

currently frontwoman of both the kills and the dead weather, alison mosshart has managed to avoid the paparazzi attention meted out to her kills bandmate jamie hince since he made the decision to become kate moss's other half, maintaining a cool aloofness about the whole affair. she repeatedly insists that she and kate are friends while at the same time looking like frenemies is a more accurate description, and that she could probably tear her to shreds with secret lazer beams hidden behind her eyes if she wanted to. the video for the dead weather's 'treat me like your mother' is pretty much the most badass thing i've seen recently (brief summary: she and jack white, wearing top-to-toe leather, walk from opposite ends of a piece of scrubland, and empty hundreds of bullets into each other from a series of heavy-duty  guns worn about their person while smoking cigarettes and looking angry). i want every pair of shoes she owns.

3. akiko matsuura

formerly (edit: apparently she still is) singer for comanechi, now drumming for the big pink, akiko matsuura moved from japan to london specifically because she wanted to be in a punk band. tiny in every way, she manages to thrash out the harshest drumbeats for the big pink while maintaining a fuck-you cool. at the big pink's recent glastonbury set, she played wearing nothing but a leotard and a playboy bunny bow. hot-a.

2. annie hardy

annie hardy, now the only member of giant drag, didn't let the other member's departure stopped her from playing all instruments live on her own. she looks like an angel, but she specialises in audience back-chat and explicit song titles: debut album 'hearts and unicorns' contains the songs 'YFLMD' (you fuck like my dad) and 'my dick sux'.

1. karen o

there's only one lady who can occupy this top spot, and that is the totally unique karen orzolek. she spits grapes at audience members, runs around in insane outfits (by friend and designer christian joy), and has a pair of lungs on her more ear-splitting than five lesser girls put together. never, ever upstaged by her other half, even when that other half is spike jonze (or when ex-boyfriend, liars' angus angus, doesn't turn up to meet her at the taping of their video for 'maps' before he goes on tour, making the tears she cries in the video real), she tops a recent straw poll of 'girls gay men would go straight for,' and i've been her biggest fan since i was about fourteen. long live the queen of cool girls in bands!

paradise-onbury

i tweeted this time last year about how my excitement about glastonbury is similar to the excitement a hyperactive eight-year-old gets the night before christmas. and here i am again, a bit breathless and finding it hard to fall asleep. i spent my half-hour car journeys to and from work today blasting youth and young manhood at top volume, tryin to get a feel for the holy roller novocaine within in time for wednesday. i've been shopping with an eye out for 'what would work in pilton' for about the last three months. my influences have been many and varied, but this is my glastonbury moodboard 2010.