You are not a woman. You are an Angel.

Her inner strength never ceases to leave me in awe.

The Other Audrey

I'm sooooo annoyed! I have been wanting to see this film ever since it was announced that Miss Tautou (One of my favourite actresses) would be stepping into the shoes of the iconic, legendary, petite designer Gabrielle Chanel. I love Chanel, I love Audrey, I love the equisite attention to detail in the cinematography of french cinema BUT Reading, being the corporate, big-budget Blockbuster kind of town that it is will not be showing it. Vue and Showcase aren't going to show it neither are the nearest towns so I guess I'm going have to wait till the dvd release to see this film. I'm not really too keen to watch it online either.

Your trash=My Treasure

Ok so I've been horribly negligent of my blog for the past week and a few days and among ordering books off amazon, buying jewlerry and hunting down great dresses in charity shops (Wells someone else's trash is my treasure and vice-ersa), working and booking cinema tickets I didn't do alot else due to the un-summer like weather that has been depressing my part of the world and made us all maudlin. Here's a quick summary of what I've been doing/ buying/ listening to/ eating etc.

I've been eating alot of...

Drinking alot of...


Listening mainly to....

Reading...

Got new frames for my glasses... Yeah I know, right: alert the media(!)

I bought this new necklace. You can't really see it from here but it's basically alot of twisted chains and black beads with charms interwovern into it and a vintage-style pendant.

I found this Jus d'Orange dress at a charity shop. It's made of real silk and it feels so nice. It kind of drapes but really beautifully and I never wear that much bold colour so this was a chance to...

I started using those Elvive Nutri-gloss spray stuff and it's made my think hair significantly lighter and a bit more shinier.

I wore this hat for the first time out to a picnic. It was the first time I wore it out in the five years in which I have owned it.

Well that's pretty much it lately. I deeply apologise if you've actually read this blog entry and that I wasted a minute of your life that you will never get back just to fulfill my blog quota but either way thanks for taking time to read it :)

"It should take you four seconds to walk to that door. I'll give you two"

Breakfast at Tiffany's on the West End stage?
Anna Friel as Holly Golightley?
This summer I'm hoping to get tickets to see this because how could anyone not be curious. I loved Audrey in the film (as did everyone else I know) but I think Anna will put her own little stamp on Holly and I hear it's going to stay closer to Truman Capote's novella so it should be a little darker. I love Anna from Pushing Daisies and Me without You so I don't doubt her abilities as an actress but is this venture to risky?

How did they EVER make a movie of Lolita? *HEART shaped glasses*

Five days of Danger

So I have been back from Berlin for three days and I'm still buzzed from the whole experience and looking back it all seems a surrealistic blur of political art on walls, stunning views, tear-jerking concentration camp stories, talented street performers, dancing to some really bad tunes and getting inebriated on German beer. Memories that leave a dopey smile on my face. So I'm gonna try to condense my five days in the German capital into this blog entry and post some pictures (only a few, however, as in total I took over 400).

Our first evening was spent touring the Berlin wall art gallery which is some of the best "grafitti" (and I use that word loosely) that I've ever seen. Then after dinner we went down to the hotel bar and each ordered a different beer and sampled each others (that's how we discovered which ones we liked best and that's what also made us slightly sick). Throughout the week we I realised we kept going to all the capitalist places that were familiar to us: H&M, Starbucks, Mcdonalds. To make up for our lack of enthusiasm for real German food (lets face it, as a vegetarian it's not much fun). We "soaked" (quite literally) up the culture through drinks. I was addicted to the red Beliner Weisse which is basically beer with syrup in it (sounds nauseating but it's sooo good), the classic Kolsch beer and then there's Mezzo Mix which is half cola/half orange and helped with the hangovers from previously mentioned drinks. In Germany you can drink beer, lager and cider at 16 but you have to be 18 to drink spirits. I thought it wouldn't matter how much I drunk as someone else was bound to get more drunk than me and I'm not a lightweight at all so I had hoped the attention would never be on me the morning after but of course I was foolish to think that. I love Berlin but it's seriously lacking on the tea front. The coffee drinkers had a great time whenever we'd go to cafes but the tea left a bit to be desired and on the plane ride home there was alot of "When I get home the first thing I'm going to do is make a huge pot of Twinings". However what they lacked in tea they made up for in junk food: doughnuts as big as your head, blocks of assorted flavoured ice cream. incredibly sour sherbet sweets, sourdough cookies, pizza, fries and spicy ketchup.

On Wednesday we visited Sachsenhausen Concentration camp. It was raining that day which I was grateful for as I don't think I would've been able to see it bathed in glorious sunlight and it was an element of pathetic fallacy mirroring our moods to this particular side of German history. The whole thing was very maudlin and I don't know why but what struck me the most was seeing the striped pajamas that they were forced to wear. There was a wall where you could write and leave messages and I left a note as a small token to the impact it had on me. It's a difficult experience but I think everyone should visit a concentration camp in their lifetime. It can make you deeply contemplate the limitations of cruelty that humans can surpass.

The next day we visited beautiful Potsdam which is just outside of Berlin. It's an idyllic quiet town which was overrun by us English students singing "Paparazzi" at the top of our lungs. There are windmills and palaces and markets and grand churches and it's like another world. That night we went to a club and by the end of the night everybody was dancing (including the teachers). I only had three drinks that night (and a damn small cola I spent more than 3 fucking euros on!) as I could not afford to get drunk again both morally and economically. Friday was a sad day as it was our last and we went shopping in Alexander platz. I managed to stretch my last five euros quite far and bought a tiny converse sneaker keyring, a Berlin t-shirt, a coffee & cream eyeliner pencil and some twisted beads.

The art on the walls...

By the Riverside

At the begining of the night when no-one is drunk ebough to start dancing YET (that happened five minutes later...)

Some more art in the outdoor gallery

The Jewish memorial. You have to be there to really understand it.

These guys REALLY had talent but somehow only the girls could see this....

A tip to future visitors of Germany: Probably not the BEST idea to buy a communist-style hat in a formerly fascist country (the poor guy was just trying to be ironic but he got a lot of dirty glares)...

Some cool Germans we met outside the Sand Bar

The morning after the night before...

The view from the top of Reichstag

The striped Pj's at Sachsenhausen

A sure fire sign of a good night...

Back home and looking ROUGH...

THAT necklace

I'm in love with that necklace. That's all. xoxoxo

A 1940's housewife crossed with a 50's bombshell silhouette and 1960's commercial prints with some on trend modern fringing

Ok so forget my previous post. Before I go I HAD to post some pictures from the Lena Hoschek Spring/Summer 2010 collection from Berlin fashion week. The look is...well the title pretty much sums it up and there are some subtle folkloric hints to her Austrian roots is you look real carefully :) Check out the Elvis print on one of the dresses and a shirt: tres chic or tres fou? I'm kinda undecided but I think she pulled it off without it looking tacky...and I'll forgive her cause the rest of her collection is GORGEOUS! XOXOXO

Sprechen Sie Deutsch? BERLIN '09

This may be my last post for a couple of days because as of 3am on Monday morning (what I still consider as Sunday night) I am headed for the German capital of Berlin with my a-level History class. I'm really excited, though a bit annoyed we didn't go last week when it was Berlin fashion week- it's like my school doesn't care about the international fashion schedule(!). I've been to Munich before but never Berlin and it just seems brimming with culture, great music, cool people and definatly an... interesting history. However, we may have the week off school but, despite what SOME people think, it's not a HOLIDAY. My idea of a hoiday is not five days touring museams, memorials and concentration camps and being herded like cattle from one place to another like those poor italian students I see around Reading (only without the orange hoodies) but that won't stop us having a good time and we have most evenings off so it will be cool to explore and I'm going to take loads of pictures and who knows, maybe I'll be inspired.

Enter Mystery Challenger and Sign in Please

Ok don't laugh but I've had a new hobby, kind of an addiction, for a while now....a guilty pleasure I don't really feel all that guilty about. Some people watch I love Lucy re-runs, some people secretly read Pippi Longstocking books and some people listen to the soundtrack of Mary Poppins to unwind after a stressful day. I spend my time on Youtube watching 1950's &60's writers, movie stars and musicians (basically the creme-de-le-creme of the society pages back then) on What's My Line. You're probably thinking "What the fuck?" and if you are, let me explain what I understand to be the general format: There is a panel of so-called experts who are blind folded and then a celebrity personality comes out and they ask them Yes/No questions to try to figure out who they are, in which the celebrity must adopt an accent to disguise their natural voise, especially if it's distinctive. It's a fairly simple concept and hugely entertaining and I bless the person/people who have uploaded these archives for us to view. You can find the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Salvador Dali, Sue Lyon, Walt Disney, Ava Gardner, Julie Andrews, Lauren Becall, Natalie Wood, Eleanor Roosenvelt and William Holden, among others but my all time favourite has to be Elizabeth Taylor. Her comedic essence and her natural grace are just bought out so well in this clip...

"We're here for the bank's money, not yours."- Public Enemies

Today, Michael Mann's latest film, Public Enemies, was released in the UK so naturally I went to see it. I usually buy dvds or watch movies online (and if you saw the prices of cinema tickets nowadays you'd probably think it a wise decision) but every now and then a film comes along where I think, "You'd regret missing the chance to see this on the big screen" and this was one I had my eye on for some time. I mean a Crime/Drama/Thriller starring the tour-de-force that is the beautiful & talented Marion Cottillard in company with the equally talented & handsome Johnny Depp and Christian Bale...this movie screams "MUST SEE!" I didn't know all that much about John Dillinger prior to this film to be perfectly honest so, even though it's not a biopic, I can't assess how much is fiction and how much is historical fact but that doesn't deter from the fact that this was a superbly crafted cat-and-mouse drama with an excellent soundtrack. The camera work was slightly poor but the acting was no less than powerful to make up for it. I was nervous, initially, about Cotillard's Academy-Award winning performance skills to be wasted as just the "token female" but her role really progressed and, especially towards the end, she became a vital part of the plot. Bale, I mean goes without saying that he was excellent as the determined agent Melvin Pervis and last but not at all least is the living legend that is Mr Johnny Depp. Now I'm not someone who worships him but I can't deny that his body of work, his filmography, is pretty damn impressive. He has that rare ability to carry and command the screen like a leading man but is still an excellent character actor with tremendous range that applies himself to every single role 110% and it damn well pays off, especially as the notorious bank robber John. The relationships between the characters were well structured, especially between John and Cotillard's character, Billie, who's relationship is driven by real love and it's actually believable. Add some nailbiting suspenseful moments and some easy humour and you got a film which is not too shabby. Really reccomend this film. xoxoxox