Spring Ramble

Can't believe that three months have been frittered away so that we are almost a quarter of the way through 2010!! Where has all this time gone?

The last semester has been a blur of house parties and sleepless nights. However I am closer to finishing some skirts from my fashion course! No more mindless finger puppets to while away the hours...

But the biggest bugger up is the whole losing my camera thing so no photos to display today... But I'm sure I will somehow get more to put up for your entertainment (you know who you are).

I keep thinking about after Uni... What the hell am I supposed to do? Damn this 'shitty combined honours' that I do!

Until I have something concrete to write I am going to leave you with a simple au revoir and the notion that I need to watch more America's Next Top Model.


Ciao Bella Xx 

Fashion Ramble

Hola Chica.

It's that time of year where we look to Spring and Summer because, let's face it, the Winter and snow has gone on for far too long and we're freezing our legging clad buts off for the sake of fashion. We're looking for new and innovative fashions that are going to give us that hope and inspiration to work through this Winter to see the beautiful, HOT, sunlight at the end of the tunnel. (Here's hoping).

Believe me. We are ALL freezing in this photo... Not quite snowy, but definitely a sub-zero chill/wind factor!!

Well, seeing as I am stranded at home, unable to venture out my front door due to the obscene amounts of snow that we have had to deal with this past week, instead of revising (exams???) I have been trawling through the latest magazines, taking note of the latest trends and forcing myself to believe that summer is just around the corner - give or take a few months.

So as I was faced with the February 2010 edition of Elle I removed my gloves and donned my specs in the hope of better things to come.

I love the new Chanel ad campaigns; Zorro meets a less-than-virtuous milkmaid.

However, I'm not quite feeling the new adverts for Gucci's Spring/Summer 2010,
or indeed Dolce and Gabbana's collection...







It reminded me far too much of last year's Guess ad campaign...

Which in turn I thought I recognised from cocoperez.com...

Nevertheless, finally having a look through something that did not include any sort of poetry or Victorian literature I was more relieved than ever to have a glossy magazine between my fingertips!

As we start a new decade I wonder whether we are going to rehash previous trends, (the '80's are still going strong) or start something new (Alexander McQueen's Armadillo heels)? I'm looking forward to a season where we take our own initiative and are proud inventors of our own trend, and hopefully NOT the Snuggie!

The main designers that manage to catch my untrained eye are the collections by none other than the biggest names in fashion; Chanel, Dior and Versace. They manage to epitomize elegance with a style that our modern world sometimes lacks through forgetfulness. Having said that, Proenza Schouler's daring tie-dye range of fun, wearable, summer surfer chic will be a constant beacon of ideas and inspiration for my own summer wardrobe. Ralph Lauren had a  return of denim, dungarees and 'dustbowl America', whereas Celine had a realist take on a durable monochrome and neutral pallet. In all, I think that this Spring/Summer (if it ever arrives) will be a nod of the head to 2010, a new decade, a new direction and a new sense of hope for the future.

Ciao Bellas Xx

Rambling Birthday

This is just a wee short notice about a 21st Birthday today!!!

As I am ALWAYS broke and have no way of express my love and happiness for a certain lady in my life I thought I would show my love through a wonderful miniblog.

To you dear Kimbers I wish a fantastic 21st birthday and we will celebrate IN STYLE once we are reunited up North. Until then, this is all for you...

I close my eyes and think of you

And Cupsy holding hands.

Add capybara to the mix

And dream of far off lands.

Where curly boys and Jellihags

Reside together and

Making an almost even six,

Are still quite incomplete.

We need a slug and wait, a straw

For diet coke no less, 

And cheese (for some) even bacon

Make the world so much more.
 

Still a pink dressing gown needed, 

An accent like no other,

(Oh no). Throw a horse in the mix

And finally we have a birthday wish.

Very spur of the moment poem which I know makes no sense. But it really was the best I could think of!!

Love to all of you and of course Happy Birthday.

Ciao Bellas Xx

New Year Ramble

Ahh, the first ramble of 2010... Happy New Year!!!

Cannot believe I'm in the second decade of my life now... Where has the time gone? It does not feel that I have been in the UK for 10 years... Though as I try and remember the years passed, actually a lot has happened, and considering there are a lot of days (like yesterday/today) where I tend to sit in my room watching and rewatching Gossip Girl or reading or even a little bit of work (!), it isn't surprising that we are unaware of where the time goes.

I know that new year is supposed to signify a new you. Or at least that's what all the magazines say.

Be thin, this year!

Get the man you want, this year!

Be rich, this year!

Get the satisfaction you deserve, this year!

Be self-empowered, this year!

It's no wonder that we put all this pressure on ourselves in January to be this all new person, better than we ever were before. We all make resolutions, but how many of us actually manage to keep them past the first week? We are human. We are prone to failure and give in all to easily to temptation. I don't think that's something that we ourselves are ever going to be able to change, unless we somehow learn to become something that we are not.

My only new years resolution, is to try and be kinder and more positive. Of course in the back of my head I know that whatever I mentally prepare myself for, I cannot help the inevitable irritation that some people just cannot control. Nor can I control my own anger, counting to 100 more likely to help than counting to 10!

My parents thought I should try give up swearing, which I shall try, at least in front of them.

My friends from home thought that I should try and be less like me, or rather just try to tone down my personality. Not sure whether I will give this one ago, because I like being loud and boisterous.

Up North I'm not quite sure what my friends there would want my resolution to be, probably something along the lines of write more emo poetry/draw with your own blood, all for their amusement of course. But there too, no can do (that's all the rhyming you're going to get from me).

Resolutions are all very well, but there is far too much pressure on the beginning of a new year to be the perfect person. By February we have all resorted back to our old selves and are swearing, stopped going to the gym, kept the pounds we gained over Christmas and are as grouchy as ever. I think that if we lost this notion of a 'new you' over the new year and just took it within ourselves to change when it is right for us then we would all get a lot further on in our resolutions. Or at least there would be less pressure to be perfect from January onwards...

I know I'm not perfect (ish) but there isn't much about me that I want to change. Is that so wrong?

It seems fitting to end this ramble with a quote from Gossip Girl...

You know you love me

xoxo

Ciao Bellas Xx

Christmas Ramble

Ok, so it's technically a couple of days after Christmas. But I'm sure (what with it being the season of Christmas) you can forgive my belated seasons greetings.

Ahh Christmas. Rowing families. Too much food. Too much TV. High expectations. Yada yada yada.

It's the same every year so why do we put so much effort into a tradition that has now lost all meaning? Anyone remember that small child that was born some 2000 years ago so that we could have this feast? Love being a Christian at Christmas time, makes you feel all good inside. Unlike at Easter, when the guilt erodes your soul.

However, during church the other day, while singing Happy Birthday to Jesus, I was thinking about the whole Christmas charade. Technically we are celebrating the Winter Solstice, the bleak midwinter pagan festival necessary to try and chirp ourselves up during the long cold winter months. Which doesn't really have anything to do with some small child who created an entire new branch of religion.

Far too stressful to think about when tired.

Regardless of my ramblings, we do celebrate Christmas as a family holiday and although the reason behind Christmas has been warped over the years, it is comforting to know that we travel far and wide to be with out loved ones over the longest, hardest, coldest days of the year.

Merry Christmas and a happy new year.

Ciao Bellas Xx

A Beautiful Ramble (That I can't claim to have written)

In my Victorian literature module we are about to start studying Elizabeth Barret Browning (1806-1861).

She was a poet who wrote some incredible love poems, one of which has completely captured my heart and all I want to do is share it with you.

This is number 43 from a collection of sonnets called Sonnets from the Portuguese.

So here goes.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of everyday's

Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints, - I love thee with the breath, 

Smiles, tears, of all my life! - and, if God choose, 

I shall but love thee better after death.

There is no way in hell that you can not feel the passion behind that poem. I just hope that it brightens up your day. I will write something new soon.

Far too much work on at the moment, hence I'm actually doing work in the middle of the afternoon! (ok, with slight procrastination).



Anyway love you all.

Ciao Bellas Xx

 

Rambled Baudrillard

Evening,
So this is going to be a little different to the usual posts that I do... I'm not going to cut out the self-indulgence but this also isn't about my life. Much.

In one of my Sociology lectures on Thursday we discussed Jean Baudrillard, the French Philosopher and Sociologist. We read an obituary from the Guardian on Baudrillard and then proceeded to attempt a civilised deliberation.

You might need a little bit of background knowledge about this Seminar I have. It is taken by a middle-aged, female, Communist who spends her life in black. Someone who I would never want to get on the wrong side of!

Anyway, of the 15 or so people that turn up to this Seminar, I'd say that easily 1/3 are mature students. Mature students who have an extra couple of decades' worth of life experience to add to their knowledge and opinions compared to the green Undergraduates who have just come out of college for the standard University life.

We are all supposed to read the obituary, and answer two questions ready for discussion:
1.) Consider what has been the main contribution of Baudrillard to Social Theory.
2.) What are the advantages and disadvantages of Baudrillard's theory?

Well. Baudrillard, born in 1929, could easily be referred to as a Post-modernist, and even a Conspiracy theorist. He questioned reality, mistrusted the media and believed in a 'hyper-reality'. It was he who helped to coin the term 'virtual-reality' and decided that we are the "simulacrum of (ourselves)." The portrayal of Baudrillard through his obituary gives the impression that he was a very ironic, sarcastic, entertaining and somewhat cynical man. He is perceived as a very influential contemporary social theorist, but his entire arguments about how we don't exist in a real world, (yeah, the Gulf War never actually happened) sound as if he wanted to make an absurd theory just to see who would follow it.

For example, the 1999 film The Matrix takes many of his ideas and uses them to create this fictitious world where we are all controlled by machines in a world that doesn't really exist. However, Baudrillard protested against the film saying that, "The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce," and so doesnt want to get involved with it personally. Despite his reasoning and firm belief of 'virtual-reality' he doesn't ever give us a way to become real; it's almost as if we are doomed to live in this 'hyper-reality'!

So the examples that my fellow students start to fling around the classroom include; Disney-isation (apparently that is a word), airbrushing, films (CGI in particular), computer games, plastic surgery, internet dating, fashion, the list is endless. According to Baudrillard, Disney films and Disneyland/world corrupt our children into believing in a false world. We are socially conditioning them to believe in the 'happily ever after' ending, that animals can talk, that, in the case of Pocahontas, history wasn't at all bloody and painful but in fact a walk in the park.

Then of course general films were brought into the mix, how we apparently believe that what happens in the films happened in real life. Seriously, the Saw franchise would have a field day if they knew that everyone completely believed in the horrendous torture that occurs throughout those films. The conversation then rambled on to airbrushing. On to how our 'virtual life' no longer knows what it is to be beautiful and how we all want to look younger and we have to look like the celebrities in the magazines who have flawless skin and are size zero.

Apparently there is this incessant need for us to want to achieve 'the American Dream' but in actual fact chasing that dream is giving in to the 'virtual reality' and embracing our simulacrum. The line between what is real and what is virtual is being blurred by our society and we are letting it. We just try to fulfil our wants, without really knowing what it is what we want, because we never have enough. We get seduced into wanting to possess objects and adopt styles that say more about who we are than we can ourselves.

Baudrillard has a point in that we are completely obsessed with the idea of celebrity and instant gratification and this idea of globalisation - that the entire (Western) world is obsessed with having one economy, one financial market that can be monopolised for capitalist gain. It was Marx who said that capitalism was the result of the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, which Baudrillard expanded on to say that it the class distinctions had 'been replaced, in the "post-industrial" era, with the problem of simulation'.

Yet is it fair to say that we don't know what is real? Taking it to the extreme, we can't honestly, 100% know anything about anyone else's lives unless we experienced it firsthand. Everything that we hear from other people we judge based on our perception and the reliability of the source, but if we have been socially conditioned to believe; the 6 o'clock news, the Guardian, the internet etc. then why would we ever have any reason to doubt it?

In reference to the ideas that people can spend their entire lives blinkered by 'virtual reality', I don't doubt that it is possible. Some people may lack actual social skills and thus spend their lives hiding away on the computer, having virtual relationships, ordering their food online, doing work at home, talking to people on networking sites, watching films and tv, reading nothing other than what is fed to them through their frequented websites, playing games in virtual worlds, and their lives do lack any form of reality, think the Disney (!) Pixar (!!) film Wall-E, set in the distant future.

However ironic Baudrillard tries and succeeds to be, he does bring up some interesting points about where we are headed. I find it difficult to understand wanting to explain the gory details of war to a child who wants nothing more than to see moving pictures and a simple storyline, or how we can honestly believe that men and women over the age of 40 can be wrinkle free without plastic surgery or airbrushing (which I accidentally said in out loud in the seminar... Didn't go down too well).

We live in a world where we care about our image and how we dress and we aspire to have a better life. How is that unreal? The Western world have it ingrained that we should be ambitious, aim high and want more than we have. How is that unreal? We want to believe what we are told because it is easier for us to believe than to question everything, we want to have easy and happy lives with no troubles or scandals. How is that unreal?

But then, in comparison to our capitalist, commodity fetishism there is the hard reality of poverty, discrimination, prejudice, environmental disasters and crime, which is impossible to escape and is the only life that some people know. They have no access to our 'hyper-reality'. Escapism escapes the very people who need it most and we are stuck in a world where we are more concerned about fashion and plastic surgery than saving lives and trying to live the most real life that we can imagine. One without the desolate hardships or the ridiculous extravagance.

Ciao Bellas
Xx