Tag: party

Live Music

Hi all,

On Friday I finished my first half of a semester of University. (I wish I could paste sound effects into my writing – here I would place that cheesy clapping cheer that is played in old TV series). It was a great relief and I am very much ready for a break. I flew home on Saturday surrounded by many of my peers relieved, like me, and most, unlike me, hungover (which lead to amusing expressions on their faces when turbulence hit).

My first job as I got back was to be sent off as a chaperon for my sister and her friends to the One Direction (minus one) concert. I’m not a fan, there music isn’t aweful and they certainly aren’t ugly, but their music is just not my type of music. Regardless I went along and I was excited because a concert vibe is always cool and I hadn’t spent time with my sister in about two months and I was thrilled that I would get to party with her for the whole evening.

We were seated in the very back row at the very top so if you squinted you could sort of see the little men running around on stage and, based on the colour of their t-shirts, guess who was who. The concert for me was average. The vibe was average (I think the screaming teenage girl factor put a dampen on the evening). The performance was average. After watching Bon Jovi, a man with great experience, on the very same stage it was hard for the barely-more-than-teenage boys to live up to him. They also seemed a little stiff, understandably, after losing their fifth member. If I am honest they weren’t that bad and the ‘directioners’ had a ball but it just wasn’t my type of music.

Cape Town I have discovered makes live music far more accessible than it was in Joburg and I have been able to watch a couple of live shows since arrving. These are South African bands who sing good, interesting, natural music that sounds like once upon a time it was practiced for hours in someones garage. So far I have seen Beatenberg, Gangs of Ballet, Desmond and the Tutus and some smaller bands including Early Hours, the Pranks and others. This has been a far more enjoyable experience of music than with the masses at FNB stadium watching a franchise on 8 legs.I watched some of the bands at a Kirstenbosch Summer Sunday Concert (a regular event in the Early months of Cape Town set at the incredible botanical gardens). You take a picnic and pick a spot on the lawn and then listen to the music while admiring the beauty of the Gardens. Beatenberg is a band I have liked since I watched them live at the Bastille concert at the beginning of last year and Gangs of Ballet was an added bonus. Because both bands are still relatively small, they have to rely quite heavily on their live performances and because the setting is more intimate their sound ends up being more natural and to my ears more beautiful. I even got to meet Beatenberg (who are very cool in person) and I took a Polaroid with them. I would just reflect on this…. I TOOK A POLAROID WITH ONE OF MY FAVOURITE BANDS (and I think they may have been more excited about it than I was) now do you think you could say that about One Direction?

The other bands I saw at a club/venue place in town called ‘The Assembly’ which hosts live bands and seems to be hipster watering hole in Cape Town. It is also relatively small and we got pretty close and personal with the performing bands (and afterwards managed to do some creepy fan-girling and met a few members). Desomond and the Tutus are crazy and incredible to watch because the lead singer is insane on stage. Maybe they have this luxury because they aren’t performing for 90000 people at a time but they also appear to have a different care-free attitude while on stage.

Since arriving in Cape Town I have had so many opportunities to watch and experience live music and I think this helping to keep my soul content (and balances out the excessive maths my brain is being harassed with)

I hope you are enjoying your week so far.

x J

Self or other?

I’ve always found myself attracted to the worlds of creativity whether it be music, drama, dance, art (etc) I’ve tried my hand at all that I could, ending up much better at some areas than others and so although I still love to watch and listen to music and dance I spend more time in the drama and art arena because it come more natural to my own self.  At my school both drama and art are offered as subjects and so when it came to choosing it would be probable to assume that I would take both but alas I couldn’t because I have interest in quite a few spheres so I was forced to choose. It was an extremely difficult decision but I settled on continuing with art while maintaining my drama passions out of school.

And so I began the rigorous three years of senior art which I must admit tested my very soul more than any other subject ever could but it was worth it. I love art and by the doing the subject I was able to find myself in it.

In matric, along with your final papers which you must prepare for, you also do practicals in certain subjects and obviously the very nature of art dictates that a major part of your final mark must come from a prac. So many months before exams the IEB (Independent Examination Board – the group that sets our exams) releases a theme to which every private school matric art student must do a work. Ours was “Self/Other”… a horrible theme. I looked at it and groaned. I had no idea what to do and I certainly didn’t want to do a self-portrait because I have done far too many of those and so I felt stuck. The point of art however is too be creative and I suppose the seemingly boring theme worked to push us to be creative and so I formed an idea.

I am currently trying to figure out my place in the world as a woman and how I feel about feminism, sexism and such topics so I decided to use the work to delve into these ideas and so from almost the beginning I knew that I would do a feminist piece and look at how women’s “selves” are defined. Something else which a love in particular about art is the way a viewer will look at an artwork and see something different to another viewer depending on their personal views and so I wanted to somehow incorporated this idea of seeing yourself in an artwork in a strong way. The third thing I decided I wanted to make a part of the work was audience participation. I made a puzzle out of an earlier work of mine and I had loads of fun making it and when other people actually got to touch and feel and play with the art work the joy that it bought them was completely worthwhile for me as an artist to see and so I wanted to take that and bring it into this work.

There are some rules to making art for the IEB: it can’t be plagiarism, it has to be your own ideas and work and there has to be at least two works, one piece can be anything and then it must be accompanied by a thematic drawing which has to be a piece showing drawing skills (although the word drawing like everything else in art is often reinterpreted quite creatively by the students).

I didn’t do two works… I did a great deal more.

My main piece was three works and they focused on the idea that society will see a woman and judge her stereotypically because of certain traits. Now I am well aware that this also happened to men but I do believe that it is stronger and it has a greater effect against women. The work was called “I see you in me”, and consisted of three woman each drawn life-sized of their portraits. The first was ‘The hipster’ as I like to call her. She is a young woman with tattoos and piercings. The background is a triangle pattern based on the hipster triangle. I find that often much more so than men a woman will be looked down on, dismissed and abused because she has tattoos. Most people automatically create a judgement based on those tattoos before they even know the woman beneath them. The next work was ‘The businesswoman’ she is a black businesswoman. I find that woman in a commercial environment especial black woman in a country like South Africa are judged to be hard, cold, less than their male counterparts, having gotten their position through alternative ways (etc). I got the background pattern from one of the patterns on the new South African R200 note design. It is both a traditionally based pattern but also symbolic of the business world. The last was a young Muslim girl who I referred to as ‘The religious woman’. I feel like women involved in specific religions are judged both by those within and out of their religions are expected to full very specific roles. I feel like this is even more dramatic currently for Muslim women due to the current social views and prejudice rocking the globe.

I place broken mirror over the faces of the women in all three works so that when you look into the work you literally see yourself reflected in the work. This was to help incorporate the self or other theme on more than one level. I was already discussing the idea of women’s selves and others’ judgements but now I could bring in the idea that you can see yourself literally reflected in the art work and hopefully this would help the emotional reflection in the work. I think the mirror added extra depth and became another fun element to the work.

I then moved on to the thematic drawing. I did two pieces. One was a fun piece which was rather uncomplicated and didn’t require much work on my part. I was inspired by an incredible audience participation piece called Measuring the Universe by Roman Ondak. This was an installation in the Modern Museum of Art in New York where people could go and measure themselves. A simple idea true but it turned out incredibly. I wanted to do something which would require a similar involvement from my viewers. So I posed the question “What is a woman?” and the audience could then write on the page what they thought the answer was. I was excited about the work and curious as to what the reaction would be. I was, I must admit, disappointed. I go to an all-girl school and overestimated the young women’s intellectual connection both with feminism and art and the work turned into a bit of a joke to some people. It still came out with interesting results. There were the obvious words such as “strength”, “virtue”, “love” and so forth which appeared many times. There were then more modern words such as “swag”, “Beyonce”, and “Bootay” which I hadn’t expected. Some girls also chose to write their own names for whatever reason which was intriguing. One of the most notable things for me was that some people had written negative names (fine by me as I do believe a woman is not perfect) but someone had gone and meticulously crossed out every negative word. I found it odd that someone would be so disturbed by the idea of our imperfections that they had tried to erase them. I still feel the work had more potential than was reached by my school peers.

The other piece was far more complicated. Going on the idea of my puzzle I decided I wanted to make another work with game like qualities. I remembered playing games when I was very little with blocks where each block would have different features and depending which way round you displayed them you could have different objects, animals or characters. I wanted to apply this to the feminist work. I decided I would make a giant cube of faces which could be turned to create different faces. I started by drawing four square works of four different girls’ faces (one, I admit, a self-portrait). When these were done a photographed them and printed the faces out in various sizes. I then made three boxes of different sizes. Then I collaged the photos onto the boxes to create faces reminiscent of Picasso. I was originally concerned about the collage effect but ended up liking it… I am not completely sure why. This piece I called “Step Right Up” and the idea was that you could ‘step right up and make your own woman’. I collaged the tops and bottoms of the boxes with various words out of magazines which had been biased against women. I was amazed at how I found word after word, article after article which told women to act, dress and look a certain way to fit into the world, to be good enough for men. I was angered by how easy it was to make this collage. I wanted the box to point out how the media and others end up defining the role a woman must fill. I wanted my viewer to step forward and have fun making a woman’s face but also realise when they stepped away how they might have seen or participated in this in real life. I wanted this work to be intriguing and fun for my audience but I also wanted to leave them with a deeper message.

Over all I think my matric work was a success. I don’t say this to be boastful but more because I really enjoyed making the work. I enjoyed the experimental part of it and what I could learn while making the work. I still am confused in the land of feminist but I was very enlightened while making this work and I hope I managed to enlighten at least a few of my viewers.

Please note that these are my own works and my own ideas.

Silly Week – Day 1 (JTB)

At some South African Schools, including my own, when you get to your last week/term/day/s (depending on the schools’ specifics) of matric (and high school), you get to dress up, play pranks and participate in a manner of different silliness. It is done to relax and have one last group effort of fun and games before settling down to study and celebrates the last days the grade is together as a whole.

Ours began on Friday. We played a number of pranks including cling-wrapping passageways, hiding school bags, disrupting classes to play 30 seconds with younger grades (with the teacher’s permission of course), serenading teachers and having an absolute crazy ball.

The thing which I find most fun about the whole event (other than it becoming acceptable to bunk classes) is the dressing up. We have decided on a different theme for everyday to which we all have to dress up. For our first day we had to dress up as anything which starts with the letter J, T or B. These were chosen as our head girls name is Jess and her deputies are Teffie and Bonnie. It was loads of fun and some girls went to extreme lengths of creativity.

A friend of mine and I went as Thing 1 and Thing 2 (from Dr Seuss’s Cat in the Hat). We wore plain red tops, printed signs off the internet and pinned them to our shirts, borrowed two blue wigs and invested in some large mens working pants (in red of course). I think our look came out successfully but you can decide. The other ideas which my peers came up with were also a myriad of characters ranging from builders, to joggers to pregnant ‘baby mammas’ and ‘township hoes’ and even Jesus.

Below are pictures of some of my favourite looks whether it was because of costume or creativity. (Please excuse the state of some of the photographs, the girls were so excited they just couldn’t stand still.)

A classic dress up pair and ofcourse I always jump at the oportunity to do anything Dr Seuss. This was my look for the day.
Hey if you look like a Barbie why not? although I did think the dog was a bit much (and maybe a bit cruel)
Jack Parrow is an Afrikaans rapper and famous in South Africa for his oversized hat. Excuse the hand gestures but it is definately necessary when representing Parrow truthfully.
All I can say is that this was entertaining. I think a vibrent personality adds a great deal of entertainment to this look.
I thought this idea was cute but classy and practical as well. She wanted to bring mugs of beer to complete the look but decided it might be inapropriate for a school event.
I dont know if she raided her mother’s closet or the nearby second-hand shop but it must have been fun to be a bride for the day. There were other brides but this girl took the cake and won hands down.
This is always a good and classic pair to dress up as.
I thought that the bubble-wrap was funny nd creatice but she did eventually begin to boil under all the plastic and had to take it off. The ballerina was also a cute and simple idea and not so boiling.
You dont need a shop bought ‘princess look’ to be a recognisable disney character.
Township is the name for a specific urban settlement in South Africa and came about during apartheid. These places are still called townships today but are no longer segregated. This group each picked a stereotypical township character to dress up as. This is an entertaining yet uniquely South African dress up idea
I am focussing on her in particular out of the Township Gang because I think this style is on top point and deserves a mention of its own.
This two ideas, especially the beggar, are two ideas which are cheap and easy to create yes come out looking impressive and understandable.
Jack Sparrow is always a good dresss up idea in my opinion. The box: this was a simple yet completely genius idea.
It is always good to have a reminder of how you spent your childhood while saying goodbye to it. As a major teletubbie fan this was nostalgic.
Because we do actually get many of these stereotypical tourists in SA it made this look clever and funny. The Twister I thought was one of the most creative looks and came out with great success.
Baby was one of the most common dress ups but the giant dummy and cap definitely made this look the best one.

Birthday Blog

Happy, happy birthday to me!

On Monday it was my 18th birthday (finally) and surprisingly I do feel quite grown up. I feel terrified about the future but also huge excitement because now everything is truly at my finger tips.

 

I guess the big question is… what did I do to celebrate?

I didn’t go out and get drunk but rather on Saturday I had a lunch with all my girl friends (I go to an all girls school so I have more girl friends than guy friends). I personally feel that a lunch is far more intimate and celebratory than watching 100 of your closest fake friends get drunk and vomit on your carpet. I don’t see how a) this is fun, b) this celebrates the host’s birthday or c) is any different from a regular house party. Plus I think that neither my parents nor my house would have survived a hectic party anyway.

 

I was born in winter but I always wanted to be a spring baby, there always seemed to be something elitist about the title, and so the theme for my lunch was spring. Luckily the cold days stayed away on Saturday and although it wasn’t as warm as spring the sun was shining and we could wear bright floral patterned dresses.

As soon as people found out about my theme they wanted to help which I was really grateful for. We borrowed chairs and tables from my neighbours and my family and a woman who had done a similar theme for her daughter’s birthday gave us table cloths and rows and rows of buntings which we hung around our house and completely transformed the place. I have found a new love for buntings. I’m not sure why I think rows of triangle shaped pieces of fabric are so beautiful but I do.

For other decorations my sister and I collected jars (mostly coffee and mayonnaise jars – don’t worry we don’t eat these two things together but w do go through a lot of both) out our glass recycling bin and my mother filled them with beautiful flowers while others were filled with colourful sweets.

For food we decided on bread and coronation chicken as well as lots of different types of salads and quiches (thanks mommy for all your hard work making these). I found a great (and easy) Martha Stewart recipe for pink lemonade which I made and surprisingly it tasted pretty good – I say surprising not because I have little faith in Ms Stewart but rather in myself. We also made fruit infused water which just tasted like lemon and mint in the end but was still good.

I was also spoilt rotten by a dear friend of mine who made me a cake but I didn’t know what it looked like till she arrived at my doorstep with an incredible two tiered cake covered in meringue icing (yes this exists and you have to taste it) and homemade macaroons which tasted amazing.

The beauty of the theme, the colours and the flowers started the day off with an amazing positive atmosphere and all my friends were happy which made the day even more pleasant for me. I had an incredible day and I would lik to thank everyone who was involved.

May the next year be a good one for me and you.