Decor Inspiration from TV Shows

Sex And The City (1998 - 2004)

Movie of the week: Blue Jasmine

Yesterday I saw Woody latest movie. From all the critics I read about it I was expecting a big thing and it really was. Time passes and I just become more and more addicted to his work, not only he is a genius director but a fantastic writer. I guess he sees the world and human relations as I do, that's why it’s worth watch it in a theater.

To bear in mind:

1.       Cate Blanchett is absolutely fantastic

2.       Amazing sights of San Francisco

3.       The soundtrack is all that jazz! Best track:

The greatest hip-hop songs playlist

Food that can change your life

I’m on diet which means hard times, I have a sugar addiction. However, this combination can be perfectly healthy (in appropriate amounts) and tasty...dark chocolate and green tea as desert. Yummi…

No wonder oriental people live longer, as I read “if you eat dark chocolate ( 70% percent cacao) more than twice a week and you'll have one-third less artery-clogging plaque and will cut your risk for heart attack and stroke by 30 percent. And green tea is packed with anti-inflammatory compounds that fight skin, breast, lung, colon, esophagus and bladder cancers. Plus, it lowers the risk of high blood pressure”, nice one!

Watch - Eddie Murphy - Red Light ft Snoop Lion

Eddie Murphy came back to his music career. Jah Love!

Watch - Arcade Fire - "Reflektor" - 2013

Watch - These New Puritans - "Organ Eternal"

Bob Dylan's choices... for waking up real quick

1- Swing Low Sweet Cadillac - Dizzy  Gillespie

2- Umbrella Man - Dizzy  Gillespie

3- Hot House - Charlie Parker

Man of the Year

Well, good morning ladies, how do you like Joseph Gordon-Levitt, classy or casual? I fancy his style a lot and looking forward to see his upcoming movie "Don Jon".

Style of the day

 

Love this picture... Just like Sarah I'm in the packing mood... I'm looking forward to pack all my summer clothes in the wardrobe's bottom, dress the autumn-winter outfits and face the cold wind.

Mercury Prize 2013

Arctic Monkeys - AM

James Blake - Overgrown

David Bowie - The Next Day

Jake Bugg - Jake Bugg

Disclosure - Settle

Foals - Holy Fire

Jon Hopkins - Immunity

Laura Marling - Once I was An Eagle

Laura Mvula - Sing To The Moon

Rudimental - Home

Savages - Silence Yourself

Villagers - Awayland 

 Winner to be announced on 30 October.

I Love London too

 

 

I heard these guys at Festival Optimus Alive. Everyone was jumping out and having a great time, including my friend who didn't stop dancing the entire show... This song was probably amongst the few songs I danced or jumped, as you prefer. P.S Teenagers love them.

Bars with jukeboxes

NYC - Jimmy's Corner

Manhattan - The Rusty Knot

Brooklyn - Skinny Dennis

Song for the day

"I've been infected with restless, whispers and cheats..." this song sticks in everyone's head.

 

To The Wonder

 Recommended Movie.

Monday

The best of The Bling Ring

Sofia Coppola is a great GREAT director. I don't have any critics to her films. She moved from the loneliness lives to criticized the superficial empty society of Vanity Fair so well. An ambiguous movie based on the real story: The Suspects Wore Louboutins. What an aesthetic sensibility, tasteful, glamorous, well-done Coppola, clap! clap! clap!

1. Emma Watson, the "English Rose" surprising role. Keep an eye on her, she has the potential to win an Oscar soon.

2. Lucid quotes about Facebook generation and celebrity culture

3. Super cool soundtrack, as always.

Top 5 hangover songs

Good-looking brothers

I like KOL since 2003 album "Youth and Young Manhood" but stopped listening to this guys when "Sex is On Fire" was playing on and on in commercial radios. They replaced their rock n' roll blues with a kind of repetitive, equal boring, pop-rock. However, after seeing them at Optimus Alive, I started to enjoying them again... I just hope they will come back to good old days. Meanwhile I'm listening to "On Call" on a loop... and Caleb Followill ... I'd marry him,  Xoxo

Aren't they cute?

Karen Walker New Zealand fashion designer.

A beat like this...

Check this album-film from TV On The Radio...just awesome!

What's wrong about The Wire gangster's style?

Soooooooooo cool... I love TV On The Radio

Movie of the Week: Paradise: Love

Glad my first feelings are right. When I was choosing what to see from Indie Lisboa 13 and after read a couple of plots I though Paradise Love by Ulrich Seidl would be worth see. But, I couldn’t make it to the movies and only saw it yesterday night in my cosy sofa.

The story focuses on a group of Austrian middle-aged women “Sugar Mamas” seeking for love in Kenya, where love is itself a business, a money source to many young men who accept to get involved with the European tourists solely to get money. All the characters are fictional although at some part we might begin to mistake it with reality. It has freshness.

Paradise Love is a clever movie, with some Freud quotes, so you better be prepared for the psychological double-meaning in every small dialogs. The subjects are race, sex, overweight, aging, Africa versus Europe “This is Africa, just love”. Paradise Love left high expectations to see the other two parts of the trilogy Paradise. I might go back on Ulrich Seidl previous documentaries too.  7/10

Movie of the Week: Shut Up and Play the Hits

“Shut Up and Play the Hits”, is a musical documentary about the end of LCD Soundsystem shot in 2012. The story is more or less the band’s last show in New York City and the time before and after that moment. It is remarkable especially when you can feel how good people they all are, the great vibe during the concert, the strength of NYC lights, and imagine how James Murphy and the band are in their real lives.

James Murphy’s interview, for this documentary, says all and nothing. I didn’t imagine him that wise. When I started listening to LCD I was in the university, in 2005. That time “Tribulations” and “Daft Punk is playing at My House” were real cool songs and it was forbidden not to add them to any playlist. I did it a lot, every Friday, in my two hour’s show for the university radio.  After came “Sound of Silver” in 2007, probably their most sold album with hits “ North American Scum”, “New York I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down” – BTW it ends the film so well, you can actually see I teenager crying among white balloons and the guitar down in a stage already empty of human warmth – and the last album, “This is Happening” in 2010, which I review as a more-of-the-same album, with trivial lyrics and beats without artistic content, definitely not what we were used to listen from these guys.

Then in 2011, Murphy announces the end of LCD Soundsystem and this film came one year after. Things to point out:

1. The interview Murphy gives to a journalist (don’t know who he was and the producers didn’t write his name on the screen ewww) answering all evasive but at the same very sensitive.
2.  The part where Reggie Watts appear on stage is very cool.
3.  North American Scum and Yeah Yeah Yeah best tracks live.
4.  NY I Love You But Your Bringing Me Down, aka the perfect final with white balloons, gave me goose bumps.

Movie of the Week – III Movies of João Salaviza

Cinema. There’s a new generation of young Portuguese directors playing the game, Gonçalo Tocha (É na Terra não na Lua), Miguel Gomes (Tabu) and João Salaviza (Arena and Rafa), that after a couple of awards in Berlin and Cannes have achieved a gorgeous reputation among cinema critics.

Midas Films just launched a DVD with Salaviza’s three short movies and its available in French and English as well, so exportable. In an interview for a Portuguese radio show the young director shared his witty thoughs about his work “my flat mates say my emotional intelligence is all focused on cinema”. He grow up in Lisbon and the pictures he captures in his movies are true, in a way that they exist just like they are in reality, with the same people around, same color, same essentia.

 “Arena”, 2009, won Golden Palm in Cannes, is a short movie and tells a story of Mauro. He’s arrested and lives with an electronic bracelet at his home. He likes to tattoo people. It’s mid-day, the sun is hot and strong, and three kids of the area come near Mauro’s window.

In “Cerro Negro”, 2011, Anajara comes back from its work in the jingle-jangle morning. She cannot leave Iuri at school. Seventy kilometers from home Allison waits his wife and son. It’s the visiting day in Santarém’s prison.

The plot of Rafa, 2012, Golden Bear in Berlin, is about a child named Rafa. At 6AM he found out his mother was detained at the police station. He leaves his home in the Southbank of Tejo River, crosses the bridge with a friend in a motorbike and arrives to inner Lisbon.

Salaviza’s technique and photography are remarkable, and also the ends - everyone can give a future to his characters. He's working on a new film to be lanched in 2013, a film with more than 60 minutes, shot in Lisbon, because he is a big-city man.  3.5/5

James Blake – “Overgrown”

The second album of the 24 years old London producer starts like this: “I don't want you to know / I took it with me / But when things are thrown away like they are daily / Time passes in the constant state / So if that is how it is/ I don't wanna be a star / But a stone on the shore / Long door, frame the wall / When everything's overgrown”, from its song album-title Overgrown, which is much better than his debut “ James Blake” that offered only one single heard outside of England “there’s a limit to your love” - it's not even good.

Criticism like this one is arrogance. “Retrogade” is a new approach of Blake to dub step sound and minimal electronic, the powerful explosion of the chorus, the ups and downs beats with his whispering voice, resulted in a perfect single.  In “Take a Fall for Me”, Blake invited rapper RZA from Wu-Tang Clan and it turned out to be a cool rap track. “Dlm” and “Our Love Comes Back” are both depressing but “Digital Lion”, in turn, makes you step into your dancing shoes, also “Voyeur”.

Blake is something special. Great show in Coachella 2013, in the stage there were drums in the middle, James Blake himself on the right side (piano, PC, sampler and vocals) and on the left side a synthesizer, drum machine, music sequencer and sometimes a guitar.  Nevertheless, the tracks don’t sound the same live as they do recorded. I’d love to see Blake in a different stage. I saw him once in Optimus Alive 2011, but again the stage was unfamiliar, and the afternoon time wasn’t helping, only hundreds watching - a pity. 

He isn't a rock start but he does a good job exploring new electronic beats, so here's a  4/5.

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds - “Push the Sky Away”

“Push the Sky Away” is one of the best albums of 2013. What a record! Nick Cave expresses better than ever his writing skills: the whole album is a poem. Amazing piece of work with Warren Ellis (violin, viola), who co-produces seven of the nine album’s songs.

“Jubilee Street”, a dark song, “push the sky away” full of hope, acceptance ( push the limits away), “Higgs Bosom Blues”, a trip to Geneva that ends with Miley Cyrus flooding in a swimming pool in Taluca Lake, “Mermaids” and “Wide Lovely Eyes”. The album is a fairy tale (mermaids, water, skies), humans versus mermaids, not from this earth. 5/5

Upcoming show in Oporto, Optimus Primavera Sound 2013 May 30th

Movie of the week – “Band of Outsiders”

Without a doubt Godard had found the formula for what I call a true cinema with his nouvelle vague histories. In Godard’s “Band of Outsiders” two friends (Arthur and Franz) try to robber a parisien madame and her money they think come from unpaid taxes. Odile (Anna Karina) is helping them, a young girl they met at English class. The part where they actually met her is genius, their teacher is reading Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in French for a translation assignment. The three speak poor English. Odile doesn’t love the cinema nor the theater – funny and ironic the way Godard plays with the emotions between people and the cinema – she prefers “la nature”. She is in love with Arthur but he is unreadable and Franz is in love with her.

Best scene – Dance in the café; Worst scene – Arthur assaults Olive, putting the blame of their failed plan on her.

My first incursion into Godard’s movies was“Vivre sa Vie” (1962), then “À Boute de Suffle” (1960), “Le Mépris” (1963), “Pierrot Le Fou” (1965) and at last “Band of Outsiders” (1964), wholly random choices and what impresses me the most is that he directed nearly a movie per year and all of them quality, wary, superior master-pieces. I just couldn't stop watching, I was emotionally engaged. As a woman, I look different to his approach, especially the scripts. Even before I read Godard used Anna Karina as an object of creation for his films, he had been aggressive to her, though I really didn’t mind to check if it is only gossip or an accurate fact, even then I had the opinion about his conception of women characters: naïve, curious, emotional, beautiful, and free, for it bothers me seeing this kind of violence in his movies. 4/5

Movie of the week – “The Iron Lady”

In the month where the citizens of the world woke up by the sound of Margaret Thatcher’s death it’s mandatory to watch / re-watch her autobiographic movie "The Iron Lady", directed by Phyllida Lloyd, praised for her work in opera and the movies Mamma Mia! and Abba. There’re those who might know her career enough: her politics ideology and the way she had run England over 11 years ( 1979 – 1990), but this movie is a great opportunity to see first an amazing actress Meryl Streep, who won the oscar in 2012 for the role, second London’s street frames and the parliament in the 80’s marked by the end of Cold War.

Also, the script is fairly-good: Maggie the grocer’s daughter who became Secretary of State for Education, Leader of the Conservative Party and the first and only woman Prime Minister in the country’s history.

Though not all measures were popular, quite normal as far as politics concerns - she was harshly criticized during Falklands War - the movie articulates her foremost politics and sociological memoirs. Maggie’s weaknesses and strengths are revealed in a strong movie as the character itself, with roundtrips from youth to mental illness. 4/5.