When do you finally become an adult? Is it when you commit to using a handbag instead of a backpack? Or when you host dinner parties with multiple courses, serving a nice red instead of passion pop? Maybe it´s the first purchase of something nice to hang on your wall.
For those of you keen to get out of Never Never Land, by picking up a piece of art, head on down to the Blue Hotel in Woolloomooloo this Thursday 16th April for the first FLAC event. These fashion-art-lifestyle-culture extravaganzas duly support young emerging artists as well as fostering creative talent in our city´s less privileged. Some of the money raised from the evening will go towards the Mathew Talbot Homeless Services, creative arts program.
With limited capacity of 300 for the first event, get down there at 6:30pm on the dot. Tickets for the auction are $25 and include drinks, food, product samples (yay!) and the opportunity to pick up a future Damien Hirst. Or at the least, a talking point for your next dinner party.

I am so inseparable from my laptop that she may well be my best friend.
She's seen my most embarrassing photos, she has great taste in music, if she didn't always try to distract me with Facebook and Youtube, she'd make the most intelligent contributions to study. Even so, and call me superficial, she has no dress sense. At all.
Whenever we go for coffee, she always wears this black, boxy canvas number. It is SO daggy. (And don't get me started on her foray into tight black leather).
Thankfully, my unputdownable best friend is now styled by megafauna & me, a small, eco-minded design company from the Blue Mountains. My laptop now wears her very own cosy, quilted vintage-fabric sleeve to the cafe each day (she keeps her fabulous hand printed sleeve for going out dancing).
Meeri Quinn, design-guru at megafauna & me creates each piece with our impact on the environment in mind. All products are hand-made, from recycled materials, sourced from second hand emporiums far and wide.
As well as laptop sleeves, you can funk-ify your camera with a vintage-fabric cushy pouch or be the coolest customer in Coles with retro teatowel shopping bags.
Keep checking the megafauna & me website - their online shop will be up and running soon. In the meantime, check out what's available on their Etsy shop.
Your laptop will never be poorly dressed again!




      

My current travels have brought me to Chile. The long, skinny country of breathtaking scenery, friendly inhabitants, lots of dogs (!!??) and a sometimes suffocating amount of American college students on vacation. As is necessary on the road, to keep the budget satisfied, I've made many trips to the local supermarket and each time have had totally comic exchanges once at the cash register. Being the Bourgeois Greenie that I am, I try to take my own bags, but stumble into the problem that I can NEVER remember the word for bag! (With the assistance of my current connection to babel fish, I can tell you that Spanish for bag is 'bolso' but I'll be damned if I can ever find that word in the chaos that is my brain's Spanish department). Instead of being able to express "No thanks, I have my own bag" I have to mumble phrases like "I have one" ... "you have one what?" or "It's not necessary" ... "What's not necessary? The food you are buying? Then get out of our store and stop tormenting us you foolish Gringo". The girl on the till or the guy packing the bags look at me like I'm some raving, hand-waving lunatic. And though it makes for traveling comedy, it's all quite awkward and difficult and it makes me think:

If nobody in Chile has received the memo that it's a good idea to reuse your own bags, then 1. who else doesn't know yet and 2. HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO SAVE THIS FREAKIN' PLANET???

And then I think, who am I to begrudge the Chileans a few plastic bags? Chile gains almost 80% of its electricity from renewables like hydroelectricity, commendable indeed, while we in Australia are about to compromise big time on environmental friendliness with the sham that is the Garnaut White paper (forgive my tardiness on commenting on this subject... less connectivity in the southern continent).

Finally, to bring some positivity back to the subject, let us listen to the rational, level headed gospel of the fabulous Tim Minchin. Until next rant... I mean post, keep on taking your canvas bags...

Dear Santa

So... I´ve been particularly good this year. I was hoping you could help me out with a few things? I really, really, really would love to be the proud owner of a goat. Yeah, a goat. Actually, farm animals in general. Ducks, pigs, chickens and a donkey.

You see, I don´t actually need them, but I know you´re big on presents. So I thought rather than you getting me things I don´t need (socks and knickers three years in a row?), you could get me farm animals? Yeah, I know I don´t need farm animals, and let´s not even get started about where they would go in my shoebox apartment. But get your elves to have a look at Oxfam Unwrapped. Just make a purchase for me, and the present will get sent onto somebody who needs it more.

Got it? Okay great. Merry Christmas

I often find myself in conversation with friends, debating the merits of city-living. Despite growing up in a small coastal town, I'm now unashamedly addicted to the urban metropoli. But until a conversation a few days ago, I must admit my arguments were fairly weak. I'd muse old faithfuls like:
"... just so much going on, lots of energy, loads of different people...". And although they were true, even I didn't believe that they were the reason for my love affair with high density living. They were why I liked it, not why I loved it.
My best friend (from the opposition 'I don't love the city' team) proposed, "I'm glad I don't have to live in London. I'd prefer to just visit for a couple of days at a time and then get the hell out of there."
" Well of course you hate it then. The best thing about living in a city is that you get below the surface. You find the little places tucked away that you begin to know and love and can call your own." And there it was. My light-bulb moment. By finding pockets of wonderfulness, you eek out your own existence and can fight that feeling of being so small that you're overwhelmed by hugeness. Phew...
It's less about George St, in Sydney's CBD, more about Booth St, Annandale or Gould St, Bondi. It's the cafe run by a bunch of Kiwis that serves the only good coffee in London, the knowledge of which is passed like gospel, from ex-pat to ex-pat (when you come, we'll tell you!). It's the amazing Turkish restaurant we only found because our washing machine broke and it was next door to the Laundromat. It's the skinny barista, with beautiful eyes, in a cafe on Abercrombie St, whom I flirted with shamelessly each morning on my journey into Sydney Uni. It's the guy pictured up here, in the middle of Tokyo's 35 million inhabitants, on an outrageously busy shopping strip in Shinjuku, chilling on the pavement, selling his hand-illustrated postcards. These small diamonds in the roughs make no parking in Bondi, the tube at peak hour, living in shoeboxes and millions of neighbours so much easier to love.
And that's it. I don't have anything in particular to plug, or point you towards. I just wanted to share this little epiphany. What's the pocket of your city that makes it all worthwhile?

Today is Interntional Buy Nothing Day. You might buy nothing because you're totally broke, you know, credit crunch and all. You might refrain from purchase as a mini personal challenge, do you really need that bag? You might opt out to make a statement, saying that you're not bound to the retailers and their cunning advertising tricks. You might desist because you understand that a society addicted to shopping is negatively impacting on a planet under pressure. Or maybe you could care less and splurge, it's your money, you earnt it. I'm not here to preach.
I'm not even totally convinced. I'm not sure that one day where you buy nothing is the best way to combat excessive consumerism. A 'Buy Nothing Month' or 'Buy only What you Need', maybe. But I do think it's a start. Whatever you do tomorrow, buy or not, I hope that at least you consider your purchase. Do you really need this? What is its impact? Do you care?

I just read the below post and felt a little ripple of homesickness. ***Sigh*** The beginning of the Australian summer. Music festivals galore. Long sunny Sunday arvos at Bondi. Spontaneous weeknight beers. Thongs, skirts, singlets and sunnies. Spare a thought for those of us bunking down for the long UK winter ahead. At least those friendly peeps at Modular seem to have us in mind. While (for the first time in musical history) the line-up looks astronomically better in Oz than in London, Nevereverland will be bringing a little bit of sunshine over here NEXT WEEKEND! Quick! Get your tickets here before every other Aussie in Shepherds Bush beats you to it.