Videography

Lights, Music, Action! | Music Theatre Bristol

Black & White Winter OOTD | vintagegenevieve

Autumn Lookbook | vintagegenevieve

Venice Spring Lookbook | vintagegenevieve

Ice-Skating OOTD | vintagegenevieve

 

Another Suggestion

Sorry for the lack of blogposts recently, I have been getting really stuck in to my new 2nd year modules, and we have unfortunately been having a lot of trouble getting internet in our new flat. However I have written another article for Palmarium Magazine. It is a little deeper than the last, and if you felt like giving it a read that would be lovely!

http://www.palmarium-magazine.com/w15-abstractlight.html

Comedy Night @ The Anson Rooms (UBU)

One of the first Fresher’s events this year was a comedy night with Carly Smallman, The Noise Next Door, and Mat Ewins as compere. Seeing as I hadn’t managed to get to any of their shows in Edinburgh I jumped at the chance to see them for free in the new and improved Student Union venue.

As an MC Mat Ewins does a decent job of getting to know the crowd and embarrassing enough people to get everyone in the mood for audience participation. His actual stand up got a mixed response but generally went down well – indeed one of our favourite palindrome based jokes was his!

Carly Smallman was great – a lovely mixture of stand up and musical comedy that she tried to relate well to the student audience, despite its more adult nature. Two of her songs were absolutely perfect. Firstly “Love song to myself” which was just lovely, and I think everyone should write their own. “I’m in love with my brother” wasn’t a complete hit with the audience, I think it was a little too twisted for some sensitive freshers, but my friend and I found it completely hilarious! 

The Noise Next Door are extremely good at what they do – improvised musical and sketch comedy – plus are absolutely lovely guys! With lots of audience participation I was nervous the sets might not work with a load of freshers but everyone got in the spirit and we came up with some hilarious scenarios for them to act/ sing out. I think I prefer the acting improv that they do, purely because it seems less set up than the songs, which while equally impressive have a very obvious structure. What I really love about the Noise Next Door is that they put absolutely everything into each scene – they aren’t afraid of any accent or scenario thrown out, they are great even when corpsing, and their dance moves are fantastically over the top.

Overall I think UBU organised a great freshers event, that for once wasn’t based around drinking!

A Suggestion

I wrote an article for my friend’s online arts magazine Palmarium entitled ‘The Rise of the Fool’. It would be lovely if you could give it a read!

http://www.palmarium-magazine.com/w13-riseofthefool.html

An Update

I’m back! Apologies for the complete lack of posts over the last couple of weeks. I was in Cuba for the last week of June and the beginning of July, where there is almost no Internet access whatsoever,  so the final 30 Day Snap posts will be coming in the form of a travel picture diary. The day after our 18 hour journey home, I drove to Bristol to move into my beautiful new flat for second year. A lot of heavy lifting, furniture moving and throwing out freshers leaflets was involved, but I am now officially renting my first ever flat! It has been a very exciting, fun and tiring couple of weeks, but now that I have settled down at home for July I am back on the internet. Coming up is my Cuba diary, a couple of reviews and a little plug for the shows I am representing at the Edinburgh Fringe.

30 Day Snap #19

Yesterday my amazing flatmate Tess left to go home to America. We stayed up all night with her, and waved her off in the taxi at 5 in the morning. Despite having lived together for 9 months, we don’t have any pictures of our entire flat that we could put on her card. So at about 4 in the morning we improvised with some very old-school photoshopping (using actually photos rather than a computer!) I’m pretty proud of the girls’ effort, and this photo is pretty priceless now! I have had such a great 9 months living with these girls, and I will really miss having them right there next year. 

Subjectivity

*WARNING*: This is a rant! I very much need to write this down as it has been bugging me for a while, and where better to express that than the Internet, right?

At my Summer Ball Everything Everything were the headline act. I was over the moon about this, I really love both their albums and was super excited to see them. I understand, however, that they are not to everyone’s taste. And that is fine, music is a subjective thing, and it would be impossible to find a big act that absolutely every single person there would want to see. But one particular friend of mine was extremely vehement in expressing her dislike of them.

At our hall’s end of year BBQ a friend asked how the ball was. When it came to Everything Everything my friend piped up with “Oh they were rubbish, we saw one song and just went to the other tent.” In the interests of truth and variety I then said that I had actually really enjoyed them, but of course they are more my sort of music than for some people. I thought that would be the end of it, and we would move on to complain about the lack of bars (1 for 3000 people… not the best organisation!) But no: “No, they’re so bad, they’re boring, so mainstream and they cannot perform at all.” “Well… I liked them, I know some people don’t.” “They’re just so rubbish” – said to the girl asking, without any acknowledgment of me, or my opinion. (Just as a bit of background, and something that annoys me almost equally as the main problem discussed in this post: the girl in question is self-professedly ‘not that into music’, so her complete vehemence on the matter shocked me quite a bit; she is also very very far from being ‘hipster’, so I found it really quite odd that she would phrase her argument in terms of them being ‘mainstream’ – the favoured word of complaint for most hipsters.)

I do not mind if my friend doesn’t like the same music as me; music preferences are entirely subjective and just because I like something, it doesn’t mean that other people have to. At least that is how I view that sort of thing. Clearly my friend doesn’t, because of course her opinion on the matter is final, and there is no question of subjectivity. That is what really annoyed me – not once did she say “Well, I think” or “In my opinion” or even just simply “Well I didn’t like them at all”. There was just the final proclamation that the band was rubbish and that was that.

I intensely dislike that sort of attitude. It is impossible to state a fact about an opinion – let alone an opinion about something so subjective as music, or indeed anything under the hugely broad category of ‘art’. There are several instances in which I do not agree with my friends on a film, or a band, or a book or anything to which the only response can be an opinion rather than a statement of fact. And that is fine, if we all agreed on everything life would be extremely monotone. But thinking that your opinion should be taken as fact, and expressing it in that sort of way seems, at least to me, horrifically arrogant and ignorant. Without a sense of subjectivity we would go about life stamping out any variety and interest in the world, just to make sure everyone agreed with our own opinion. I would hate to live in a world where there was no debate, no difference, no subjectivity. And I would hope that the majority of people feel the same way, and in this case I’m not sure a difference of opinion is particularly favourable.

What do you think? Should people be more aware of subjectivity, or does an unrelenting opinion show strength?

30 Day Snap #6

Today, as I was walking home I was met by a lovely local cat called Olive. I had seen her in my first week in Bristol, when she was a kitten, and she was so friendly she even jumped up into my friends lap! Today she was just as friendly, if not as little, as that first meeting. She kept resting herself over my arm and knees, and really made me smile. I hope she does the same for you!

Apologies for the slightly odd angles, she refused to let me stop scratching behind her ears, so it was a little hard to capture her gorgeous face!  

 

30 Day Snap #5

Today I went to see my flatmate sing in a lovely little pub in Bristol (as a pre-audition for a certain talent show) and I really like this picture of her smiling after she had sung Misty by Ella Fitzgerald. If I can persuade her to agree, I’ll add the video of her singing to this post, she was completely fabulous and everyone there had smiling faces and were telling us how great she was. I felt so proud of her, and wanted to share that with you all! 

Apologies for the rubbish iPhone quality! 

 

30 Day Snap #4

Today was another spent outside, enjoying the summer that has finally reached Bristol! This is a picture of my friends ice cream. It reminded my so much of being little and loving anything with sprinkles, or syrups, and anything pink of course! With so many children running around and playing after school, this picture really brought me back to my childhood.