Gone Gaga

 

Cause you were born this way baby.

The Born This Way Ball was a brilliant thing to have been able to go to. Lady Gaga has this amazing presence on stage and her fans have the most amazing respect for her. It really was a spectacle to see and I am not even talking about the fact that her show was set in a giant castle. Just seeing how Gaga treated her fans was amazing. I don't think I have seen a relationship like it. She gives all credit to them (us?) as we are her "Little Monsters". People will yell out "I love you Gaga!" and she will say straight back "I love you too" and you can tell she means it. She genuinely loves her fans. And she is very dedicated.

Gaga spread the message of love and acceptance for all but then continued to shoot a few of her dancers and later on to dance with guns...just a few contradictions to the message but they can be overlooked because it was far too great to be hung up on these minor things. And what does it matter? I was always looking for what the next costume would be rather than trying to decipher a message in the midst of this race of moon people coming to bring acceptance to all...

I do have to say that I do not like all of Gaga's songs/music. Some of it is quite trashy really. I mean Just Dance is one of my least favourite songs, ever but then some of them are just so catchy that you can't help but like them. But there is such a different feel from the first Fame and Fame Monster albums to the new...I think you can really notice a difference and not just in the music but in the lyrics as well. Who would want to be a Paper Gangster or Dance in the Dark if you could be Born This Way or be just You and I? Anyway, acoustic versions of her songs are (most of the time) musch better. Just Gaga singing and playing the piano is pretty awesome to hear, and see really. How she plays the notes with those finger nails and in the ridiculous heels that she wears I will never know.

Yes, that is a key board on a motorbike.

The monster pit as the main part of the mosh pit is called was going off. And I am pretty jealous and regret not getting mosh pit tickets. It's not all that fun attempting to dance by yourself in the second from the back row, especially when the people that are next to you don't join in. The not dancing part is probably why they bought tickets in the stands and not in the mosh pit but I couldn't help myself. I just wanted to dance and wanted those around me to be dancing too. I was pretty late in buying my tickets, so late that my friend and I could not get seats together and had to sit apart, but then we were early enough not to know that the concert dates had been extended from 1 night to 3...

I tried to get the strangers sitting next to me to dance to especailly when Gaga was telling everyone to stand up. I didn't want to be a downer by sitting down when she was getting everyone to dance. The two students to my left side said they would only dance if Gaga sang poker face and to their credit they did stand up for that song. The ladies to my right though, during the encore when they had really started to bop along, I leaned over and said; "It looks to me like you want to stand up and dance." They just laughed and stayed sitting. So that didn't really work and I suppose that is why people buy seats so far back. They just want to see the show and don't really want to be a part of it when I can't help myself, I just can't hold it in.

Sketch of the Born This Way Ball set up as tweeted by Gaga.

Buying mosh pit tickets would have been totally worth it. You get to dance and be super close. Plus I had a friend in the mosh pit on the Thursday night and she said that Gaga looked straight at her. Plus (again) Gaga would always reach down and grab everyone's hands and talk to them and who doesn't want attention from a famous person? But the biggest plus is that she kept inviting people from the Monster Pit to come backstage after the show. She invited at least 4 people and their friends backstage. One person was holding a "Free Hugs" sign and Gaga says; "Is that a free hugs sign? Can I have one?" and so invited the person backstage so that she could get a free hug. But mainly the best part of the mosh pit or Monster Pit is that you get to dance. All I wanted to do was dance.

The most magical moment of the concert, for me, was when Gaga began talking about how she was bullied at school and then proceeded to sing Hair.

I just wanna be myself
And I want you to love me for who I am
I just wanna be myself
And I want you to know, I am my hair
I've had enough, this is my prayer
That I'll die livin' just as free as my hair

It was a beautiful moment. We sent little prayers up to those that were not able to cope with being bullied. I would go so far as to say that most of the people in that centre were crying. I was on the brink. It was a very emotional time for all involved.

I am no fashion expert or etiquette expert but I do have some tips in these fields for some of the people that attended Gaga's concert; if they are not going to dress up Gaga style then at least dress up in a formal sort of way, as one would if they were going to the theatre or something. That's really what this is, a gigantic play and people need to dress accordingly. Jeans and a hoodie DO NOT cut it. I know it's cold, so wear a jacket or at least a nice cardie. And I know that those who attended the Wednseday concert at the Entertainment Centre missed the second game in the State of Origin series but seriously? Wearing State of Origin jersies to a Lady Gaga concert? Really? How did you ever think that was a good idea? Now I can see the irony here, Gaga's message is to love everyone and to not hate but there are standards. Normally I would complain about people's lack of clothing but as I was at a Gaga concert it was justified. Gaga never seems to wear all that much clothing and when people are replicating her style for her BTWB then I am okay with that. And some of the costumes were the exact replica of her outfits but I was a little disappointed that more people weren't dressed up.

Now this is from Gaga's merchandise. I don't know whether it is one of the coolest things ever or if it's pretty gross.

 An article by Bridie Jabour called; Review: Lady Gaga at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre aptly said;

The crowd was simply lost in the Gaga experience. When she barked "jump" the Entertainment Centre shook, when she demanded "shout" we screamed so loud Queensland got spooked and lost the State of Origin.(http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/review-lady-gaga-at-the-brisbane-entertainment-centre-20120614-20b4g.html#ixzz1ynQvFbs4)

Gaga ended the show with Marry the Night. She pulled a young girl from the crowd and they danced together. Everyone was jealous but it was an awesome moment. Earlier in the show, Gaga had been talking to the same little girl about her costume which her mother had made her. The little girl was in tears and saying that Gaga was her idol but Gaga looked at her and said "No. You are my idol." It was quite a touching moment. What a show!

A car chase in QLD?

In the early hours of this morning, my family and I were driving back from the airport after seeing my sister off to China. At the Mobil near Wild Horse Mountain, the police had set up a road block were they were pulling everyone over for Random Breath Testing. When we pulled up the police were all talking about "another stolen car" and seemed quite distracted from the RBT that they were supposed to be getting my brother to complete. Then this white car pulls up and then begins to speed back onto the highway. One of the officers actually fired some shots at the car. Crazy! At the time I had no idea what was going on and the sound from the "service arm" as one article calls it, just sounded like these pops. I always expected a gun to be louder I guess.

And then a police car followed suit and the car chase began. It may have been abot 12:45 or later in the morning and I may have been getting quite sleepy but after that I was wide awake and as excited as some of the police that were on scene. I don't know if I was really supposed to ask, but I asked the policewoman how many stolen cars there had been if this was just "another". She said a few. Which didn't really satisfy my curiosity but at least she answered me. Turns out there were two other cars before this one.

So the policewoman told us to drive safely and have a good night. Almost the whole way back I was just wondering where the car had got to. Whether it had kept going along the highway or tried to turn off at one of the little side roads that come off the Bruce Highway. Right when I had just about given up hope of seeing how the car chase had turned out, just near the Landsborough exit, there was the white, stolen vehicle. It had run off the road and was a lot worse for wear in the long grass between the roads. The police car was sitting up on the road, completely intact and probably arresting the people responsible.

What a night. Then this morning I wake up and find the police article about the chase and find that the people from the car, after crashing it had tried to make a run for it and had been aprehended by the police with the aid of their police dogs. The people one of the other stolen cars had also been found when they had turned around and attempted to head back in the direction of Brisbane.

For those of you who want to read a more scholarly article and not my babbling go here; police-incident-glasshouse-mountains

Okay so it wasn't quite like this. (Or maybe it was.) I really only got to see the beginning and the end of it. It was still really exciting though. Never thought I would ever see a car chase in real life, or even be witness to a shooting (and it counts as a shooting because shots were fired).

And I just found another article from the Sunshine Coast Daily, police-shoot-stolen-vehicle

With a Boy and a Bear

Boy & Bear are amazing live!
Those guys are so talented. They are skilled musicians and their harmonies are so great. At times they do 5 part harmonies! That's an insane amount of harmonies! And it just sounds so pretty.

The worst part though, was as soon as they got to the chorus of Lordy May, just when they started to sing, with on of their beautiful 5 part harmonies, a girl next to me starting singing along, really loudly and really out of tune. It was such a disappointment. That girl really smashed the moment. Not just smashed, completely destroyed. Desimated. Disintergrated. Turned it to dust. Then put the dust into a cardboard box and then set the box on fire. Then...did something to destroy the ashes that were left over. Anyway, the moment was ruined. Luckily they sing the chorus more than once and there were multiple songs with lots of harmonies so it was okay.

 All of there songs were of as good a quality or better than their recorded stuff and it was beautiful to hear. There cover of Fall at Your Feet is so great and I love that I got to hear it live. My one wish was that they had played Blood to Gold but they didn't. But it's okay. I am coping. Just.

But geez there are some douche bags on the Sunshine Coast. I accept there existance and I will let them live peacefully in this world, but why do they have to infest good music concerts? Why must they come to a place where people just want to spend an evening enjoying quality music and ruin it for everyone by making stupid, offensive comments, yelling out and pushing people about? That's just not cool. Luckily the few people that were like this didn't completely ruin my night, I don't know about everyone else though.

The support acts were pretty good. The first was the best by far. They were called Tin Sparrow and they were the cutest little, four person, band (not quite as cute as Tinpan Orange though). They main guy had a really nice voice and the girl who played with him on the key board pulled off some killer harmonies. At one point this girl was playing the xylophone with one hand, the keyboard with the other and singing all at the same time! Got some talent right there. I really wanted the other band to be as good but they did not live up to Tin Sparrow's standard. They were called Jungle Giants.

They had a girl as their lead guitarist which is pretty awesome and looked promising so myself and the friends I was with really wanted her to be as good as the girl from Tin Sparrow but she wasn't. Don't get me wrong, she could play guitar but that was it.The band didn't even bother to give her a microphone so there was no singing or harmonies there and her attempt to dance was pretty shocking, especially when the bassist was such an awesome dancer. He was absolutely going off (he also looked like Frodo from Lord of the Rings) to the point where he even crowd surfed for a bit. This girl had a strange, blank look on her face that made it seem like she was in pain for most of the performance. She tried to bop along to the music but was moving at half the pace that the beat of the song was, so it was a little out of place. And most of the time she had her mouth open for some reason and looked like a deer caught in headlights. The drummer was also pretty cool but their music was pretty awful. You could barely hear it over all the guitar and the main singer had a voice that really grated on my ears and was not all that enjoyable to listen to for the period of time that I had to.

But Boy & Bear were great.

Reflecting all that was JOUR1111

What can I say about this course?
Well, first off, it was a lot of fun. The lectures were always interactive and entertaining (especially at the expense of Kiwis). I always enjoyed going to the tutorials as there was always good stuff to learn and fun things to do. I would probably never have started a blog without this course and I am so glad that I have. This blog thing is fun.

Some of the subjects that were touched on during the course were quite dry and information based but they were handled in a way that the subject was easily understood and retained (the blogging each lecture also helped with retaining the necessary information).

This course has a good overall knowledge of journalism and communications. It offered a great base of knowledge to get wach budding journalism student a good start to their course and studies. And it's even better  for those that actually want to head in a journalistic direction, especailly with the changing of the journalism world and the way everyone receives news.

If people miss out on this course then they are missing out on quite a lot of quality information that could help them regardless of what career they choose in the future.

I don't really know what I want to achieve in my career or where it will lead but I think this course has been a good start for what is to come.

Movies

Something seems to be going wrong in Hollywood lately. Have you seen the movies that have been coming out? (Avengers aside) Most of them are just sequels/prequels and then there are remakes and re-releases (Titanic and all the Disney movies and old classics).

 We started the year (or ended it) with that awful piece of crap New Years Eve brought to you by the same people that made that other atrocity, Valentine's Day. That was the worst piece of film making that I think it is humanly possible to make. There are awards for bad films and this one is definitely up there for the first prize. Marc Fennell (that movie guy) was definitely right about this one. Hollywood think we are stupid. They chuck a whole bunch of famous/ semi-famous people in a movie, forget about a plot and film the thing in a day piece it together as best they can and release it and release the public of their money.

Then there was Project X, I have never hated a movie more. It glorified that Corey kid and his party in Melbourne and had young kids wanting to be at a party like that. The amount of kids under 15 (the movie was rated MA15+) that tried or succeeded in getting into that movie was ridiculous. And, although the cinematography and editing and the like weren't all that bad, it was a painful movie to sit through as all it was, was basically shots of slutty dancing to Pop songs.

 


Underworld 4. Although I was a fan of the first movie, I do not like any of the sequels/prequels. They didn't really need to make another Underworld and now it looks like they have set the stage for another one. But saying this, this was an okay sequel. Number 2 was pretty crappy and the prequel was 2 hours of my life that I will never get back.

 

 One for the Money. I never saw this film and I do not believe that I ever will unless I am captured by some unknown enemy and part of my torture is being made to watch this film. And that goes for This Means War as well. Again I never saw it but it looked like a very sad excuse for a movie.

Then there is The Lucky One and you know how I feel about that. And The Vow (again, haven't seen it) but it looks like it is exactly the same as The Lucky One so there will never be a need for me to watch it.

Battleship. Rhiana is in it. That's all I need to say.











I thought that Dark Shadows had some promise. It's true that from the trailers it looked pretty awful. BUt I had hope because it was Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. It was an okay movie. Whilst sitting and watching it I quite enjoyed it but thinnking back, it was pretty insulting. We have seen Burton do so much better. He may not have written the script but that doesn't mean he doesn't have any say in it how the movie plays out. None of the characters were ever really developed. It mentioned characters and then forgot about them for the rest of the movie and just added them in right at the end. None of the characters were given any real cause for doing what they did. They were just there. It just seemed like no real effort was put in this which is sad.

And then we get to movies like What to Expect When You're Expecting. It's based on a pregnancy manual! It does a few laughs and Elizabeth Banks is pretty hilarious but it's really not all that worth it. Jennifer Lopez can't act, I am not a fan of Cameron Diaz. The only good thing she ever did was Shrek (that was a good movie and part of the reason Cameron Diaz is good in it is because you can't actually see her). And who asked that man from Glee to be in anything other than Glee? He should really stay on TV and get off the cinema screen. But Chris Rock is cool. He can stay.




Just as a side note. I only paid to see these movies because I work at the cinema and it doesn't cost me very much to go and see these things and it gives me an education of what's good and what's not. 

Now I am not saying that all the movies released this year are crap because that certainly isn't true. The Muppets was brilliant, The Grey was good, Man on a Ledge even had something to offer. Chronicle was pretty interesting and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was a nice film. 21 Jump Street was hilarious and I am told that The Hunger Games was really good. AND The Avengers of course.

But then you read what is coming soon; another Adam Sandler movie, another Bourne movie (it could be good, I just don't think it will be), another Madagascar, another Ice Age and something called Magic Mike that looks like it is just a movie about Channing Tatum stripping in front of a camera. Oh dear.

But there is also lots to look forward to like Prometheus, Brave, Batman the Dark Knight Rises, The Amazing Spiderman (maybe), The Perks of Being a Wallflower and of course THE HOBBIT!! Which looks ridiculously amazing. So maybe I should stop bitching...

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries

A new (ish) Youtube channel that is a must watch if you are a Jane Austen or just a Pride and Prejudice fan is The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. It's the classic story told with a new modern twist. It's told through a series of video blogs and it's very cool.

The characters and situations have been cleverly adapted to suit a modern time. In this retelling, there are only 3 Bennet sisters, not the original five. Lizzie is studying at university but her mother is still caught in her old fashion ways and wants all her daughters to be married, as;

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

Lizzie's best friend Charlotte Lucas (in the book) is now Charlotte Lu and Mr Bingley is now Bing Lee. The town ball where the characters first meet is a wedding and now play video games. It's really interesting to see this timeless story and these characters in a modern light.

This is the description of Lizzie and Charlotte's video blog;
My friend Charlotte and I are embarking on an epic expedition to document the insanity of my family for a few weeks. Charlotte's in school for TV and film production while I'm studying Mass Communications. We're honing our skills here.

This is a very cool project that is clevery done and great to watch. And here is the first video to give you a kick start.

Lennon and Maisy Stella

These kids are ridiculously amazing! Really the video just speaks for itself. They are 8 and 12 and can sing and harmonise far better than I can. And trying to do the rhythm thing at the same time would probably be far too much for my brain to handle and they own it. This cover matches the original of this song and I think I even like it better.

After being sent a link to this video from a friend, I ended up watching all the videos that these two kids have posted and they are just brilliant and so talented. But how could you not be talented when you have such an awesome name like Lennon?

And just because I can, here is another video. These two are my picks up from their videos.