"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
- Anais Nin
Categories
Blog Stats
247,438 hits
Want to get in contact? Send pen pal applications, grandma's cookie recipes, sweet valley high movie casting news, questions, requests and hate mail through to thebellelumiere@gmail.com.
A couple of weekends ago I had the pleasure of attending the Perth Concert Hall to see the West Australian Symphony Orchestra play a rendition of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. I’m a bit of a closeted classical music fan so I was really excited about it and I’m happy to say I had an absolute ball. The music was perfect, the venue was lovely and the atmosphere was different to any concert that I’ve ever attended in the past (did you know there is some sort of etiquette where people hold in their coughs until between each break of music?). It was my first time at the Concert Hall seeing this sort of performance, but I will definitely heading back to see more in the 2012 season.
One of my top goals for the Day Zero Project was to travel to Sydney. And last week I did just that. I had an amazing time and Sydney is a very beautiful city. Highlights for me were seeing Mr Shuffles at Taronga Zoo, spending the day at Luna Park with my family, visiting Adriano Zumbo’s Manly pâtisserie, spending too much money, eating too much food and drinking way too much Rekordelig cider (in every flavour). Good times, good times. See you again in November, Sydney!
One of my Day Zero Project Goals is to watch 10 documentaries. Unsurprising as it is, there are some pretty awesome documentaries on Youtube if you have the time and can be bothered to look. The first documentary that I watched (and am about to share with you) is a short 20 minute piece titled “Year of 4″ which centres around Beyonce and the making of her latest album and the film clip for Run The World. If you already love Beyonce you will definitely enjoy this and if you don’t like her, well honestly I think you’re a little bit strange.
Last weekend I looked forward to what I assumed would be the awkward and uncomfortable experience of attending my high school reunion. Thankfully, it was actually a pretty good time. I’m not sure if it was due to the fact that my close circle of girlfriends happened to go to the same school as me, so I showed up surrounded by my best friends, the fact that the most embarrassing thing I did all night was forget people’s names (unlike some people who got so wasted that they fell over and knocked tables down, and then got kicked out of the bar later in the evening) or the fact that a guy pretending to be a student from our school was buying my friend and I tequila shots throughout the night but I definitely had fun. Not sure if I will attend the 25 year reunion… Time will have to tell on that one.
I am making slow but steady progress on this goal, and can now tick yet another concert off of the list. This time it was Caribou & Four Tet playing together at the Perth International Arts Festival this past weekend. The concert was epic and I really enjoyed myself, I did not however enjoy the subsequent hangover that lasted the entire next day. (note to self: sitting down at a concert while drinking is a bad idea as it’s easy to lose track of how much you’ve consumed until you stand up to dance…) I don’t have any concerts planned now until November (Kings of Leon had to reschedule their Australian tour) so hopefully something will crop up mid-year that I can attend! Have you attended any concerts lately? What has been your favourite this year?
I managed to cross another one of my goals off of my list this past week, to take my grandmother to the movies. Because I had some time off of work I was able to book us in to a day time ‘Gold Class’ screening of The King’s Speech – which, by the way was an incredible film. I had a great time, and I think my grandmother did too. Hopefully we’ll be able to do it again soon and not just because it’s on my list of things to do…
The fifth goal in my 101 things to do in 1001 days project is to read all of the books on the Time Magazine Top 100 Books list. I’ve been working on this list for a little while now, but have fallen by the wayside a little bit in choosing these books when deciding what to read next. I’ve gone through the list and bolded the titles that I’ve already read. I’m going to try to work some of the unread titles into my upcoming reading list so that I can catch up…
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser Animal Farm by George Orwell
Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
The Assistant by Bernard Malamud
At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien Atonement by Ian McEwan
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
A Death in the Family by James Agee
The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
Deliverance by James Dickey
Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone
Falconer by John Cheever
The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
The Heart is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
Herzog by Saul Bellow
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
I, Claudius by Robert Graves
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Light in August by William Faulkner The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Loving by Henry Green
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Money by Martin Amis
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
Native Son by Richard Wright
Neuromancer by William Gibson Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro 1984 by George Orwell On the Road by Jack Kerouac One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
Possession by A.S. Byatt
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
The Recognitions by William Gaddis
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carre
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
Ubik by Philip K. Dick
Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons White Noise by Don DeLillo White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
How many of these books have you read? Any suggestions as to which I should start with first?
