Archive for February, 2012

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03
Feb
12

The Night Slicky-T Kakked His Broeke

By SlickTiger 4 Comments
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , ,

real-ghost-picturesI got good and loaded a couple of weeks back at The Shack playing pool and drinking whisky and made the rookie error of giving my card to the barman so he’d open a tab for me.

Suffice to say, I staggered home on foot (we live about 5 mins from The Shack) without it, which meant I had to mission back there the following night to pick it up.

It was one of those windy nights in CT where it feels like you’re living in a hurricane, and I was driving along McKenzie street, right by Wembley Square when I saw her.

She had auburn hair and was wearing a grey cardigan and jeans, I guessed she was in her twenties. She was walking down the road, in the middle of the right lane, basically right outside Wembley Square, maybe 30 metres from my car.

The moment I saw her, something caught my attention to my left, a packet or something being whipped around by the wind. Whatever it was, it diverted my attention for maybe half a second while I was driving, and then I looked back to where the girl was.

And she was gone. I’d seen her clear as day, right there in the road walking ahead of me, so real I could touch her and then half a second later, it was like she had never existed.

 

 

At first I thought nothing of it and just carried on driving, but my mind refused to let it go. It was like I was crunching an equation that just wasn’t adding up and instead of forgetting about it, that image of her in the road started looping over and over in my head.

She couldn’t have just ducked off behind a car or something, no one can move that fast, it’s just not humanly possible.

I was halfway to the Engen on Orange when something else about the whole experience struck me that started making my skin crawl.

There was a gale force wind blowing outside and she though she was walking in it, her hair and her clothes didn’t move at all. She wasn’t even bracing herself against the wind, she was just walking down the street like it was a perfectly calm, still evening.

I drove back home with this hollow, anxious feeling in the pit of my stomach and literally sprinted up into the flat to get the hell out of the dark.

It’s the first time I’ve ever experienced anything like that and it still gives me the creeps when I think back on that girl.

What if she’d turned around? What if I’d seen her face?

Anyway. Bit of a fucked up story to tell all you crazy kids right before the weekend. Not really sure why I decided to tell it today of all days except I saw this picture a few minutes ago and it got me thinking of the whole thing all over again.

 

 

So yeah. Have a killer weekend?

-ST

02
Feb
12

The Lana Del Ray Debacle

By SlickTiger 2 Comments
Categories: Album Reviews and Killer Posts
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

LanaDelRayAnyone who follows the music press and music blogs is probably sick to death of the three words “Lana Del Ray” at the moment and I have to apologise before I even start writing this for adding to the hype surrounding this “artist”.

But the thing is, at the moment Lana Del Ray is like that girl at high-school who magically got gorgeous overnight and in doing so, managed to get the entire school talking about her.

Murmurs about her started last year when her track “Video Games” hit the internet, but now that her debut album Born To Die has been released, those murmurs have evolved into people shouting indignantly from the rooftops that Lana Del Ray is full of shit.

 

 

I gave her album a spin yesterday so I could hear for myself what the fuss was all about and I emerged from that experience simultaneously entranced and disappointed.

The tracks that made her famous (“Video Games” and “Blue Jeans”) appear on the album in all their languid glory, brimming over with promise, tension and that unmistakeable melancholy that so articulates the theme of the broken American Dream, which is at the heart of this album.

“Diet Mountain Dew” and “Radio” also stand out as noteworthy tracks – I mean how could you not admire an artist who rhymes the cringe-worthy line “Now my life is sweet like cinnamon” with the undeniably bitter, “Like a fucking dream I’m living in” as Del Ray does in “Radio”?

 

 

I think what the furore about her all boils down to can be summed up on one simple statement: no one wants to believe she’s real.

Everything about her, from her looks to her style to her music, has been accused of being manufactured like she’s just another plastic robot being churned out of the Fame Factory with no real substance to her whatsoever.

And, sad to say, if you listen to the final few tracks on Born To Die (ie. tracks like “This Is What Makes Us Girls” and “Lolita”), which sound like outtakes from a Britney Spears album, you’d agree in an instant that she’s a pop shop mannequin and nothing more.

 

 

But somehow that just doesn’t sit right with me. Call me naive, but I think there’s more to Miss Lizzie Grant (her real name) than the haters out there are willing to acknowledge or accept.

Sure, her Saturday Night Live performance was a little ropey, but in one of the most telling interviews I’ve read about her over the last few months, she replied to Rolling Stone’s comment to her that the backlash from the SNL performance was pretty harsh saying:

There’s backlash about everything I do. It’s nothing new. When I walk outside, people have something to say about it. It wouldn’t have mattered if I was absolutely excellent. People don’t have anything nice to say about this project. I’m sure that’s why you’re writing about it.

Suffice to say, I haven’t made up my mind about Lana Del Ray just yet. Her debut album, for all it’s intrigue, is admittedly a bit of an incoherent mess stylistically (she swings from Amy Winehouse to Mickey Mouse Club so effortlessly it’s scary), but if she’s still around, I think album no. 2 is going to melt faces.

In the meantime, don’t write her off completely. Give Born To Die a listen and, if nothing else, you’ll at least, you’ll at least be able to formulate your own opinion and wield it with authority the next time a hipster starts hating on Lana like he’s some nerd she refused to go to the prom with.

-ST

01
Feb
12

The Tiger And The Nokia Lumia Launch

By SlickTiger 1 Comment
Categories: Events and Good Times
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Nokia launchYou get jaded pretty quickly as a blogger – PR companies contact you to invite you to one launch event after the next, all of them promising events that will CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOREVER!

Fast forward to when you get there and you find a bunch of completely disinterested journos scratching their bums while they wait for the powerpoint presentation they know is going to follow with a look of mortal terror in their eyes.

You bolt as soon as it’s over and vow never, EVER again. Then you get the other kind of launch event, the kind that is awesome from start to finish like the Nokia Lumia launch I hit up last night.

Both the product and the event itself were noteworthy, but let me start with the product because gauging both from the launch and the buzz online at the moment,  Nokia’s new Lumia phones could very well be the game-changers Nokia needs to regain market share in the smartphone arena.

 

 

The Lumia 800 and 710 are Nokia’s first Windows Phones, both running Windows Phone 7.5 which, from the demo I was given at the event, looked like a MASSIVE improvement on previous versions of Windows I’ve used on phones like the HTC Touch 2 though, granted, that was a LONG time ago.

This time around, the folks at Microsoft have spent a LOT of time and effort thinking up ways to seamlessly merge all your accounts (Google, Twitter, Facebook, Windows Live, LinkedIn, etc.) so that communicating becomes as easy as selecting a person and choosing how you want to communicate with him / her.

Instead of a “call register” you can literally bring up your entire communication history with a person which lists, in chronological order, all the conversations you’ve had with that person whether they’re via email, sms, Facebook chat or over the phone.

 

 

The best part of it is because your “People” list is cloud-based, if you ever loose your phone, you will be able to pull all your contacts onto your new phone by simply logging into your Windows Live account – BADA BANG!

You can also log in to your X-Box Live account from your phone and communicate with your little gaming buddies whenever the fancy strikes you.

In case you’re interested, here are the specs for both phones so you can see what they’re packing under the hood:

Nokia Lumia 800: Stunningly social

  • Unibody design with vivid colors: cyan, magenta, black
  • Social networking provided by Windows Phone release 7.5
  • Internet Explorer 9 (hmmm… hope it’s better than the PC version…)
  • 3.7” AMOLED, ClearBlack display with WVGA 800×480 pixels, 16 million colours and 2.5D curved glass
  • Leading imaging capabilities with Carl Zeiss optics, above the lock capture, 8MP camera with autofocus and touch focus capability, dual LED flash, high definition 720p video recording with 30FPS and one touch image sharing
  • 1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 512MB program memory, 16GB internal user memory, and up to 9 hours of 3G talktime

 

 

Nokia Lumia 710: Designed to be personal and affordable

  • Can be personalized with white or black body design, five vibrant exchangeable back covers (black, white, cyan, fuchsia and yellow) and thousands of apps
  • Social networking provided by Windows Phone release 7.5
  • Again, Internet Explorer 9
  • 3.7” WVGA TFT, ClearBlack capacitive touch screen with pinch zoom, 800 x 480 pixels and 16 million colours
  • 5 MP camera with auto focus, LED flash, high definition 720p video recording with 30FPS and one-touch image sharing
  • 1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 512MB program memory, 8GB internal user memory, and up to 7.6 hours of 3G talktime

 

 

And as for the event itself, it was like no launch I’ve ever seen.

In between speeches by the head honchos at Nokia, Microsoft and Vodacom, a group of dancers ripped up the stage, accompanied by shirtless okes pounding drums and this guy who twirled a steel-framed cube whilst dancing in and around it.

Shows like that I usually find pretty nauseating to sit through, but I really enjoyed this one, which ended with all these cannons blasting confetti like gigantic snowflakes for a good 5 minutes before the DJs took to the decks and got the party officially started.

 

 

Which was when I left.

I would have loved to have stayed and partied on through the night, but as a general rule I don’t party on school nights because my internal organs don’t bounce back like they used to and going to work hungover is right up there with removing my teeth with pliers when it comes to my favourite experiences.

I am keen as a bean to get my hands on a Lumia 800 review unit so I can give you guys a better run-down of what it’s like to actually use one of these phones, but if the hype is to be believed, it will CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOREVER!

Only time. Will tell Winking smile

-ST

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