Sunday 30 September 2012

Underground


Yesterday I culturally enriched myself and went along to Gloucester's Guildhall Underground festival, which wa brilliant. Unfortunately you will all have to wait for the photos to get developed before I show you, however I will leave with some music tracks which were featured yesterday from the lovely lads playing.

1. Swim Deep - King City
 
Even though claiming themselves to be a little hungover that evening they were glorious, King City was beautifully played and it was a real adrenalin rush to be smiled and pointed at by the lead singer for noticing me in the front row. After their gig I performed my duties as an obsessed fangirl and waited for them to pack up and have a drink so I could have some snaps with them which I'm excited about seeing soon.
 
2. B∆STILLE - Of The Night

 
As the final act of the night these lads were pretty rad, they created a fantastic atmosphere and had a nice sound which differed from that typical Indie boy band image, mixing their music with some electronica.  Although it was safe to say by the time they came on at 10 I was pretty zonked and after hearing eight other indie boy bands I felt like going a little crazy.
 
3. Last Dinosaurs - Honolulu

 
Ah these Australian beauties were very enchanting, I found their image and their sound all very endearing. They took a nice turn on the overridden English Indie boy band look and were just lovely to be frank.  I wil definately be buying their album when it comes out in a week. Even though they do have slight generic influences it's nice chilling out music.
 
4. PEACE - Bloodshake
 
 
These guys were joyfully playing whilst I was waiting for Swim Deep and they sounded brilliant live, I feel a little bad for not fully appreciating their music, but from what I remember they were r8 good...
5. The Struts - I Just Know


 
Oh wow, these eccentric laddies. At first I didn't know whether to take their image and music seriously, but after a while I warmed up to their incredibly wild personalities! They put on an amazing set, and although their music isn't my style I still appreciate it.
 
Photos coming soon.





Wednesday 26 September 2012

Feel Good



(Crystal Castles II)
 
~~
It's inevitable to feel slightly lonely at times. I haven't had this feeling in a long time, and no matter how many people I surround myself with in the day going home to no-one but myself (and my parents) is beginning to upset me slightly. I found it hard today to say goodbye to my friends after walking home and even though I'm only my third week into A-levels I miss the easy going life I had in the summer, I just suddenly realised how much time of my life will be consumed by work...
I also miss the company of someone special, it wasn't the most successful relationship in the world, however it was something and to be single again is sad as I don't know what to do with all of these feelings.
 
I don't mean to be so personal with everyone at the moment, however I'm feeling unusual and I really don't know what to do with myself. There are people I want to see and people who I don't atall. All I want is to snuggle up in bed with my friends and drink some kind of hot beverage... I just don't like having this hole in my heart after something goes wrong, as it takes so long to heal!
On the plus side my Crystal Castles CD arrived so I'm slowly burning through all the powerfully electronic tunes and making pre-mature judgements about them.
 
 
 


Friday 21 September 2012

Woopa




We play this everyday in the sixth form common room and I absolutely love it! Even though it's eight minutes, it's eight minutes of pure sweet-ness. Sixth form is going pretty well so far, although I have developed an aching back and pulsating temple vein. Other than that it's all good in the brotherhood! I'll have a nice social day tomorrow with work and then a partaay, which will most probably involve this tasteful tunage, and a little Gangnum Style dancing...

Sunday 16 September 2012

Kewbe

 
 
Yesterday I went on a glorious trip down to London's Kew gardens with my chums. It was absolutely beautiful there and I got some fantastic shots, not only on polaroid but on digi too! I'll share with you a couple of my 'pro' shots later on perhaps, however for now I think it's nice to see the film I shot. I absolutely just fell in love with all of the greenhouses in Kew, telling people that my house will just be like a giant greenhouse when I'm older. I just felt like the atmosphere was tranquil yet there was still alot going on around you with the ferns tapping your shoulder and the creepers wriggling down to greet you from the ceilings. Even though there was five of us, Hannah and I split from the boys and decided to have adventures of our own. By the end of the day we got very tired and everytime Hannah and I were laughing we had to find a bench to sit on or a patch of grass that wasn't stained with bird shit, because we simply had no energy to stand up!  It was a wonderful day and I'm happy I recorded it all with my cameras. Also I hope you like the new header, I thought it was time for a little bit of a re-vamp and found this vine photo taken on my 600 so beautiful.
 
*Also, funny story. Hannah and I were trying to 'observe' wildlife, so when she saw two pigeons perching on a stone feature next to a pond she slowly started creeping up to them (I have no idea why). As she got closer and closer the two birds began to fidget quite alot, patting their little feet on the stone. Then one of them got so nervous that it shit itself. Obviously Hannah and I squawked with laughter at this and both birds flew away. I don't think they flew away because they were scared though... I think they flew away from the embarrassment. Who knows...*


 

Thursday 13 September 2012

I Need A Doctor

 
Adrians

Suedes

Boots

Mary Jane's

1461s
 
Okay, I have a slight Doc Martens obsession. So much so that I now am a proud owner of five different types of docccs...I know, amazing! My first pair were the boots, ah the Doc Martens boot, so beautiful and comfy. Then went the Mary Janes, the Adrians, the Suedes and now the 1461s! At least it's a sensible shoe which I am obsessed with and not some ballet flats that last a week! I have been wearing docs for over two years now and they have never failed me. They always fit my abnormally wide foot and are just the comfiest shoes known to human kind! I am surprised I have come this far and not bought a pair of extremely outlandish ones! However most of these shoes (apart from my Suedes) have cost me around fourty pounds each, which isn't the cheapest thing ever, so when I do buy them I try to keep it simple and stick with the classics. My Mary Jane's are probably the most 'outrageous' of them all and that's just because they're green! If I were to re-order them then I would've bought them in brown. I am a very Brown/Black shoe person, as are most people I suppose. Anyhow I just think Doc Martens are the shoe for me, and aside from my Creepers and 90's chunky shoes I wear my Docs more than anything. Now thanks to school I can wear them even more, which I am ecstatic about. You know what they say, you can never have too many shoes Doc Martens!
 
 
 

Tuesday 11 September 2012

Bleeding Unicorn

 
Models own in Ibiza Mix and Indian Ocean

 

I couldn't resist talking about the amazing creation (and nail saver) that is the brand Models Own. When I say saver, I don't mean nail repairer. I'm talking about turning your drab nails into sensationally incredable pieces of lush-ness (even though none of that is very mature sounding). With the two I bought I have been telling many people that I either feel like a mermaid or that I have 'unicorn blood' on my finger nails. The colours 'Indian Ocean' and 'Ibiza Mix' really compliment eachother and create this mystical, dream-like vibe which I find just beautiful. I'm not much of a light colour nail polish person, I prefer blacks, midnight blues and burgundys, so this is a very rare moment for me. Obviously being a girl I am hugely attracted to glitter, so that was an obvious sign to buy the Ibiza Mix (even my guy-friend Louis rates it!), but if you look at Indian Ocean, well it was just one of the most attracting nail polishes I had seen in a long time. They are quite steep at five pounds per colour, however I've been wearing it for almost five days now and they have only just started wearing away, that's right, not chipping, but wearing away! So seriously people, next time you have some spare cash on you, or you want a little pick-me-up then I recommened you delve into Models Own broad collection of nail polishes and have a ponder. I found mine in Boots, so look in your local one and ASOS do a small selection of colours aswell. So even though I've already spent ten pounds on there polishes, I'm thinking of buying their Disco Heaven (or something) next...


Sunday 9 September 2012

Thursday 6 September 2012

Howl


 
Alan Ginsberg - Howl
For Carl Solomon
 
 
This is only part 1.
 
I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,

who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

a lost batallion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,

who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,

suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,

who wandered around and around at midnight in the railway yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,

who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,

who studied Plotinus Poe St John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the universe instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,

who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,

who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,

who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,

who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,

who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving nothing behind but the shadow of dungarees and the larva and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,

who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but were prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,

who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open full of steamheat and opium,

who created great suicidal dramas on the appartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,

who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Bowery,

who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,

who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,

who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,

who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,

who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,

who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,

who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch Birmingham jazz incarnation,

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,

who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,

who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,

who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturerson Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with the shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,

who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,

returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,

Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,

with mother finally *****, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger on the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time—

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soulbetween 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,

and rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.


II

What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisable suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstacies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!


III

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland

where you're madder than I am

I'm with you in Rockland

where you must feel strange

I'm with you in Rockland

where you imitate the shade of my mother

I'm with you in Rockland

where you've murdered your twelve secretaries

I'm with you in Rockland

where you laugh at this invisible humour

I'm with you in Rockland

where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

I'm with you in Rockland

where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio

I'm with you in Rockland

where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses

I'm with you in Rockland

where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica

I'm with you in Rockland

where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx

I'm with you in Rockland

where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of actual pingpong of the abyss

I'm with you in Rockland

where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse

I'm with you in Rockland

where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

I'm with you in Rockland

where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha

I'm with you in Rockland

where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb

I'm with you in Rockland

where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale

I'm with you in Rockland

where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep

I'm with you in Rockland

where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free

I'm with you in Rockland

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

 
I literally cannot stop thinking about this poem...


Monday 3 September 2012

Groovin' it


 
Thanks to my chum I am enjoying the psychedelic sounds of Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs. They remind me a little of Friendly Fires which are a classic favourite of mine, its nice lighthearted sounding music, good for dancing and grooving! Their song 'Garden' above is the one I enjoy most, however I am very partial to their other tuuunes. School tomorrow, and I don't know how I feel...
 


Piece done by Amy Ross