WELL LOOKY

SHE IS SO GLORIOUS THANK FRICK SHE WERE BORNED

sober driver

- intended to go to wine cellar and not have 'a late one'
- saw seth frightening, sharpie crows and a dead forest index
- seth frightening kept doing metal ass guitar shreds in the middle of his lovely folk songs, seemed funny, thought 'doom folk'
- someone bought me 'feijoa liqueur' which i drank bc it seemed rude not to
- went outside for air and discovered this swing dance competition happening, made me feel happy to watch
- wine cellar is a really awkward venue and why can i never get a couch seat anymore i h8 u
- lost all my friends for like 2 hours
- confirmed my theory that if you sit outside alone on k'rd for long enough a drunk guy will hit on you
- he told me there was a gig at whammy that sounded good so i went in and didn't pay heh heh
- saw beach pigs, ghost wave and grass cannons
- during ghost wave creepy guy stood too close to me, kept edging away until i had to move away
- ghost wave are rly good
- made friends with a nice couple, the boyfriend told creepy guy to go away
- smoked cigarettes with nice couple
- found my friends
- lost my friends again
- during grass cannons a fight broke out in front of me and i got pushed over
- people offered to buy me a drank but over the loud music i would just do the 'hands on steering wheel' gesture
- felt like i was drunk anyway via the atmosphere and other drunk people but probably just deliriously tired
- wandered back and forth up k'rd trying to find my friends
- found them at a hip hip 'club' which i walked in and didn't pay for, stealth ass
- danced to hip hop
- worked my dorky dance moves in seamlessly with my 'smooth' dance moves
- errbody in the club getting tipsy ('cept me)
- in true k'rd tradition, halved a falafel kebab before home time
- there was a guy passed out directly on top of his kebab
- drove my drunk ass friends home at 4.30am

day in review 24th march 2012

had a real nice sleep in, woke up around 11am and it was sunny as frick. i made toast and ate it watching man vs food which i find hilarious and disgusting but immensely watchable. got my shit together and got the train to brockley, where i sauntered around in the sunshine and arrived at brockley market about 10 mins before they closed. i was a bit concerned it would be too big for me to navigate in that time but that was plenty. i got a free coffee from the nice coffee boy in the corner because they didn't have any more soy milk. i bought some free range eggs, a sourdough donut filled with lemon curd from the london particular and it was really really yummy. i realised that my friend ellie actually worked there (knew she worked at a market in brockley, didn't expect it to be that one though, hopefully i don't seem too much of a stalker) and we caught up while she packed down her stall. there were heaps of attractive looking people at the market. made plans with ellie to hang out at easter, curing my fears about 'where the chocolate comes from' if you don't have family at easter. i kept walking on into deptford, stopped in a cute vintage store, two antiques stores and then arrived at deptford high st market. they have a flea market on saturdays and i bought this velour cardi with gold buttons and beads for £3. then i kept wandering around with a giant smile on my face until i used my 'south london art map' to find some galleries. went into utrophia, apt, past art hub and cockpit arts because they were closed/i don't think you can go into cockpit arts. sat outside laban dance school (or whatever) on their geometrically designed lawn. that was weird and nice in the sunshine. then i walked back to new cross and bought some dried fruit and a courgette from a nice grocery and got a free sample of granola cause i said i was going to try making granola with the dried fruit. i got the train back to crystal palace and saw the dinos in the park for the first time (from afar), going to make it my mission to go there probably tomorrow when all the horrible children are in school. i went into this four-storey antiques store and walked around with my mouth hanging open like a dummy because it was so fricken cool. noticed a cupcake shop has opened up on our end of the triangle, feel excited about that, want to work there. bought groceries from sainsbury's. went home, dithered about making dinner and chatted to my flatmate ashleigh and we decided we should go out for a drink later. so later went out to the white hart with paul, max and ashleigh. it was fun, there are beautiful people working there and beautiful people drink there. we went to westow after that briefly but it was weird because there were these girls dancing really badly. just real bad. but mostly it was a legit as heck day, had a real great time doing exploring then having a lil drank with my flatties. gonna give it a 9.5/10 mostly just because i wish i could have afforded to buy heaps of stuff at brockley market/everywhere i went. i took a few pics and they are here

ps how weird/lame is it the whole 'dot co dot uk or dot com dot au or dot co dot nz' thing ???

the shack

things i will miss about the shack:

- sitting on the steps
- coming home to pickles on the front step meowing and thinking "home..."
- going down to wood bay beach with my cup of tea and writing things in my notebook
- got my room exactly how i wanted it
- the sound of branches etc falling on our roof from the canopy above us
- not having to care about spilling things, hammering things into the walls, things of that nature
- really really nice neighbours who sometimes brought us their homebrew beer
- reading a book with pickles curled up in my lap
- hat wall
- mail wall
- flowers out my window
- pickles :(((((((((((((((
- quiet
- lots of birds
- going for big walks around my neighbourhood and meeting lots of dogs
- the real nice people who live around here
- forest vibes
- being close to the ocean
- feeling so so so good in solitude

things i will not miss

- the swamp that has formed in our front yard
- the smells
- mould spores
- rats
- far away from civilisation
- non-flushing toilet
- no washing machine/freezer
- feeling isolated
- bad phone reception

also i just discovered the pus-ey (?) eyed neighbourhood cat's name is 'pud', makes me sad that i will never get to call him that now

some book reviews

everything was fine until whatever by chelsea martin

this is a collection of poems & short stories that crispin loaned me. this book was funny a lot but also sad a lot. i liked how there were sort of normal stories interspersed with quite odd things. what i mean is that there were sort of real introspective things about people and relationships then something sort of unpretentious and hilarious at the end of a paragraph maybe. maybe this was unintentional but it makes the stories seem warmer or something and like endearing. also there was good fine print. and the book has a good title so it seems like you are an interesting person if you read it on the train. 

follow me down by kio stark

did i already write about this here? this book was really nice. it was short but compelling about this girl who gets mailed an old photo in an envelope then she tries to find out who the person is in the picture. i think it was just really nice prose about a city really, all her attempts to find it, meeting people around her neighbourhood and in different parts of the city. the protagonist was also a redhaired babe who used that to her advantage to find out things and i sort of liked that she was unashamed of using her looks in that way, but unusually i didn't end up hating her because of this. 

instructions... etc by tim key

also loaned to me by crispin. this book was good to read at work because i could easily read a thing while waiting for somebody to pick up the phone and answer questions to me. it is real funny in an earnest way, like quite verbose but hilariously so. a good use of parentheses. one of my supervisors thumbed it at some point and seemed intrigued by it. i think it made me seem 'interesting' because actually yes a lot of the things in the book are weird instructions.  

wind up bird chronicle by murakami

the second haruki murakami book i have read. i liked a lot of it but towards the end i felt like i just wanted toru to stop meeting different people. i felt sometimes like the women in the books were too sexually available, or that's the way they were written which also bothered me. perhaps it was just masculine and i'm not used to that. i liked this thing that toru says about kumiko "I just want you to keep one thing in mind: anything of yours - anything at all, as long as it belongs to you, I will accept as my own. That is one thing you will never have to worry about". generally what i like about this book and the other murakami book i have read (sputnik sweetheart) is the way that really odd things seem to happen, like just going to sit in a well then somehow going into dream states that aren't really dreams or spending every day of the week just looking at people, then mysteriously meeting a wealthy benefactor, meeting women who can somehow heal other women of their pain - these things that 'seem strange' are written about not without curiosity but without surprise. i liked this, because it seems like the things we do in life like get up and go get a train somewhere, make eggs, do our jobs.. they are all done as routinely as you like. who's to say going to sit in the bottom of a well shouldn't be just as normal. i don't know, i'm not explaining that very well. but my overall sense was that peculiar things seemed to be more usual and i enjoyed that. perhaps it was the japanese sensibility of the book coming through. 

richard yates by tao lin

i didn't really like richard yates very much. i mean there were some things that i enjoyed at the start but increasingly i despaired at the way that haley joel osment treated dakota fanning who was clearly vulnerable and young and probably not obese. and i also didn't feel like haley was being reasonable towards the adults in the book but was portrayed as being a reasonable person. however crispin mentioned this good thing during a discussion of this book with some other people a month back, that it sort of showed how truly shitty things get between some people and how sometimes things are really truly fucked. or he said something better than that which i can't remember right now but maybe that was the gist of it. 

the sending by isobelle carmody

what can i say, this was the latest book in the obernewtyn series and i freaking loved it, but only because i'm a xxcore ten year fan of obernewtyn and even though it's quite a weird sort of series i'm going to keep reading it until it's finished. i had to leave my copy of this (along with richard yates) at my hostel in new york though because i needed to cut off some dead weight. 

the tiger's wife by téa obreht

got this for xmas. it was an interesting read. it seemed to sort of have echoes of things in murakami, but work in a similar way to 'everything is illuminated' actually, in the sense that there was a protag, then a sort of person who told stories, then a separate narrator of these things. it made me think more about stuff happening in the balkans and weird folklore. the murakami echo was this character who simply couldn't die just because he'd had an aunt who said 'you won't be able to die now' or something of that nature. it was a pretty good read actually and i thought it was written pretty beautifully. 

um next i am probably going to read 'there is no year' by blake butler but it is an unusually shaped book and hard to take on the train sort of. currently reading a bill bryson book though which keeps weirdly intersecting with my real life in an informative manner

lynx

just looked about my person as if i needed something tangible to complete this post, think it might have been the instinct that i need tea to write. seems like a cute idea to collate some links and internet things that i have been utilising more and more recently. trying to broaden my 'internet horizons'. just because there are lots of nice things going on around here (here being online) and yeah let's just all support each other okay? : )

sylvia plath documentary on youtube
seems funny that i used to be real obsessed with sylvia plath/the bell jar/all manner of depressed women in literature. but this is nice. also well. i mean it's not nice but it's sort of nice that she was in london and i am in london. (she committed suicide in a house in chelsea, where yeats lived i think)

did everybody else know about podcasts before this week? i feel like i spent a lot of time talking about podcasts in my degree but i never really listened to them very much before now. i did a 'cry for help' tweet about needing podcasts and resident twitter champ david claridad suggested the av club's podmass which is basically a roundup of a lot of different types of poddies. it's really good. from there i got onto the 'stuff you missed in history class' podcasts and one on nerdist featuring tim and eric. who are pretty kewl dudes.  also i listened to this one from wtf with marc maron with nick offerman and megan mullally (idk how you spell that).

as for music poddies i have been digging this mix on coke machine glow which has real kewl trax by clams casino & other people of that nature

herbonestructure by natalie chin just a really lovely blog that stacey & i have been reading lately
autumn almost by sarah reid as above : )

also ohh this is a really cool thing, nowness, which is daily interviews/documentaries with/about design type people. the first one i watched was about this hairdresser who makes artwork with hair and it was a really beautiful video as well as being a pretty interesting thing.

other things that have happened recently include me making hedgehog and having to explain it to absolutely everybody in the world because slices don't exist in england, starting to crochet for money, losing my owl ring (hopefully under my bed), not having cigarettes for over a fortnight, only having one pair of non winter socks, consistent tiredness, volunteering for future cinema's bugsy malone and somehow managing to be outgoing and have a lot of fun doing so (?) 

also i'm thinking about starting my craft blog again and am having serious thoughts about going into baking at some point or another, especially with the revelation that such a thing as this clandestine cake club exists... i keep having visions of me walking into a bakery with a box of macarons and them giving me a job just on the spot. sigh. did everyone know i work in a call centre? hmm. anyway. i am also trying to work on not hunching my shoulders as much which occupies the rest of my life.

last times i have smoked

feb 25
smoking on my steps
vchatted james
listened to julie doiron

mar 1
in a carpark on cross st
drinking woodstock from plastic cup
asked a girl if i could roll a cigarette
smoked it

mar 3
felt so bad
also watched a lot of mad men
which makes smoking look like the best thing in the land
(it's not)

mar 3
..later that night with friends in my living room (enablers)

mar 9
wine cellar smoking area
shared with xinia
2x guys asked us about ourselves bc they said they wanted to know about the "demographic" of the bar

mar 9
whilst walking through downtown
had to stop bc i can't walk and roll
shared with ben rosamond

mar 14
needed something to do with my hands whilst sitting on my steps
it was morning
i sang out loud to bright eyes songs

mar 17
cigarette and tea
idc, felt good

there are flowers outside my window

i lean out to touch them

things re: 'real estate' gig last night

is that matthew ridge? oh wait no..

singer from sherpa said 'man it's so cold up here' while visibly sweating

trying to explain to someone what a sherpa was: "a sherpa, you know like a sherpa...mountains and shit"

thought the drummer was a hot girl but it was just an unattractive man

xinia must be drunk bc she is dancing like a lil gnome

feel like i'm at cassette

wth, why are there lasers

typed a draft into my phone to help me remember the above two things as 'cassette lasers'

going to start tagging the word 'booty' (with the two o's connected so it resembles a booty)

we feel awkward via not knowing what to do with our hands

i got a txt that says 'happy fake bday'

feels bad trying to clap when you are holding a beer, like you just don't even make any noise

the 'three wines and two beers' buzz

bass guitar 4 prez

yep so this is indie music

thought omg so many stripey tops in one room and then realised i was wearing a stripey top too #fml

ntp ntp ntp (need to pee (x3 (that's just like real needing to pee)))

feeling really aware that i am packed into a room full of people who are all slightly moving to the same rhythm

slef aware

On 5 Mar 2012, at 22:38, Stacey Teague wrote:

was just thinking about how you said that you realised you didn't know yourself like you thought you did, now that you have moved to a different country. i think this is because we let the things/people around us shape who we are, like having those things/people around affirms who we are and the fact that you are away from those things/people means you lose part of yourself via putting so much of yourself into those things/people. this came as a sort of revelation to me in the shower but i suppose it is fairly obvious. when i am sitting in my room with all of my possessions and comforts, i feel the luxury of being/knowing myself. since i still live in the town i was born in, there is a sense of familiarity everywhere i go. i've left parts of myself and my memories all over this city. that is fine i suppose, but we need to go somewhere else so that we can discover who we are when we are not being defined by external things.

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 12:23 AM, Susie Anderson wrote:

it seems weird to me to live in the same town where you were born, but we were born in v different places. i guess i would feel different about melbourne if i had been born there. it'd be nice to think i'd still love it as much as i do having only lived there ~4 years. the thing is, it's a really nice feeling to be able to create a new sense of familiarity, discovering things, but also to still be able to be surprised by somewhere.

the thing i am doing now is pretending that i'm this orb of a person who can adapt into anything (read: most situations). it's sort of working, but i feel pretty detached about it. i think much of what makes up your personality is shared jokes and memories. meeting new people you don't have that.. so those things get pushed away when there's no one to share them with. and i've found myself  nodding along with things that i find truly dull, or using anecdotes i have no interest in. this is helping me become less judgemental i think.

but also there are things i know i can't control like how self conscious i am : (

On 8 Mar 2012, at 07:19, Stacey Teague wrote:

wondering about the difference between 'self-awareness' and self-consciousness'. i suppose i've always thought they could be used interchangeably, and they are similar, except i think that SA is generally more of a positive term whereas SC is like SA gone bad os

i think i feel both self conscious and self aware

i feel okay about being self aware, but i don't think i have any choice in it. since i am so introverted, hanging out in this inner world thing i've cultivated, it's natural for me to have a strong sense of self. also maybe i have come to an age where i am more sure of things. it's like your body is a shell and there's a lil you deep in the middle and every day that lil you grows more comfortably into that shell. that's a really bad metaphor idk, what do you think

i think about self-consciousness as one of my worst afflictions, i really do

i think that being self conscious is like being the person at the party who is constantly taking photos, you sort of miss out on a lot of things and are often unable to experience things organically, like being completely "in" a situation b/c you are too busy thinking about yourself in conjunction with the situation and everyone else in the situation

i remember talking to spencer about "knowing yourself" and he said something about not understanding the concept of it via "how can you know yourself if you are yourself" and i assume he also meant 'how can you not know yourself if you are yourself'.

because now that i really think about it, the idea of knowing yourself is bullshit

i mean most of the time we just do things and don't think much about it right, that's probably the way it should be

i just think we are who we are no matter how much thought we put into it

and 'knowing yourself' is not a conscious thing, it's more like something you feel or know as opposed to any kind of complicated thought process

On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 1:22 AM, Susie Anderson wrote:

I think that for me being self conscious is more about me being aware of how much I dislike myself. It's weird. I don't know.

It's weird having moments when you realise other people aren't as 'self aware' and they are like 'oh my god you think about things so much'. weird right.

as for the shell thing. i see what you're getting at. just reminds me of the container thing from wind up bird. it would be weird if our outside selves looked exactly what our inside selves were like. i wonder what it would be like. or maybe it's exactly right.

yeah seems like other people always know your quirks and things. jordan always says 'you'll indulge my quirks'. he just seems to have a really good grip on the things that make him 'him'. and he knows we all know them too. i think some people don't know those things at all, other people don't care, and still others are trying to work them out.

just reading what you said about the 'photographer at a party'. i can't say i like that analogy, it makes being self conscious seem really selfish. i guess in a way it is.

knowing yourself is a bit weird. i don't know. sometimes i feel real detached from who i am. and i feel happy about that. is that a bad thing. i think being aware of yourself is better than knowing yourself, somehow. 

First poddy o the year

We finally did it!

This 'bumper' issue contains pomes by the following wonderful peeps:

AA (Mountain Poem) by Aaron Billings from Voiceworks Summer issue

While in captivity by Helen Vitoria from Lies Isle

She had no feet by Dawn Lonsinger from Passages North

I can marry you by Gabby Gabby from Screaming Seahorse

Eucalypts at sunset and Butter Pecan by Eliza Scott

the first of every month by Emma Cherry

...and when we grow old by Cassandra Nguyen from Very Beautiful Women

Four poems by Dan Hoy from Lamination Colony 

Think to Believe it by Kira Clark from Kill Author

Somewhere in the bottom of the rain by Steve Roggenbuck from Metazen or watchable on Up literature, essential viewing

We also read tweets by Maggie Lee, sumfink from Chelsea Martin's book 'Everything was fine until whatever' and some of Stacey's favourited tweets.

 I hope you guys like it a little bit. 

We will do another one soon now I am living in a real place with bananas and curtains and everything x

things that are attractive on boys

white shirts (not too crisp)
brogues
tatts
flanelette shirts
vans with no socks + rolled up trousers
seems like eyebrow piercings are attractive sort of (idgi)
chinos lol
african hats
developing fondness for white boys who wear their pants low (what is this country doing to me)
swoopy fringes
desert boots
hilarious patterned shirts
shirts done all the way up
beards
butts
plain hoodies
plain shirts
plain clothes policeman
scottish accents

2011/12 internet champions of the world

have been trying hard to work out what kind of things i want to do blogging about lately.

i just wanted to do a quick post about the nice people i met from the internet. in appreciation. each of the following peeps were just totes lovely and in some cases let me stay at their houses, which is a kindness i will always be thankful for and hope to repay one day : )

david s. klein
eamonn marra
jackson nieuwland
james duncan
alice may connolly
ben rosamond
carolyn decarlo
spencer madsen
marshall mallicoat
dj berndt
shaun gannon
michael michael motopsychle
jess dutschmann
jae dyche
megan boyle
zachary german
jacob steinberg
dave greenspan
gregory sherl
crispin best
ben brooks
stephen o'toole
kirsty lewis turkington (technically met in 2012 but are too awesome to leave off the list)
vicki tingle
laurens verdonkschot
giles ruffer


just makes me feel really good about things when you can go somewhere and feel like you have frands to show you around or hang out with.

auckland music pt. 1

food/drinks i like currently

1. cous cous
2. coffee ass coffee
3. cranberry juice
4. courgettes
5. garlic
6. falafel wraps
7. hummus
8. tofu salad
9. plums
10. peanut butter toast

hello, i'm london

Twice this year I've seen trees go amber and naked, (you can see the real shape of them) looking perfect and perfectly dead in the sky. I was promised that things are going to sprout again. (Looking at nothing in particular, constantly, eyes glazing over.) When they were dying in Athens I practiced my eyeliner, winged, thought about becoming pale and slim, deserving of takeaway coffees and cigarettes, thinking 'if I had cigarettes I wouldn't feel this hungry'. Aware of new followers, eyes on the street and in the office, up and down, up and down again. Everything is tenderly connected in a schoolyard secret sort of way: opening a book to find pages about the namesake of my new suburb, parallel initials, the same size jumpers, flannelette, socks to bed. I can navigate this, my dear. But if I die on the tube because of a terrorist it will be okay, I will smile, my ears filled with sound.

selection of sent text messages

wake up in the morning, got a big chin
just felt bad re my appearance today and then i thought 'at least i have a nice booty'
yeah tennis and sports suck
sitting outside on my front steps with my dog and coffee, listening to the microphones is how i always want to be
420 bro
i just skulled half a bottle of wine, i feel you
where my bestie at
i bloody love reggae
just cried in the supermarket reading an ad that said, "widower seeking friendship from widow. likes car rides, picnics and lunches. please call me."
it is quiet and warm and there are bird sounds
my sister just complimented me on my cleavage. what is life
who dat
shake that healthy butt
a car full of boys pulled up next to our car blasting nelly's ride wit me and i did that 'sup' thing with my head and they did it back. best moment of life
sorry that i hung up but you were being an asshole
got a fright when i turned around and a dog was sniffing my booty
()() 00 OO [][] different types of booties
i wanna love you (radio edit) - akon
you rang?
yep i'm free
you are such a good thing
we wait for you on st kevs steps after we get chips
asian man just thought i was a prostitute :(
i am sitting in bed topless, staring at my computer eating burger rings. sad as hell
baby i'm 2 lost in u
stop hitting on teenage boys
just yelled 'pizza shapes for president'
i would rather be in your sleeping nook than anywhere else

gchat romance