Dark Materials

Lots of tumblr/flickr, the art of Adolf Woofli, Marquise Casati, Aleister Crowley, Erin Wasson, Susie Bick, Gary Glitter, Nick Cave, Absinthe tin someone gave me as a gift from France, Anton Lavey.

I've dreamt up an equally evil outfit to go with this that I shall be wearing tomorrow night. The music is going to be sickeningly twee so I thought I'd go against my previous inspiration entirely and get out my crucifixes and brothel creepers. Stay posted.

Sweet Sixteen

Upon completion of possibly the worst essay I have ever dribbled out into existence today I was feeling pretty shit. A fortnight of frantically trying to consume and regurgitate 1600 years of global history had taken it's toll on me and I was looking forward to gin's sweet release and the company of some fine, healthy friends. 

But unfortunately in the early hours of this morning whilst I was pulling hair out over Homer, my friend had drunkenly slipped down the stairs and cracked open a heinous head injury. After a melodramatic rush to the hospital, thanks to sweet baby jesus I found her sat in her a pajama suit, bored but fine. She has to stay in all weekend which really sucks, but I'm visiting tomorrow to bring her more useless tokens of my love. 

This sorry turn of events also means that I've been sat in my room since eight o clock on the Friday night after exams, watching Gypsy Weddings (absolute genius) and rediscovering my old Myspace page. It's cringing and self-indulgent, yet I can't help feelings of nostalgia and pride when I look back on what a pretentious dick I was at sixteen.Who knew being a pretentious teenager was such fun...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Most of these photos were taken by & belong to Sophie Anderson

 I rememeber talking to my friend Tabi ages ago about how weird it is looking at your old Myspace profile, all those hours of HTML coding and the careful selection of other's peoples shit that you used to express yourself with. It's like a modern timecapsule or scrapbook I guess, it perfectly encapulates who you were at the time. Have a massive urge to see all the friends I've made this year stuck in their 16-year-old timewarp profile window. As you can tell, I was going through a quite contrived grunge phase...

Sort of miss the days when I would have nothing better to do than sit listening to this on my record player, dying my hair all manner of hideous colours, scribbling in my angsty diary and thinking I was the coolest kid on earth. RIP sweet sixteen.

revision's making me mental

Just digested 10,000 lines of epic poetry in three and a half hours. My mind's gone soggy.

Halloween House Party 2007

filth

Think I'm turning into a terrible human being, need to turn to an imaginary spirit guide. I'm going to pray to Lohan.

Best post haul of the year

Two-headed "freaken-duck" from Etsy, the highly anticipated Slutever Zine, and a postcard from Dad, aww.

As I peered into the shallow metal hole that is the glorious communal post box this evening on the quest yet again for eternal revision procrastination, I spied that it was full to the brim of sweet goodies just for me. I'm a fan of taxidermy and after trawling ebay for some affordable creeps this two-headed dude waddled onto the horizon for a student-loan kind of price. I also treated myself to the latest Karley Sciortino zine when student finance crossed my palms with silver. She's pretty much the reason I started reading blogs, as a distraction during my AS Levels in that wonderfully naive sixteen year old spring, when I discovered Vice magazine and sex and therefore thought that as a combination of the two she was totally the coolest thing ever. With her disgustingly candid tales of drug addled sexcapades and squat romps aplenty she pretty much stood for everything the sixteen year old me would want to aspire to when I was older. Perhaps if I wasn't such a weedy wimpish type I could've persued that dream, but for now I shall settle down to some revision and gaze at my taxidermy to gather some sense of excitement. Sigh.

Sugar and spice and all things nice

Flickr, Kate Moss in Pop, Bridget Bardot & Serge Gainsbourg album cover, Saga via the never ending story, jelly sandals, Marriane Faithful, Holly Madison, France Gall, Emma Bunton, Ariel Pink, Courtney Love, more Flickr, Kittens, Tickley Feather

Inspiration for the purchase of this baby pink vintage button up shirt, Barry M nail varnish in berry, and lipstick in 147

Sleigh Bells were lame

Last night as a respite from my tortuous revision regime, (as if) I thought that I would go along to the Deaf Institute to see a band I had reservations about, but was sweetly and patiently willing to be proved wrong. It was perhaps going to take a bit of effort to persuade me that their over hyped jangly, metal pop was on the nice side of irritating, but I could imagine that perhaps they'd put on a good show and that maybe in the flesh they were slightly less well groomed and a bit more punk and credible. The venue was absolutely brimming with every variety of douchebag, and whilst being rubbed up against by some dick head in a wife beater and long hair who thinks he looks like that twat out of Razorlight (so 2005) is quite amusing for a while, I was looking forward for the music to start so that I could have a distraction from the feeling of being packed like sweaty sardines. But no, I might've well have been to see Britney Spears, except at least, as my friend pointed out, Britney has a dance routine, which requires at least some inkling of effort. The music came on but I didn't even notice that the band were on stage, as it became apparent that Sleigh Bells were miming their entire set. I mean, they were excellent at looking good. The girl had that pseudo-punk thing down to a tee, wearing her tattoos really convincingly as if she was actually quite alternative, not in a glorified PR groomed version of McFly. And the guy held his guitar the right way round which is a start. But his soloing was really quite out of sync and when she actually had her microphone plugged in her screaming sounded like a molotov cocktail hitting someone in the face. I actually began to feel quite awkward and embarrassed as the girl kept throwing the same poses and the guy still hadn't taken his trendy jacket off, but luckily they didn't have to keep the act up for long because after half an hour of track skipping on the sound system behind them they'd exercised all possible talent and called it a night. I mean, Neil Young played a two hour set and he's had a stroke, talk about wasting their youth. I'm now totally convinced the whole thing is a massive troll by the music industry, and the joke was most definately on the crowd. On the plus side, an extremely drunk girl next to me spent the night trying to hold my hand, which was creepy, but didn't quite feel as humiliating as having paid to see the pitchfork equivalent of Busted.

Photos coming soon.

How to decorate your student halls cell.

It has been almost four beautiful months since I moved into my pale green breezeblock palace, and I'm loving every minute of being encased in a ten by six cell. However, this is largely due to my interior design talent, something not many people are fortunate enough to possess, so I thought I'd share some tips to make Laurence Llawelyn-Bowen weep and your mother proud.

1. Gig tickets/ bits of card you should've left in your handbag, as proof of what an amazing crazy cool time you're having at "uuuuuni". The truth is you got so fucked that night you can't remember anything but clutching the interior walls of the club and have hung onto the meaningless bits of ticket in a desparate attempt to prompt further memories and justify the fact that you paid ten pounds for a sore head, and a piece of paper. Another good thing to stick on your walls is paraphernalia from eccentric women you meet on buses, and photos of loved ones in case you forget what they look like and it's mega awkward when you go back.

2. The highly embarrassing but essential Pretentious Book Collection. Note the astounding amount of literature on Communism,brought on by guilty sweats when you ended up doing an all nighter with SWP party members at a protest you arguably knew far too little about. You'll probably never read these, but as John Water's says "If you go to someone's house and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em." so best stock your shelves up as a precautionary measure.

3. Dead things. Nothing says "come back to my place" like a festering, species-ambiguous lump of the once living. This one's called Stout. Because he was once a stoat, and he's lanky...get it?

4. "Arty" soft porn poster. I once went to an ex-boyfriend's house whose entire bedroom wall was covered in badly blu-tacked, slightly askew pictures of naked women. He may have been fifteen at the time, but the truth is that if only he'd upgraded from Nutz to POP, the posters would've been totally acceptable. For getting away with indecent pictures of girls remember the simple formula: breasty="tarty", skinny="arty", even if the same amount of crotch is on show.

I also have an Ariel Pink poster so that I can drop in the fact that I met them once, leaving out the that I was too shy and uncool to propely talk to them and just watched in awe as my friend marched Ariel off to buy cigarettes and grilled him over the LA music press. Ariel's constant one liner reply brings me onto the next tip; "It's all smoke and mirrors maaan, it's all smoke and mirrors."

5. Charity shop finds. If you dish out a couple of quid like I did for these little beauties you can pretend that they came from the marble staircased, open air jacuzzi mansion you once inhabited before you had to downsize to live the student dream. Mirror, lampshade and plate all battle prizes from elbowing through grannies at St Oswalds.

6. Unmade bed/ dirty cups. If you really want to convince people that taxpayers should be paying for your education, then a hoard of moulding crockery is the way to do it. As for the bed, you can pass it off as decade-too-late BritArt installation. Take that Tracey Emin, I can do lazy too.

can't wait until exams are over

Have a feeling I'll be having LUDACRIS amounts of fun once my chalky, dusty dry brain has been squeezed for all it's worth

Harald Hardrarda be getting drunk right now

The quest for revision distraction ends to extreme nerding out, medieval style.

Dom: I've yet to do any today but i plan on dedicating the rest of the day to it. The vikings are great but the carolingians are pretty dull. They're up next.

Me: Yeah they suck i'm catching up on them now i think. I reckon a couldn't write a full essay on anything, i haven't written a history essay in years arghh

Dom: I know, that's what's freaking me out. How am I supposed to write 1000 words about some dick called charlemagne?

Me: Hahaha. Yeah i'm reading about him now but he's too boring to care about. Least  he wasn't a pussy like alfred i guess.

Dom: Mate, Alfred was fucking awesome. He fought off the vikings, built a load of burhs, educated the kids and created the first english navy. Asser's full of shit.

Me: Man you're good. Alfred was sweet but he was also too scared to do it with a girl, despite his military conquests. Offa was sassier i reckon

Dom: A king doesn't rule his kingdom with his dick though, does he?

Me: Maybe. Look at the success of the vikings and the barbarian invaders. If he can't get it up he can't secure the royal line. But maybe i'm being harsh on alfie, i did forget he did that whole burghal hidage thing

Dom: Yeah, it's a real shame though, a king like that could've probably got all the hot medieval chicks. But you gotta respect the burhs.

Me: They are one of the greater examples of medieval earthworks. Finer than harald's danevirke, charlemagne's incomplete karlsgrab of even offa's dyke some might say

Dom: Hahaha, i'm worried that I had to wikipedia those dudes...

Bristol babes and stolen goods

 

The feelings of trepidation on my last visit to the Bay were totally uncalled for. The night was a total success. This massive babe I know from Bristol came up to stay for a glimpse of the seaside life, and I feel that her experience was in no way hindered by being limited to the insides of a filthy club. We got drunk on wine and rum and broke into the staff area of super mega club JIMMYZ with a Z, stealing photographs of balding men with seagull shit on there head (lolsy), and a massive bottle of Disaronno (classy) from the bar area that had been shut off for not passing it's health and safety test (naughty).