POLAND

Summer Gothz.

Ashish for Underground, The Craft, Guinevere Van Seenus, flickr, The Craft again, Chloe Sevigny, Tumblr, Ukrainian folk artist Svitlana Dolesko, Wavves.

Independent woman part I

 

Busy working pretty hard, earning dollah before my departure to Poland next week. No time for productive leisure activities.

Slutslobbing.

Photo courtesy of Jonny Cotton.

Part I. KIEV:LAND OF KEVIN KEEGANS

I've been terrible at posting lately due to being generally rubbish, but also through having exams and a thick fog of time to wade through to find my long lost friends once my three hour essay on the concept of masculinity in Catullus and weeks of library paranoia and nail biting was over.  Though I did get to write 'buggered' and 'erect phallis' several times in an academic context which was quite fun.

I've been trying to preciously preserve the memories of my time in the Ukraine, saving them for when my brain is at its least dim and hungover to do it justice, but in the process may have let them wither and die a little, which is why I wanted to post a taster so that I'll feel bad not completing it. Doing this might be comparable to an overzealous toddler squeazing a small animal to keep it safe but killing it in the process I guess. Or in of Mice and Men, when Lennie kills Curley's wife because her hairs so pretty he can't help but strangle her to death in order to stroke it, I feel that my literary skills cannot do justice to what I absorbed through my puny peepers, but I shall try my best. I'll put the whole thing up when I climb out of my post-revision hole of gluttony, endless Twin Peaks watching and hangover induced despair.

 Alex's eyes looked like those of a long abused dancing bear as he stared hollowly at the concrete punctured wilderness around us. Insane drivers occasionally clunked past us in their 1977 issue Soviet Ladas, shooting round the corner with time to pass a glare at the obvious tourist scum we had become. My frazzled brain snagged repeatedly on half-missing syrillic lettering, propped on the top of the building blocks. We wandered down the road to a graffitied and half-shuttered porta-cabin concrete block with cigarette cartons in the window. There was a woman with heavy make-up and an apron behind a plastic mock-marble bar and a variety of meaty, sweaty looking substances piled onto plates and litre bottles of £2 vodka. She couldn't speak English, but we purchased mineral water after reading that even brushing your teeth in the local tap-alade could cause a nasty bout of dsyentary. Also, with the entire of Ukraine's water supply running under the Chernobyl reactor we didn't fancy taking our chances on the involuntary ingestion of glowy stuff.

Eventually from under our layers of panic induced cold sweat we decided to consult my £3 guide book, which strictly advised us to not stray away from the centre of Kiev, a good ten miles away. This particularly cheery paragraph did nothing to soothe any feelings of apprehension; "As you get further from the city centre, the underlying poverty becomes more obvious, fewer and fewer people speak English and facilities that can help or cater for visiters become fewer and fewer." And fewer, and fewer, and fewer...said the voice in my head, along with "you're sacrafising revision time in the middle of exams to get lost and potentially chopped up in Eastern Europe and contaminate yourself with radiation and you didn't even remember to tell your parents you were going here."

Back to life, back to reality.

Ten hour library days and tofu dinners. I really want to write up my Chernobyl adventure, but guilt may stop me doing so for another week perhaps. Back to revision, grey scummy skies and watching Twin Peaks curled up in bed. At least if I fail these exams, my ginger, chili and garlic tofu is a success, therefore I win at life. Sort of.

Fantasy Fulfilled.

My squeaky clean nike air max lite arrived today to my pleasure, bought for the bargain haggling price of £12 on a second hand website. Not only is my pre-teen footwear fantasy fulfilled, but it also allowed me to compile a suitably Eastern-European looking outfit on my first day back in Manc. I was surprised by how popular Nike and Adidas shops were there; it seemed like wearing a completely matching Ali G style tracksuit was the epitome of western cool or some sort of status symbol.
Paired with these hideous marjuana print socks from Ebay and my vintage German jumper, I think I would've fit in far better with the double denim crowd in Kiev in this ensemble, instead of the queer looks I recieved being clad in American Apparel.

 

 

P.S. PHOTOS OF CHERNOBYL COMING UP SOON. So keep on checkin'.

Soviet Spoils: Return from the land of mullets & double denim.

My trip to the Ukraine was stupendous. I shall be wittering on about it when my head is less fuzzy from 12 hours of cross-European travelling, all done on minimal sleep and a meagre cheese sandwich. Cigarettes were so cheap we bought them for metro change. My week was spent drinking 40p beers outside next to the fountains, picking up old pictures of Soviet space propaganda and Kazakh settlers in cobbled-street markets. Welling up with awe and gawping at icing-cake buildings and golden domes. Loading up on sour borsht and delicious Ukrainian pastries. And now it's back to sunny Manchester and the revision grind...
Here are some pictures of my beautiful spoils.

Monster fashion

As I uncovered my favourite child hood books from home I started to think that the dreary colour schemes had a resounding influence on my clothing choices. That and my fascination with the disgusting that has culminated in more adolescent pursuits now, like listening to the Butthole Surfers and watching Embarrassing Teen Bodies. I forgot how amazing Fungus the Bogeyman is. With these two and Haunted House I was always destined to be a child who couldn't resist mutilating Barbie and engaging beanie babies in strange cross-breed-with-dinosaur-toys-orgiastic fun.

Trepidation.

In approximately twelve hours I shall be started my snail journey to Kiev, and eventually Chernobyl. I feel really lame but...I'm kind of scared. Trying to laugh off my distinct lack of travel insurance.

Enid Coleslaw Syndrome.

Photo by Clio

Yesterday I went with some old friends from school to the fairground. Up until I was about seven this was a permanent fixture in town, and doubtless a big incentive to moving here. Especially as a kid, having a run down, rickety, roller coaster, ghost train, old fashioned helter skelter and a plethora of hook-a-ducks, ring tosses and candy floss stalls directly opposite school was glorious. But for at least a decade now the fairs tacky reincarnation has come back to the sea-front every bank holiday, bringing with it a rudimentary crowd of tanked-up, teenage mothers in waiting, intent on emptying their cheap cider stomachs on the waltzers, only to fill them back up again with mechanically reclaimed meat snacks. It's a sad carousel of tired looking families, fake tanned adolescents and creepy chain-smoking stall merchants.

Trying to win a 200 pack of Regal cigarettes on the ring toss, the bitter north easterly wind kept blowing Clio's hoops in the wrong direction. I looked around me. With the thick, foggy sea fret that had been hanging over the coast all week, the tops of the tallest helter skelters were obscured in the mist, as was the sea. The usual sounds of seagull squawking and crashing waves had been usurped by blaring, early 2000s pop, so we could've been anywhere, but the spirit of the place was inherently in keeping. A hideous version of Jefferson Airplane's 'Somebody to Love' by the 'Boogie Pimpz' was playing full blast, whilst twelve year olds rode the uncomfortably over sexualised Rodeo Bull ride. A ten foot, spray painted picture of a topless woman with a stetson was behind them as the ride MC exhaled his cigarette, "Are you reeaaaaddddyyy?".The children squealed as Grace Slick's voice stammered electronically, the tacky, soft pornographic image smiling behind them and a crowd of track suited, shaven headed youths gathering to glimpse up the short skirts of those on the cusp of adulthood.

Spending time with one of my oldest best friends, I remembered the first time we'd watched Ghost World on a sleepover at twelve or thirteen, and how utterly and rapturously I had been able to relate to those characters. Though being too cool, awkward and Enid-like to quite express it at the time, seeing Clio always makes me feel that again. Looking back to our bitter, sardonic fifteen year old selves, I miss trawling through the streets in a dead end town with her, spying on weirdos and mocking everything in a ruthless cull of all that was tragic and lame. As I went to the ThursBay clubs for the second week running that night, I had the sad feeling of selling out in enjoying the drunken clamor around me.