writing #3 - An Attempt To Be Sexy

Did a new 'thing'. I'm pretty sure it's a short story but some of the sentences in it are really like I was trying to write a poem. Please excuse the late night husky voice and the phone on which the recording was being made vibrating half-way through. Ta.

___

AN ATTEMPT TO BE SEXY

“Hold still”
“yeah?”
“Yeah. Okay, I think I got it...”
“Right”
“Yes, yes, okay, got it”
“So can you hear me now?”

I stared through the window, my left cheek squashed against the glass. The once-cooling surface had, within a matter of seconds, become the source of a chill that prevented me from speaking to you.

“Hang on, I’ve lost you again.”

It seemed a shame that it was my jaw, not brain that had frozen over. My breath had by now clouded the pane and blocked any view. Hot air escaping from my nostrils began to thaw my mouth and the same gas waiting to emerge finished the job.

“Better?” I began to reply, until I realised that my body was trying to motion accordingly and the consonants scrambled in my mouth. I found the futility of this act entertaining enough to divulge my attention from attempting to distract you from the reality of the fact that we both preferred it when we had less in common.

As such I found it a blessing that tonight would not suffer the routine roll call of all the people I didn’t like, didn’t know and didn’t want to know. Nor off-the-cuff, semi-relatable (under analysis) remarks about the coincidence of being alive at the same time being vast and quixotic as it is and the subconscious setting of barriers because it always pays to be prepared. No: my mind went blank as you asked me to begin and a mental image of you seared itself on my mind’s worn-out eye.

“Um,” it began, disappointing even myself and starting over, “I manage to remove my socks with minimal fuss”. Politeness is an only half-desirable trait and was unfortunately the one of my few to find itself amplified by the telephone receiver.

“Speak up.”
“Can you hear me now?”
“Shh. Carry on.”

Something about the subtext encouraged me but a mistimed gulp between breaths interrupted my flow and startled, it turned into a belch. Time was, it would have passed with a laugh but the humour was no longer present and though the lack of reaction was in itself unremarkable it hit me with a jolt and I once again started to think. Trying to talk I spluttered outside of my shell and unchecked, half-formed thoughts mixed in the air with the organic waste and my lungs gave way to the great wave of guts.

It didn’t turn you on.


___

Writing - poetry #2

Afternoon all, hope you're well. You may remember this post, a month ago, in which I shared an upbeat little ditty about two of the world's oldest professions. Today, something a little more dark.

___

Sonnet no.1

Burn each and every member of the flock
Before the black bird swoops and takes his prey

(The most easy of these: those numbed by shock,

The rest blinded or taken in affray).

But he swoops, he dives, he eats my insides

And blood drips as we crow, his beak a key

That opens me. Again, I watch him glide

I’d rather drift, a pyre out at sea.

It seems smoking him out has no effect

So now it is my chest where he resides –

Jailed by ribs, they can take all his pecks

With his tongue I have no need to comply.

Now after so long abusing my pen

All of my words shall become mine again.

___

List: Sunday Evening's Soundcloud Set

How regularly do you go on the internet on Sundays and see a million complaints about boredom? It's a disease, I tell you, but one that I am not currently inflicted with. This might be down to having listened to a lot of music tonight which I can, for once, link you to without too much effort*. So here's a little sequence for any bored ears out there tonight - I can't guarantee it'll flow particularly smoothly or anything, it's just a semi-random sequence of songs I found on my soundcloud, listened to and particularly enjoyed tonight. Hope you do likewise!

Tempunauts - don't be scared off by this one. It's not at all my usual style but someone linked to it on Twitter and listening to it in the background I found it surprisingly enjoyable.

First of My Kind - Like the previous track, this is unusual for me - I don't really like Miles Kane, in that I find his image and popularity irritating given his lack of good tunes. That said, this is much better and I can see myself starting to like him if he releases a few more like this and people stop calling him well-dressed. The start of this song sounds like It's Raining Men!

Simple Math - Always been a favourite, this. An undeniably good song.

Fitzpleasure (BretonLABS remix) - It's not often you find a genuinely good, listenable remix and this, of a stand-out song by a band who blew away my initial expectations with their interwoven rhythms and interesting riffs, is as good as the song itself. This one is downloadable!

Toothache - The first song to really hit the high standards of their first few, this band have so much potential as well as being properly brilliant already. This is the first single with their new member, Asya, singing, and she really adds to their sound. Listen to Two Dozen, too.

Can't See Myself - A tune I always liked, but was never quite sure why. Good stuff from a band I've enjoyed every time I've seen them. RIP Maddox.

Hello Sadness - The title track of the latest album from potentially my favourite band. Benefits from repeated listening and savouring, but still brilliant on the first listen, like all genuinely good music.

La Moustache Formidable - I adore Mimas. This was the first I heard from them, and I've listened this and Mac, Get Your Gear On to death. Honest-to-God fantastic.



If you're still stuck for a listen, before those few I watched this twice, and am rewatching (well, listening this time) this - Arctic Monkeys live at Coachella 13/04/12 (WHY DOES AMERICA PUT THE MONTH FIRST STOP IT NOTHING MAKES ANY SENSE LIKE THAT)

I love Arctic Monkeys. I cannot be bothered to write about them so here I shall compile some of my tweets from earlier this evening:
Love watching Monkeys videos at the moment, it's a joy to see new tunes as highlights of the set.
(for the first time in ages, as well)
I can't help but have the feeling that right about now would be the best time to see the arctic monkeys
Confidence levels and you can see them enjoying it, back catalogue meaning no heavy reliance on new or old material...
Anyway yes, they really are growing into being almost my favourite band again. Feels like I'm in year eight again


T'ra! Have a nice evening xxxx

* usually listen to records, which come without a hyperlink etceteraaaa

I've been finding it really hard to not panic-buy in these hard times

Record Store Day 2012 & The Black Wax Addiction

If you know me or my writing, you'll probably know how proud I'm becoming of my growing record collection. I've got so much of my favourite stuff on vinyl now which feels like quite an achievement to someone as lazily perfectionist (there's a contradiction for you) as me - albeit a rather expensive one.
I'm not going to go over the entire Record Store Day initiative for you, however superb it may be - and is - but focus on this year's exclusive releases - because I'm sad enough to have spent a good hour earlier painstakingly and comprehensively listing a large amount of what I am most after in priority AND alphabetical order. Yeah. Sad, I warned you. It's a bit long and I am a student and am not really able to afford one, let alone everything in the 'want' section of my list, but will regardless do my best to get everything in 'need' as much as 'want a lot' as I can allow myself. Maybe more.
I'd also love to get this.
It does not even regret me to admit that, nay, proclaim that I will be queueing up for doors to open - I would consider going later, so that a section of my list is already gone and I CANNOT spend as much, but s Arsenal are playing at home (against Chelsea! Big game) later on, which I can't miss, so I'm just going to have to trust my small amount of self-control. My wonderful local record store David's Music will not have, according to staff, ordered too many copies of things that wouldn't have deserved a stand-alone release but are taking advantage of the RSD 'feeding frenzy', which could eliminate a lot of the 'maybe' list. ANYWAY, enough pre-amble, here is my RSD list (I AM SO SAD)



NEED
Arctic Monkeys - R U Mine? Ltd heavyweight purple vinyl 7"
Beach House - Lazuli 7" Blue/opaque vinyl 
Gorillaz - DoYaThing 10" Picture disc 
Oscar Cash - Plays Metronomy 7”

WANT A LOT
Animal Collective - Transverse Temporal Gyrus 4 track E.P. 12" 
Bloc Party - Shes Hearing Voices 7" re-release of the band's debut single 
Bombay Bicycle Club - Lights Out, Words Gone (Rub A Dub)
Caitlin Rose - Piledriver Waltz/Love Is A Laserquest 7" with exclusive jukebox sticker
The Cure - Friday I'm In Love 7”
Graham Coxon - What'll it Take
Metronomy - Black Eye Burnt Thumb (Woodwind version)/You Could easily Have Me (Woodwind version) 7"
Slow Club – Paradise LP 
St Vincent - Krokodil/Grot 7” 
Two door Cinema Club - Acoustic EP 7"
Xiu Xiu/Dirty Beaches - Always/Tu Ne Dis Rien Split 7" 

WANT 
BBC Radiophonic Workshop - Dr Who Sound Effects 
Belle & Sebastian - Crash Exclusive 7”
David Bowie - A Side: David Bowie - Starman (original single version). Stereo
B Side: David Bowie - Starman (Top Of The Pops version) Originally broadcast on the BBC TV Programme 'Top Of The Pops' on 6/7/72. Mono
The Cure - Three Imaginary Boys LP, Seventeen Seconds LP, Faith Numbered (normal or coloured vinyl) LP, Pornography LP, The Top LP
The Futureheads – No 1 Song in Heaven
The Kinks – King Arthur, Face to Face, Something Else LPs
Laura Marling - Flicker and Fail/To Be A Woman 7”
Neutral Milk Hotel - coloured vinyl re-pressed LP
Odd Future - The Of Tape Vol. 2 Triple album 
Of Montreal/Deerhoof - Stygian x Bisection Split 7" 
Sigur Ros - Ekki Mukk 10" 
The Subways - Kiss Kiss Bang Bang 7" grey vinyl 
The Specials - The Specials Live 7" 

MAYBE
The Beat - A: Mirror In The Bathroom, AA: Too Nice To Talk To 7" single picture sleeve, coloured vinyl 
The Beatles - 1's Singles Collection 4 x 7" Singles in Tin Box 
The Black Keys - El Camino 2LP 7" plus additional 7" vinyl with 2 live tracks. Gatefold with poster and bonus CD 
James Brown - Live At The Apollo: There It Is, Pass The Peas 
The Clash - London Calling Special digitally re-mastered new version by Mick Jones and Bill Price 
Consort Audite Nova - Plays Metronomy 
Dry The River - New Ceremony 
Elbow - McGreggor 
The Fall - Night Of The Humerons 
Morrissey - Suedehead, We'll Let You Know (live)*, Now My Heart Is Full (live)* - 10" picture disc 
Richard Hawley - Leave your Body Behind You 10" Single (part of Richard Hawley Singles Club)
Pains Of Being Pure At Heart - Acid Reflex 12" RMX
Pete Townsend - The Quadrophenia Demos:
EP One: Side 1 - The Real Me (demo), Cut My Hair (demo), Punk (demo) Side 2: Dirty Jobs (demo), Is It In My Head (demo), Any More (demo)
EP Two: Side 1: I've Had Enough (demo), Drowned (demo), Is It Me (demo) Side 2: Dr Jimmy (demo), Love Reign O'er Me (demo) Two exclusive 10" vinyl Eps featuring a selection of demos from the recent, critically acclaimed box set reissue - Quadrophenia: 'The Director's Cut' 
Ramones -Blitzkrieg Bop/Havana Affair 7", sire house bag
The Supremes - Baby Love (Heart shaped 7”)
Frank Turner - I Still Believe/Somebody To Love 
The Wombats - The Wombats Proudly Present LP 

Flatmates

One happy family

If you were wondering, "бляди" is apparently Russian for "whore". 

Does everybody else find this as amusing as me? I particularly enjoy the way he does absolutely nothing to suggest unhappiness with the £50 he was fined for anti-social behaviour.

He has previously been reported to facebook for uploading pictures of what I can only describe as medieval torture porn and is notorious amongst my flatmates for his lax attitudes towards everybody else's crockery and breaking two toasters in a week for trying to toast cheese.

What a tit.

Writing exercises - poetry #1

Evening. Yesterday evening I was working at a Luke Wright and Ross Sutherland gig - two performance poets who I have a real love for, the latter inspiring the former into poetry, who subsequently got me hooked on the medium when I went to Latitude in 2010. In the afternoon before the show, they held a workshop, which I went to. Not only was it really interesting and informative but we had a couple of 10 minute intervals to try out some exercises, which didn't give me the opportunity to procrastinate, my most seductive enemy. In the first, we could either write an alliterative (alliteration being the technique used before rhyme came into popular useage) or univocal (using only one vowel (Y counting as a vowel)) poem. I didn't get very far with my 'E' poem (called Fleet Street), so here's the product of the second exercise, a long one sentence poem which starts with an image, goes off on a tangent, and returns to the image right at the end. I read this out on stage (very badly):



Here's a transcript:

The anchor strained against the rope
Pulling the boat into the sunny cope*
As its crew flexes to catch the eye
Of the assembled gathering of passers-by
Who witness a sight too silly to believe
As the trends have changed no news reached sea
That the ladies of Britain are now hard to impress
With the sight of muscles bulging from a tight white vest
Other than one, Ms Daisy Hook
Whose more-than-a-glance is a noticeable look
That more than a few sailors see
(Most of whom assume she demands no fee)
A brawl breaks out, friends become foes
The Captain shrieks "She's just a cheap hoe"
It seems that little Miss Hook's look
Was the final fray of that crew's rope

Ta-da!

Okay, must dash, off to continue the poetry hype with an evening of being read to be Simon Armitage! Love the theatre I work at. Hope you all enjoyed x


*I'm not sure this is right. Is a cope a thing? You get a cape, and in France you get a cote - is cope in that sense a neologism?

How-to: create a fuck-off massive Wagon Wheel (71,640.6 calories)

Found this as a draft. Look how old it is!

"Yesterday (Wednesday 9th) third year, senior RA and fresher-fucker Matthew Rutter walked through our kitchen door with Tesco bags containing £30 worth of ingredients including marshmallows, jam, shortbread and 10 kilos of chocolate, with the purpose of making his ill girlfriend a GIANT wagon wheel."

Ha, really should have written this post.  The wagon wheel was well cool, as well, here are some pictures:

Katie smashing up some shortbread.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfeyUGZt8nk    

Matthew waiting for the first chocolate layer to dry

CALORIE COUNT (accidentally but hilariously written on a pizza hut box background)  

some of the top layer of choc

just a casual little geek out

ellie and i decided to attack harriet

#ff

"40 Posts, last published on 24-Oct-2011 – View Blog"


Woops. 


Well I'm sorry it's been a while, it turns out that uni is just totally amazeballs, and I haven't reaaallly had much time on my hands (absolute barefaced lie, all I do is sleep).  Anyway, I've got an essay due in soon and there's nothing like procrastination for kick-starting an urge to blog, is there? 


Cunctation isn't the only reason for this, however: I've been reading some of your lovely posts and a couple in particular have really stood out.  It's Friday, and as a Twitter addict of the highest order, I thought a few Bloggers #FFs would be a nice thing to do. 


Very nice people live below this heading


Hila
The best thing about a fucked up sleeping cycle is being able to see tweets from down under.  In the past week I've very swiftly fallen for Hila, and I think her new year's poem can demonstrate why.  She is also bally ace for good retweets, and I've found several lovely things via her in the past few days, such as Jennifer Grotz’s stunning “Poppies”. And no, that's not a link to the Sun.


http://hila-lumiere.blogspot.com/ 
@tout_moi


Charlie
One of the best people I've met this year (and this is the year I've gone to uni) is a boy I followed on Twitter on a whim after seeing him tagged in a few friends' tweets.  Turns out the guy shares more than an interest in Peep Show with me: a keen writer, bantersaurus rex and fellow sufferer of arrogance and laziness syndrome, we've been planning to co-write some stuff for a good forever now and I therefore pledge to eat a hot chili in a vlog if, by the end of summer, we still have nothing substantial to our names.


@charliechalkley
Black and white blog
Colour blog


Zoe
When I first joined this website - almost entirely down to the efforts of Bee, who I'm sure you'll all know - I immediately followed several blogs in a flurry of activity, in an attempt to really get stuck into this whole community business.  Zoe's fantastic photography, craft and lifestyle blog, Ladybird Likes, is one of very few that I stuck by, and that's as much down to her amazing personality as it is her superb eye for gems when thrifting.  I for one am very much excited about the prospect of her new - own - business and if any of you wankers don't at least have a butch I'm going to send the big boys 'round.
(Zo', I'm sending your mixtape SOON AS I'm so sorry it's taken quite so fackin' long)


ladybirdlikes.blogspot.com
@ladybirdlikes
Flickr 


Flatmates
As you might have expected, I'm at university with some pretty charming chaps.  My flatmate Molly, for one, is fiercely intelligent and of everybody I know has one of the best tastes in literature.  Together we run (ran) @matthewquotes, the tribute twitter account to Matthew Bond, one of the most entertaining people you will ever have the pleasure of meeting.  Here's a photo I took of him the first time we went out as a flat.


One of the best things about studying at a university notable for its multiculturalism is how different the people you meet are to each other, and just how many people you meet and love.  Somewhat surprising, then, is how Charlie has managed to end up in three quarters of my classes, but I regret nothing - she's proper ace, right; she likes feminism, films and fluffy penguins, and her happy new year video was wrapping herself up in cellotape.  


YouTube channel  
@EdgeOTI 


Have you subscribed to Charlie on YouTube yet? Ace. Now watch this.*


Aleks  
The nicest person around is Aleks Bhowmick - without his consistently happy tweets, the world would literally collapse.  I don't really feel I need to say much more: following him on twitter will quadruple your quality of life.  Go for it.


@AleksBhowmick






BLOGGY BLOGGY BLOG BLOG








*Nothing she's done, but I'm always up for misleading my readers into watching a nice bit of Thierry-porn.