heartless hounds

Her wagon-spokes made of long spiders' legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider's web,
The collars of the moonshine's watery beams,
Her whip of cricket's bone, the lash of film,
Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not so big as a round little worm
Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid; Mercutio

I talk of dreams: which are the children of an idle brain/Begot of nothing but vain fantasy.

"and every song, every single song on that tape, said exactly the same thing"

...why don't our parents worry about us?
...why don't our parents worry about us?

This is THE mixtape. The mixtape I received when I was 11 from a colleague of my dads I mentioned I liked Nirvana to, and a few weeks later she presented me with this tape, which has arguably formed my entire music taste from then to the present day. Not entirely conciously - I discovered this while we were going through the neglected dusty tape boxes today, having not listened to it for about 5 years, but the key elements are there: Nick Cave, My Bloody Valentine, Joy Division are all artists I enjoy now, whereas back then it was Muse and The Pixies that struck me the most.

It was like finding an old friend hiding in the cupboard...

sweetness, i was only joking

"the brainium contains the brain"

It's exam season again, and everybody is gearing up to do alot of the above in the coming weeks. I should be feeling like this is the end of the line, that all my secondary schooling has led up to this one moment - but somehow, I'm feeling strangely apathetic towards it. This is the fourth year in a row where I've had supposedly 'important' exams (year 9 SATs, GCSEs, AS) and now that they really are important I just don't have the will to worry about them any more. British students are apparantly the most tested in the world, and spend more of their youth at school than most kids in Europe and the US. People my age had their first national SATs tests in year 2 at the age of 6 or 7, which was already their third year at school. French and German children don't even start school until that age! From the age of 4 to 18, we're subjected to an intellect-crushing national curriculum that focuses entirely on making us into reliable little government-boosting exam-robots, ready to tick the boxes that need ticking and not much else. In reality, exams don't tell you anything apart from who is good at doing exams.

"I have the knobs on my side"

I'm wearing: trilby from Oxfam, white shirt from the White Company, braces from Clock House Vintage, peg leg trews from H&M, 1950s court shoes from crazy vintage shop in Howarth (Yorkshire, Bronte town).
I got told I looked like Steptoe & Son today, which I actually quite liked.

"chaos was what killed the dinosaurs, darling"

It's 1988. Perms? Check. White tights? Check. Impossibly large shoulder-pads? Check. Winona Ryder? CHECK. Throw in a young Christian Slater, the jocks, a geek squad and some teen-angst and you've got Heathers, an atypical American highschool film where the popular clique are all killed off it even gets to Prom. I love this film. The dialogue is sometimes a little clunky - you can't help but laugh at Christian Slater saying things like "the only place different social types can genuinely get along with each other is in heaven" as justification for murdering three people - but the whole film is just brilliant. And as far as the 80's goes, these girls are going to be my style bible this summer...











Inspiration (al).

the perks of being a wallflower

The phrase "the perks of being a wallflower" is far more interesting than the novel of the same name by Stephen Chbosky. It is probably due to the aesthetically pleasing cover, the dreamy-sounding title, or the many recommendations I've had of it that the novel turned out to be the complete and disappointing opposite of what I had expected. I had imagined an understated but affecting tale of unappreciated beauty, but in this case I was judging it entirely by its cover. It's one of those books that I've always been told to read, a supposed 'generation defining' work, adored the world over by a multitude of teens labouring under the misapprehensions of youth. And although I count myself among that multitude, I just didn't get it - I found it trite, condescending, and inconsequential. The plot was weakened by the first person narrative of Charlie, as in an effort to be more accessible perhaps, Chbosky gave his central character only the most basic and functional language to tell his story with. This could quite obviously be a reflection on the character - were Charlie a real person I doubt he'd be prone to verbal acrobatics - but it made the narrative incredibly boring.

Some kids look at me strange in the hallways because I don't decorate my locker, and I'm the one who beat up Sean and couldn't stop crying after he did it. I guess I'm pretty emotional.

Stop press - Strange? Crying? Emotional? The very essence of the troubled youth... In reality, it has more in common with The Story of Tracy Beaker than anything else.

I was trying to find a photo that represented what my idea of a "wallflower" had been, and found this picture:

I took this at the Neue Wache sculpture by Käthe Kollwitz in Berlin. It's a strange memorial, housed in a massive, grim-looking grey concrete box, and dedicated to all those who died in the Second World War - including the Nazis. Anna standing alone had escaped my notice, but I really like the effect of her isolation from the group. She looks almost superimposed, a pale ghost looking on from the outside.