Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: costume, halloween, headspace, tampons, toxic shock syndrome, tss
I think it’s about time for one of those every few years whoooshy music/aesthetic changes. That are unplanned but come as a relief when they do happen. Everything is a little uneasy right now. This first image is form Halloween 1973. Today was pretty much uneventful; last night was (began) excellent. I dressed as TSS – Toxic Shock Syndrome this year. Red tights, bloodied skin, a string from the centre of my head and a billowy dress with a strange organic/carnivorous anemonic pattern that faintly resembles a gangrenous tampon. Possibly my favourite costume ever?
more
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 3oud, aesthetic, anti-civillization, cairo, folk metal, headspace, korpiklaani, kvlt, misty glen, murakami, oud, oudoccidentalising america, semantics, semiotics, summer, the south, travel
I guess I read a lot of Murakami when in Cairo- you wouldn’t necessarily think they’d match, would you? Here’s a bunch more things that don’t match but that I’ve been visually digging lately, diagrammations aside. Many of them from the righteous Acid Sweat Lodge, “organised for the dissemination of outsider knowledge”. Brilliant for mental mapping and planning my circa-August 2009 ¡Occidentalise America! trip which will hopefully be NYC-Nashville-New Orleans shaped, perhaps with many detours. It’s interesting how “The South” seems kind of internally exoticised among Americans? A Northeastern friend from Massachusetts tells me it’s dark and poetic and swampy and beautiful.
kvltising the 3oud?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anthropology, brownbook, dead time, deira, dubai, estrangement, evan collisson, expat anxiety, future gutter status, ghost of petrodollar bubble past, headspace, karama, skateboarding, summer, uae
Dubai again and a strange affection for a city that I guess is my home, little as it does want me here. Jobs here seem impossible at first hunt, perhaps I should look to skip and dip on standby tickets for the next two months? I will definitely be in Cairo (and not Berlin) for a fortnight sandwiched in June, and Kashmir/Mumbai for the first 2-3 weeks of July. Hopefully finding an affordable (!) sublet in NYC for August and couchsurfing for the last dredges of July til I can inshallah move in. My life is currently packed into six boxes in the radio station – I fascinatingly had five last year and four the year before. I suspect the number could go down though as I have scores of books to disperse (like theory, like cats) into the atmosphere, and several boxes lined with wake-up-an-hour-before-kickout-time dump and run panic. [you can't go home again..]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anarchism, anarchist bookfair, anthropology, ☭☭☭, cat party, catastrophe, dead time, dissemination, dubai, expat crisis, future gutter status, headspace, listen trotskyist, new school, situationism, summer
“I sometimes think I envy those people who know where they belong;
writers who have a language and a history that is granted them with no catches, no hooks. Theirs for the taking. Along with a nation of willing accomplices, compatriots who see their own fate and that of their nation’s history and literary tradition reflected in the mirror the writer’s labour. It is all so neatly sewn up. Of course, I enjoy no such privilege. I belong to that nomad tribe, the great unwashed, those people born in the joins between continental shelves, in the unclaimed interstices between time zones, strung across latitudes. A tribe of no fixed locus, the homeless, the stateless. I have two passports and quite a variety of other documents to identify me, all of which tell the world where I have been, but not who I am, nor where I am going to…
A petrodollar summer?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: alice dellal, hair, headspace, mohawk, shaved head
Some Brazilian-Iranian socialite-model that grungifies it up it seems. I don’t know (or care to, really) much about her but her hair! Incredible – I’ve been thinking of undercutting it for a bit now but perhaps I’ll give this a go instead? It seems versatile and I like it’s a bit softer than a full hawk. Good for the weather too, which is getting promisingly warm, even as nyc remains slightly soulcrushing post-Berlin. Nice take on the Madonna bra too?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bass, berlin, dancing, drugs and rock n roll, friday i'm in love, fugazi, fugazi fridays, headspace, joy division, magnolia, promises, sex, signs, text, the cure, toast, word on the street, words, writing
Another week, another Fugazi Friday. This one is about words, words and expressions, as the song Promises from their 1989 Margin Walker EP (and the compilation 13 Songs) goes. This was the first Fugazi album I ever heard, and the sweet intro of Waiting Room coincided wonderfully with learning to play bass, coincidently also age 13. It’s not actually that hard but I remember being crazyproud when I finally nailed it. I didn’t actually realise it was a compilation album until probably a few years later – as with, perhaps embarrassingly, the Cure’s Galore. The song Promises can anyway be found audibly here, and also, adorably, here with this video from sometime in 1988 in DC. Having just begun to recover from the doom that was Intro to Linguistics, I’m not so much a fan of words and their phonological microcomponents right now. I still like words on walls though, and words on the street and on signs, so here’s ten for today, with what is probably a shockngly accurate characterisation of my headspace right now. The signage of Fraday I’m in love’ might be the best thing I have seen all week?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 1990s, as if, dead time, fashion, film, future gutter status, headspace, rage against the machine, rags, rnc 2008
The last few weeks have been kind of strange, kind of characterised by a weird pre-apocalyptic silence (that has nothing to do with election hyperventilation). Sleeping every three days, and when I do sleep, missing whole days. I have been semi-repulsed by fashion over the last near-year or so yet I find my self drawn to it and everything visually embodiable lately. And maybe mostly, the 1990s and the films, and fashion that went with it (and I suspect there’s so so much I’m missing).
Things I remember like plaids around the waist and docs and small-print florals and dungarees and neon sneakers and dark lipstick on coffee cups (I’m becoming my mother) and really really wanting to be a riot grrrl. And things I don’t like the ubersleek gorgeously clean minimalism of the early side of the decade. Of course it’s retrospective nostalgia, but didn’t things seem mad fun? Like this Amy Grant video (the hat!), and remembered slushies, astroturf, pink bougainvillea and little-kid fashion shows in somebody’s Jumeirah back garden. I really miss Dubai right now, or at least its more-is-more excesses, maybe it’s the same thing.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: art, dead time, future gutter status, hasisi park, headspace, south korea, tss
What if you wake up to find that dictionaries have been revised
And the revolution is only a thought in what you think is your head?
There’s something faintly comforting about these Hasisi Park photos, like the exoticising/legitimising fluid motion of putting cumin or cardamom milk in your tea instead. I don’t care to much some of h(ir?) work, which mines the same extra-grainy scummy hpster aesthetic that I love to hate to love. These I do like though; perhaps I need more flowers and porcelain dolls in my life (maybe Fran has this last part covered?).
 |
 |
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: arabic, dead time, future gutter status, headspace, larkin, summer
I am unsure of who this man is or what it is that he’s doing. This does however characterise my current relationship with the Arabic language rather accurately. Today I was told that I sound like an ambulance siren (a quieter, more mumbly version) when distressed. I’m not sure how I feel about this? [I would like to learn to whine/wail to the theme tune from M*A*S*H when I grow up please]
But I’m reminded of a goldilocks level of bitterness – Philip Larkin poem:
