The world has changed, and I am different. I am much older now. I must be, with the baggage I have collected along the last year. I've been away, I've come back, I've been in London studying, I have left. Final work, exhibition, Christmas, end. End.
I am aware this site looks incomplete, that the person who made it has moved on, and I don't know how to fix the frays in it's fabric. I don't know if this matters, if the work I love takes this form too. Is the facade the best bit? The pictures of me looking blonde and young and how I was 3 years ago smattered across something as you read it? It is far too timely that I should be absent altogether. Just a few Instagram shots from last April lingering on it, a trace of something I leave behind.
Who am I but words and actions. For those who wonder, my hair is dark blonde, grown out and then fashioned into a fringe. The ends are still as blonde as the pictures that hang around. My physique is similar, can't seem to lose much, but neither will I really gain. Always around a size 10 where my shoulders and hips are concerned. Is my face the same? Mostly. Maybe I am older to look at, I don't know. I guess I am still 24, the lines shouldn't quite show yet.
It feels good to blend. It's what I wanted. I wanted my hair to grow, no more shocking colours, no more vibrancy. Just a young, unthreatening woman, pale and quiet travelling through life in silence. There is so much noise. I have learnt over the last year that I need quiet more and more. Studying sound, it seems, can do that to you. I wear earplugs more, day or night. Weird to others, I'm sure. So many people love the crashing and the clutter and the shouting each day brings. The noise outside your window merging with the chaos of your personal space. I love music, I love dancing and socialising and being around everyday calamity just as much as the next person, but that controlled quiet once a day, in sleep or in calm, is very important I have found. Silence, though never complete, is essential to balancing your life.
I propose a quiet new year for myself, though not my desired career path, I am grateful for my job being here in the overlapping period, where I can think, gain some kind of hold over my finances, and dream perhaps of what I might do next. I might lose a little weight perhaps, I'd would like to be better at my pole dancing, and I believe my deadlifts haven't quite come yet due to a little excess weight on my lower half.
I miss London and my friends. I miss talking in a certain way to people, I miss the challenge. I miss the quiet. Always the quiet? London isn't quiet, but it allows you to live in constant company, whilst being in the silence of your own self. I could put ear plugs in and wander the streets, and I don't think anyone would ever know. One minute we are too introverted as people, the next we are too extroverted, but I see it as a constant collaboration. Perhaps a refined form of presence. One thing I discovered is everyone knows personal space, and that in itself allows for selective hearing; a chance for your own silence.
Wednesday 28 December 2016
Wednesday 17 February 2016
Touch the Glass
Erratic sirens toll. The doors close. Visit somewhere new to revisit someone old. Hand back your memories, perhaps in pieces (lets be honest, you never checked). Give a smile, apologise for your brisk leave due to time constraints. Choke the remorse. Shield regret. A cup of tea would have been nice. Break the ice. The wind is cold and so are you. I never knew this street existed.
London smirks at my shoddy goodbye, my retreat to safer shores. Come back soon, have that drink you promised. Stare at your reflection in the carriage window, they won’t see you like her. They see someone who couldn’t answer, who never will. The past is just that. Hide behind a screen, more pressing matters demand you there.
Thursday 14 January 2016
South Ocean Blvd
I’m going cross country on a Silver Meteor train from West Palm Beach to Winter Park, the current home of my oldest Florida buddy. The journey is 4 hours and 5 minutes. The sky is thick and grey like smoke, the countryside is dry and rolling. It’s January here too, so don’t expect the warmth, expect a strong breeze and cold sun, if it isn’t overcast. Well, the strong breeze is if you are on the water, which is where my mother’s new condo is, right off the Inter-coastal in North Palm.
This view from the carriage window is like nothing you would find in the UK. The orange brush-like grass consumes the ground, with the occasional spike of green. Cattle come and go within seconds. I see the occasional bungalow or camper van amongst a clutter of twisted trees. I never knew so much pale hanging moss could cover so many branches. Now a mile of orange trees fill my peripheral - it is Florida after all.
There is a drive we would always do to my grandmother’s in Palm Beach. It is a drive I could not compare to any other. It is embedded as a core memory since a child, and gives me this feeling of wonderment, an emotion of exhilaration. The vision of dream-like perfection covers the beautiful coast, the monumental beach mansions of pastel purity, gazing out to endlessness. The rich and safe live here. Perhaps they never stay. Most of these villas look empty, but for the occasional bedroom light signifying someone, somewhere in its vast estate is tucking themselves in like any other to go to bed. I look at these creations as if they are sacred pieces of art unveiled for a private showing, just for me.
I don’t feel sadness, I don’t feel jealousy. I don’t feel remorse as if we should have taken another path to visit my grandmother’s little condo. These symbols greet us with a reminder that happiness comes in different forms. That success is always within reach. That we can create glorious things to pass on to friends and family, to share over generations, to inspire others. Wealth comes to us in so many ways. Perhaps it is the romantic in me. Perhaps I look for the best in everything humans make such an effort to create. But all along that shoreline, discreetly and serenely, there are people out of sight getting the view of their lives.
Wednesday 28 October 2015
Ultraviolence
It’s relentless, beautiful and supernatural. Ultraviolence is an album I have never been able to put down since I first found it last year. But it took me time to appreciate it, to really hear the words and feel the sentiments of Lana Del Ray. The darkness that envelopes you throughout; it’s like a layer of smoke, a ghostly fog in the streets that is always present. This makes it impossible to pull away from the haunting vocal textures, restless guitars and drums that softly guide you from one scene to the next. This is cinema. This is music you swear you can see and feel, if you just extend your fingertips far enough.
Her crowd pleasing album ‘Born To Die’ had the strings, the vibe, the cinema and the pop that we all yearned for, that made us sigh in relief that someone did it and it was ours to hear. I loved that album, but I was cynical of her when it came to me in my first year of university. I wasn’t sure if I liked the fad that came with her. I felt girls were getting the wrong end of the stick so I closed my ears for a while until the noise died down. Thats when I really found her, by myself, when I needed her. An artist like Lana needs time to absorb. So here I am, completely consumed day in day out by Ultraviolence, the album I dubbed my ‘transition album’ last year as I travelled between places in a state of graduate limbo. But it took even longer to appreciate. I had to really listen, almost against my will in places, like reading a very intense and rewarding book that demands your focus.
It begins with the wonderful 6.39 minute song ‘Cruel World’, a constant serene drama that loops over and over again. You think it will never end; you hope it doesn’t. A daring beginning for a ‘pop’ artist, but one that immediately caught me in its endless web.
‘Ultraviolence’ the title track that follows, is what I would consider the most like her previous works, but even then it has something so much more. A different tone. A maturity that wasn’t there before.
I see ‘Shades of Cool’ as a filler to earth us back to the girl she’s showing us now. Its purpose is to draw us back to the command of her voice as it reverberates all around.
‘Brooklyn Baby’ and ‘West Coast’ have a playfulness to them. They reflect the sexuality that we see in her as a person, that her refined physical beauty brings to the table. We sway with her in ‘Brooklyn Baby’, and get down with her in ‘West Coast’. We feel a hunger the way she does, and respond to the deep whispered notes and the chorused sirens of her voice with an excitable chill.
By now we have reached a point of no return, as ‘Sad Girl’ hits a soft spot, preparing us for ‘Pretty When You Cry’ - a solemn moan for attention that every girl feels when they are alone in their bedroom, overthinking their romances yet again. This is one of the moments when we really see her as a narrator of love the way it is really felt.
I want money, power and glory,
I want money, and all your power, and all your glory,
'Allelujah,
I'm gonna take you for all that you've got.
'Allelujah,
I'm gonna take them for all that they've got.
I imagine a similar male character like the one described in the very first song 'Cruel World'. A man of false virtue, with his gun in hand, bible in other, screwing people over again and again to work his way to the top and find his financial heaven. But you wonder with the constantly swapping perspective of this song whether Lana is in fact the one seeking the glory, perhaps she has moved from the girl she was in Cruel World, a girl of sensitivity and weakness, and has transcended to the woman who controls the game, right at the top.
This leads us to what I consider another thought provoking and powerful song. 'Fucked My Way Up to the Top' is forceful and driving. It is lyrically topical within pop culture, as well assertive in it's beauty.
'Old Money' is the deep, seductive and hopeless ballad we were waiting for. Unyielding piano chords set the mood of a girl waiting at her window, reciting beautiful descriptive symbols she remembers from a past time in New York City. 'Old Money' describes faded glamour, past riches, and someone who would do anything to revisit this place again, the romantic fantasy inside her head created so many years ago.
The album finishes with 'The Other Woman', a restless song about two contrasting females, both competing in their own way for the love and attention of the same man. It is vocally loose and relaxed, with operatic moments towards the end. It ends with the solitary word 'alone', as the strings fade out, giving an anti-climatical response for the listener, who feels a story isn't finished with this the end of the album. Personally I feel 'Old Money' would have been a more beautiful ending to the album. But the truth is, Lana doesn't deal in perfection. By not leaving us with the obvious - a piano ballad - more respect is felt on my part as the listener. She had all the cards, but she shuffled the deck and gave us something we didn't expect.
AKC x
'Old Money' is the deep, seductive and hopeless ballad we were waiting for. Unyielding piano chords set the mood of a girl waiting at her window, reciting beautiful descriptive symbols she remembers from a past time in New York City. 'Old Money' describes faded glamour, past riches, and someone who would do anything to revisit this place again, the romantic fantasy inside her head created so many years ago.
The album finishes with 'The Other Woman', a restless song about two contrasting females, both competing in their own way for the love and attention of the same man. It is vocally loose and relaxed, with operatic moments towards the end. It ends with the solitary word 'alone', as the strings fade out, giving an anti-climatical response for the listener, who feels a story isn't finished with this the end of the album. Personally I feel 'Old Money' would have been a more beautiful ending to the album. But the truth is, Lana doesn't deal in perfection. By not leaving us with the obvious - a piano ballad - more respect is felt on my part as the listener. She had all the cards, but she shuffled the deck and gave us something we didn't expect.
AKC x
My Place of Transition
There are so many things I will never know about you.
How cold you might be in winter.
What it feels like when the radiators turn on.
How bright it might be if all the lights worked.
What the furniture would look like in different places.
Whether a change of curtains would change your personality.
What the ceiling would look like if it was fixed,
Whether it would drip more in December rain.
What it would be like to have sleepovers with old friends here,
mattresses and duvets strewn across the floor.
To have friends visit at all.
You were my place of transition.
One relationship ended and another was found.
A best friend welcomed me here,
She doesn't speak to me now.
I was neighbour to so many pieces of the past here.
I could look out my window and see the sea.
I felt safe and at peace here,
I never needed much.
You gave me enough to survive here.
You even helped me find love.
I wonder who you were before time grew on you.
Before I found you as you are now.
I like to think art was made here, and a girl sat where I do now.
The bed is back where I found it.
The sofa has it's old place.
The wardrobe is empty and waiting.
My time here hasn't left a trace.
I like to think walls absorb things,
That they listen and take life in.
May many more stories find you here.
May the new couple see you in the light I did.
Thank you for everything.
How cold you might be in winter.
What it feels like when the radiators turn on.
How bright it might be if all the lights worked.
What the furniture would look like in different places.
Whether a change of curtains would change your personality.
What the ceiling would look like if it was fixed,
Whether it would drip more in December rain.
What it would be like to have sleepovers with old friends here,
mattresses and duvets strewn across the floor.
To have friends visit at all.
You were my place of transition.
One relationship ended and another was found.
A best friend welcomed me here,
She doesn't speak to me now.
I was neighbour to so many pieces of the past here.
I could look out my window and see the sea.
I felt safe and at peace here,
I never needed much.
You gave me enough to survive here.
You even helped me find love.
I wonder who you were before time grew on you.
Before I found you as you are now.
I like to think art was made here, and a girl sat where I do now.
The bed is back where I found it.
The sofa has it's old place.
The wardrobe is empty and waiting.
My time here hasn't left a trace.
I like to think walls absorb things,
That they listen and take life in.
May many more stories find you here.
May the new couple see you in the light I did.
Thank you for everything.
Wednesday 15 July 2015
The Love of a Good Woman
Sometimes I wish I was married. Sometimes I wish someone would come up to me, whoever it might be, and tell me this is the end.
This is a tragedy that isn’t uncommon, I know. I’m sure so many women feel that nervous ache that they just can’t keep on with the uncertainty anymore. We always long for them to commit, but we don’t want to be caged. Maybe I want the safety of that cage now. Maybe I’m just emotionally exhausted.
Yes, I’m 23. Shocking of me to have these feelings growing inside me over time. But its all relative. I have had a lot of relationships. A vast spectrum of people entering and leaving my life. Sometimes I lie in bed and wish more than anything that I had stolen myself away from all of them from the start. But I didn’t know I had value, that I was worth hiding. I just wanted to experience life and make someone happy. Sadly, it doesn’t quite happen like that. We run for love. Hold us back, and we sprint for it.
It was in finishing a section of one of Alice Munro’s short stories that I really felt the weight of romantic decision-making. She shows a moment, a pinnacle decision, and then the outcome several years later. It puts so much in perspective and honestly ached my heart. It made me think of strong decisions I’ve made, and had I continued one way, my life would have been so different. Perhaps simpler even.
I used to be so good at banishing regret. I could stare it in the eye and kill it. I prided myself on my ability to see the end of something as inevitable. That fate wanted it, so I gave it. But things feel fuzzy right now. Maybe it’s the constant blurring in my eyes that does it. But I must keep trusting that the right will triumph, and I will still follow the break in the clouds, when each complicated decision is made.
AKC x
This is a tragedy that isn’t uncommon, I know. I’m sure so many women feel that nervous ache that they just can’t keep on with the uncertainty anymore. We always long for them to commit, but we don’t want to be caged. Maybe I want the safety of that cage now. Maybe I’m just emotionally exhausted.
Yes, I’m 23. Shocking of me to have these feelings growing inside me over time. But its all relative. I have had a lot of relationships. A vast spectrum of people entering and leaving my life. Sometimes I lie in bed and wish more than anything that I had stolen myself away from all of them from the start. But I didn’t know I had value, that I was worth hiding. I just wanted to experience life and make someone happy. Sadly, it doesn’t quite happen like that. We run for love. Hold us back, and we sprint for it.
It was in finishing a section of one of Alice Munro’s short stories that I really felt the weight of romantic decision-making. She shows a moment, a pinnacle decision, and then the outcome several years later. It puts so much in perspective and honestly ached my heart. It made me think of strong decisions I’ve made, and had I continued one way, my life would have been so different. Perhaps simpler even.
I used to be so good at banishing regret. I could stare it in the eye and kill it. I prided myself on my ability to see the end of something as inevitable. That fate wanted it, so I gave it. But things feel fuzzy right now. Maybe it’s the constant blurring in my eyes that does it. But I must keep trusting that the right will triumph, and I will still follow the break in the clouds, when each complicated decision is made.
AKC x
Wednesday 17 June 2015
Fragments
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It’s been a while since I’ve written. Mainly because I’ve been so caught up in my own thoughts, but also because I have been helping friends and trying to process a lot of changes around me. I will be 23 in 2 months. Still a while but these things catch up with you. I’m getting further and further from being a teenager now. I’m going to Rome in just over a week for my first holiday away with my boyfriend (I don’t think visiting him in Switzerland counts).
This is my 3rd work trip back to Brighton. I got my old job back from during my last year of university and here I am, tired but determined, off to sleep on sofas and live in a suitcase as I have many other times before. But this isn’t a bad thing. I’ve know many a person who lived this way and it doesn’t make you weaker or exhausted with your life. Yes, there are moments. The moments when you don’t feel safe, or life seems relentless, but over all it is something that builds you. I was taught how to pack well from a young age, how to live 2 weeks from a carry on suitcase, how to get the best from my journeys. Relying on myself alone doesn’t frighten me anymore.
I’m doing my masters in London at the end of September, and I’m taking every day as it comes until then. I believe things show themselves when the time is right, you can’t chase everything. If a flat I am drawn to in Brighton calls me, I will answer and do everything in my power to make it mine. But I am also understanding of the hurdles. Should I be back here? There is no real answer to that. The events of the next few months will drive me one way or another as I work towards my next educational step in Sound Arts and Composition. I should try and be excited by the uncertainty.
----
It’s time. This is my last evening train journey home as a flat-less girl. After a long weekend of full-time work, I can’t believe this moment is finally here. The sun is so bright as it sets around me. Sets on a tired lost girl, and rises tomorrow on one who has been found. I know I will be up all night packing, panicking, throwing my clothes and belongings about as I prioritise the things that I will shove into my car early in the morning for the drive back down to Brighton. I know that music equipment and my pole come first. Any others are a blessing. Oh, and the microwave I bought myself. My first microwave. God everyone’s heard me rambling on about that damn microwave. Sunsets are so beautiful.
Every pain ends. Time heals, because it passes and so many things change around you that nothing can ever really be the same again anyway. You can’t feel that ache the way you did before. The level of sadness I felt even two weeks ago, the absolute despair over every choice I had made, is almost gone now. There is so much hope, as the last ropes loosen around me and I feel like I’m not choking anymore. There will still be burns but they will fade. It will be fine. I will heal, in this space I can finally call my own. And suddenly, just like that, every voice in my head will be silenced.
Hold on to the decisions you believe in.
----
I’m currently sitting on a Virgin Atlantic plane sipping a rum and ginger ale, looking out the window at glorious sunshine and vast ocean. This is a flight back to Florida, probably my most visited destination over my lifetime. Not only do I have family and friends I can’t wait to see, beaches to walk along and intensely hot weather to look forward to, my mother has also just bought a property here.
I must say this trip has come with both terrible and incredible timing. It was such chaos to get my flat sorted and build my life in Brighton back to something sturdy and happy, that it is a shame to suddenly part ways with it for 2 weeks. But there is also something beautiful about throwing yourself into another world when you feel least prepared for it. Perhaps things could’t have come at a better moment. Perhaps there couldn’t be a better start to such an exhilarating summer.
----
Of course when you are older and reach adult age like us, this turns into excessive cocktail consumption, loud music, general disorderly behaviour and frantic gossiping/bitching. We are a rather feisty duo when brought together.
So here we are with me visiting Florida again, and Kara and I decided it was only right we had a belated birthday celebration (both of our birthdays fall in April), so Kara booked us a room for 2 nights at Disney's Caribbean Beach Resort.
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There's no feeling quite like the one you get moment you touch a real piano. I know people who have lived on keyboards their whole lives, and the moment they feel the weight of old ivory under their fingers they panic. They find it heavy and unforgiving. But I longed for real pianos as a young girl. Keyboards were lifeless to me and stifled the creativity that flowed so strongly from me as a teenage girl.
I was given an old upright piano by a dear family friend at a time when I needed it most. It bettered my playing, inspired me and was a good friend for years. This upright eventually turned into a baby grand which is what I am lucky enough to play now when ever I visit my parents. A studio flat is just too small for something like that. But I play so much better on a real piano, and today I got to play mine.
AKC x
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