When she was child, sometimes she would go missing, her mother used to find her playing with boys in the sand and drag her home screaming.
It’s the responsibility of a child to challenge the boundaries imposed on their world by their parents, to find the defining lines that mark out where love begins and where it ends, the role of the parents to drag us from our wants and desires, back home, to the reality of right and wrong, action and consequence, life and death.
The autumn sun illuminates the trees, the golden leaves shining like a city on a hill. A promise for tomorrow and reminder of the quiet that awaits my return. It’s cold, yet bright- I can see all the world laid out before me.
Even in decay-all things remain beautiful in your light.
seems like everywhere i turn on the internet there’s more and more beautiful things, my ongoing quest to read the whole of the internet honestly didn’t get much further today but did reach a peak with my faith being restored in the scientific community. finally i understand where all the research budgets go to with the application of science for an enormously fruitful end, yes; the formula for making the perfect bacon sandwich…
N = C + {fb (cm) . fb (tc)} + fb (Ts) + fc . ta, where N=force in Newtons required to break the cooked bacon, fb=function of the bacon type, fc=function of the condiment/filling effect, Ts=serving temperature, tc=cooking time, ta=time or duration of application of condiment/filling, cm=cooking method, C=Newtons required to break uncooked bacon.
although, personally i’d skip the science bit and head straight to canteen - that way someone else does the washing up.
thanks to another dear friend of the latitudes, joebocop, for a hook up to a superduper blog run by some guy he met at a barbeque this weekend. we have emense respect for anyone who can blog regularly and still bring home the… erm, bacon so while i can (somewhat bitterly) put the fact that these kids manage it twice in a day and have also found time to publish a book down to youthful exuberance, you all should check out out it’s nice that. i love their utterly covetable mini frisbee of a calling card which you can see hob-nobbing with the cream of beautiful blog business cards above. it’s nice that brings together so many lovely bits of design, music, film, photography, fashion… everything destracting and inspiring to my magpie eye you wonder how they have time to find the stuff let alone write the damn thing.
still, mine is not to wonder why… get to it.
and if that’s not enough then the new coco electrik album, army behind the sun, comes out today too. buy it here.
Had a couple of really disrupted night’s sleep, which has set my bodyclock way off-kilter, so even though I’m tired as hell, I can’t get seem to be able to get any proper shut-eye. As a result every thing is a little wierd and alien today, like someone has changed the colour settings on the tv of my life.
My brother has this theory that the best time to watch films is when your feeling like this, all your senses are slighty raised and that can help you get more involved in the experience. Reminds me of those scenes from Insomnia, where Al Pacino’s character’s perception becomes more and more distorted and hallucenogenic, the longer he goes without sleep.
I thought I’d try and post a track that feels like the soundtrack for this kind of mood. Taken from Photek’s heavy 1996 ep, Hidden Camera, It’s just about my all time favourite drum and bass tune and among the few that truly justify the jazz moniker, which was bandied around all over the place in the mid-nineties (any track with a saxophone or double bass sound was jazzy at one point).
It also perfectly captures the paranoid feelings of always being watched, so it works really well as a soundtrack to walking round the city, headphones on, seeing the world through sleep deprived lenses.
Had a great time away from the city with the lads last weekend. Cold winter sun, uninterupted quiet and loads of inspiring times.
The one thing I really missed was ‘big city cuisine’. I’m aware that just by saying that outloud I have crossed some unspoken line and am bound to live the rest of my life within the domain of metrosexual-dom, but man the food was dark.
It’s easy to forget how good we have it these days, m&s chorizo and chickpea soups, EAT bircher museli breakers, taste the difference sausage, smoothies, monmouth coffee, LEON wraps.CANTEEN bacon sandwhiches-man we take our food (and health) seriously these days-and it’s all good.
Even a few years ago the thought of pub grub was enough to make you opt for a liquid lunch and the only choice on the motorways was the evil that is ‘little chef’ (more robots!!). Obviously it’s a slipperly slope to horrenduos, poncey food snobbery (too late for me I’m afraid) but if it means we take more care of what we consume and don’t become caught up in needless gluttony, then let’s just enjoy the little things that make us happy.
so here’s a little something i wrote yesterday, just, you know, to prove that yep, cliches have a foundation in truth. and yep jk and i are both obsessed with our hair.
The weather in London today is textbook squally.
Blustery winds which whip construction materials around building sites and crack flags with ominous violence against their bending poles.
Its also messing with my hair.
And as i sit in the relative calm of a riverfront cafe behind etched glass crading an oversweet paper cup of cinnamon scented chai tea the brightest blue sky cracks over Lambeth Palace and its like central London’s beneath the blanket spell of a storm obsessed witch.
The calm in the distance is at such odds with the city detritus being flung about in my near distance, people braced against the winds and gulls tossed about over the Thames and gusts so strong that they catch my trailing leg as I trot along the street and nearly spin me off balance and i realise that theres nothing like bright skies in the distance while you’re slap bang in the middle of a maelstrom to highlight the terrible contrasts of light and shade.
I remember having an online chat with this girl from latvia once.
It was all a bit stilted,her english- not so good (but certainly better than my latvian) and we didn’t have much to say to each other anyway. As the conversation petered a little I tried to keep the momentum going by talking about the weather, I think London was experiencing a mini-heatwave or something. I was naked I know that much*. Anyho as soon as I started talking about how hot it was, she became super amused -turns out ‘back in the day’ her english teacher had told her that people in the UK were obsessed by the weather, and now she had her proof.
Few things are worse than being busted mid stereotype.
Since then I’ve tried hard to justify this ‘british fixation’;'as a nation of island dwellers we are uniquely affected by dramatic climate changes….’ ….er …’as a rich multicultural society the weather has become a shared unifying narative…’etc etc. But might have to ‘fess up that actually I’m a bit of a latvian cliche.
Anyway it’s freakin windy today (and that’s ’six people dead’ windy, not ‘this is making by hair a bit buffanty’ windy****) and here is a track with wind in the title (see what I did there). It’s a vintage axelrod production and is all good (apart from the rubbish poetry bit which is just a bit too sixties.
It’s sometimes better to just admit that your flaws rather than desperately trying find excuses for them.
Scott Harrison is an man of extremes. From the insane extremes of the new york party scene to helping provide water to people in some of the world’s most deprived regions is along way to go in a lifetime (let alone a couple of years). hearing him speak last night, it was, ironically enough, this unlikely juxtaposition that gave his story real depth. There are plenty of people doing good works in Africa, but somehow his past life hedonistic extremes provides him with a unique perspective and drive,all of which is incredibly infectious.
He’s talking tomorrow at the Apple store shop on Regent’s St from 7 and you should try and make it down if you can. (although methinks it will be pretty busy down there for other reasons)
a freezing fog’s descended on london town making the more salubrious areas looks suitably dickensian just in time for the crackling fireplaces of the ancestral living room to begin their festive clarion call.
having made an executive decision to take a day’s holiday pre-holiday just, you know, to make sure we’re relaxed enough for the upcoming break, i figured i’d spend this last hour shackled to my paying keyboard pre-empting what might be a fallow period for these here horse latitudes…
and totting up my super6 bringers of great joy and gladness for double Oh-6.
1) horse latitudes - finally, an outlet for my incessant cod philosophical muso musings. shared, of course, with two of the finest minds of my generation and committed to bringing you the bestest thing since the last best thing we brought you.
2) j.tillman records - i might have to self-edit my tillmania for the whole of january just so you don’t get bored but if you’ve not bought minor works for someone in your immediate family this christmas then they will be terribly disappointed.
3) high heels - making me nearly six foot, causing blisters galore and forcing a strut like a peacock but i never really wore them before and now i love them probably a little bit too much.
4) the beast’s blow-outs - laying down some serious cooking time dans la cuisine i’ve made some killer food this year and best of all shared it with more than appreciative audiences - all that and i invented the 2nd best breakfast ever (raspberry french toast parcels, fried in butter and dusted with icing sugar, anyone?)
5) family - mine and other people’s, officially and unofficially, related or just on the same plain (man)… this year’s been all about growing/adopting/appropriating/rediscovering amazing families all over the place.
6) right back atcha.
to round off, my contribution to the christmas track paean is by sufjan stevens, from his much blogged/touted christmas box set but it also happens to be one of my tracks of the year.
There are zillions of ‘end of year’ best of lists flying around at the moment.
We had a little talk about it here ,at horse latitude mansions, but decided we didn’t really want to do a top ten albums, cause we can’t honestly say that is how we listen to music anymore.
So perhaps a top five tracks then….
….well maybe later, right now here is a list of 6 (for 06) things I fell in love with. Things that may have been around for ages, but, after coming across, in 2006, I can no longer imagine life without them.
1) 5ep jeans (bought them on a whim in january and have worn them at least 300 days this year ,which is probably a bit skanky ,but they are so beautifully made and for the first two weeks they made me feel like king everytime I put them on)
2)The Road by Cormac McCarthy (bleak yet uplifting, lean and poetic-a bit like me then except for the bleak bit…and not so much the poetic or lean bits either)
3)The Children Of Men-the best film of the year (I could barely get on the tube afterwards and was positively weeping at the denouement-heavy cinema)
4)Entourage-I’ve been pinning after ari and the boys ever since I blew my bitorrent wad a little too quickly by blitzing season three in the Autumn, it’s back on early next year-this dude, for one, can’t freakin wait.
5)’PAUL’ chocolate and almond croisssant with a ‘Monmouth coffee’ cappuccino-now thats a mother freakin’ take-out breakfast.
6)I’ll have to tell that to you in person.
