twirling as if it's the last night of the universe

music to yer ears

2007-03-07T12:12:33Z

these website are The Bees Knees (future band name, betty and the bees knees)

http://www.pandora.com/
tell them what song/artist you're into and they will look in their super data of millions of songs organised in tinfoil cartons and make you a radio station with lots of music that you will like. they call it the music genome project (cool) and it finds the music's genes and its predecessors, successors and friends. scientifically.

http://soundtransit.nl/
sound colletors have been ferreting out sounds from all corners. take a sound transit journey from anywhere in the world to anywhere, with stopovers. they will put together a jounrey of noises. it's nice.

The Rules

2005-02-13T00:58:43Z

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

velvet_jane @ 2003-12-01T10:58:00

2003-12-01T10:58:20Z

saturday night was sillllllllyyyyness, pints of ale, pints of gin, pints of weird gingerwine-whisky debacle...

there was dancing, this i am sure of, much spinning in circles in moshulu and probably (undoubtedly) forcing other people to spin with me and make fools of themselves too...

then a big blurry patch of nothingness ..?...

and waking up wrapped in a duvet on someones floor scattered with es and bucky bottles and cans of half-drunken cooking lager, and consuming these all for breakfast and bwarghhhhhhhhhhh
*falls over*

velvet_jane @ 2003-11-21T12:44:00

2003-11-21T12:50:18Z

our philosophy tutor told us stories yesterday about magical octopusus (octopi?) who float around the pacific pretending to be other creatures, flattening themselves out and spreading their octopussy tentacles in a sting-rayesque manner, wriggling around like electric eels and gernally playing halloween pretend everyday of the year. apparently you can pull them through a tube and their (4) brains will squish up into some glutenous substance and squeeze through, and we all aggreed they are indeed the smartest of things. oh and the identity theorists have their unromantic, physicalist, materialist, realist, cynical bollocks theories quashed by magical octopuses/pi.

i don't know why this makes me so happy, but it does.

velvet_jane @ 2003-11-03T12:19:00

2003-11-03T12:25:36Z

ohhhhhh, halloween is so sublime

i was glittery and green and spinny and filled with soul-warming tingly absinthey goodness all night, performing beautiful and grandoise and ceremonial rituals with spoons and sugar, scalding my fingers and eyebrows, it burns...

wearing masks is always fun, playing at someone else, something else, mad exestential faerie spouting philosophical randomness every time she inhales, spinning faster&faster in stockinged feet and being sillier&sillier as the night progressed.

i love halloween, i wish we celebrated the end of every month like this.

velvet_jane @ 2003-10-14T16:16:00

2003-10-14T15:23:55Z

ohhh, protests are fun.

later we got to listen to some very intense and angry and SHOUTY CAPS LOCK types talking about iraq and planning to firebomb mr bush out of existence when he comes a-visiting. which would be good. and then to the pub, oh dear.

bless laurence who organised the anti-arms protest but has laringitus so made it seem all conspirital and communistic by whispering in the ears of everyone who arrived. for the rest of the night all conversation was conducted through the medium of notebooks (which made everything seem superpoetic and beautiful and should be recommended to anyone drunken and inspired) and we stumbled home into bed drunken and silly at 5am, and my head hurts today.

velvet_jane @ 2003-10-12T14:19:00

2003-10-12T13:51:43Z

so much for being in any way decent at keeping in touch, these past two weeks have been a little (hah) submerged in madness so brief and random summary...

ska dancing! ballgown and dunlop trainers. gin!gin!gin! groupie idolisation and onstage flirting with The 55s singer *purr*. ballboy setlist! arthouse film pretensions brazil,whatthefuck?. open mic night, every night, acoustic geetarr, folky girls, chop!! and ohhh, dancingdancingdancing or sitting with gin and pints in those darkened attics, crouched on the floor among stickiness and plectrums. sensational hair, afroes and quiffs and floppy indie boys. jeremy's trilby. arthur's seat, stumbling and wine-drunk. old-man theme pub crawls through the old town. ohhhh, and tea parties, daily, bright eyes and jack johnson soundtracks to endless camomile tea and crumpets and such things

anyway...

velvet_jane @ 2003-09-26T22:43:00

2003-09-26T21:53:24Z

ohhh, my muse is online, a prettyprettiness girl who looks like karen o and writes like pete doherty did before he eskewed everything literate and beatiful and arcadian-urchins for arm-punctured criminalities.

velvet_jane @ 2003-09-24T14:05:00

2003-09-24T12:48:50Z

What in the world ever became of sweet Jane?
She lost her sparkle, you know she isn't the same
Livin' on reds, vitamin C, and cocaine,
All a friend can say is "Ain't it a shame?"

You're sick of hangin' around and you'd like to travel;
Get tired of travelin' and you want to settle down.
I guess they can't revoke your soul for tryin',
Get out of the door and light out and look all around.

velvet_jane @ 2003-09-23T13:14:00

2003-09-23T12:05:12Z

woke up miracualously without a hangover today (i'm not sure why either). it may have had something to do with the vast quantities of munchied foood i consumed at 1am, mostly cheese, given that i'm so short on drugs and needed to live my hallucinations through my dreams.

fuck, they were weird though. time went all elasticated so the stars were like long wavering streamers, it went all gloopy and liquidated round one day so it stretched into eternity and then it solidified round a week and we were trying to get in to no avail. then these dogs pushed their noses through the mosquito net on our tent, just leapt at it and burst straight through. the fuckers wouldn't go away even though i was screaming 'shoo' and trying to outstare them in some kind of a weird power trip. i blinked. then we were on a weird diving mission where we ended up finding these atlantis mini worlds which had burgandy carpets with tiny gold flecks on them. and we had to dress up in french knickers for the spectators. and my teeth wouldn't stop bleeding, so when i was going under i kept getting mouthfulls of blood every time i tried to put the regulator in. fortunately, the atmosphere in the homes was breathable and the only clue to us being at the bottom of the ocean was that certain parts of the carpet got wet when you stood on them, and there was a very enthusiastic woman dressed in tweed who brought us the underwear in the first place. i think it was a competition to see who could stay their the longest, apparently these worlds were all prepared before and there were other teams doing the same thing. we had thought we were trying to stay in the water longest so we had stocked up on diving equipment. bad move. it should have been cigarettes and food and backgammon boards. so it goes.

but such is life.

velvet_jane @ 2003-09-22T18:57:00

2003-09-22T17:48:37Z

oh WOW kurt vonnegut is just layers upon layers of genius.madness.insanity.brilliance!!!

i'm endlessly taken by the idea Tralfamadore. the thought that everything exists in four dimensions and most people can only see three, and that's why the world believes that things such as faeries and goblins and werewolves and heaven and hell don't exist. but of course they do. just not to everyone's eyes. and it is just an illusion we have here on earth that one moment follows another like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. and death doesn't really exist when you can look at time like we look at the rocky mountains, like we look at a landscape, focusing on one part to another as easily as shifting our gaze. and you can fall in love and it will exist forever, it's just we trap it in our bubbles of time and it's imprisoned there forever, and we never see past the trappings to burst the shimmery surface and drench our entire lives in those moments.

i think somewhere in the minds of drug-addlers and dreamers and poets and musicians there's a tiny hole that we can slip through, seeping vaguely into the extra dimension just occasionally, just ever so often in a bright burst of light and genius, and every-so-often losing yourself (myself) in the lewis carrol tunnels that worm deep into the surface of reality and twist&turn&shiver through all the things our parents taught us not to believe in, because they grew up and forgot they existed.

oh, and have you ever stared at the sun so long that the entire horizon has just...exploded?

velvet_jane @ 2003-09-21T19:45:00

2003-09-21T18:38:49Z

eeeeeeee! still on a major spinny~joyous high from having found the dancing soulmate of jim at moshulu on friday night... someone decided to feed me absinthe (i lurve youuuuu!!) and that, coupled with the general gin habit i've been cultivating, contributed greatly to obscene purple rotating behaviour, winning at table football (hah-HAH!), hugging random strangers because they weren't smiling enough for my liking and gernally acting like a complete ginfool. (gin is now the precent to everything, in the context of *ginslut* behaviour).

last night me&phil drank lots of nice red wine and watched the stars from my roof (because no smoking in my mother's house, no sir) then idolised all our geetarr heroes and giggled high-pitchedly at sid&nancy moments ("how d'ya spell oliday?" "s-h-i-t" "dear mum...having a lovelayyyyyy !!!!")

and today i've been taught how to play purple haze on the guitar, which makes me more warm and smiley in my soul than i have words to express. this evening is half a bottle of wine for me, raymond chandler, kurt vonnegut, worn down blistery finger-ends and my huge red chair in the corner. mmmmm *purs*

velvet_jane @ 2003-09-19T13:02:00

2003-09-19T11:56:05Z

eeee! email from my tarah...quote to self I just ran into some people from high life...they said that after we left everone called us the mushroom girls i think the thing that pleases me most about this is that random people we met one day still remember me in thailand, like a little piece of my me is still there, being remembered and being insane and taking mushrooms daily in the heads and stories of some stoners. and that's endlessly pleasing

oh god, i miss thailand. right now she's heading for a meditation retreat in chang mai for 21 days of silence and solitude. a cleansing of the system after our months of abuse. i wish i could say the same for myself...instead i'm consolodating my gin&whisky habits and becoming (remaining) all grubby inside.

ohh, i let my mother at my hair with scissors, WHY? whywhywhy? it felt like penance after she bought me suber-expensive conditioner to get rid of my diver's split ends. now it feels like stupidity.

other randomness...do lambs truly sleep peacefully? have you ever watched one lie in bed all dreamless and unconscious and rested? and when they grow up and become sheep, does all their youthful innocence fade away and they become tortured and tormented beasts, tossing and turning under their make-believe duvets, screaming internally at sheeply dreams and insanities? or are we just so narcissistic we can't bear to compare ourselves to anything that isn't cute and fluffy and childlike? truthfully, i've been sleeping like a sheep recentely, waking up and staring at the swirling red circles on my ceiling (these really exist, this isn't some complex metaphor this time...) and realising FUCK, i'm in the same bed i've been in since childhood. i can't decide whether this is manifest of my awaysickness symptoms or simply because it's the first time this year i haven't been going to bed in a state of obscene drunken/stoned behaviour. still, much drinking tonight, so we shall see...

velvet_jane @ 2003-09-14T16:49:00

2003-09-14T15:53:07Z

hurrah! i finally got rid of my party hangover (stumbling around for a day mumbling 'it hurtsitHURTSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS' and planning to move to penrith). time to celebrate with red wine and drugs. phil's fridge is mightly well stocked with alcohol and cheese and very little else. nibbles! why do salt&shake crisps taste SO good?

random journal quote of the day "I only hope that I don't puke because there are few things taste as rank as partially digested orange juice" . My bleeding soul!

velvet_jane @ 2003-09-11T14:37:00

2003-09-11T13:20:14Z

i've been crossing continents, tripping over time zones, stumbling around the world (oh GOD, yes, the world, i've been to it now, i've seen it, and it's fucking INCREDIBLE) and now i'm back and well, we don't talk about that. but still... for anyone who missed who missed my random spouted nonsense and dreams… (and more than that, for me to read in the early hours when I need to remember the Promised Better Places.)

paper bags from sydney….

If the only way to get through life is to convert your life plot into a series of little stories in interior, then you’d better hope when you write them down they come up with something interesting because when people who don‘t exist have more interesting tales to tell then something’s gone wrong somewhere, and it’s time to run to where the cigarettes are cheaper, the sun is hotter and drier and the people aren’t ashamed to smile in superlatives. We’re all looking for something to fill our voids, because God took a day off and forgot to make us born whole, I found my missing pieces on the road and now I can’t stop smiling, but you all look in different ways (“do you even remember how it felt to be 18…?” “When I was 18 I was a complete coke head”). So what do travellers do all day? I know that now – it’s just Life relocated to where things are Better, and why would you choose to stay at home? When the hours of work aren’t dreamed away by promise of bluer beaches and the road, the road, the Road…what motivation is there to pass the day? (Doing what you’re supposed to is a faster car, a mortgage, but how can you keep up knowing that you’re not doing this to get out of this place, knowing you’re not going to get out of this place, knowing you’re not even dreaming of doing it?) I get to listen to Jimi Hendrix and read Kerouac in a Coffeeshop, wired on espressos and PBPs.

Is there something wrong when I consider 7 hours an epic sleep and a glass of orange juice as nutritional ecstasy? I have my adornments of bruises and cigarette burns, I feel older and more beautiful now (miss Marylou). Practising tired jaded waitress looks (Fear&Loathing expressions). Playing the martyr and playing the fool, grinning for tips, wide-eyed&wild-eyed, and Lucas, of course you’re right, my body is screaming at me to stop, to slow down at least, but I’m wired out on what’s not good for me and my soul is hurtling too fast towards death or oblivion or immortality to consider that this could be the end of the line.

And diary pages….

and for singapore…the initial trepidation & crying on white sheeted double beds in hotel rooms almost instantly dissolved in daylight leaving Life and Experience burning in some soulful way , the mad desire to do everything before I’m gone. Eating with chopsticks and bowls the insane&bizaare array of food laid before me…sour spicy soup that makes you wonder what gelatinous meat could be lurking behind such an intriguing name, roast duck with hoisin sauce on noodles, seafood swimming in chillies and spices, banana leaves and fingers stacked high for my delection, colours&tastes&textures and everything done in extremities, then me, wide-eyed and too smitten to record a word beyond sobbing letters of love when the door closed and all that was left was thousands of miles from home and sanity and loved ones, a beeping fire alarm watching over me but no One to fill the void. And tossing and turning with jet-lag and fear and waking up unsure if it’s morning or night or whether it even matters when there’s no one to tell it to. But of course, it’s easy to be saved by a prophet Jack, and wandering forever more with the twitching essence of Dean ecstatic in my gypsy soul. Ohh, it’s all to See and how can they walk so calmly, and is this insanity beating only in my heart? Some single live-eyed madman-girl stumbling bare foot through temples with her own private insanities and subliminal ecstasies, and the sad sensation that being white and middle class will really never be enough, because we were born to see the world through jaded eyes, born to carry religion as a burden and a guilt instead of showering great deities & affection & love over the skies and everything they contain. Dreams warped into advertising slogans and life’s soundtrack’s selling fast trendy cars and how can it ever be enough?? And sometimes the only option left is to run with ragged legs as far as it takes, until you find a place where the air is thick with moist, lush vegetation, sizzling woks, flying spices, insect songs, a thick intense rush of incense to the brain…and one sniff can catalogue the beauty of being in ASIA, with every breath and gasp and dirt worn into fingernails and well trodden soles, every bit packed tightly with the essence of an existence so utterly detached from your own it catches in your throat and the only thing to do is run fast back to the safe haven of home or coat yourself in a thick layer of experience and survive. Sweating at night your eyes open to the ceiling and you wonder if you can REALLY do this, because it seems hard and scary and so very alone, till the comforting and terrifying thwack hits you… Yes, you can cope, because what else is there?. You can do it because you have to – there is no easy back-up, no phoning your mother from time zones away and asking for a lift home – when the choice is to be scared but to get through it, or to curl up and die in the corner…what else can you do? Except look back with fondness always and say the biggest breath of your life has been taken and now those thousand&thousands of kilometres are yours to hold forever in your soul, and the pass into the World has been handed to you with a highlighter pen and a map, and everything ahead to glisten in exploding stars&diamonds for your feet. oh yes, the Road is Life

…perth, oz

And yes, already I never want to go home again, jarvis cocker, oh mother, I could never… The first nerves always come in waves, and why does it feel like they’re all kindred spirits from a thousand hasheesh daydreams gone past Before My Time, but 5 minutes sinking into the inevitable sofa and in one hand a joint, the other a beer, and the acrid burn in the back of your throat, something high-pitched wisping through your stomach, and exhaling sublimely. If I can’t find the words to jump in then at least there’s some explanation for this silence and this grin.

…perth, oz, spinners, I miss you all…

oh Rob, your lean monkey frame and far too tanned for those pale indoor geek-chic glasses, stoner eyes and a giggle resonating through the cinema, pockets stuffed always with weed, you made me sparkle and tingle a lot with your friendliness, there’s something in you I couldn’t quite explain. You’ve Seen and Done and it scares and thrills me, you and Helen and a trail across Asia, stories of the Thai mafia and traces of coke on your credit cards and that giant board game you used to play in Thailand, and oh, what’ll happen now that you’re gone, and what are you going to see next, and I’m forever jealous of your life full of stories and memories to tell and to hold…
Kyle walked in with glittering eyes and made me grin, wasted and dazzled and that slow self-conscious stoner drawl… “awright?” A t shirt proclaiming ‘Listen to Bob Marley’ and sitting with your joint proud of Your Rachel, with that big dumb grin…
And her, I’m jealous, she listens to good music and masters retro cool and always dances with impunity. She’s 25 and not beautiful, but eternally cool…
Lisa is beautiful, she danced harder and may have been a faery, blessed with an insane beauty and prettiness that radiated from somewhere deeper than you could imagine…
Stefan…oh, Stefan. Prettyboy looks and glittering eyes once more, dark and mussed hair, Jagger-esque lips and that propensity to make me smile and giggle and fall into stupors of insanity on the sofa, because something in that bong was inhaled too deeply and ‘it’s the way forward! It’s the forward caper!’…some switch was flicked which filled him with a strange madness of the best kind, and such a goofy grin he could never subscribe to his own male-model looks, fortunately blessed with enough madness and humour to be far more than just a pretty pretty boy…
Mark could have been my brother if he had never taken LSD and danced to trance music like some pill-popping fiend, something in his face and manner and med-student ways took me straight to Edinburgh dorm room, he was family when he taught me to skin up and he could get himself off Spinner’s sofas to See on occasions, and we sat on Rottnest beaches and smoked and Saw, and life was mind-bogglingly, existence-blowing insanity exist when I’m just some suburban girl tired of nothing and excited for everything and sometimes the world delivers for me – everything, always…
Casper saw through the accent and lamented missing Scottish girls and we giggled in our chef-waitress roles till it felt like home (and stories of coke snorting in the toilets reminded me of staring at Dave’s arms that night, reminded me of heroin habits and beautiful ex-junkies when sometimes there is no mean glint in their eyes). Casper would climb the crane with my flag because he saw my own crippling madness, and what student hasn’t committed such atrocities, and playing with marker pens and paint, clutching beer and joints for inspiration, a pretty sheet transformed , you know he would have done it… and 100kmph & a crate of beer, nothing will ever be the same again as the madcap glint I your eyes betrays itself, prison charges and guilt for Barry, a terrifying mortality… that day it felt like the summer had ended…
And dreaming of flags and cranes, oh Marcus… thank you for climbing down so I can sleep safely this year. Marcus, you surprised me eternally. The first layers presented themselves as some footballer type having a good time on the beach, on some drugs, on some woman, but books left on tabletops and comments dropped into conversation, and the phrase ‘whole new light’ springs to mind, you’re some slow-burning flame and more intelligent than I ever gave you credit for. Excited stories about hitch-hiking across the South Coast and when everything goes tumbling wrong…I respected you more then. Plotting to ship the country if you ever confirm your flight, if you can ever convince yourself to leave, and yet another Overstay blushing at border controls, because Yes sir, we do just love your country too much. Sorry. And back to normalities, explain to your mother the size of that tattoo.

velvet_jane @ 2003-09-08T22:24:00

2003-09-08T21:54:54Z

i can't cope i can't cope i can't cope

but instead of the drained and jetlagged ramblings of a slightly soulstricken gypsy girl who circumstance made come home i'm going to spatter you in the dreams of the past month, random spasms and spurts of insanity...

slitting our feet on the rocks because we're too high and too happy and too wastedly beautiful to do anything other than jump in the sea with all our clothes on, giggling mouthfulls of saltwater and acrid smoke, mushroom hallucination dreams and lazy hammock days.

we crawled through the diamond and the eye and the fire and the rainbows and then we were THERE, on the beach, feet in the sand, the mushrooms swirled pretty pictures and my eyes exploded in the mirror, pupils like basement vortexs, crawling through the irises like so many awning cupboards and scuffing our feet on the cluttered boxes of junk from past days until everything justjust... disappeared, falling visions of guitar chords and pink floyd crazy diamonds and the lewis carrol promises.

...i've got a phosphorescent secret, i've got memories that EXPLODE when i close my eyes....

ohhh, and we danced, glistening-eyed girls with broken feet stumbling with the hookah and promising pretty things - the rain!!! - strobe lighting exploding in glitter as it bounced off each droplet and onto our shinyshinyshiny skin (we were glowing, sparkling with teeth that could reflect the entire moon, dancing like we're chemically altered by somthing other than this white dust that covers everything....it's just sand, it's in our toes and our hair and our beds and our sleepy hammock mornings and it's so beautiful, life, it's burning a hole in my heart and my retinas and i want to grab all my insane memories of the last 9 months and cram them in their eyes and scream "look! loook! how fucking beautiful is the world??? how can you not KNOW????????????")

because, ps, it really is, the skies are shooting stars and the sea will always exist because so will the moon, tugging at waves and heartstrings, and even though i'm a thousand miles from my soul right now and i want to fly right back to my madness, i still...i still grin lunatic smiles and dream of steller nights

!!!

velvet_jane @ 2003-08-29T14:14:00

2003-08-29T07:22:43Z

i'm feeling like everything has gone just steller

diving and weightless every day and the feeling of perfection we have jumping in to the water...well, we recreate it in elaborate festivals every night with bags of psychedelics and stoner experiences. shaun took his djembe out on mushrooms while tarah trance meditated on the rock, we stared out to sea and grinned at how beautiful the world is. swimming stoned in the sea, mushroomhigh, giggling, collecting shells and coral all day from the beach (pretty colours, and i remember theway the coral looked in the ocean, when it pulsated and bounced with alien life, and i wonder how the world and people can destroy such a beautiful thing, but in death the coral coats our beachfront bungalow and when we dream of our sunsets they're spattered with dream catchers created with hemp and beach offerings some stoned evening

i think i'm living in a dream. maybe i fell asleep in the sand in ko pha-ngan when we were lying on the beach in a multicoloured haze (random guitar notes picked out in the sand) because when we wandered into the sea it glowed with phosphorescence, the water lit up and tongled and vibrated around us with tiny green and blue lights, tiny insane creatures, i lay on my back supported by them and their light as i counted shooting stars and flying lanterns that explode across the sky in thailand, shoot to the heavens then trail a gold star across the million silver lights of the stars, we could barely catch our breath, and they told us in thailand it's NORMAL.

a piece of phosphorescence washed up on shore and we cradled it in our hands, it glowed blue light that made me think of mad hallucinations and insanity, i might have been tripping but it was still real

last night we jammed all night on the beach with joints, guitars and rasta baby's djembe, we left our backpacks in a pub and slept for free under the stars with our toes in the sand. i really, really love life right now.

velvet_jane @ 2003-08-14T18:40:00

2003-08-14T11:47:16Z

oh GOD!! the sunrise today...i lay in tatters on the beach with amphetimines and whisky and chemical dreams floating around my bloodstream, and wow!! is the most prophetic i can manage today.

life is absolutely perfect, beyond all realm of comprehension, i'm on a tropical island in thailand, we celebrate the full moon every way we can conceive, life is spent underwater flying round the alien world where everything quivers and pulsates with colour and life, i get to dive every day! thailand is just...sublimesublimesublime. i'm thanking god and the world for being so damn perfect right now.

wow...

velvet_jane @ 2003-08-06T15:27:00

2003-08-06T05:38:54Z

oh, you should have come play in melbourne yesterday, it was perfect. i walked to st kilda and spent half the day on the beach throwing starfish back into the water, staring at the jellyfish who've sacrficed themselves on the broken shells and burying my toes in the sand (the perfect thing to do in winter, and all the time belle and sebastian lyrics....ease your feet off in the sea, my darling, it's the place to be. take your shoes off, curl your toes...) and of course skipping stones for wishes. lunch at 4 in the veggie bar which has the opened windowfront gazing out at brunswick street, (which i could describe a thousand times in abject beauty and detail, suffice to say anarchism is revered in spray paint and posterpasted madness and everything spills out onto the streetfronts and the road) and the magazines all promised music&art&independentfilmfestivals and i died quietly and smiling. at night i watched donnie darko in an arthouse bar with Beautiful People, at the end a boy turned to me and his faith in human nature had just been restored, then we all turned ourselves out into the evening streets and darkened rain with pretty pictures in our minds. the tired and impoverished backpackers didn't want to come out with me and explore the bohemian lights, some people don't get enthusiastic about tram lines at twilight hanging low over the city (i SIGH, they're so pretty...) so i went looking for jazz alone and found it in some tiny cafe bar, and befriended the sax man and a drummer boy, who took me to a GAY BAR (electric six voices here please) and lots of dancing till the small hours, then home to watch some strange david attenborough nature documentary on lizard sex with a stoned kiwi bloke with a lazy voiced drawl and tatooes on his wrists, and i babbled drunkenly my hearts deepest strangest darkest desires (while he dozed on the sofa, and probably intermittently mumbled at me to shut up, but i was too glowy and smiley and tingling to pay much attention).

and such is life right now

velvet_jane @ 2003-08-04T13:18:00

2003-08-04T03:42:17Z

quickly...a true story i've been dwelling on a lot recently

i was in sydney, took the train to bondi beach after stumbling down darlinghurst road in the cross, shoeless and unconcerned about the scattering of syringes and prostitutes which lined the street, the sun was shining so brightly i couldn't help but stare at it till it almost burned holes in my retina, it was lucky because the sun doesn't often shine on darlinghurst road, the neon walls and smut shops line the road too high and light never fights its way in, except for a few hours in the day when the street is lit and it seems wrong, the nocturnal air curdles and the grubbyness dissolves a little in a way that seems altogether wrong for the cross. anyway, i took the train to bondi and wandered down to the cliffs and the day was perfect, the seabed drenched in the kind of turquoise water which brings to mind coral&diving&turtles&dreams. this walk along the cliffs is tranquility and perfect peace away from the stresses of the city, and to make matters better not a single other person was within view, i could have been the last person alive and jumped from the cliffs to the water, and they wouldn't have found my body till it dissolved into stars. about three quarters of the way along the gravel path snakes into civilisation a little away from some cliff tops which are cordoned off and deemed too dangerous for the public, of course i climbed the rope and padded along to the furthest point where i lay flat on the briny rocks, sea spray in my hair strong enough that when i licked my lips they tasted of salt and visiting my gran as a child. in this perfect paradise moment, baking in the sunlight as high under the sun as i could care to be and waiting for a stronger gust of wind to blow me straight into the ocean as i stretched on the furthest peak, and as the wind changed it picked notes of some lonesome sax out of the air. i shivered inside, they were far enough away to only catch ever so often as the wind peaked right, and my curiosty was suitably aroused to stand up and pad over in the direction of the music, and crouching, spasming in some insane personal ecstasy of the moment and the music, some perfect boy torturing himself with his saxaphone on the clifftops, and me the last person in the world alive to hear it. i stayed out of sight until he noticed me, terrfied of stealing the moment away from him and myself, and when he turned and came over to speak to me i had a sudden shock of realised fantasy, i pictured him laying me down on the rocks here and kissing me all over, then never seeing him again, falling in love perhaps and leaping into the water together, for one brief second in time he could have been my soul mate and we'd wander back (he in bare foot also, how perfect?) to sydney and live there in a haze of pot and jazz bars and sleepy morning sex.

of course, it didn't happen. he smiled and began to talk, and the day, the moment, life, was so perfect i couldn't bear to deprive my life of this beauty by making it normal, conversational, sensible. had he come and touched my hand or kissed me or quoted kerouac i would have fallen in love and gone mad with the wondering of it, but he made some comment about the weather or me travelling or something, i've blocked it out of my mind because it would pervade every second of this memory otherwise, and i couldn't stand that because it was ohhh, perfect till then. so i turned before he even finished his words, let my hair catch in the breeze and ran from the moment, and i've wondered ever since.

expecting perfection from the world, diamonds from the stars, beauty from the ordinary....i might be missing out on some dreams&moments, but life is sublime, and i couldn't reject it. i don't know the point in this story except it makes me shiver and smile, wonder about myself in this (madmad) world and appreciate life, because it terrifies me and i love it more than [...]

velvet_jane @ 2003-08-04T12:43:00

2003-08-04T03:07:18Z

i'm scared it's not pretty enough here, i dissolve faster when it's not beautiful and i need my daily salvation, the prettiest image by the prettiest girl put in my head the phrase 'fingernail moons' and that's my salvation for today, oh that and....

a place called fitzroy makes me smile, spray painted monkeys on the walls proclaim 'you laugh now but one day we'll be in charge', the boy in the record store with the heroin blackeye smudges playing and grinning!giggling at pink floyd remixes, vegetarian orgasms (the smell of kumera and pumpkin and pungenthot chilli, dreaded girls in tattery rags and beads wrapped round their arms, i wish i could be that beautiful, but at least i'm here to see). the old bookshop with lewiscarrol labrynth shelves, worn ladders you can crawl to the ceiling, first edition salingers plastic wrapped from our grubby fingers (so i slipped it off anyway, buried my nose in the paper and inhaled and died, at the moment i get high from caffiene, camomile tea, fresh ginger and old book scents).

what else....tell me 10 reasons i should stop drinking because i need to know. start with 1.drugs are cheaper and 2.life is prettier, or tell me i'll be fine either way, i'm not entirely sure i will, but i'd still love to hear it from you.

(i miss nz but life is still beautiful, even without my props, i watched the sunset for the last time over mountains - they sprouted from the water, how perfect? spirally mountains upsetting the laws of gravity by just leaping straight out from the sea - and i sighed)

send me hangover cures and kisses and the most beautiful thing to happen to you today.
mine, yesterdays that is, for today has only had vomiting for breakfast and a warm library room, although there was a picture of thom yorke on the magazine, which was lucky.... yesterdays was tram lines at night, the ephemeral moment when the twilight turns the skies purple of the wires hang low over the city, sparkling with red lights and shunting sounds and a thousand memories of manchester and prague, hopping the trams for free before they noticed us there, any city with trams is special to me now since the boy in manchester gave me guided tours of the city to a belle and sebastian soundtrack, and we ran around looking for smiths lyrics in street signs

friday is THAILAND!!!!! explosions and all night tripping in the sand, diving(!!) the full moon party(eeeee!!!!) and treks in the north, in the jungle, i'm going to the JUNGLE!!... i am bubbling and twitching and insane, shivering with anticipation and smiling, giggling, grinning.

now i'm going to find a record store to read belle and sebastian linear notes and smile at boys who torment themselves at night with lou reed berlin-era tortures and low level lighting, but grin with ecstasy eyes in the days, losing themselves in shelves of beauty and madness and stacks of MUSIC....i'm going to join them and giggle until the gentle tug of the working world brings sense to bear.

velvet_jane @ 2003-07-25T13:53:00

2003-07-25T02:12:48Z

i feel poetic today, not in words necessarily but in a little burning happy soul ache that i haven't felt in a while, at least i haven't felt it since i last stared into the sun and burned holes in my retinas and gazed at the mountains and felt the brightness burn~burn~burn crazy whitelight, whiteheat.

i drank so much, i fucked up, sometimes i am a fuckup, a disaster, a mad burning child with too much to prove and too little sanity, drinking till i can't stand up straight or hold the car wheel and what am i doing, where am i going, what's wrong with me...they say you can't be an alcoholic at 18 and i just giggle and crumple to the floor in tears, i'm like that sometimes, it scares me in the morning, and i just clutched patric and whispered i'msorryi'msosorry, more mumbles than words, and he held me up straight and put me in the back seat and drove me there, and every will be fine, stare at the sky, stare the stars...i'm in the sounthern hemisphere now and oh, you can see the milky way! tumbling clouds of gases and stars and diamonds smattered across the sky. self-destruction is harder when the world is so beautiful, you can wake up and know it will always be ok, it's impossible for the world to quit on you when it shows you such beautiful beautiful things...

i'm in love with life really, sitting in utter tranquility with only my heartbeat and the wind making a sound, i can hear the water if i try hard enough perhaps, but it's so still, just a mirror really placed under the mountains so all this beauty can be seen twofold, exploding a thousandfold in my eyes, i fall asleep and dream of falling from mountaintops, plunging headfirst into beauty. i'm happy really, i don't need boxes of wine every night, i just wish i could convice my sober self that, i feel poetically broken when i fall down in tears and i wish i wasn't.

we walked home on a high pointing out venus and mars and wishing on shooting stars, faye was dancing on herbal highs, paddy and matt still on the decks waiting to sit up all night on ups and acid and vodka, a crumpled flat with decks and a map and a set of drawing pins. pete and jules were still dancing, spinning, madness, i think everyone was, we ate hot mince pies and laughed like it was the last night of the universe, i didn't ever want it to be morning, or sanity, or sobriety, i wanted my own stupidity and madness to last forever and never come down. never come home again.

velvet_jane @ 2003-07-16T22:02:00

2003-07-16T10:09:44Z

the sky reflects in the lake here, moutnains sprout upwards (and ever onwards) till they touch the sky and explode in piles of shattering diamonds and stars, personally i'm sold and i could live here forever, lake wannaka, paradise or something close with a box of wine and a scribbled notebook by the waterfront, fringes in eyes and downward glances, aren't we so lucky to be here

i did a bungy jump, i plunged to earth like i never have before and feel towards death and the gorge and the world, plummeted towards the world, i fle for life and landed in it and it was PERFECT, i lived and breathed and gasped great mountfulls of adrenelin and endorhpins and excitment until i couldn't stand up straight without quivering all over in ecstacy and the feeling of a thousand pills through my veins.

i hitchhiked, or at least stuck my thumb over wine in the direction of mad women from london, and they took me around to places straight from the pages of lord of the rings and paradise, there's a place north of glenorchy called paradise, i can't wait to visit, i've been promised and i'm excited, i'm umn....alive

we'll always be freaks and we'll never be like other people

sunsets and diamonds and beauty abd flying and tears and lakes and mountains, clouds that quiver pink in he twilight, people who quiver delirious in the later hours. i'm not coming home, or when i do i'm not me any more.

velvet_jane @ 2003-07-03T23:30:00

2003-07-03T11:57:52Z

when did i forget how to write? it used to be pages&pages of mad words scribbled from the brain of a beat-addled imaginary princess, but now i don't know what to say, the words are slipping and replaced by the images of acid-trip technicolour sunsets falling off the side of the world in the outback, psychedelic coral trips diving in the reef, raindrops on my fingers in the rainforests (you'd give anything to taste them) and pretty pretty pictures i can't find the eloquency to describe. i miss having the words for this bubbling in my throat and my veins and my heart~soul.

and i still do get soul shivers

life is perfect and beautiful and undeserved, save for the undying appreciation i'll offer any god who paved my road with splintered shimmering mosaic pieces and promised my pot of gold. i'm starting to read again, reminiding myself that kerouac and philosophy are cut of my ilk, they're my first loves along with the prettypretty musicians who write as perfectly as any poet, except perhaps ginsberg, he can still alight everything with tiny magical shooting stars, but then mr syd barrett shone diamondsall over the skies, nore than anyone, except perhaps bob dylan who breaks my heart every night, and leonard cohen who evokes a windowless whitewalled room in singapore and an aching heart, pink floyd the hot moist~lush night of rainforests and bats screaming into the windscreen, a thousand km of unwavering road and excitement (or sometimes just a warm room and incence and my soul quietens down for a while to remember), jeff buckley lying in tatters in switzerland soul~screaming at mountains...i don't know where my thoughts are going anymore.

moonshinewashingline, a boy promised me mushrooms and i dreamed in stereo again. i sleep with a towelled stuffed walrus to stop my fingers (and my mind) picking at scars and i'm sleeping more deeply and dreamless than i ever thought possible, it terrifies me one day i'll ply my brain with so much alcohol it'll never really be whole again, short circuiting as a romantic notion but really i believe in immortality, chasing rainbows and sunsets across the world for sometime approaching eternity, i haven't found eden yet but i've seen a thousand paradises like it, i just feel a little too tired right now, a little too normal tonight, keep feeding my brain with french films and czech novels and really, really it's going to be perfect.

</small>how could it ever be any other way? i flew into new zealand and suddenly everything was alive, it was green, the hills rolled like some picturesque english novel and after five months not seeing grass, i gasped, pressed my nose against the window and grinned as the lunatics started rioting in my soul again, the ones which faltered when we broke down in the desert and i knew we were going Home, the ones who rolled over and played dead when adam boarded the plane, the ones who told me it would be ok, who whispered mad words of solace when i boarded my first plane, i thought i'd die of a broken heart but they cured it, them and the rainforests and sunsets and waterfalls and dreams</small>

please speak to me, please comment, please let me know what you're doing and feeling and dreaming today. i need pretty words and mad angels and all of you.

much drugs and madness...or at least that's how it seemed to me

2003-06-19T01:26:13Z

i've been very quiet recently when it comes to keeping in touch, too busy or too tired or too selfish to write a hundred smitten emails on the theme of how happy i am and how incredible the world is and oh good god, look how bright the stars are! life is such...i've been travelling with adam and we've had the time of our lives, i've left this too long and i don't really know where to begin.

we left sydney 7 weeks ago this sunday, that is to say we planned to leave but our van had other plans and we lived in a clapped out van in the heart of the cross, the seediest grubbiest place in australia, so we sat on our sofa in the back and drank plenty of wine and thought ...what now?... but eventually it was fixed and went, breaking down all along the way. the blue mountains first, skies straining with eucalyptus fumes and tinged blue because of it, bush walking, the rainforests, sitting atop a rock looking at a million foot drop with a joint in your hand wondering how the fuck you clombed down here...coffs harbour, an involuntary stop thanks to our tempremental van, the big banana being the main tourist attraction (don't ask) as well as a pretty beach where we went swimming in the storms (the sky is beginning to bruise...) and nearly killed oursleves getting crashed against the jetty, and plenty of sherry to make it all right...nimbin, finally! rainforests and hash cafes and mountains and fresh air and hippies as far as you can see, murals and painted shopfronts and tiny shops all reeking of incense, the museum stuffed with magic mushrooms and mad, wild vw kombis than ran here as a safe haven from being thrashed round oz again...byron bay and we were miserable as, filled with trendies and the type who spend $200 on that skirt because it looks so damn gypsy, and they're sure to wash it after every wear too...brisbane, my favourite city, arty types and hot lamb sandwiches, joints on the roof, culture and laziness and the city beach, we went at sunset and watched it go down over the river, curled our toes in the sand and the sea and gazed at the skyscrapers and smiled...pegging it up the coast to cairns, in our mad frenzied van and our beatles tapes, pink floyd at night and the white stipes, dead bugs and bats splatted across our windscreen, sleeping at the service station or some random layby and then we finally arrives...cairns, diving with turtles and fish and coral and i've never had an experience in this world like it, flying underwater, weightless, breathing easily and wanting to gasp, seeing everyone from sydney again, adam's birthday and the feeling of incredulousity, we made it so far north, there's nowhere left we're going to go upwards again...so driving back south, stopping at the crystal cascades and atherton tablelands to dive in waterfalls and swim in swimming holes and wash our hair in the millaa millaa falls like they always did in the timotei adverts...south more and INLAND! into the outback and after half an hour of driving we couldn't believe it, emptiness as far as you could see and the most dazzling sunsets, setting the skies and horizons on fire and until you've seen this world you can't believe how enormous the sky really is (in australia, the sky is actually bigger at home, i don't know how or why but i do have friends who will vouch for me this is true...) and finally breaking down again before we got to the red centre and ayers rock, dying in cloncurry and another night watching the stars and the electrical storms and wondering what we were doing in the middle of the desert, and what would we have done had it not been for those friendly truckers who pulled out their tow-rope and took us onward to civilisation. but it was too late for our van and us, we lived with a family in the outback for a while before abandoning her corpse (sigh) and taking a bus back to the places we loved the most...brisbane and nimbin, staying on a campsite in the latter overrun by kangaroos, huntsmen spiders (the size of your outstretched hand and living dangled above our showers) and our favourite - two giant pythons setting up home in the showerblock, 3m and 5m long. then it was kings cross, home, where i am now, but it doesn't feel like that now because everyone's gone, even adam left yesterday morning and i feel a little empty right now. i want to get to new zealand and see my friends again.

i miss you all from home Home too, when i read your journals and hear about uni and normalacy and doing things out with friends...i think about aberdeen sometimes so don't forget me entirely. i'm sure i'll come back one day. oh, and i love you.