May and June Recommendations, 2012

RAE MORRIS

I first saw this girl opening for Noah and the Whale back in March, and though all I’d seen of her was a few Youtube videos and hadn’t known she was the support act, I recognised her straight away because, with her wild brown ringlets and easy-to-lag-around keyboard she plays, Rae Morris is sort of iconic. She has an impressively ginormous voice and powerful set of lungs but when she stopped to express her awe at the size of her audience, a full to the brim Manchester Apollo, she spoke softly and shyly.

This song, “Don’t Go”, is particularly lovely.

BEN HOWARD

When I first listened to Ben Howard’s, “The Fear” I got this feeling that I’d heard it before. I don’t know if it was because I’d heard it on the radio or on a film or something, but it’s full of familiarity, springing from a minor key in the verses to an energetic, freely guitar strumming chorus, both the song’s structure and Ben Howard’s style of playing guitar remind me a lot of Mumford and Sons, which is never a bad thing. His record “Every Kingdom” is really unique, and full of references to nature, the stars, the forest and the ocean.

He’s also done this brilliant and hilarious cover of “Call Me Maybe”.

ANGUS AND JULIA STONE

Angus and Julia Stone are no brand new discovery of mine, neither are they unheard fof. Isaline, my French exchange sister, introduced me to Angus and Julia Stone last year and I recently bought their album “Down the Road”. I guess they make folk music. They’re Australian, a brother and sister, and really talented both separately and together, and their music and lyrics are the kind that sounds like home: it becomes the place that you are when you listen to it, whether that’s cycling on a spring morning, driving down the M6 late at night or just laying in bed when it seems like the whole world is quiet.

I couldn’t choose which song to post, because it’s all good, particularly “Big Jet Plane”, “Devil’s Tears” and “Santa Monica Dream” but this unique cover of “You’re The One That I Want” from Grease is really cool.

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I'm sorry for absence recently, and I should be back to writing much more frequently.

Hope all's well your end

- Lizzie x

Coming to Visit

So one of my friends was in hospital last week, for a while. I went to see her and brought her flowers and some books to read and things, and so did a lot of other people, and from what she's said to me about it she was hardly ever alone.

It wasn't anything death threatening but I found it really reassuring how much they all seemed to take care over this, especially seeing as as a group I don't really feel like we do see each other out of school but not very much (something which has its negative and positive points). It was nice, and none of us have ever been in situations like this, it was nice how devoted everybody seemed to be. But I can't help but wonder if it would be like that for everyone in the group, if they were ill, if it was someone else.

Today, for a few reasons, one which was a song, I started thinking about the visiting area in prisons.

It's something that's suddenly become really interesting, the environment in this situation. I think that people don't seem to know how to interact, because although you're talking with someone you know and you're used to, addressing the mundane little things that go on in your life, bringing in awkward smiles and forced jokes but it's still very there: the fact that only one of you is really able to participate in real life, at that time. That's sort of devastating and I can't get my head around it.

Obviously it's a situation I've never been either end of, and luckily. But it reminds me slightly of last summer, going to Manchester regularly to visit my grandfather as he was dying. And it wasn't definite and nobody ever addressed it but I think we all knew. Though his favourite thing to do during those times was just make a little conversation about my school and things, then watch sports on TV, normally golf or tennis. Maybe the best way to do things like this is to act as we always would.

Coming back to the first thing; my very well looked after friend who was in hospital, it made me think. Not that I'm planning on it, of course, but:

If I was in prison, would any of my friends come and visit me?

Because it's easy to associate yourself with somebody that's incidentally ill, bring them carnations and confectionery and hugs,  write all over their Facebook page how much you miss them and want them home. But prison is, obviously, completely different, because unlike illness committing a crime requires shame that some people have to share. Thinking about my friends, they fall into two categories: those that would want detachment from the situation, and those that just wouldn't find the time. And I don't particularly think that that makes them awful human beings.

The song I was talking about before, that made me think about all this, I've found out just now it's about somebody in rehab. But that fits in too: it's much easier to love and support somebody in a hospital ward to admit to yourself that they're a criminal, or a cocaine addict, or somebody to be ashamed of as well as them being your friend. The "Love 'ya babe, come home soon"'s probably don't extend that far. I feel the need to constantly reassure you that I'm not planning any of this, it's just something that really interested me: but if I was arrested, if I overdosed and went into rehabilitation, I can't help but thinking at least seventy percent of the people that I know would cut themselves off as soon as possible. And a little part of me doesn't really blame them, because it's hard to admit to yourself that the version of somebody that you love isn't the one that they always are. It's much harder to be on somebody's side if they're not what you can agree with, or be proud of.

Late Spring, Walking Home

This is a fairly mundane story:

Today, I went to visit one of my friends who is very sick. I brought her some flowers, and my copies of "I Capture the Castle" and "Stardust" to read.

As I left and embarked on the mile walk back to my house, it was early evening but the sun was still out. I watched people walking by the river in their t-shirts and sunglasses, and thought about how entertaining it is how we react to a little bit of summer here in England.

I made a point to smile at everybody I came across. This is a game I play with myself sometimes, or I guess you could call it more of a research project, because people's responses often depend hugely on the weather or the place, but sometimes age groups. A girl, aged about five, waved at me. An old man reading a newspaper on a bench grinned back. But a woman in her thirties made a point of looking at the ground. I don't know if she was being stereotypical because I'm a teenager, although I don't look very threatening, or if people just don't like eye contact with strangers.

I passed Arthur's Grave: a monument dedicated to Arthur Brown, an American pilot in WWII who crashed his plane to save our town. It is always covered in flowers. When I used to go running by the river with my dad, in the winter months in thick hoodies and hats, he set the rule that without fail we always had to shout, "Hi Arthur!" as we passed the grave. Even when I'm walking past it on my own, I still whisper it under my breath.

Outside somebody's house on the main road there was a table with tall, blooming raspberry plants on it, in buckets of water, an honesty box and a sign. I put some money in the box and took one for my mum, not thinking about how heavy it would be or how long I had to walk. I must have looked kind of hilarious struggling to carry a giant raspberry plant for half a mile.

As I walked home I saw a girl stood on the patio in front of her house across the street from where I walked. She was maybe six or seven, though I'm bad at guessing ages, wearing a long and bright pink coloured dress and dancing in the carefree way that you do when you're a child. It wasn't until the few seconds break on the Bon Iver record I was listening to, between "Flume" and"Lump Sun" that I realised she was loudly singing S Club 7's "Reach For The Stars" as she danced, whilst gazing up to the sky and wearing a very concentrated expression. I wondered when it becomes normal to stop doing that, and when it's better to look down out of awkwardness when a stranger smiles at you.

No conclusion, no revelation or shocking twists. I just think people's habits are really interesting sometimes, especially on an English summer's day.

The Inconvenience of Change

From a children’s book called “Once There Were Giants”, to relatives telling me “Look how much you’ve grown!” and American films with cheesy graduations and proms and goodbyes I think I’ve always been told and prepared about how much I was going to Change and Grow Up and Everything Would Be Different. The idea of everything changing indicates so much: people being gone, buildings being gone.

And up until recently, recently being last Sunday night, I didn’t really think that was happening at all. There’ve been a few times over the last few years when I’ve realised I’m older than I feel, like the realisation when I was in Year 9 at school that there were people my age and in my classes at school that were having sex and doing drugs and whilst I probably didn’t seem less mature than them I still felt – still feel – about eight years old. It’s just weird the moment you realise it’s not just in TV soaps, it’s real, and it’s not happening to far off characters you’re introduced to in teachers’ warning PowerPoints but people you sit next to in Maths or went to primary school with.

The other evening it was a few simultaneous factors marking change that made me realise how quickly things have moved without me realising – I was smoking, it was the night before the first of my GCSE exams, resulting in the end of high school in a few weeks. And the place I was – the closed down site of a garden centre and small wildlife zoo which I visited frequently during my childhood with my parents, went to to buy candles in a phase I had in my early teens, and more recently have used to learn to drive in the closed-down car park or just sit around in the surrounding fields to be on my own.

Then I thought about why I hadn’t been attentive to all of this changing and happening. It’s really just because all I spend my time doing is walking around the town and getting buses and trains away with my friends, two and three person parties, and then reading books and eating meals and going to concerts and homework and sitting at my computer. The only things that we have to mark time, really, is Firsts. And I’ve had a lot of Firsts in the last year but they don’t seem like the things that make time pass either, like the first time travelling alone, the first published reviewing of music, the first time drunk and the first New Year’s Eve on a beach. And Lasts too, because coming up is my last day of compulsory education, my last time all of my school year will be in one place, and probably the last time I’ll see a few people.

I can’t work out if time is marked by these, the things that get referred to as “milestones” or just when you look up one day and think about the fact that your body is different, despite never seeing in the mirror that you suddenly are taller or have different eyes or longer hair. It’s really strange, and I can’t come to any conclusion except that they don’t suddenly baffle you with introducing moving metal boxes on wheels. They do it slowly.

 ***

In other news…

- I’ve gotten pretty into Ben Howard recently.
 - I read a really brilliant and unusual book, called “Kafka on the Shore” and it’s by Haruki Murakami.
- As of tomorrow, I will never have another RE lesson and I couldn’t be happier.

I’ll see you soon.

Lizzie x

Oh, and a song:
"Bikes" by Lucy Rose

"the empty bed"

I will wait until they are in bed and then I will go out and I will set the world on fire.

Away from the walls that my hopes are too fat for, I will be the line, the highlighted journey you follow across maps from a bird’s eye view, as I board trains that tunnel and chuckle away into the night. I will run through cities, cities that make me things I’m not, colour me in the same way as dresses and bright shades of lipstick could.
I will find things, some which I looked for and some which I didn’t – places with the uncertain familiarity of the faint orange glow at the end of a cigarette in the dark.
I will find music, I will find laughter and noise and heart. I will find people who belong to it all and we’ll dance, in sweaty, fairy-lit bars that stench of sticky beer and of smoke.
I will walk, I will get lost. I will lose, find, lose, find, and at some point I will learn the way.
My shoes will be muddy, my back will ache. But even then, when my eyes are prickling and through stations I draw closer and closer to what I recognise I won’t have any fear anymore because I’ll have done it, I’ll have been and come back in the blink of an eyelid, in a puff of smoke and I will have won.

When it’s 6am, and I’m oddly enough back between sheets, closing eyes against the uncomfortable pale grey of the early morning sky I’ll still know. And as my worn and achy body goes to sleep, in the bed nobody noticed was vacant, I will for a while believe that I am no insomniac and no depressive but a wanderer.

They’ll never know.

blubbering about music, putting off my biology paper

I’ll tell you in advance this post will be naïve and soppy and stupid. Especially this next sentence:

Music is just so, so good.

I don’t know if it’s that I forget or that I underestimate how it can make me feel, but every so often the way that listening to certain artists and bands can comfort me is just ridiculous. It’s maybe even wrong because it’s a form of comfort that isn’t quite real, even though it’s there. It isn’t the same as a person, not even food or a blanket or something solid to hold on to but what it can do to us is so astounding to me.

And I think today I came to the conclusion that sometimes one of the best things art can do is make you forget yourself. Whether it’s a film about talking dogs or a Jane Austen novel or the sound of Winston Marshall playing the banjo, sometimes I find that something being incredible in whatever way it is and taking up all of my attention can even make me forget who I am or what I look like, to not have to be a person and have my thoughts completely wrapped up in art.

*

Excuses time: I’ve kind of had technical problems over the last month, but hopefully normal posting will resume. Since last time;
- I went to a really great concert with my friends and met Noah and the Whale!
- I went skiing with my family in the Three Valleys, which was really nice
- I read a lot of good books and went to Buffalo Grill

Hope all’s well your end.

Lizzie x

Recommendations: February and March

"THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER" - Stephen Chbosky
I'm definitely not the first to write about how brilliant this book is, and I'm coming rather late to the party but I can't go without mentioning it. Sometimes you read a book at just the right time: "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" just sums up all of the weird events that occur during the "growing up" period, and doing things for the first time. Also one of the smaller plots related to a situation I've found myself in, and Charlie reminds me of one of my friends to a ridiculous amount of detail. It was just really close to hope.
And I love that line: "We were infinite."

"POST OFFICE" - Charles Bukowski
It took me the first few chapters to get used to the narrator's voice in this novel, because Bukowski's writing style is so unusual, as well as him using a certain amount of what I guess was jargon, but all of that's a good thing and once I did this novel was really good and like nothing I've read before. I ended up liking Henry Chinaski in a twisted kind of way, despite how unkind and lazy and for want of a better word, pathetic he is - I think there's maybe a little bit of him in all of us. A great summation of the "white trash" culture, from a point of view I haven't come across much before.

WHITTARD'S TEA: DREAMTIME
I think I've expressed my love for ridiculously sweet instant tea drinks before. Apricot and honey flavour. Perfect if you have a cold. www.whittards.com. I believe they deliver.

PENGUINS
It was actually from a Laura Marling concert the other night that I learnt that here you can watch penguins at a zoo in California via live webcam. I don't really think I need to explain why this is amazing.

PETE ROE
If you hear from me anywhere else on the internet you probably know this, but I went to see Laura Marling last week... possibly three times. I'm broke but it was brilliant and worth it, and one of the guys who opened for her was Mr Pete Roe, who also plays piano and guitar in her band later on in the set. He's a really great guitarist, by the third night, I could sing along with several of his songs. I think this one below is my favourite of his.



I don't think he's released any music yet, but I'm sure it won't be long.

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Sorry for forgetting Wednesday again. I won't make promises but we'll see what happens next week...
Aside from that, I hope all's well your end and I'll be back soon.

Lizzie x