Our front door, windows to the soul

The last twenty-four hours was a blur. There is an ethereal atmosphere that surrounds the Last Time you do something. The last time I hear the buskers acoustics echo through the tube station. The last time I share a jug of Snake Bite, also known as the Poor Man’s Black Velvet. The last time I walk down Old Street at 4am when the streets are lined with homeless people and exploding rubbish bins. The rubbish that I once loathed had looked like poetry that last morning.

Goodbyes are asphyxiating. The first goodbye was that morning, on the rooftop. It was the first clear day that London had birthed in weeks. The air was fresh and the streets were fuzzy from the glare. I gazed over East London’s imperfections, like a mother over her first-born. This place had ushered me into my eighteenth year, showed me the ropes and now I had to cut them loose.

I was fresh out of high school and I had fallen in love with the first city I met... With all its charlatans and drudgery it was a beautiful world to which no one but we had keys.

Stairway to heaven

Cause the smell of her perfume echoes in my head still
Cause I see my people trying to drown the sun
In weekends of whiskey sours
Cause how many times can you wake up in this comic book and plant flowers?
- Rodriguez, Cause

'Words can be like x-ray's, if you use them properly - they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced. That's one of the things I try to teach my students - how to write piercingly'
- Aldous Huxley

'He only stole cars for joy rides'
- Jack Kerouac

Behind the scenes of Academy for Men magazine shoot for Winter 2010 issue, out soon. See previous issues here.

Eagle feathers, leather boots, ponchos, fur, swaggering attitudes and an endless yarn of colored wool were the tricks of our trade and Ben with his magic wand, that, with a single punch of the finger captured the essence of a moment. One blinding flash and the satisfying crunch of a camera shutter and we were imprisoned in his memory card. Within that card lies a myriad of impressions bound only by your imagination; a feeling, a journey, a story, another world that once existed in the minds eye of a single person and has now been brought to life. There is nothing more rousing than sea air to get the creative blood cursing through your veins again. We fled to the ocean. In the trustful arms of Mother Nature and the artists behind Academy for Men magazine, dreams were brought into fruition.

The Blackbird Markets held on the 1st Saturday of every month at The Workers Club, Brunswick street, Fitzroy.

Family dinner with Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeros

Lead singer, Alex Ebert, has the presence of a shaman and his female accomplice Jade Castrinos has the voice of a young Nancy Sinatra. This legion of musicians had the crowd crawling onto the stage to join in the harmonious whistle of Home. I'm not quite sure what it is about the theatrical world of Eward Sharp that exudes such a powerful magnetism, regardless, I felt the pull.

Because she likes the feeling of blood rushing to her head,

this one time I walked into her room and she was balancing in headstand position on her bed. She had her back and legs up against the wall in a straight line as if suspended by some transparent web. Right now I can imagine all of the blood that filled her body, from the tips of her toes until the last vertebrae, slowly seeping into the top of her head like food die dripping into a bowl of water. The red color would form thin curls that look exactly like the smoke that is escaping my mouth each time I take a drag of my cigarette.

Those words they had said began washing from side to side of her mind rhythmically, and as they washed, words, like little shaded lights, one red, one blue, one yellow, lit up in the dark of her mind - Virginia Woolf