From the archives.
I find in life that it’s best to take it easy when you can. There are very few things better than kicking back and not doing anything at all apart from flick the TV over and rearrange the cushions behind your head while touching yourself underneath your pants. University is probably the second best chance you will have in life, after your toddler years, for a substantial period of taking it easy so it’s very important not to waste any time expelling extra energy. Here are a few simple rules for you to follow to enjoy at least three years of blissful under-exertion.
MOVING IN
Before you even move in to a house, you need to be thinking about the best ways for you to do as little as possible. Rule number one: don’t show your face for the first week. There will be furniture to be moved, repairs to be made, cupboards to be cleaned, stuff to be painted. Casually stroll in after a week and this will all be taken care of. Whatever you do, do not get the room nearest to the front door. You do not want to be woken up at 7 AM once a week by the postman because the textbooks your bookish little worm of a flatmate keeps ordering won’t fit through the letterbox. Get an intermediately positioned room (so there won’t be too much effort needed to get to the front door when choosing to leave the house) and make a pact with yourself only to be risen by fire alarms or armed robbers.
WAKING UP
Never set your alarm clock too early. Have as much sleep as you like. Don’t worry if you miss the first episode of Neighbours, Channel 5 will very kindly repeat it again later on. Making breakfast is way more hassle than you need to deal with, so do anything and everything you can to get help with it. There is little better when dozing in bed in the mornings than hearing the words “cup of tea?” resonating from the kitchen. Never let an opportunity like this pass. You should be able to detect these words through concrete walls and closed doors. Your ears should perk up like those of a gazelle watching over its newborn in the dead of night as hyenas creep closer, and you should instantly reply “…and two slices of toast, please, with plenty of peanut butter. Bring them up.” If you drop a few crumbs on the floor while eating don’t worry about it, leave them. What do you think the mice are there for? The moment you leave the house they’ll have nibbled away those unsightly lumps of food and replaced them with much harder to detect little dark brown deposits that they will kindly hide out of sight under the bed or in the corners of the room.
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Posted on October 20th, 2009 | 4 Comments
Tagged: chillaxing
WORDS BY JAMES KNIGHT
PHOTOS BY JAMIE LEE CURTIS TAETE
Have you noticed how everyone is a photographer these days? Boring, isn’t it? Thanks a lot, digital technology, for convincing millions of idiots that they’re the next Wolfgang Tillmans or Terry Richardson. In reality, a tiny percentage of wannabe snappers will ever make it. The industry is near impossible to break into and the sheer number of people who want in has made it crazily difficult to get your images seen anywhere other than Facebook or Flickr. Having just come back from showing in LA, and with two solo shows in the works, it’s safe to say that 23-year-old Vice photograper Jamie Lee Curtis Taete’s pictures are being seen in lots of places. So we asked him how that happened and what advice he has to make it happen for you too.
Vice: Hi Jamie. Where did you grow up?
Jamie Lee Curtis Taete: In a village called Burbage in the Midlands that no one has heard of. It’s in the dead centre of the country. When did you start taking photos? When I was about 12 my dad got a digital camera and I kept stealing it. Before that I shot on film cameras. I don’t really remember what I was shooting, my memory is awful and I have a real habit of losing stuff or stuff being stolen so I can’t go back and remind myself of whatever it was I might or might not have been taking photos of. I think I may actually have the worst memory in the world. I am great at useless trivia, but anything to do with my past or feelings I can’t do.
What were you shooting once you had your hands on your dad’s digital camera?
I used to go to a lot of gigs in Birmingham. I used to be really into this band called King Adora. They’d attract a lot of Manic Street Preachers fans – lots of feather boas and tiaras and boys in nail polish.
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Posted on October 16th, 2009 | 6 Comments
Tagged: jamie lee curtis taete, photography
WORDS BY JAMES KNIGHT
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOE HADDOCK
At some point in your three years of minimal activity and maximum sloth you will want to explore the wider world. This will be an urge stronger in those who didn’t spend a year dicking about in Guatemala after their A-levels. For all those who want to recreate the Grand Tour or pretend they are George Orwell, here are a few of the less obvious attractions that the wonderful countries of Europeland have to offer.
ITALY
Forte Prenestino, Rome
Travelling all the way to the home of Roman civilisation to visit a squat may seem odd, but you have to take into account that this is the biggest squat in Europe, and is therefore of interest, especially if you like squats. The Germans think they have the whole squatting thing on lock with their organic beer made from grass and their violin-toting punks who do interpretive ballet set to Wagner, but
Forte Prenestino is the real deal. The Italians call squats centro sociali, which sounds far more romantic than plain old squat, but the same thing that goes on in abandoned warehouses in Peckham goes on here on a grander and generally more productive scale.
It’s basically a 19th century fort full of people putting on fantastic parties, concerts and exhibitions, and it makes London’s anarchocrusty sit-ins look half-arsed.
The Vittoriale degli Italiani, Gardone Riviera
Imagine if, in the early 20th century, the state gave almost unlimited funds to a daredevil fascist poet, allowing him to expand his lakeside villa at will, merely to keep him from interfering with the government. Well, that’s exactly what the Italian government did. The fascist poet Gabriele d’Annunzio’s monumental folly on Lake Garda, northern Italy, was built to insane proportions, and successfully kept the busybody wordsmith out of the way. His work is widely credited with inspiring Mussolini and Italian fascism, and there happens to be a battleship in his garden.
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Posted on October 15th, 2009 | No Comments
Tagged: austria, germany, holland, italy, sweden, travelling
From the archives.
PHOTOGRAPHER: BEN RAYNER
STYLIST: ALDENE JOHNSON
Alexis wears jacket by Insight, shirt by Fred Perry, trousers by Franklin and Marshall and trainers by K-Swiss.
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Posted on October 13th, 2009 | 4 Comments
Tagged: Fashion
From the archives
Welcome to university! Today is the first day of the rest of your life! Forever!
Let’s raise a toast!
To the science students: Well done for making the informed choice to study esoteric theories dreamt up by totally insane professors that may or may not ever exist!
To the arts and humanities crowd: Get back to us when you’ve worked out the secrets of life by smoking pot, daubing paint on your trousers and reading books written by hippies and alcoholics who committed suicide at the age of 35!
To the business students: Be careful about the “blowing-off-steam-at-the-weekend” you’re going to have to do for the rest of your life because your shitty office job is like living in Guantanamo Bay. Only without the sex!
University is going to be BRIIIILLIANT!!! Wait. Is it?
YEAR ONE
SOCIAL LIFE
Myth: University is a whole new start on the social ladder. You will be the coolest kid around and will somehow be able to fool the new people you meet into thinking you are not a manic depressive loner, who was ritually beaten every day of your tortured life at school and who people only spoke to when asking for help with their French homework.
Fact: You will have the exact same social status you had in school, but without people knowing about the time you loudly fanny-farted while reading out a section of Tess Of The D’Urbervilles during English Lit. Sure, this is a new start of sorts but attempting a complete personality / identity renovation is a risky business and 99 per cent of the time ends in tears, relationship difficulties and drug addiction. Wahey!
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Posted on October 13th, 2009 | 17 Comments
Tagged: alcohol, education, sex
From the archives
UBIQUITOUS WHITE PLIMSOLES
Three years ago, the Lord of Hipster Fashion decreed that every single person in the world must own a pair of these cheap plimsoles that fall apart after three weeks of wearing them. These are perfect for those of you intent on reinventing yourselves from unpopular rich nerds to bohemian wastrels. You must also carry around with you notebooks full of poetry about “winding, blinding puffs of smoke trickling into space”, “desolate pigeons” and long, annoying words like “coruscating”.
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Posted on October 12th, 2009 | No Comments
Tagged: Tidbits
From the archives
ACTION PLAN Planning is everything. You need booze. You need a hard person to be the door guy. You need numbers for cabs. You need somebody who’s able to sort out what the music business calls “fruit and flowers” (Google it). You also need sectioned, locked areas of the house that only you have keys to. Most importantly, you need some overall idea about how the party should end up. This means: how to get the best people to stay and how to get the worst people to leave.
BABES You need at least a couple of these (of both sexes) to turn up early-ish as they make a talking point for the ugly people (everybody else). You should get the babes as drunk as possible so they’re more likely to stick around, and give them access to the secret areas where the “fruit and flowers” are distributed. If, after courting them for a couple of hours you decide they are complete idiots, then start a Chinese whisper that one of them has AIDS of the bumhole.
CLOTHES You have to have some kind of party outfit planned. The best thing to do is dress low-key and smart, but have some amazing novelty value flashing light thing going on in the corner of your outfit to attract drunk, horny people.
DEGRADATION Fuck these boring student dinner parties where everybody’s complimenting Sophie on her avocado and pine nut salad. Unless there’s a blindfolded virgin having opium forced into their anus by a giant walking tit dressed as a rabbit while a rave dwarf covered in baked beans felches them both by 7.45 PM, I’m OUTTA HERE!
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Posted on October 9th, 2009 | 3 Comments
Tagged: a-z, alcohol, drugs, party
From the archives
For some people, nothing ends a night out on the town more satisfyingly than kicking the shit out of a student, i.e you and your friends.
In London, attacks on students and people who look like students have increased. Faris from The Horrors had teeth knocked out on Whitechapel Road for having long hair and the singer from Les Incompetents Billy Bell was almost killed after a night out in Camden went wrong when somebody took a dislike to his trousers (and tried to cop off with his girlfriend).
Outside London it’s even worse. Sadly, if you’re living in a strange new city with accommodation in one of the less salubrious parts of town and you enjoy “night life” then being beaten up, or the fear of being beaten up, is an inescapable part of your new life.
One thing that you can’t count on is the how, when or why you’re going to come in for the pounding of your life.
Sadly, if you’re approached by a clucking heroin addict desperate for the £3.47 in your pocket or by a gargantuan meathead who got rejected from every university in the world and wants to take out the fact that he’s got to pay for three kids by the time he’s 22 on your face, you’re probably not going to win the fight. Sorry, you’re DEFINITELY not going to win the fight. What you CAN do is be prepared for sitches like these and be ready to defend yourself by any means possible.
We’ve lost pretty much every fight we’ve been in (apart from when we had the bouncers at the Old Blue Last to help us out) so what the fuck do we know?
Oh yeah, let’s ask our friend, Angela Brennan, the British Middleweight Tae Kwon Doe Champion (2004).
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Posted on October 8th, 2009 | 2 Comments
Tagged: cartoon, self-defence, violence
From the archives
Paul: “Students are more willing to stop and have a chat with me. It’s just when they come out in groups, I’ve been spat on and kicked.”
Aaron: “I went straight from secondary school to labouring and I don’t like the way that they look down at me for that. Throwing big words about like they know something I don’t.”
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Posted on October 5th, 2009 | 32 Comments
Tagged: hate, students, vox pop
From the archives
ACADEMIC SUCCESS
Don’t worry so much. A 2:1 is the most common grade. Nobody gets firsts except weird brainiacs or Chinese people. This looks great on graduation day but understand that straight A students have endured years of overbearing parents, endless maths tests and “educational toys” for Christmas presents. For the men, when they get to 32 they spend thousands on rare Stars Wars figures because they never had them when they were young. The women? It usually manifests itself in a huge dildo collection, prostitution, madness, suicide or becoming a sexually voracious, piss drinking slattern. Good six-month-girlfriend material if you can handle the suicide attempts.
BED SHEETS
A lot of students, especially the boys, are little wimps struggling to understand life away from the comfort of mummy’s bosom. This is why they don’t wash their bed sheets for a whole year. They sleep on gallons of dried cum, piss, vomit, spilled beer and tiny particles of Original Cool Doritos. This is how they get “fresher’s flu”. It’s because they can’t take care of themselves. They invented a thing called the internet a while ago and if you type in www.google.com and enter “healthy diet” you can probably stop all this happening. Also, don’t be scared of the Launderette. Just ask the immigrant lady how to work it. Or do a service wash. It’s more expensive but time-wise it’s a lot more economical.
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Posted on September 30th, 2009 | 14 Comments
Tagged: the vice guide
