On L.Pierre's 'The Island Come True'

The well known Arab Strap’s mouthpiece Aidan Moffat offers us a fourth release under the name L.Pierre, The Island Come True. After waiting six years since his last album Dip in 2007, Moffat’s sound evolved. It grew bigger, darker and, at some points, lighter. The album borrows its name from a chapter in  “Peter Pan” by J.M. Barrie, and just like Wendy, Moffat’s sensibility is growing.  Pianofortes and children’s lullabies walk hand in hand (Dumbum) while tumbling drums (Drums) rejoice at the sound of seagulls (Kab 1340). The rhytm is throbbing and at the sound of Moffat’s keynotes forests, wild bushes, secret mountains and rivers awake to accompany him in his tracks. The tone is fantastic, avengeful, fearless and sporadically strange. Coupled with the creaking sounds, L.Pierre’s album The Island Come True is definitely a voyage back to Wonderland, but this time with an armed heart.

You can listen to Harmonic Avenger (personal fave) here, and buy the album here.

A sad story about work

    It is almost 11AM and I am browsing a complex and dull-looking website that will tell me how much money the clients of the bank I'm working at will lose today with the stock market. It's called current liquidity excess, it is repetitive and uninteresting, and it needs to be done twice a day to ensure that no one loses a vast amount of money, like, say, 3 million dollars. All is well, none of the clients have their names in red.

I started my internship on the 25th of June 2012, and in two weeks I will be done. As a media undergraduate who attends an Arts College, working in a bank goes against all my beliefs and principles. I hate money and how it enslaves people, I hate that money is the biggest entity in the world, I hate the political schemes of corporations and banks, I hate what it makes people do. But most importantly I hate that I have to work for money, eight hours per day, five days a week, all year long. I guess you could call me a naïve idealist who believes that we can live on poems and flowers. 

What my job consists of is making sure the clients' transfers are archived by numbers and dates, that the stocks they've bought are correct, that their amount of cash at the end of the month does not differ from the one in the bank's system... Hours of archiving and numbers and maths, and Excel graphs and tables. HSBC, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Merril Lynch have become part of my daily vocabulary. As a student who used to cheat her way through her maths class (and still miserably failing to get a simple PASS), this was torture. I could never get the same result twice, and would often opt for the number that seemed most appealing to me (34500 or 256... mm 256 pounds seems reasonable I guess). I found it hilarious that I couldn't get the same result for a simple addition of numbers, even with a calculator. But this was overestimating my capacities in maths: 38000 dollars became 83000 dollars, pounds became euros, hong kong dollars became swiss francs... I was a disaster. And when the cash at the end of the month did not match the bank's system, it was my task to find out why they had lost so much money (we are talking millions here). I thought it was completely absurd to let a 19 year student (who, to make it worse, got the internship without any interviews or skill assessment... Nepotism at its best) find out why the client had lost so much money, but they thought it was normal. After pretending to find mistakes in a twenty pages long cash statement, I finally asked the un-askable : "Maybe someone stole his card and then spent all the money! That would explain why he lost 38million euros and 256 million dollars! That explains it all!!". To which my boss looked at me as if I were a dinosaur. After a couple of hours, it came to light that I had entered the wrong data and thus the whole incident had been engendered by my maths mistakes. Oops. 

Another incident that makes me giggle (but shudder in shame at the same time) is the day I inadvertly printed out 250 pages of cash statement. It lasted around 10minutes, during which my infuriated colleagues  couldn't get hold of their faxes or prints. It was hilarious. After realizing that I had printed the wrong pages, I quickly flipped them over and put them back in the printer, as I did not want to look like a stupid, soulless and tree-loathing person. But in my purely altruistic act, I had not flipped the pages on the right side, and my colleagues were both shocked ( at my stupidity..) and irritated to find that their prints and faxes had been printed on my printed pages. They couldn't read a thing and we had to throw everything away. I couldn't stop laughing, but I was the only one. After that, they ceased giving me complex things to do, like printing out excel charts  or anything that involves numbers. Instead, I am now in charge or the archives and spend all my hours on 9GAG, because it is one of the few websites that is infinite. Sometimes I watch movies without the sound, because I like living on edge. It also makes for interesting plot twists. 

Apart from the sporadic hilarious incidents (mostly caused by me...), work is a dull pain in the ass.

I've only just come to the sudden realization that I will be graduating from university in two years. And then what? The real world? A job? I don't feel ready to become a person with a job. The only thing that I learnt from my internship is that I do not want to work in an office, I do not want to work in an environment that involves money or dealing with numbers. I want to learn new things everyday, I want to have a job where ideas are thought-provoking, a job where I can discuss compelling issues and contemporary problems that affect me... It pains me to see that people have jobs that they hate, but cannot quit for financial reasons, I hate that not everybody is given the chance to choose what they really want to do in life, it pains me to see that everyday is a repetition of the day before and before and before that... And it's worrying, because if I can't enjoy a simple and secure job like what I have right now, what will life be after university? Will I have to wake up everyday to a job I don't like? A lifetime seems pretty long...

Is it normal to be this scared? 

Get the sky for your birthday

Freelance photographer and glider pilot Jaanus Jagomägi tells Suzanne Zhang about flying, and the importance of training in extreme situations. 

“The clouds there look really nice, let’s go there”. In what world does one have that kind of freedom? To navigate in the sky and choose your own route just because the clouds look nice. Imagine that kind of freedom; that calm and appeasing feeling you get when you see the soothing sky? Well now it is possible to actually be there. To say to yourself, ‘hey, let’s turn right after the second cloud’. We know it’s every man’s dream.

“Flying a glider is like having a bicycle in the sky”, says 20 years-old Estonian game design student Jaanus Jagomägi. It is easy and instinctive, but unlike when you are on the ground, when you fly, “all your senses are heightened, but in a more relaxed way”. A glider is a small plane with no engine that is transported by thermals; so there is a very natural feel to it, says Jagomägi. Ironic, as it is made out of glass fiber with wings spreading to at least 18 meters wide, like the LET L-13 Blanik, the most common glider in the world.

It was on the L-13 Blanik that Jagomägi first learnt to fly a glider, when he turned 16. “Flying has been in the family ever since I was a kid, since my father was a pilot”, tells Jagomägi, who remember growing up in airfields, next to gliders. He passed his first license when he was 16, which is the legal age in UK. However, the gliding license is not an easy simulation test, it requires time and practice. You are required to pass seven exams: navigation, aerodynamics, meteorology, human factors & limitations, rules & regulations, and finally, a full-time two-day medical course at the hospital. All this was easy for Jagomägi as he had several tips from his father and friends, “all airfield instructors”.

His brother recently passed his license, a birthday present since he turned 16. When asked about the different prices in Estonia and in the UK, Jagomägi raises his eyebrows and explains that “in the UK they are after your money, whereas in Estonia you can fly for very cheap because they are not being opportunistic”. You should expect 17 pounds for a 12 minutes flight and 34 pounds for a 30 minutes flight (and then up to 10 hours). In the UK, however, the prices are much higher: 200 pounds at the London Gliding Club and around 444 pounds at the South London Gliding Club. Thus getting the sky has its very own price.

When asked about fear of heights, Jagomägi replies that he “used to be scared”. The scariest part is not flying very high because “when you’re low you’re going to need to land in a random place, and you can’t see well”. The further high up you get, the safer you are, as the thermals keep you safe from hitting the ground. But is flying a glider as safe as they make it sound? “Small manoeuvre accidents are bound to happen, but you are always prepared thanks to the training”, argues Jagomägi, who has had two frightening experiences. His scariest moment was two years ago, when he was “flying in a really big triangle (when we go flying we put three points on a map)”. The weather changed abruptly and the clouds disappeared, which means that the thermals are not stable enough to carry a glider. “Looking for a place to land and not seeing anything was one of the scariest things”, says Jagomägi. His glider lost height because of the lift to drag ratio, and he was suddenly at 300 meters above ground. From what he remembered from the textbooks and the practice, he needed to land as quickly as possible in a big flat field. Because he couldn’t see any, he flew over a combine since it released a thermal from a field, which is what all textbooks advise you to do, and “got up to 900 meters, which was more than enough, although [his] heart was racing”.

Jagomägi emphasises the importance of the textbooks and practice as he recalls this adventure, telling me that “it’s not all about instincts, up in the air it’s very technical”. He recalls other experiences, when he went skydiving and again argues that for your survival, practice and the textbooks are what will save you in the end. So what about people who get scared easily and have a mediocre sense of orientation? “It’s doable”, replies Jagomägi. In his opinion, when you get up in the air, you must feel the plane, the mechanics of the manoeuvres; but this is a skill you learn to master. And GPS and maps are always a necessity on gliders, which means that really, anyone –even with fear of heights-could fly a glider.

Contact info and photo: http://foto.jaanus.cc/