While I was in Paris I visited the famous Père Lachaise cemetery, and took a lot of photos both monochrome and colour, which I will post later. One roll, however, turned out to be half-used already and I ended up with double exposures. It turned out I’d already taken photos of a place called Domfront in Normandy with it. Domfront is a bit of a ghost town, which made me laugh to get double exposures of a literal graveyard over a figurative one.
Month: January 2015
Montmartre Photos
I wandered up from near the Opera (where the hotel was) through back streets up to the top of the hill, where the church is. I think it’s a much better route. You see lots of interesting tucked-away things, and avoid crowds and having to climb lots of steps.
Fanzine Ynftyn 14- jo, freilich, die gnädige Frau Magister Emma ist nach Österreich gekommen
I used to go to Austria quite a lot to run workshops in schools, travelling from school to school each week. I started writing this zine after my first trip to Vienna in 2010, didn’t finish it, and then finished it off a couple of years later. I made a few copies at the time, but then mislaid the pages again when moving house, so barely anyone has read it. I recently found them again, and scanned them, so people can order it now!
A baker’s dozen of books
1) Operation Mincemeat- Ben Macintyre
2) The Pyramid- Ismail Kadare
3) The Mirror Maker- Primo Levi
4) The Third Miss Symons- F.M. Mayor
5) The Making of the British Landscape- Francis Pryor
6) The Years of Rice and Salt- Kim Stanley Robinson
7) The Moving Toyshop- Edmund Crispin
8) Travels with a Typewriter- Michael Frayn
9) Mail Order Mysteries: Real Stuff from Old Comic Book Ads- Kirk Demarais
10) How to Build a Girl- Caitlin Moran
11) Fannie’s Last Supper- Chris Kimball
12) The Gallery of Regrettable Food- James Lileks
13) A Winter Book- Tove Jansson
Gigs of 2014
I was really broke for most of 2014. I didn’t get to go to many bigger gigs, but I did go to a lot of smaller ones. I made this playlist of songs each by a band I saw last year. It’s not an exhaustive list, I just picked songs I liked by bands I had a good time seeing, which were also available on Spotify and worked together on a playlist. If you are outside the UK I don’t know if all of them will play, due to a lot of them being bands of people I know putting their records out on small labels or themselves. Hopefully they will.
2015
So now it’s 2015, the year of the future. I expect a fax to pop out of somewhere unexpected any minute now. I had a very sedate and teetotal Christmas and New Year due to injuring my shoulder and then coming down with a bad case of the flu that lingered on forever. I wanted to get a few creative projects finished over the Christmas break, but that put a spanner in the works. Already this year I have started a new job, been to Paris for a few days and turned 30.