Pig- Sparkle­horse

So anoth­er song- Pig by Sparkle­horse. I was consid­er­ing pick­ing Tears on Fresh Fruit, which is my other favour­ite song by them, but this won out.

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Categorised as Music

Midsom­mar

Last night, I saw Midsom­mar, a film I’ve had my eye on for a while. It’s received very mixed reviews in the press, but I loved it. I felt it was pretty much what you’d get if you got Alex­an­der Jodorowsky to direct the Wick­er Man

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Categorised as Books, Films

Ghost Fang

Kevin who I run Connect Noth­ing With Noth­ing with has an improv group called Ghost Fang. Each perform­ance includes whatever musi­cians want to take part…

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Categorised as Music

The Song is the Single

Here’s anoth­er song for you- The Song is the Single by Barr. It origin­ally came out when I was at univer­sity, and then ten years later, Brendan did a show at Power Lunches out of the blue, because he was in town for an art event anyway…

Nuns contem­plat­ing Dog

I took some press shots of “”pineal-poking punked-up psyche­del­ic speed­freaks” Casu­al Nun at Dream­land when they came down to Margate to play a gig recently. While everyone’s back was turned, Irak­lis won a huge toy dog from a sideshow on the first attempt.

Tumble­weed

I’ve been out of action for the last ten days after a stage light fell from a shelf onto my head and I was left with concus­sion and back injur­ies…

HI STRANGER

This is the creepi­est anim­a­tion I’ve seen in a long time. I love it. The youtube comments are split between people being creeped out and find­ing it sooth­ing. I’m in the creeped out camp- stop trying to glom onto me with your love, sneaky plas­ti­cine man. I don’t know you. Here’s some other inter­est­ing links too:

Kleenex- Nice

So next up, Nice by Kleenex. (Who later had to rename them­selves Lili­put after pres­sure from the tissue company). Infec­tious early 80s Swiss post-punk.

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Categorised as Music

Over the Edge- Wipers

So I thought I would pick a song I like each day, and write some­thing about why I like it, in an attempt to make myself write more often.

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Categorised as Music

Old Stripy Bum

A couple of months ago I adop­ted a young cat from the local anim­al shel­ter. The profile said he was play­ful and curi­ous, had a miss­ing tail and needed a lot of atten­tion and activ­ity.

I’m back

So like a lot of people lately I’ve been think­ing about the influ­ence of the big social media sites, espe­cially with all the news stor­ies about how they have done little to noth­ing to stop far-right radic­al­isa­tion in the past few years. I loathe Face­book, and would happily close my account if I didn’t use it for promot­ing events…

2018 to 2019

2018 was a hard year and felt like it lasted a million years rather than just one. I spent most of 2017 trav­el­ling around for both work and pleas­ure, visit­ing the Czech Repub­lic, Austria, Germany, Japan, Croa­tia, Slov­e­nia, France and Switzer­land.

Here I am

I have barely updated this blog since the summer because I’ve been both very busy and rarely home. I spent most of Septem­ber in Australia…

Bismuth

Hello from the south­ern hemi­sphere. Here’s some new press shots of my friends’ band Bismuth I took a few weeks ago at the origin­al UK Botany Bay…

Bloody Head

So here’s anoth­er gig I’m help­ing to organ­ise and did the poster for. This time I went for a pretty simple design. Spilt blood speaks for itself…

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Categorised as Music

Dachau

On my way back from the Tyrol, I stayed in Munich en route to the airport, and visited the Dachau concen­tra­tion camp museum- it was the first Nazi concen­tra­tion camp and served as a template for many of the others…

Schwartz­see

A short train ride or couple of miles walk outside Kitzbühel is the Schwartz­see (“black lake”). It’s full of miner­als washed down from the moun­tains that give it the glassy black effect…

Kitzbühel

So here’s a couple of assor­ted photos of Kitzbühel town. It’s a ski resort in the Austri­an Tyrol, about equidistant between Salzburg, Inns­bruck and Munich…

Hahnen­kamm

In July I went to Kitzbühel in Austria for work. I was there to run a work­shop in the local middle school, and the mayor gave me and my three co-work­ers tick­ets for the local ski lift…

Enter the Vortex

So here’s the posters I designed for two gigs I’m help­ing to put on- one in London, the other in Margate. As per the press release “Girl Sweat is the ever-chan­ging garage-noise project fron­ted by the 6ft 5” beast that is ‘Sweat’” along with the fine collec­tion of psych and drone weirdos assembled in support. My brief for the poster was “illuminati/​masons cult shit”. I hope I delivered.

Behemoth Lives!

Margate is currently host­ing a vari­ety of art events related to T.S.Eliot (who wrote the Waste­land here almost a century ago), includ­ing a week­end dedic­ated to cats over East­er. I created this print based on Bulgakov’s the Master and Margar­ita, and a giant painted banner version of it to hang up at the show. It was a bit last minute, but I got it all done on time. The show is on at the Viking Gallery off North­down Rd over the long East­er week­end and until the 7th of April.

Very Friendly

Here’s some photo­graphs I took of my friends’ band Very Friendly. For a while we had inten­ded to take some promo shots with a miser­able day at the beach theme, and then the beach was suddenly covered in thick snow, so this happened over a lunch break. Harry even­tu­ally got warm again. Even­tu­ally.

Whit­stable print

Here’s an illus­tra­tion I recently did of Whit­stable seafront. A3, A4 and A5 giclée prints are avail­able here.

Prim­or­di­al Soup

Here’s a gig poster I drew recently. I was given free reign to do whatever I wanted, and it turns out what I wanted was to do a fake cyan­o­type of pondscum. Face­book event for the show here.

Ma Chambre

So here’s my room. I moved to this small unfur­nished flat in Octo­ber, and until the New Year I didn’t have a bed or enough shelves, so everything was in boxes all over the place, and it didn’t look great. The other room has both the living room stuff and my desk, which isn’t ideal. Photos of that will have to wait because it’s currently covered in a load of paper­work and art stuff.

Dawn­walk­er

So I recently did some artwork for an album cover- Human Ruins by Dawn­walk­er (featur­ing Dane Cross from Sacred Son, who caused an incred­ible fuss last with the Black Metal fanboys with his choice of album artwork). I did the moons and runes, and someone else did the photo­graph and logo. Photos cour­tesy of Mark from the band.

New print- Sheep Skull

So here’s a new illus­tra­tion I did. It’s actu­ally based on a draw­ing I did when I was 17 that I found while sort­ing out some paper­work recently. You can buy mono­chrome and colour prints for £3-£30 over on the shop.

Janu­ary Playl­ist

The second half of Janu­ary has been a bad time for me, with a lot of very diffi­cult things to deal with. I’ve been low on energy for doing anything much creat­ive. Here’s a playl­ist of songs I’ve been listen­ing to lately though.

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Categorised as Music

Die grade Linie ist die unschöp­ferische Linie

Just before Christ­mas I ran a Hunder­t­wasser-themed work­shop as a fundraiser for 101 Social Club. (If you are not famil­i­ar with Austri­an artist, archi­tect, envir­on­ment­al­ist and cranky old hippy Friedens­reich Hunder­t­wasser, I have writ­ten about him quite a few times- you can find the entries here) People had food and drink, learnt about Hundertwasser’s work and philo­sophies, and did three differ­ent casu­al art activ­it­ies- collab­or­at­ive line making, resist paint­ing, and creat­ing archi­tec­tur­al models of Hunder­t­wasser-style build­ings out of recycled mater­i­als. All while listen­ing to the fine selec­tion of Can, Neu, Fennesz, Cluster, Faust and other artists from the playl­ist below (I had it on shuffle on the night)

Domest­ic Abuse Support All-dayer fundrais­ing gig

I recently went to a local gig put on by Art’s Cool rais­ing money for the local domest­ic abuse support char­ity. It was an all-dayer, with half the lineup being local Kent bands, and the other half being from Leeds. The next day they did it all again, but in Leeds, and rais­ing money for an educa­tion char­ity there. I missed the first band, but they were kind of a super­group made up of members from the differ­ent Leeds bands

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Categorised as Music

Trying to be nicer to myself

Today is the last day of my 32nd year on the plan­et. As someone with a mid-Janu­ary birth­day, I partic­u­larly hate how Janu­ary is assigned to be the hate-your­self-and-vow-to-change-everything-about-your­self-in-a-punit­ive-way month. Rather than futile and harm­ful diet and gym plans, I’m trying to be nicer to myself and less viciously self-crit­ic­al about my appear­ance.

Büren-Harth

Here’s some more photos from Germany. From Harth in Nordrhein-West­falen to be more precise. It’s a small village in the Sauer­land, a scen­ic forest region about a hundred miles east of Cologne, popu­lar for hiking and cycling.

Some thoughts about having left London

So I returned perman­ently to the UK in Septem­ber and moved to Margate. I grew up in Kent, but haven’t lived here perman­ently since I was 18, which feels like a long time ago. Settling in has been both good and hard. I trav­elled non-stop essen­tially from Janu­ary to Septem­ber, and adjust­ing myself to being in one place and the idea that I live some­where has taken a while. It’s also kind of weird pretty much only being surroun­ded by people I’ve known for 1-2 months- you feel like the awkward new kid at school.

Düssel­dorf

I spent most of August in Germany, teach­ing some school work­shops and going to Docu­menta art fair along the way. My first assign­ment was in rural Nordrhein-West­falen. The agency has a tend­ency to book you on flights at brutal times early on a Sunday, so instead I booked my own flight to Cologne on a Friday even­ing, and claimed it back off them. I have been to Cologne loads of times, and my colleagues were flying into Düssel­dorf, which I had never visited. So I decided to stay in Düssel­dorf, do a bit of sight­see­ing, and then meet up with the others before head­ing to the Sauer­land.

They only want you when you’re seven­teen

I made this playl­ist a while back, and the post has been languish­ing in the drafts for a while, so I thought I’d finish it off for the end of the year. It’s all songs I liked when I was 17, which was in 2002

Wooden hands

I got a short notice illus­tra­tion job this week for images for Christ­mas greet­ings from Buil­dopia, an Itali­an eco-build­ing company. They special­ise in wood and their slogan trans­lates as “the build­ing game”.

Zilin­ski album launch

So here are some much more recent gig pictures- from this week in fact. Local label M8s Records held an album launch party for Canter­bury band Zilin­ski. With Lazy Pilgrims and Trash Mammoth in support.

Cloudrat & Moloch

A couple of years ago my friend Steve Larder’s band Moloch did a split LP and tour with Amer­ic­an grind­core band Cloudrat. I found the uned­ited photos the other day, and finally sorted them out. Enjoy.

I’m Curi­ous To Know Exactly How You Are

I had to put a Hüsker Dü song in this list, as they are one of my all-time favour­ite bands, but it was hard to decide which one. In the end I went for a really obvi­ous choice- the first song of theirs I got into.

“I cried for madder music and for stronger wine”

I have Bacchae prints avail­able again. The text says “I caught this young lion myself without a trap”. Based on the scene from Eurip­ides’ Bacchae where Pentheus’ moth­er tears her own son’s head off with her bare hands while under Dionysus’ spell and parades it round the stage. Avail­able from me as a print here for £6 or £12 depend­ing on size. Ideal fest­ive gift for all, look how red it is.

Hobot­nica

And to round off my stuff from Croa­tia, here’s some sketch­book notes from Zadar museum and Trogir. Hobot­nica (pronounced hobot­nitsa) is Croa­tian for octopus. It’s a good word.

Trogir

So here’s the last of my pictures from Croa­tia. This time of Trogir, a town up the coast from Split. I went there on the bus, on a whim really, and was glad I did.

That Cat’s Some­thing I Can’t Explain

I would describe this as essen­tially a Bond theme about a Siamese cat. I’m a big fan of Syd Barrett, but have a deep pool of loath­ing for Roger Waters. I would call it an irra­tion­al hatred, but I feel like I could come up with plenty of reas­ons for my loath­ing. My moth­er is a big Pink Floyd fan, so I’ve had plenty of expos­ure over my life­time to fuel it.

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Categorised as Music

Marjan

If you keep walk­ing out of Split you end up on the Marjan penin­sula. The first time I visited I made the mistake of climb­ing up to the peak in 35c heat. After that I sens­ibly took the coast road.

I just wait, I just think

I debated which Codeine song to use, the compet­i­tion was strong. Codeine are often described as Slow­core. Slow songs in Steph­en Immerwahr’s (a fitting name- his surname is German for “Always True”) clear voice with vivid images about the small despairs of every­day life and rela­tion­ships. A long even­ing alone in the Winter. I imagine a lot of people will hate this and find it dreary, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s anything but.

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Categorised as Music

Split

Here’s some photos from my trip to Croa­tia this summer. It was a real last minute thing, I suddenly had a week free in a packed summer of teach­ing engage­ments and still didn’t actu­ally live anywhere yet, so I bought a cheap flight to Croa­tia and did some sight­see­ing.

Ponder this to get near­er to noth­ing

When I wrote the 50 Things About Me entry a little while ago, I star­ted creat­ing a playl­ist of 50 favour­ite songs. It got unwieldy and didn’t flow well though, so I gave up. Instead I’ll write a little bit every so often about songs from the list.

The Van Pelt are not famous or well-known outside a small niche. The sing­er­/song-writer  Chris Leo’s broth­er Ted Leo is much more well-known, and bass play­er Toko Yasuda has had success over the years play­ing with Enon, Blonde Redhead and St Vincent, but they never hit the big time. Instead they released two quietly treas­ured albums in the mid-90s (Sultans of Senti­ment and Steal­ing From Our Favour­ite Thieves) and then disban­ded- they’ve released a collec­tion of sessions that were inten­ded for a third album (Imagin­ary Third) and done the odd reunion tour (I was lucky enough to catch one in London-it was a very special even­ing) but I’m guess­ing only a small selec­tion of my read­ers will know them.

Topi­ary

I used to work at Hamp­ton Court. This is a mark­er draw­ing of some of the trees in the gardens there. I earnt a pittance, worked every single week­end for six months, and wore a terrible poly­es­ter uniform. I got very used to being surroun­ded by incred­ible splend­our though, and spent quite a lot of happy hours mind­ing the maze, sitting in a shed read­ing long Russi­an books, listen­ing to whatever mellow music wouldn’t annoy tour­ists (lots of Elli­ot Smith, Fleet­wood Mac, Tortoise and Grandaddy), and making up lies about the maze to tour­ists. (I wrote about being in charge of the maze in issue 22 of my zine). I also used to get a good amount of free glasses of Pimms too from jugs that were left over from the outside bar.

A magi­cian calls

Anoth­er old sketch­book page I scanned in. This one is from a couple of years ago. I was teach­ing on a resid­en­tial course for teen­agers. It was in an old nunnery in the middle of nowhere, so the staff organ­ised a lot of even­ing activ­it­ies and film show­ings to keep them amused. One night a magi­cian came to do a show, and I made these notes.

Ljubljana Bien­ni­al

This summer I had to chance to go to both Docu­menta in Kassel and the Ljubljana Bien­ni­al of Graph­ic Arts. Here’s my photos from one of the Ljubljana Bien­ni­al exhib­i­tions that allowed photos. The theme of this Bien­ni­al was this poem by Slov­e­ni­an writer Jure Deleta.

Green concrete

Here’s an illus­tra­tion of a car park in Brack­nell. Like the one I did yester­day, the origin­al artwork was a pen and ink draw­ing, and the colour was added digit­ally. It’s avail­able as a print in three differ­ent sizes, from £6 to £24.

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Categorised as UK

Knock Three Times

Knock Three Times is not a well-known book, which is a pity.

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Categorised as Books

Halloween Sale- 25% discount

I’ve got a Halloween sale running until the 1st of Novem­ber. 25% off anything with code PUMPKIN. That’s zines, stick­ers, patches, pins, anything.

Check out what I have avail­able here.

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Categorised as Crafts, Zines

Cambridge’s Most Haunted

I didn’t have a very thrill­ing pre-Halloween week­end. I was struck down by the bug that’s been going around locally, and stayed in and watched Stranger Things instead. I was temp­ted to get a pump­kin to carve, but build­ing work next door has displaced mice that have tried to come into my flat. At the moment they are deterred by cotton wool and strong-smelling orange and lemon­grass essen­tial oils, but I’d rather not tempt them in with a large ready cut pump­kin to eat.

In the summer I went on a ghost walk in Cambridge via work. The guide told stor­ies of myster­i­ous cloaked figures on roofs, and Black Shuck the giant black ghost dog, and also poin­ted out this spot, at the back of Peter­house College, where it joins onto a grave­yard, as the most haunted place in town.

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Categorised as UK

Sail­ing up the Ljubljan­ica

When I was in Ljubljana this summer, I went on a boat tour up the Ljubljan­ica river that runs through the city.

Published
Categorised as Slovenia

Sea Serpent Book­plates

I’ve made these print­able book­plates, in both A4 and US Letter sizes. Four per page. They are for person­al use only- you may not sell copies you have prin­ted, host these files on anoth­er site, or use the artwork for any other commer­cial purpose.

The down­loads are free, but if you like and use them, a pay-what-you-want tip is very much appre­ci­ated.

Hiding in plain sight

I’ve wanted to write about some happi­er things for the last few days, but my mind has been very much consumed with the Harvey Wein­stein sexu­al assault scan­dal

It’s so funny how we don’t talk any more

I real­ised recently how much I miss getting comments and having conver­sa­tions on this blog. I know that people read it and they seem to enjoy it, but I don’t get much feed­back or reac­tions outside Face­book.

Metelkova

Metelkova is an area in the centre of Ljubljana that was origin­ally a milit­ary barracks, then was squat­ted in the early 90s when the Yugoslav army pulled out after Slov­e­nia declared inde­pend­ence, and is now full of social centres, work­shops and gig venues. (And a hostel where I stayed overnight before cross­ing the border to Klagen­furt for work).

One Second A Day- Septem­ber

Here is my one second a day video for Septem­ber. Features Hamburg suburbs, Heidel­burg, small towns in Baden-Württem­burg, the Kent coast and a gig from Brit­ish Sea Power and Everything Everything.

So I moved back to Kent…

So I moved back to Kent last week. (I’m knackered after trav­el­ling round Germany for three weeks and then moving house back-to-back). To Margate in partic­u­lar. I grew up in Medway, a little way to the west, but left when I was eight­een to go to univer­sity, as it didn’t feel like there were any oppor­tun­it­ies for me. Nearly fifteen years later, here I am. A lot has changed in that time.

Margate Zine Club

I moved house last week back to back with coming back from Germany, and am exhausted, but here I am organ­ising events. A little zine meet up in a lovely local cafe/​record shop/​yoga studio- plenty of vegan and gluten-free options. Free entry, and step-free, but sadly no disabled toilet (the toilets are upstairs).

The District Without Qual­it­ies?

So I’m back in the UK. For good now. Most of this week has been taken up with house-hunt­ing, arran­ging vans etc. More on that soon. I don’t like to count my chick­ens before they’re hatched.

However, I was tidy­ing up the folders on my computer this week, and found these miscel­laneous photos of Vienna from Febru­ary.

So Bin Ich

I return to the UK for good next week (?!?) after a year spent mostly abroad. It will be back to service as normal round here, and I’ve got a whole load of photos of differ­ent places that I have yet to post.

I’ve got a fair few new read­ers lately (mostly from my photos of Japan), and the bio on here isn’t very forth­com­ing about myself. A lot of the time my approach to blog­ging is Look Here Is A Thing, but I think a lot of people prefer some­thing more person­al to keep read­ing. So here’s one of those 50 Things About Me things, (with one for luck).

(((O Boards of Sunnada O)))

Anyway, in July Sunn O))) toured the UK, and I couldn’t go because I was commit­ted to work­ing long hours on this resid­en­tial course I was teach­ing, and I felt pretty sad about it. So I used It Took The Night to Believe as the prompt for that week’s creat­ive writ­ing activ­ity for my students. The previ­ous week I’d used the video for Reach for the Dead by Boards of Canada (both pieces of music gave good results in the student’s writ­ing) . While setting up the activ­ity I acci­dent­ally set off both songs at once, and discovered they actu­ally sound amaz­ing togeth­er. So enjoy. For best results, start the Boards of Canada song first.

August Zines-25% off

I’m back in the UK until Weds, and able to send out zines again. However I can only do the small selec­tion I have already prin­ted up- new print runs will have to wait until my perman­ent return in Septem­ber. With a bonus 25% off. Here’s what I’ve got:

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Categorised as Zines

Sick Exhib­i­tion

I’m much more timely with writ­ing about this than I usually am, because the exhib­i­tion is currently running. My friend Zara Carpenter has curated an exhib­i­tion of artworks In Chath­am related to chron­ic illness. It runs from the 4th to 27th August at Sun Pier House, Chath­am. You can find out more about the exhib­it­ors and philo­sophy behind the exhib­i­tion on the website. There are just some hasty phone photos from the open­ing night.

Here I am

Also I haven’t been updat­ing this blog as much lately, because I’ve just been so busy. I went to Croa­tia, Slov­e­nia and Austria for work and pleas­ure in June, and then came to Cambridge at the start of the month to teach on a resid­en­tial course. My contrac­ted hours were already high, and I’ve been doing a lot of over­time cover­ing for someone who was hospit­al­ised. I’ve worked 160 hours in the last three weeks, so it’s no surprise I’ve had no spare time. I only have one more week left to go however, so expect some photos of Austria and the former Yugoslavia, as well as other things.

Japan Roundup

So I’ve finally put up all the photos I took in Japan. Below is a summary and links to each post. I have also created some designs for gifts and home­wares over on Soci­ety 6 with my photo­graphs from Japan. You can find them here.

Japan playl­ist

Here’s a Spoti­fy playl­ist I made while I was in Japan, of Japan­ese artists and music that matched my mood at the time. (All the Japan­ese bands are marked with a J).

Hiroshi­ma

One of our final stop-offs in Japan was Hiroshi­ma. Hiroshi­ma is most famous for being the first city (and so far 50% of all cities) to be nucle­ar bombed. Nearly everything in the city was destroyed, and at least 50% of the popu­la­tion died, with the surviv­ors often suffer­ing extreme health prob­lems after­wards. Nearly all the build­ings in the city are modern- the Atom­ic Dome pictured above was one of the few old build­ings stand­ing. Visit­ing Hiroshi­ma has only increased my belief in nucle­ar disarm­a­ment. (And I’m for unilat­er­al disarm­a­ment- some­thing the UK govern­ment had the chance to do last year but didn’t, with choos­ing to renew the Trident missiles).

Ema

An import­ant aspect of Japan­ese shrines and temples are ema plaques (the name 絵馬 liter­ally means “picture horse”). These are small wooden signs with a picture on one side. You write a wish on it and hang it up (or take it home as a souven­ir). Each site has its own design, so I made a collec­tion of photos of differ­ent ones I saw in Japan. They are origin­ally a Shinto tradi­tion, but can also be found at Buddhist temples. At bigger sites you can find messages writ­ten in a lot of differ­ent languages.

Nara Garden

While we were in Nara we also visited a tradi­tion­al Japan­ese tea garden. Unfor­tu­nately the tea house was shut, and it was rain­ing, but it was still a lovely garden.

Indi­ana Jones and the Temple of Deer

Our final stop in Japan before flying home from Osaka was Nara. In the 700s it was the capit­al of Japan, at the time when Buddhism really became estab­lished in Japan. Nowadays as well as Buddhism, it’s known for the tame deer who live in the forest park surround­ing the temples and shrines. We stayed in a hostel in the forest. It seemed a short walk from the train station, but we ended up walk­ing along dark forest paths drag­ging cases seem­ingly forever, with deer star­ing at us accus­ingly like some­thing out of Prin­cess Mononoke. (The hostel turned out to be a pretty weird place too).

Zine orders close for summer 21st May

I’m going to be away a lot over the summer, so I’ll be clos­ing my online shop down (until prob­ably Septem­ber) next Wednes­day the 21st of May at 3pm GMT. This means that if you want some zines you need to order this week or wait sever­al months. It also means I can only really do trades with­in the UK. As well as zines I’ve also got vari­ous badges, patches, prints, lengths of vintage ribbon etc. You can find the shop here. There are also whole­sale prices avail­able for distros.

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Categorised as Zines

Craft as radic­al?

I’ve split the article up into four sections- my criti­cisms of radic­al spaces and scenes I’ve known, of the fash­ion industry, and of the current commer­cial craft reviv­al, and then at the end explain­ing the ways I think doing textile crafts can be radic­al. In writ­ing the article, I was specific­ally think­ing of crafts such as sewing and knit­ting, both because they are things I do, and also because they are stereo­typ­ic­ally done by women and often dismissed as silly and frivol­ous, but a lot of the points can apply to any handi­craft. As well as deal­ing with the topic of crafts, it’s really more of a kind of wander round my thoughts about “radic­al”. The section on crafts is actu­ally the shortest, but I’ve used it as the over­all fram­ing device. I’ll prob­ably manage to piss off both the cliquey punx and the craft blog­ger people with this, but never mind.

Okun­oshi­ma- Rabbit Island

While I was in Japan we visited the island of Okun­oshi­ma. In the Second World War it was a top secret chem­ic­al weapons plant, but now is a nature reserve famous for its free-ranging tame rabbits, who are prob­ably the descend­ants of the lab rabbits.

Diana Wynne Jones zine

I have a zine of articles about children’s writer Diana Wynne Jones (of Howl’s Moving Castle et al) I wrote this zine in 2011, also managing to inter­view her before she sadly died (you can also read the inter­view online here). The origin­al edition was 1/​6 of an A3 sheet, made on a Riso­graph machine. This was great when I still had access to an A3 Riso machine, but after I didn’t it was very expens­ive and diffi­cult to reprint, so it went out of print. Recently I did a new edition, with all-new illus­tra­tions, in a much more conveni­ent stand­ard A6 size

Benesse Museum collec­tion

Benesse House on Naoshi­ma doesn’t allow photos of their modern art collec­tion, so here is a selec­tion of works I like by some artists I saw there. I though the space of the museum was wonder­ful, but the fact that there was no inform­a­tion about the artworks was a letdown. If you didn’t know much about modern art already, you might not have got much out of the visit, which is a bad thing for a museum, seeing as one of the main reas­ons to go is to learn new things.

Naoshi­ma

Naoshi­ma is tiny idyll­ic island in the Seto Inland sea devoted to modern art. The open­ing of the Benesse modern art museum (owned by the same organ­isa­tion as Berlitz language schools) revived the island’s fortunes, although it’s still a small and quiet place with only a few villages and a lot of old people.

Zine cata­logue

I have updated and created an online cata­logue of my zine projects- both the current ones, and the out of print ones. It can be found at http://www.ynfytyn.co.uk. If you have ever wondered why my zine is called that, you can also find out here.

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Categorised as Zines

Kyoto Shrines and Temples

Kyoto is famous for its Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, many of which are UNESCO world herit­age sites. There are so many in the city that even though I spent a whole day walk­ing round differ­ent sites, I only saw a small percent­age of them. People place stones on these Shinto torii gates for good luck. You can also see my photos of ema good luck plaques here.

Kyoto II

Here’s some more photos of Kyoto. I have split the pictures up into sever­al entries. You can see more photos from Kyoto and other cities in the Japan category, and also read about the trip in the zine I wrote. Kyoto is famous for its cherry blos­som, but sadly we were there a couple of weeks earli­er than it comes out in full bloom. You did see the odd bud here and there though.