Miyazaki’s Read­ing List

When I was in Japan I went to the Studio Ghib­li Museum just outside of Tokyo. Sadly pictures were not allowed inside, but I wrote about it in my zine of the trip. I highly recom­mend the museum, it’s magic­al. The book­shop was also stocked with Miyazaki’s own favour­ite books, as well as books related to the studio’s films. I didn’t buy anything, as they were all in Japan­ese, and it would take me forever to read anything, but I noted down a lot of less well-known books I saw in the shop to compile a read­ing list (help­fully the copy­right tends to list the author’s names in roman text rather than try to make it fit katakana). Unfor­tu­nately I wasn’t able to write down the Japan­ese author’s names in most cases as read­ing unknown names writ­ten in kanji is very tricky. However Miyaza­ki made a list of clas­sic children’s books (includ­ing a lot of the usual suspects like The Secret Garden) else­where which also includes some Japan­ese recom­mend­a­tions.

Kyoto I

Here’s some 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. While I was there I also met up with local zinester and research­er Kiyoshi Murakami (村上 潔), who kindly took me to some of his favour­ite places in the city:

Polly’s read­ing list

Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones, based on the folk tale Tam Lin and Eliot’s Four Quar­tets, is one of my all-time favour­ite books. The gifts of clas­sic books that the prot­ag­on­ist Polly receives from Tom, the other main char­ac­ter, are an import­ant part of the plot, but not listed anywhere in the novel. I made this read­ing list of the books for the zine of essays about Diana Wynne Jones that I made.

All Neon Like

Here’s a selec­tion of instagram photos I took in Tokyo. I felt I was giving it short shrift only having one post with a few photos. You can see more in the Japan category, and also read about the trip in the zine I wrote.

Tokyo

I took a lot of photos in Japan, and it’s taken me a while to sort through them. I’ll be spread­ing out the posts over this week to avoid having one giant pile of photos at once. I wrote a zine (avail­able here) about the trip to Japan as well, so I’ll save blog posts for the pictures (which you will be able to find under the Japan category).

These are from Tokyo. I didn’t actu­ally take that many DSLR photos in Tokyo, mostly film and phone photos. You can see the phone pictures on my Instagram account, with all of the neon skyscrapers you’d expect from Tokyo. The gate above is in Taito, an area further out of town where we stayed.

The Best of Fanzine Ynfytyn 1-13

I’ve been doing my zine for around 10 years now. I’ve got a lot of back issues that are no longer in print for vari­ous reas­ons. I didn’t want to reprint the whole issues, but it seemed a shame to have them completely languish­ing in a folder, so I’ve made a compil­a­tion issue with articles from the first 13 issues. 40 pages, 30 articles, 12000 words for £3.50

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Categorised as Zines

Hello again

So I haven’t updated here for over a month, and updates have been thin on the ground all year. That’s mainly because I spent most of Janu­ary and Febru­ary work­ing in Austria, most of March in Japan without a computer, and have been busy since I returned just over a week ago.

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Categorised as Japan, Zines

Zines! Zines! Zines!

I return to the UK from Austria for just under a week this week­end, so I’ve re-opened my online shop for zine orders until Tues­day the 7th of March. All orders will be sent out by Weds the 8th of March. The shop then closes again while I’m in Japan, until further notice, so this is your chance. All prices include UK post­age. Inter­na­tion­al post­age is extra, and auto­mat­ic­ally calcu­lated by weight.

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Categorised as Zines

This Means Noth­ing To Me

I have been in Austria for a week and a half now for teach­ing work. I meant to update last week, but some brutal 7.30 am start times, heavy snow, a lot of plan­ning to do outside the classroom, and a diet of pure stodge in a small town with few dining options (and even fewer options for veget­ari­ans) tired me out. It feels strange to be in small-town Austria, where not much tends to happen, while polit­ic­al turmoil with dire consequences for many vulner­able people goes on around the world.

Friar hermit stumbles over

I’m in Brno in the Czech Repub­lic for a week before start­ing work in Austria next week. The Czech Repub­lic is having a much colder winter than usual, with heavy snow. Yester­day we went down to Brno Rese­voir, which had unusu­ally frozen over.

Gute Reise

On Thursday I go off to spend 6 weeks in Cent­ral Europe. One week in Brno in the Czech Repub­lic, then five weeks in vari­ous places in Austria teach­ing. Then in March, I’m off to Japan for two weeks.

So I will clos­ing the shop from 3pm GMT on Weds the 18th of Jan. If you want zines or ribbons or badges, this is your last chance until April.

Keep it clean

I wouldn’t say I was partic­u­larly tidy, but I do like to keep my living envir­on­ment clean. I spent a few years work­ing in restaur­ants when I was young­er, and a big part of the job was keep­ing the restaur­ant and bar as clean and pleas­ant as possible. Espe­cially at the end of the night, you can’t go home until everything is spot­less, so you get used to clean­ing things as effi­ciently as possible, and in a way that makes sure it all looks shiny as well as being hygien­ic. This has also been useful in making not-so-nice rented places in London a lot more pleas­ant to live in. (It has also given me the side-effect of find­ing house­work to be an effect­ive hangover cure)

I’ve come to real­ise lately, a surpris­ing number of people find house­work diffi­cult and turn out not to know things about laun­dry, unblock­ing drains etc that I thought every­one knew. It still seems a bit patron­ising for me to write these tips (but also quite milit­ant in my aver­sion to dirty tea towels and unrinsed wash­ing up), because they’re obvi­ous to me, but I know now they’re not obvi­ous to a lot of people, and New Year seems an appro­pri­ate time to write them.

2016 in review

I spent a low-stress and low-key Christ­mas with my friend Vicky up in Manchester, and have returned to Kent over the New Year to see homet­own friends. I’ll be in the UK for a few more weeks (includ­ing my birth­day), then head­ing off to Austria for 5 weeks for work, then a further 2 weeks in Japan, mean­ing I’ll be abroad until April. A vari­ety of factors has meant that I’ve not worked full-time in months, and to be honest I’m itch­ing to go back to work and being busy all the time.

It’s fair (and easy) to say that 2016 was not a good year for me. And the consensus is that it was also a terrible year polit­ic­ally, that has seen fascism and far-right polit­ics on the ascend­ant. Here is a brief list of my posit­ives and negat­ives for the year.

I’m going to Japan

This March I’m going to Japan for two weeks with my friend Vicky (also of Pen Fight zine distro), co-incid­ing with her 30th birth­day.

A little while ago, I won a compet­i­tion I’d entered at a food fair run by Japan Centre food halls.The top prize was two flights to Osaka cour­tesy of Air France KLM, five nights stay at the Hyatt hotel in Kyoto (way, way out of my normal budget), and a free tour of the Gekkeik­an Sake Brew­ery. The runners up got free sake. I’ve entered this kind of compet­i­tion before, but only ever won the free booze at best, so I was aston­ished to hear that I was the winner, and didn’t quite believe it was real until the whole trip was firmly booked yester­day. So a big thank you to Kim at Japan Centre (and also for the deli­cious free lunch at the company’s restaur­ant when I collec­ted the prize).

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Categorised as Japan, Travel

Defeat­ing the To Read pile

I’ve spent most of this after­noon sort­ing out my books, and making a pile of the unread ones. It turns out I have 84 unread books. Over the next six weeks it looks like I’m going to have a lot of time on my hands, unless a new job or a large chunk of money magic­ally presents itself, so I’ll try to get through a good chunk of these.

Here is a list of the books, arranged alpha­bet­ic­ally by author:

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Categorised as Books

Fanzine Ynfytyn 24

I’ve got a new zine out. This one’s prob­ably only of interest to those with a uter­us. About getting a Mirena coil when you already have endocrine/​autoimmune prob­lems and have to take Pred­nisone.

Published
Categorised as Zines

Colour­ing Book

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been draw­ing artwork for a colour­ing book zine, and here it is. It’s an A5 colour­ing book with 15 differ­ent images to colour and comes with a free pack­et of cray­ons. Post­age is free with­in the UK, and calcu­lated by weight for the rest of the world.

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Categorised as Zines

Well that was depress­ing

So Donald Trump just about won the US elec­tion, continu­ing the exhaust­ing and depress­ing down­wards traject­ory of 2016, and the continu­al rise of the far right to power. Brexit and the elec­tion of Trump show how good the Right are at times of econom­ic hard­ship in convin­cing people their prob­lems are caused by foreign­ers and the Other, rather than that they’re living in a system designd to make the rich become rich­er, and keep a perman­ent pool of people desper­ate for work to drive down wages and condi­tions. Saying “oh it won’t make much differ­ence” after events like Brexit or Trump winning is some­thing you can only say if you and every­one you know and care about don’t fall under the categor­ies of people such as POC, Muslims, women, poor people or immig­rants whose lives are about to become so much more diffi­cult. People always think “oh that doesn’t mean my friend/​wife/​neighbour/​workmate, they’re talk­ing about those weird threat­en­ing strangers, not those nice people I know”. It does mean those nice people you know.

Char­ity shop finds

I haven’t found as many good char­ity shop items lately as over the summer, but there’s been the odd few things. I got this vase for £2, which I’ve planted an aloe vera in, for my own plant version of Sideshow Bob.

Trif­fids in search of a new home

I’ve got a large number of cacti and succu­lents, some of which I’ve had for years (and have their own offshoot chil­dren grow­ing in separ­ate pots now). By the end of the summer, some of them were look­ing a bit sad, and were in seri­ous need of repot­ting. I collec­ted a load of Hornsea ware and other vintage pottery for £1-3 a time over the summer, and then had a big repot­ting session outside, just before the weath­er star­ted turn­ing cold.

Colour me in

Lately I’ve been draw­ing much more, and writ­ing a lot less. I’ve been prepar­ing artwork for a colour­ing book, which I need to get finished by the 12th of Novem­ber, to have ready in print for the Rose Tinted Zine Spec­tac­u­lar in Brighton on the 19th of Novem­ber. So there’s been a lot of 8 hour draw­ing sessions and high levels of caffeine consump­tion.

A bit part in your life.

So it’s Octo­ber now. The last few weeks I’ve been boun­cing back and forth between Kent and Sussex. Job-hunt­ing is boring and tedi­ous, and has pushed back moving house. All my things are packed up in boxes, ready to go, but the going isn’t happen­ing yet. I’ve also had toni­sil­it­is for the last week, which is finally clear­ing up. I’ve got too many of my own projects I need to finish. So not the most fun of times, but hope­fully it won’t drag on forever.

Here’s some inter­est­ing odds and ends:

Torbole

After Malces­ine, Limone sul Garda and Riva del Garda, I present to you Torbole. I went to Torbole just because the boat from Riva del Garda to Malces­ine stopped there along the way, and I’d never been there before. It was a weird little place. Like Riva, it used to be in Austria until 1918. Every­one except the staff of the restaur­ants seemed to be German, and really into intensely star­ing at you in the street. The light and the way the water looked along the harbour front was beau­ti­ful though, and I spent most of the hour before the boat back sitting on a bench soak­ing it in. I don’t think this is a real place, I think it’s a screen from one of those new-age computer games from the 90s like Myst.

The riso­graph lives again (after a fash­ion)

About five years ago I did two riso­graph prints, one based on Diana Wynne Jones’ Fire and Hemlock, and the other on Eurip­ides’ Bacchae. Each print was an edition of 50, and I sold all of them a long a time ago (except for a couple of copies I kept for myself). Now I have a giclée print­er though, I have resur­rec­ted them as a new edition. This time they’re prin­ted on Canson Infin­ity rag museum paper, which is an acid free and archiv­al water­col­our paper for fine art digit­al print­ing.

Riva del Garda

So far I’ve shown you Malces­ine and Limone sul Garda. I also took the boat to Riva del Garda at the north­ern end of the lake (which is also in a differ­ent province- Trentino). It was rain­ing all day, so I figured I might as well go to the colder, rainy end of the lake and visit the museum, and save the outdoorsy stuff on the south­ern end like archae­olo­gic­al sites for a sunny day.

Limone sul Garda

Now I’m head­ing over to Limone sul Garda on the other side of the lake. I didn’t spend much money while I was in Italy, but a hefty chunk of the (tiny) budget went on ferry tick­ets. Boats constantly criss-cross the lake to all the towns, and it’s the most scen­ic way to see the area. If you’re in a hurry, you can take the bus on land, but I was on holi­day, so by defin­i­tion, not in a hurry.

Fanzine Ynfytyn 26

This one is about the exper­i­ence of grow­ing up holi­day­ing in a cara­van at French camp­sites. A typic­al holi­day for Brit­ish people, but prob­ably weird and exot­ic for those from further away. Avail­able for £2 from my shop (includes UK post­age- inter­na­tion­al extra)

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Categorised as Zines

Fanzine Ynfytyn 23.5

I have two new zines avail­able this month. This is a mini zine I made for the 24 hour zine project, which runs every July. You have to write and layout 24 pages with­in 24 hours. No pre-prepar­a­tion is allowed. It’s a fun chal­lenge. Avail­able from my shop for £1 (includ­ing UK post­age).

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Categorised as Zines

Tues­day the 13th

No posts for a week. I stayed with my dad for most of last week to go to a family wedding, took my laptop with me to do some work while I was there, but then stupidly forgot to bring the power cord with me. Here’s a relax­ing video. I actu­ally really don’t enjoy those “relax­ing” videos of people whis­per­ing or crink­ling things, they don’t relax me at all (and some of them are defin­itely aiming more at “attract­ive woman pays atten­tion to you” than sooth­ing sounds), but I like this one. Best enjoyed with head­phones.

I’ve got it on, your favor­ite tee, it never looked as good on you as it looks on me

Talk­ing of 90s reviv­al, I real­ised that the clothes I was wear­ing yester­day were some­thing I could easily have been wear­ing 20 years ago. This isn’t the actu­al shirt I had as a teen­ager (that one, like all of them, inex­plic­ably had a German flag on the arm), but it’s pretty much the same. I got this one from an army surplus store at some point in my 20s for £4, but by mistake they gave me two, so it essen­tially cost me £2. I recently saw some identic­al shirts in Topshop for about £40. Some­times it pays to be a loser who never throws anything away. Until about five years ago I actu­ally did have a top I’d been wear­ing since the early 90s. It was a burgundy and black ribbed thing that seemed to be made of near-indes­truct­ible mater­i­al.

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Categorised as Photography

Malces­ine, Lago di Garda

At the end of May I went on a last-minute trip to Italy by myself. I had given up my tenancy in London, because I was fed up of paying a small fortune to a land­lord who was unwill­ing to fix the seri­ous leak in the ceil­ing that was prob­ably going to bring the plaster down some­time soon, and a relat­ive asked me to house-sit. The house-sitting date then changed, but it turned out to be cheap­er for me to visit friends in York­shire, and then go on holi­day for a week than it was to extend my tenancy, which shows how ridicu­lous the prices are in London now. As it was a last minute thing, I had to go on my own. I don’t mind trav­el­ling solo though, I used to do it regu­larly for work, and trav­el­ling alone is better than going on holi­day with someone who doesn’t want to do any of the same things as you. (In my case, wander­ing aimlessly for hours and hours, taking hundreds of photo­graphs and eating a lot). I also got to re-read The Name of the Rose in peace.

Forgot­ten late 90s Indie Pop

A little while ago, there was a thing on Twit­ter where people used the #indieam­nesty tag to tell funny or embar­rass­ing stor­ies about their involve­ment with the whole Land­fill Indie and Nu Rave thing in the mid 2000s (there’s also a surpris­ingly intel­li­gent and self-percept­ive inter­view with Johnny Borrell (!!) here). As the Guard­i­an article I’ve linked to said, “Indie amnesty brings togeth­er thou­sands of relat­ively banal anec­dotes about unglam­or­ous people doing slightly idiot­ic things into some­thing quite majest­ic” and most of the people were writ­ing about being fool­ish and easily impressed in their teen­age years.

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Categorised as Music

Bienv­en­ue à Lassay-les-Châteaux

My moth­er lives in a small town in North­ern France called Lassay-les-Châteaux. For a few years she’s had a holi­day cara­van in a park nearby, and at Christ­mas she bought a house in the town. The English version of wiki­pe­dia has prac­tic­ally noth­ing to say about Lassay-les-Châteaux other than show­ing photos of two of the three local castles- one in the town centre, the other two just outside. (The town’s name also sounds like it means “leave the castles” in French). The French entry doesn’t tell you much more, except that a lot of people were guil­lotined there in the Revolu­tion, the local mayor doesn’t belong to a polit­ic­al party (after a long line of right-wing­ers), and that Victor Hugo visited once. It’s just not a place where things happen. If you want the quiet life, you can find it in Lassay.

Vegan Nanaimo Bars

I was watch­ing a BBC series recently about the history of the native peoples of the Pacific North­w­est, and it gave me a hanker­ing for Nanaimo bars. I used to have a co-work­er from Manitoba, who would make this typic­al Cana­dian treat from time to time, and bring it in. Those were good work days. It’s some­thing in between a millionaire’s short­bread and a cheese­cake, requires no baking, and is totally deli­cious. As well as the stand­ard vanilla filling, mint or coffee vari­ations are also common.

Godless heathenry

The next issue of Being Edit­ors will be about C.S.Lewis and Phil­lip Pull­man. As a sneak preview, and to give contrib­ut­ors an idea of what my own reli­gious (or more to the point, non-reli­gious) back­ground  is, here is the article I wrote which leads in to anoth­er about why That Hideous Strength is a guilty pleas­ure- if you’d like to contrib­ute, find out more here

That Hideous Strength has always been a weird guilty pleas­ure. I’m not a Chris­ti­an, never have been, and didn’t grow up in a reli­gious envir­on­ment. People enjoy the Narnia books because they’re good children’s books and writ­ten with charm and wit, and they don’t Jesus you too hard (except for the last one). That Hideous Strength is noth­ing like that, the plot is weirdly cobbled togeth­er, and it’s full of rail­ing against every single one of C.S.Lewis’ person­al bugbears as a sexist old Chris­ti­an univer­sity don of the 1950s, and he doesn’t both­er to hide it. The relent­less sexism, homo­pho­bia and evan­gel­ising makes me want to throw the book against the wall as the godless hell-bound pinko lefty I am, but it’s just so glee­fully bizarre that I actu­ally quite enjoy it and have re-read it count­less times.

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Categorised as Books, Zines

Low stress travel on the cheap

I love to travel, but I don’t have much money. Although long-haul flights and luxury holi­days are out of my reach at the moment I’ve managed to see a fair bit of the world for not very much, and perhaps my budget limit­a­tions have meant that I’ve seen some inter­est­ing places I might have other­wise missed out on.

I find online budget travel tips not that great though. They seem to swing from “save money by only eating ityer­eal bars and sleep­ing on trains on your trip” to “cram in thirty museums in one day with this special tick­et” to “get this special Air Miles cred­it card only avail­able in Flor­ida, and book your flights at 3am on Thursdays Alaska time”. I want to eat nice food from the cuisine of the coun­try in ques­tion; sleep in a clean, safe and comfort­able hotel room in a conveni­ent loca­tion; and get a chance to explore and see things prop­erly, not treat­ing sights like a tick list to complete as quickly as possible. I don’t want to be cold, hungry, exhausted, or put myself in danger; this is supposed to be fun. I just don’t have a lot of money to spend.

Patch­work quilt- a work in progress

For the past six months I have been hand-sewing a new patch­work quilt for my bed to replace the worn out one my nan made for me when I was a teen­ager. I’m still no-where near finished, but I’ve done the bulk of the work. These photos are from my Instagram account over the past few months, so they’re not as sharp as if I’d taken DSLR photos of the work.

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Categorised as Crafts

Recent char­ity shop finds

The good thing about spend­ing the summer in a small town full of old people is that there are a lot of char­ity shops and jumble sales, they often have good stock, don’t over­price and there aren’t a lot of other people look­ing for the same things as me (which is more likely to happen in a big city).

Mont St Michel

I went to Mont St Michel last week for the first time in years. It’s a medi­ev­al abbey on an island on the border between Normandy and Brit­tany, about an hour’s drive from my mum’s house in France. We went there a few times when I was a kid, and the last time I was there was in the late 90s on a school trip. It has dramat­ic­ally changed since then.

There was some­thing a bit seedy and cynic­al about the place in the 90s despite the spec­tac­u­lar town itself. Buses and cars drove over the cause­way to the island, and parked in a decrep­it carpark on the shore, which had a tend­ency to flood. As you made your way up through the snak­ing medi­ev­al street to the abbey at the top of the peak, there were endless shops selling cheap replica hunt­ing knives, saucy post­cards and boxes of fire­crack­ers. It must have been a night­mare for teach­ers super­vising school groups.

Microbe et Gasoil

I saw this recent Michel Gondry the other day. The Science of Sleep is one of my favour­ite films. Microbe et Gasoil is a lot more natur­al­ist­ic than a lot of his other films, but it still has a lot of the same little touches. Two misfit 14 year old boys decide to build their own car. When it turns out to not be road legal, they turn it into a shed on wheels and go on a very slow road-trip round rural France, in the spir­it of a Jacques Tati film. Lots of fun.

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Categorised as Films

This must be the place

The past few weeks haven’t really given me time for blog­ging. I’ve been help­ing with house-clear­ances, writ­ing a propos­al for some freel­ance work I really wanted but didn’t get, and under­go­ing major dent­al work. I now have the next 10 weeks house-sitting in a small town at least an hour’s travel from anyone I know.

Should a word have two mean­ings?

My three top new albums this year have all been by female solo artists, two of whom are Welsh, Cate le Bon’s Crab Day, Gwenno’s Y Dydd Olaf (the Last Day) and Artan­gels by Grimes. Crab Day is well worth check­ing out, combin­ing influ­ences from spooky 70s folk, Fleet­wood Mac and Devo.

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Categorised as Music

Where I’ve been

I haven’t writ­ten here for a while. Life has been very busy, and apart from a holi­day to Italy, gener­ally stress­ful and a little depress­ing, and I’ve very rarely had access to the inter­net other than on my phone, which doesn’t encour­age updat­ing a blog (although I’ve got lots of things I’d like to put on here). On a person­al level, I moved out of London at the end of April. I was supposed to go down to Sussex to take care of my mum’s new flat until the Autumn. She inher­ited some money before Christ­mas, and moved house and bought a holi­day cottage in France with it. The plan was she’d have some things done to the new flat and then spend the whole summer in France sort­ing out the holi­day cottage how she wanted. “Some things” turned into “rip out all the elec­trics because they turned out to be illeg­al and unsafe, have all the walls replastered and replace the kitchen and bath­room”. Coupled with a build­er with a very elast­ic sense of time, it’s only just being finished at the end of this week. That means I’ve been living out of a suit­case since April. I’ve been to Italy and Shef­field in that time (very nice), visited relat­ives (very stress­ful) and spent a very claus­tro­phobic two weeks in a cara­van in France with my mum where we couldn’t go anywhere or do anything because there was a fuel strike and then floods (I didn’t murder her).

Two new zines

I’ve got two new zines out- Fanzine Ynfytyn 23 & 25 (21 and 24 are still in the works). If you’re new to my zine, and are curi­ous about the name, the explan­a­tion is here. Both zines are £2 includ­ing UK post­age (inter­na­tion­al post­age extra), avail­able here.

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Categorised as Zines

Roll up, roll up

I’ve been very busy this week. On Wednes­day I moved all my stuff out of London and into stor­age until the end of May, and visited my dad, then took the train up to Shef­field to see friends and table at the Shef­field Zine Fest. I had a great time, but I was exhausted and fell asleep at 7pm on Saturday! I’m going back to York­shire this week­end for a friend’s wedding, and then Italy the follow­ing week (ridicu­lously, it was cheap­er to go on holi­day to Lake Garda, hardly the cheapest region of Italy, than it was to extend my tenancy a week in London. Let that one sink in… ). When I come back towards the end of May, I’ll then go to Sussex to house-sit for the summer.

Here I am.

My life has been both turbu­lent and boring at the same time lately, and I haven’t been writ­ing here, as I haven’t had the energy. I have been suffer­ing with health prob­lems, deal­ing with family illness, and trying to keep my head above water in a London that is increas­ingly unaf­ford­able and inhos­pit­able. (And to make things even worse, this week­end a homet­own friend died at a horribly young age. RIP Louise).

Every morn­ing there are moun­tains to climb

I haven’t posted here for nearly a month now. Family illness, upcom­ing major life changes, unsuc­cess­ful job hunts and other stress­ful things have taken up my time. I’ve had a lot of ideas for posts to make here, but neither the time nor energy to write them. Not a lot of fun happen­ing round this way lately. I got to see Grimes play live though recently, which was some­thing, at least. Here are some inter­est­ing links to share.

Frimaire, Nivose & Pluvi­ose

I haven’t updated here in a while. I worked long hours through­out Janu­ary and also moved house. I’ve also now offi­cially deferred my course until next year. I missed too much of the school year when I was ill. I’ll have a little while off, and then look for some work to tide me over. In between all that I turned 31. Ancient, really. I’ll have a bit more time on my hands over the next couple of weeks, so I’d better make use of it. Here’s some links of inter­est­ing bits and bobs to tide you over.

New Years 2015

I’m not going anywhere tonight. I’ve never been much of one for NYE, and my options for tonight included spend­ing lots of money I don’t have, or spend­ing at least an hour cross­ing town. As I’m not drink­ing at the moment, feel­ing kind of quiet and tired lately, and totally broke until Monday, I’m happy to stay in. My preferred NYE social options are either going to a pub with­in quick reach of home, or going to a friends house/​hosting them anyway. The prob­lem with London is that every­one is so spread out with long jour­ney times or awkward jour­neys if you’re not going via cent­ral, and trans­port is often such a horrible exper­i­ence on NYE that it can become a bit of a mission to do even that.

Book reviews: the birds and the bees and T.H. White

As I mentioned in my previ­ous post, I’ve arranged the book reviews in groups loosely on the same theme. Here’s the first set. More to come.

H is for Hawk Helen Macdon­ald
The Bees Laline Paull
The Sword in the Stone (The Once and Future King, #1) T.H White
The Witch in the Wood (The Once and Future King, #2) T.H White
The Ill-Made Knight (The Once and Future King, #3) T.H White
The Candle in the Wind (The Once and Future King, #4) T.H White
The Book of Merlyn (The Once and Future King, #5) T.H White

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Categorised as Books

Roll on 2016

I’m at my dad’s place for a couple of days over Christ­mas, I’m not feel­ing at all fest­ive this year though, and it seems a lot of other people aren’t either. When I was grow­ing up, they nearly always showed Water­ship Down on TV at some point over Christ­mas. It seemed perfectly normal at the time, but now it seems an odd and slightly depress­ing choice of film to repeat every year. So here’s the trail­er as my half-hearted attempt at being fest­ive.

Enjoy your Londons

In 2015 I’ve worked long hours in the day job (+ spend­ing the spare time I did have in the summer help­ing to make DIY Space for London a real­ity) and not had much time for creat­ive projects. It’s been good for my CV, and my mater­i­al stand­ard of living has improved, but I’ve not always had the time or energy to devote to doing much in the way of creat­ive work or taking as much advant­age of all the inter­est­ing things London has to offer as I could do or would have liked. I now have plenty of time and not much money until Janu­ary, so now seems the time to try to figure out how to get a better work-life balance without going broke (always a chal­lenge in an expens­ive city like London). It’s a month early to do New Year’s Resol­u­tions, but why let a calen­dar stop me. I always feel much happi­er and focused with a to do list to work on. Here’s my goals.

That cat’s some­thing I can’t explain

I don’t currently have any pets. Land­lords in London who allow cats or dogs are a rare breed. My house­mate has a trop­ic­al aquar­i­um, and I don’t fancy getting hamsters or mice, and don’t have space for rats. So no pets other than fish for us.

Published
Categorised as Nature

Odds and Ends

Here’s some nice things I’ve found lately. Start­ing with this stop-motion cook­ing video by PES Studi­os.

Long time no see

I haven’t updated my blog since August. Since July I’ve moved house, worked in Cambridge teach­ing a summer camp, then worked long hours to help make DIY Space for London a real­ity (it worked, it worked!), and enrolled on a teach­ing course a few weeks ago. The first few weeks of the course crammed a lot of classes into a short peri­od of time before we star­ted our first place­ment, so I didn’t really have time to update. I also wanted to take my full name off my blog, to keep it out of the grubby mitts of the kids (I was teach­ing before in places where the students called me by my first name, at Brit­ish state schools I’m Ms F- if it were up to me, I’d stay on first name terms) and move it to its own site, with a new layout. All this takes time and energy, of which I had neither. Some of the images and format­ting on older posts may be a little wobbly until I’ve gone through everything thor­oughly. They don’t always auto­mat­ic­ally import very well.

Actu­al Crimes

Last week I took some promo shots of my friends Kirsty and Aaron’s band Actu­al Crimes. They recently became a two piece after the depar­ture of Lenny for a job in the US, but are hope­fully becom­ing a three piece again in the near future. No expense was spared for this photo shoot, we bravely walked five minutes down the road to a brightly painted garage door, and devoted ourselves to posing for ooh, at least half an hour.

Gener­al wander­ing round Copen­ha­gen

About 6 weeks ago I went on a short break to Denmark and Sweden. It shows how busy I’ve been lately that it’s taken me so long to post these. I unex­pec­tedly had some extra holi­day days I had to use up quickly before the end of my work contract, and none of my friends were free to travel on the specif­ic week­end I had to use them, so I went by myself. I saw cheap flights to Copen­ha­gen, and booked them on a whim, on the grounds that I’d never been to Denmark before, and it was also easy to visit Sweden from Copen­ha­gen. I also have a danish friend Sanne I used to work with in London, so I arranged to meet up with her while I was there and drink some Mikkeller beer at normal prices (rather than the exor­bit­ant prices they charge in the UK). (Good luck with the PhD viva Sanne!). I liked Denmark a lot, although I’m not sure if I’d want to live there. They seem very set in their ways. In fact it reminded me a lot of Austria, but with sea rather than moun­tains.

Good­bye N17, Hello SE13

I’ve been really busy the last month. I moved from one end of London to the other, finished one job and did anoth­er short-term one, all in the space of a few weeks. When I’ve been at a computer in my spare time I’ve mostly been doing admin for DIY Space for London.

Danmark & Sverige

Tomor­row I’m going on holi­day to Copen­ha­gen for 5 days, some­where I’ve never been before. I’ve visited Iceland, Finland and Esto­nia before, the outliers in the Nord­ic group of coun­tries, and all in the winter, but I’ve never visited the core three Scand­inavi­an coun­tries in their famous long-dayed summers (although I’ve been in the High­lands of Scot­land in the summer before, which is very simil­ar). Copen­ha­gen is with­in a short train ride of Malmö in Sweden (in fact Scania used to be in Denmark at one time), so I’ll kill two birds with one stone and visit Sweden too. As well as Copen­ha­gen, I’m going to try to visit Roskilde, the Louisi­ana Art Museum and Elsinore, which are all nearby. (I’m not going to Lego­land because it’s at the other end of the coun­try, and I’ve been to the UK one loads for work anyway).

Trif­fids

I’ve built up a collec­tion of cacti and other succu­lents over the last year or so. They’re desert plants from the Amer­icas and south­ern Africa which store water in their bodies, so they don’t need a lot of look­ing after, and they have a huge range of dramat­ic shapes, which explains why they’re such popu­lar house plants. They’re also cheap to buy- mine all came from the super­mar­ket, Wilco or IKEA and cost £2-4 each- and can live a long time if kept in the right condi­tions. (Opuntia cacti also produce deli­cious prickly pears and nopales pads for cook­ing). My current room has a large windowsill which gets some fierce sunshine around lunch­time, and is next to a radi­at­or which dries up the air through­out the winter, which is the ideal condi­tions for grow­ing them. I used to be into grow­ing orch­ids and indoor herbs as well, but they just don’t thrive in the condi­tions here.

Published
Categorised as Nature

Blogs -vs- zines

People who don’t make or read them much them­selves some­times ask me why I still make zines, even though the inter­net exists, and the world is becom­ing more and more digit­ally-focused, and I have this blog. In short, the answer is for the same reas­on I still have hundreds of records and books, and devel­op black and white film at home, even though I have an ipod, spoti­fy subscrip­tion, e-read­er and two digit­al camer­as, and I’m far from a luddite: I feel the phys­ic­al medi­um offers me some­thing that I don’t get from the digit­al version.

Manchester: North­w­est Zine­fest 2015

Last week­end I went up to Manchester to do a stall and run a Zine 101 work­shop at the first North­w­est Zine­fest. I had the luxury of a day off work, and enough money to take the train rather than coach, and stay at a bed and break­fast. The last time I was in Manchester was well over a decade ago, and it was nice to have a whole week­end rather than rush to and from the event.

On Light Fest­iv­al

A few weeks ago, Univer­sity College London held a light-themed street fest­iv­al, with stalls run by the differ­ent univer­sity depart­ments with demon­stra­tions and free activ­it­ies. My friend Mel was there to win a Guin­ness World Record for the world’s largest cyan­o­type print (she’s already the hold­er of the record, which she did as part of an arts fest­iv­al in India earli­er this year, but she wanted to beat her previ­ous record).

Fanzine Ynfytyn

My zine, Fanzine Ynfytyn, is named after a song by Welsh language post-punk band Datbly­gu (“Devel­op”). The name could be construed as either “Fanzine Idiot”, “Idiot Fanzine” or “Idiot’s Fanzine”. People either look at the name with baffle­ment, go “uh, is it Welsh in some way?” or are pleased because they know the song (those people get a free copy). In some ways I regret giving it a name that so many people struggle to pronounce or under­stand, but I’m on issue 22 now, so they’ll just have to get used to it. When I star­ted it, I only expec­ted to give a few copies to some friends who were already famil­i­ar with the song, so it wasn’t really a concern (I also had a mini collage zine called “Pobble Eh Come?” like a really mis-spelt version of the soap opera). Seeing as one of those people was a fellow language student penfriend who I had a running joke with of us mangling Welsh and German togeth­er to make one über­bendi­gedich language, I wasn’t too worried about the palat­ab­il­ity of the name. I was never expect­ing to get to issue 22, and have sold or traded hundreds of copies of some of the back issues and have them in librar­ies and academ­ic collec­tions. I was surprised I got to more than a couple of issues to be honest.

If it ain’t brack­en, don’t fix it.

I refuse to apolo­gise for that pun, you’ll just have to suffer. Here is a photo I took of myself recently in my dad’s garden. I can’t remem­ber the last time I had a new photo of myself bar a few awkward phone snaps when I’ve been out. Perhaps you could say I was commun­ing with nature when I took this photo, but I was sat on a plastic bag to avoid sitting in anything nasty hidden under­neath the plants, so I don’t think I was that in touch with nature. Luck­ily we don’t have pois­on ivy or danger­ous snakes in this coun­try, I was more worried about the milder perils of sting­ing nettles or fox drop­pings. I was also a little limited with angles and fram­ing, because stick­ing a wide-angle lens in your face is rarely flat­ter­ing, but I couldn’t get the distance to use my portrait lens because I didn’t have a tripod with me.

Chel­lah, Morocco

Here’s an inter­est­ing place just outside Rabat in Morocco. Chel­lah was a Roman city, which later became a necro­pol­is for the tombs of mara­bouts, wander­ing Sufi holy men, who often take on the role of saints after death. I took these pictures over a decade ago, when digit­al camer­as weren’t as good as today, so apolo­gies for any burnt out high­lights or other optic­al issues- the rest of the photos can be seen here.

Published
Categorised as Travel

Morocco

Here’s some photos from a trip to Morocco I’ve dug out of the archives from when I first got a digit­al camera in 2004 (you can see the whole album here). I was in between my first and second years of univer­sity, and bought a cheap digit­al camera from Aldi, it was surpris­ingly decent though, and it’s hard to take bad photos in Morocco because the light is so clear and the colours are so vibrant. Most of these pictures are from Rabat or Essaouira.

DIY Space for London is go!

For quite a while now, I’ve been part of the DIY Space for London co-op, work­ing to open a non-profit, co-oper­at­ively run access­ible music, art and gener­al creativ­ity & activ­ism venue in London along the lines of Wharf Cham­bers in Leeds. Oper­at­ing in London has raised its own unique chal­lenges. Most projects of this nature in other places can find a build­ing and have trouble rais­ing the money. We had the oppos­ite prob­lem- we had an incred­ible amount of good­will, and people kept giving us money, but we had trouble spend­ing it. London is in the middle of an uncon­trol­lable prop­erty boom, and we had immense trouble find­ing anywhere suit­able. Places went imme­di­ately, had resid­en­tial neigh­bours or plans to build flats in unsuit­able places that would imme­di­ately result in noise complaints, had legal issues or wanted ridicu­lously huge depos­its.

Sleat­er-Kinney

A few weeks ago I went to see Sleat­er-Kinney, one of my favour­ite bands, at the Round­house. They had been on hiatus since 2006, with the members work­ing on other projects like Portland­ia in the mean­time, so I was pleased and surprised when they announced a new album and tour. The last time they had played in the UK was when I was doing my finals, so I’d had to give it a miss. I’d seen them before at Read­ing Fest­iv­al, but I never really count short after­noon fest­iv­al sets at massive outdoor fest­ivals like Read­ing as really seeing a band prop­erly, because you’re basic­ally watch­ing them on a tv screen stand­ing at the other end of a field (one of the many reas­ons I don’t go to them any more). I don’t think I have ever been to such a big gig as the Round­house one where I just constantly ran into so many people I know and like, it was almost too much, there was someone new to say hello to every time I turned around . The band them­selves were superb, and played for an hour and half. I don’t think you could ask for more, really.

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Categorised as Music

North­w­est Zine­fest 2015

I’ll be tabling and running a zine­mak­ing 101 work­shop at the inaug­ur­al North­w­est Zine­fest in Manchester on the 29th of May at the Star and Garter, and having a nice mini-break in MCR and seeing friends. Check out the Face­book event and the website.

Published
Categorised as Zines

London, you get to keep me (for a while)

For the past few months I’ve been weigh­ing up wheth­er to stay in London or to leave. I’ve lived here since 2011. In that time I’ve been a part-time post­grad (and finished the course), done an inter­est­ing but mostly not well-paid assort­ment of jobs, and lived in an assort­ment of sublets and prop­erty guard­i­an­ships. Since the end of 2013 I’ve lived in a prop­erty guard­i­an­ship that’s unusu­ally cheap, but not at all homely, but far too cheap to give up need­lessly.

Slide film photo­graphs of Whit­stable

I used to do a lot of photo­graphy, but I don’t do half as much now, which is a bit of a pity. My flickr account (which I star­ted in 2007) has 376 albums and 4976 photos. I thought I’d do some regu­lar posts with photos from some of the older albums. I’ll tag them as “from the archives”, espe­cially as a lot of them are from well before I star­ted this blog, or moved it from blog­ger to word­press. Here are some photos from a trip to Whit­stable in Janu­ary 2008. It was my birth­day, and I went on a trip to the coast with my friend Bryony and our then boyfriends. I had this Kodak slide duplic­a­tion film I’d got in a giant bag of expired film I’d got for 50p per roll a few years earli­er, and kept in the freez­er. I’m not sure if it was taken with a Lomo LCA or an Olym­pus XA2. I had both at the time. I still have them in a box under the bed, but they’re both slightly broken, because I got them very, very cheaply second-hand (I think they were both about £15). I should get round to fixing them at some point. I think they’re fixable. These pictures were cross processed in C41, and then scanned. The pictures on my flickr account are a little small by modern stand­ards, but screens were smal­ler then, and stor­age space on Flickr limited. I still have the negat­ives filed away, anyway.

Shef­field Zine Fest 2015

I went up to Shef­field again a few weeks ago for the zine­fest, organ­ised by my friends Bettie and Chella, and stay­ing at Rebecca’s with Tukru. I think there must be some­thing around Shef­field in the Spring that I’m horribly aller­gic to. Whenev­er I go up in March or April I have some kind of horrible reac­tion, yet when I’ve been up in the Autumn, no prob­lem. Once when the bus went past Chester­field, a nearby town, my whole face puffed up like a hamster and no amount of anti-histam­ines would deflate it, and was that way the whole week­end, spon­tan­eously deflat­ing again once I was clear of Derby­shire on the way home. I had no hamster face this time, but sinus pain and a nasty rash on my shoulders and naus­ea. Perhaps I’m aller­gic to steel. Nowhere else in the region seems to give me this prob­lem. (It’s also sad because the zine­fest venue has a slide, and I’ve never been able to go on it in any of the years I’ve been, it not being a good idea when you’re pukey or suffer­ing from balance prob­lems due to a giant swollen face and glands.)

Published
Categorised as Zines

Two new zines

I had two never-before-seen zines to bring with me to the Shef­field Zine Fest (photos of the fest­iv­al coming later in the week). Issue 22 was new, where­as issue 14 has a bit of a history. I made no. 14 a few years ago, mislaid the pages, found them again last year and finished some bits off, made a few copies, mislaid them again moving house and then found them again recently. Now they’re safe in a folder with all my other master copies, scanned to a pdf, and avail­able to print whenev­er I want.

Shef­field Zine Fest this Saturday

This week­end I’m going up to York­shire to run a table and work­shop at the Shef­field Zine Fest (Face­book event here) and see friends. I’ll have lots of issues of zines from both myself and Char­lotte Richard­son Andrews and some other good­ies, and I’ll be running a work­shop on getting star­ted with zine-making (and my good pal Tukru will be running a hands-on miniz­ine session).

Wander­ing along the canal

I often like to get some fresh air in my lunch break by walk­ing along the canal near my work. There’s not a lot there, just some house­boats and a small lock, and a lot of lunch­time joggers and the odd person eating sand­wiches on a sunny day. I’m a big fan of canals, and I think I’ve walked along pretty much the whole length of this one at vari­ous points.

En train de flân­er. Aucun train-train.

Here’s some more photos from Paris (again taken with a Pentax ME super and expired Pound­land film with a strange red cast), from my gener­al wander­ing around. Wander­ing is one of my favour­ite things to do. In French it’s flân­er, and someone who wanders around a city, observing things and casu­ally explor­ing is a flâneur or a flâneuse, much celeb­rated in liter­at­ure. I did a lot of that on my recent trip, both because I was on such a tight budget, and also because I was on my own, so I was free to spend my time as I liked. I’m in the middle of writ­ing a new zine about the trip. Hope­fully I’ll have it finished by the Shef­field Zine Fest next week­end.

Penguin Little Black Clas­sics

I bought some of these tiny 80th anniversary Penguin books the other day. Each book is around 50 pages long, and has short stor­ies, poems or extracts from writers from around the world. The perfect size to keep in a bag for spare moment read­ing. There are 80 differ­ent ones to choose from, and each one costs a bargain 80p. In pick­ing the books, I went for authors I had never heard of, or writers like Cavafy I’d heard of but never checked out. Hope­fully I’ll discov­er some­thing I really like. The full list of titles can be seen here.

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Categorised as Books

Save Water­loo Library

I made these posters to help a friend campaign to stop Water­loo Library being closed down and sold off (there is defin­itely no resemb­lance inten­ded to a certain range of paper­back books . . ). Lambeth coun­cil is making devast­at­ing cuts to their librar­ies after having their budget cut. This govern­ment have been slowly and delib­er­ately destroy­ing every public service they can, if it doesn’t make their rich busi­ness friends rich­er, they don’t care. Librar­ies are incred­ibly import­ant, and the poorer the area the more vital they are. Even with my family, who did have books at home, there is no way I would have the educa­tion I have now if I hadn’t have been constantly read­ing books from the public library grow­ing up.

Jardin de Luxem­bourg

Here’s some more film photos from the Jardin de Luxem­bourg in Paris. (Luxem­bourg is one of those words I always have to look up the spelling of, other­wise I’m temp­ted to insert all kinds of extra vowels).

Canal St-Martin

Here’s some more pictures of Paris, this time of the Canal Sainte-Martin, once again taken with an old Pentax ME Super from the 70s. The film was expired and from Pound­land, and went through the x-ray machine at the airport, which resul­ted in it having a red cast. I colour correc­ted it out where I could, but the pictures don’t quite reflect the aqua green water as I saw it. I also took some b&w pictures of the same area, which I’ve developed but not yet scanned.

Your suspi­cions I’m confirm­ing, as you find them all quite true

1) Contin­ent­al Shelf- Viet Cong
One off the radio at work. I’m not that fussed about the whole album, but I really like this single.

2) King­dom of Heav­en (Is With­in You) – The 13th Floor Elev­at­ors
From the True Detect­ive soundtrack. The seedy side of the late 60s. It really fitted the show well.

Published
Categorised as Music

Not gate-crash­ing a funer­al

I actu­ally atten­ded this funeral/​memorial for children’s writer Diana Wynne Jones over 2 years ago. I had meant to write about it for a long time, but I didn’t want to write anything without having the programme of speak­ers from the event to hand, and it stub­bornly disap­peared until recently when I had a big clear out of papers (and faded with some print rubbed off after 2 years), so here it is.

Andre Thomkins

When I was in Liecht­en­stein, I went to the Modern Art museum there. I was really impressed with the qual­ity of the museum, espe­cially in such a small coun­try. They had a special exhib­i­tion about Swiss artist André Thomkins (whose estate had donated his works to the museum). I hadn’t come across him before, but I really enjoyed what I saw (and his large array of German puns), espe­cially the short film where he was talk­ing and demon­strat­ing how he made marbled paint­ings by float­ing lacquer on top of water, some­thing he star­ted exper­i­ment­ing with after wash­ing a brush he’d been paint­ing furniture with.

Graveyard/​ghost town double expos­ures

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.

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

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Categorised as Books

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.

Published
Categorised as Music

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.

Profess­or Knatsch­ke

My univer­sity library had a massive stack of print­ing industry annu­als from the 1890s through to the 20s. I always enjoyed look­ing through them because the illus­tra­tions and articles they chose to show­case new print­ing tech­no­lo­gies were often really odd, and were good to photo­copy for collages and zines. Next to them on the shelf was a strange little book called Profess­or Knatsch­ke. It’s a comedy book writ­ten and illus­trated in 1912 by Alsa­tian satir­ist Jean-Jacques Waltz, aka Hansi, about a clue­less German profess­or and his daughter’s trip to Paris, mock­ing both the French and the Germans (but mostly the Germans) in a more inno­cent pre-WW1 pre-Nazi era. I always really liked the illus­tra­tions (and Elsa K’s obses­sion with making gifts embroidered with “inspir­ing” mottoes) , and now it’s avail­able free online as a copy­right-free ebook.

Slugs. Ugh.

I forgot to post this before. My friend Tukru does a free­bie Halloween themed zine every year for her zine distro. She needed some extra pages and asked me to draw a monster, so I cobbled this togeth­er and scanned it in about 45 minutes. I hate slugs. Horrible things. In my final year of uni, I lived in a house which had seemed fine when viewed in the summer, but come winter turned out to have a real damp prob­lem, and a slug prob­lem in the kitchen

Malevich

Recently I went to the Malevich exhib­i­tion at the Tate Modern. I was vaguely aware of him as an avant-garde Russi­an artist (turns out more Polish-Ukrain­i­an) and his black square paint­ings which caused such a fuss, but I didn’t know much else about him. I’m glad I went to the exhib­i­tion.

Liecht­en­stein

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In other old photos I’ve dug out recently, here’s some photos of Liecht­en­stein from last summer. I’m currently writ­ing a zine about that trip, so I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here.

Liecht­en­stein is a very weird place. It’s one of the smal­lest coun­tries in Europe, and is essen­tially a small Swiss town that is a separ­ate coun­try by histor­ic­al acci­dent, and now stays a separ­ate coun­try because they have a nice income from being a corpor­ate tax haven. The entire coun­try has one high school. I was work­ing at a school just across the border in Austria, and there were a fair few students from Liecht­en­stein at the school. The capit­al Vaduz has a small parlia­ment build­ing, an impress­ive castle, a small museum like that of any small town, a really big and impress­ive modern art museum, a big post office that does a roar­ing trade in souven­ir stamps and a town square with some expens­ive cafes and assor­ted useful shops. There’s, Schaan, a suburb­an town where most people live, a couple of other villages and a big super­mar­ket, some lovely moun­tains and that’s the whole coun­try really. I saw pretty much most of it in an after­noon, which you can’t say for most coun­tries.