Here’s a few photos from St Kilda in Melbourne. It’s a fancy coastal suburb of Melbourne filled with interwar bungalows, with a pier and esplanade. In the 1960s it was run down and where all the hippies lived, but is now back to being fancy. I went there because there are wild penguins living on the pier and I hoped to see some. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to spot any that day.
Singapore
Last year I went on a trip to Australia, with a stop-off in Singapore along the way. I’ve finally started sorting out the photos and writing a zine about the trip. Here’s some photos from Singapore- they’re all phone photos as I left my suitcase at the airport for convenience as I had to fly to Melbourne the next day and I realised the battery charger for my camera was in it too late.
Goat Comic
I stepped out onto the midway
I meant to do a lot today but ended up napping on the sofa, so I went for an early evening walk along the beach to see the sunset and get some fresh air. The funfair was in town but there was almost nobody there on a Saturday night. Surreal.
Times Out of Mind
Louisiana Art Museum, Denmark
I was tidying up some old photos and found some from my trip to Denmark in 2015 that I never posted. These are of the Louisiana Art Museum. It’s a modern art museum and sculpture park just up the coast from Copenhagen.
The Fictional Books of Jorge Luis Borges
You Get Used to an Empty Room- playlist
Everything has been grim- the world, politics, more personal matters. Here is a short playlist of a certain mood of corruscating bleakness.
Some ideas and resources for arguing against common racist comments in the UK
At the time of writing in June 2020, we’re going through a dramatic shift in public consciousness in many countries about racism, the problems with current society, and nasty histories that have been brushed over and ignored. A lot of my friends are arguing with family members and acquaintances, or discovering that friends are much less well-informed than they’d hoped. Here’s a resource page of response ideas and links to resources.
How to spot fake Twitter accounts and misinformation
The main way to keep up to date with what’s happening on the ground with the Black Lives Matter Protests is via social media (and Twitter in particular).
It’s really confusing though, because there are a lot of people and organisations acting in bad faith and deliberately making communication and fact-checking difficult, and using manipulation strategies to drown out the real information about what’s happening on the ground.
Some design changes
Saint-Céneri-le-Gérei
Fanzine Ynfytyn 27- Solitude Standing digital version
In 2016 I left London to house sit in the small town where my grandparents had lived. After a sequence of unfortunate events involving electricians and train strikes I ended up spending the whole summer pretty much alone in a town full of old people, where I knew no-one and there was very little to do, and I had very little in-person contact with other people. A situation a lot of other people can relate to at the moment I think.
Roskilde Viking Ship Musem
It’s very unlikely I or anyone else will be travelling much this summer (I’ve not been more than a mile away from home for months now), so I thought I’d sort out and post some old travel photos. Here’s Roskilde from 2015. I posted photos of Copenhagen and Malmö at the time (you can see them here and here), but I forgot to do these ones.
I want my MTV (late 90s edition)
I was a teenager in the dark ages when you had to have lightning reflexes to tape songs you liked when they came on. I didn’t have cable or satellite at home, but I did a lot of babysitting at houses where they had the music channels. So I used to to make mix tapes of music videos. Here’s some of the stuff I remember taping.
Special Effect Photography – 1983
I got this 1980s guide to using lens filters from a charity shop. Of course a lot of these effects can be created in Photoshop these days, but actually for a lot of them the analogue method creates something unique, so a large proportion of these filters are still on sale.
It’s a fool who doesn’t see what I see watching trees
Here’s a playlist. There’s a certain early 80s synth pop mood, even if all the songs aren’t actually from that era. There’s some Russian stuff, there’s the Deftones covering Duran Duran (yes, really). Have a good aesthetically composed sulk on me.
Sophie Woodrow sketchbook page
I’ve really been in a creative slump under lockdown. All that time, no motivation. I forced myself to do some drawing today- just some simple sketches of some ceramic sculptures by Sophie Woodrow that I’d admired. I think it did me some good.
“There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse”
I cleaned and reorganised one shelf that I’d never been happy with, and before I knew it, I’d spent pretty much most of the day cleaning and rearranging stuff. When you’re home all the time everything seems to get dirty so much quicker.
Mycenaean Grave Goods
I was tidying up and found some bits from art school ten years ago. Here’s some preliminary sketches I did for a project based on Mycenaean artefacts. Rather than draw direct, I drew various motifs on some acetate with marker, and then held it on the cyanotype paper with glass to expose the pictures. These prints were not the final project, I don’t know where that has gone. They were more preliminary exploration work.
Amps for Total Beginners
If you are playing an electric guitar or bass, you will need an amp. Here’s a guide to how they work, and how to find the one that will suit you.
A walk along an empty beach
Not many people are getting to the beach these days, but I live right next to it (in fact I can see the sea from my living room window). It’s strange to live in a tourist town when there are no tourists.
Bulgaria- toy camera vision
In the fuzzy zone between Christmas and New Year I scanned a lot of old negatives. I’ve recently started going through them and editing the photos. It’s not like travel is going to be much of an option this year, so might as well sort out all my old travel photos that I overlooked.
Tim and the Hidden People
Tim and the Hidden People is a series of children’s school reading books from the late 70s/early 80s that a lot of schools had. They have a strange, bleak folk-horror atmosphere, and the illustrations in the first three collections are a little uncanny valley. Tim is always walking along lonely canal paths with strict instructions to not look over his shoulder and tie the silver string around a particular tree or else.
Schloss Belvedere, Vienna
I realised I still had a few photos from February in Austria left unposted, so here they are. Strange to think that six weeks ago I was travelling around Central Europe for work, and now I don’t venture more than a mile or two from home.
A general update
I haven’t posted much this month because I was ill- not ill enough to need medical attention or be bedridden, but not ill enough to do anything much either. Was it the virus, or not? I have no idea because of course I wasn’t able to get tested, but the symptoms fitted, and the people in the flat next to and below me were equally ill with the same symptoms, and I live in one of the most affected parts of the UK. I also felt tired and grey for a long time after recovering- similar to after having glandular fever and shingles (not helped by doing something painful to my shoulder in the meantime). So it seems likely.
Japan Zine- digital edition
A couple of years ago I won some plane tickets to Japan, and went inter-railing around Western Japan with my friend Vicky. The whole trip was short notice and on a very low budget, but we had fun. When I came back I made a zine about the trip. The paper edition is still available here, but for the foreseeable future I can only send physical copies to the UK. So I’ve made a digital edition for people to read.
The Shame Pile
My living room has a very handy built-in bookshelf (although the amount of different compartments meant it took a long time when I moved in to paint over the old nicotine-stained paint). The majority of my books live on the bigger bookshelves in my bedroom, but the living room houses the Shame Pile.
Ichi-go ichi-e
This was my April 2014 piece for Storyboard , a writing site with monthly prompts run by a friend. I couldn’t think of a story idea, so I wrote a kind of essay instead.The theme that month was “Ichi-go ichi-e”: a never again moment. I couldn’t think of a story, so I decided to talk a little about ways other writers have handled the theme. I suppose you could call this a casual essay. I’m afraid it won’t be closely argued or meticulously footnoted, and it is quite loosely put together, but maybe it will give people some good recommendations of things to read
Ink Master Copies
I had a whole folder full of artwork masters, so I decided to stick them into sketchbooks this afternoon (these kraft paper folio-sized books are around £6 from Muji). I tend to draw the line artwork by hand with a non-photo blue pencil and posca marker, and correct mistakes/add the colour digitally.