Category: Popular Posts

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.

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.

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.

Red Lead & Choler­ic Humours

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In the days when I worked at Hamp­ton Court I got to go to quite a few of their special events. They had a roster of actors who could portray the vari­ous monarchs who had lived at the palace (and two Henry VIIIs) and would do special days with re-enact­ments based on vari­ous time peri­ods or themes. On one of the days they had a day based on science in the time of Charles II. I found some photos when I was tidy­ing up the computer the other day.

Pick­ing Black­ber­ries

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A little while ago I went to visit my pál Erika (sorry, can’t resist the terrible pun) in Surrey for black­berry pick­ing. Her friends Stephanie and Katja came down too, and we went out on a sunny day into the woods and picked some berries and had a picnic and drinks (for N. Amer­ic­an read­ers, Brit­ish woods aren’t very wild). Black­ber­ries grow every­where here at the end of August and most of Septem­ber. They don’t belong to anyone, and it’s safe and legal to pick and eat them. I used to pick huge amounts of them when I was grow­ing up. They’re also good for jam, pies, crumbles, coulis and wine-making. We made jam this time. Foxes also like them as much as humans.

Toy Camer­as in Brighton

My flickr account has 370 albums on it, dating back to 2007, before I star­ted this blog. A little while ago I dug out some pictures of Brack­nell from the archives, and I thought I’d find some more things from the oldest albums.

Inter­na­tion­al Pop Hits

My all-time top Finn Tukru, sent me some weird Finnish music videos from the past. (Don’t intro­duce me to any other Finns, Tukru, you might get demoted).

Space Scrap­book

I have kept scrap­books like this since about 2002, stick­ing in things like tick­et stubs, cata­logues from art exhib­i­tions, food pack­aging, pass­port photos etc. Future histor­i­ans will prob­ably not be that grate­ful to me. Once a year or so I also make a gener­al list of things I like, to compare with previ­ous years. The lists have been pretty consist­ent though, my tastes don’t change a lot. This scrap­book spans late 2011 to the end of 2013. I photo­graphed all the pages and made this gif. I took photos of some other old ones too, but I haven’t finished edit­ing the pages yet.

The Phantom Toll­booth

I recently watched this docu­ment­ary about the Phantom Toll­booth, one of my favour­ite books when I was young­er. (I still have the same battered, dog-eared paper­back copy). Milo, the main char­ac­ter, is a boy who is always bored and doesn’t see the point in anything.

Fish­bourne Palace

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A while back I went to Fish­bourne Palace. In the 1960s engin­eers digging a new drain in a village just outside Chichester discovered some Roman mosa­ics. When they were excav­ated, they turned out to belong to the one of the largest Roman palaces outside Italy. My thing I wrote for Story­board this month is based on it (and yes, the build­ing really does look like a swim­ming pool). No one is one hundred percent sure who it belonged to, the most common guess is Tiberi­us Claudi­us Cogidub­nus, the local chief­tain /​ Roman ally /​ client king, but there are no inscrip­tions or histor­ic­al records either back­ing it up or prov­ing other­wise.

School anim­a­tion project

For the past few months, I’ve been work­ing with a group of students and an English teach­er at a school in North London to create a small anim­ated film. The students were set the chal­lenge of coming up with a story that reflec­ted some­thing about the school and the students with­in it. The school is very diverse, and they created a story about a girl who comes to London as a refugee, and is miser­able at school because she doesn’t know any English yet, and can’t under­stand anything or anybody. However, she soon starts to learn the language, and becomes far happi­er once she can under­stand and make friends. The anim­a­tion delib­er­ately has no music or sound effects other than the voice-over, because the music teach­ers are plan­ning to use it as a compos­i­tion project in class.

Tömeny romantika, imád­lak 80s hungari­an songs-ika

The other week­end I went to visit Erika and her part­ner at their beau­ti­ful house. I always have a nice time there. The worst thing that ever happened to me there was that I once ate too much Stilton and had to have a lengthy lie-down. If the worst thing about your day is that you ate too much blue cheese, then the day is going well.

Salzburg

On the way from Nieder­ös­ter­reich to Vorarl­berg I stopped off alone in Salzburg along the way. I had to change trains in Vienna, and after a week of hearty, dairy-laden alpine food I was very, very thank­ful to eat some dhal and chapat­tis at the station. I really, really liked Salzburg and would gladly return there. I don’t know what it is about the city, but it just had a really nice atmo­sphere. I arrived at about 5pm, found the hotel really easily, and dumped my stuff and went for a wander. It’s an old univer­sity town, with a castle perched on an outcrop of the moun­tain look­ing down. There is a stereo­type in Austria that people in Salzburg are snobby, but I found them friendly enough.

St Wolfgang­skirche, Nieder­ös­ter­reich

While in Kirch­berg-am-Wech­sel we were given a tour of a disused church perched up on the moun­tain­side. It has suffered a lot of misfor­tune over the years (if you can read German there is a wiki­pe­dia article here), it burnt down and was rebuilt twice, and is furnished with all kinds of leftovers from other churches, which makes it more inter­est­ing.

Hermannshöhle

While in Kirch­berg am Wech­sel I also got to go on a tour of Hermannshöhle with anoth­er teach­er. It’s a series of caves inside one of the moun­tains, with lots of stalac­tites and a bat colony. Usually the tours are at set times and only in German, but we got a private tour in English, which was really nice.

Kirch­berg am Wech­sel

Last Summer I spent a week work­ing at the juni­or school in Kirch­berg am Wech­sel, a tiny moun­tain town on the east­ern end of the Alps on the border between Lower Austria and Styria. It is essen­tially one long street between some moun­tains, with “Lower Austria’s finest stalac­tite cave” (more on that later) and a yearly Wittgen­stein fest­iv­al. As moun­tains go, by Austri­an stand­ards they are pretty tame, mostly being below the tree-line. When I said some­thing to the kids about the moun­tains they basic­ally went “what moun­tains?” and when I poin­ted out of the window they went “oh yeah, those, there are much better moun­tains in other places”. Still, I like any kind of moun­tains, and the Wech­sel is still 1,743m high, so it’s hardly a hill. Mountains/​hills and water, that’s what I like. I wouldn’t do well some­where like Kansas.

Dreams of the Alps

I spent a lot of last summer trav­el­ling up and down the Alps by train. Here are a couple of pictures I took out of the window. Taking photos from the window of a moving train can be very frus­trat­ing, you see a spec­tac­u­lar view, but by the time you have taken a photo some­thing like a fence is in the way. I like long-distance solo train trips, espe­cially ones with spec­tac­u­lar scenery and no stress or time pres­sure when it comes to connections.Both of these pictures are some­where near the Austrian/​German border. Inter­est­ingly German for night­mare is Alptraum – “Alp dream”. That alp is a night time incubus type thing, not the moun­tains, but it gives a strange mental image if you’re an English speak­er. An Alp dream would prob­ably involve frol­ick­ing with goats in a sunny moun­tain pasture. I clearly read Heidi too often when I was young­er.

The wonder of card­board: making anim­a­tion with school chil­dren

Since just before Christ­mas, I have been doing a weekly anim­a­tion work­shop with kids at a school in North London, work­ing with one of the English teach­ers. The brief was to create a short film which told a story that repres­en­ted the school and the exper­i­ences of the students in some way. The students range from 12-18, with the young­er ones being the art assist­ants, and the sixth-formers being the produ­cers. They came up with a story them­selves about a refugee girl from an unnamed coun­try who flees from a war to London, but is then unhappy at the school because she doesn’t speak English (quite a common real story at this partic­u­lar school). Gradu­ally however she starts to learn and under­stand, and feel happi­er and make friends. In the initial sessions, some of the inspir­a­tion clips I showed them included Persepol­is, The Science of Sleep, and my own Erika Pal’s the House.

Kostel Sv. Mikuláše

We also went to the baroque St Nich­olas’ church in Prague. I’m not at all reli­gious (and it seems neither are the Czechs), but I like visit­ing churches for the art and archi­tec­ture. I really liked the faces of the statues inside, espe­cially this bish­op type who seems to be going “who? me?”.

Prague Puppet Shop

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Puppetry is a big thing in the Czech Repub­lic. As well as being the home of Jan Švank­ma­jer and Jiří Trnka, there are a few puppet shops in the Old Town in Prague selling the work of local puppet artists. I’m afraid I didn’t get the names of the artists who made these ones I photo­graphed. I really wanted to buy a small puppet, they weren’t hugely expens­ive, but I didn’t have much chance of getting it home in one piece, so I reluct­antly gave it a miss.

Prague

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After a week in Dresden at the end of August, I went to Prague for the week­end with my work colleague Hazel. We both had to go to Vienna en route to our next assign­ment, so it made sense to fit in a quick trip to Prague on the way.

DDR Museum

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I’m fascin­ated by the history of the Cold War. Both the polit­ic­al side, and the social history of people’s every­day lives. I’ve always been extra fascin­ated by the former DDR, both because I can speak the language and because they tried so hard to be a “model” Iron Curtain soci­ety. You read about people being “intern­al emigrés”. Being a good comrade and work­er on the surface, but intern­ally escap­ing to their own world via drink or just plain daydream­ing. I suppose that’s what I’d do in the situ­ation. I have a lot of thoughts on the subject, but I’m currently writ­ing a zine about the trip this summer, so I’ll save them for there.

Golden Hands Book of Crafts

While I was at my grandparent’s place, I scanned some books. Here’s the Golden Hands Book of Crafts from the 70s. I have some of the magazine of the same name, which I scanned before. You can see that here. Most of the tutori­als in the book weren’t very excit­ing, but there were some nice 70s stock pictures.

Concrete wonder­lands

Flickr have massively changed their website recently, and I took the chance to go through all my old photos and re-organ­ise them a bit, so I’ll be digging up vari­ous things from the archives over the next few weeks. Here’s some of Brack­nell from 2005.

Diana Wynne Jones Inter­view

A couple of years ago I inter­viewed the children’s writer Diana Wynne Jones, my favour­ite writer grow­ing up. I was compil­ing a zine of articles about her work. Unfor­tu­nately I didn’t finish the zine before she died of cancer, because I’m a terrible procras­tin­at­or, and she never got to see it. When I get a chance, I have anoth­er entry to add about attend­ing her funer­al.

москва в брайтон

I have been busy recently, and the ever-present back­log of photos and so on I mean to post gets ever longer. Here’s some photos I took of Brighton Pier at some point. I have no idea when I took them, prob­ably when I lived in Brighton, but I scanned them the other week.

Hunder­t­wasser

Every so often I like to write on here about things I like, and why I like them. I’ve (finally) been finish­ing my zine about Vienna, and there’s a section about Hunder­t­wasser in there, but I didn’t really have enough space to say everything that I wanted to say, and in a b&w zine obvi­ously you totally miss out on the colours, which are a major part of his work, so here is a longer thing about him and his work. I’ve visited the Kunsthaus/​Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna quite a few times, and I wrote about one of my visits here. I first came across his work in 2001, when I was 16/​17, and bought a £3 book from a discount shop because it looked inter­est­ing from a quick flick through. I’m glad I did! All the pictures in this entry are either taken by me, or come from hundertwasser.at. I don’t feel like I’ve really caught  my exact favour­ites here, but collect­ing images from lots of differ­ent sources and making sure they were all cred­ited prop­erly would have taken a long, long time. Here’s an over­view of some things.

70s interi­or design book

Here are some scans from a 1970s interi­or design book- House by Terrence Conran. Some of the stuff in it is really really 70s look­ing, and some is very clean and time­less-look­ing. The pictures I’ve scanned are a mix of the two categor­ies. I just scanned the pictures that appealed to me, as it’s a massive book. Some of them are a little grainy due to the print­ing tech­nique. I scanned anoth­er 70s interi­or book I have here.

How I Make my Zines

This is how I person­ally make my zines. There’s no right or wrong way (aside from doing things like acci­dent­ally making it unread­able once photo­copied or forget­ting about your margins and cutting off half the text). If you want a more in-depth guide to all things zine-related, I can recom­mend Stolen Sharpie Revolu­tion. You can see all the back issues of my zines on my website.

Golden Hands Monthly

got this stack of 70s craft magazines in a junk shop in Devizes a few years ago. That place was amaz­ing, a multi-floored cavern of junk. It’s gone now, I think. Here’s some photos.There’s the usual ultra-cheesy raffia work projects and crocheted plant hold­ers and so on, but the clothes patterns are actu­ally mostly pretty nice, which is why I bought the magazines. What I’ve scanned is a mix of nice things and weird stuff though. I also couldn’t scan double page spreads very easily, because the bind­ing on the magazines is dodgy, and I didn’t want to pull them about too much in case they broke. These issues are from 1972 and 1973. I have anoth­er issue from 1976, but it’s prin­ted on much cheap­er paper (the paper qual­ity wasn’t ster­ling to begin with) and the contents are pretty dull.

Visu­al Diary

As part of my MA, we were required to keep a creat­ive diary keep­ing track of the profes­sion­al prac­tice lectures, research, read­ing, exhib­i­tion visits and gener­al inspir­a­tion. I finally got around to scan­ning some of the one from my second year. In the first year I used blog posts for the same purpose, but I felt the need later on for a phys­ic­al record.

Costumes for Plays and Play­ing

When I was a kid I used to borrow this book again and again from the local library. The first thing I ever sewed myself was from it. A friend of mine at juni­or school’s older sister was in a school play of Toad of Toad Hall, and we went to watch. When you’re 7, 13 year olds seem incred­ibly impress­ive. What impressed me even more were the weasel costumes. I wanted one for myself. Armed with an offcut of brown fabric and a toy sewing machine I’d got at a boot­fair, I made a hood with ears like the ones in the book. It was wonky, and I was a bit ashamed of it though, and wished I knew how to sew straight (look­ing back, I’m not sure the toy sewing machine was actu­ally capable of a straight seam). My opin­ion of my sewing projects has improved slightly since.

Aban­doned school science lab

I was doing some resid­en­tial teach­ing for the last 2 weeks. A group of year 9s from Chile came on a school trip, and I gave them lessons about English and Brit­ish History/​Culture and took them to vari­ous histor­ic­al places like Cambridge and Canter­bury. I was work­ing in the middle of nowhere, in this old manor house in the middle of a nation­al park. The house had been a board­ing school from the 1920s to 2005, and the company I worked for was only using part of the build­ing.  We were the last school tour to be there before it was going to be handed over to the new owners, who no-one knew much about, but didn’t seem to be using it as a school. There were lots of locked up rooms that had been used by the board­ing school, but weren’t used for the language holi­days, like the science lab, and they had piles of school stuff lying every­where. The atti­tude was pretty much feel free to explore, just make sure the kids don’t get into anywhere that could be danger­ous.

How to run a zine event

For 3 years I was part of the group that ran the Brighton Zine­fest. We star­ted just with the idea it would be fun to have a zine event in Brighton and managed to build a success­ful and fun event. Sadly we don’t run it any more because some of the origin­al organ­isers live in Brighton any more, the others were too busy, and nobody new appeared to take over, and so it just wasn’t prac­tic­al to hold anoth­er.

аз съм английска, от лондон

Last week I was in Bulgaria teach­ing. I didn’t have too great a time, because all of us teach­ers got food pois­on­ing, and there was one partic­u­lar class of kids who were a pain, and due to all round tired­ness and illness, I didn’t get to leave the dull suburb we were stay­ing in and venture too much into Sofia. I went twice, and here are some phone pics. I’ve got some 35mm ones too, which I need to scan, and some diana ones, which need devel­op­ing still. I think if I went again to Bulgaria I’d go some­where in the moun­tains or coast. Sofia isn’t their top tour­ist destin­a­tion, it’s really more some­where where people work, and the natur­al scenery of the coun­try is stun­ning. I’m in the process of writ­ing about the trip in more detail for my zine.

Nature All Around

These are some pictures I scanned from a 1970s kids book at my dad’s house called Nature All Around. My uncle used to work for a non-fiction publish­er and we always seemed to have strange free books from his work around the place. It has draw­ings and photo­graphs of things chil­dren can spot around the aver­age brit­ish garden/​field/​beach and inform­a­tion about the lives of the vari­ous creatures.

Explor­ing the World of Robots

I’ve had this book since forever. It was part of a set of educa­tion­al books that were a hand me down from my cous­in. The others in the set were pretty stand­ard, on topics like anim­al migra­tion or cars, but this one is a bit odd. The others in the set have long gone to the char­ity shop or anoth­er relat­ive, but I’ll always keep this book.

All the cheese­cloth & macrame you can eat

I got this 70stastic book for £1 from a char­ity shop, mainly because of the pictures. The textu­al parts are worthy and Blue Peter-ish, with lots of making things out of tea chests and copy­dex (why doesn’t tea tend to come in chests these days?), guides to home tie-dying, and sentences like “and kitchen foil gives a touch of glam­our”.

Someone Tell Me Why I Do the Things That I Don’t Want To Do

One of the many rolls of film I have sitting around wait­ing to be scanned. This is from the days when I used to live in Read­ing. I want it to be sunny now! I long for long walks and picnics and lying on the grass in the sunshine, I’m fed up of the scrag end of winter. Diana + camera & Kodak Ekta­chrome 100 cross-processed.

Bacchanalia

Today Tukru helped me take some photos for my uni project (someone needed to stop the camera tripod fall­ing down the hill and be able to touch things without cover­ing them in blood. Today’s myth was Pentheus & the Bacchae. I was a Bacchant/​Maenad. I got to sit around in a vest in the winter doused in fake blood, clutch­ing a mostly empty bottle of booze and a fimo human heart and trying not to squint in the unex­pec­ted Febru­ary sunshine. How I usually spend my Tues­day after­noons, really. Fake blood is surpris­ingly cold in the wind. Clear­ing up felt like we were cover­ing up a murder.

Leopold Museum

I was work­ing in Vienna a few weeks ago, and I haven’t got round to upload­ing photos and putting them here. There’s plenty to come. I went to as many art exhib­its as I could in the week I was work­ing in Vienna. I’ve never felt so spoilt by all the free entry in London. I think I spent about €40 over­all just on museum entries. It was worth it to see some things in the flesh though.

Note­book

When I was 17 or so I used to carry this note­book around in my bag to jot stuff down in. In boring moments in the pub, friends used to draw in it too. I managed to lose the insides (I’ve still got a few pages some­where, but I haven’t seen then in a while, I’m sure I’ll uncov­er them when I return to Brighton and unpack my stuff). You can see where other people have scribbled stuff on the cover too, and polar­oid stick­ers got stuck on, and then fell off where the mater­i­al was so flimsy. Those polar­oid izone stick­ers were a bit rubbish really. I scanned the covers a while ago, and forgot about it, and just noticed them on my flickr.

Smuggle!

This is a board game I got in a char­ity shop. I think the title deserves an exclam­a­tion mark. It encour­ages chil­dren to lie to customs officers convin­cingly. You get to smuggle dodgy perfume and boxes of cigars through customs. In my head it belongs to an imagin­ary Fath­er Ted epis­ode where Ted & Dougal are stuck inside on a rainy day, and decide to play a board game, they have a choice between Trivi­al Pursuit- Papal Edition or Smuggle, then Dougal turns out to not under­stand the concept of bluff­ing