Walk with me (2 metres apart...)

How are you? 

It’s an up and down kind of time, isn’t it - thinking/worrying about stuff, people and livelihoods, trying not to overdose on the news, checking on friends, feeling indebted to all those keeping things going.  Then needing to give yourself some breaks, get lost in levity and little bits of normality and trivia wherever possible.  I think that’s just going to be a pattern for a while now.

So, like an obedient dog I took my daily walk yesterday and gave myself time to think some silly thoughts.   My walk incorporated a stop at the shop to buy some essentials – only a short list but a bottle of wine included, essential surely.   It was colder than I expected and every step felt like I was waging war against that northerly wind, one of those that’s so icy and strong it seemed to lock my features into what I can only imagine was a horrifying grimace. 

It was an interesting study in behaviour, though, and I guess many are experiencing this on our eerily quiet streets:  that each time another person came towards me on the pavement or path, one of us would actually stop, pull in and give way to let the other walk by at a safe distance. I realised it was exactly as if we were each driving an imaginary car (mine’s an E-type Jag then please, may as well go for the full fantasy).  Just like motoring down a narrow lane and using a passing place, with a little wave of the hand to say thank you. Maybe we should all start wearing miniature headlights on our coats that we could flash at each other, just to save any confusion, especially if it gets foggy.

Making the most of my outdoor exercise allowance I took a diversion along my favourite lane, noticing a pile of plucked feathers in the grass verge signifying a recent sparrowhawk attack (either that or someone really has got desperate on finding empty shelves in Tesco).   I could hear a chiffchaff in the tall lime trees, it’s a lovely sign of Spring.  If you don’t know already it’s very easy to identify the call of a chiffchaff.  It goes chiff chaff, chiff chaff…   And there were already newborn lambs in the field, all wobbly black legs and curious faces.  I know I'm lucky, things feel more normal when you’re surrounded by nature.

A chiffchaff

Most chiffchaffs migrate to warmer climates for the Winter

and return here to breed in Spring and Summer.

I found myself thinking (this is the silly, trivial thinking) about how, when this is over, we might all come out of it looking like something from the ‘70s.  It’s the haircuts I started with – are we all letting it grow wild, or risking a dodgy home trim from an unqualified family member?  The last time I properly cut anyone’s hair was in the '70s....  and that was a doll's...  (If only I'd realised her long glossy locks actually originated from just a handful of broadly spaced plugs! I was so mortified in case my mum found out what I'd done that I hid her in a box for a year).  Will pudding basins and comb-overs become fashionable again?  

What about teeth?  Perhaps classic vintage ivory will make a comeback, now there are no professional whitening services open for those who like their gnashers to glow like ultraviolet light.  Botox-addicts may learn to embrace their wrinkles and the lips of many female celebrities may finally return to normal human size; body hair will flourish again at last in the comfort of its own home.

And we’ll wear down the heels and soles on our footwear so much through all this daily walking that, with no heel bars open, we’ll decide to revert to longer-lasting platform shoes and boots…   

I finished my walk and as my frozen face thawed out and my hands lathered up the soap, I allowed myself a little (20-second) escapist reverie – a vivid image of a whole new world of very hairy, yellow-toothed, wrinkly, 1970s-throwback, platform-boot-wearing cave-dwellers emerging blinking into the light.  We'll all have terribly chapped hands too.  

Then I listened to this!

The Temptations: I Can't Get Next To You

Take care x

Distraction (Playing along with the art school boys - part four)

I've been struggling with knowing how to pitch blog posts and words in general at the moment.  I've decided for me at least distraction is beneficial, a way of keeping things as 'normal' as possible, and I really hope this doesn't appear flippant or insensitive. It's just one way of coping and trying to offset the deluge of intense anxiety and very real issues and uncertainties that dominate and affect all our lives right now.  I don't want to go there in my blog as well and  to continue writing about unconnected things in a familiar way is a form of expression/outlet which helps keep me grounded; a stable, trivial place away from the rest.  But I'm aware this may not be the same for everyone, so I do hope anyone coming here will understand.

Thus today I'm just writing about art.

----

As I sloshed shiny brown paint onto an over-sized sausage formed from lumps of foam wrapped in paper, I had no idea about Bauhaus.  I don’t mean the band –  although they were soon to lure me into torn black lace dresses – I mean the art movement.  But I realise now that one of the very first projects we were given on my Foundation Art course was directly influenced by it.  The original Bauhaus Art School founder, Walter Gropius, was keen to encourage problem-solving and experimentation in different media, and 60 years later my college tutor Stella did the same.  It was a basic introduction to the study of elementary form, materials, colour and craftsmanship.

The resulting artwork, a collaborative effort, was a giant hot-dog, around 4 feet long, made with discarded objects and materials unearthed from studio rubbish bins and the like.  I can’t remember now if the things we found inspired the idea of a hot-dog, or if we were inspired by someone’s lunch.  It doesn’t matter – in true Bauhaus style we experimented with materials, solved construction problems and  thus transformed foam and paper, Copydex  and paint into a supersized weenie, complete with plastic Ketchup and woodchip sesame seeds.

Ah, such carefree, creative days and yet did I truly appreciate them?  I don’t think I did. 

So when I see art students now I get that whole feeling  back, but wish I could do it all again and not be so overwhelmed by all the silly things that most 17-year olds are overwhelmed by (or were then!).   Seeing fresh-faced art students, so often deep-thinking, slightly misfit kids with a taste for strangely matched clothes, gives me a genuine lift.  I think it's because it reminds me of all those opportunities to explore and experiment, to learn and be playful, in a field which really, when you think about it, is something of an indulgence.    However, perhaps given the situation we find ourselves in at the moment, we might appreciate the undemanding pleasure of  some art for art’s sake more than ever.

This is exactly what I felt the other night on watching the recent TV documentary about the Bauhaus School on BBC Four ('Bauhaus Rules', still available on iPlayer here  - interesting soundtrack too).   The delightful Jim Moir aka Vic Reeves took us to Central Saint Martins  where we met some young graduates who would spend a week working on various projects subject to the ‘rules’ inspired by the original Bauhaus artists who taught it.  From strange breathing exercises to a themed costume party and much in between it's a crash course I would happily sign up to now if it existed..  Oh, I wanted to be back in Stella's Foundation Art class, just starting out, feeling as if we're pushing boundaries (from the safe haven of an educational institution!), wide-eyed and curious (and sometimes a little defiant).  We oscillated between the opposing states of either taking oneself far too seriously or having ridiculous, unbridled fun, between being a quiet introvert on the one hand and having a distinct taste for the outrageous on the other.   

Anyway, in the programme, the students are set projects by established creatives from different disciplines who have all been inspired by the Bauhaus design principles.  One of these is Neville Brody and I was reminded just how much I love his graphic style and typography, with which many of us of a certain age are so familiar, thanks to his work in ‘The Face’ magazine.

Once you become aware of a certain Bauhaus style, you see it all around too, from chair designs to clocks to album cover artwork.

If you have some extra time on your hands and you’re into art, or perhaps anything a little left field (and/or Jim/Vic) I recommend losing yourself in this programme and the joy of art student thinking for a short while.  And even if not, maybe now is the time to abandon our genuine worries for a brief moment, turn to some easy escapism and playtime from the safety of our own homes, and set ourselves the task of making something creative and unexpected.

(Well, it has to be Bauhaus...)

Kick In The Eye 2

Take care x

Art therapy

Art and music are great therapy, aren't they?  So what better reason to write a bit more in the coming weeks on two of my favourite subjects and try to keep this blog alive and kicking while many will no doubt be joining me in the working-from-home ranks.  To help get me back into it I revisited some old series that I'd started on here long ago (seeing as I never seem to get past 2 or 3 'editions'), and one that sprang to mind recently (thanks to watching Jim Moir aka Vic Reeves' brilliant documentary about the Bauhaus art movement) was a tribute to my days studying art and design at college.  There was so much going on musically too.  More soon if I can get my act together, but in the meantime I hope you won't mind some repetition from several years back, just to get things flowing again.

Here's where I left off...

-------------

Much as I would love to claim to be the artist behind this poster, all credit must go to Simon, who was in the year above me at college and designed and drew this for a party in 1980. (If you should happen to stumble upon this, Simon, then I hope you won't mind me reproducing it here. I also hope you're still drawing!)   I think it's a great piece of graphic illustration, especially considering he was only 18 when he created it.

I've kept it for all these years because, much to my great surprise at the time, a good friend and I were immortalised in it. That's me, apparently, top centre, wearing fishnets and brandishing a cutlass, showing more feistiness (and flesh) than I think I ever did in real life. My beautiful college mate is nearby looking suitably sultry in a Cleopatra get-up. There are one or two others in the crowd which are wonderful caricatures of our fellow students, and I like the fact that Bowie and Jordan (the original) have made a guest appearance in the pic; sadly they never made one at college. All in all it kind of sums up 1980 art school life for me.

Even though I didn't make it to the actual party (I can't remember why), I can probably tell you fairly accurately what would have been played there. Musically 1980 had some interesting things to offer. A quick look at the year's indie charts reveals that the best-selling bands included acts as diverse as Dead Kennedys, Spizzenergi, Joy Division and Crass but in December's UK Top 40 you could hear Abba one minute and AC/DC the next, not forgetting singles by ELO, Kate Bush, Clash, Madness, Spandau Ballet, oh and... St Winifred's School Choir... what an odd mixture.  That month, John Peel aired sessions by the Raincoats, Theatre of Hate and Red Beat.

The murder of John Lennon just a couple of weeks before this party was shocking but, you know, I remember it didn't really touch me in any significant way at the time – unlike the deaths of Malcolm Owen and Ian Curtis earlier that same year.

A great dubby track from Red Beat.

Food for thought

Following a conversation in the kitchen this morning in which we mused upon the dilemma of what to eat if the shops become bare – ignoring the rather throwaway suggestion of consuming our own effluence (which would at least save on toilet paper) - we made some decisions.  

My mother-in-law would survive on the countless packets of biscuits which she’s been accumulating in her cupboard since 2009, Mr SDS would tuck into his many pairs of cheap sunglasses which he feels compelled to get each time he passes one of those carousels in the garden centre, and I would feast upon my stash of 2H pencils (they last longer) washed down with Permanent White gouache.  

Sorted!

Stress-buster

Quickie post:  Heard on 6Music today, and you know when your ears just prick up and you stop what you're doing - it's just too good not to want to say "Hey, what do you think of this, I love it!"  in the hope that someone else will agree.  Reminds me, sort of, of the more melodic elements of New Model Army... there must be others that I can't bring to mind too at this moment but it's got that whole bouncy, aggressively energetic post-punk feel to it... '80/'81, Peel... you know what I mean.  Probably a very appropriate title for many of us on this spinning rock right now too.  Apparently the band, Talk Show, are from South London.  Some great healthy stuff going on in the music scene right now it seems to me - will be listening out for more.

Talk Show: Stress

Identity? Part 2...

Sorry it's been a while, I've been hard at it and time just flies.  But last night I found myself jumping about like a flea on Espresso -  I was so excited (honestly it doesn’t take much these days, my life really is exceedingly dull...)

I’d sent some new illustrations to my agent to get feedback on the entirely different technique I’ve been immersing myself in (i.e. doesn’t look anything like my existing work), and she came back with words I’d been secretly fantasising about hearing. 

 “Yes!  Please do more like this...” she said, which was lovely, but it was this bit that got me bouncing: “...so we can upload them to the website under another name”.

Another name!  Haha, if I can pull this off then I have, you know, proper permission to create a whole new alter ego.  Sadly, this thrills me far more than it’s probably wise to admit.   Like an adolescent who’s invented their band’s name and album title before learning their first guitar chord, I’ve already decided on a pseudonym. (Just have to make a lot more work before I can use it, but what an incentive.) I'll be looking at wigs next. Maybe coloured contact lenses?

The different persona thing is quite common in illustration so clients don’t get all confused, they like to see a name and know what they’re getting, not get befuddled by the crazy notion that an artist may have more than one style.   Like authors, of course, when they use different pen names.   

This got me thinking about all those musical aliases as well; I  totally get why bands and musicians might want to work on spin-off projects without affecting identities they’ve already established. XTC did it (exceedingly well), and the Damned, Elvis Costello... I'm sure you can think of many more.

Because, don’t we all want an alter ego from time to time?!

(XTC as) The Dukes Of Stratosphear: Vanishing Girl

Alien invasion

Aargh, I’m feeling very sorry for myself.  I’m on antibiotics and painkillers, thanks to a nasty infection inside one of my cheeks (apparently the culprit is likely a cracked tooth).  The right side of my face now resembles a cross between a Cabbage Patch doll and a chipmunk.... all swollen as if I’m storing nuts in it for the Winter, skin shiny and stretched like an overblown balloon - it’s not a good look.

And it hurts and I’m tired and and antiobiotics bring you down, don’t they?  So what do you do when you feel like shit?  You find yourself irresistibly drawn to tacky 1960s so-bad-they're-good sci-fi films ...

Thank goodness for ‘The Terrornauts’ being aired on the charming ‘Talking Pictures TV' channel earlier today.  I’ve caught quite a few gems (I almost typed ‘germs’ then, how apt) on this station, I get hooked in quite easily by anything from the ‘30s and ‘40s for instance, often with wooden acting and those strange clipped British accents that no longer exist.  And the outdated language – those frightful scoundrels!   I’m mesmerised by the décor in the houses (they can make me feel quite funny, as if I’ve been there in a previous life).  Ancient city sequences do it too – the sit-up-and-beg cars trundling down half-empty streets and thin people in hats and coats looking in Georgian-glazed shop windows, or those heady bucolic scenes where the birdsong is overpowering and you can almost smell the blossom, even in black-and-white.  Frequently the stories in these films come second, I just like immersing myself in their atmosphere.

1960s films are natural favourites too;  style and fashion and subject matters often more resonant, some evoking my own ‘60s early childhood – and movies featuring bands or groovy soundtracks are of special interest of course.   But there’s nothing quite like the ambitious yet amateurish props and op-art sets of 1960s sci-fi to soothe a sore face.

For sheer silliness ‘The Terrornauts’ (1967) had it all.  I curled up on the sofa this morning and welcomed its ridiculousness.  The main hero, Joe, played by Simon Oates, was immediately recognisable from his role in popular TV series ‘Doomwatch’ and stayed quite serious to the last even though he had to deliver a classic f’nar f’nar moment  about a strange alien device, “It’s a kind of vibrator, can’t you feel it?”  

His sidekicks were a somewhat mixed bunch including Charles Hawtrey , immediately bringing to mind the Carry On films, and Patricia Hayes, whose comically prosaic lines delivered in characteristic Cockney accent didn’t disappoint.    I love the way some people  can be abducted and transported through outer space in the middle of the night and yet they never panic...   

As hoped, and expected, there were plenty of kitchen implements too disguised as spacecraft, swimming cap headwear with wires attached (that our heroes plugged into funnels on top of boxes through which ‘knowledge’ could be transferred to their brains), a feathery sort of monster with tentacles, one crab claw and a juddering (cardboard?) eye on its side worthy of any small child’s drawing, and some nasty alien ‘savages’ with green skin wielding spears, whose thirst for (female, of course) sacrifice put actress Zena Marshall’s life in danger...  sort of.

Here's a brilliant trailer:

Just the tonic I need, especially as I'm looking and feeling like I've been invaded by aliens myself right now.  Pass the penicillin...!

Forever punk?

"Oh YES, that’s exactly it!” I exclaimed excitedly at the telly.  Or, more precisely, at Chris Packham on the telly.  And it happened more than once as I watched the recent BBC Four programme, ‘Chris Packham - Forever Punk’;  it was that jubilant feeling of being a kindred spirit, that understanding of why a certain musical movement seemed so important to those of us who felt like outsiders in our early teenage years (and maybe still do...)   Confirmation that punk was there for us and, yes, it did change things.

I’ve never really felt I’ve been able to get this across effectively to anyone who either ‘wasn’t there’ or who only picked up on what the papers urged them to at the time.  I remember once, soon after I’d left school in the Summer of ‘79, I was talking to a friend I met at college and it turned out that her neighbour had been my former Geography teacher, Mrs T.  Apparently a conversation about me had taken place  – I’d made quite a name for myself at school being the only girl there with an overtly punk image (which got me into a lot of difficulty, but that’s another story).  Mrs T told my friend she had been surprised when I had become a ‘punk rocker’ (a term which only people who didn’t get it would use!) because I was too (in her words) "nice”...   always the quiet one, a nerdy, shy student... it didn’t fit with the media’s portrayal of punks as gobbing, spitting, fighting yobs.

I never knew any gobbing, spitting, fighting yobs who were into punk.  Not one.  Any bristling aggression against the world, against injustice, right-wing politics and persecution - all valid targets - was channelled into music.  We were harassed and insulted by many non-punks, though.  Shouted at from across the street, barred from pubs and shops before we’d even opened our mouths, chased, even beaten up for our choice of clothes and hairstyle.  All this abuse came from non-punks – and often the straightest of people.  Funny, that.  What was it they found so threatening, so offensive, about a few kids in fluffy mohair jumpers, bleached hair and badges?

One of my “Oh YES, that’s exactly it!” moments during the programme came when Chris articulated how inaccurate that thuggish tabloid caricature was and that punk had been much more about inclusiveness.  Right from the start my own experience illustrated this too – punk felt like a place where us ‘outsiders’ could be on the inside, on our own terms.  The scene at my local music venue was a perfect example; a friendly gaggle of local teenage punks alongside a motley crew of others who just fitted in for not fitting in elsewhere.  And they genuinely liked the music.  C with his shoulder-length hair and Afghan coat, L with his thick-lensed glasses and total lack of sartorial style, a good few years older than the rest of us and like a kindly uncle, plus his biker mate W.  N, who booked all the bands, a little bloke in little round specs and a big hippy greatcoat.  At one time there was J, a lovely black guy who put flour in his hair to give it a bright white streak, as well as ex-public school boy/geeky punk E.   As Chris said in this interview in the NME , “Punk was never unkind.  It was about fairness and equality.”

The documentary drew attention to the causes with which punk associated itself, such as Rock Against Racism, and how the release of the Tom Robinson Band’s single ‘Glad To Be Gay’ early in 1978 was a ground-breaking moment that could only have happened at that special point in time, proof of punk’s whole ethos of defiance and standing up for the right to be different. 

In my view punk was a brief, once-only event, and from its early, genuinely rebellious and more creative/artistic origins, aspects of  it inevitably evolved in ways that weren’t always so positive (e.g. the Oi! movement) – then, as so often happens, things became more watered down and appropriated.  But other good things happened because of it. Now too we have a whole new crop of bands clearly influenced by it (e.g. Idles, Slaves, Savages, Fontaines DC, etc.) and the state of contemporary music is all the better for them.  I guess we still call them punk but it's intrinsically different just through no longer being a new nor shocking phenomenon.   Still, if we go right back to what drew us to punk's initial incarnation all those years ago, it does make sense that its spirit should live on forever.  For me that doesn’t mean trying to dress like you did when you were 15, nor even playing your old Adverts records all that often, it’s about maintaining faith in who you are, caring about equality and staying true to what you believe in, however non-conformist that may be in the eyes of the mainstream.

I won’t give too much more away about the programme in case you haven’t seen it and want to catch it on BBC iPlayer (here), but it was interesting to see some old faces and to be reminded of how well a lot of people have come out of it (even though our teachers may have told us we wouldn’t!)  Many are still motivated to bring about some positive change in any small way they can.  I came away feeling quite uplifted and even more pleased to have this history in common with Chris, whom I’ve long been inspired by and admired for all things nature-connected anyway.  And he does have a fantastic record collection!

We’re not so bad, eh, us old punks?!

Chris Packham's all-time favourite punk song is 'Shout Above The Noise' by Penetration,

but this is the Penetration song that truly spoke to me...