The Month in Mood Board - the creative shot & affirmative horror

Remember, remember. This November things got darker. And deeper, as I began to ponder my grandmother’s love affair with horror legend Boris Karloff. I tried to NaNoWriMo it, and spent a cosy afternoon with my shadow...

“Why don’t you cover a big cork bulletin board in bright pink felt, banded with bamboo, and pin with coloured thumb-tacks all your various enthusiasms as your life varies from week to week?”

— Diana Vreeland

My Grandma Loved Boris Karloff

My mum’s mum is a woman of mystery. How she went from being a petite, chignoned blonde to a Les Dawson-in-a-dress-look-alike is not so much mysterious, as evidence of what life and 12 (actually 13-but-that’s-another-story) kids can do to you. Beyond this, however, we know very little.

One of the few things we do know for sure is - she loved Boris Karloff.

She would have been 10 when his seminal film Frankenstein came out in 1931. And by the end of the 30s she was an usherette. So, I asked myself a question: could the films of Boris Karloff help me to know and understand my grandma a little better?

Watch this space…

Why Kids Should Watch More Horror

Imagining my 10 year old grandmother going to see Frankenstein at the pictures got me wondering: is horror bad for kids? Or did they know stuff we didn’t way back?  Because in the early days of cinema there weren’t really kid-specific films.

Cue Spirit of the Beehive where a young girl gets fixated on Boris Karloff’s creature when a travelling cinema showing Frankenstein comes to town.

According to Greg Ruth - NY Times bestselling author and comic artist - by over-sanitising what children watch:

“We deny to our kids the full measure of what we experience and suffer as adults, but they aren’t idiots and know something’s going on, and what we’re really doing by accident is robbing them of the trust that they can survive.”

Ruth says, as a kid, he wound up finding:

“[A] great sense of trust in scary movies I never got from my parents, who tried to comfort me by telling me ghosts weren’t real. Horror told me they were, but it also taught me how to face them.”

Me & My Shadow - an afternoon with Hanna Ehlers-Bond

Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung had a theory: we all have a shadow self.

Jungian analyst, Aniela Jaffe described the shadow as the:

“[S]um of all personal and collective psychic elements which, because of their incompatibility with the chosen conscious attitude, are denied expression in life.”

And Jung said:

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

And, so that’s what we were doing one Saturday afternoon shrouded in candlelit darkness...

NaNoWriMo November

November is dedicated to that bucket list of a To Do - write a novel. AKA National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo). You can join a global and local community of writers all aiming to get 50,000 words written in 30 days.

Sounds crazy, but it’s doable. Think: 1,666 words a day and it sounds better, right?

Inevitably, stuff happens and you’ll get behind. But NaNoWriMo has solutions - one of which is Twitter Sprints. Basically live prompts of varying lengths where you write as much as you can for 20 minutes, 10 or 5 even.

NaNoWriMo gets you started and over your self doubt. Like Bird by Bird author Anne Lamott wrote:

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.”

Because your first draft won’t be Dostoyevsky or even Dr Seuss, it will be shitty. I wouldn’t even call mine a first draft, but more a massive, grammar-absent, spelling error-infused stream of consciousness. Embrace it, and maybe there’ll be the odd gem glinting amongst the rubble...

SEVEN Do Twenty One’s Pecha Kucha Night - #PK125

Pecha Kucha anyone? Turns out it’s a time-limited way of presenting initially imposed on talkative architects.

For me and the SEVEN collective it meant 3 minutes for two of us to present something on our sketchbooking project. Three minutes meant forty (odd) Southend-based creatives could get to speak about their stuff in one single evening.

Which meant we heard about everything from Wild Essex to contemplations on ageing and death, learning to tap dance, and, of course, TV censorship across the globe - which wound up in a Cinema Paradiso-esque montage, but instead of kissing there was a lot of swearing and a guy having his face minced up by a handheld power tool...

Notes to Strangers - affirmation, schmaffirmation

I discovered the artistic phenomenon that is Notes to Strangers (NTS) earlier this year. And ever since I’ve been thrilled to stumble upon NTS posters across London. Then this month Andy Leak (Mr NTS himself) displayed a selection of his posters at the newly opened Browns East.

A rainbow array of posters were suspended like flags across the entrance to the showroom: words of advice, inspiration and sometimes just plain silliness upon them.

One of my faves so far:

“Everyone is winging it.”

Secondhand Style First

TRAID’s #Secondhandfirst Week is dedicated to celebrating the power of reusing the clothes and other resources we already have.

According to WRAP - a body dedicated to delivering “practical solutions to improve resource efficiency”:

Clothing has the fourth largest environmental impact after housing, transport and food.

TRAID goes onto say:

Sourcing more of our clothes (and other goods) second-hand is a practical way of immediately adopting a more sustainable way of living.

Plus, personally I still get a thrill from discovering a charity shop gem.

The Month in Mood Board - dark stories, lessons on perfection & Salvador Dali

October, the gold, amber and ruby leaves are falling, revealing skeleton black branches beneath. Winter is coming. But before that it's time for whodunits, macabre fairy tales, stories from Hollywood's first century, and little teeth...

“Why don’t you cover a big cork bulletin board in bright pink felt, banded with bamboo, and pin with coloured thumb-tacks all your various enthusiasms as your life varies from week to week?”

— Diana Vreeland

You Must Remember This…

I stumbled on the YMRT podcast when Googling Carole Landis, an actress I heard mentioned but wasn’t all that familiar with. Thank you internet.

Because without that serendipitous search I wouldn’t have found Karina Longworth - who  writes, narrates, records and edits this fantabulous podcast:

“...exploring the secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first century.”

From the Dead Blondes season - wherein I found Carole Landis - to the career-wrecking communist witch hunt which was the Hollywood Blacklist YMRT is more than just stories about 20th century films and those who made them - which to me would be interesting enough.

It’s tales as old as time too. Tragedy and comedy are everywhere. And so too are themes of self-sabotage and hubris, just writ large-r and enacted with more drama (natch) and in better clothes than regular folks could generally muster in real life.

Oftentimes YMRT tales highlight socio-political issues too. The Jean & Jane season, for example, explores:

“[T]he parallel lives of Jane Fonda and Jean Seberg, two white American actresses who found great success (and husbands) in France before boldly and controversially lending their celebrity to causes like civil rights and the anti-war movement.”

Join her, won’t you?. (That’s a riff on Karina Longworth’s kinda catchphrase thingy). And if you love film or are interested in American history, then you definitely should.

Little Ashes - Dali, Garcia Lorca + Spain’s fascist past

A charity shop find, I’d never heard of Little Ashes. Turns out it stars a pre-Twilight Robert Pattinson as a pre-Dalí Dalí.

It centres on the lives of three artists: Salvador Dali, poet Federico García Lorca and filmmaker Luis Buñuel.

The story: An attraction between Dalí and García Lorca. The location: 1922, the School of Fine Arts, Madrid. What happened? Well, not that much is really known about it. But as the Roger Ebert website says:

“[I]n the conservative Catholic nation of the time, and given Dalí’s extreme terror of syphilis, it seems to have been passionate but platonic.”

While all three would go on to achieve fame. It was Dalí and Buñuel who wound up working together on the famous Surrealist film Un Chien Andalou - you know, the eye-slicing one.

García Lorca - whom I know little about - on the other hand went on to achieve acclaim with Gypsy Ballads (1928). According to the Poetry Foundation:

“His lyrical work often incorporates elements of Spanish folklore, Andalusian flamenco and Gypsy culture, and cante jondos, or deep songs, while exploring themes of romantic love and tragedy.”

Tragically Garcia Lorca was arrested and killed by Spanish fascists in 1936, aged 38. Although the whereabouts of his body and exactly whodunit are still largely mysterious.

Artist Descending a Staircase - now listen carefully...

Also featuring three artists and a whodunit, Artist Descending a Staircase (ADAS) is a radio play by Tom Stoppard. What’s more it’s a play which uses “a whodunit to frame metaphysical questions” on art and perception.

The three artists - Donner, Marbello and Beauchamp - are flatmates. And, when one, Donner, is found dead at the bottom of a staircase it appears his last descent was caught on tape...

“[T]the meaning of these aural clues ... depends entirely on the radio listener’s interpretation of them. Beauchamp and ... Martello, assume - quite understandably - that the recorded clues can only mean that one or other of them is a murderer.”

says the BBC blurb.

The answer to the whodunit isn’t really whodunit at all, but howdoyoudoit. As the NY Times says ADAS is:

“Mr. Stoppard’s larger inquiry into how people, and artists in particular, see the world (or fail to see it).”

And, we haven't even mentioned Sophie, a girl who haunts them still, a girl who happened to be blind...

Justine Leconte’s little teeth - a lesson on perfection

Of course in the world of social media appearances - both lifestyle and physical - are much debated.

Personally, sometimes I like nothing better than to think about clothes and I can often be found foraging on social media feeds for new-found inspiration.

To be honest I find much of the apparently unedited monologues on many a fashion vloggers output to be irksome to say the least. But then there is Justine Leconte.

Justine is a French fashion designer based in Berlin who talks in English on design, ethics, production, style and so much more. She’s knowledgeable, passionate, non-fluffy and accessible.

But guess what?

“At least once under every video I upload, everyone, I get a comment saying that I have small teeth. Do the people commenting think I didn’t notice? By the way “Justine Leconte teeth” is the second most Googled thing about me. Why does it matter so much? Truth is it’s a part of me and I embrace it. I don’t care. But imagine a 15 year old girl…”

She goes on to address who has the right to talk about low self esteem - err everyone. And she says her solution is always to:

“Try something new.”

A must-see vlog for anyone worried about putting themselves out there. In short: It happens to the best too.

SEVEN overcome perfection anxiety with rapid sketching

As former New York  art director Steven Heller writes in his piece on drawing and doodling for The Atlantic notes:

For most people, the big question isn’t “when did you start drawing?” but “when did you stop drawing?”

Something some of the SEVEN collective - have asked themselves. I, personally, gave up drawing when I felt life had gotten on top of me.

It wasn’t till much later that I found my natural inclination to draw was also something I needed - soul food, if you will. I find the process calming. It takes me out of my head - usually. And it’s grounding.

“When you draw an object, the mind becomes deeply, intensely attentive … And it’s that act of attention that allows you to really grasp something, to become fully conscious of it.”

designer Milton Glaser has said.

Skill is not the preeminent concern here. In fact Heller goes on to share a discussion he had with children’s book illustrator John Hendrix, author of Drawing is Magic:

“As a kid you draw without any thought to enjoying it. Enjoying it is assumed! Then we get to art school and learn there is a right way and wrong way to make images. ... But, then after that, we have to be trained to learn to play again.”

As Heller notes Hendrix believes:

“[F]inding enjoyment [in drawing] is an essential first step to finding good ideas.”

Tanith Lee reimagines Red Riding Hood with more bite

Long dark nights call for even darker books. This Halloween I reached for Tanith Lee’s Red as Blood (Or Tales From the Sisters Grimmer).

“[N]ine devilishly twisted fairy tales as the Brothers Grimm never dared to tell them.”

I picked Wolfland. A reimagining of Red Riding Hood, who is here called Lisel and could give Veruca Salt a run for her money. While the once dowdy grandmother is the Matriarch, Madame Anna:

“[A] weird apparition of improbable glamour.”

Because there is something a little off kilter about grandma. Oh my, grandma, what very blonde hair you have... And, oh my, grandma what long discoloured nails you have...:

“Grandmother’s eyes … were not so reassuring. Brilliant eyes, clear and very likely sharp-sighted, of a pallid silvery brown. Unnerving eyes, but Lisel did her best to stare them out … .”

Read on if you dare...

The Month in Mood Board - new terms, the power of uniforms & inspiring projects

September, second chance saloon for new beginnings, especially for the stationery lovers and the constant self-improvers (or, ahem, procrastinators) amongst us.

This month the SEVEN sketchbook collective began a new term, I re-pondered the power of the uniform, took a ‘lesson’ in history-meets-science-faction, learned a bit about the School of Doodle, and discovered the most dangerous word in the dictionary… .

“Why don’t you cover a big cork bulletin board in bright pink felt, banded with bamboo, and pin with coloured thumb-tacks all your various enthusiasms as your life varies from week to week?”

— Diana Vreeland

New Room New View - the peril of muddles

For months my stuff has been stacked and stored against the wall. My bedroom felt like a stockroom. Only it looked over the woods. I loved all those leaves. It was peaceful. But I felt a bit disconnected. And a bit stuck.

A move to the front of the house and things feel and look different. And I got to thinking of A Room With a View. I reckoned on finding an insightful view-themed quote. But wound up with these words of wisdom on the terror of ‘muddles’ instead:

“Take an old man’s word; there’s nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. It is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror - on the things that I might have avoided. We can help one another but little. I used to think I could teach young people the whole of life, but I know better now, and all my teaching of George has come down to this: beware of muddle.”

— E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

A uniform - it may look easy, but...

Speaking of muddles I’m still forever trying to capsulise (have I made up a word?) my wardrobe. Clothes alone do not maketh the stylish. Effortless style seems to be the answer to a tricky equation which entails - cheesy as it sounds - knowing yourself.

Here’s what a 1978 edition of the Washington Post reported French designer Sonia Rykiel as saying on the power of the uniform:

“It is most important for a woman to find her own form, her unique form … It is not uniformity. It is the place of a woman. Like her house, her bed, the street where she lives, the shop where she buys the food she eats. It’s a mixture of all this. And it is a unique place where she is completely herself.”

“The trick to discovering your ‘uniform’,” they asked?

“I can’t help. You must find it alone. She must try many things, look in the mirror. And keep doing it till you find your unique form.”

No shortcuts. Dammit!

The Boys From Brazil - a uniform project?

Just what does a fugitive Nazi war criminal wear in order to operate under the radar in ‘70s South America? Well, if you’re Gregory - Atticus Finch - Peck playing Josef Mengele in TBFB it’s a too white suit offset by too black hair.

I’m pretty sure the first I heard of Nazi SS officer and physician Mengele was in a book on vampires in film. Only thing, unlike Nosferatu, he was real…

His assignment to Auschwitz gave him the opportunity to continue his pre-war genetic research. Famed for his particular brand of camp cruelty he became known as the Angel of Death.

Cold and sadistic, the candy-carrying ‘uncle Mengele’ had no regard for the lives of his victims - who were mostly children and mostly twins.

The Boys From Brazil - a novel by author of Rosemary’s Baby Ira Levin - imagines what he did next. Because Mengele got away.

Hunted by his own Van Helsing - Yakov Liebermann played by Laurence Olivier in the film - Mengele plots to kill 94 men aged 65. But what nefarious experiment could he be conducting now? Could it be anything to do those sneery, ice-eyed doppel…, no, triple-gängers perchance?

New Moleskine New Me? - plus that dangerous word...

It’s one thing for someone else to foil your plans. But what if you’re a self saboteur?

To me the ‘T’ part of SMART goal-setting stands for ‘trouble’. Work deadlines - fine. Personal deadlines? Not so much.

And, so it was while watching Cruise-Cameron action comedy Knight & Day that I had what Oprah Winfrey calls an ‘aha’ moment.

“Someday. That’s a dangerous word. It’s really just a code for ‘never’.”

Says Tom Cruise’s overzealous ‘I’ve got this’ agent Roy.  

Thus, my trusty new Moleskine academic diary has become, not just a way to refresh my year before, well, New Year, but an instrument with which to plan and create a future, which right now, I guess, is pure fantasy.

It’s back to the drawing board. Watch this space.

The White Bus Project - animation recreation

A truly smart person may not try to take young kids to the cinema. Staying the distance can be a feat of endurance. But what if they’re autistic, and have a meltdown over a small and relatively unobtrusive black hole in the floor? Yes, that happened.

That’s why my sister and I love the Southend-based, community-focused The White Bus project, which dedicates part of its programme to a season for children with disabilities:

These allow [the children] the opportunity to experience a 'big screen' film show while allowing parents and carers to relax, safe in the knowledge that, if their children are a bit boisterous (or even want to leave halfway through!), it doesn't matter at all.

Free (yes, free!), friendly and informal, the front seats are bean bags and there’s even a before-the-animation animation - in September it was Mickey’s Garden, a cartoon which seemed to be championing blanket-bombing gardens with insecticides. Ah, the good old days, eh?

The School of Doodle - connect, create & kick ass

Worried about our internet-addled youngsters? Maybe you should think again. Because Generation Z - teens roughly 12-19 - are making their creative mark. And it’s surprisingly sophisticated. Because of the internet.

As this intriguing article in the Creative Review said:

“After all, if the legendary stylist Grace Coddington talked about the inspiration of receiving Vogue by post as a child to her remote Welsh hometown, this group have grown up with entire universes of global culture to mine.”

What’s more:

“...Generation Z also loves to cut and paste, collage, and layer images, both online and off, using decoupage, pin boards and stickers. From fanzines, to hand drawn political slogans, cartoons, Gen Z also loves the aesthetic of hand-drawn, penned, or designed images. They love doodling dense detailed canvasses, with words integrated – and for the textures and gestures of the tools they use (crayon, felt tip) to make it feel more hand-drawn, imperfect.”

Which brings us to the School of Doodle an online ‘learning lab’ - whose strapline is 'create, connect and kick ass'. In other words it aims to support Gen Z girls and gender non-conformers to bridge the ‘confidence gap’. Here ‘doodling’ means ‘exploring’ and ‘leaning in’ means ‘standing up straight’ by learning to find your own ‘voice’.

I wanna join!

SEVEN Collective  - a new term

In the space between SEVEN collective ‘terms’ we were supposed to create something inspired by our #LAT2017 sketchbooks. Summer came and went and well, surprisingly, my SMARS - ‘someday’ - approach to goal-setting wasn’t working out.

So I wound up throwing around a few magazine pages. Played with random collage. And then used good old carbon copy paper to transfer the images onto plain paper. There’s nothing like a deadline to get you started...