The Month in Mood Board - style versus soul, word inspiration & sauerkraut

This February was oozing with unexpectedly purple sauerkraut, saw the beginnings of a greener wardrobe and featured a snow-white day or two.

But it all started with a magenta sock...

“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

The Phantom Thread - what a tangled web we weave...

A New Yorker review of The Phantom Thread says this:

“[I]in the opening minutes, [Reynolds Woodcock, 50s haute couturier,] pulls on a magenta sock, buffs the toe cap of a shoe, and, wielding a pair of hairbrushes, sweeps back his lightly silvered locks with solemn care, as if robing himself in a vestry. Yet this is not a film that dwells on style. It is a film possessed by a fear that style alone, or the quest for it, can cramp the soul.”

Inspired by the intricate mythologies of haute couture - think Alexander McQueen’s claim that he concealed messages within the layers of his garments - yes, but at heart The Phantom Thread is a gothic romance which draws on fairytale and film history.

Hitchcock - particularly Rebecca - Powell & Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, the Oedipus myth, Bluebeard, Beauty & the Beast are all woven into the mysterious, macabre and mischievous web of this movie.

As Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review concludes:

“More than anything, however, what “Phantom Thread” borrows from Hitchcock is his clammy-comic touch—a sense that love, at its fiercest, can be both protective and toxic.”

My Green Closet - is there a haulternative?

The trend for YouTube fashion hauls would, no doubt, make Reynold Woodcock spin in his impeccable mausoleum. I mean, I’m no stranger to a second hand / charity shop clothing haul. I can see the potential in everything!

But, at heart a haul screams of having no boundaries. Of not knowing where a trend ends and your own style begins. Hauls are a sure fire way to wind up with a wardrobe crammed with clothes but nothing to wear.

I reckon you probably can’t be well dressed with too many clothes - unless you have a valet or a stylist or a computer programme like in Clueless. To dress well with oodles of clothes at your fingertips takes the kind of time only teenagers or SATC’s Carrie Bradshaw can afford.

But this month, housebound and bedroom bound I took it upon myself to face up to the wardrobe overload which had been bothering me. Determined to create a collection both effortless in style and ethical in substance I discovered a new generation of eco warriors. 

Intrigued? Then I'd suggest starting with My Green Closet.

 

Estuarine - new theme & new ideas for a new sketchbook

Of course they say necessity is the mother of invention. Which is why, I think, SEVEN collective is all agreed we like the boundary-creating limitations of a theme. This time it’s: estuarine.

A word which sums up the ever shifting view here - part sea, part river, part land. The estuary is constantly in motion: concealing and revealing, concealing and revealing. A kaleidoscope of greys, greens, blues, shimmering silver, blank cloud and flaming sunsets.

And thus, that mysterious metamorphosis from blank page to ideas made manifest begins...

Sauerkraut - when red & white collide

Speaking of getting the juices flowing there’s a lot of squashing going on in sauerkraut.

As food trends go sauerkraut is having a moment. I started eating it initially because it’s meant to be good for your gut. And my gut definitely needs some goodness. What’s more it’s cheap.

So, when I heard there was a free sauerkraut workshop going on down at Chalkwell Hall one Saturday I was there, my Planet Organic organic cabbage in hand.

Turned out the guy running this free and friendly workshop was just as free and friendly with his food. This meant my pristine organic cabbage wound up squashed and be-salted with a beautiful-but-very red cabbage brought by the woman next to me.

The proof, of course, will be in the eating.

Snow, Snow, Snow, Snow, Snow - Kate Bush to the rescue!

In case you didn’t hear it snowed. I was working from home. I didn’t have to venture out. So, I sat at home, snug, warm and smug. Appreciating the muffled quiet and the crisp whiteness from afar.

Yes I went out. But on my own terms: like to wander in the woods. And I relished it. The quiet blankness of it. The black and whiteness of it. The Snow-White-Black-Forest fairytale magic of it.

In her song 50 Words for Snow Stephen Fry recites 50 spellbinding, surreal, sometimes silly sounding synonyms for snow:

“Drifting, twisting, whiteout...”

So far so snowy. But then we find ourselves in:

“Shnamistoflopp’n, terrablizza, whirlissimo, vanilla-swarm, icyskidski, robber’s-veil”

As one reviewer noted:

“...50 Words for Snow is ... packed with the kind of ideas you can’t imagine anyone else in rock having. Taking notions that look entirely daft on paper and rendering them into astonishing music is very much Bush’s signature move. … [A]n album that, like the weather it celebrates, gets under your skin and into your bones.”

The Month in Mood Board - great stories, revisiting the past, imagining the future

New year, new stuff to do, discover and get confused about.

So far, it turns out the T-Rex is a myth. Electricity is almost a character in the long-awaited Twin Peaks: The Return. I kinda joined the #DavidBowieBookClub. And, I found out a bit about Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who reckoned:

“New York, Chicago, Los Angeles — all will disappear like the dinosaur.”

Oh, my!

“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

The Real T-Rex - time to put the monster to bed, or is it?

From 50s B-movies to Jurassic Park T-Rex has stood tall. Stamping his beady-eyed, razor-toothed, killing machine monstrousness on our collective cultural consciousness with one giant step.

But, it is just this vision of the T-Rex which naturalist Chris Packham set out to dispel in his programme.

“I fell for a dinosaur in 1965 ... but it was the wrong dinosaur. It was fat, slow, stupid and wandered around in swamps. It was grey, or green, and by the time I was ten I suspected that the lumbering monster from the movies and TV – and even my treasured books – was just not viable as an animal.”

Turns out there’s been a bit of myth-making around this monster. The science of today means everything from the skin, to the brain, to the way T-Rex moved are being reassessed.

It seems to be that the erect, Godzilla-esque killing machine was more horizontal, possibly colourful, maybe even feathered. And, far from being a Lone Ranger kinda guy could actually have been rather social...

“Perversely the most exciting thing about the programme is that it’s probably already out of date, or will be by next month. ... That’s the real joy of T. rex, that’s why its fascination endures – because we will never know everything we would like to.”

Hawksmoor - satanic architects & the #DavidBowieBookclub

Speaking of those fertile myth-making spaces between fact and supposition, let’s talk about Hawksmoor.

“His freemasonry, his fondness for “pagan” symbols such as pyramids and obelisks, and the lack of solid biographical detail have made [architect, Nicholas] Hawksmoor the ideal candidate for an 18th-century man of mystery.”

Says one Guardian piece.

The Peter Ackroyd book, however, distances itself from historical fact. Hawksmoor is a modern day senior detective. Nicholas Dyer the eighteenth century architect. And, Dyer’s churches the sites of a series of murders.

Place has a tendency to become entwined like entrails with people past and present in Hawksmoor. The fancy name is Psychogeography. But if you live above a Brick Lane chicken shop (like I once did) it’s much more matter of fact.

The Ten Bells - where some of Jack the Ripper’s victims hung out - was a stone’s throw, and Hawksmoor’s Christ Church Spitalfields a hair’s breadth away from that. It meant the streets behind our flat were frequented by be-backpacked tourists congregating en masse, enraptured by gory storytellers.

As Ackroyd said of writing Hawksmoor:  

“[It] teaches you how the past animates the present, but it also makes everything slightly hallucinatory.”

Back in the Brick Lane flat we used to joke that if you drew lines matching up all the local murder hotspots perhaps our flat would turn out to be the evil epicentre of it all.

I’d like to blame it on Iain Sinclair’s poem Lud Heat - which suggests that Hawksmoor's London churches form an invisible geometry of power lines. Or even Alan Moore’s From Hell. But I expect it was probably more Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Sunnydale Hellmouth.

Marshall McLuhan -  the first seer of cyberspace?

“Today [1969] in the electronic age of instantaneous communication, I believe that our survival, and at the very least our comfort and happiness, is predicated on understanding the nature of our new environment…”

Back in the 60s when his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man was being discussed all over the shop, media theorist, McLuhan was often dismissed too. I mean, sometimes even McLuhan didn’t seem to understand what he meant.

Maybe part of the problem was he was trying to bridge a cultural chasm he’d felt between him and people just 5-8 years younger than himself. And his observations and predictions were tad ahead of his time, as this newspaper article suggests:

“[In] the introduction to a re-print of Understanding Media, renowned editor Lewis H. Lapham wrote that much of what McLuhan had to say made a lot more sense in 1994 than it did in 1964, what with two terms of Reagan and the creation of MTV. Twenty years after that, the banality of McLuhan’s ideas have solidified their merit. When Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, for example, compared the expansion of big data to the planet developing a central nervous system, that’s McLuhan. When Chief Justice John Roberts opined that an alien from Mars might mistake the smartphone as an integral feature of human anatomy, that’s McLuhan, too. ”

Confused? Intrigued? Watch this BBC Radio 4 / Open University mini-film and let to Gillian Anderson explain it all.

Or, read a lengthy but insightful Playboy article with McLuhan himself on Next Nature.

Story Grid Podcast - what makes a great story?

So I started the New Year as I meant to go on and joined a writing class. Well I say 'class', but it was more 'writing in the same room as other people' under the relaxed guidance of the Meetup organiser.

And, well, it inspired me to find a podcast on novel writing, cos I was feeling a little too freewheeling where my efforts were concerned, and there is only so much stream of consciousness one woman can excrete (is that what I mean!?).

Enter: Story Grid. Wherein wannabe novelist Tim Grahl and experienced editor Shawn Coyne “...discuss the ins and outs of what makes a story great.”

What I really like about the series is how Tim really puts himself on the line. Shawn trashes his early story ideas - backed up by sound reasoning. And at times he’s just plain confused by Shawn’s Story Grid rules.

So what is Story Grid? Shawn explains it like this:

“The Story Grid is a tool I’ve developed as an editor to analyze and provide helpful editorial comments. It’s like a CT Scan that takes a photo of the global story and tells me what is working, what’s not, and what must be done to fix it.”

Which is helpful, no? Yep, especially in an age when if you wanna get published you’ve probably gotta be your own editor too ...

Twin Peaks: The Return - is the real star electricity?

Speaking of grids electricity took on a life of its own in Twin Peaks: The Return. So much so, that I did a bit of research.

As the Welcome to Twin Peaks site says:

“From [sound effects] to the way Dale Cooper re-enters our world, electricity is all the buzz in Twin Peaks: The Return. In Part 15, it may have even contributed to Dale Cooper’s long-awaited awakening, the fork being the key to restoring the former FBI agent’s brain.”

Apparently electricity is a recurring motif in David Lynch’s work:

“I don’t know why all people aren’t fascinated with it. It makes beautiful sounds, and it makes a lot of times some incredible light. It runs many things in our world and it’s beautiful. It’s sometimes dangerous, but it’s magical.”

I guess Marshall McLuhan would agree.

The Month in Mood Board - Christmas, looking back, loneliness in life & art

The thing with Christmas present? It tends to be haunted by the spectres of Christmas past and Christmas future.

Sometimes that’s a warm and cosy feeling, overflowing with rosy-cheeked expectation. Other times it’s just a dread-filled pit of despair with tinsel on it.

So, perhaps it's time to go with the gloom in order to better appreciate the glitter?

“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

MR James - wandering in a haunted hinterland

Montague. Rhodes. James. What a name. Turn of the twentieth century mediaeval scholar. Provost of King’s College, Cambridge.

I like to think of his leading men as Brit versions of Indiana Jones. Slightly awkward, lone academics in lonelier locales intent on ‘looting’ some historic hotspot.

And, instead of Nazis they’re pursued by ancient forces beyond their academic comprehension - all the more harrowing for their just out of sight - was-that-a-man-or-a-bin-liner? - presence. No gun-toting, whip-wielding antics will help here, I’m afraid.

Watch Michael - original Paddington narrator - Hordern in Oh Whistle & I’ll Come to You (1968). Or listen to King of Horror Christopher Lee tell tales by the fire on Christmas Eve just as MR James himself did...

Inside No. 9 - cherry-picking = a recipe for delectable disaster

In fact MR James’s brand of macabre-meets-the-mundane has inspired writing duo Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith of Inside No. 9 fame.

A masterly mix of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected, comedy, horror, history and more, Inside No. 9 harks back to TV-past.

And it’s this wealth of storytelling techniques, from the Twilight Zone to Shakespeare, which make every episode distinct.

Speaking about their inspiration Shearsmith told one interviewer:

“[W]e’re cherry-picking all our obsessions and teaching some people who don’t know about Hitchcock and things new tropes and new worlds.”

David Bowie - innovation can be a lonely place

Speaking of inspiration and innovation David Bowie was never afraid to take his ideas and run with them - often into a future others hadn’t yet envisaged.

But innovation is often a lonely place, as Bowie’s son director Duncan Jones Tweeted:

“Creative arts can be painful. I remember my dad being beat up numerous times by critics, only to have those same people come back 5 / 6 years later & say that in retrospect the work was ahead of its time. Was even revolutionary!
Be patient. Good work proves out in the end!”

December Reflections - inspiration for dark times

When you’re out of sorts Christmas revelry can drag you down faster than Jacob Marley’s manacles. December seems to magnify everything: loneliness, loss, love, lust (if office parties are anything to go by), long-held resentments… . It can be a bumpy ride to say the least.

Which is why turning all that Quality Street jollity on its head and doing December a different way can be no less than soul-soothing.

Although I firmly believe we need a bit of light and glitter in the darkest days of the year, it should be a time to retreat and regroup too.

One way is to use some of December’s much needed down-time to reflect on the good stuff that came your way in the last year and get inspired about the year to come.

Which is why I’d recommend Susannah Conway’s December Reflections Instagram challenge:

“The idea is simply to take a photograph (and share it if you wish) every day in December while reflecting back over the year. I’ve provided a list of daily prompts with a mix of things to photograph — for example: sparkle, red, skyline — and things to ponder. The ponder prompts are an extra invitation to pause for a moment and consider some of your favourite bits of 2017.”

Sex & the City - the twisted fairytale of New York

If Christmas doesn’t get you then there’s always singledom:

“When did everybody stop smoking? When did everybody pair off? . . . I’m so bored I could die…”

Says an older-single-lady, before accidently plunging to her death.

Yep, this is Sex & the City, the show maligned for its self-obsessed, shoe-obsessed, sex-obsessed superficiality.

In truth I did turn to SATC for some trusty old style sustenance. But boy are those NY tales of dating and relationships dark and twisted - packing, not so much a punch, as the relentless grind of a cold, hard stiletto heel.

As New Yorker writer Emily Nussbaum says:

“[SATC] felt ugly, and sad, in a realistic way.

Most unusually, the characters themselves were symbolic. …[T]he four friends operated as near-allegorical figures, pegged to contemporary debates about women’s lives...”

Carrie Bradshaw begins the show all sassy and dressed-to-please-herself but winds up admitting that when it comes to love with the elusive Mr Big:

“I’m not like me. I’m, like, Together Carrie. I wear little outfits: Sexy Carrie and Casual Carrie. Sometimes I catch myself actually posing. It’s just—it’s exhausting.”

And eventually as Nussbaum says:

“[Carrie] became scarred, prissier, strikingly gun-shy—and, finally, she panicked at the question of what it would mean to be an older single woman.”

And so I couldn't help but wonder: Could I make dating any better?

Feud - how the macabre helped two movie stars make a comeback

While many women are trapped in the romance fairytale, many more are realising a girl’s best friend is probably her, well, friends.

But, still, a good old cat fight gets people talking. And one of the best shows in town was Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Cue: Feud: Bette and Joan.

Whether you were the most beautiful woman in the world or one of the greatest actresses of Hollywood’s golden age, actual age made Davis and Crawford hasbeens. Enter: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? A tale of two of twisted sisters, and yes, Hollywood hasbeens.

As the show's writers, Michael Zam and Jaffe Cohen told the BBC ahead of Feud’s UK debut:

“[W]hat makes Bette and Joan so fascinating is that they are both fighting for their dignity, their legacy, their futures, and their self-esteem. In other words: their lives. For them, this is the equivalent of life and death.”

So is Feud fact or fiction?

“As writers of historical fiction - as opposed to die-hard historians - our guideline is not what happened, but what could have happened … Drama is often described as the lie that tells the truth. In historical fiction, the lie simply needs to be plausible. It has to feel like it could have happened.”

I think this is what legendary magazine editor Diana Vreeland called ‘faction’.