There's a Rose in my VaJayJay For You

What is a fun thing to do with your buddies on a Saturday night? Yes that's right, it is drinking Dr.Pepper and vodka, eating Tangfastics and Pringles, and playing a Tipping the Velvet drinking game. Here are our rules:


Drink for vaginal imagery, i.e. oysters

Kitty throws the rose

Drink at antiquated Victorian sexual swearwords.

Boobies

Rachael Stirling (Nan) does terrible, terrible overacting

Appearance of antique dildo

"Whitstable"

Sarah Waters in the credits

Moment of melodramatic emotional crisis

Sexy smoking

Deep voice while unconvincingly passing as a boy

Music-hall style montage of Victorian doings

GAY.

If you hear "Oh Kitty!", down your drink



I recommend this as a fun activity. Ah, Tipping the Velvet. (Wahey!) Enjoy the hottness of Keely Hawes and Jodhi May, and put up with the ridiculous over-acting of Rachael Stirling because she is also hot when in drag.

Been Trying to Meet You, Velociraptor

My friend Nick just showed me this fantastically silly video.



Why am I suddenly seeing the comic value of dinosaurs? (It must be the 'cellphone in a pile of dinosaur poop' gag from Jurassic Park III. Saw that on telly the other day.) There's also this one of Phillip from a while back.



(That's from the BBC's The Wrong Door, but I'm pretty sure that's the best thing it did by a long shot.)

Five Finger Discount

Thought I'd post some pieces I did for an artwork exchange with a girl in the States. I took some photos before sending them off. They aren't that great - I mean, I didn't have too much time to spend on them, but even beyond that they're not that great. Oh well. I didn't have a particular subject I was supposed to do, so I just reached for what was convenient.

(Just in case you hadn't gathered the theme by now...)

Bikes in the Hallway

Here are a handful of photos I took of the bikes that have latterly inhabited the hallway of my house. Or at least the ones that were vaguely in focus - my camera sucks! So here we have Tim's pink and blue fixie and his Ridgeback hybrid, which Kaia rode. That's about as knowledgeable as I am capable of sounding about bikes, but I do admit they are pretty.














P.S. Not that we would ever keep bikes in the hallway because our landlady expressly forbid it in case they messed up the carpet. (You all better swear to that under oath, our landlady is a scary woman. She looks like Margaret Thatcher.)

Nom Nom

So this is one of the best books I have read this year. Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow - you should read it immediately! However I don't have the energy right this minute to tell you why it's so good, instead I want to look at the cover. You'll just have to trust me on the top-notch quality of the contents. (Lyrical, moving, thrilling, emotional, intelligent, evocative, powerful, many more dramatic adjectives, flippin' cool! etc.)

Sharp Teeth, the American cover.

Sharp Teeth, the English cover, Vintage.

Which do we like best, English or American?

Personally I am inclined to prefer the American cover by a long shot, although the basic image works well for both. The US cover is bolder, brighter, no clutter whatsoever. (My in-person UK edition has reviews on the front too, which would be much better stuck on the back.) The design, I guess for both, is by Suzanne Dean, and the illustrations are Natasha Michaels - there are some more fantastic stark black dog illustrations throughout the novel.

Man, I always end up preferring the American edition of books to the UK editions. It's a few details like the matt covers and the floppier binding, but I would also go ahead and make the generalisation that the design just tends to turn out better. Bolder, less generic. But hey, maybe it's just my America obsession making me biased.

P.S. Read Sharp Teeth.

Googly-Eyed Weirdo

I can't believe it took me this long to see the following Buffy/Twilight mashup. It basically demonstrates that Edward Cullen is a creepy, stalkerish pain in the butt, and that Buffy, bless her heart, would not put up with that kind of nonsense. This video is also really, really well put together, IMO. Watch it.

Merry Popsaversary!

Happy Father's Day! Now if you'll excuse me I'm off to give my pleasant and beardy Dad a call on the banana phone. And then on the real phone.

Here's the card I mailed to my Pa.

Stamp Stamp

Been making quite a few things with eraser stamps lately. It is basically the cheapest form of print-making possible, and so is suited for someone such as myself who has that pesky print bug but also no money.


Here are some robot buddies (I also put these on the back cover of my next zine) and here is how it's done:


You get an eraser, the very kind with which you get rid of your pencil mistakes, and then you take a craft knife and carve the thing, and then you use any average cheap inkpad to ink it up, and then you print with it. Could not be simpler. It's not the most durable medium, but you can still print it a whole lot of times before it gets fuzzy and corroded. And you are limited by the size of erasers you can buy. I really need some jumbo novelty erasers.

I'm also fairly sure all my efforts look goofy and childlike, but I sure have fun doing it and they're good for postcards and a few other things.

(By the way, I know I keep saying 'eraser' for these things, which is the American word rather then the English way of saying it which is 'rubber'. But since I lived in America I just can't go back to saying 'rubber' with a straight face. Y'all know what I'm saying.)


Here are some trainers. My friend saw this and was like "Oh, I like that one of a monkey. You know, a monkey kicking a tuning fork...oh it's a trainer. Never mind." That boy's mind is a wonder.

Here's my last Christmas card.

This mountain range here was actually done my my talented girlfriend. Isn't it awesome?! This is way better than my crappy attempts, I don't know why she doesn't do more art.

A couple of cityscapes, fairly obviously inspired by Portland, OR.

And some leaves. Leaves are fun to do.

(Sorry yet again for the crappy photos. I'll have access to a scanner soon.)

Coming Soon...

What's this? Could it be the cover for the next issue of our thrilling zine Enthusiasm, which you should all be familiar with by now? Yes, I think it is!

We're almost there with Issue Four, and it's going to be full of all sorts of interesting things to read and look at.

Who's excited? I know I'm excited. You in the back, I can tell you're excited.

(Apologies for the crap picture. It'll look better photocopied, stuck on the front of the zine and in your hands.)

Untitled

Untitled, execution date 1982-1986 print date 1999, dye-transfer

I've been meaning to post the rest of these photographs by William Eggleston for ages and ages. I posted a couple before because they reminded me of Gregory Crewdson. Well, William Eggleston is pretty much my favourite photographer of ALL TIME EVER. I saw an exhibition of his work at the Hayward gallery in London when I was about 16 and it utterly blew my mind. Beautiful stuff, and I have to admit Eggleston is inextricably tied in with all of my romanticised images of America. I don't need to be back in teh 70s, but I do need to be back in the America in these photographs.

Untitled, execution date print date c.1970, c-print

Untitled (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), execution date print date 1987, c-print

Untitled, from the Los Alamos series, execution date print date 1978, c-print

Untitled, execution date 1980 print date 2000, c-print

Untitled (Berlin), Execution date print date 1983, c print

Untitled, portfolio Eve's Bayou (1997), execution date 1980 print date 1997, dye-transfer

Untitled, execution date 1970 print date 1996, dye-transfer

(You might recognise the photo above from the cover of the new paperback of Ali Smith's collection The First Person and Other Stories, which I am reading at the moment. The Accidental also had an Eggleston on the cover.)

Books Illustrated

Elizabeth Bennett, by Colleen Coover

If you like literary figures, and you also like illustration, then boy do I have the blog for you!

"Hey Oscar Wilde! It's Clobberin' Time!!"

(I can't really work out what this blog is actually called, but it does have a header of The Thing announced his intentions to open up a can of whup-ass on Oscar Wilde, so we'll go with that.) Some fella has been collecting illustrations of literary figures/authors/characters since 1998, and there they are on the web for anyone to look through! The breadth of material here will keep you going for days (I know I've spent far too much time scrolling through), and the quality level of the artwork is just incredibly high. Aside from too many caricatures of Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut (that's book-reading Americans for you), there's probably everyone's fave author/character here. Plus Gene Ha, Jim Rugg, Will Eisner, Mike Mignola, Terry Moore, Trina Robbins, Kate Beaton, Bryan Lee O'Malley, Chris Sprouse, Neil Gaiman, and every other illustrator you've ever heard of. I don't know how this guy managed to make friends like these. Anyway, enough gushing, enjoy.

Kavalier and Clay, by Steve Rolston

Orson Welles, by Ethan Vansciver

Tom Sawyer, by Kirk Leonard

Don DeLillo, by Brian Wood

Douglas Adams, by Tom Fowler

Don Quixote, by Dice Tsutsumi

Point and Laugh

How have I gone so long without this website in my life?

Look at This Fucking Hipster

(Pretty much does what it says on the tin.) This site articulates one of my major thoughts on the subject, which is that hipsters are pretty flippin' cool and I secretly want to be one, but they usually take themselves far too seriously. Now, let's make our hipster checklist: layers, old man chic, granny shoes, all that American Apparel 90s acid-washed stuff, a lot of hair at the front, pretentious tattoos, fake geek glasses, wispy moustaches, one of those scarves which people are unaware have political connotations...

BY THE WAY: If I gave the impression I'm permanently up north now, I'm not til the end of June. I just had a trip to drop off my beloved at the airport (boo) and we visited the sculpture park beforehand. Just to clear that up.