This train terminates at Highbury and Islington, all change I repeat All Change. I moved house again, yes kids, I moved NORTH OF THE RIVER

As I assumed I have instantly become 17% cooler. (and 12% more arrogant). I’ve quit the day job and soon I will be embarking on a full time Art and Design PGCE course at the Institute of education.

So I have to stop swearing.

Blerg.

But it’s the thing again with the waiting for the internets to come in. A month ago I was in Spain for 10 days and internetless proper, it was hard for the first few days but I got into it. Now is not so bad as I have blackberry access and there’s always the option of lugging my novelty oversized laptop to a wifi pub or cafe l’internet. But still. Adds up to a poor online presence and little or no of the blogging.

Here is a painting I did of the house I was staying at in Espagna, it was roughly a million miles from everywhere. Poifect relaxy days and family time.

But just cos I’ve not been around much don’t think I haven’t been, you know, doing stuff. Before I left the South London massive I went to see my old friend Rokhsan at Tracked in Tooting, which was pretty Ace. Because I’ve been meaning to draw her for ages and I know her and stuff the self imposed sub conscious pressure of it all made my drawings a bit crap, this is the best one, I wanted to draw her full length to get in her awesome shoes

You honest to goodness owe it to yourself to check out her music. It’s super catchy and life affirming. I refuse to use any musicy adjectives to describe it because I’ll probably get it wrong, so you just have to listen to it yourselves.

Before she played this band Alms from Bristol were also on. I really liked their song Simply which you can hear on their myspace. They kind of reminded me of Kimya Dawson but I couldn’t tell you why.

Chris

I’ve been pressing on with the facebook project and have now drawn all the Chrises. Although I’m still a way off the end of the Cs. The project was featured by Balled Of Magazine last week as well, they always say the nicest things. It would be enough to make me blush if I were the blushing type and not the alabaster tanless type. I bought some half price Nicola Roberts fake eyelashes, but I havn’t worn them yet.

Forthcoming expect lots of nice fashion stuff as London Fashion Week rolls round again. And some more political stuff should be on the horizon too.

In recent journalising I did a (mostly) nice write up of the Cycling in London Exhibition and I also did an interview of Tigz Rice about her new book Bitten.

Last week I went to the Comica Comiket thing in Battersea Park, I met Paul Shinn and Cliodhna again, made pathetic fangirly conversation with Philippa Rice and oblique zine conversation with Mark Pawson. And I saw Paul Gravett, although I did not speak to him. I only took £10 on purpose so I didn’t buy much.

I had the same issue as with the Zine fairs I’ve been to – trying to judge books by their covers basically, as the likelihood of the actual writing in these things being super cynical and depressing is very high. Because, you know, it’s quite depressing being a massive geek and social outcast I imagine. Ha. But then there are really cool people who do this kind of thing as well, but trying to tell the difference with a quick flick through on a table is hard.

The actual hyper comics exhibition in the Pumphouse Gallery is really good though. I think the idea is all about taking Comics into new directions, literally, like different story strands. You can’t really do this in the book format without the old turn to page 156 if you think Joey should slay the monster, turn to page 178 if you think Joey should have a nice cup of tea format (although that is awesome obviously).

So the comics were all over the walls. Warren Pleece’s Montague Terrace has joyfully unlikely simultaneous timestreams, and Daniel Merlin Goodbrey has big complex multistrand puzzle type stories on big squares that take up the whole wall. There are 3 pieces about 3 aspects of The Archivist’s life, all aspects of which pretty much reflect a trippy yet compartmentalized view of life. Very fitting for the format, very very geeky, most definitely addictive reading in a way which again sort of reflects the total focus that these activities encourage. I think, well, maybe that’s not what he meant by it. I’m going to be an Ace art teacher eh?

The awesome awesome one was Dave McKean’s The Rut though. Well, I was expecting it to be super awesome, so maybe that affected my judgement a bit, but nah. Just Awesome. Really haunting, and evocative, looking at how stories branch in different ways and a moment can effect someone’s whole life, whichever way it pans out. Also. There is a bright red stags head mounted on the wall. You can’t get much better than that.

here is a collage with fish.

I haven't had much time for watching Big Brother these last few weeks

my boss had me on 9 to 5s at Dayjob#1 - how do normal people do it? guess i'm not normal people tho. who is? oh wait. dolly parton. right.

here's a picture of people, me on the left in the boots, Ali and Anna of TwoMagpiesFind are in the middle, at the launch thing for Fragments. I wrote two journalisms about it, one for Windsor local Beat magazine, which was a bit serious, and about my art and stuff, and another one for Amelia's Magazine which was a bit less serious, and about birds and Windsor and stuff.

this is a super budget phone photo of one of the paintings i did for the show - it has puffins!
Puffins are mental, how have they not died out yet! it's not survival of the cutest!


Also, what has been happening is I have been working on my ethical fashiony stuff for that Amelia's Compendium open brief. its too late you missed it.

I went to The Big Swish (it's where you swap your clothes but not with any naked) last week, (it was very fun, although there was Primark related controversy) anyway, I almost brought home a playsuit. almost. i didn't actually. probably for the best.

I forgot to write in my bit about me for the submission how much I love drawing pitcures of people taking photos of themselves, and of groups posing for photos. They are so ace. I love how you can go out one time, and on facebook there's this photo of you looking well chummy with all these people you didn't even properly meet. And I love everyone pulling thier photo faces, almost as much as i love catching people so not making their photo faces.



anyway everything is ok because i have drawn Nelson Mandelephant
please do not hink there is any kind of political meaning to him, it's purest wordplay. He came up in conversation at a grown up cocktail party come geeky sleepover I attended at the home of my cousin in Coventry. (see i told you I has had exotic adventures) which was awesome.

other adventures I have had recently include going to see some sshhhhhhhhakespeare at the globe theatre which i had not done before. That was Ace. there were lots of fat jokes.

Also I went to see Inception FOR FREE (due to my genius of being the most geeky out of 4 people!) it is super good, i recommend it a lot. love the ending - so cheeky!

Also i made a cheesecake. that was a while ago now but still a first. oh, before that i went strawberry picking as well! that's where the cheesecake had its genesis.

And I went to a pub quiz.

And i went to THE GYM.

that might be all of the adventures.

I am up to the Chrises in the facebook project. there are 8 of them. beaten by Daves with 10 tho.

I also did this interview with the amoresome Tigz for the magazine d'Amelia.

Oh ALSO. I am moving house again soon. NORTH OF THE RIVER. saints preserve us. i shall become trendy automatically i assume.

SO this week I have been doing some journalisting, for Amelia's magazine;
last weekend I went to Southampton and wallowed in nostalgia of various kinds, my review of Ejectorseat festival is up here
this is Baku Bankai, they make minimal dance/electronica, apparently (music talk is all french to me).

I also wrote a bit about the Nancyboy Decade exhibition I went to on Wednesday, I'm more proud of this one, will link to it when it's up.

All these little scenes kind of freak me out tho, I mean, I'm allways banging on about how I think people naturally form social groups of around 100 people and are happier and more productive that way (It's ironic because I'm a massive globalization junkie), so of course I expect people to mark out territory. The problem is that people seem really prone to acting like their mini group perspective is obvious and natural, and anyone coming from slightly leftfield is seen as a bit suspicious. I didn't write about this in the article, I wanted to be predominantly positive, and talk about the work (possibly not what Amelia was hoping for). But I do think it's really interesting. Part of it is a school days echo of desperately hanging on to a feeling of belonging to the cool clique.
Here is a drawing of hipster punters round a unintentionally distorted table at the Book Club, I really liked the venue, and I really like Liat and Klaus altho they were too busy (understandably) to really chat to me.

I'm not saying what I mean, and I worry I'm becoming London centric. If I put a little effort into it I'm at the stage now where I could go to some kind of launch and drink free wine most every night of the week here, it's a big city, there's allways stuff going on. It's not hard to crash things, they put up rsvps to guest lists on their websites, but that's what I'm doing really, crashing. And I'm a little bit over it.

Journalism is hard you know, I'm glad that's not what I want to do with my life.
I much prefer drawing pictures of Nicola Roberts (I super love her), this one is for Matt Bramford's cover of Graduate Fashion Week's Gala Show Finale


I also am very pleased with these creepy arm spiders I drew for Magpie Market's the Spider and the Fly logo competition. I didn't win, but it's the excuse to draw weird things that counts.

last night i went to the solipsistic pop 2 launch. it was a pretty fun night, it wasn't super dull at all. i kept my adrenaline levels high by repeatedly talking to strangers and aquaintances, and tenuously connected people. It was nice to see Cliodhna and Jimi there, the zinecore. zinescenecore. yeah. possibly.

anyway. It was awesome and stuff, the book is a thing of beauty, i like the weird comics best, there are a few themes like childhood memories and serendipity snapshot, defining moment type stories. my faves in the comic are Sweet Mystery by Jack Noel, Mud by Matilda Tristram and the back page of the funnies by Joe Decie, who i love anyway. postives positives. it's all good. go comics. I talked to a tall boy called Tom, and he said maybe i can be in Solipsistic Pop 4. so that would be uber cool.

Also at the event was the famous comedien Robin Ince, he talked about comics and philosophy. and mooning. I enjoyed it, especially the bit about the stranger. I failed to draw him and missed his second bit because i was talking to Barny's brother.

This is the story of how i met Barny's Brother: he had only just walked in to the pub but i saw his face as i was coming back from making a phonecall to my friend clare. I asked him if he was Barny's brother, he said he was. we had not met previously. Later i talked to him again and recomended that he read Love and Rockets. sometimes i can be a bit agressively friendly when talking to strangers. I get this from my dad.

Also some musiciens played. this is dogtanioni met them after by mistake, although it didn't look like a mistake, tho it was. they were very nice. i have mentioned before that i am not a music journalist even a little bit, so i will say that i enjoyed their tunes and lyrics. At the bottom in a different blue you can see my aborted drawing of Robin Ince. It was aborted (at 20 weeks) because he stopped talking and left. i should have started earlier, but you know, what's life without regrets?
this is Tristsamor one of him, them, it. whatever. as you can see. he is pretty. his music was too.

stuff and things.

I finally got round to making one of those facebook fan pages that all the kids are talking about. I'm going to do a silly project based there soon i think, you know like one of those, 365 drawings of my cat, or illustrating every single beatles song using only moulding icing projects. not actually one of those two. a different one.
my Cabal design is being made into one of 8 postcards of the super dog, which should be available in May. woo.

I went to see Chilly Gonzales on thursday and did some drawing. he is a great entertainer and awesome musician, but very tricky to draw as his head is allways moving, hair greasin' and flinging about, fingers flying across the keyboard, that sort of thing. here are the 2 i was happy with.

yeah, he was wearing a dressing gown and slippers, the girl is the one he molested as a finale. guess he wanted to make his audience feel violated. the hipsters were loving it.

I also found one of my favourite band drawings i ever did which i am scanning in for your pleasure here:
it's of a band called Skitanja who i saw in 2007, obviously, they seem to like dressing up.

last night I went to the Little Philistines single launch party in exotic Kilburn. the last time i was out in North London in the evening it turned into a poetry reading. those kids are crazy.
me and fran got there just in time to catch the end of Thom Main's nice guitarry set, he is not, as i had assumed, actually married to David Cronenberg, but is the singer out of a band called David Cronenberg's wife.
the problem with seeing live music, especially in small attractive venues in North London, is that people don't dance till the headlining act comes on and even then they don't dance properly. this is an issue for me because when there is fun music happening, my hips and feet tend to go off of their own accord.
so to avoid embarrasing myself too much i decided to draw the bands instead. i love drawing live musicians, they make awesome shapes and faces. It's a bit attention whorish drawing in public, but what can you do? i networked with some of the nice hipsters. this is the stars down to earth, the drawing is a bit budget because my fineliner was running out. their music was very fun and tuneful, probably my fave after LPs. there was a female drummer, like in FAME. no really, they were good, i'm not a music journalist. thats all i have to say. I was drawing from the balcony and couldn't see half the band, so this is only 3 of them.

next up was Dora Brilliant who were also awesome, great timing, i especially enjoyed the way the songs ended suddenly when you weren't expecting it.
i drew manormouse? in blue fineliner and red biro to mix it up a bit. i'm crazy like that. i remember that i liked them as well, but i didn't make any notes and by this point in the evening i had had quite a few red wine and cokes so i don't remember why.
a kind hipster at the bar impressed me with the ablo aspaniel knowledge by telling me the spanish name for red wine and coke. I have been told before but i can't make the word stick in my head. i forgot it again as soon as he told me.

it was then time for the main event and there was a very exciting video piece shown with paper fire and artistic cutting. disapointingly, the Little Philistines had not brought any of the paper fire with them to decorate their set, but they were very good anyway. got to do some dancing as well. The girl singer is prettier than in the drawing and she had a very exciting orange and black dress which is not featured.
In honour of because he is my friend and invited me i also did this quick drawing of John Riordan playing the trumpet with his head on fire. Horay!

after that some of us lived in south london so went to get the last tube.
when i got home i had a super sandwich with Homous, cream cheese, wafer thin smoked ham, some lamb stew and cucumber in.