That’s a fifth of my life, by the way.

It was five years ago today that I arrived in London from Perth. I came by myself, not so much fresh-faced as unwashed and desperately exhausted – the combination of a flight delay that totaled 30 hours in transit and the tail-end of a pestiferous bout of glandular fever that had forced me to postpone my trip by a month. I arrived alone, not knowing a soul in the city except for a couple of ex-Perth folk and my aunt, who I would live with for a time. Admittedly, I couldn’t have done it without her. She put me up, motivated me through my various job searches, supported me in finding me feet and included me when I didn’t know anyone else. I’m so lucky for that. Upon arrival, the first thing we did (after dropped my bags off) was head straight to the bar at the Tate Modern, to take in my new city and drink a bottle of wine on that grey, rainy afternoon.

If you asked me why I came, I’d feed you the average answers; I’d finished my degree and didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life / there was nothing Perth held for me / to explore the world / to find new options /  to have a new experience. Really, I wanted to throw myself across the planet just to see if I could. I wasn’t sure if I’d last three months, but I did. This place didn’t consume me and in some ways it made me better. I went out, got jobs, made friends, established networks. I even started a new degree over here. Now I’m almost as immediately ingrained in life over here than I am back home, in some cases more so.

I still miss home and the people inside it but when I’m back there, I miss London too. When I step on to the tube at Heathrow, I suck in the English air and smile as the scenery rushing past gets more familiar as the city looms through the panes.

So thanks, London. Thanks for being kind to me when you’ve seen it fit and for keeping me. Don’t get me wrong – you’ve been a total dick at times too, but the good things are enough to have made me stay all these years.

Happy anniversary.

And then Meat Cat flies away on his skateboard.

There’s all this stuff that needs doing, both for the magazine and uni. We have a month-long break but at least three-fifths of it will be spent doing work for either of those. Dissertation proposal / redo a couple of projects for assessment / redo the typography brief / photography ‘road trip’ brief / prepare content for new ‘book’ project / transcribe 40 minute interview / write up as 1300 word piece / transcribe 20 minute interview / commission illustrations / commission music interviews / the usual editorial email barrage. Bring on the long holidays, I say! Then I only have to worry about juggling magazine stuff with researching and writing my dissertation. Going away is nice. Not checking work emails is manageable for about 4 days but work inevitably piles up. In the end, you’re part of a team and you really can’t let them down.

Sometimes I wish I could just have, say, 2 weeks off from everything. No commitments at all. We’d go someplace like a cottage with a grassy expanse surrounding it. Clean and quaint with a couch and a large hunk of a wooden table. I’d lie on the grass under the sun and at night, watch films and spend time editing photos from the past year that I’ve had to neglect.

It was so sunny today.

Just yesterday I came back from a four day trip to Amsterdam with six friends from school, which was great even though we did end up having to stay overnight in Bruxelles-Midi station so we could catch our train back to London which had been rescheduled from 8pm the previous evening to the next one at 6am. Adventure, eh? Not my first time sleeping overnight in a foreign train station and I can only assume it won’t be the last.

That it was three years ago now – that first one -  seems like an impossibility. Lately the photos have started to come unstuck on the wall above my bed; every day I see one about to fall and I have to press it hard, back into the surface. You do anything you can to hold on.

One foot in front of the other.

I was heading back home from dinner at Karen’s – first by an attempt at the bus and then by catching the last tube east – when a song clicked onto my ipod. It was ‘One Foot In Front Of The Other’ by Bright Eyes, and though I’d listened to it countless times in other scenes, I could pinpoint the specific time and place of that song. It was 2004 and I was the back seat of a car driving the backstreets of Leederville in Perth, Western Australia. The song was being broadcast on the local public radio station, a track off the record company’s compilation. It was Spring then, September I think, and the weather was that confused mix of not knowing whether to turn on the air con or put on a jacket. No one demanded the air conditioning so we neglected it, and I remember how my skin prickled as it was tenderly coated with humidity. The other passengers were my sister and brother. I can’t remember who was at the wheel. We were heading to pick up a friend from his house before we drove into the city, to the office where we’d spend a day printing copies of the mini-comic zine that our small collective had been working on. I was in love with him then, I guess, and the combination of the near-heat and song made the muscles in my chest beat agitated against their bony frame.

I remember listening intently to the song, more so to the words. It got to the bit where Conor Oberst sings “the world’s got me dizzy again // you’d think after 22 years I’d be used to the spin.” He sounded like an adult to me, like even though he didn’t have it all together right then, he was going to. I was 18 at the time and I suppose I mentally earmarked 22 as the time when I should be as grown up. I wanted to have such profound words when I got there. I wondered if I could achieve as much too, even without the whole wunderkind baggage attached to my lapel. I thought of that song again when I did hit 22. I didn’t feel grown up at all. I don’t know what I was expecting. Clarity? Wisdom? That was all over six years ago now; I’m 25 years old. I do feel like a grown up, finally, though sometimes I feel like I’m self-consciously reaching out for what I expect the pinnacles of adulthood to be. I have a plan; it took me a while but I’m getting there. I’ve collected stories, but goddamn. I wonder if Conor was still dizzy after 25 years too.

Cinematic photography II: untitled outback thriller.

When we last spoke about the cinematic photography brief that I was doing for uni, I was talking about driving out into the Australian countryside and taking a series of photos based on isolated breakdown thrillers with a hint of ozploitation. In planning the shoot, I wanted to get the feeling of ‘Wolf Creek meets Picnic At Hanging Rock’. The model (my sister Emm) and was dressed in a white summer dress and heels, and I made her run around deserted yellow fields that we were technically trespassing on. Credit to my photog assistant (ie. Dad) too, who drove us around until we found what I finally declared to be the perfect location. It was a bright, hot and clear summer day with beautiful blue skies, so I played with the colours quite a bit.

The full set is up on Flickr here.

Bowlie 2.

Another ATP, another brilliant time had. Here’s some photos I took.
My friend Laura did a write-up of the weekend that you can read here.

Cinematic photography.

The new extra photography brief is titled ‘The Image To Come: How Cinema Inspires Photography’. It goes something like this: “This brief invites you to explore the connections between the two visual arts and how, in particular, the photography is informed by the memory and imprint of Cinemas vast image bank. … Your response should establish a narrative and do more than simply replicate an existing filmic work.”

The first step was to do some research into photographers whose work has a particular cinematic quality. A kind of tableux vivant take on photography, capturing narratives in static scenes. The photography tutors made some suggestions, some I’d heard of before and some that were new to me.

I’d stumbled on Gregory Crewdson before, in the photography gallery at the V&A, and was immediately taken with his work.  His photographs are elaborately staged with the aid of a professional crew. Aside from looking dramatically beautiful, it’s the scenes that he portrays: eerie suburban landscapes with a surreal sense of foreboding. There are hints of David Lynch in his pieces. From what I’ve seen, his work seems to follow two main strands: bedroom scenes (indoor) and abandoned car scenes (outdoor). The colours are fantastic in both. Admittedly, I’m less partial to the bedroom scenes but I love the car scenes. There’s a beautiful mystery to them.

Then there’s Cindy Sherman’s work in her Complete Untitled Film Stills collection. More of a Hitchcock quality.

Alex Prager is another photographer working in a cinematic style. I quite like her images of women, again quite Hitchcockian but also with elements, I think, of Pedro Almodovar thrown in – the vivid, highly saturated colours; the melodrama of the strong female characters.

And speaking of Almodovar, his films also take beautiful photographic stills.

And finally, here’s an image that a street photographer snapped in a laneway in Melbourne. Very noir.

So what’s my plan for the brief? Well, I was thinking of capitalizing on the fact that I’m back home in Australia for 3 weeks and doing something out in the bush. I was thinking of a deserted highway scene, something like a breakdown far from any civilization. When you drive a couple hours or so out of the city, you see a lot of this:

There’s something awesome (as in ‘that which inspires awe’) about that vast amount of space. The colours are vivid. It’s dangerous and lonely, yet teeming with the movement of wind in the trees and small creatures scuttling. So the plan is to drive out one day with a model (ie. probably my sister), do a bit of a recon to map out some shots and hopefully get something usable.

Fanfiction.

Our third project for unit 5 comes under the heading of ‘Generate’. I chose the ‘Fanfiction’ brief set by Joshua: “the challenge is to author your own work of fanfiction based on a ‘canonical fictional universe’ that you’re a fan of, utlizing your skills and knowledge of graphic design to further the genre, while
experimenting with the fine line between fiction and reality”. It’s a pretty great brief for me, considering what a film/tv/fan geek I am. The first hurdle was deciding which show to base my project on. I flirted briefly with doing something with the Log Lady from Twin Peaks (having recently been through a massive marathon of the show).

But I decided no. I wasn’t sure where I could take it. So then I remembered a passage from a book that I’ve always loved, Overqualified by Joey Comeau. The excerpt from his Nintendo letter goes like this:

“We need a new Mario game, where you rescue the princess in the first ten minutes, and for the rest of the game you try and push down that sick feeling in your stomach that she’s “damaged goods”, a concept detailed again and again in the profoundly sex negative instruction booklet, and when Luigi makes a crack about her and Bowser, you break his nose and immediately regret it. When Peach asks you, in the quiet of her mushroom castle bedroom “do you still love me?” you pretend to be asleep. You press the A button rhythmically, to control your breath, keep it even.”

I love that idea of combining the fantastical with the mundane and domestic. What happens after Mario saves the princess? It has been covered a bit:

The idea in my mind revolves around it being photography-based. Putting obviously fake characters in a real-world context would make it most surreal. The big hurdle would be making the costumes…

Ministry of stories & hoxton street monster supplies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I can’t tell you how in much I’m in love with this concept of a space for the literacy and fantasy from creative studio We Made This (in collaboration with other fine people, including writer Nick Hornby).

From their blog: “The Ministry follows the model of the 826 centres: a writing centre where kids aged 8-18 can get one-to-one tuition with professional writers and other volunteers; with the centres being housed behind fantastical shop fronts designed to fire the kids’ imaginations (and generate income for the writing centres). In our case, the shop is Hoxton Street Monster Supplies – Purveyor of Quality Goods for Monsters of Every Kind.”

I’ve read about the other incarnations of the 826 literacy project before, my favorite being the The Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company:

It’s really nice to have one of these here in London.

Cuddly microwavable purple stegosaurus.

This is 100% amazing and I am absolutely buying one.

Tree of codes.

This is astonishing. Jonathan Safran Foer has written his new book, Tree of Codes, using words cut out from his favorite book, The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz. He uses it “as a canvas, cutting into and out of the pages, to arrive at an original new story. The result is a text of cutout pages, with text peeking through windows as the tale unfolds.”

More on The New York Times ‘Paper Cuts’ blog: http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/24/jonathan-safran-foers-book-as-art-object/.