Getting all self-reflexive and so on

Oh man, do I miss writing essays. I remember about this time last year, I literally broke down because I wanted to spend more time on my essays (and, well, relaxing/partying) and I couldn't because of the amount of hours being piled onto me by the restaurant I was working at. I know, I know, there are so many out there who do so much more, but I'm not one of them, and shifting gears between smiley-smiley-on-my-feet-memory-index-face-of-the-pizzeria-waitress to essay machine was irreducably painful.
This year, while I'm still thankful I'm not a waitress, I wish to god I had some academic influence in my life. I have a few friends who are doing the course that I did, but lord knows they dont need my help. In fact with my background in literature I'm categorically unuseful to these stellar philosophy types, and my poor memory doesn't help. Derrida's what, now?
I was hopeful I'd carry on writing vaguely academic papers as time wore on, but without access to the academic library, I am unsurprisingly letting it all slip. For shame.
I have, however, managed to learn to knit rather effectively. Swings and roundabouts? From one equally ineffective and unapplicable skill, outside of a very intense and devoted field which pays very little if you are lucky enough to be earning in it, to another. Go me.
Still, check it, yo:







I'm proud of him :)
Zombie Christmas and a Zombie New Year, folks!

New Ye-ah!

Well, time for my diet of lemon juice, cous cous, water and shame to truly begin. Why must the most decadent time of year be immediately followed by the night where you are supposed to look your most spectacular? Admittedly I could behave myself over Christmas OR not care how I look on New Year's Eve, but it would be nice to pig out AND still look stunning. When I say stunning, I of course refer to having a less wobbly behind/pot belly.
Not that I haven't been really tempted by all the recipes I've found in You magazine. My grandparents get it with the Sunday Telegraph and it's generally a parody of reality, all £550 handbags and £2,345 wear-once cocktail dresses. The photography is lush though and they do spare some time for amazing recipes which I've been harbouring for years.

And now, New Year's Resolutions:
1) Manage my diabetes. It's been nearly five years and no one has tasked me to take it on as a resolution before. Obviously I'm getting better at present, after getting a bit too frightened about the state of my health, but I'm determined to truly own it from now on.
2) TONE DOWN THE CRAZY. This has also been a struggle this year. I have decided I need a new attitude to relationships. Blablablablabla. I'll probably not let you know how that goes.
3) Don't become your mother. This involves continuing the way I am, hopefully.

Now and Then

My corduroy knight, my middle class hero, strikes again. I have to be honest, the more I read everyday newspapers and the more I watch anything touched by the satirical Midas that is Chris Morris (Three Lions - HOW excited?!) the more painfully middle class The Now Show truly feels. However between the in-jokes and the slightly shaky impressions is the occasional moment of shining brilliance and this definitely is one:

Marcus Brigstocke's Dr Seuss Copenhagen


As another pointless but hilarious tangent, here are some of the performers of the Springfield Jazz Festival, which occurs in the Simpsons episode 'Jazzy and the Pussycats' (I'm not out-punned yet, Groening):
- Gooey Martin
- Willie Mimms
- Drop-Jaws Turner
- Sketch Friendly
- Tootsie Childs
- Sammy Builtmore
- No-Talent Jones
- Anwar Benitez
- Bossy Marmalade
- Bad-Check Mazurski
- Ray-Ray Takamura
- Shakey Premise
- Bootsy Crouton
- Richard Sakai
- The Pre-Marital Sextet
- CSI Miami
- D.W. Jitters
- The Chubb Group
- Cantaloupe St. Pierre

My favourites are definitely Shakey Premise, which appeals to the philosopher in me, I suppose, and CSI Miami. Which appeals to the CSI fan in me, obviously.

COOKIES!!!!!!!!!

Emma and I had great fun decorating these. Basic sugar cookies + ready to roll white icing + writing icing + The Mars Volta = delicious proggy Christmas :P









I'm still fighting with the html, anyone suggest any good tutorials?

Xmas-ness

Such huge apologies for not posting in so long. Been very very busy. Here is a link to a lovely Christmassy cartoon to make up for it a smidge:

The Spirit of Christmas

I'm currently watching the BBC version of Hamlet, with David Tennant and Patrick Stuart. Although the use of CCTV in this 'modern' version is perhaps a little Brechtian, it's really excellent. I'm adverse to the fact that Tennant's totally taken over the airwaves this season (Dr Who, Desert Island Discs, QI, and countless others) but he is aboslutely and ultimately way better than John Barrowman.
More festive excuses soon as.

'nuff said

Well, I didn't manage the tryptych, so I guess it was more of an open-faced sandwich, whatever the hell that is. Also I want to make mince pies but completely failed to get hold of some cutters.... idiot.

NEW DRESDEN CODAK!!!!!!!!!!

That is all.

or sparkling beams of light

part two, a story, of sorts:

I look with satisfaction at the blood trickling down my arm. Feel hot wet warmth. Was pleased I had bothered to get a decent knife from the kitchen. Even though I despised myself for feeling pleased. I know that this is barely mutilation at all, just a few scratches. No need for stitches, barely any blood, really. The arm never bleeds enough. I thought of some of my friends' arms, the patina of silver lines, and wondered how they had done it. Determination, years of agony and confusion and turmoil and all the reasons and feelings. More feeling than I ever had in my useless being. I've never been as devoted to anything. Can't even make mutilation more than a fairweather hobby. What with the diabetes, my own blood has become something of a mundanity. Still I love it. The colour, the warmth, the taste. The thought of all those workings inside me, being so real, look, there, it's flowing, I must be here somehow, why else would it pulse like that? What could be more tangible?
I always get a strange feeling, of this intensity, when I'm on my period. To actually feel the lining sloughing away from me. This ineffable force from the inside out. This symbol of life and death. Think of women in concentration camps: the first thing to reassert itself when they were finally reasonably well nourished was their menstrual cycle. It's powerful and terrifying in a way, this genuine force for life. Transcendental to womanhood but so fucking real too, that smell of earth and iron. What do men get that comes close? The smell of napalm in the morning? Effortlessly it symbolises life; they summon up death.
I push the knife in again, but already I'm chickening out. The zeal of the first cut will never be echoed, it does still hurt, I'm not so far gone.
And I always seem to do this after weed, after him. Such a terrible set of reasons. But i never understood what was so different, really, between doing this and getting a tattoo. It's all mutilation. Both definitely hurt, which some people draw pleasure from. They try and take control of their bodies. It's just one costs a lot more. Except, for me, all I really want is too see the blood. It's that colour: there is nothing like it. I want to cut myself and watch it bead forth and flow and drip everywhere, wreck everything, soil it, stain it. From pricking my fingers for my blood sugar meter, there are spots of blood on most of my clothes, notebooks, sundry bits of my life forever branded. Out damn spot, show me something truer, show me what it really, really means to be bleeding. I can't divulge this fear, this hatred, all of these feelings, there aren't words. But there's my body: there's my blood. It can speak for me, dripping on the bedsheets now. And i'm daubing at it with a blue napkin, fascinated by the vibrance still. Oxygenated haemoglobin, plasma. Science unrivalled in it's beauty. I want more but my arm hurts. Pathetic. Blood doesn't protest in pain, it simply is, follows forces, does the heart's bidding, meets gravity, takes the shape of the pool that surrounds it. Doing the heart's bidding is probably what got me into this state. And now i want to see blood. So we're both slaves. Sisters in shame.
I put the knife down, push it away. Put my head down on the pillow, arm held rigid in front of me.
Tomorrow night. Maybe the other arm.

Thoughts like errant butterflies

Sorry, sorry, sorry. Been busy. So today will attempt a tryptych of posts (working title 'Bad Sandwich') to make up for it. As a starter for ten, here is my most recent review on the 405:

Camera Obscura - The Blizzard

Bitter Ruin full review

Hurrah! A review has gone up!!!
Check it

Video Launch



Word, biatch.

Aesthetics Debate 2 - The Sun Also Wiesings

Sorry, sorry, sorry, I will work on that pun (I won't).
This leads on from this post here.
We introduce Wiesing, who has no Wiki page! And very few mentions, even in German domains. I'll see if I can find some further biographical details in an actual book.
Could skyrocket my SEO ratings (among aestheticists). Wiesing decided that rather than look at the limited nature of paintings which Wolfflin's theory involved (mainly centred around Renaissance artwork in its examples, and involving a necessary historical circular progression from linear to painterly, closed form to open form, etc, and back again) he would open up the concepts.
Wiesing suggests an alternative to Wolfflin's metaphysics of history. He wants the concepts to be free of these historical constraints and open them up to apply to all Bildung: to find the "necessary conditions of the possibility of pictoral content". I want to stress here that while this seems to centre around art, it technically shouldn't and it is to some extent an oversight of the lecture that more images weren't included. For instance, images that bear continual importance, outside of their invention within history, such as a bar graph (linear, closed, planimetric etc) or a Rorschach image (presumably painterly, open form). Thus Weising took the concepts forward into a transcendental philosophical grounding.
At least so he hoped......
My examples there divulge the line of thinking he followed. The idea of the linear and painterly becomes a theory about mark-making - the transition between marks can be more or less distinct. The focus becomes the locatable relationships between marks, and thus a scale, with the image locatable on it, is created. Equally the planimetric and recessional still represents surface and depth, in which visual representation is necessarily spatial, and closed and open form would mean the two ends of the scale would be 'minimally' and 'maximally' ordered. The importance of the Bildlogik here is that it can be applied to ANY image. There's more but I have to do some other things, and I would also like Patrick to find the time to reply. HINT.

Songs and S'Feminism

The Kodaly Method

Very interesting song styling - I might try it to improve my singing :p
Also, anything whose creator's name is ZOLTAN gets my vote!

I'm also giddy and excited because they have released a new English translation of Simone De Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex' (yes, I'm a terrible English person who doesn't speak French, and am endlessly jealous of those who do. My conversational German could probably get me by though...). Radio 4 informed me that originally, the book sold incredibly well in France, and was there purchased by an American woman. She assumed it was a rather more clinical and sex-based book (missing the point somewhat) and passed it on to a French-speaking zoo-ology student friend of hers for translation. The poor feller took it on all by himself and thus, as is often the case, many nuances of the language were lost and several awkward mistakes were made. I can't remember the examples mentioned but there was a very odd one where the phrase that would equate to 'the human condition' became something like 'women's activities', or a similar absurd term that seems couched in the 50s rhetoric of happy housewives.
One of the other guests did comment that Beauvoir was, in spite of her brilliance and perspicacity, very scornful of the 'traditional' aspects of women, such as bearing children and taking a partner, or even being a house-wife. She herself lived alone, with Sartre as her long-term lover (I cannot imagine) and thus was an "unconventional" female figure, at least, very much so for the decades she lived through. But as was pointed out, this doesn't mean that the feminine aspects of women as they are traditionally seen (and still regularly enforced) should be totally disregarded as archaic and thoroughly unfeminist. More that they should be embraced by men too.

I'm also waiting on a new translation of Heidegger's Being and Time that makes fucking sense. I think it's out in 2010.... the future!!!

Busy week

This has been a lazy few days for blogging. I have still madly been writing cover letters and also a few reviews, which don't seem to be showing up on the site :(
Links when they do. Bitter Ruin I am still completing a review of, out of intense nervousness of wanting to do right by them because of their sheer loveliness.
The photos I took of their gig can however be found here, and I intend to 'shop and post up my favourites properly.
This has been a week of buying shoes as I felt pretty rubbish throughout. Lest I go into detail about why I felt rubbish, I will instead say that I REALLY LOVE SHOES. Moreso than people, sometimes.
Photos of me wearing shoes will probably come about soon as well.
And I've begun two more knitting projects: a hot-water bottle for my housemate, despite the fact that, to my intense sadness, she is leaving us, and a zombie for my friend's Christmas present. Sadly I can't post up pictures, unless you promise not to look, Stuart?

Body Image

I have been noticing this more and more of late and it's beginning to upset me. Actually, it's really upsetting me. For starters, women seem to have a really complicated relationship with food. I might speak about that more in a another post, as I'm only dimly coming to a realisation of it myself. It's part of the way beauty is represented, for sure, but also men simply don't have a clue what you're referring to if you bring it up. Blokes seem to eat what they want: when they're young their metabolisms handle it and when they're old they either are lucky enough to stay slim, or they get fatter. Or they have a partner aiding their cooking choices. Massive massive generalisations aside, I can vouch for almost every female in my knowledge feeling, deep down inside, that life would be better were they 'a little bit slimmer'. This is including friends of mine who used to be anorexic. Some of my absolute closest female friends have survived this disorder, long before I knew them, and thankfully are all in fighting shape now.
I know that one Christmas, one of their mothers bought them a pair of scales.

So really, this is an open letter to the "Twiggy Generation", 40 to 60-year-old mothers:
YOUR DAUGHTERS ARE THE RIGHT SHAPE
I have never been more ashamed or mortified than when I hear these stories relayed back to me, and recognise them in my own experiences. They very rarely have anything to do with health concerns. The sly remarks, vague comments, rude frankness and sometimes open ridicule. Our mothers simply think we could be thinner. Perhaps, for the most part, inadvertently. I admit, this is an emotional issue and one I personally worry about. My own mum is a culprit, who talks proudly about how little she ate for lunch, who tells me to tuck my bum in with a tone of absolute horror (when I am already fully upright: I have a round behind), and, when I said I was happy with my shape and carrying myself better, told me I could 'still lose a bit of weight'. Her being my mum, I take these remarks to heart.
Try asking (nicely). Ask a woman in her 20s if she feels she could be a bit slimmer. Use the word slimmer, it sounds healthier for one thing, has less of the negative connotations of being 'thin', and you'll be far more likely to get an answer. Then ask her, whether she says yes or no (and amazing kudos if she says no) what she feels her mother thinks. If she still says her shape is fine, she is the luckiest person in the world.