Remember, remember

Not many things I enjoy much more than fireworks. What's better than the entire sky glittering above your head?

Get home, get cracking

It's been a while since I've updated this ol' blog, and as fourth year work piles up, now seems as good a time as any to get back to it ...?!

Last time, I proclaimed that I would really get cracking on my return to the country. So what exactly does this 'cracking' entail, I hear you ask. Well there are a few things I've been up to...

Firstly, that degree I have to finish off.

I enjoyed a short stint at the TANK offices as an art department intern.

Jacob Kimmie

I popped into London Fashion Week as usual and this time produced a little series of photos that can be found HERE.

Lako Bukia

The photos first went up with the new arts and culture online hot spot, Little Ghost, a project run by editor Sian (one switched on, sassy lady). I'm happy to have since joined the team to offer a little creative direction, and have been working on giving the temporary layout a facelift, and LG an visual identity. The end result is minimal with a few careful details. I'm sure you can expect a lot more to come as the project grows.

Oh and I've also recently joined Redbrick newspaper's design team as Jr Art Director!

So, there's a fair bit to do. So far this first term of our final year, has been stressful and awesome in equal measures. I have a feeling it's going to carry on in much the same way. It's been good to get home and get cracking.

The Fisher King

Finally found this lovely, lovely scene from Terry Gillingham's film, The Fisher King. As always there's an endearing story at its heart, and in this case it's the tale of a lost man redeemed by a fool. Anyway, here is the charming Grand Central Station scene:

Bye Bye, Dijon

I'm not sure if I mentioned, but I've spent the last month living in France. (Here's me in the trees, in France, as proof.) Now there's just a matter of days before I finish off this Erasmus year for good and head home where there's work to be done... can't wait to get cracking!

Paris

So, what was I doing whilst my own cities were being turned upside down? Skipping around Paris, that's what!

Had a great time. Here's the Eiffel Tower!

Barton on Winehouse

It's so easy to lose the Winehouse plot, but Laura Barton articulates precisely why I'm sorry we lost Amy Winehouse.

"It was often noted that Amy Winehouse's music harked back to another age — to the heydays of Motown and soul, R&B, jazz, girl groups and Phil Spector's Wall of Sound; it was there in the brass, in the impeccable period production and the sublime smoke and burnish of her voice.

But it was a quality that seeped into her words too, into the lyrics that nodded not to her contemporaries, but to the work of early female blues singers such as Big Mama Thornton and Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith. These were songs sometimes written by the blueswomen themselves and occasionally contributed by male songwriters (JC Johnson for example, who wrote Smith's Empty Bed Blues and Waters's You Can't Do What My Last Man Did), but that took a female perspective – tales of hound dogs and backdoor men, coffee grinders, deep sea divers, and of love lost, deserted, thrown out and taken back again.

Pop music had often cast women as sweet, bright creatures, but Winehouse's lyrics revealed something mulchier, messier. Here was a woman who refused to conform – not in the eccentric mad woman in the attic mould of Kate Bush or Björk, but a woman who chose to live a little wild, follow her heart and sing of the simple stew of being female. Her songs were filled with broad talk, cussing, drink and drugs and dicks, songs that could hinge on one magnificent, unladylike question: "What kind of fuckery is this?"

She sang openly of female desire – not the squawky, shrill sexuality of Sex and the City and Ann Summers, but something truer, more physical, more serious. She sang about the ache of the body, the need for emotion, the distracting allure of a man's shoulders, shirt, underwear. "When he comes to me, I drip for him tonight," she sang on I Wake Up Alone. "Drowned in me, we bathe under blue light."

She frequently gave her songs a familiar, almost domestic setting, a world of kitchen floors, chips and pitta, Tanqueray and Stella. "I'm in the tub, you on the seat," she sang on You Know I'm No Good. "Lick your lips as I soak my feet/ Then you notice likkle carpet burn/ My stomach drops and my guts churn." It was a verse that started off like a Degas painting, naked and intimate and warmly erotic, but swiftly dissembled into something sad and messy and ruined.

And this, too, was key to Winehouse's lyrics – she gave you an image and then quickly swiped it away, a honeyed love scene soon dissolved into wretchedness; over the course of an album it gave the impression of a life of instability, lived from one ramshackle lurch to the next.

But there were constants – namely addiction and passion, the flaming five-storey fire of love she always returned to in Love Is a Losing Game, the ferocious, proprietorial female strength of Some Unholy War, the mind fogged by drugs and love and desire. In Back to Black's great tangle of pride and neediness we found a melding of the two: "You love blow and I love puff," she sang. "And life is like a pipe/ And I'm a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside."

The other constant presence was of self-recrimination and remorse. In her lyrics Winehouse seemed to show how she screwed things up – how she should never have played the "game" of love in the first place, of "teasing" her self-esteem, and of "this regret I got accustomed to". In Tears Dry on Their Own she gives herself a stern talking-to: "I cannot play myself again, I should be my own best friend," she warns. "Not fuck myself in the head with stupid men."

She had a special knack in her lyrics, a trick, a twist that made her songs often startlingly truthful; each composition would contain at least a line, an image, a turn of phrase that seems to shuck the song open."

Monachillin'

I've been meaning to put up a little bit of Monachil / use Monachillin' somewhere for a while now. It's just a 20 minute bus ride from the centre of Granada, and quite amazing.

Cabo de Gata: A sleepover by the sea, under the Milky Way.

For our last weekend in Spain me and my friends spent the night on the coast in Almeria. Uploading the photos on Facebook, I opted for the rose tinted title 'A sleepover by the sea, under the Milky Way'. If I were to give you a more precise account of our trip to Cabo de Gata, it would probably sound a little less romantic. It was perhaps the most uncomfortable sleepover ever, that left me with 1 000 000+ bites, and consequently a swollen face and hands. It wasn't my best look, but a quick trip to the emergency department, one injection, and a few anti-histamines later I was A okay.

Allergy aside, I suppose the weekend was as lovely as the album title suggests. We did see the Milky Way amid countless stars (some shooting), and it was beautiful. I wasn't equipped to take a good photo but I have to say that more than the sea or snow, if you never have the chance to see the night sky naturally you will have surely missed out.

And of course, you can't fall asleep beneath such a spectacle without something suitably incredible to listen to:

This Mario remix is courtesy Brooklyn beat maker Rimar (responsible also for the delightful beachy tune above) and deserves a thorough listening to. The best way for me to describe it would be like a warm, fuzzy dream in 3 minutes. You know when you wake up and you don't quite remember what you dreamt, but know that it was something good?

Anyway, two weeks later and I'm still very much having a Rimar moment. Sadly this is no longer my soundtrack for stargazing, but the commute into London. That said, it still takes me elsewhere and despite the bite related complications that followed, I'd much rather be lounging on that beach than sat on the piccadilly line.

Feria de Granada

...was just beautiful!

"Why don’t we try to understand the song of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them? ... people who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree."

- Picasso

SBTRKT Countdown!

A mere 5 days till the new SBTRKT album...!

Ready Set Loop

Arc Vel - VS//YOUTHCLUB Remix

Ta da! Another superb VS//Youthclub remix. This time it's Arc Vel's Hippocampus (another excellent Brum producer!).