London Sweats No Fresh Country Air

Our mission: To take Tom shopping and give him a good, smart look. What a day to choose... I do not envy anyone working in central London in the heat. As well as finding him some dapper garments, I also managed to find myself some stuff including a shirt that is a good compromise for the blue/flowers western shirt I was after. It reminds me of mini-milks with reindeer antlers.



I also noticed this signage on Argyll Street that I have somehow managed to miss in the past. Good-ol' Coney Island style sign-writing. I need to go back to New York. My friend Leo was telling me he went to one of the sideshows when he was out there recently. We always managed to miss them and I know we were missing out big time, damn-it. Soon soon.



Now I am home and sorting images and ideas for a couple of up and coming projects. I fished these books out for inspiration:



My re-discovered love for Hairy Diamond's 'Givin up' has finally got Dizzee Rascal's 'Dance For Me' out of my head thankfully. Also I just checked out Bryony's video for Rod Thomas' 'Same Old Lines'. It cracked me up...Watch for yourself, she certainly had sock puppets coming out of her ears at the time of making:



If only he had a live sock monkey performance at Green Man Festival next weekend. I am off on Friday for just under a couple of weeks to be part of the management of the festival and listen to some more lovely music. Particularly looking forward to seeing Caribou (whose album artwork is pretty pretty pretty too) and sitting under one of the beautiful, solid oak trees in the fresh night air with a big cup of cocoa and a massive wooly jumper.

Dance for Me

...cos I freak, freak, freak like TLC, I got my left eye checkin' out the scenery.

A General Tip-off.

Today proved that I should never dress too fancy when I don't know where my day might take me. My soft new black jazz pumps and sparkly gold jumper wouldn't be my normal choice of outfit for skip-raiding but when you get a tip-off like we did, I'm not one to give a shit about breaking a nail or similar (actually funnily enough Anna did break one today on our mission). So we found a skip of mannequins...Or more like a skip of many ideas and dreams that awill finally come to life. Funnily enough Nick at YCN had tipped us off earlier about a project through YCN which sounds RATHER exciting. If you're reading this Nick...are you thinking what we're thinking? Mannequin legs? Maybe not but oh well. So yeah by the time I got home very late tonight, I looked slightly suspicious carrying various limbs and packaged heads into my house in the pouring rain...I am now utterly bedraggled and in need of my bed, which I can confidently say I will not be sharing with a mannequin or two, like those freaky doll-lovers. I gave them the sofa. Oh dear. a shock for the household when they awake too. I just hope the film 'Mannequin' wasn't based on a true story...

Be Kind Rewind

Who has been? Who WAnts to go?

Bus from 'Speed'

The last few weeks have been intense. I have felt like the bus out of the film 'Speed' except I am not quite sure what would happen if I now went below 50 kmph. I think it might be the opposite of an explosion. I identify more with the pace than the outcome...Blah blah blah anyway. Anna and I finished the final shoot for Plastique Magazine and decided to celebrate the end of our hard work in the good old Oxford in Kentish town. One phonecall changed all of that. I went from this:



to this:



More work and no sleep for the wicked. I am now assisting Jennie and Lisa of Webster and Stokes on a fantastic shoot for Muse Magazine. They are art directing it and sent me off today, skip-raiding and sourcing all sorts of weird and wonderful props. Right up my street. The photographers are Nick Thornton Jones and Warren Du Preez who have a very experimental and futuristic style to their photography. I am very curious to see how all the collected bits and bobs will be used... Exciting. From today, for the next month, I will also be working with Lucy (Lampshade) Butler on the window display for Matches in Notting Hill which will coincide with London Fashion Week. The state of my hands each night makes me go to sleep with a smile on my face. Hurrah. I have always believed that no job would ever entirely satisfy me unless my hands got dirty each day.



Other news is that one rascal named William Edmunds of the Leeds-based Nous-Vous Collective tried to be sneaky about accurately depicting my 'Sunday Face' on his private blog but I got clever and found it.

I tell you, nothing is sacred online now, no mater how private you try to be and anyway what he didn't realise is that I can be in several places at once... If you watch his Special Effects video REALLY closely, you will see that I pop up for 1/25 of a second and then again, blowing up a carrier bag later on wearing different clothes. That very same day I was also in Leeds at Sub-Dub...












Last but by certainly not least, Anna and I are working with Alex who founded Fever Zine to produce a beautiful book with YCN charting the process of the Piñata 'Call for entries' promotion/competition. Well done to Kate Moross and Tom Merrell for their fantastic winning entry. It was colourful, funny and beautifully filmed in an AMAZING location. A lot of time and effort obviously went into it.

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This isn't to say that there weren't some other really amazing entries but we thought that giving a joint first prize was a bit of a cop-out. Especially after wallet washing Christmas has just been and gone. A big thank you to everyone who took part. You can see all the entries here.

Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree, How Lovely Were Your Branches...

I was driving back from the studio today and I saw a massive pile of flames dancing dangerously close to a house. I was about to call the fire brigade when I realised that it was only a pile of Christmas trees being dramatically disposed of. The residents of Brooksby Street in Islington have a very definitive way of saying goodbye to Christmas. In my tired state, I felt a bit sad.

I have spent the weekend engrossed in my work. The daytimes have been a mixture of sticking, cutting, sanding, painting, casting and driving round London finding materials. By night, my mind has been swimming with rabbits, harlequin floors, playing cards, white picket fences and green sweets. Constant travelling has also led to me to test how many routes there are from Deptford to Crouch End. With the neverending (and believe me I am not complaining, just not sleeping very well) piles of work at the moment, it has been giving a refreshing meaning to the saying 'we'll cross that bridge when we get to it'. I love driving through London at night.

Last night I settled down to (try and) shut down for the night by writing some 'tomorrow lists'. The Dragons Den was on Channel Dave and Peter Jones came out with another one of his usual, witty and cutting quotes, "Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity". Wishful thinking, my budget could just about afford me an apple turnover at the moment. I much prefer some of the quotes I found scribbled in the back of my sketchbook as I was leafing through. My favourite being Ron Norsworthy's answer to the question "What are you doing today?" His answer: "Well loads of bullets are gonna be flying my way and I just have to decide which ones I dodge and which ones hit me." Amongst my New York doodles, my little black book is full of his wise words, frantically noted down, so as not to miss a (legendary) trick. A wealth of advice and encouragement to which I constantly refer.

Saturday Morning Fun and Frolics

An eventful, inspiring and fun-filled weekend. I had a lovely morning in Islington with Lucie before driving up to Leeds yestrday. We bought our friend Michelle a book called 'Something to Do' from a cute vintage shop in Camden Passage. It was the original edition from 1966 and lists recipes, games, activities for rainy days, facts, tips for gardening, beach combing and a whole lot more. Our favourite was the April activity of making clothes out of newspaper (?!?). Apparently, a fun thing to do on a rainy afternoon.

I bought a beautiful vintage chandelier from a random street vendor for the ridiculous price of £15...The bare lightbulb in my bedroom will now be happy. We also saw the strangest but possibly the best Christmas window display ever: A taxidermy Christmas dinner feast...The ferret's teeth were very viscious.

I had forgotten just how lovely some of the shops in Islington are. Past Caring on Essex Road has always been one of my favourites- lovely vintage stock and a furniture section now too which is not over-priced. There is also a crazy taxidermy shop oppostie called Get Stuffed and a cool shop called Handmade and Found. However, our newest discovery was an AMAZING shop opposite Preposterous Presents on Upper Street called Labour of Love. Lucie and I wanted one of everything in the shop. They have the sparkliest shoes, the best chocolate-shaped brooches, the coolest origami skirt, the finest leather belts and the most stylish hats. They stock a lot of the Tatty Devine colection including their new Dark Stages Collection which is amusing and beautiful. The dress in the window was the best AND it had a matching parasol. Buy me the shop NOW (Please).

The Abattoir

I was looking at Giulio Miglietta's website yesterday. His beautiful photographs of an abandoned hotel near Florence, in Italy reminded me a day in Brighton a few years ago where Laura Snell and I went up the derelict abattoir. It was a peculiar place and there had obviously been some parties in there since it had been abandoned. If only you could portray smell through photographs because the stench of dead flesh was extreme. Someone had also bizarrely made a heart shape out of dead flies near the entrance but unfortunately it had blown away before we had the chance to photograph it. The abattoir became a bit of a local graffiti hall of fame before it was finally condemned. It was a beautifully eerie collection of buildings that have a very different feeling to the hotel Giulio photographed. They are both intriguing in their own way. Check his lovely black and white photographs here. He helped Anna and I massively with our piñata project for YCN and made us laugh so much. He is a very inspiring, driven person and all this comes through on his website.

ermmm.....

Anyone wanna come dress up cutlets with me?

Batty Irish

& What???????

Fascinating Fireworks.

Why do they never cease to impress? These photographs are from the Thames Festival Finalé last month. Anna wondered whether Ken Livingstone had something on his mind when he oversaw the choreographing of the fireworks in the last photograph...ooooohhh, aaaaaahhhh, ooooooohh. Hmmmmm.

Oh yeah

I forgot, the first one of my friends got married on Saturday. How scary, but right for her. Although it means that Anna and I now won't have a cushty pad to rent in Williamsburg, NY anymore as they will be living there! Katie is an actress in Sound of Music and got the guy from Hair and beauty to do her hair in a twenties flapper style. What a beauty she was...

a little summer sunshine

I'm on the beach as i type, this is great. Roll on summer, if only I didn't have any work to do!
Good luck to Lauren hitting the big smoke tomorow. Thinking of you xxx