festive friends forever

i've been having festive fun of late, kicking off a couple of fridays ago with a twee but amazing folk night my housemate rose put on with pat and trevor at the sassoon gallery in peckham. i did a flyer for it (unedited version above) and they used my werewolf project for visuals. my ~personal highlight~ was soy un caballo who were, misleadingly, very belgian and very nice.

also, our mantelpiece has been gradually improving under my tlc. now school's out and i'm back in glasgow (y) and have a comedy cold (hml).

the werewolf

here are a few images from a series of about twenty illustrations depicting an angela carter short story. i think i might make a book of them. p.s. STILL NO INTERNET.

desk

i've had no internet for nearly a month and i've borne it like a man. i live above a mobile phone shop in camberwell now and we're finally getting the internet this week, so look forward to an exciting barrage of posts soon. in the meantime my drawings are in the new issue of Ein Magazin über Orte (a magazine about places). you can see a few pages on the site and you should totally buy it. thanks birgit, elmar and julia!

FASHION club!

ok so 90s nostalgia is so two years ago but i found my 1992 busy book (the jotter we got to abuse during school wet intervals which, being a non-football playing freak of a boy, i cherished), and in amongst the lists of kids i liked and hated and the speculatively drawn sash windowed housing estates i sold off to classmates (so quirky) i found a few pages relating to the FASHION club! which as i recall i founded. the drawing on the right has really messed with my perception of time as i still think of pepsi max as being a recent innovation. wasn't it all about tab clear and twist 'n' squeeze (eventually banned from my primary fyi) back then? it's a shame the highlighter detailing on my heart-adorned trackies has faded but check out that graphic design Yo!



back to 2008 and i've been totally on trend with the credit crunch that's so hot right now. i bought nearly no clothes over the summer and my look has consisted of variations on the above, with my favourite 'pieces' costing a grand total of £1.49. lol @ me trying to appear moody while sporting an aubergine velvet bowtie. my beloved old ben sherman shirt was 50p from battersea car boot sale and the slightly unusual jock/standard grade art sketchbook of ~textures~ jacket was 99p off ebay (plus about 3 quid p&p but whatever). what do i want, a medal?

semi-detached

garscadden road, old drumchapel, glasgow

L@@K!! it's my exciting new house-per-day side project dedicated to my number one obsession, houses. i can't pretend i'm not proud of that url.

this is england

i'll be returning to camberwell imminently so here are some paintings and drawings from a photocopied zine i made about walworth road, the road that dominated my life last year and which has the best shop names in the world ever.

UNRELATED: i saw eden lake last night. from what i'd read about it i was expecting daily mail chav-demonising propaganda, but it was a lot more subtle than that - kind of texas chainsaw massacre vs a clockwork orange with a slight shane meadows realist vibe. the stuff about it being ~reactionary and sensationalist~ is reactionary itself i think (SO WRONG!). it's a "genre" lost in the woods slasher movie that's unusually carefully plotted and plausible and therefore the most horrifying horror film i've seen for a while (although tbh i may be damning it with faint prase as this has been my summer of zone horror channel).

my thoughts were short my hair was long

for today i'd planned an indian summer day trip which i hoped would be so kid rock video right now but i ended up admiring suburban bungalows in the drizzle and getting stuck in the rangers match traffic.

24 HOUR ASDA, GOVAN, GLASGOW

favez

the nicest looking pictures i've seen in recent weeks

gay gay gay gay gay

a week or two back i, with my pals paul and adam, helped out at tilda swinton and mark cousins' film festival in nairn, scotland. we stayed with my 90 year old grandmother in her bungalow, where she made a number of much appreciated and valiant but ultimately doomed attempts to feed us tongue sandwiches, and a similar number of hopeful enquiries re girlfriends. oh man.

i found the whole experience of having fun in nairn amusing but confusing and disconcerting in the way that getting too drunk with my parents is. my favourite moment was when david cross and amber tamblyn sneaked some local kids into the cinema when we were larging it after hours, who then proceeded to say NEWTON FAULKNER at a ~film buff~ with dreads. LOL. my second favourite thing was seeing the bill douglas trilogy, which i think was exactly the kind of scottish lol that in the past i'd have instantly chosen to hate. srsly though, it was stirring and true and would bring a tear to a neon triangle eye.

Stay In The Game

my dad sheltering from the rain in an underpass yesterday

i've certainly said this every year since i learned to talk, but this has been the WORST SUMMER EVER. unfortunately in the rare moments when the monsoon has temporarily abated i'm way too scared to even relax in the back garden as my thuggish 4 year old neighbour alfie has taken to belting out 'shut up and drive' by rihanna over the fence, except with the words changed to 'shut up and die'.

however, this exists:

IRL

non-paper things from over the past year. this was a self-portrait (aged 3) drawn with party food, about the death of childhood or something.



matt and i created this poster by cutting out words from cardboard boxes we found at the back of the 99p store and suspending them from the ceiling and sticking them to the walls of my living room. it's based on a conversation between sam fox and freddie starr on celebrity wife swap.

&&________♥moc

memba make out club? coz the other day i did and was delighted to see my polaroid from 2003 featuring my great-grandfather's undoubtedly libertines-inspired highland light infantry jacket was still up there, albeit now surrounded by graphics resembling a fusion of b&q wallpaper borders circa '99 with a fat face catalogue. omg though, being pre-myspace and even pre-friendster, that site was probably my first brush with the concept of being cool on the internet. i had postal service and the shins (pre-garden state, gimme some credit) lyrics on it and a deep sentence including a healthy sprinkling of ampersands about sun coming through the window making me want to just ~BURST~ out onto the street (to kill myself on what was really a rather busy commuter route, hopefully). it was a more innocent age, i swear.

a book about unusual things that happened in my house growing up

say something nautical, richard

recently my days have revolved around keeping up appearances on uk gold. i'm such a sucker for hyacinth bucket's brand of endearingly unfunny but delightful middle english snobbery (though i'm glad no immigrants or black people feature or things could rapidly turn more sinister).




and wow, look how trendy hyacinth's promiscuous sister rose is! floral prints, pre-aa pencil skirt combos, stonewashed high-waisted denim shorts and non-ironic gold jewellery. ledge m8.

i'm fascinated and a bit in love with this kind of unpretentiously pretentious (lol) suburban world even if it doesn't actually exist, and (to seamlessly relate this to something irrelevant that makes me hate my life right now) especially compared to the types of gross kids i keep encountering who look a bit edgy but are casually conservative. i never realised before moving to london how much of the ~creative world~ is secretly posh. plotting how to outdo the barker-finches at villa costa blanca and get back at lydia hawksworth for calling your kiwi fruit lower-middle class is so much more acceptable than taking banging hi contrast photos, trust fund squatting then voting boris.