Portrait of the artist with Spurge

Portrait of the artist with Spurge

Magical girl gardening

Obviously, this is a dress designed for a baby. I call it my baby dress, except at this moment I realise I might stop that because it sounds fetishistic in ways I’m not really into. Anyway, what kind of baby? A cute baby witch. Check my broomstick! Call Studio Ghibli!

Basically, every dress-wearing individual needs a dress in which they will never, ever feel too hot. For me this is that dress. It will also never accidentally stop covering my nipples: a sizeable bonus!

Maybe a safer way of talking about this dress is to call it “my kitchen garden dress”? Kitchen gardenness is an important part of my identity. I’ll go with that, I think.

I wore this to weed around the purple cabbage and celeriac seedlings, water some stuff, and pick rhubarb, obv. I made rhubarb chutney, I made rhubarb crumble, and I acquainted myself with tarot a little more. I’m enjoying that a lot. I’m finding it good for my psyche.

The dress was £2.75 from the Myton Hospice sale rail.

Blissing out

I bought ‘everyday’ shoes with some birthday money.

I like them a lot.

Over the past two weeks I’ve been staying with my boyfren and feeling good about everything, even crummy things. That is how love works, maybe. It’s possible. But importantly I have been feeling good about good things too, such as: my hair. Culottes. These shoes. Food. Wandering around (“walks”). Investigating Amicus Productions (Verdict: good).

I haven’t really figured out how these culottes look yet. You know how there’s one way things look in the mirror and another in photographs? Because of change in perspective I suppose, literally and psychologically. A picture is a picture of a thing, even me; a reflection is reflecting a clothed body that I know I’m in, and I can’t entirely not see how I feel. So sometimes things look worse in a photograph than they do in the mirror! Because I always feel that I look smashing.

I’m pretty sure it’s thumbs up though. For these culottes.

See here, this above, this is me and the werewolf break in The Beast Must Die, an Amicus film. Perfect 50s-gimmicky from 1974; the film stops 3/4 of the way through to ask the audience if they’ve figured out who the werewolf is yet. Wonderful! I hadn’t, except I sort of had.

Film trivia– There’s a cut without this intermission that goes by Black Werewolf. You’ll see it listed on blaxploitation-horror sites sometimes, but: it’s British and doesn’t actually address ‘blackness’ as a concept – only a very technical inclusion. In that it is a horror that stars black people. Watch it, definitely, I loved it. Werewolves! Giant wicker chairs! Bad archery! Silk tunics! A sleeping/hunting combination outfit that is made entirely of high-gloss black PVC.

My gran was right. It really does look like a Pacman dress.

“Valiary sweet”. Faded and old but basically everything I want in a sweet, because they have two textures, both are nice, and a very strong perfume with a solid taste to back it up. Plus they are tiny and there are lots. Foods that feel like ball pools. I made my own bubble tea. It was a first try.

I wonder if you can tell which pictures were taken by my sweetie. I wonder if my face looks different in them. It does to me.

England is made of films

Today it’s sunday but I’m scheduling this for Monday, so yesterday I showed you Saturday, on Sunday, and here is what happened on Sunday (today (but not “TODAY”)).

Sometimes my dad is like “opulence? Why not??” and we stay somewhere fancy for a night. We ARE visiting my only younger daughter he must think, I suppose. It was somewhere that Jane Austen has stayed (again); my wee sister goes in for a bit of Austen. I am not so much a fan, because it is not exciting.

Sometimes a hotel will have books and teddy bears, and this one did.

And a tiny bench, which we sat upon.

To return to the (tiresome) Jane Austen theme, we visited Chatsworth House. This is where a number of exteriors were shot for the Knightley Pride & Prej, and the rest of my fam have been before. Perhaps one hundred times. I have only been outside, and the grounds are very lovely.

But! Liz gave me a copy of the 2010 The Wolfman for Christmas this/last year, and upon viewing it I leapt up and cried “HARK! I’VE BEEN THERE!” And I had. For Fake Lawrence Talbot is also a Chatsworth man.

The 2010 Wolfman is a pretty half-full film. It’s more Hammer-evocative than Universal, although not in a good way, just “it’s a period piece and a bit silly”. The more obvious callback to the original, the wolf’s head stick, is introduced bizarrely and serves literally no narrative purpose. Emily Blunt’s character (“the fiancé”) should have – I do not say this often – been cut, and Hugo Weaving’s Nice Policeman character been the one to ‘break the curse’ (‘kill him’), using the love that a Nice Policeman/decent human has for the common citizen. That would have been a million times better than [my fiancee has been dead/I have known you] for two months, during one of which you were unconscious and the other you spent being tortured in an asylum, but– I love you!! Enough to DIE. That, reader, is nonsense.

Anyway, I kind of liked Anthony Hopkins’ weird creepy dad character/’arc’, I did like Hugo Weaving’s part, and the transformation sequence that focussed on teeth was pretty good. It was not a complete loss. So I threw myself with reasonable abandon into Discovering the Wolfman. The dvd is in the other room as I write and I am sleepy so I won’t do comparison shots (maybe later on tumblr) – when I tell you “this bit was in the Wolfman”, just believe me. Okay? Ok.

This bit was in the Wolfman!

This wasn’t. These are just nice seats (etc).

Basically a leather cocoon. I love it. I want one. To live in.

I found him??

These are just paintings of some men, but I felt their voices very strongly. The one on the left must be nasal and chewy, the one on the right a sort of deep pigeon voice. Apologetic, but not embarrassed.

This is my “being a dick about Modern Art” face

There’s a lot of rather nice statuary, if you fancy a visit.

This fuckin’ guy.

Darcy and Lizzie -

There is also a whole glasshouse of Camellias, which I HEART. In a witch-ish sort of way?

~~~My mother~~~

Finally we weren’t really sure – I made Lizzie watch Wolfman with me the night before, so she could/would help me – which was the right tree, or if they invented a hollow IN the tree, or perhaps superimposed a different, hollower tree from somewhere else in front on the house? So we hedged our best, basically.

The morning after Benicio-Lawrence goes full wolf and murders a bunch of guys by accident, he wakes up covered in blood and dirt in a cosy little tree-nest in front of the house, and then gets taken away by Hugo Weaving and posse. He’s pretty “nyauuurrghh” about it. As you can see.

And that is the end of our adventure. There is plenty of Pride & Prejudice and The Duchess merch in the gift shop, but no Wolfman! Can you imagine.

Fambly

My family is a family for whom “visit” means “take on a long ol’ walk”. My parents and I visited my sister. We took her on a long ol’ walk.

She gave me this beret for my birthday, and also some “fig balsam” – this is vinegar, that tastes like the apricots of heaven. That is not what I am drinking in the picture below; that is groundwater, and I am not dribbling however much I may look like I am.

Do you know what this is. This is a gall. It rhymes with ball. It is where a baby insect lived, in this case, I am pretty sure.

This was really nice moss. I wanted to get to know it better.

This sometimes happens when you walk in light rain. Pretty neat, I would say? Rain is not.. a solid ‘thing’.

Family business

Whoops, another thing I did last week was meet my aunt’s chickens. It’s impossible to meet chickens and not talk back to them. My dad, his sister, their cousin, and I: a line of ridiculous coo-ers.

My cousin found a dead vole.

My last week of being 25

^My angle-grinding. I like the angle grinder a lot. Dusty as fuck though! Cover your hair!

And now here I am, twenty-six! Sharing my birthday with Shawn and Amano Kousei!

As well as Rachel from S Club 7.

Podcasting!

I’ve been doin’ stuff

Audio stuff!

Here I interviewed Hannah Chapman of the excellent Bath comic book event Comic Book Slumber Party, for the first Women Write About Comics podcast!! A podcast! Wow!

Then here I sort of WAS interviewed about GENDER in KAMEN RIDER and my experiences of being an international lady fan, by Matt aka unkamenrider aka KamenRiderPEZ and his bros. Good guys.

Well I guess the time has come

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SHOW YOUR PALS

Loot calls itself the town’s “best kept secret”, and y’know, I can’t argue! But that’s not interesting! What’s interesting is how fantastic this (repro?! I took it for true blue ’72, but who cares when it’s this good?) shirt which I bought is.

Here I am wearing it to the roller disco, at which I requested Hanson and had a fabulous time.

Here I am wearing it in front of books under bad lighting!

I can’t stand a boring collar. I’ve been wearing this a lot. Here are some other people wearing bold shirts from things I like.

Blacula’s first victims, from Blacula

Ryo, from Agito:

And some damn fine pink/orangeoutput from Godzilla vs Gigan, to which I am pretty partial depending on which version is showing.

Wow, I’m boring today!