Y’all, I know I haven’t written anything very thinky for an age, and it’s not that I have not been thinkING or that I have changed focuses here on this blog! I am just (always have been) really bad at finding the focus/botheration to start my brain firing into TextEdit when I’m all “but i HAVE BEEN to work today, give me a BREAK, I need to find BALANCE and I have MY OWN THINGS TO SORT OUT” in the back of my head. Just ask my old teachers how often I gave them finished homework. I’m sorry, my old teachers. That, and the fact that everything I’ve been working on when I can find the motivation is long-term stuff that isn’t finished yet!
Don’t lose your faith in me. I’m unemployed again (nobody needs a Dinner Lady when all the kids are on holiday), so lots of time to feel like I need to do at least something for society at large.
I’m working on things to make you ponder or inform you, honest. You will get them eventually.
..Not next week though (probably), because I get to go to the beach!
Going offline for the weekend (due to both a pain in my touch-pad hand and my gentleman coming for a visit), which will give YOU a few days to think about spending money to support concept-based music. Because if I was flush, I would - but I’m not, so you can be my surrogates.
You know what I don’t enjoy? Vomiting. Ugh. I want to go to work! It’s rewarding!
Besides that, though, today I have been working on book reviews again. The Raven’s Gate one, and a new one where I share the knowledge I have stockpiled about which ‘marketed to look like The Da Vinci Code’ books are actually like The Da Vinci Code (spoiler: none).
But that’s like saying (spoiler: the princess gets the guy) about an animated Disney joyfest. So y’all will still want to tune in.
It’s pretty infuriating, reading interviews with authors. They almost always say something completely whackadoodle that makes me want to metaphorically smack them. Authors are just people, and people are pretty fallible. I just.. think that books deserve better than that, I guess?
Speaking of books-for-kids.. when I wear this jacket I’m paying silent tribute to that glorious style maven Claudia Kishi. Claire was standing by the wall, fists over her eyes for some reason, wearing a cream-silk blouse as a jacket. She looked fantastic. She had made it herself, by cutting the skirt from an old wedding dress, and she said the frayed hems were symbolic (I didn’t ask of what). It was really unusual, and anyone else might have thought it too over-the-top to wear at home on a sick day - but Claire had long ago decided that if you can see yourself, that’s audience enough. Thank you, unnamed narrator. I think you look great too, even if those leggings aren’t my style.
If you too were a BSC fan, can I rec you this fic and this blog? Yes I can. I just did. Happy reading,
Today I am wearing “mom jeans”. Ugh, saying “mom” feels so wrong to me. I AM ENGLISH! ENGLIIIISH!
The jeans of my mother, again. I forgot about them! And that they turned out to fit me pretty well! I don’t need to buy new work trousers, after all! I already have the means to teach the new generation about how to dress like a 1970s Tokusatsu secret identity.
Did people bend their knees a lot in the seventies, or have I fabricated that entirely? And if so.. why?
The pictures are all effects-ed up because I couldn’t find the camera, so sister took these with the “polaroid” “app” on her magical future-phone.
Plus, as promised: some pictures from the Morris dancing in the town I was in a couple of weeks a go. Gosh I enjoy traditional Britain. We are a culture of tie-on costumes, arcane dancing, effigies and scary masks as much as any other, and (considered as a whole) we have not lost the dance-to-death spirit as much as our more toffish reputations suggest.
The face of the hobby horse:
Brilliant. Just brilliant.
I have a ton of story-seeds using Morris Men like pop culture uses ninjas.
This is the secret handshake, internet. Let us sort the msties from the chaff.
You see, Ironside really likes chili. He feels it is “the only food fit for man”, because it has all the right nutrients! So, chief.. what’s your recipe? What goes IN this amazing chili? We’re all dying to hear.
The first picture was referenced, the rest were referenced from the first or from memory.
OK OK I’ll give you this one for free! Because I like y’all.
I told y’all I spent today (off sick) learning to draw Raymond Burr. He has a really particular face! As you can see in that last picture. This for the sake of an Ironside/MST3k comic, which you shall see later. If you tune in.
Needing to save my workshirts for work only, I have taken to wearing these oversized “peasant shirts” in the heat and just tying them up until they stop annoying me with their bigness. It’’s pretty comfy I guess, and disguises my belly button - if you can’t see it, you can’t be sure I’m not a clone. It’s less structured than I am used to or quite comfortable with; good for being in fields or on run-down farms or cooking a la Like Water for Chocolate but not for being in company, really. The skirt, also, is shorter and breezier than usual.. a little less secure than ideal. This is the kind of thing I need to say to myself curse it all, I have no inorganic responsibilities today before I can wear it.
Yesterday I was a jailbird, today I am the fuzz. American fuzz, anyway. Highway police? Or something? Do they (you?) say “the fuzz” there? Well I am, because then I get to be the “peach fuzz”. Because of the colour of my shirt. My beloved said, before I doctored the picture, that I looked like I had been raised to kill by Jean Reno. But I only loose my bullets if the crims shoot first, man.
For comparison, please see Nicholas Cage in the beginning of this review. Then watch the rest, because it is funny.
You’re welcome.
(No I didn’t have it tied in a knot when I was at work)
Shirt: GAP, trousers: Liens via second hand sales comm, boots: Dr Martens
Wikipedia says that the claim to ‘care’ is sarcastic, and then it quotes Chuck Mosley as saying Well, ah Roddy wrote all the things that he cared about and I just wrote the part that says, “it’s a dirty job but someone’s gotta do it” ’cause I figured that’s just the feeling I got, which sounds the opposite of sarcastic to me.
But when I listen to this song, I just take it straight because it’s how it always sounded to me. I care a lot. This song is the sound of me, having been in charge of twenty-one four and five year olds who just don’t care to be nice to each other, or to listen to me, or to be safe, or to take turns at needing a grown-up because I CAN’T BE EVERYWHERE AT ONCE - thinking it is fucking hard to set a consistent good example. But since I only have them for an hour and twenty minutes every day there is really no excuse for letting things slide, letting them off from bullying and endangering and exclusion and disrespect and all the worst things about current society’s interpersonal relations.
It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it, and I care a lot.
Here’s a Mike Patton-led version, because.. why not? I like them both.
This is the second summer workshirt, salmon chambray, but more importantly - it is a shirt that I can wear and think “Yes, I could be digging something up in the desert in 1922″.
That’s really all I want out of my clothes.
The fold along the center of my panama gives my silhouette a pleasingly pithy air, too. Just imagine that I am standing in from of sand, not bricks, okay?
“Yes, Lord Carnarvon, I will be done in just a moment!”
“But it’s tricky, there seems to be a problem with these bandaged hands sneaking out and grabbing all the other people on the dig.”
And I think something bit me..
I stayed in school after dinners were done to help take the five year olds on a walk. A really awesome walk; they all got to take their shoes off and play in a stream. On a school walk! That never happened to me! So cool! The teachers had their feet bare too and were leaping across the banks.. but I thought that, since I’m still pretty new (and ambiguously young), I don’t yet have the authoritah to stand muddy adventures and come out on a different, non-peer level. Major. Bummer.
I like the practical-practical 20s-30s archaeological-style adventure clothes but I also like the “..and here is a version for a lady“. Because, I am a lady, and I like to see if and how ‘lady’ stuff can work for me. So, la! Pretty pretty princess, undead spirit falls for her, she says “no thank you”, kicks sand in his face when he is not dissuaded.
I actually found it trickier than I expected to find example pictures of the kinds of stories my head is digging when I wear this way. I wanted to embed a section of the Appointment With Death Suchet-Poirot with Tim Curry, but youtube has it disabled! So. Here’s Diana Palmer from the 1996 The Phantom (a movie I own and will watch over and over; Billy Zane is a fun actor, and the lady friendship sub-plot is neat), Evie from the 1999 The Mummy (again, a multiple-watch film for me), and an older Diana Palmer, from this article from dailypop.
Peace out, comrades - I got history books to read.
ABOVE: shirt: JM via rinkya, skirt: Modelle via NASTYGAL, shoes: VW + Melissa via Yoox, book: “The Last Gospel” by David Gibbins via a second-hand market stall (it’s a good quest thriller! Adheres to the formula yet avoids cliches and offense like a champion. Also, it is a bit about how Jesus was a bronze-skinned beardy feminist). BELOW: shirt: Aladdin Sane via sister via H&M, shorts: vintage lederhosen via etsy, socks: JM via second hand apparel community, shoes as before.
If you ever worried that I have given my heart to a bozo or person otherwise unworthy of it, please - collect yourself! If you cannot take my word for it (fie!), then look upon this; though it does not become a lover to demand proof of affection by material trinkets, compatibility can perhaps be calculated by the measure of unsolicited gifts. Behold!
I celebrated the close of my first year of blogging last week, but the first real post post that I wrote was actually published on the twenty eighth. So I have four days to go, til then. Since my gent’ll be here for the next few days I may well be disinclined towards posting anything then, so consider this the partypost, kay?
My first real post was about The Tribe; a show I loved when it was first shown and I was eleven-ish, and which I had just started re-watching a year ago. I still love it, and the feeling only GROWS.
So that’s what was up a year ago. What is up today is that I got an email from Hervia that they are having an up to 70% off SS10 sale. And I am filled with COVETOUS WANT.
I really don’t have any spare money, though, so to dull the pain and on a sudden stroke of it-all-comes-together I decided to assign as many pieces as I could to a Tribe character. The aesthetic philosophies are similar, I think. Awwww, here goes!
Some of these may be tenuous, and some you may think are stinkers. You just don’t understand my vision. Click to buy!
Kay, first, this one was easy: Ebony.
This is a girl who knows how to wear red leather, and also when: always.
See?
For the lulz: Lex!
Pretty flippin’ obvious, if you know the show even a little (if you don’t, well, you should learn): Zoot
I’m pretty sure that Tai-San wore tangerine at least once.. This picture at least has the turquoise, and the spiky.
Trudy had a tiny short fringe through the entire run of the show, I think. The very low vamp and toe cap (? I had to google for shoe terms), with the little prissy hole, echo that to me, and the colour halfway between brown and gold suits Trudy’s insecurity and power trips.
The lilac colour is on The Guardian’s scheme, and the wax-style seal is representative of his grasping for that orthodox, cultish, heavy-formality type of power and organisation!
I always did think that the Technos did at least have snappy dressing going for them, if nothing else.
Nothing, I mean nothing, will ever be as ungodly fug as Bray’s knitted string vest, as seen here. I hate it so much that I almost (not quite) love it. It shocks me offensively every time I see it.
But even when he wasn’t wearing that thing (Amber must have really, REALLY loved him) he was wearing some pretty goony, earnest prep-skate-hippy stuff.
I was going to give him this:
But that harkens clearer to another Dwayne Cameron (goony) role -
And then I saw this, with the right slate-something/white-ish beige colour scheme, and decided that even if it wasn’t totally gross, at least it was weird, like a lace-up vest knitted with string that has apron-straps over the shoulders UGH UGH AUGH WHY.
Amber, my very, very favourite (and how I despised her on the first go round, unable to tell ‘incredible badass’ from ‘goody two-shoes’) has worn a lot of things, and I would put any of them in my own wardrobe in a second. But this was what had the most visual similarity in the collection - matched to Eagle-Amber the resistance leader. Man, just typing that makes me want to wave flags.
The Amber-Bray love ring (or should I say the Amber-Sasha-Amber-Bray-Amber-Pride-Amber-Bray-Amber love ring? Whaddeva, I’m a romantic. The Amber-Bray love ring.
Well romantic as I may be, I have always though that that ring was pretty unattractive. It reminded me of one I’d got off a magazine, and I appreciate that it was given to a thirteen year old by her father, so it’s not going to be Tiffany’s, but.. ehhh. It’s so HUGE.
This ring is huge too though! And has Amber’s signature turquoise, and a knobble, and silver, and a symbol on the ‘face’.
It also has the white of Bray’s heinous vest. Of course.
Bonus! What did Zoot and the Locos wear to do their exercises? WONDER NO MORE!!
Soooo here is my “me”, from the Scott Pilgrimavatar creator(thanks for the tip, King!). It’s actually not at all bad! No glasses, and not quite enough hair (there were no solid fringes), but! Mix up the three following real-me photos, and what do you get? Pretty sure I have worn this formation at some point. And if I haven’t yet, I will.
Whaddaya think? Bruce?
I show you this because though I haven’t read the Scott Pilgrim comix (yet) (I’ve seen scans, it’s honestly not quite my kind of alley, bookwise) I think the film looks pretty interesting. And definitely the kind of movie that should be encouraged! It looks more fun and honest-hearted than most of the Big Two comic movies, f’rex. I like how.. semi-crappy it looks? And a romantic interest/leading lady with hair that an on-the-street Average can achieve (as long as she has the texture for it) is a big plus. Trailer:
So there you go. This movie has the IllusClaire nod of considered approval. Go see it; demand funk the music* instead of funk the smell.
*Not implying that there will be funk in this movie
All of these are worth a watch, but my favourites are extrapolated upon below.
Suzi Quatro: I love how self-conscious-butch she always is (I can relate), whilst also seeming like a huge lady badass. You go, Leather Tuscadero!
Brooke Shields: as a concept piece, this is tops. Lipstick horse on mirror — bareback riding white horse through countryside. A+
Sean Connery: Sean Connery. Car. Sean Connery. Car. What??
Rod Stewart: I never thought Rod Stewart was doing it on purpose before. But now I think he’s kind of funny.
La Toya Jackson: WACKY!!
Sean Ono Lennon: adorable
Harrison Ford: This is your most likable role to me, Harrison Ford
Charlie Sheen: What are you doing on the set of a CITV game show, Charlie Sheen? Or did you find your way into Escape from Jupiter? Why? And to sell shoes?
I like these colours. I feel like a stretch of countryside.
The badge is from an Eduardo Paolozzi exhibition which I saw in Scotland a few years ago. It was fantastic. It really opened my mind - the validity of collage as an art form; semi-/abstract colourwork as an intellectual pursuit; how impressive and invigorating modern sculpture can be. I saw one of his small sculptures on Cash in the Attic once (or was it DIckinson’s Real Deals?), an elephant in plastic or rubber all made of angles. Oh, and there was a recreated Artist’s Studio as part of the exhibit - he has a Geordi LaForge figure in there. I am pro TNG.
Look at this - this version of Vulcan/Hephaestus was at the showing I saw. You could look at it from three different levels I think. Photo via nationalgalleries.org!
And how good is this?
Changing subjects, this is my annotated copy of the book I’m preparing a (thorough) review for (two thousand words in..):
Each of those turned-over pages stands for something I have a problem with. Kind of impressive I actually still plan to read the last two books in the series, huh?
Don’t frown at me. It’s a mass-produced paperback.
I’m doing it for the LOVE of books! Come on! Paper isn’t always sacred..
LET'S BE BUDS, BUB IllustratorClaire: Twenty-three year old Illustrator and Englisher, female feminist, interested in being helpful and denouncing things that aren't. Designed and drew the Britsh Style Bloggers logo; available to hire on just about any illustration project. Currently working as a Dinner Lady. For illustration portfolio, click the "tales from the sketchpages" tag or my logo below! Why do I do this? click here. Thank you!
I am not paid - in money or in gifts or favours - to endorse anything here. If I was, I would be bad at it, because lying is ugly.
If you've commented here and it isn't showing up, it's not because I hate you! It's because either wordpress or 1and1 hate me. Give me a shout on claire [at] illustratorclaire.co.uk, or claire [at] britishstylebloggers.org.uk!
Oh, and by the way - I do tend to post on Sundays, so if you find that day a little net-empty.. check back? Great idea!
