My Illustrative Life

NOTE: I’m basically still offline! But I wrote this, and transfered it to a computer that can get online, so, here it is.. for YOU.

>((Cross your fingers for me to be able to get my BSB colum up the day after tomorrow, huh?))

I used to watch Ocean Girl

Actually, I used to watch Ocean Odyssey, because I am Bri’ish. But the show was Australian, and in Australia it was known as Ocean Girl.

I read it, too; there was a cinemanga-style phoo story adaption thing in Girl Talk, which was my favourite magazine. The radest thing about going to the Big Bash in year six was going to the Girl Talk booth and talking to the editor, getting a goodie bag and my nails done.

Ocean Girl was a pretty good show. It was the kind of sci-fi where the speculative aspect of the genre is just an add-on to our current real life, and Australia and New Zealand (something in the air? Or water?) were apparently really good at those from about 1994-2005. According to wikipedia the show was “an example of deep-ecology science fiction” - it was about two boys (both named, as the captain formally addressed them, “Master Bates” I am not kidding) whose mother’s job as a marine biologist demanded that they move to an under-sea research dome lab run-like-a-ship thing. They have to learn to get along in their new environment, in the cramped quarters with the other kids whose parents are ‘on-board’, with having left their friends, with their dastardly father’s absence, blah blah.. but then they also meet Neri, who is magic.

Course, she isn’t just a wizard did it-style magic. She lives alone on an Island, and can talk to a whale (Charlie) and swim underwater for extended periods and is terribly curious about the boys’ world whilst also fearing outside influence. Pretty straightforward Pocahontas-arc stuff, only eventually it turns out that Neri is actually an actual alien, from space. By the end the elder boy and she fall in love.

When it’s written down like that it sounds like just my kind of thing. Emotional drama on a backdrop of futuristic science fiction, with no gratuitous tit-flashing (because, For Kids), with a basically ridiculous premise played straight. Dark Angel, The Tribe, Dekaranger, Buffy, Kamen Rider Anything, The Girl From Tomorrow, classic X-Men, etc etc. And the costuming was good too - Neri wore a dressthing made out of what looked like natural fibres and fishing net, which was perfectly evocative of ‘ocean’ and ‘girl’ and even ‘alien’, really. The boys (and the other kids on the station, who were the gang in the background for use when needed) wore variations on a basic lab-base uniform which got across the whole “suddenly trapped in a military-style world away from home, grasping for identity and personal connection” thing. But somehow.. somehow it never really became “mine”.

You know what I mean when I say “mine”, right? It’s the difference between being a fan, and just tuning in or picking up. You know what I mean.

It kind of bugged me, what was so-called ‘wrong’ with Ocean Girl. It did. It went off-air in 1998 and I think I stopped watching before it finished, but it stayed at the back of my head somewhere. I was curious! But I watched the first eight or so episodes recently, and I think I figured out what my problem was.

Wikipedia, again, says that the show was set “in the near future”. We all, I think, know how poorly vague that can be. But that wasn’t the point here - the point was that the show never contextualises itself that way. That’s not the whole point, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

In August 1994 I was seven, and as a seven year old it didn’t occur to me that underwater bio-dome laboratory stations didn’t actually exist. I didn’t know - I lived in inland England, and I was seven, and I had heard about Atlantis. I knew that science was pretty amazing, and that people had been to space. Sure, people could live underwater. Why not? With that as the only solid suggestion that the timeline on Ocean Girl and the timeline I was living on were out of sync - because I definitely never noticed any dates referenced the first time around, and I gotta say I never noticed any this second time around either - there was no reason for me to think Oh yes, of course, this is set next Sunday A.D. Of course! Culturally, things may be a little different!

That was a problem, because the hairstyles on the base-bound girls in this show were fipping wacky. I’m serious, I am fairly sure that this was the basic reason why I could never really get into OG’s groove. I can’t quite believe how small-minded that makes me look, either.

But see, at seven one is old enough to know about “normal” and “weird”. Honestly I don’t think this is a parental-fail thing - parents don’t know about which trainers are cool, and my parents raised me to not see “cool trainers” as something I was entitled to, but I still knew which ones were cool and that people valued them based on that. I may not have been completely down with omgtrainers or omgcool, but I still felt the pull of cool trainers. Y’know? Am I sounding totally well excuuuse me princess about being a judgemental asshole (at seven)?

It’s nice to see that the [whatever they call character designers on liveaction shows] were doing their job, being creative, experimenting. It’s good that they tried to do a bit of extra world-building. But the script, alas, completely let them down.

In Dune, things are different to now and nothing is explained; it’s just written as if what’s everyday to the characters in their weird drugged-up space-future is everyday to you, the reader - and that’s cool, it’s good, it makes the story larger and realer and engages you all over the shop. But in Dune, it’s more than just “Paul woke up in his perfectly normal bed, put on his perfectly normal trousers and shirt, went through the perfectly normal automatic door to the bathroom and looked in the mirror at his COMPLETELY BATTY ENORMOUS SQUARE BOUFFANT WHICH LOOKED CRAZY. He mused on how utterly usual everything was, especially his hair, which he never mentioned to anyone ever.”

Do you get my drift Ocean Girl?

I’ll show you pictures, now.

Mark, please - there are three characters here. One of theme is batshit bonkers in the locks department, two are merely real-world unusual and what you might call bold. If I saw them alone, or in real life, I wouldn’t squint at them or wonder what their game was! I’d think, you rock that puff lady, right on. They wouldn’t unsettle or throw me out of a story in just about any other circumstances. It’s just the volume of unusual that’s here, all crammed together, never mentioned, discussed, spotlit or even lampshaded.. there’s a kid with a fringe cut in steps, too, and a boy whose details I have forgotten but who again alone would look interesting and individual, but packed with the rest makes/made me want to shout EXPLAIN! EXPLAIN! TELL ME WHAT IS GOING ON because I know that that isn’t what you’d get if you just took a bunch of people!

It’s a SQUARE, just on her head. Why.

If you are going to evidence cultural shift, even ‘just’ visually, you need to note that your story is not set now or kids like me, who pick up on patterns but are too young to quite articulate or realise the questions forming due to them will just not be all that into your show. And it will bug them to all heck, maybe for twelve years.

Then I guess they’ll write a blog post about it, and maybe someone will read that and think “I remember that show, I loved it. I think I will buy the dvds RIGHT NOW” let me know if that’s YOU, so maybe my tirade is all in vain, and it’s actually a pretty good long-term marketing strategy.. ..?

It’s still really annoying though.

Happy watching, ocean girls and boys.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; 
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him;

Bury him in advice!

Advice the first:

When you are cycling through fields in summer you DEFINITELY need to wear a face-protecting neckerchief. You see how many bugs are on this sleeve? The black specks. Imagine that many bugs flying into your face. That’s no fun. Only once I forgot my necker, and it.. was pretty terrible. You can feel them hit your lips.

Advice the second:

Even if you buy a second-hand, vintage item that has surely been washed MANY times before - if it is a deep colour.. wash it alone or with (very) like shades. I know, I know! Obvious! But not obvious enough, for me!

Things that used to be white:

This shirt - luckily the only non-pants item that wasn’t something of mine - used to be a delicate pink to match the buttons.. I’m sure my dad likes lilac, though. Probably.

There was a pair of pants in this was that went from green to purple. That was a strong purple pill!

Advice the third:

When a nine year old peels off from the pack of nine-ten-eleven year olds who have already sassed you several times and runs across a field apparently expressly for the purpose of telling you you should “get a better hat”, Caesar, I want you to remember this - you should drink down that fine old vinegar-wine of oh yes, that’s how it feels to know that people want to belittle you because they’re uncomfortable with your wardrobe. I remember and savour the fact that it’s a vintage unpleasantness. Not one that can currently spoil your day. In a minute, you’ll catch a glimpse of your reflection in a french window and you’ll think DAMN, I’m looking GOOD.

And you’ll be right!

Oh, and don’t forget to bend down to his or her eye level, give him a Paddington stare, and say “And maybe YOU shouldn’t be so rude“. If you don’t tell them, how will they learn? That is the kind of thing you need to nip in the bud.. before they grow up into full-blown users of “negging“. That would really make the world a poorer place.

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.

Abney Park

They make music, they have a look, they have a whole parallel reality.

Buy them for me, buy them for you, whichever.

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,

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.

Pictures from the weekend:

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.

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?

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.

Nuns vs bikers with good hair and neckerchiefs, in a battle of words, in the sixties, with an audience of boarding school girls. On a road trip.

That’s my kind of movie, baby! Dig it!

Sunday! A day of rest, according to my Church of England atheist upbringing. A day of vest, right now.

I can count on Sunday to not require me to go out, mostly. I am fond of Sundays for this reason.

Garden pruning gave me a little accessorising - and no, this isn’t my Florrie’s tea party floral offering.. One does not go to garden parties in one’s robe.

I feel a little bit Snufkin, a little bit Luffy, a little bit something-I-can’t-think-of and a little bit Moreau. You see? La.

Sundays are also days when I sometimes pretend to be hipper than I am. Long necklances piss me off because they fall about, and off, and get tangled, and just look so.. forgotten? But when I’m not moving enough to affect a long thing dangling from my neck, sometimes I try it out to see if I like it after all.

Upon consideration, I don’t. I just dislike things that look precarious. “Tie it on properly!”, I think. There’s a better shot of red nose day Madonna, though.

Here is the old (”Classic”) version; ‘the bathing suit’:

Here is the new (”boring”) version; ‘the Chick in early 90s gritty cartoon’:

And here is my (”I just drew this in Pixen whilst waiting for my communication technology to work”) version; ‘wrestling is a Greek thing, right?’:

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!

Awww yeahhhh.

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!

All pictures wither from TribeHeaven or Dwayne Cameron’s (Bray) personal site (uh, hope that’s cool?)

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.

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!!

You’re welcome.

Soooo here is my “me”, from the Scott Pilgrim avatar 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

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..

Yup! I’m wearing the same as yesterday. Sue me!

I didn’t really feel like dressing in something new just to sit and puzzle over tailoring my CV for the job I have my eye firmly on (please cross your fingers for me!). But that worked out for the best, because after finishing that up I needed a change of scene so I went and picked flowers. Which I’ve been looking forward to since I first spied this skirt - the pocket are so perfect for meadow-wandering! Don’t you think?

Please, enjoy these flowers as well!

After that wholesome interlude, I want to share some music with you. Which I don’t do that often, because it usually seems a bit pointless - who doesn’t know about the Misfits being awesome, or Faith No More or Cheap Trick of the Runaways or Elvis Costello or Suzi Quatro or Michael Jackson or the Pixies or Tom Waits or Kana? And when I am listening to things I don’t hear people talking about I kind of.. have nothing to say other than “this is really good, I like it” most of the time. I don’t know how to talk about music! If you read here regularly, you should know that.

But suddenly I have found a reason to talk bands with you guys!

Let’s talk Danish pop, shall we?

Of course, by that I mean “The Cartoons and Aqua were brilliant and I love them”.

I was ten when Barbie Girl came out, and eleven when Witch Doctor came out and they hit me right in the joy buttons. Even then, there was a little bit of ‘must pretend to like ironically in public’, but I asked for their albums for my birthday and christmas and I got them. At this point, my music collection was like so: Eternal; Boyzone; Spice Girls; [repeat].

They both found their way into my farm in the same way that they managed to fool most of the people most of the time (I’ll get back to that) - they wore bright colours! And had super-gimmicky prop-instrument-costumes! And they moved really fast and were exaggerated! Their videos gave me something to look at, instead of fourminutes of a bunch of guys standing on a dark stage kicking up dust and strumming soulfully. I hate boring music videos, I really do. And yeah, I genuinely like the sounds that they make - they’re unserious, and joyful, and sort of shiny-heartfelt. I like the volume and mania they have in their noise.

You may laugh, but the most important thing about these bands (once you get past the image, because I did need that to notice them) were their lyrics. I know, it sounds ridiculous, right? Ooh ee ooh ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang.

But really. They’re both kind of filthy, if you listen. Filthier than ten-eleven year olds are used to, and filthier than you’d assume from the perky-perky toon-music and the perky-silly costumes and videos.

I’ll say right now that I have no idea if they wrote their songs or not - I know that the Cartoons mostly did/do covers. That doesn’t matter, actually.

That is enough to make me a life-long convert, to be honest. I remember listening to this song, being eleven, and thinking, “I know I am hearing a song about oral. Nobody is noticing. I know that nobody would want me to listen to a song about oral. This CD didn’t have ‘explicit content’ on it. Nobody knows. They have tricked people by looking silly.”

Again - rape? The word “rape” in a song for me, an eleven year old? It’s allowed because they are a novelty band? Mind: blown.

‘They’re talking about fucking, aren’t they”, I thought.

Even as a ten year old, you could hear the satire in “Barbie Girl”. I thought it was aces, I mean come on, it was funny! So daft, so obviously venomous, so true to life. This satire about gender roles was at number one for three weeks, here. Mattel sued, and it was dismissed. That’s fucking landmark stuff! A pop band skewers the shallow, unquestioned ‘perfect life’ dream sold mercilessly by a toy company, gets sued, and wins. Feminist victory, gone unnoticed!

I like these bands because they make me laugh with what they say, and when they aren’t making me laugh they’re making me go “awww, that’s nice!” The way that Aqua crafted most of their songs into stories (and had the videos to back them up) mattered to me, particularly as pre-bedtime listening. Fairytale castles in songs with horse-feet sound effects in. Flippin’, rigging’d airships.

And I like the technobilly echoing depth of shallow that the Cartoons give. “Who put the bomp” is one of my favourite songs. I can’t help it! It just sounds nice, and the lyrics are sweet, and, I like it! They have a double bass disguised as A CARROT, you know? Give them a chance.

First: on theme!

Harsichord-sound. Pirates. Badass princess. Narrative progression. Someone playing their own dad. HURRAY!

They went there. “Giant lizard”!

I am always pro-band who use animation in their videos. Or rather, I am always pro-using animation. That’s a wiser statement.

Click here for the Witch Doctor video. CURSE YOUR DISABLED EMBEDDING!

I’m including this one because it has the official video included; it’s one of the weaker ones, I rekkin.

Maybe all bands, really, are dirty mouthed horrors. Eh. I still love these ones. I don’t know what it is about you, Denmark! But I like it.