My Illustrative Life

You remember how I was lamenting how expensive trousers that don’t really fit me are? I got some for free!

Not blogger-free. My mum’s colleague’s daughter’s hand-me-sideways free.

They’re kind of loose at the waistband, and they ride rather lower at the rear than I’d like when I sit, squat or bend, and they’re tight enough on the thighs that when I put them on (and then periodically, through the day) I have to do the kind of lunges that used to give energetic schoolmasters a bad name.

But they’re mine, and they cost me nothing, and they represent the thoughtfulness and unwillingness to waste of strangers. And they fit inside my boots easily, and I can make them work for me. And they’re a nice colour, a sort of almost-silver. There’s a black pair too, actually, which I should have worn today because I have already got bicycle-chain oil down my right calf. I didn’t notice it happening..

I wore them for my Last! Day! of School! and they stood up to it fine. We are now a team.

The lighting was off, clearly, when I took these. So I fiddled (to no effect) with all the powers of iPhoto, on the one shot where I managed to get my whole foot in frame. A more exaggerated pose too, obviously - I prefer looking a little silly to looking like I’m trying not to look anything but ‘nice’.

Lunges:

And in a moment of colour-normality.. Why couldn’t the balanced photos have happened next to the apple tree? Apple trees are pleasant!

The newly purple stitching about the neck of my sweater matches my boots so well.. I don’t expect anyone noticed, but I did, and it made me feel dandy!

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,

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.

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.

ETA: Video!

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!

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.

Soooo I just watched Iron Liz’s first video review; the Sailor Moon RPG. And I enjoyed it, and it got me a-thinkin’. Watch first, then I’ll tell you.

When I was a young teen and pre-teen, finding my way on to the internet and making it my home, I came across mention of this “Sailor Moon”. Sailor Scouts, Sailor Senshi. I saw the geocities fanpages. I saw the rudimentary and the amazingly fine cosplayers. I saw stickers and plot synopsis-es and fanart and official art. I fell in wow. One of my very first eBay purchases was a vhs tape containing the first two episodes, dubbed into english, for eight pounds. I needed it.

I’ve always lived in villages and I was always a shy kid - and I didn’t know anyone with ties to Japan or who knew what anime was. So there was no-one to help me, but I had this great big needy desire to know all about anime, in general, and to understand this country where grownups were allowed to watch cartoons omg. I wanted to master this new way of drawing (yeah.. that never happened)! I’d buy any animated vhs I could find, unless it looked too scary (Guyver) and just watch it with this weird coiled-spring feeling. Part of that was just awe at the cultural shift - acceptance of illustration and animation and speculative fiction as everyday necessities! I wanted so badly to be involved in that that. But part of it was just: Sailor Mooooon. *0*!!!

The reason I loved Sailor Moon instinctively, I think, is that looking at a character lineup you can understand that the main characters are completely normally-coded girls. Girlish girls, who are girly, like girls are ’supposed to be’ and like even girls* who don’t want to be pigeonholed as ‘just a girl’ or ‘the girl’ can (perhaps secretly) like to be sometimes, too. But they’re also the heroes of the piece, completely and unapologetically. They are who the show is about, they are the Power Team, they fight the villains. They can be like a girl and a fighting hero at the same time, absolutely.

There doesn’t have to be a girl or two on the team, which is led by boys. There doesn’t have to be The Girl who the boy team visits every now and then to get potions or clues from, or whatever. There doesn’t have to be The Girl who leads the pack of boys (I love you, Marian, but you didn’t set me up so well for taking camaraderie amongst chix seriously) Girls in fighting teams don’t have to take on ‘masculine roles’; they don’t have to wear ‘masculine clothes’; they don’t have to not have girly hair styles and they can still look tough and in control when they do. They don’t have to change personality once they suit up. Curse you, Power Rangers, curse your dishonest remix-happy ways (I don’t mean it, Power Rangers, we are still friends I need you). Being a girlish girl does not mean that you are the team mascot or the team eyeroll.

Gosh, that was a relief to see.

“Femininity can not keep ability from me”.

That’s a beautiful lesson.

*And boys, obv! But I was doing that whole “talk about yourself whilst pretending to talk about people in general so as not to be all guts everywhere” thing. Sorreee.

Pictures pinched off Wikipedia

Sometimes there are things which inspire and one admires and aspires towards somehow, without the specific desire to be/be in/be with the places, characters, wardrobes, movie. Sometimes a film will take you by surprise, and speak to you with atmosphere and colour scheme and attitude in a way that heightens your intent to do your thing your way, without actually being a film that you want to poach costume from.

Let’s learn about one such film, my fine comrades!

Let’s learn about RED SURF. A George Clooney movie with an 18 certificate, from 1990. Which according to imdb comments went straight to video!

The cover LIES, you guys! Yeah, even bargain bin dvd releases bother to photoshop their covers in an attempt to cash in on more lucrative, starry periods of their lead actors’ careers.

This is what George Clooney actually looks like in this movie:

Lulz!

The back cover was what convinced us to buy it, actually -

- the back cover’s picture of how George Clooney actually appears in the actual film. Why do they think people buy cheap-ass dvds? Either because they can’t afford expensive ones, or because they like sub-par cinema. Or both. Don’t lie to us. Don’t patronise people who know they aren’t at Blockbuster, don’t put off people who don’t want to be. That said, check out this alternate cover/poster, as well as this one (Check’em all here). What, can no-one in the world appreciate 90s grunge metal surf criminal drug choker George?

Apparently not, I guess.

So. In Red Surf. George Clooney plays Remar, man without a family, man without law, man without qualms about lying to his 90s-earnest girlfriend. He loves to play pranks like convincing his best friend his girl is cheating on him, then tricking him into thinking that they have accidentally murdered her. Fun times! Then they follow that up by going out on jet-skis (loaned from Gene Simmons, “the Doctor”) to collect drugs from the sea.

This is the apparently communal party drugs casual crime beachhouse, also home to sensitive hat-wearing girlfriend Rebecca:

(This is Rebecca, later in the movie:)

This is George Clooney/Remar feeding best buddy Atilla (actually? the movie’s real eventual hero) some delicious cocaine from his lap whilst driving. They love to weird out the squares!

Did I mention this was a movie about George Clooney, looking in no way how I imagine “George Clooney” to look? Acting the part of a leather-wearing curly hair having ex-professional surf bum large-scale drug dealer? Who is also able to get a sensible, on-the-wavelength multi-necklace wearing art-loving girl pregnant (again; implied abortion alert) and convince her that he will change and raise a family with her, through thoughtful gifts of guitars and well-timed fake promises?

Well, it is. WEIRD MOVIE.

Aaaanyway. Remar finds out Rebecca’s pregnant, and she tells him she wants to keep it. He’s all, “okay..” but when she tells him she wants to go to Portland to raise it with a friend of hers who has kids already, he starts getting protective and territorial. Promises her he’ll change, blah blah no more drugs and crime, more time for romance and kisses. She gets up for ice cream, and by the time it takes her to serve two bowls full he’s all *coffcoff*I really love drugs*coffcoffff*. Sadface.

Later, Atilla and Remar have a heart to heart about how Remar’s going to screw things up and lose lady & baby - Atilla is psyched at the thought of having a baby around - and Remar talks about how for the first year, you hope the baby won’t die, and it doesn’t, and then the second year it starts to hate you. And it hates you and hates you.. with this honest frightened bitterness. And he tells his buddy how he feels like he’s suddenly lacking control. There’s a later scene where Doc tells Remar to quit with the drug deals, and later than that Remar refuses, outright refuses with yelling and a pushfight, to take money from a deal that all his buddies planned without him with the explicit intention to set the couple & child up for a secure life. Why is it that movies with these real relationship scenes and true-person complexity get bargain binned? I have no idea what makes a “good movie”.

The whole thing keeps building - running big drug deals get you in to trouble, did you know? Well, Red Surf is here to tell you that they do. They have to fake a murder, and Remar misses doctors appointments with Rebecca, and Atilla becomes her rock (it’s really nice) and they talk about girl babies playing little league, and they have to send off one of their gangbrothers to save his life after he talks to the police. He cries! He’s the most annoying sort of character, that you just want to squash and yell SHUT UP!! at, but when he leaves his guys he cries and it’s sweet and sad. Bargain bin film. I don’t know. Then there’s more peril, and more apologising/lying to Rebecca, and the blabbermouth gets stabbed and then probably fed to wolves. The antagonist/drug partner lives in this decrepit ruined house with two guys in slacks and vests with big guns and slicked back hair, and he has a pit of wolves in his front room. Did I not mention that?

Soooo eventually Remar dies. He gets machine gunned and blown up on a jet-ski. Atilla and Rebecca set him on fire and push him out to sea for burial. But not before he tells Atilla he loves him, when Atilla is trying to convince him to let the boys do the run so he can stay safe for baby! BARGAIN BIN MOVIES. He literally says “I love you”.

Atilla doesn’t take too kindly to his friend being all killed and such so he goes off to infiltrate/murder the antagonist/partner’s (..okay, just antagonist by this point) gang. With Doc Gene Simmons, who was in ‘Nam. I really, really want a video game out of that scene. Or all of this movie. He kills them all and avoids the wolves (not everybody else does, om nom nom) and hurray, he wins!

There’s actually a very nice, assumably realistic ‘person unused to machine-gunning has to use a machine gun’ scene. Atilla wears his heat on his sleeve!

By the closing credits, Atilla and Rebecca look to be starting this super-sweet, semi-awkward, adorable take-care-of-each-other romance. He follows her to the train station as she’s leaving, bereaved, for Portland and.. it’s sooo cuuuute. I was completely satisfied by the progression of this film. My beloved and I both had that “no wai, for reals!” expression of surprised enjoyment - for £2.99, in a village shop, we’re used to expecting Jaguar Wong or “Richard Harrison IS.. a ninja“. Not an honestly watchable, variably heartfelt, fun movie. With George Clooney in a bandanna with a crack pipe.

This is my favorite George Clooney movie. Of all time.

No Rebecca, really!

All the clothes in this movie are so worn-in. they look like they’ve been walked over by the whole cast, and have sand ground in and the colours worn out. Nobody’s constrained by what they wear - comfort first, expression of wild-life values second. Honestly I’m not sure if I like it so much only for itself, or for the fact that it has such an un-George Clooneyish George Clooney. I mean, that’s a compelling element, right?

But I think a fair part of it is that it’s that 1990s grunge-metal-taste-of-hippy aesthetic that’s so present in a lot of films & shows I really love but completely divorced from the music that made the scene. This is what I know about music in the very late 80s - early 90s: Patton-era Faith No More and Primus existed (excellently). Also, people liked the bands they namecheck in Bill & Ted and Wayne’s World. THAT’S IT. I guess Nirvana happened some time around there..? I’ve made no secret of my hatred for music journalism and I find the sartorial guidelines hard to use as an entry point to the sounds because as far as I can tell there was an extreme gender divide - dudes wore baggy t-shirts and loose trousers, girls wore leather bras, spandex and hotpants. Neither of these looks have really worked for me, as yet, and for some in-brain reason that really impedes my investigation and understanding of the knots of bands and sub-genres that make up the cultural era. And that failure to break through the bubble surrounding my perception of the music scene means that I feel inauthentic approaching the dresscode with increased zeal. It’s a vicious cycle! Of ignorance!

A movie like Red Surf though, which I assume has no budget to source big soundtracks and which only broaches the question of “what do you listen to” with mostly-covered t-shirts and easy to miss flyers pasted on bedroom walls in scenes where character tension is high, doesn’t make me feel like a double outsider. I can assimilate the costume apart from the intimidating musical context.

Here’s a question that Red Surf raises for me - what’s so wrong with me that I’m suddenly not finding 90sgirl hats completely, ultimately ugly?

Wanna know a secret? I wrote this entire post saying “Lisa” instead of “Rebecca”. Yeah, she doesn’t get that much autonomy. I still have this film a ten out of ten on IMDB.

BONUS: Here’s the pretty shitty trailer! With really awful sound quality!

Ever done a workout video? I have. Just one.

The lesson here, is “always check the charity shop VHS stocks when roaming town with your romantic object”. This cost us twenty one pence, I think. That or twenty four. A difference of three pence isn’t that much.

Here’s a section of the video!

Honestly, it’s a really good tape. At one point she goes a little overboard with the “being sedentary is bad because you get fatter” rather than “being sedentary is bad because it makes you feel less vital”, but - overall it’s a really nice, Jessica Fletcher-y pro-you 50 minutes about how to feel generally better about yourself. And! Having done the full workout today, I feel.. miles better, physically. Less stiff. THAT’S EMBARRASSING I’M ONLY YOUNG.

It’s basically a series of stretches and flexes (some involving a towel or a windowsill), tips like “don’t feel guilty about doing relaxing tasks like watering flowers, wondering round the garden or sewing!” and “in the morning, rub yourself and thing positive thoughts” and “take tea! It’s nice!” (and who doesn’t love to be validated in regards to this stuff?), topped off with about ten minutes of “free movement”. Which is enormous fun. Georgia and the Ace Gang, as my sister remarked, would definitely do this tape.

How’s this dress with this overdress, then? The sweaterdress itself is too short to wear in public. It also ends just as it’s passed the exact widest part of my thighs, which looks interesting and “unflattering” in a private way. But it’s perfect to wear under the apron-thing - form-fitting so as not to distract or get too blousy, cotton to keep cool, long sleeves for contrast. Is the blocky black-grey-white too stark vs the broderie anglaise pretty-pretty?

And why do things I wear so often end up making me think “the sixties!”? Ah sweah, it’s not intentional. Or maybe even apparent to anyone but me.

Pee Ess checkout my snax! Delicious

Watching Pulse, now, BBC3 (hence “bodyhorror” tag!). I like it. I like it quite a lot. Hope it gets picked up!

Yeasterday I said:

And today, I DID IT!

Yeahh, I am as “good as my word”.

Actually to be truthful, I have no caught up on Freak Angels BUT - as yet, there has not been time. So I’m still good!

Cycling in skirts is actually surprisingly easy. Even in a big, long, gathered, pannier-pockets skirt -

You just have to take the middle of the hem at the front and the back, and tuck them up under your bum on the seat. You end up with some puffy pantaloons, basically. It’s not guaranteed modesty, though, and they do come down sometimes. I spent a fair portion of one particular country road hitching about my crotch trying to tuck all the fabric back safely. Which really? Is not that admirable or fun. Kind of funny, but not the sort of thing you want to find necessary all of a sudden.

So, bloomers. Wardrobe essentials from my more active days as an egl community member - useful for feelin’ pretty, avoiding flashes, and keeping temperate in slightly breezy/sunny weather. I don’t feel it inappropriate to show them here, because I wore them specifically to be a piece of bicycle-gear rather than Victorian-style underwear. I’m not doing anything more than wearing a visible vest, really. So don’t you go getting ideas!

I love this skirt. It is so always-appropriate and comfortable! It’s not too heavy, it’s not too light, it’s got these MASSIVE STATEMENT POCKETS, and the stripes/apron combo is interesting enough to still be interesting in muted colours. So I can wear it with anything. Even hand-me-down beater sweaters that, if I could, I’d tweak the colour and fabric of.

I was going to ride in my sandals but I think that the pedals would mangle them horribly. And they are precious. When I got home though..!

Mmmhmmm I am going to keep posting pictures of my feet in these shoes, until I have gone through every pair of tights and socks I own. I may not be a compulsive shoe-buyer, but GOSH can I appreciate the heck out of a pair once I ‘ave ‘em.

England is still beautiful, by the way. I might ride out again tomorrow, I passed a pretty great church that was calling out “sketch meeee” and several fields that gave me the picnic-eye.

The beef I ate was chili to this recipe. It’s good, honest!

Now, back to this guy?

It’s a day full of things, isn’t it?

I’ll do them in this order.

First of all, my Hankshirt arrived this morning!

And it is a very pretty colour, actually. Like egg yolk, or those white and orange daffodils.

Do you know who Hank Green is? Well if you don’t, I will tell you: he is half of the Vlogbrothers, who are two brothers who started keeping up with each other in video blog form a few years ago, and kind of caught on. Basically they are nice people who do nice things, and their fans (”nerdfighters”) are nice people who help them do nice things. Oh, just go and watch them, there’s more to it than that.

Anyway, the Hankshirt was created for his 30th birthday earlier this month and proceeds went half to giving him presents an half to plating Rainforest. The Hankplants are plants planted in honour of Hank (see video below). Honestly it does feel a little weird having a shirt and some plants all about some real live guy I don’t even know, but it’s an odd mixture of “nothing personal”, and something personal.

But I didn’t wear it. Because you see, today is also a protest day for Take Back Parliament. Which called for purple to be worn. And you know, why refuse when asked?

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL.

The twenty-fifth of May has quite the full schedule!

It’s time to Wear the Lilac, too. Which is an idea that I cannot consider at length without my eyes getting a little something in them. If you read Night Watch, the Discworld title I mean, this will mean something to you. Probably something that will squeeze your heart a bit (and something nicely relevant to a day also about political reform), but what it’s come to mean in.. the ballworld(ours)?.. is something else. Terry Pratchett has Alzheimer’s, and Wear the Lilac aims to raise money and visibility for research. DONATE if you can.

I know I’m not alone in considering the Watch books my favourites of the Discworld library. I have my problems with world and with the writing (I find that the women adhere too closely to a sensible/silly binary, f’rex) but even so - I love these books. They have seen me through long/boring/sad/sleepless hours. I so enjoy the ‘jaded mentor finds earnest and true vigorousness due to new charges and remembrance of the importance of The Job’ trope, and Vimes fulfills it perfectly and adds in a bit of that-could-be-my-brain-be-careful-but-be-proud. I owe Mr Pratchett’s mind. I’d appreciate you helping me try to pay it back a little. I haven’t donated yet because I literally can’t, but when I can? I will. Remind me, if you like.

And then on top of that it’s towel day. I’m not what I’d call a fan of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, to be honest - I can appreciate it, but it didn’t stir me like it does a lot of you (oh, and, the 2005 movie SUCKED) - but Dirk Gently’s adventures are my kind of fiction. So I’ve got my towel with me, too, and I’m not panicking even though that’s a lot of referencing to fit into one day, one outfit, one post.

Whew. One politics, one environmental and two britlit (hahaha I just thought of that portmanteau and it is SO OBNOXIOUS that I am going to use it) and slacktivisms. NERDFIGHTERS! DFTBA!

I live in England, specifically in Warwickshire. I have done since I was eight, and I love it here. It’s beautiful. Until recently, I hadn’t heard about the ‘controversy’ going on in another part of my county: Meriden. The ‘exact center of England’. Oh, and also the birthplace of Napalm Death! Nice. What’s happening there right now is that a great many of the villagers have “banded together” to protest a local-living man’s use of the land that he owns; he wants to build a permanent travelers’ camp. The land is green belt land.

You can read more about this here, here and here if you would like. There is also a very good report on the Travelers’ Times here.

Full disclosure: Every now and then, I think about movies I have seen that feature people credited as or referred to as “gypsies” and I think, wow, they were dressed in a way I found really cool. I’d like to dress that way. The fashion industry backs me up; ‘gypsy style’ is a periodical summer staple. And then I feel guilty and callous, for culturally objectifying and potentially appropriating the modes of a classification of people who are treated extremely poorly by people I know (please never say “gyppo” to or near me) and by my country (and just about EVERY country, it seems). Then I go online, and try to find out about the factual histories and present times of travelers.

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This time, I went through here, here, here and here as well as here which sent me to the Travelers’ Times Online, linked above.

In case you didn’t follow the TTO link before to the article about the situation in Meriden, here’s the video report:

Noah’s Ark from Travellers Times on Vimeo.

Natural beauty being bulldozed and planning permission laws being flouted are bad, or at least not good. That’s true. But do you know what is worse? RACISM. YOU FUCKS.

People can say “I’m not a racist” all they like. That doesn’t make it true. Even if, as a white person, having an asian dentist were proof that one had no prejudice at all against any kind of asians, that still wouldn’t be the final word on whether or not one was any kind of racist. I’m pretty sure that there are people who are totally great with, say, ethnic Jews and black Caribbeans but make foul remarks based upon their beliefs about, for example, Pakistanis or the Japanese. “Coloured people” (ouch) are not one monolith of unwhiteenglishness. And ‘being able to pass for white’ does not mean that a person is white, in the sense of being ‘not of another race’.

There’s also the arguable difference between racism and xenophobia and cultural prejudice and ethnic-religious prejudice. Personally I am not sure that there’s much use in differentiating, but as a white person raised atheist-Christian in Church of England schools, I may be missing something important in the distinctions. Is there sense in calling a white English geographically settled person racist for being against, say, white Irish travelers? I would say yes; I think that there’s enough of a similarity in the dismissal of a lifestyle and heritage someone is born to to make racism and ethnocentrism effectively synonymous.

But as - I just checked, I missed it the first time whilst chopping onions - it says in the video, the travelers in question are Roma. They are an ethnic minority here. They are an ethnic inority everywhere. They are members of a race that is not in power. So all quibbles here become moot.

Did you note the sentence structure and inflection in the woman’s interview section, in the video? The “them” and “us”? They should have to follow the same laws as we all have to. That’s some hardcore sub-radar othering, lady.

The first man interviewed really stresses the word “pretty”! He’s implicitly saying, with that and the rest of his speech, that these people will bring ugliness. Necessarily.

The old guy straight-up says that if it were he who had an identical planning permission overstep, there would not be this outrage. One of the news articles I linked noted that the villagers themselves were breaking laws with the placement of their protest - so it can’t be simple illegality which has got their goat about this settlement.

A year or so ago, I had discovered Yahoo! answers, and was going crazy with finding questions I could answer. Then I ran across a boy who was dating an Italian girl, and who wanted to meet her parents I think. Or, no, maybe he had met her mother and experienced a poor reception. His question was, he wanted to know, was it because he was Roma - did Italy have bad history with Roma people? Now I cannot resist the opportunity to help along a romance. So I googled, and I found this, where “Italy’s highest appeal court has ruled that it is acceptable to discriminate against Roma on the grounds that they are thieves”. And I found this; “Gypsies in Italy protest prejudice”. And I found out about the fire that was set to Roma settlements in Naples in 2008.

Later in the year I somehow ended up on ONTD reading through this thread. The subject of the original post is Madonna being booed for preaching equality and acceptance at a concert with Gogol Bordello in Bucharest. The subject of a lot, and I mean a lot of the comment threads are more detailed looks at how and why gypsies face prejudice in various parts of the world; a lot of these threads start or build with someone saying “but no you guys THEY LITERALLY ARE ALL THIEVES, so it is OK!”. Then these people get schooled by wiser members of their community, but often? They just keep on keepin’ on, ignoring the fact that blind prejudice makes you a dick, rather than your opponent a(n un)worthy victim. It’s an interesting thread. Horrifying, but interesting.

The point is, that all this information isn’t hard to find. Roma people (if I’m saying this wrong, please forgive me and if you’re willing teach me better) are subjected to widespread racism. They suffered pretty darn badly in the Holocaust too, did you know that?

Irish travelers are recognised as an ethnic group here and don’t fare well, either.

I have never, as far as I know, met anybody who lives either partially or completely nomadically or anyone with immediate Roma heritage - as I mentioned earlier the only reason I started thinking about their (your?) lives at all was because when I was maybe six I saw a movie where the romantic lead was ‘a gypsy’ I’m sorry - I really cannot tell if this is an acceptable word for me to use or not. I’m trying to use it only when referencing where it’s been used already and he, his sisters and ex-girlfriend all wore outfits that I wanted– and because Gogol Bordello seem like the coolest people in maybe the entire world. Nothing rests on my doing this research. I am not in the dilemma of “should I go and protest against people (who want to have somewhere to live) being allowed to have somewhere to live, or not?”. And yet - I found this information. In one afternoon, using one search engine, I found all of these news items about the victimisation of a race and of a lifestyle throughout the whole of Britain and mainland Europe. It was not hard; a non-computer literate person could go to the library and say “I need to find some information” and the librarian could point them towards google.

There is no excuse for these protesters.

You can’t gather a posse, saying “I don’t want these people here”, ignoring the persecution they and their brothers and sisters face in multiple countries (right up to government level!), and then fall back and say - “But I’m not racist. I’ve got nothing against them personally”.

You know what? I’m just going to go there and say it. If you can’t manage to not express this kind of wholesale rejection at adults? Think of the children. Please.

Do you care more about planning rules and a single field and, I don’t know, a slight potential fluctuation in property value (are you planning on moving? To a new home? Oh, lucky you), than in the right of a child to be brought up in a place that doesn’t treat her like an eyesore, a criminal and an unwelcome nuisance before they see her as a person? If you do, reader: I judge you.

“I don’t choose to live like this. I was born to live like this.” Said the man who owns the land in dispute.

This makes me feel like bursting.

I hope you win Meriden, travelers. I really really do.