il libro mio

I'm not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don't prefer one "strain" to another.
I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says "That's
not like Frank!", all to the good! I
don't wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--
you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

Frank O'Hara

Hallo, I hope Christmas went well for you. I had a really lovely time over two days sandwiched in between more twelve hour shifts at ye olde market researche company. Edinburgh is as bitterly windy and full of people wearing ugg boots as I remember.

Oh lord, there's a new Jonathan Creek Christmas Special! I am having nosebleeds of anticipation. Almost all the rest of shows including Doctor Who I've missed or kind of lost track of, but oh this episode is getting painstakingly recorded.

Also, in typical locust-like fashion I've started a new blog over here -

http://laspecola.blogspot.com/

Partially because I am loathe to pay LJ to remove the WHY IS YOUR STOMACH FAT?? BE POPULAR! welcome banners from my page. But mostly this'll just be a sparse wee sketchbook to stick drawings in.

Happy New Year everybody!

Ohh I fail at livejournal. CAPTAIN'S LOG, NOVEMBER, 2008, THE STARSHIP ENTERPRISE.

( NSFW, photos. )

And what else? I'm mostly obsessively watching stuff on Youtube, like Jan Svankmajer's surrealist stop motion version of Faust, and young Ian Mckellen being a bloody good Macbeth, and spittling all over the ghost of Banquo. I should learn to embed videos. And I'm writing some kind of story, but sloowly, and on lj due to not having Word installed on here, rar. For such a stupidly rambley person I feel like writing is like straining cheeses for me. Not that I ever strained a cheese. I never even caused one mild discomfort.

Realistically I won't update this for another few hundred years now. Happy Winter everybody.

Oh, radio silence in livejournal land! I've just been all busy with schoolwork, except now I'm having this really annoying thing where I keep waking up about half past five in the morning and can't sleep and then by the time I've sat around cooking and downloading audiobooks and trying to make myself sleepy I have...forty five minutes left before I'm supposed to get up anyway. Are those last frustrating few moments in bed worth it?

...Actually...I think they might be. Will ramble later!

OH P.S. Rebecca if you read this madam HAPPY BIRTHDAY! I'm not sure if it still counts at this stage but we'll just pretend your birthday exists in some kind of staggered period that warps and stretches over the space-time continuum like...butter spread over too much bread. I hope you had a fabulous time.

Going back to Italy already. So much stuff I meant to do and people I meant to visit. Really disappointed with self. Last call center scribbles while I still have a scanner...

( Read more... )

Bye!

So in a fit of madness last week I applied for a job in a market research call centre. Yesterday, as I sat at a retro computer like an MS DOS text-based adventure game gone wrong commanding me in glowing green capitals to

PREPARE TO PROBE FULLY. (DO NOT READ THIS OUTLOUD)

I realised I'd made a terrible, terrible mistake. Now I'm roped in for thirty five hours of training in the next week. It's actually making me queasy just thinking about it.

And oh, other flavours of stuff. Things could be going better.

But I went to see the Dark Knight! Another work doodle.

( Batman and the Joker. )

And I'm going for dinner with Sade and Miki tonight, who I haven't seen in a really long while!

Helloo. in pressing news, I had an allergic reaction to some facestuff and now I'm all flakey and horrible, and awaiting my complete metamorphosis into a lizard.

And I'm trying to finish that portrait of Hugh that I started, ohh, three months ago...so he gets to sit around some more watching stuff on my laptop and being stared at.



So on the day I arrived back in Edinburgh and went into my bedroom for the first time, I found a book had been subtly left on my bedside table called Descent into Hell. Aaahaa I...I love my mum.

But what the...heck, I'm reading it anyway. I also just finished some fantastic books, The Time Traveller's Wife (don't know why it took me so long to get around to this one, but it was so lovely) And also The Little Friend by Donna Tartt, who I'd never heard of before and pretty much has the worst name possible for such a prodigiously gifted writer. She's only written one other book, The Secret History, but it sounds kind of really fucking creepy and awesome, especially since I did my enormous great Latin essay on Bacchus and his rites, back in the day.

I love working five til seven shifts! I will become a lizard-bat and never see daylight again.

( Lucy faces doodle. )

I need to do this whole tagging business, and then I could make an Extraordinary Leonard Tag, and be super organised.

Aaand Pushing Daisies...

Ned: You're the only one for me.
Chuck: I know you feel that now, but there are things you want.
Ned: So? Everyone wants stuff, we wake up every day with list of wishes a mile long and maybe we spend our lives trying to make those wishes come true, but just because we want them doesn’t mean we need them to be happy.
Chuck: What do you need to be happy?
Ned: You.

So I started my summer job again, which means...sitting behind a till with pencil and paper! Behold, the fruits of being a horrible employee.

( Sketchety sketch. )

What else? Hugh is cooking a ready-meal and feeding me the third episode of Pushing Daisies, which I really kind of love already.

And I'm hoping to try and paint a few decent portraits this summer. Sade for definites.

Life has really dramatically settled down after being incredibly crazy and surreal for the past couple of months, and I don't quite know what to do with myself. But its nice.

Artwork, photos, rinse, repeat!

( Moaar! )

Also, my old computer is dying, and last time I was home I was clearing out all the files I wanted onto here, and I managed to move all these songs I didn't even know I had into my Windows Media Player. And, aww, its so lovely, all these bands I had forgotten and obsessed about, entire soundtracks to my life, are back with me. Its weird how music acquires this aftertaste, a strange communion with our experiences. Jeff Buckley, The Church, Roxy Music, Cocteau Twins, is all Sade and change and gentle mystery. Fiona Apple, Regina Spektor, is saturnial. Then Bauhaus, Rozz Williams, the Cure, that hallowed shrine of eighties that still makes me shiver.

I think I like it that we compress the texture of our lives into songs and pictures and words, building little time capsules around ourselves.

Aaah, I keep thinking of things to post on here and then forgetting about it.

Hello! How are you? I've moved house, and am now sharing a loft with fifty hamsters and one slightly senile landlord. I'm a bit woobly at the edges still but I'm making soup and doing laundry, so all's fine by me. And...yes. Have some art! And photos.



( Cake...or Death! )

Oh boy, I'd forgotten how time consuming this is. I have other things to say but...sleep now.

( +1 The Morrigan doodle. )

Oh man, another thing making me happy right now is TEAteateatea. I bought some Twinings vanilla tea and now my room smells...amazing. Did I mention already saturnial sent me the most unbelievable kettle you have ever seen? It's moving house with me in two weeks or so! Its like my surrogate cat. Though slightly less comfortable to have sitting in your lap.

edit:

( Speak of the devil. )

New Blackwater page! Hurrah, hurrah, etc. This here is the very, very beginning, now, more beginningy than any other beginning that began before it. Honest.

And you know things are in a bad way when you wake up in the morning and go to the fridge to survey your breakfast options and they turn out to be;

- half a carrot, slightly squishy.
- conjunctivitus eye drops.

Must go buy stuff. Eat. Nom nom.

( Read more... )

...is about how I feel right now.

edit- oops, tl;dr!

On that note, Happy Christmas! I am working all day every single day from now until January 2nd, which makes me cry a little inside.

( Lucy and Leonard version 9 )

The Curse Gets Worse!

( + Samuel and the Morrigan. )

The Morrigan, goddess of destruction, Ael's younger sister. (though you wouldn't think it, girl needs a decent exfoliator?) She and Samuel forge a strangely functional bond, mostly since she thrives on the human desire to self-destruct, and he thrives on...free heroin!

I remembered to take both my sketchbook and my diary to work today, and ended up drawing on my diary D: Why? Why?

Also, just for sheer vicarious pleasure, Hugh saw Dylan Moran outside HMV on Princes Street yesterday and didn't leap into his arms screaming. He's made of stronger stuff than I.

( Ael and Samuel. )

Aaw, my babies!

That's 2008, in time to tear the whole thing to bits, plan it out and string it all back together 2008. Rather than in about 11 days time. All appendages crossed.

And sorry this journal is becoming so bulbously and copiously imagey. (dear lord, self, go to bed.) I need to figure out how to do those little preview thumbnails again.

edit:

( + old Blackwater drabble, July 2006. )

(I'm in the process of cleaning out my files off my old computer at the moment, and found this, one of the first things I wrote for these characters, thought it fitted bizarrely well. I also found some seriously hilarious, terrible, angsty writing on my part, and Blan, the epic sci-fi which me and saturnial began writing once. It sounds like some kind of unpleasant porridgey breakfast cereal, but really it was much better than that, and had scary sexy mermaids and dystopias and the like.)

Mnfh incoherent. That text is Letraset, which is beautiful darling rub-off instant sketchbook joy, muaah! After months of drought I found some last week in an art shop in Glasgow, and spent an unjustifiably huge amount on four sheets. But it is so satisfying.

Er, I should probably rename this journal 1001 Nights of Very Repetitive Illustrations. But the girl's nifty! Ohhhh, you thought you couldn't get sick of the sight your own characters?? MUAhaha! Also I had a couple of other drawings from the galleries we went to in Glasgow to post here but I am too tired.

edit: oops, never mind.

edit:

( +1 more )

( Luce and Leonard version 8. ) Also, for Pratchett fans; The PTerry Thank you Project is a really sweet, positive idea. Think I'm going to submit something.

Keep cheerful, keep cheerful.

Christ, I'm struck with this horrible vision of all the authors, artists, and comedians who have effectively raised me getting old and dying out, one by one, until there's no-one to make any sense of the world for me anymore. D:

Anyway, here's Leonard and Lucy, trying to develop this one really slowly and not rush it. It's such a novelty for me to actually have a kind of working process that I'm going to post it here as I go.


( Development sketches +4 )

Crits, advice, scathing looks, etc. would be really welcome, since I want to fix things now before I start the meat and taters.

( more sketchbook, nudity and armoured bears. )