Mila’s Daydreams – Thanks to Pete Ashton for alerting me to this blog from Adele Enerson of her well cute baby photos:
This blog is my maternity leave hobby. While my baby is taking her nap, I create scene around her and take quick snap photos.
Which is gorgeous. But what I was struck by was the way Adele’s found a really simple way to exercise her creative juices every day – without leaving the house, using the bits and bobs that happen to be lying around for props and her camera. Each baby-naptime, Adele has a quick go at creating and telling a simple story with a picture, with some amazing results.
It made me want to do something similar in some sort of attempt to keep the creative bit of my brain alive, be it by letting Tyrone (who’s not been on any travels of late) see the world from within my home or by taking a stab at some Hint Fiction (hat tip Nick Lockey). Just something nice and simple to creak the cogs in my head and stop them from completely seizing up.
On 19th Feb I went along to The Story – a lovely day-long ‘celebration of everything that is wonderful, inspiring and awesome about stories’. It felt incredibly indulgent, spending the day listening to different people tell their stories in different ways, but it was definitely a day well spent. The Story ‘was a very selfish event’ organised by Matt Locke ‘because I wanted to go to an event like this’. Fortunately what Matt wants struck a chord with everyone there, who thoroughly enjoyed the day. I really hope we’ll see more of the same next year.
The real highlight for me was experiencing the genius that is Tim Etchells. I don’t think I’ve known what it is to sob with laughter before hearing him describe a man showing someone a picture of his children by drawing stick figures on a napkin. You had to be there. I was fortunate enough to get the chance to chat to him over the mid-morning break. Unfortunately, I was far too awe-struck to say anything much beyond, “That were great.” Sorry Tim.
I decided to make a London weekend of things so stayed over in a teeny, tiny EasyHotel pod. On Saturday I made my way to Kings Cross for the Shoot Experience Capture Kings Cross event, which explored the variety of themes and influences from the British Library’s Points of View exhibition. It was kind of a photography treasure hunt – participating teams were given a sheet of clues to Kings Cross locations and handed in their camera’s memory card of photographed answers at the end of the afternoon. My friend Jennie and I had a great day running around Kings Cross trying to find answers and inspiration and snapping away. Above is the slideshow of images we submitted in response to these clues – can you match them up?:
FIXED CLUES
A. Once number eight of nine, a gas provider in its prime, now standing alone awaiting renewal.
B. This place of worship has proved Hardy against advancing development since AD 313.
C. This basin has long since washed its hands of ice and is now a cultural Place ft for a King.
D. For an aerial view of the Regeneration around, head to this old House – follow York and onto the Wharf.
E. From Industrial coal yard to a Natural revolution this Park is an ornately gated hidden gem.
F. Cut from the same brick as its neighbourly station, this tower of text houses the photographic history to inspire your journey today.
OPEN CLUES
G. The Camera Never Lies
H. Making Tracks
I’d love to see Shoot Experience do something in Birmingham. Although their events are mainly London ones it seems they do sometimes venture North, and there’s definitely enough people in Birmingham up for having a fun day out with their cameras to warrant it.
On Sunday I just fancied chilling by watching a film so headed to The Renoir Cinema in Russell Square to catch a screening of Michael Heneke’s astonishing The White Ribbon. The 3-hour film (which doesn’t feel like it) tells the story of ‘A village in protestant northern Germany. 1913-1914. On the eve of World War I.’
On the face of it village life is ordered and harmonious, with the villagers happy with their place within the pecking order of the traditional feudal system. But strange things start happening – ‘Who tied the wire to trip the Doctor? Who set fire to the barn? Did you ever wonder who tortured Karli?’ The local schoolteacher takes it upon himself to investigate and discovers the seemingly idyllic society is, under the surface, rotten to the core, with those who should be righting the wrongs too fearful to face up to them and preferring to turn the other way.
Of course a lot of reviewers took this as a precursory tale to the horrors of Nazi Germany: ‘Did these events contain the germs of the tragedies that followed?’ What it screamed to me was just how contagiously toxic bad elements within communities often are, and how harmful smoothing over the cracks can be.
Proof that even when getting down to sirius conferuns bizniz, people still have that natural inclination to play and turn the whole thing into one big game. At the Hello Digital 2009 conference everyone settled down in the main hall for the opening speeches…and a game of battleships ensued on Twitter.
It started with people stating their locations (‘one row behind and 6 seats to the right of @paulbradshaw’) and others present trying to trace them. It then progressed to launches of torpedos and the like – the audience were trying to take each other down. So next time you’re at a conference and find yourself a little distracted, don’t drift off – connect to those around you via Twitter and have a little fun.
I’m not going to be here for Halloween (rather annoyingly, seeing as BARG are playing hard that weekend). I’m going to be in Portugal, taking a summer holiday so late it is, in fact, winter sun. But I did manage to get a taste of Halloween with Carl last Friday, when we spent an enjoyable evening carving pumpkins.
“It’s like shelling out brains,” said Carl rather worryingly. But once we’d gotten past the mucky stage it was lots of fun. Carl went for the logo of cult videogame Left4Dead, whilst I went for the more traditional scary face design.
Then we ate pizza and watched the Black Books boxset, making it a truly perfect evening.
Because I’ve been so busy, I haven’t taken a full-on summer holiday this year, just had a few nice long weekends away. One of them was spent with my Dad in Caerphilly, where I grew up. Me and my older brother were pretty feral as children – we used to spend all our time playing outside in a big pack, coming home like cats when we were hungry. Our favorite haunting ground was Twyn School Field, which has scrubland around the playing field that felt like a dense forest as a child.
Whilst I was back in Caerphilly I literally took a trip down memory lane (which is no longer littered with white dog poo) – past the railings I used to somersault over, down the path along The Brook into The Field. It was great having my memory jolted by a tree where I once disturbed a wasps’ nest, a shed where we all found a stash of illicit porn mags and the bushes where I had a rather clumsy first kiss.
Even better was seeing that a new generation of players are using the space for much the same thing. They weren’t there but telltale signs of them were – a tree used as a bridge over a ditch, graffiti tags on a garage door, an empty bottle of cheap white cider and the throne of the new King of the Castle – a sopping wet blue playchair on top of a tree stump.
Well, it’s been a good long, while, hasn’t it? I’m not going to do the cliched apologising for the prolonged silence, most people know I’ve been a busy bee. In early August I left my job with ACE dance and music to join Will Perrin’s talk about local team and spread the hyperlocal love. And things have been a wonderful whirlwind since then.
But all work and no play makes me really rather dull. So that’s probably what this blog will start to become – more of a personal place of play.
And I’m going to start off with a game played with Nikki Pugh on her birthday recently. Nikki decided she wanted to play the game rather than make it for her special day, and who were we to argue? So after Libby Heighway and Michael Grimes had finished with Nikki in the Nature Centre, they packed her off to me at the graveyard in St Mary’s Church, Moseley.
She found me there waiting with a piece of cake. It was only after she’d eaten it I told her it wasn’t her cake, but that of the cake-loving ghosts. So poor Nikki had to find said ghosts going by the clues below and play them a message from their mean Cake Angel.
Can you spot the gravestones of the ghosts in the slideshow?
I rode into heaven on my trusty steed.
Too young to lay anchor, I swam aweigh to sleep with the fishes.
I survived my sister to die on Turkish soil, caught up in the Drama of Dardanelles
John and Jane have flown into heaven, their family’s legacy is yellow and sweet.
So many of us, we caught Bounder’s bus to heaven.
Luckily, Nikki managed to find them all in time to get to The Fighting Cocks and enjoy a cake that did belong to her, a grand Michael Grimes creation of chocolate, jelly babies and liquorish all-sorts.
I got all the gravestone-name gathering with Ben Whitehouse, when we were thinking about a possible Moseley Barcamp thing that didn’t happen. But it was a great day, mulling over the encryptions and thinking about the stories behind them, and it gave me some inspiration eventually!
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