5 Favourite Songs | June 2018

This month I've been listening to a lot of soft and wild indie music, with a little bit of dreamy synth stuff thrown in. It's been nice. A little hazy, a little sunny. Let me detail my five favourite songs from June.

1. Tessa Violet - Crush

This is such a fun and cute song with a great, playful music video. I love the clinky, dusty piano music and the snippets of phone noises and talking. Something about this song makes me feel like I'm on tiptoes in a liminal space, and I love that. It also is such a perfect, carefree yet knowing song about the delightful weirdness of liking/thinking about someone. The repeating parts (crush crush crush crush crush / touch touch touch touch touch) are so great.

Links: Spotify | YouTube

2. Soccer Mommy - Your Dog

Soccer Mommy is so, so great and I highly recommend listening to the entire discography, but this is such a standout song. It's filled with so much calm rage and utilises expert delicacy. The bass is so dark and tasty.

Links: Spotify | YouTube

3. Flor - Unsaid

This is a beautiful synth pop wonderland that unfurls like a stream of blossoms. It's magic, it has a peppering of helplessness to it, and sounds like a riverside of fireflies. Totally glorious.

Links: Spotify | YouTube

4. Woodes - Dots

This is such a cool, mysterious, twinkling song. Synthy but understated, with magical vocal movements blinking throughout it. There's a gentle fantastical feel to this, and it's the best.

Links: Spotify | YouTube

5. The Courtneys - Silver Velvet

I love this song because it's so unapologetic. Something about the lines, "And nothing you say and nothing you do / Can stop me from thinking about you / Doesn't matter if it's right / You're just the one I like" just feels really great to me and makes me feel joyful. It's such a happy, sunny, grungy little song.

Links: Spotify | YouTube

♬

I like the mix of stuff I've been listening to this month, and somehow it feels like it all fits in so well with the growing summer. So many carefree, fun, interesting songs. I hope next month will bring similar delights. I'm sure it will.

Mickey Mouse & Bending Time

I really want to make more space on this blog for miscellaneous thoughts and things, so that maybe the whole thing can feel sometimes more like a journal than a blog. When I was a kid I really wanted one of those weird electronic secret diaries. The idea of a hidden world all my own, in notebook form, was wildly appealing to me, and on many levels still is, even though basically I make stuff in that form totally public now (because ultimately I find that more rewarding, to write something and unleash it into the ether, or something).

Mickey Mouse in Plane Crazy (1928). Alternatively, me when I first see myself after waking up.

For a while I was so into minimalism as a concept. Owning less and having less clutter in your physical spaces as well as, maybe, in your mind, fascinated me. The idea that you can kinda be fuller with less stuff. That making space around you means you can fill that space with a more fundamental self. We all need space, after all, to be ourselves and to keep all our thoughts and core parts of the way we want to be. I think in terms of writing or making things, or expressing myself in general, it feels great to throw it all out into the open. I like to stick paintings to my walls, or send them to people. Once they're out there, they're far away and gone, and I can just make, write, think, and focus on something new. My most new self gets to thrive.

Mickey Mouse in The Mad Doctor (1933). He's been changed to be much cuter than his earliest iteration here, and this is my favourite design/style for Mickey compared to the earlier and later versions.

That said, I like to keep a host of memories. The best parts of things that make me happy. I don't cling onto items that much, but I also let myself hold and enjoy things. I let things be there and remind me of something. Remind me that I'm not all new and I don't have to be, maybe. Because there's some pressure to rewrite yourself, or at least, I feel it somewhere. I want to be the best I can be, after all. I want to make people laugh with new jokes, and sing new songs, and make new memories and new meaning. But it's okay to keep all those old things in your heart too, right? Good or bad, or neither.

Mickey being terrorised by a skeleton, again from The Mad Doctor (1933).

I've been watching really early Mickey Mouse cartoons, and there's something I like so much about them. The way they bend, and the surreal, expressive nature of them. The completely different charm that Mickey has before he becomes so rounded and colourful. Yet parts of them are less satisfying in some ways too. It's that way with almost everything.

Mickey in The Haunted House (1929).

I love the endlessness of change, but I fear it too. It would be nice to stop time at a perfect moment and to be that person in it forever, but at the same time the oscillations of time's passing are like glittering rings I have to fly through. I don't know. It's all a process. A constant decluttering and collecting.

Ugly Me / Good Love

I watched a documentary called 'Ugly Me: My Life with Body Dysmorphia' recently and it was such an interesting and compassionate and oddly sweet thing to watch. I'm so interested in the way we all focus on things and exist inside an environment of our own feelings and perceptions of everything. Because I find myself almost constantly waking up from a particular phase or focus or feeling, like I'm coming out of a lake repeatedly. It's such a weird feeling, of sort of breaking consciousness. Like those days you wake up and throw cold water in your face to give yourself that sudden, unmatched, ready clarity that otherwise drifts off cloud-like to dissipate in the atmosphere. For a moment you're so clear and alive.

This is a picture of me listening to pop music.

Another thing that has totally gripped me is Aly & AJ's new release, 'Good Love' which to me feels like such a perfect illustration of the kind of great desire and fleeting, racing bliss that can come from that kind of shift in focus and clarity - and that vocal phasing around the 3:10 mark, oh man, it's the perfect audio representation of this feeling too.

This is me (in dog form, don't question this) dancing to pop music.

I'm waking up over and over again, all the time, and there's no point trying to clutch at forever receding straws, but I'm excited to keep waking up, and keep splashing that cold water in my face, and keep drifting off again into that phased out synth cloud. You know what I mean? Someone knows what I mean.

I love all the petals and leaves wilting and curling in the streets, I love all the lines and strange discrepancies in people's faces, and I sure as hell love the twinkling rhythmic synths Aly & AJ are blessing me with for summer 2018. They are the footmen of my heart.

Big Red Hearts

I wanted to add some hearts to these scans, as I often do (you know me, I am the number one fan of hearts), so I painted some on this clear plastic stuff so I could have some watery red hearts. Nice.

I kinda want these to float about my person at all times. A permanent floating accessory. An intriguing gang of gravity-defying hearts. A mysterious filter made real. When will technology allow this? Or shall I just attach them to myself with a halo of wire? Surely this is perfect business attire.

Grass Stains & Journal Plans

I had a chaotic little painting session with some super muddy greens and blues recently, and some watery, bubbly paints making something that looks a bit like a grass stain in my journal. I think I'm gonna really destroy some journals soon and do lots of painting and collaging from journal to journal. I just want to make some feverish shapes and patterns and be rough in my assembly of something. I feel like I haven't done enough that's dense recently. I want to make a really thick journal again that bursts with so many discordant things. That's the plan.

Sometimes concentration is my biggest enemy and I want to throw dirt and broken leaves in my journal, so I'm going to do something like that and see what I end up with. Maybe make annotations and stick in some notes and things like that. Who knows. I'm going to spend some time making some very cathartic, messy, jumbled journal stuff I think. Dreamy, colourful, miscellaneous things.

Sometimes I think maybe my journal isn't really, truly my journal if I wouldn't hurl it into the sea and then drag it out and put something else in it. I gotta destroy it. Bury it and dig it back up again. Get some real grass stains on it.

Dreams & Dreams

There's a million things to do and see and destroy, but it's funny how we all sink into routines, encased in our little submarines under everything. I get so excited all the time by a new song or an old photo, it's like with new things you get turned into a different person all of a sudden. Like I was a different person before I read this novel, or before I bought this new shirt. It's weird thinking about your identity and your personality, who you are fundamentally to yourself. Because it's never really the same. Moment to moment I feel like I've changed in every way sometimes, the river has carried me out to sea. Everything is different in an instant.

Yet of course I'm the same person, doing the same things, performing the same mannerisms and conjuring up the same nervous thoughts, probably. But so many things still shake me as if I've been transplanted to a different world. I get excited by writing blog posts, by taking a moment of my thoughts and committing it to a page, but then in the routine of writing I get stuck in a formula and I sit there and try to form a post, to pluck it from myself like a stuck feather, and it gets to be a weird simulation. An attempt to make the same thing happen and to arrange the same words in a different way, almost. It gets futile and tough.

That's why I like thoughtless and aimless and spontaneous things though. Diary entries and scribbles. Streams of consciousness written ten seconds after waking up, when your head's still full of fuzzy dreams.

Last night I dreamt about a friend going with me to a labyrinthine old estate, and a charity shop piled high with thick tweed coats and pleated grey miniskirts. It was gleeful and adventurous, but dusty and alien and a bit uncomfortable. He was urging me to buy the grey skirt that looked like a strange 1960s hounds-tooth thing. I pulled a children's book about doctors from a shelf. Its illustrations had thick black lines and simplistic stethoscopes. He was playing, laughing, and I was uneasy in this place of strange surroundings piled high.

I think this dream is a great representation of these kinds of thoughts and worries. How do you keep doing things that are new and exciting and that pour out of you? How do you do that when you have responsibilities and routines and the normal restrictions of life and your own mind? But I guess this question really ends up being "how do you live?" - and that's a question that doesn't have one clear answer. That's a question that's like a dream.

There's so many ways to do everything and nothing, to think and to try and to also crucially stop doing those things. Sometimes it has to be about doing nothing, in the most "something" kind of way. Sometimes we're dreaming when we're awake, and that's what works. Sometimes it's only dreams of consciousness.

My 5 Favourite Pokémon

I wanted to write a very casual and fun and silly blog post today, so here's one about my favourite Pokémon. Which will they be? Who can predict which Pokémon have stolen my heart? I'm choosing these Pokémon based on memory, rather than looking them up and trying to be meticulous and serious about them, so I'm sure I'll miss out some of my biggest favourites because there are so many that I love, but it should be interesting to force my brain to make a quick decision about this very important and necessary subject.

Okay, let's go.

1. Raichu

Raichu was, is, and has been my main big favourite Pokémon for a while. I remember loving the angry Raichu in one of the early anime episodes. I love Pokémon who are angry and plump. I don't know exactly what it is about Raichu that has captured my heart so much, but I'm glad. I will love Raichu forever. I'm devoted.

2. Klefki

This is from one of the more recent new Pokémon generations, and who am I to resist a Pokémon who is keys? I am a mere mortal, and my affections have been stolen. Or perhaps... unlocked.

3. Ditto

Look at its face. Look at it. Ditto is perfect. A beautiful pink lump of mischievous indifference. A true icon. Next.

4. Growlithe

I love Growlithe and Arcanine so much, they are so fluffy and cute, but I always used to love getting a little Growlithe pup to have bite everything in my way. They're so cute. Please let me hug all of the Growlithes.

5. Ribombee

This Pokémon is so perfect. It's a tiny bee-butterfly thing and it's wearing a scarf. It's a fashion icon. It collects honey, which is very cute. What a precious friend. A treasure.

☆☆☆

So those are my favourites, off the top of my head. Please tell me about your big favourite Pokémon and why you love them. I must know.

Watching Girls & Eating Its Everlasting Misery

There's a certain type of TV that I have weird feelings about. Stuff that has a strange blend of bleak and silly, something that feels like falling down the rabbit hole the whole time I'm watching. Girls is like that for me. I watched it when it was originally airing until somewhere in the middle of season 4, where I left it because it just made me feel sad. But recently I decided to watch it through from beginning to end, and whilst it still very much has that ambling, soulless, destructive, and almost soap opera level dreariness to it, there is also this quality of the bizarre and dreamy that pulls me in.

The best way I can think to express this is by comparing it to one particular scene in Skins, another show that gives me a similar sense of discomfort and voyeuristic, creepy yet hushed weirdness. The whole of Skins has so much grossness and callousness, but there's this one scene in a later season where everyone has run off so that two of the characters can get married on a whim and they come upon some abandoned building with a piano in it or something and they dance around in the beautiful shafts of light created by the tall windows and they're all wearing lilac bridesmaid dresses and it's a little moment of beauty nestled inside so much cringe and pain and exploitation. Girls situates itself in that kind of place, and it's mesmerising.

I wish it didn't go quite so overboard with the twists and turns and the constant relationship swapping, especially in later seasons, but I guess that's what Girls is. It's completely chaotic, it's a mess of sometimes funny, sometimes sweet, sometimes incredibly awful stuff, and whilst that was basically too much for me when I first watched it, now it feels like a strange nod to how life is. I mean, it's completely melodramatic and over the top, but the disjointed, crumbly nature of all of the tangled narratives does feel like a wry smile in a dark place now. In many ways, it's like a shrug in TV form, and there's a weird delight to that.

And Grover is obviously the perfect baby name.

Journal: HEY DON'T IGNORE ME

It's really been a while since I did stuff in my journal like this. I've been focusing on making paintings and drawings lately, mostly on paper rather than in a journal. I thought it would be cool and good to lie down on my bed and watch TV and do some thick, scribbly pencil stuff in my journal in particular for a while. I love all the scratchy, reflective lines. They're a bit ghostly in a way, and I like the sound a pencil makes.

I also have a bunch of pens in odd colours that I don't quite know what to do with, so it makes sense to journal with them and experiment a bit with my more neglected materials and some weird and unusual shapes and stuff.

One thing I definitely avoid a lot in journals is painting, just because I know I'm going to have to make sure the pages will stay open when drying, and then I can't carry on to the next page for a while. It's sheer impatience, but when I do paint in my journal I remember that it's really fun to make painted spreads, so I should probably do it more.

One of the best things about journaling is the way you get to look at a collection of things later. It's good to be able to see things inextricably linked to other things. Elements mingling and intruding on each other. It creates a good opportunity to look at things differently and you can press all your drawings together to make a cute little monster, maybe.

Scanner Adventures: Again & Always

I just looked through a bunch of old scans and I realised maybe I've been doing them a bit less in recent months. I think I might do some more of them soon. Gotta keep scanning my face! It's interesting looking at my earliest ones from 2012 because they still look almost the same in most ways. I did like making vertical ones a lot more back then. Maybe I'll try that again.

I think I might also try doing some more artistic and strange ones again soon. I do like to include little props and drawings a lot these days, but it's all been fairly straightforward more recently, and it would be nice to throw some leaves or dirt or pieces of confetti down on the scanner bed, or make some collages, or even just some black and white scans, again.

Either way, here's my face. Again.

Diary: Letters & Graves

It's June, and I have prepared a device that will spray me directly in the armpits with deodorant approximately every twelve minutes, as is necessary. I've been really enjoying making stuff and taking time to do so slowly, and I've been writing a letter or two to some friends, which is so nice and relaxing. I remember some years ago I had a few penpals, and I think it can really stick with you and feel special to send and receive little physical tokens of your friendship. I should probably send my grandma something again soon.

I got the attachments taken off my teeth after my initial Invisalign treatment came to an end. What a weird feeling it is to have smooth teeth again with no strange lumps in the middle of them. It's really cool.

I also visited a crematorium and cemetery on a hot day, and saw so many birds and flowers. It was so lovely and peaceful and pleasant. I love all the gravestones shaped like hearts. Then I spent time painting miscellaneous requests for a while and had a very chilled out time listening to some perfect soft sort of indie music like Snail Mail and Soccer Mommy (the latter in particular is a huge favourite right now).

Later, I took a walk along Westminster Bridge and other nearby places, and I always really love being surrounded by tourists. I love seeing them being excited and crowding around each other and just enjoying themselves and being cute. They're kinda inspiring. I love them.

5 Mori Girl Style Dresses | A Cute Wishlist

I've been leisurely browsing the pages of cute and strange dresses at banggood.com and they have so many incredibly cute, forest-y, loose, vintage-style options in interesting patterns and colours, I had to make a list of some of my favourites. I love these styles so much. Let me guide you through them.

1. Plantlife Embroidered Maxi Dress

I love this because it is so light and airy and sweet, but also, look at the little plants. So cute. Why aren't little plants and leaves embroidered on all of my clothing? I've been living a life far too devoid of the sartorial celebration of plant life.

2. Flower Printed Dress

This dress has such a nice little floral pattern, and I love the dark forest green. Very satisfying. I would like to look more like a pine, if I'm honest. A pine under the mountain somewhere.

3. Half Button Plaid Mini Dress

I love the colours these come in, and again the billowing, vintage cut and gentle check pattern combined with a button-up top half is super cute. Let me wear these and greet cows every day and gather dandelions or something. Let me carry around a little basket of jam.

4. Short Sleeve Button Up Dress

This dress is so simple, yet so pretty. I love the buttons, the dark blue colour, and the crinkly fabric/pleats.

5. Leaf Print Drawstring Waist Dress

Now this one is perhaps a bit of an odd colour choice for me, but I'd really like to try some more daring and strange colour/pattern combos, and this colour reminds me of forest fruits yoghurt, or blackberry, which can surely only be a good thing. The print is lovely, and I like the dark blue contrasted against the earthy pink.

☆☆☆

Which one do you think is the cutest?

YOUTH IS A TRAP

Don't demand excellence in everything you do. Fall over in the snow. Wear your comfy clothes. Send messages to people whenever you feel like it. Burn memories, or keep them safe in a special box. Change you name if you want to. Formally or not. Watch trash TV. Read weird poetry. Walk along the river at night and laugh at geese. Share snacks. Grow old.

This is a picture of my grandfather having a lovely time perching on a rock.

Everyone's so afraid of ageing, of doing things wrong, of not doing enough, of looking bad. But we should do all of those things, with glee and with wild abandon. Run naked through the fields of time at sunset as a cow watches on, unbothered. Laugh hard and count your wrinkles, a reminder of all your funny faces, your comical frowns, and the times you see babies and you just gotta grin at them.

If you stop dreading getting older, then it can become a fun collecting process where you gather all the cute and silly and strange little memories that can rush behind your eyes in a montage set to a Carly Rae Jepsen song. You can look forward to whatever cool thing you will do or see when you're 55 and you've just bought an ugly plastic frog ornament to celebrate (this is just, maybe, how I envisage myself at age 55, purchasing weird frogs).

What's so great about youth anyway? Maybe you've got smooth skin and you can drink 1 (one) alcohol without feeling like something has died in your face the next day, but maybe you're also a beehive of worry and pressure. Your youthfulness does nothing to make you less insecure about all the little bodily things you know about yourself that you think are weird (ironically probably the things other people think are beautiful about you - your moles, the way your hair sticks up, your oddly shaped nose). Maybe it's idolised because it's a beginning, but what's a beginning when you can be in the middle of the story, which you thought was going to be conventional but that actually involves the acquisition of some ugly frog ornaments? Maybe it turns out to be a way better story.

No one knows what's going to happen, but spending your life dreading it is a mistake. Get older. Let each new number be an exciting declaration of your place in the world. You're here, and your new number is a ticket to all the trains waiting for you at the station. Let your grey hairs grow in like threads of confetti for your head, and forget about youth. Just shave the 'th' off. Because you'll always be you, with or without it.

Mundanity Is My Passion

I've been thinking about that feeling I have when I've just gotten out of the bath. When everything is perfect and bright and good, because I'm clean, and everything feels fresh. It's like I've washed my brain, cleaned it out like a cupboard. It's so good.

All the best feelings tend to come from things like that. I love the meaningless, inexplicable, gentle pleasure that comes from just living. Nothing else is as important as that. I've been drinking a 'night time' tea lately, and it is wildly delicious. It's Pukka Night Time Tea if you're curious. It's my favourite thing now. It tastes so good and I love to drink a hot sleep drink. I'm living my dreams, and it's perfect.

Other things that are perfect and good include:

• Wearing a new shirt, I love to wear shirts now.
• Jenna Marbles doing basically anything. Her endeavours are weirdly inspiring. She has so much fun! I also want to have so much fun.
• When my friends, on Twitter dot com, post either pictures of themselves or a dog they saw that day. Those are beautiful moments. Maybe I should print out those tweets and put them on my pinboard.
• Writing letters. I love writing letters. Preferably ones that are illegible and chaotic. Love to put things in an envelope. It's nice.
• Wearing my pyjamas for an extended period. Or clothes I use as pyjamas, but no one knows, so I have the illusion of not wearing my pyjamas when I know the secret, the sneaky truth.

There are so many perfect domestic things and I am v. happy about them. That's all.