5 Favourite Songs | August 2018

August has come and gone, and I've been listening to a weird range of stuff. A bunch of new releases, old '50s favourites (mainly my man Neil Sedaka), a mysterious find or two, and a bit of grime. Here are the five best.

1. Jade Bird - Uh Huh

This is one of those songs that hits you full force in the face and you fall over and you're like, "ok wow". It's so good. A big, angry guitar song. Uh huhhhhhhhhhh.

Links: Spotify | YouTube

2. Ed The Dog - Television Era 

I found this through a Spotify advert and it took me less than a second to fall in love with this band and their whole Bis/Blue style thing. This song signals pretty well what they're all about. There's a level of playful clever-silliness full of callbacks to '90s and '00s cultural memories with lines like, "there's plenty of Simpsons to watch all the way from season 1". And just, what a great song. A bouncy, nervy, cute song.

Links: Spotify | YouTube

3. Phum Viphurit - Long Gone

This is a song I just discovered, and it's so dreamy and sweet. A nice gentle soothing guitar time. The music video is also super relaxing and features some good dungarees, which as we all know are scientifically proven to be relaxing and cool.

Links: Spotify | YouTube

4. Gabbie Hanna - Honestly

This is the major pop hit of this list, a song made by [shocked gasps] a YouTube person. It's an expertly compelling song of sheer righteous anger, and for that I love it. It builds so nicely into a great chorus of rage, and it will be incredibly stuck in my head for a while.

Links: Spotify | YouTube

5. Dara Sedaka - Huggin'

Finally, a gem I discovered after entering the unique haze that comes from listening exclusively to Neil Sedaka songs for days. I found the equally brilliant but very different stuff recorded by his daughter, Dara. This is the funky, saxophone-infused opener from her exceptional 1982 album, 'I'm Your Girl Friend'. This rocks.

Links: Spotify | YouTube

♬

So that's what's up for August, a fun little selection, some smooth and cute songs for doing awkward yet adorable kitchen dancing, and some angry stuff to exert all your mean-spirited energy to. Special mentions go to Sinner by Deaf Havana, Stumblin' Home by Smallpools & The Aces, and Mitski, just in general.

2 Hearts

For the millionth time I am listening to the beautiful, melancholy, exhilarating songs of Talk Talk, and I made some black and white scans recently, with some little paper hearts. Just a couple.

I really will never get tired of making weird stretchy shapes with this thing. It's just so cool that you could make thousands of scans of your face and they would all be different and strange and almost ghoulish (in the most perfect and beautiful way, not like how I saw my reflection in a train window the other day and legitimately looked like some kind of ghoul person).

I also think it might enhance the mood to listen to Talk Talk's song, 'Living In Another World'. It has such a great atmosphere, I feel like it could match these scans somehow. But I'm just a big Talk Talk fan and I like to include them in anything and everything, so you know.

The little hearts are from an old paint palette/scribbly painting. Hearts with some texture. Like they're supposed to have, maybe.

Journal: Confused Animals & Gradients

Oh, you want some more journal pages? Some more purple? Well, here it is! I really have been using purple so much recently, and I'll probably continue to do so. There's just something about it. A great colour. A fun time.

I've got some super watery friends here, and I like the cat with his multicoloured outline. It's a lot of fun and feels a little adventurous and chaotic and good to make the outline be made up of different colours, or perhaps a gradient. Gradient is also a great name for a cat, I think. Imagine yourself calling Gradient from down the hall. It's good.

I also did some collage stuff here. Look at these animals. I love how they're standing there looking at each other. They look confused, which I think you probably would be if I had just stuck you down onto a page of green and purple blobs, so it's appropriate.

I love this blobby, watery, red bunny too. A perfect horror movie villain, I think.

Me & My Sloth

I have a sloth now. I am finally fulfilled. My true life's purpose has been realised. I love my sloth.

This is a Namakemono no Mikke plush, made by Amuse, as apparently everything is, and as you can see, it is a beautiful and majestic sloth. We're going to do everything together from now on. Me and my sloth? Inseparable. I'll walk down the street and people will say, "look, there goes the sloth girl!"

I welcome this. No one can come between me and my sloth. Good day.

Journal: Felt Tip Chaos

I decided to watch a stream the other night and just draw a bunch of stuff in my notebook at the same time. Lay out a pile of felt tip pens before me and scribble my way through the journal. It feels pretty weird to draw like this. I really feel like a little kid. All the super light colours! It's fun to do cheesy landscapes with them, or use the transparency of the ink to combine all of the colours.

I think my favourite things to do with felt tips in this format is using a lot of colours at once and a lot of wiggly lines. Like they're trying to escape.

I got really sleepy towards the end so they started getting a little more... desperate, maybe. I like the feeling of drawing when I'm really tired, in a way, because it's like part of my brain just leaves. I become a wobbly human Spirograph. It's good.

I like the chaos.

Making Weird Good Stuff With AI

I came across a great blog post recently about drawing some stuff with AI, and I had to see what kind of images I could get trying out this demo by Cris Valenzuela. I was not disappointed.

Essentially you just type in whatever you want the AI to draw, and you will find new horrors appearing on the screen. It's great. Give it a try. It really can't draw people as anything other than blobby monsters with mysterious cavities and shadows. This is fine.

I found it fun to type in concepts that would inevitably result in more abstract images, often what looks like smudges on walls. Vague shapes. They're satisfying in their own right, but it's also pretty fun to play with recognisable texture.

For example, this tool knows on some level what a flower is, and will try to put a flower texture of some kind in your image if you mention it. This leads to some really interesting results that look like natural landscapes that have been irreparably broken. There are some beautiful images to be made here.

I like this one I tried to do of Sonic the Hedgehog. This picture is the only real picture of Sonic now. I will accept no other Sonic.

Breath

I currently have about five sticky notes scattered on my coffee table, and it's like my thoughts are scattered there, curling up at the sides. It's good though, as long as they're written down and they're somewhere, it's fine. That's why I'm the big sticky note collector that I am.

Here are some uncomplicated scans though. They always make me feel sorta clear-headed, just having this clean visual representation of me. It reminds me that all the jumbly stuff outside of me isn't really that important.

Sometimes I just need to be reminded of my own breath or something. Like, hello, okay, I'm a person just existing over here. My hair is doing this thing... nothing matters. Yeah.

In closing, here are some of my favourite things from recently:

• Dara Sedaka's 1982 album, 'I'm Your Girl Friend' (what a title!)
• Halloween Pusheen keychain plushes (my mum bought so many of them... help me)
• those Müller Corner yoghurts that have the chocolate balls (very delicious)
• my sticky notes that are shaped like bread (love to store my thoughts on foods)

Journal: Love Dog & Spooky Caves

Here are some simple, casual journal pages. I went for a green/orange/purple colour combination, and I like how disparate these colours are. They're kinda striking together. Anyway, here's a happy dog. Not saying anything, but just basking in his own love, which of course floats around him in some kind of cartoon physical manifestation. That's just how it is sometimes.

As you can see in the above image, these are the colours nice and bright and separated from each other, but I love how dark they get when you mix them, like below:

I love the grey-purple tones. Reminds me of caves and jewels. I think it would be cool to live in a secret bejewelled cave somewhere. Dark and dismal and spooky, until you come across a well-hidden cavity with vast walls of jewels in all colours. That's my dream home. Bats love it.

Here's a bunny, however, not living in a cave but perhaps wishing to. Maybe there's a part of all of us that wants to decorate our own mysterious cave. Who knows?

Diary: Rain & ABBA

I've been having a pretty okay time lately. I just finished an Agatha Christie book and I'm thinking about getting into some non-fiction soon. After I read some Jules Verne, that is. I'm also writing this while listening to Neil Sedaka's 2012 album, 'The Real Neil', which features him playing some nice piano versions of some of his greatest songs (my particular favourites are his jaunty version of 'Amarillo', and the way he says 'oh my god' right at the tail end of 'Heart of Stone'). Such a nice album.

I made some videos I'm pretty happy about, and I've been painting a lot of stuff and watching and listening to a lot of good stuff too. So I feel really good, but kinda antsy. I want to DO everything.

We had some really nice rainy days, where rain just poured down outside. It sounded so great, and it was so cooling. I actually felt cold again for the first time this week, and I was so happy. I got to wear a jumper! Life is normal again. I've also been watching a bunch of YouTube stuff, of course, and especially the second part of Shannon Strucci's series on parasocial relationships, which I highly recommend checking out.

My weekend ended up being a cool and relaxing one. I watched Mamma Mia to ignite the fire in my heart that exists purely for Pierce Brosnan practically grunting out an ABBA song - truly the most glorious art known to man, and a gift I shall always treasure. Great times. Beautiful.

TV: How Bad is Insatiable?

Insatiable is a weird show. It's a Netflix original series that had an awful trailer, sending plenty of Twitter users into full rage mode - and I can fully sympathise with that negative visceral reaction that so many people had. The trailer painted a horrible picture. However, while the show certainly does have its cons, I think it's on par with an awful lot of American comedy-drama shows being made at the moment in terms of a sort of catty melodramatic style that wants to ridicule the culture it's born out of (like Scream Queens, or on the much more serious end, 13 Reasons Why).

The most glaring negative to me is not so much it's treatment of weight-related topics, which are more even-handed and nuanced than the trailer suggested (although by no means ideal), but rather its humour concerning sexual abuse - particularly a prominently featured false allegation played for laughs. There are some more 'edgy' moments which leave a bitter taste regarding various topics, but the show's treatment of weight is generally of much more nuanced presentation than other sensitive topics.

My favourite thing about Insatiable, and easily the reason I'm actually glad I watched it, is Bob Barnard, a.k.a. Henry from Ugly Betty, a.k.a. Christopher Gorham. The guy is a sensational actor, here playing just about the polar opposite of his Ugly Betty character - a confident, almost smug man who has a reason to remove his shirt in every episode. I just love him. He deserves better than this, really, but I will be using the screenshot at the head of this post (of him lying in front of an indoor picnic) as a response image at any and every moment I am given the chance. So for that, maybe it was worth it.

I also love Nonnie's outfits (pictured below), but while there are some fun snippets and some great actors here, calling Insatiable 'good' would be a stretch. It's awful, but it was a pretty entertaining watch for me. There's definitely much better TV being made at the moment (like, in my opinion, Glow, Good Girls, and Santa Clarita Diet), but I wouldn't call this the worst, either. It's bad... in a way that can potentially be fun. Or not.

Journal: Strange Something

Here are some fun and colourful journal pages! I'm having a nice, relaxing time with a little bit of aimless painting, a little bit of collage, and a lot of wild, scribbly, melty colours.

I don't think I will ever stop having this habit of making a lot of stuff on scrap paper. I love re-using leftovers and making really tiny drawings, and making sure every bit of paint gets used up somehow. I love all the separate components and layers and pages that converge to make a strange something together.

I love all the lines and splatters and edges.

Map Men

Recently I made a short stop motion animation for my friend, and since I made these scans of many of the paper props I used, I thought it would be cool to write a blog post about it.

I decided to use stop motion because I had a short turnaround and figured I would be better equipped to make the 530 frames I needed if I used a combination of stop motion and digital animation. I also really wanted to try out that combination, because it's not something I've done a huge amount before, and I find it gives a really interesting effect to kinda combine those two planes of existence.

The fact that you can easily pinpoint the digitally drawn-over parts creates a kind of interest disconnect. You know they are separate elements, and they sorta combine to make a slightly surreal universe.

I love the collection of props I made. They are all my children. Especially the star maps.

Animation is so weird though. This definitely has a clunky feel, which I like, but alongside the narration its jumbliness could use tempering. The speed and rigid feel are the things I would work on if I was to make this again. Maybe I'd include more articulated human characters with more expressive and considered movements.

This animation was ultimately more focused on the sea of movement created by shifting backgrounds and a lot of moving parts at once, but it would have been cool to have some more serene moments and small, slow character movements. It's a big soup of whirling things.

Regardless, it was fun to make.