Oh Comely magazine issue 10 by oh comely magazine

oh comely

keep your curiosity sacred editors liz bennett, des tan

deputy editor rosanna durham fashion agatha a nitecka music dani lurie illustration laura callaghan film jason ward features frances ambler editorial olivia wilson words alice christie, johanna derry, jane flett, charlotte humphery, lisa jarmin, molly mackey, sian meades, amie mills, michelle mirsky, rob mitchell, ellie phillips, phoebe prentice-terry, danielle richardson, gosia rokicka, victoria watts, harriet williams pictures eylül aslan, dan blake, kaye blegvad, amy borrell, ian clark, dusdin condren, mara corsino, fiona essex, yann faucher, parker fitzgerald, eleni kalorkoti, max knight, kirstin mckee, trent mcminn, kevin morosky, egor rogalev, liz seabrook, harriet seed, pat shepherd, takeshi suga, david swailes, marie taillefer, bez uma, andrew urwin, rosalind wilson

advertising hannah jackson, hannah.jackson@royalacademy.org.uk steph pomphrey, steph@ohcomely.co.uk feedback and lost property, info@ohcomely.co.uk submissions, words@ohcomely.co.uk or pictures@ohcomely.co.uk oh comely, issue ten, may/jun 2012. Published by Adeline Media Ltd six times a year. Third Floor, 116 High Holborn, London, WC1V 6RD. 020 7831 8645. Printed in the UK by Buxton Press, www.buxtonpress.com. Cover portrait, Renee Lilley, by Dusdin Condren. Styling by Clare Byrne. The embroidered patch on the back cover was sent to us by Lisa-Marie. www.ohcomely.co.uk Contents © 2012 Adeline Media Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission from the publishers, although conscientious and beleaguered fair users can relax and have a cup of tea. The views expressed in oh comely are not necessarily those of the contributors, editors or publishers, or the authors’ mothers. ISSN 2043-9857.

Eyl端l Aslan took this photo on a sunny day in Madrid.

30 44

62 72

112 120

contents i t ’s n i c e t o s e e y o u h e r e

art

22 paper trees and cardboard streets hattie newman and her cut-card mountains

34 make way for may flowers japan in the season of cherry blossom

26 this is wild flag sleater-kinney’s riot grrls are older and wiser

36 from casualty to cloud atlas how david gyasi escaped walk-on roles with a stethoscope

30 if no one else breaks your heart, break it yourself andrew bird, social anxiety and feedback loops

fashion

32 a birthday party with my grandmother it was her seventieth and my eighteenth

44 in praise of solitude four writers bask in time alone

50 barnabé fillion’s suitcase of scents a perfumer and his little bottles of fragrance

62 bittersweet wednesday

52 art of the contact sheet the moments before the portrait

afternoon will never end: dusk comes in a

72 you can’t buy a circus the traditional troupe with magnificent horses and artful tenacity

90 this is not a funny story five hours of tantric dance gets beyond a joke

76 this is my paintbrush artists share their favourite tools

people

78 goodbye happy songs the sad and grieving tunes of loney dear 80 thirty-six hours to texas photos on the road through the desert 108 for tweed and country britain’s textile towns and the interwoven tales of their famous fabrics 112 un amour de jeunesse mia hansen-løve’s film about teenage romance

and

38 I drew this for you an illustration from your greatest fan

what if we pretend that the daylight and the house of darkness and light

92 I have an idea and it’s a good one festivals by the art director of lord of the rings 96 food for thought we asked the people of tokyo their secret talent 98 sold to the woman in the third row I went to an auction and all I got was a suitcase full of old clothes 120 colonel mustard in the kitchen with a sieve adventures making mustard, sweet chilli sauce and ketchup from scratch

114 the comfort of cake anguished love over a perfect victoria sponge

126 the porridge facial can household ingredients ever make good beauty treatments?

117 paper and patterns make a little origami box

128 will you be the full stop to my comma? this quiz will tell you your place in the sentence

between you and me alone doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have to be lonely There are few things as symptomatic of being alone as purchasing a ready-meal made for one. You can be just as alone while digging into the leftovers from yesterdayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s party, but somehow it never feels the same. Loneliness can be a terrible weight, and so can a single helping of shrinkwrapped curry meal, but this issue we wondered about the happy moments that solitude can bring: that strange Saturday morning, when you wake up and drink a cup of coffee in the sunlight and revel in being alone. Nothing has changed, but everything feels different. The silence is liberating, not crushing. You start daydreaming about a tasty ready meal for lunch. Some people say they donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get lonely, just a little bored of their own company. For those of us who do, it can seem an incurable ache. This issue, four writers shut the door on the world and talked about the positive side of time alone. For them, answers to loneliness came slowly, but surely: building a life in a new country, finding solace after divorce in a house of your own, or simply the everyday business of growing older.

Musical Performances by

RODRIGO Y GABRIELA GABRIELA/ WILCO/ WILCO SHARON JONES

& THE DAP-KINGS / SPIRITUALIZED /

CRYSTAL FIGHTERS / CLOUD CONTROL/STORNOWAY/ CONTROL / STORNOWAY / LIANNE LA HAVAS / FATOUMATA DIAWARA / GRANT LEE BUFFALO / LONDON FOLK GUILD Long Table Banquets with

YOTAM OTTOLENGHI FERGUS HENDERSON & ST. JOHN VALENTINE WARNER Late Night Revelry from

THE OLD VIC TUNNELS MIDNIGHT MASKED BALL Remarkable Talks and Symposiums

INTELLIGENCE2 / THE IDLER ACADEMY / THE SCHOOL OF LIFE / ROYAL OBSERVATORY GREENWICH Your Own Wilderness

LAKESIDE SPA / HORSE RIDING / WILD SWIMMING / BOATING Processions, Spectacles and Theatre

CREATION AND THE FACTORY PRESENTS ‘THE ODYSSEY’ / ROAMING OPERA / IMMERSIVE THEATRE And so much more…

MORO SOUK TENT THYME FOOD SCHOOL KIDS & FAMILY VILLAGE

Buy tickets at:

wildernessfestival.com An award winning festival from the producers of Lovebox and Secret Garden Party

World-class contemporary art in the heart of Edinburgh Always free Gallery, bookshop, café� 45 Market Street, Edinburgh Mon–Sat 11am–6pm, Sun 12–5pm

www.fruitmarket.co.uk

The Fruitmarket Gallery

special deliveries from your postman to ours

In issue nine we featured the Joy of Ex, who make cheerful goods for the broken-hearted. We asked you how to best cure a heartbreak.

Miranda. Q: Best way to cure a broken heart? A: Staples. And gin.

Caroline. My best cure for a broken heart is to learn a new constellation every time you get sad, make a cup of tea and drink it under your duvet every time you get angry and, when you feel alone, surround yourself with travel guides and plan your round-the-world trip. This way a broken heart will ultimately lead to understanding the whole universe.

Vikki. I recently had to discover a cure for a broken heart as my first ever relationship ended rather abruptly and without my permission. I found two cures. One. Photographs. I am a photography student and a couple of days after the breakup I had a photo shoot organised. I was quite satisfied with wallowing in misery but did it anyway, and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s amazing how you can loose yourself in art. Finding the beautiful things in life is definitely a great cure. Two. Summer. You can make it summer even if itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not! I went to visit a friend and insisted we go to the beach. I put on my shorts and sunglasses and braved the cold. We bought ice cream and paddled in the sea. Yes, we were cold, but it felt amazing. Broken heart? No, mine was full of imaginary sunshine.

what we listened to the songs that made the issue illustrations harriet seed

what we ate double-baked potatoes are twice as nice

end of the road presents

No Direction Home Festival th

8 -10 June 2012 Welbeck Abbey, Nottinghamshire From the team behind End of the Road Festival comes a new festival nestled in the ancient Welbeck Estate on the edge of Sherwood Forest, 30 minutes from Shefﬁeld

RICHARD HAWLEY ANDREW BIRD THE LOW ANTHEM DIRTY THREE GRUFF RHYS THE UNTHANKS with Brighouse & Rastrick Brass Band MARTIN CARTHY BETH JEANS HOUGHTON & THE HOOVES OF DESTINY SLOW CLUB MARTIN SIMPSON MOON DUO Euros childs OTHER LIVES DIAGRAMS DAVID THOMAS BROUGHTON the wave pictures LIZ GREEN DJANGO DJANGO LANTERNS ON THE LAKE AUSTRA VERONICA FALLS SPECTRALS wet Nuns Mikal Cronin The Crookes The Cornshed Sisters Woodpigeon Zulu Winter Cold Specks Peaking Lights FATHER JOHN MISTY Plus: Comedy, Literature Tent, Lost Picture Show Cinema, The Flying Boating Society, School of Artisan Food, Secret Post Ofﬁce, Sack Racing, Art Installations, 100s of Workshops, Organic Food, Real Ale, The Somerset Cider Bus and much more...

Tickets £105. For tickets and more info visit www.nodirectionhomefestival.com

beautiful, captivating stuff, a perfectly formed festival

“

The Guardian

END OF THE ROAD FESTIVAL 2012 31st August - 2nd September at the Larmer Tree Gardens, North Dorset

GRIZZLY BEAR GRANDADDY TINDERSTICKS MIDLAKE BEACH HOUSE DIRTY THREE MARK LANEGAN BAND THE LOW ANTHEM ROY HARPER ANNA CALVI VAN DYKE PARKS VILLAGERS JOHN GRANT THE ANTLERS ALABAMA SHAKES

FIRST AID KIT JONATHAN WILSON JEFFREY LEWIS AND THE JUNKYARD JUSTIN TOWNES EARLE ROBYN HITCHCOCK DEER TICK PERFUME GENIUS WILLIAM ELLIOTT WHITMORE THE STRANGE BOYS WILLIS EARL BEAL ALESSI’S ARK CASHIER No 9 DELICATE STEVE DOUG PAISLEY FRANK FAIRFIELD I BREAK HORSES LANTERNS ON THE LAKE MOULETTES MOUNTAIN MAN OUR BROKEN GARDEN 2.54 POOR MOON RICHARD BUCKNER OUTFIT ROBERT ELLIS SLEEP PARTY PEOPLE STRANDED HORSE VERONICA FALLS DARK DARK DARK FRANCOIS AND THE ATLAS MOUNTAINS TOY SWEET LIGHTS COLD SPECKS TRAILER TRASH TRACYS PINKUNOIZU LUKE ROBERTS DIRTY BEACHES PORCELAIN RAFT THE DEEP DARK WOODS ISLET ZUN ZUN EGUI CONCRETE KNIVES HANNAH COHEN LOST BROTHERS PLUS MANY MORE ACTS

Plus cinema, comedy, woodland library, victorian piano stage, forest dance ﬂoor, games area, art installations, workshops, the Wonder Lands, croquet on the lawn, Rough Trade record shop, real ale bars, organic food, somerset cider bus and much more

Weekend tickets £150 including camping. For tickets, full lineup and more information please visit www.endoftheroadfestival.com

some people who helped make this issue they told us their secret talents bez uma is a photographer from st petersburg

kaye blegvad is an illustrator and maker

A series of Bez Uma’s photographs accompanies a writers’ feature about the bliss of solitude, page 44.

You can see Kaye’s thoughtfully-drawn illustration on page 32, and some of her bird garland kits on page 17.

Tell us a little about yourself and your work. I live in St Petersburg, work in advertising and sometimes like to press a small metal shutter button.

What do you enjoy and not enjoy about moments of solitude? I need quite a lot of alone time just to keep my head in order. It helps me sort out my thoughts, feel calm, and get things done.

Tell us about a bargain you bought that you regretted later. I really can’t choose between the magnetic balls that ruined my ipod and the high fur boots that could easily open a door to Royal Vauxhall Tavern performances. Have you ever successfully used a household item as a beauty product? I don’t do drugs any more. What condiment could you not live without? It’s painful for me to talk about this. My relationship with cinnamon has reached a deadlock. Describe your perfect Sunday. It begins with the phrase, “Oh Gosh, not fucking Monday again...” “Calm down, it’s Sunday.” Find Bez Uma online at www.bezuma.com.

What is your secret talent? I can ride a unicycle. I went to circus school as a kid and that’s where I learnt it. I can’t juggle, though. which would be a more convenient party trick. Have you ever used a household item as a beauty product? I used baking soda and dish soap as shampoo when I was about sixteen. I was trying to fade my bright pink hair into a candyfloss colour. It did work a bit but it wasn’t a pleasant experience. What condiment could you not live without? Balsamic vinegar. It’s so good: roasting tomatoes in it and then spreading them on warm bread—don’t get me started. You can see more of Kaye’s illustration at www.kayeblegvad.com.

michelle mirsky is a writer and comedian

‘we all need words’ write things for people

Michelle wrote about finding a house of her own for the first time, page 44.

Molly Mackey and Rob Mitchell from We All Need Words wrote this issue’s quiz on page 128.

Tell us a little about yourself and your work. I live in Austin, Texas, where I write sad stories. I also tell funny stories on stage. I have a small son, who is also very funny. He might be funnier than I am. What do you enjoy about moments of solitude? I love the silence of my moments alone because I am never ever quiet when I’m around others. I like the opportunity to have silence enforced and the space to listen to things. What is your secret talent? If I thought I had a talent, I could never keep it secret. People might be surprised to find that I’m an excellent singer of Fiona Apple songs in my car. Or they might already know that because I emailed them from the car. Recommend us a book. Independent People by Halldór Laxness is essentially about a grouchy farmer in Iceland. It’s also the most hilarious, heartbreaking, expansive book I’ve maybe ever read. Follow Michelle at twitter.com/stardollface.

Tell us about yourself and your work. We do branding without all the weird words, diagrams and gobbledegook. And we go out of our way to arrange meetings in Monmouth Coffee. What do you enjoy and not enjoy about moments of solitude? Rob: I don’t do company. Molly: I don’t do solitude. What’s your secret talent? Rob: I can tell you exactly when you’re going to arrive on a car journey. Molly: I remember people’s middle names, and I send cards for no particular reason. Have you ever used a household item as a beauty product? Rob: I’m very traditional: bleach for teeth and toothpaste for cleaning a dishcloth. Molly: Not successfully. When I was a teenager I had an allergic reaction to the old toothpaste-on-spots trick. It wasn’t pretty. Find more about We All Need Words from www.weallneedwords.com.

pretty lovely a flat-pack ice cream van and an egg cosy pretending to be a bee would you like to win one of these clever creations? chance your luck and send a note to free@ohcomely.co.uk by the end of june.

Julia Smith aims to create affordable, simple and beautiful pottery that people enjoy using. There’s something sincere and serious about her work that makes it wonderfully appealing, like 20-year-old wedding-present crockery that doesn’t break even if you drop it. Her delicately hand-drawn, glazed earthenware designs are pretty and organic-looking. Julia has kindly given us four brooches to give away. For her current range of mugs and bowls, visit www.juliasmithceramics.com. Write in to free@ohcomely.co.uk to win a brooch, telling us a story about an enthusiasm in your life that’s never died. Caroline from Retropoodle is a costumer-maker turned vintage craftsman. She’s inspired by the fabrics of the 50s and 60s, and the challenge of rejuvenating secondhand scraps into something new. Mr Fox is made of colourful, assorted fabric patches with vintage buttons. Retropoodle also make blue tit and badger cushions and lovely lavender-scented owls to hang above your bed. To win Mr Fox, just drop a line to free@ohcomely.co.uk, sending us your favourite cute animal picture. We promise it’s not so we can waste work-time looking at them. See www.retropoodle.com for more retro glory. We always thought bees made honey, but this one seems to lay eggs. This delightfully stripy egg cosy is by Black Rabbit, who make all sorts of unusual knitted home products from the finest lambswool. They say each piece is made to order and we know this is true because we had to wait for this little bee, as Lindsay Marsden, who started Black Rabbit in 2006, had run out of yellow wool. Write in to free@ohcomely.co.uk for a chance to win, telling us how you like your eggs (usual jokes need not apply). For more of their designs head to theblackrabbit.co.uk.

What do you do if you’re desperate for a dog, but come over squeamish at the thought of poop-scooping? Stock up on plastic bags, we say! Alternatively, get a flat-pack pet from Garudio Studiage. They won’t lick your face to wake you up in the morning, but this line-up of cardboard cut-out companions made us smile. They come with a little stand to make them stand up just like real pets, but without moulting all over your carpet. To win, write in to free@ohcomely.co.uk, and check out Garudio Studiage’s other brilliant ideas online at garudiostudiage.com. Kaye Blegvad is an illustrator, designer, and general maker-of-things. Not so long ago, she flew her nest, spread her wings and went to live in New York, which perhaps inspired this beautiful illustrated bird garland kit. It has nine different colourful birds, some in flight, some sitting up and some resting. Put them together to make a party decoration pretty enough to keep up long after the last guest has gone. We have one to give away to a lucky reader and you can find more things that Kaye makes at www.kayeblegvad.com. One of her illustrations is also in this very magazine, on page 32. Our grandmothers always made us decant milk into a jug for the breakfast table, so when we came across Hanne Rysgaard’s slipcast milk jugs we knew they would be proud. Her personal approach to life is, “You have to smile,” and her work focusses on fun and function. We certainly think that this Willow Pattern Jug brings fun to the breakfast table. If it would make you smile too, write in to free@ohcomely.co.uk and tell us things that would make your grandmother proud. It’s dishwasher and microwave safe. More of her unreasonably cheery ceramics can be seen at www.hannerysgaard.com.

finch and fouracre Finch and Fouracre was started by a pair of architects, and makes beautiful, accurate models of buildings, ranging from commissions of the impressive Kingston Halls to small kits of Glaswegian tenements and the ice cream van on the right. We asked Franki Finch to tell us more about her craft. We have an ice cream van kit to give away. Drop a line to free@ohcomely.co.uk telling us how much you paid last time you bought a 99 with a flake. You can see more models on www.finchandfouracre.co.uk. What are your models made from? Most of the model kits are made from mountboard, which is a thick card mainly used for picture framing. They have acetate windows, and the tenement kits have timber chimneys made from recycled whisky barrels. Why did you decide to model the Glasgow tenement building? Tell us a little about the architecture of Scottish tenement buildings. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve loved them ever since moving to Glasgow. When I designed the kit, it was in my tenement flat in Glasgow, looking out at other tenements. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s based on a Victorian-era tenement, when the towns were growing at a vast rate, with workers coming from the country to work in factories and mills. The buildings vary little, often with bay windows and plenty of light, and nice high ceilings. They would have all had coal fires, hence the large chimneys. It says a lot about the quality of the flats that so many people still live in them. Does working in Glasgow make you happy? Folk in Glasgow are always up for having fun, and thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s reflected in the creative community. People are not money-focussed, and want to make things, have events, and meet others for the fun of it.

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st. pauls lifestyle St Pauls Lifestyle make clothes and jewellery with a mission. The proceeds support up-and-coming musicians of all genres, promoting artists who have integrity and determination. We talked to Rose Paul about how it began. On the right are some of St Pauls Lifestyle’s new collection of solid silver jewellery. To win one of their lovely pieces, write in to free@ohcomely.co.uk telling us the music that makes you feel alive. For more about St Pauls, see www.stpaulslifestyle.com. Tell us the story behind St Pauls Lifestyle. A few years ago, I was a passenger in a horrific car crash. The months and years that followed were the blackest of my life, and I learned that love is the only thing that really matters. The injuries meant I was unable to continue in my previous work. I’ve always loved music, and it makes me feel alive in a deep and true way. One day I was looking around for a t-shirt and couldn’t find one that I liked. I wanted to wear something with meaning. That’s how the musical cult brand was born. I decided that St Pauls Lifestyle would openly support musicians by telling the world how good they are. We are approached by bands from all over the world and do filmed acoustic sessions, interviews, gig reviews and podcasts. Who designs your jewellery? Margaret Turner Fine Jewellery. The textured and studded finish of the designs is inspired by the music of the punk era: The Clash and Joy Division. What is the significance of St Pauls Cathedral for you? It is an iconic symbol of survival and love: against the odds, the Cathedral has survived the onslaught of wars and—like love—its beauty endures pure and true.

paper trees and cardboard streets hattie newman makes mountains interview laura callaghan Hattie Newman’s world is a colourful one. From her studio in East London, she manipulates cardboard and construction paper to create vast imaginary landscapes, tiny characters and oversized props. Her objects lend an air of fantasy to fashion shoots, window displays and large-scale installations. Using a colour palette reminiscent of the crayola crayons we know and love, Hattie draws inspiration from the TV programmes she grew up with to create playful and unique pieces. The worlds you create are surreal and fascinating places. Where does the inspiration for this strange and colourful work come from? I have a long list of eccentric family members, many of whom are artists themselves. My brother, Rupert, is an amazing textile and light projection designer, and we often share the same bold colour palettes and playfulness in our work. The TV programmes I watched growing up have definitely had an influence on how I see the world. I don’t know what I’d have done without The Muppets, Willy Wonka, Postman Pat, and the Clangers. Tell us a bit about how you became involved in set design. When I was younger, I was obsessed with drawing maps and towns and building them out of lego. I studied illustration at Bristol, where I was introduced to animation and began building cardboard sets for my stop motion animations. My 2D work naturally evolved into 3D as I was interested in how it could come to life physically. Once disassembled, do you tend to keep hold of all your three-dimensional work? I rarely keep hold of a set unless it’s something really special. By the end of a project, I’m usually ready to move on to the next thing. I don’t mind saying goodbye to work, especially if I have a good photograph. Above: Hattie Newman made this colourful figure as her self-portrait. Left: A cut-paper illustration designed for The Times newspaper’s Narey Report on Adoption.

Details from an installation Hattie produced for the Italian paper company, Fedrigoni. Twelve illustrators were asked to imagine exploring the mountains around Verona. She made the piece in collaboration with Alex Ostrowski.

this is wild flag four old friends and their supergroup words rosanna durham, portrait john clark

When Wild Flag formed a little over a year ago, the band attracted buzz before they’d played a single gig. No wonder: there’s not a member who hasn’t had her share of success over two decades of music. Fronted by Carrie Brownstein and Mary Timony, with Rebecca Cole and Janet Weiss on keyboard and drums, Wild Flag can trace its roots to the influential Riot Grrl band Sleater-Kinney, as well as Helium and the Minders. The four are friends who’ve played in each other’s bands but never, until now, played together. Mapping their collaborations could be a fascinating exercise, but perhaps how they know one another isn’t much of a matter. When we spoke to Rebecca and Mary on Wild Flag’s first UK tour, they were markedly unfazed. It’s clear they are making music on their own terms, for the joy of it. When you got together to form Wild Flag it was a bit of a sensation. Rebecca: That was a nice surprise. I’ve not started a band where people were stoked before they’d heard a note. It’s just a great time, playing music with this group. It felt like springtime, a honeymoon phase of this relationship we started with ourselves. How do you organise things with Mary being based in Washington DC, almost 3000 miles from Portland and everyone else in Wild Flag? Mary: It’s good because we work really hard. We’ll be in the practice space for four or five hours. Rebecca: It’s true. Maybe we would get more done if you lived in town, but I like the dynamic of it. That it is Wild Flag time. I don’t book anything I don’t have to because the time with Mary is so special! When

you all live in the same town you just get a little lazier. I’ve never visited Portland before: it sounds like a creative paradise. Rebecca: It’s cheap, so there is a sea of people who live there in their twenties and thirties who aren’t interested in getting real jobs, only slacker jobs. These coveted barista and bar-tending jobs are all taken. If you have an office job in Portland, it’s like, ‘weirdo.’ In Washington, does everyone you know barista or bar tend? Mary: No, everyone I know is a lawyer. Rebecca: Everyone I know is a barista or they bar tend or have their own clothing boutique. You’re all experienced musicians. Does this make you feel freer and more confident? Mary: Honestly, I had more confidence as a younger musician. I felt extremely strongly about proving myself, especially as a woman. Now I want to do it because I enjoy it. Rebecca: I was trying to prove that I could do it. It was a real headstrong attitude and also a sense of being younger in general. The world is your oyster and you haven’t had as much time for life to beat you down. Life can chew you up and spit you out sometimes. If not you, your friends or loved ones kind of get crushed, but I didn’t really know that fifteen years ago, not in music or in life. I had more false confidence. Now it isn’t about proving myself, it’s about appreciating it. We’re doing things on our own terms as women making our own deci-

Self-portraits by Rebecca, left, and Mary, right, who drew herself as a hand and the top of a guitar.

sions, and as musicians making our own decisions. Both those groups sometimes don’t get a chance to do that as fully as they should. It interests me that you had to prove yourself as women in music. Rebecca: There weren’t a lot of women doing music. It was a thing then. I lived in Denver, Colorado when I started my first band and fell into this collective of people. It was probably 80 to 85% dudes but we were equals, a giant family of musicians. It wasn’t until two or three years later, after I went out touring, that people mumbled things under their breath: “Not bad for a woman drummer.” That kind of a thing. I wasn’t prepared for it. That was the experience of other women musicians in the nineties and I missed a lot of it. Mary: I grew up in Washington, which was a hardcore punk scene, and I got that feeling from being around all boy bands. I feel like our band is a good thing for women because people are paying attention to us as musicians. I saw a review for something early on where they compared me to Gareth Hudson. They compared me to a hero of mine! How many women keyboard players of are heroes of mine? In my top five? There certainly isn’t a female on the list. I hope that somebody has Mary Timony and Jimi Hendrix on theirs. I’m serious; I think that is really important. I hope to see that more, not less. Rebecca: The other thing is that there are not a lot of women our age. It’s like a weird little island. A lot of women have a hard time doing music if they want to have a family.

Mary: People get married, have kids, or they lose interest. Rebecca: Life happens. I’m not married, I don’t have children. I have three pretty hardy plants that don’t require a lot of attention. I’ve made a lot decisions that allow me to do this. A lot of people would make another choice and that’s fine. Are you happy with how music is changing, or are you nostalgic for the days before digital? Rebecca: A slam you hear a lot these days is, “Oh, any kid can make a record on their computer,” but I think that’s lazy and ill-informed. Now it’s a computer and before it was a cassette 4-track and before that it was? A lathe cutting a disk, or something. People need to work cheap to get ideas down. It feels like a great time to be a musician. Mary: It has actually contributed to music being interesting. Musicians are really pushed by each other to be good. I love it. When I was growing up it was more about who you knew, where you lived and being sensational. Rebecca: I guess there is still some sensationalism in, say, Lady Gaga or Katy Perry. Mary: I don’t even think of that in our little indie rock world. Rebecca: That machine doesn’t look a lot changed.

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if no one else breaks your heart, break it yourself andrew bird talks about social anxiety and nature’s feedback loops words victoria watts, portrait trent mcminn In his latest album, Andrew Bird’s musical style has begun to relax, but when we talk the same could not be said for the man himself. For years, he has suffered a level of social anxiety that he describes as almost crippling. His nervous energy is palpable when meeting him in a hotel room in London. He’s a man who stares intently into your eyes as he speaks and puzzles through answers that invariably go off point: fluent, yet unruly, and always beguiling, much like his music. He says that a journalist recently told him he was self-conscious during an interview. “I thought, ‘You fucking do eight interviews in a row and try not to be self-conscious.’ That rubbed me the wrong way. Being self-conscious is inherent in the whole thing.” Bird is a man that rides a bike, prefers the countryside to the city, and goes to bed early while his band mates “raise hell”, but he’s no wallflower. He’s charted a slow but steady rise to success as a whimsical, whistling multi-instrumentalist, famous for his haunting, beautiful melodies and obscure, intelligent lyrics. This year sees the release of a new album, Break It Yourself. The album follows a two-year hiatus where, among other things, he recorded a Muppets soundtrack, developed an ambitious musical museum installation called the Sonic Arboretum and became a father to nine-month-old Sam—a new phase he describes as total happiness.

Bird paints a picture of a carefree childhood in Lake Bluff, Michigan, running wild with his siblings, escaping into deep ravines and building forts. Nowadays, with New York as home, he frequently escapes to his family farm outside Chicago. It was here that he recorded Break It Yourself during idyllic summer days, with windows and doors open, and dining al fresco. In the past, Bird has described performing as a joy and recording as a necessary evil. This time, it wasn’t so bad. Bird’s band brought the recording process as close as possible to a live performance: “It was only intended to be a rehearsal jam session with tape rolling but I secretly hoped I’d get it, and I did. With some of the songs the band didn’t know until half an hour before we got the take. They were just feeling it out. You can sense that wobbliness, like at the end of Desperation Breeds.” Performance is where Bird thrives, content to risk even the most complicated looping arrangements to audiences of thousands, a set-up that begs for human or technical error. In fact, he relishes the unpredictable. He says, “When I get up on stage, I can relax. I feel like I know what I’m doing. There’s the unknown of what could happen, which I really love. I could even go so far as to say I cultivate precarious situations: that flush of embarrassment, the feeling of trying to pull out of a nosedive.”

Moments of embarrassment and self-consciousness are something Bird has learned to value in his music. He explains, “If I feel like, ‘I can’t write this,’ or with a record, ‘I can’t do this,’ I’ve found that’s generally a good sign that I’m on to something. In every record and every song, I’m usually puzzling through something.” One of the concepts Bird explores on his new album reveals itself in the title, a line taken from the first single Eyeoneye, and an idea he presented at a TED talk two years ago. He looks at how, when things in nature become too self-sufficient, or get too close to their source, they become self-destructive, almost as if they’re in a feedback loop. He applies this to his own heart, exploring the idea that if he continues on a path of self-preservation with “armour so complete” then the only way to experience heartbreak is to achieve the impossible and do it to himself. He says, “I think it has to do with the struggle between being so self-sufficient, being so contained, which we are all taught is a virtuous thing to achieve, and then being like, ‘Wait, what else is there?’ There’s the issue of autonomy being overrated, and needing community, needing to make yourself more vulnerable.” Listening to Break It Yourself, you can hear this idea influencing Bird’s music. Gone are the complex words, like dermestid and plecostomus,

that peppered his earlier lyrics. In their place is a more open, vulnerable album exploring themes of love and the pursuit of happiness. He says, “That’s been a breakthrough for me with this record. There are still some pretty out-there concepts, like on Eyeoneye, but it ranges from the bizarre scientific to the human more than it has in the past. Before, I was content to keep the song entirely in a metaphor, there was a bit of encoding going on in the language. I could tell you personally the meaning of every song I’ve ever written, but it’s not going to be obvious or on my sleeve.” Break It Yourself has lines he would never have allowed himself to write five years ago. “Back then, I’d have said they were clichés, but now... Well, there’s a reason why they are clichés: they make sense.” Despite the new tone in his music, he’s reluctant to give an answer to whether he thinks people should make themselves more vulnerable. Conclusions like that make him uncomfortable, and he prefers to leave his music open-ended: “It’s like you enter a tunnel and come out the other end, and something’s happened but it’s not concluded. It feels a little like giving up when you make conclusions.” Andrew Bird is performing at No Direction Home festival, happening 8th to 10th June this summer.

I shared a birthday party with my grandmother I was turning eighteen, she was turning seventy words phoebe prentice-terry illustration kaye blegvad

When I turned eighteen, I had a joint party with my grandma who was turning seventy. The anticipation was tinged with disappointment: it was my eighteenth birthday and I could only think of five people that I wanted to be there. I was sure that my grandma, who had been alive for so much longer, would have more friends than me. On the night of the party, I noticed we had both invited the same number of guests. This was a revelation: my grandmother was seventy years old and out of the thousands of people she had met in her life she only liked a handful of them enough to invite them to her birthday party. I remembered looking at the people that my grandma was sitting with that night. Maggie was an old friend from art school. They hitchhiked through the south of France together one summer. She rang my grandmother in a panic when she realised she was pregnant in her late thirties. My grandmother met Alan at Leicester University in 1979 after he delivered a talk on Cézanne. She was surprised when he approached her and asked if she would teach a session with him. Charlie tapped her on the shoulder in the 1950s when she was walking home from her interview at the Royal Academy of Art. She married my grandpa instead, but they remained friends for life. As I watched these elderly people, I began to see my own friends in them. I have carried this idea with me, that there are a handful of people who influence you so deeply that you remain connected to them for the rest of your life. At twenty-four, maybe I’ve met all of them or maybe none. Who would I end up inviting to my own seventieth birthday party? My friend Catherine is a pole-dancer and aspiring conservationist waiting with bated breath for PhD funding. She introduced me to The Good Life, I taught her how to make hollandaise sauce from scratch. Kathleen was very brazen with her desire to befriend me after she heard my aunt talking about me nine years ago. She spent two weeks trying to arrange to meet me during my visit to the States because she had a feeling we’d get on. We only get to see each other once every two or three years but we’ve made a pact that we’ll both out-live our husbands so we can spend our old age together. Justin is a maddening but inspiring womaniser I was very much in love with at university. He used to stare at me in lectures hoping I would turn around and smile at him. I once invited him to my seventieth, but now I’m not sure if I should withdraw the offer. I’m worried he will show up drunk and try to sleep with my granddaughters. Sometimes I don’t like being young. It can feel wrought with narcissism, status anxiety and competitiveness. Perhaps this is why I’m fond of thinking so far ahead. I like to think about a time in the future when I will be wiser and less troubled by the superfluous. I can’t wait to turn seventy.

march winds and april showers make way for may flowers spring comes to japan photo takeshi suga interview rosanna durham

Takeshi Suga’s photo of cherry blossom captures the ephemeral beauty of spring. We asked him about how the season is celebrated in his native Japan. See more of Takeshi’s photographs online at sugarcrisp.viewbook.com. Could you talk a little about how you experience spring in Japan? Spring in Japan is almost synonymous with cherry blossoms, called ‘sakura’ in Japanese. We plant them everywhere, so it’s hard not to spot them in springtime. Bloom dates for each prefecture are broadcast every day and people of all ages talk about the progress of cherry blossoms in their area. What do cherry blossoms symbolise? The beauty of falling cherry petals attracts us. The cherry blossom season coincides with the new term at school and the fiscal year at work. So they are associated with life’s turning points. What prompted you to go out and photograph these blooms? Because life is short and so is the season of cherry blossoms. This photo of the weeping cherry was taken in a little temple close to where I used to live in Kyoto. I took the advantage of my proximity to this heavenlike place and would go there almost every day. Blossom reminds me of the beauty and fragility of life, and makes me feel serene.

from casualty to cloud atlas david gyasi is beyond the bit parts words jason ward, portrait andrew urwin

David Gyasi fell in love with acting during his first school play. “I was a landlord in Gypsy. This dude had maybe three lines, but I was so nervous. I came on stage and knocked on the door and yelled ‘Madam Rose! Madam Rose, will you open this door? Madam Rose!’ I walked out the door and this farce was going on, and I was chasing her around, and everyone just fell about laughing.” As he talks about the experience, banging on the table in front of him and affecting a perfect American accent, David’s eyes light up. “I thought, ‘Ooh, I like this. It feels nice, making people feel happy. Wouldn’t it be amazing to do that for forty years?’” For the first eight years, David forged a steady career as an actor, popping up in everything from Holby City to Welsh-language soap Pobyl y Cwm. This was good until it wasn’t: British television provides solid employment for actors with bit-parts as doctors, patients, policemen and criminals, but moving past that stage is difficult. David hit a wall: “I felt like things were becoming stagnant. It’s not inspiring to come in and say a couple of lines. It felt like I’d done that consistently for about five years, and in any career you want to keep challenging yourself. The roles had just stopped doing that for me. I started to think, well, if this is it, then I want to get off the boat.”

Self-portrait by David Gyasi.

going. And if he gets involved in these little altercations, it’s an environment where he’d be the one to be arrested by the police, because of the racism ingrained in society. My dad said: you were away from home and you had to remember that.” He remembers one scene that highlighted the tightrope walk of restrained emotion that the role demanded. Victor is leaving his chambers in a smart pinstriped suit, when the police decide to search him for no reason. Gyasi says, “In the script, he has to put his hands up against the wall while they search him. So afterwards he takes out his handkerchief, wipes his hands and puts it back in his wallet. I was so incensed by what had happened that I took out the handkerchief, threw it on the pavement and walked away. The director came up to me and said, ‘That’s good, we’ve got that, but try one with a bit more dignity.’ So we did another take, and there was something quite powerful about wiping my hands and folding that handkerchief and putting it back in my pocket, and walking on. They had no hold on him.”

Ready to walk away from acting entirely, David decided to give his career one last push, moving in with his in-laws, changing agents and heading to America. After years of trying, the challenging roles that he’d been seeking started to finally come, one after another. It’s heartening to see a genuinely talented performer receive the touch of fortuity that all actors need if they’re to make it big: this year alone he’ll be appearing in The Dark Knight Rises, Cloud Atlas and Doctor Who.

For the upcoming film Cloud Atlas, the key to David’s character came directly from his research: in the role of Autua, a Moriori slave in 1850, he worked with dialect coaches to create an entirely new accent. “Because the Morioris became extinct in the early twentieth century, there’s no record of the way they spoke. The Maoris were the closest link, but they were integral in making the Morioris extinct, so in order to honour the Moriori tribe we couldn’t just use the Maori accent. But listening to old Maori accents, they sounded slightly African, so we built a bit of that into it, and then a bit of the modern day New Zealand accent into it as well.” He relished the challenge: “I love it! Love it. Anything I can get involved with to do with my character I just love.”

David’s biggest challenge to date has been as one of the leads in the sprawling BBC drama White Heat. He plays the role of Victor, an immigrant law student who quietly suffers racial abuse in 1960s London. Gyasi initially had doubts about even accepting the part. “Victor’s observant, but he’s very quiet,” he explains. “When I read that, I interpreted it as a weakness, and I thought, ‘I have nothing to say about this guy who is suffering this racism. I can’t get inspired about someone who doesn’t even speak up nor have a response.’ He’s an educated man, he’s intelligent. It really frustrated me, and I didn’t want to play him.” His attitude changed after discussing the role with his father, “He smiled, and said that you have to realise that this guy has an endgame; Victor is displaying dignity and focus, and in that there’s strength, because he’s aware that he’s heading to being a lawyer and a QC—that’s where he’s

When talking about acting David Gyasi is at his most animated and articulate. For him, the act of performing is infused with frank enjoyment, and acute engagement. He describes how, during the filming of The Dark Knight Rises, he was never even given the pages for the scenes he was in. “Christopher Nolan just told me my lines, and then I had to do them. He’d say: ‘Okay, he’s going to come out and you’re going to say this, this and this. Action!’ And there are two hundred people waiting for me to do it. It was very scary, but it was freeing, because all of the work that you do in building a character, you’re given a license to ignore it, and just give your instinctive, initial reaction. Your interpretation—the part of your soul that you’re baring for everyone to see—that’s taken away, and what’s left is a pure performance. It’s weird. It’s as if I don’t know the film yet.”

I drew this for you

fan art by illustrators

first aid kit illustration maike plenzke

I listen to a lot of soundtracks and calm indie music during work. I especially like the narrative and mysterious songs by First Aid Kit: they fill my head with wonderful scenes and images that I want to illustrate immediately.

submarine illustration rachel levit

Last summer, I went to see Richard Ayoadeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s movie, Submarine. It had been so long since a movie excited me like that. I loved everything about it: the characters, the humour, the art direction and of course the perfectly-suited soundtrack by Alex Turner. When I go to a movie, concert or exhibition that moves me like this, I feel compelled to do something with it to channel the excitement. So I drew this exceptional character, Oliver Tate, wearing his big duffel coat in the middle of a gloomy beach. It makes me feel more connected to the film.

betty draper illustration celine loup

Mad Menâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s huge cast of characters are divided by gender. The female characters make the best of the limited options they have, as women always have, operating in a world that constantly seeks to infantilise them. Betty Draper is very complicated character and very unlikeable. She has spent her whole life squeezing into the role that she thought would afford her happiness, and no one goes through that process without becoming deeply fragmented.

anna calvi illustration caitlin shearer

I made this when I was obsessively listening to the musician Anna Calviâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s album, wishing I could design some real gig posters for her. Anna had just released her debut album at the beginning of last year and I was hooked. Her music is the kind of soundtrack youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d find lulling around a David Lynch-esque daydream about a lady matador who is eternally unlucky in love. Sultry, tragic and compelling. Just my kind of thing.

woody allen illustration anna topuriya

I always imagine Woody Allen to be much like the characters in his movies: witty and neurotic, in the most beautiful way. Movies now tend to be heavy-handed, but Woody Allen trusts the audience, leaving more room for play. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s that connection that make his work so inspiring to me.

in praise of solitude four writers relish time alone photographs bez uma

words jane flett I moved in with my boyfriend a year ago and it’s still a surprise to wake up and not be alone. I don’t mean this as a Mills and Boon hyperbole. I mean physically, tangibly, literally: not alone. Another person in the vicinity. Another person, all the time. Most of the time, this is a delicious, squidgy thing, full of red lightbulbs, baked bread and duck-down duvets. But it’s been useless for my ability to write. In the first moments of waking, I used to loll across the bedsheets, tottering through the glorious corridor on the cusp of unconsciousness. I’d remain very quiet so as not to disturb the flitting thoughts, hoping if I did they might seep inside. I’m a fan of the morning’s first ideas and their peculiar, elbowy, dream logic. They make for good fiction. But they’re never tangible. They dart in and away again like mayflies not long for this world: one chance to mate. One chance easily scuppered by alarm clocks or coffee or conversation. Or kisses. I’m not complaining. But by now, I thought I’d have written my book. The truth is, I’m terrible at writing when company is an option. The thoughts—which if alone, I’d leave to percolate—bubble from my mouth long before they’re ready. I no longer roll over ideas on my tongue like oysters; instead, I talk. I vocalise every thought that enters my brain, and notions that might have been interesting sink like soufflés at the behest of the oven door. In truth, the only time when I stop talking is when I am alone. And then I start to think. And then, eventually, I write. This was why, last month, I looked at my wads of half-written stories and missed deadlines and decided to take myself to a writing retreat. I couldn’t afford a real retreat, so I signed up to trade labour for accommodation. In the countryside near Reading, I ended up with a small flat annexed to a manor house, the keys to a trailer tractor, sprawling grounds of fallen wood to clear, and a door that could firmly close. My phone had no reception and when they asked if I wanted the modem brought within reach, I declined. I didn’t speak, aside from the occasional ‘whoosagoodboy,’ and I waited for responses to all the endless chatter that bounces around my head. For the first day there wasn’t much, except for a persistent earworm rendition of Disney’s Under the Sea. Then, somehow, things started to slow down. My thoughts found other thoughts and coalesced to form stories. They could be as ridiculous as they liked because there were no eyes to read them. At night, I stared at the four walls and wrote things down. In the morning, I lay supine and hypnotised until all the sleep had drained away, eking out that moment for as long as possible. Then I sat up and stretched and went looking for a rake. I’d like to say that I finished my book and it’s with an agent now, waiting for the next thing to happen. Well, no. I did, however, rediscover the pleasure of solitude. The quietness of a date for one; the silence of a room without my voice always talking. I’m already planning my next trip alone. Maybe this time, I’ll get things finished.

words gosia rokicka I first came to London eleven years ago, hitchhiking from Poland, via Dublin. I took an instant dislike to a city where even taxi drivers got lost. After spending my usual weekly budget on a one day off-peak travelcard, a Tesco Value sandwich and three

pints in a pub, I swore to God, the Queen and myself that I would never set foot in this devilish city again. But it’s not like we can plan our lives, really. We certainly can’t if we’re prepared to act on the spur of the moment. Six years later I came back to London and have stayed for nearly five years. Perhaps I will stay here forever. I left behind friends that meant the world to me, parents that I loved, a flat where I felt right at home. I sold my car, rehomed my aquarium and took with me nothing but my dog. More importantly, I had to leave behind something essential to who I had been, the only skill I could perform to a decent level: my writing abilities, a proficient knowledge of my very own language. I had never imagined before how lonely you can feel when left without the only tool you have ever mastered. And how badly misunderstood: by your fellow immigrants who happily settle for the command of English that allows them to get through a visit to the doctor’s surgery and receive a more or less relevant medicine for their ailment, and by English people alike, for the vast majority of whom learning any foreign language is unthinkable. People’s intelligence and education are judged by the way they express themselves but, once we start using another language fluently, most of us rarely think about how the same rule applies to other languages as well. On entering a foreign land, you leave behind the outspoken for the merely communicative, and witty banter for flawless conversation. You feel you have achieved something when you haven’t had to ask your native friend to proofread your letter of complaint to the council. People praise your extensive vocabulary, but they fail to see how your identity has been slowly taken away from you with every phrase you have forgotten in your native language and with every new one you have learned but are hesitant to use in case you miss the context. You learn to build your life around other things, secretly hoping that one day something will change (at the end of the day Samuel Beckett, an Irishman, was writing in

French, wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t he?), but for now you distance yourself from words, phrases and utterances. Besides, you know youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll always retain a bit of a funny accent, which doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t improve your self-confidence. So you read, watch, listen, talk and occasionally write, swearing all the way at phrasal verbs and articles. But in the meantime you notice the world full of wonders entirely detached from the language. Perhaps you find out you can draw. Or that you have an exceptional eye for photography. Maybe you learn martial arts or get surprisingly proficient at car racing. Or cooking. Or street dancing. Or, like me, in understanding the non-verbal communication of dogs and other canids. Perhaps you will have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become someone else. And there is nothing more exciting than that.

words michelle mirsky Right before Christmas, I moved into the first apartment of my own, at 37 years old. After limping spectacularly out of my marriage, which is another story altogether, one of the few pieces of the future I found truly exciting was the piece in which I would finally have my very own place. I had lived with roommates, a boyfriend, roommates again, and then finally the boyfriend who became my husband. But although the compromises of living with other people always drove me to fits, I never had the budget or the confidence to live on my own. It seemed like a faraway dream. Having a husband, for a time, muted the dream altogether: before I got my first apartment, I had jointly owned two homes. I was married for eight strange years. As a couple, we did all of the things that we set out to do, except, of course, for succeeding in our marriage. When we moved into our last house, we were sure we would stay there forever. As it turns out, forever was six years. From my earliest days, having a family home has been a comfort to me. As I child, we lived in only one house. My parents still live in the same historic four-story brownstone row house to which I returned from the hospital in my swaddling blanket. I set out to

do the same as my parents had. And I did; we did. Our house was a wonderful place in which to do the things we had set out to do, until the moment it all broke down and it was clear we were over. Our house belonged to neither of us more than the other. Certainly we felt differently about the end of our time there, but we agreed the house was haunted by our failure as a couple. We made plans to sell the place and we let it go. My grief at leaving that house eclipsed my grief at leaving my marriage. I had fallen out of love with my husband, but not with my home. My broken heart found itself mended by half of a mid-century duplex. A little rough around the edges (and hence affordable) but perfect in every way I needed it to be: a place of my own was born. I found my future the way anyone finds things in the modern world—idly searching online while I was supposed to be working. I went to see the apartment one morning in a blinding rainstorm without an umbrella. The Realtor got lost on the way and had to circle back. I fell in love. I asked for no second opinion. Now all that was left was to put in the application, cross all fingers and hope my semi-apocalyptic post-divorce credit would pass muster. Once accepted into the rarefied world of paying each month to lease my very own dream, I breathed deeply and wrote all of the deposit checks. Over the last several months, I’ve furnished the place, bought an owl-shaped cookie jar, and hung a hodge-podge of art on the walls. I bought dishes and silverware. I hired a man to mow my lawn. I signed up for cable. I bought a vintage dresser. I found places for things I hadn’t remembered owning. And in the end, I stacked my shoeboxes in the jam-packed closet I share with no one and I thought, “My shit is officially together.” I pay the rent each month on time, by myself. It’s anxious bliss, but it’s bliss. To the endless dust, tricky front door lock and delicate plumbing I say: You’re awesome. Thanks for being mine for a lease term of at least one year. You’re a rock.

words ellie phillips I blame my parents for my early hatred of solitude. With two working parents, I was an unusual kid in the early seventies; if I was ill there was little prospect of either of them being at home to look after me. Aged five, I was left alone with a stinking cold and strict instructions not to answer the door to anyone. The silence deafened me.

It seemed to come out of the walls at me. I hid in my bed with my transistor radio turned up loud. Solitude. It’s a beautiful word—it’s a beautiful idea—but to a five year old it was very frightening and as soon as somebody knocked on the front door I ran downstairs and answered it, relieved to get away from my own company. On the doorstep was a terrifying man on a motorbike delivering the first of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that Mum and Dad were buying in installments. “Is your mum or dad in?” he said through his visor. I shook my head. “Well you can read this while you wait for ‘em.” I was rarely ill after that and continued to have an intense fondness for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. After all, it had saved me from solitude. Into my twenties, I needed constant company. If a night in alone was on the cards, I would go out of my way to avoid it: go to a friend’s, have a friend over, stay out all night. I found being on my own for any length of time oppressive and depressing, especially in the evening. It made me nervous. I felt wild and unanchored. I needed another person’s presence to calm me down. It changed, inexplicably, when I turned thirty. I began to dread the sound of my flatmate’s key in the front door. It irritated me to see her stuff in the bathroom. More and more often I found myself hiding from people in my bedroom. At last, I took a job that was hateful but paid well, gave my flatmate notice, and lived alone. I revelled in my solitude. I stared at the wall. I wrote stories. I loved that when I shut my front door in the morning the next person who opened it would be me. Of course, when you have a family, solitude becomes this elusive, half-forgotten desirable moment that you once had long long ago and that you dream about recapturing. Time and space is filled with ‘us’ and ‘together.’ Solitude has to be timetabled. It becomes a window that you set up: an hour in a coffee shop with a good book, fifteen minutes in the shower, five minutes crouching on the toilet with a chair against the door. In the midst of a crowd, scene you find ways of being alone.

Self-portrait by Barnabé Fillion.

barnabé fillion’s suitcase of scents a perfumer and his little bottles of fragrance interview agatha a nitecka portrait marie taillefer

Barnabé Fillion is a photographer turned perfumer from Paris. I’d been curious about his work for months, but had almost given up trying to track him down when we met on the train one day completely by chance. He travels with a suitcase full of perfume bottles, so he would take out a little bottle, open it, dip in two strips of paper, and offer me one to smell, keeping the other for himself. Barnabé has a gentle mode of being, which he seems to apply to the way he works with perfume too, speaking about his ingredients in an almost loving manner. Barnabé has worked with DoubleYou, a Norwegian artisanal perfumer, and also has some perfumes for larger names currently brewing in the lab. A perfume has three parts. The first thing that hits you is the head: small, light molecules that evaporate quickly. Next are the heart notes, the main body of the perfume. Last are the base notes, which you may not even notice for the first half an hour, but give the perfume depth and solidity. How did you start making perfume? It was very unusual. I started on my own at home: making tea, making drinks, making creams. I had a real desire to mix smells, but also flavours. Why smell? What does it mean to you? I love the idea of travelling in time with scent. My wish in life is to find a way to travel in time, and perfume does it. I started to dream about scent when I went to the perfumer Serge Lutens’ shop in Palais-Royal, when I was between twelve and fifteen. There, for the first time, I thought, “Whoa, someone

is playing with this!” I could see something interesting was possible. I’m not as fascinated by the actual perfume in the end. I hate going to beauty chains. I can’t even go in: I hate all those smells. It isn’t so much about the end product for you, then? I’m interested in the result as long as it has some magic in it. That’s a very good question, as the most fascinating thing is the uncertainty: when you think you’re making something horrible, and two days later you smell it and it’s the most amazing thing you’ve ever done. I like those accidents. There is often a moment when I’m full of doubt. At other times, you can make a perfume in three days. That is the best thing: sometimes it takes three days, sometimes three months, sometimes three years. Can you tell me how you work as a perfume designer? The perfumer usually is an employee of a lab. So he doesn’t make what he wants, but he takes the jobs that he likes. All day, he writes formulas for things that if he’s very lucky are very good and he can interpret them as he wants. But usually, they ask you to do this, this and this. It can be a good exercise, but you don’t do the type of perfume that you love. Do you want to have your own brand as Serge Lutens does, then? Serge puts his courage on the table with all these different scents that have a strong identity. Everybody who is a little sensitive to that remembers them, but it doesn’t sell. So I don’t know. I may keep it just as a passion. But at the same time, more and more people are saturated by mass market perfume.

I’m telling you this because I really do believe in what I do and the way I do it, but I spend my day working with people who only do commercial jobs. I’m just like an alien in there, because I have no training. They have so much education in chemistry, and I catch smells in other ways. Is this scent the one with plum tones? It’s so good. Yes. It’s like being with a very old friend by the fireplace, and drinking some good brandy, or very good rum. There is something a little tipsy about it. Sometimes people call this type of scent sweet. They imagine they’d wear it and feel very relaxed and fulfilled. For me, it’s more a story of subjective sweetness, because if it’s fruity, it’s a very dry fruit. From these scents, I see you like the darker, earthy, organic tones. That’s where my personality feels most cosy, and maybe where I’m coming from, but it’s not where I’m going. I’m using it as a base for creating perfume. I always start with the base, which is rare. I start with the end of the perfume! Usually, you are working on the head, trying to catch people’s attention. I’m more concentrated on what comes after. But I’ve started trying to express this base note in the head of the scent. The head is how you start your conversation, after all. Perfumery is not just smell. It’s like a theatre piece: there is a start, there is a middle, there is an intrigue. Smell is so much more immediate and mystical than images and text. It goes right inside your body. Well, we are in a visual culture. Imagine someone who has never seen a picture in their life. I’m sure it would have a massive impact!

Do you think people were more aware of olfaction in the past? The smell was probably very bad. They didn’t wash. That’s how perfumery started. I don’t like the idea that perfume is to cover our bad smell, and to stop our real smell. I’m not saying that we should smell like shit, but maybe perfume as we know it now is related to its birth, which comes from covering, a façade. For me, perfume is much more about revealing a personality, because it’s such a strong experience. For example, I don’t understand people who wear the same perfume all their life. I find it very beautiful, but how can they live all the time in a single smell? I want to push people to use their sense of smell, because we don’t really use it at all. You are a mission, then, to bring us back a lost sensuality. I don’t feel like I’m on a mission. It’s a beautiful word, but my story with perfume is very personal and very selfish. The most beautiful moment for me is when I share perfume, when I see that it’s magical and having an effect. But I’m not doing it for the other person. In a way, I’m just trying to wake myself up. I have a last question for you. Do you smell things in your dreams? Yes, a lot! This is very annoying, because when I have a scent somewhere in the house, my mind just can’t stop. I bring back all this perfume in my luggage, so you can imagine that when I open my luggage there’s a trace of it somewhere. Even when I’m sleeping upstairs, I’m sure the smell affects my dreams. It’s amazing, but also quite annoying. I feel like I can’t take a break.

photographer: yann faucher / model: jess houghton | next london / camera: pentax 6x7 / film: kodak e100g / medallist jumper: three floor

art of the contact sheet photographers share the moments before the portrait contact sheets from a project by agatha a nitecka

Nothing makes me happier than when I shoot portraits with just a model and a camera. It’s such a quiet and intimate moment, two people coming together to create a beautiful image. Their meeting point stays on the negative forever, and the contact sheet tells it all. It’s an intimate and revealing record of the relationship between the photographer and the model. You can see what emotion the photographer was trying to capture, imagine what they said, and why the model moved slightly. You can see an idea flowing from one image into another, stopped in time and captured in the frame.

Five photographers were asked to take portraits of a model and share their contact sheets from the shoot. All the images were shot on film with a medium format camera. Each photographer’s contact sheets were processed by a different lab, giving them a slightly different effect. It’s an intimate photographic exploration, and I was grateful to each photographer for this insight into how they work. Spend some time with each sheet and study it carefully. See the full project online at www.agathaa.com/sheets.htm.

london / camera: hasselblad 500c / film: kodak portra 400 / 1940s cut-out blouse: hideout / sleeveless silk blouse: monsoon

photographer max knight model olivia hull | oxygen styling adelaide turnbull

photographer dusdin condren model renee lilley styling clare byrne

brooklyn / camera: mamiya rz67 / film: kodak portra 400 / yellow shirt: equipment / pink shirt: boy by band of outsiders / shorts: chloe

st petersburg / camera: mamiya 645 / film: kodak portra 400 / collard shirt: svetlana sokolova / grey silk top: svetlana sokolova

photographer egor rogalev model alena vinogradova | noah models styling svetlana sokolova

photographer mara corsino model zara sutakova | boom milan styling fabiana fierotti assistant maria aversano

milan / camera: hasselblad 503 cw / film: kodak 160 nc / striped jumpsuit: emiliano rinaldi / dress: boy by band of outsiders

dress: orla kiely / make up: all using chanel s 2012 and hydra beauty serum

bittersweet wednesday

photography yann faucher styling dan blake assistant karina leigh model cleo cwiek | next models make up veronica perez diaz

blouse: paul smith / shorts: pyrus

jumper, shirt and shorts: american apparel / socks: topshop / shoes: kew.159

shirt: topshop / skirt: orla kiely / shoes: kimchi blue at urban outfitters

playsuit: paul smith / necklace: stylistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own

shirt: paul smith / shorts: american apparel / belt: kew.159 / socks: topshop / shoes: kew.159

Nell Gifford in the Giffords Circus practice ring.

you can’t buy a circus, you have to make it yourself nell gifford on life in the ring words frances ambler portraits david swailes assistant abbey carr

We arrived at the home of Giffords Circus with something of the same breathless anticipation that must welcome the arrival of the circus itself in a small village. We’d driven back and forth down the same stretch of rural Gloucestershire road six times before we noticed the distinctive line of trees that indicated the turn-off to the farm. Then we spotted it: the distinctive burgundy-coloured circus wagon that heralded our arrival at Folly Farm. Skillful, small and breathtakingly ambitious, Giffords Circus has all the pomp of a 1930s traditional rural circus. It rolls into villages in the West Country with painted wagons, and puts on dazzling horse displays complete with live music and aerial artists. Eschewing the stereotypical circus cast of performing lions, they favour narrative performances that rely on the skill of horse and rider. Last summer’s tour was a condensed version of War and Peace, and featured Nell Gifford herself performing on horseback while handling a hawk that swooped and soared around the ring. When we arrive, everyone is in the training ring to the side of the farmhouse: Nell, her two young twins, a horse, the horse trainer. The trainer in the ring, we discover later, is a seventh-generation horse master in the art of haute école, which dates back to circus’s roots as a military display. We’re soon settled in her kitchen, which is covered in with circus memorabilia, photographs and artwork. Gifford explains that her children will have a chance to learn haute école as she never has: “I’ll never really be anything but an amateur. I can ride pretty well, but it’s completely

different from normal riding in terms of how you move about. It’s just so hard. There’s something really incredible about having a high level of skill in one specific thing. I sometimes feel like I am a jack-of-all-trades.” To the circus world, Nell is an outsider, a josser. She didn’t come from a circus background. As a teenager, she worked for a month at an American circus and realised she had discovered what she wanted to do. “I had a sense that it would work for me if I did just one thing, and just do that. And that’s what I’ve done.” After graduating from university, Nell joined the circus and worked for troupes across the country, beginning the hard task of learning the basics as an adult. It’s a little-known fact that circuses originated in the UK. An early form of circus was set up in London in the eighteenth century by an exmilitary man to re-enact world events using riders on horses. It was a source of news, a space where, for example, the whole city could watch the latest moments in the French Revolution re-enacted. It grieves Nell that Britain has lost a sense of ownership of circus culture: “We have betrayed our own history—we were the originators of it all, and now we’ve become the laughing stock of the circus industry.” Giffords Circus exists partly to counter that, harking back to the 1930s heyday of British circus and drawing on the history of circus for inspiration. “We aim to show a very high standard of entertainment for a rural audience” Nell explains. “It’s West End standards in a rural context.” Village greens are temporarily transformed by the pageantry of the wagons arriving and the tents going up. “To me, that’s what circus is: tents and horses, the outdoors and the actual colourful costumes. I just love that.”

She measures Giffords’ success first and foremost by safety, rebutting the image of the fearless horse-dancer and echoing the military precision that lay behind the very first circuses: “That’s the first thing. It’s the most dangerous work; it’s beautifully dangerous. You need the fear. It’s nothing about being fearless, it’s about being disciplined.” This tension between creativity and pragmatism underpins every performance, and the functioning of the Circus itself—a balance that can be hard to get right when it comes to the business. She says, “We want it to be beautiful, with the costumes and everything. I know I’ve overstepped the mark before, and we’ve made a loss. It might be that we’re successful despite being home-grown, rather than because of it.” She finds perceptions of circus can be quite simplistic, all trapezists and tigers. For Gifford, circus is an art form. “I don’t think we have a very clear language in this country when talking about art and understanding different art forms and understanding that they can cross over,” she argues. “I look at the work of fine artists and thinking, ‘We do all that, and more.’ I think that people still think that performance, to be valuable, has to be like the Royal Ballet or the Opera.” One of her fantasies would be to make an installation with the horses in Tate Modern’s vast turbine hall: “I think we could do something really amazing in that

space,” she enthuses. “It wouldn’t actually be a circus, more about what we believe about art and beauty and truth.” As we leave, there’s the smell of something delicious cooking that, later, Nell and her family and employees will sit down and eat together. Giffords is still building up to the summer months so the people currently working on the farm is far fewer than the seventy employed at the height of the season. It seems romantic, an extended family who work and live together but Nell stresses the underlying distinctions, “There’s always a clear difference between family and non-family, although you do get as familiar with each other as you are with a family. You can’t really have a side on a circus. If someone’s got, say, an angry side, that’s it, that means they’re just angry. You can’t really conceal yourself at all.” Nell gives the impression of someone who is steely as much as she is creative. The challenge of building a circus from scratch no doubt demands that. “You can’t buy a circus,” she says. “You have to make it yourself.” Giffords’ summer tour this year will be The Saturday Book, which promises a witty collection of vignettes, stories and paintings. See www. giffordscircus.com.

this is my paintbrush: there are many like it, but this one is mine artists’ favourite tools interviews rosanna durham

Franki Finch, modelmaker. My tweezers are not my most frequently used tool—that would be my scalpel—but they are the tool that most feels like an extension of my hand. I make architectural models. The key to a good model is being careful, and being able to hold and position components without getting glue and fingerprints all over it. These tweezers were given to me when I first started modelmaking, so I’ve had them for years, and I still think they’re beautifully shaped, and illustrate the accuracy that is critical to good modelmaking. Benjamin Phillips, illustrator. My favourite tool is the Monami Plus Pen 3000. I’ve been using this pen a lot here in Korea, where I’m on an artist’s residency. It’s a very cheap pen, about 15p, but it has a really nice aesthetic. It’s water soluble so it looks like dip pen ink when you add water. I first started using the pens last year after being given a box from a Korean friend and I’m still using them. In Seoul, I’ve also been receiving strict lessons in traditional ink block and brush work. Rose Gibbs, sculptor. My favourite tool is a small metal waxworking tool. It has an oval convex end that is almost spoon-like, which is good for soft shapes, while the other end is sharp and flat, cut at a diagonal to the handle, which is good for getting into tight corners. I have other similar tools, but I end up using this one. I have two, one for when I work from home, the other in the studio. I use it for waxwork, for modelling my sculptures before they’re bronze cast. Tristram Bainbridge, furniture conservator. This bamboo pokey stick is used for testing the stability of fragile surfaces on historic decorative arts objects. Shayne Rivers, specialist in Japanese lacquer at the Victoria and Albert Museum, taught me how to make one when I first started there as a furniture conservator. It is made by splitting a 15cm piece of bamboo in half and then planing the interior surface until the stick becomes springy and flexible. At the handle end is the bamboo node, which imparts rigidity and can be sharpened to make a scraper point. I use it on almost every object I test and treat, from period rooms with flaking paint to marquetry cabinets with lifting veneer. Matt Martin, photographer and zine-maker. The long-armed stapler is my very useful object of choice. I have only recently become an owner

of one and it’s the best tool I have ever bought. Without this tool, I wouldn’t be able to put together all the zines I make. I can staple any size from A6 to A3. I have been making zines for eight years. My mum used to bookbind and first showed me how to put zines together using a needle and thread. Holly Berry, weaver. My favourite tools are my boat shuttles, which are used to pass the weft threads through the warp threads when I’m weaving by hand. They’re Swedish and made from wood with metal fixings and space for a bobbin full of yarn. They’re very tactile, get better with age and are satisfying to use. Ergonomically designed, they sit nicely in my hand and pass through lots of warp threads at a time, carrying the weft thread between the warp threads to build up the cloth thread by thread. Magdalen Drummond, painter. I met this old French liming brush on a wet day in Portobello Market and with all his rustic charm, I was seduced immediately. Often we fail to recognise that we depend on the infinite skills of others in order to practise our own. My French brush took me back to a time when there was no available art shop and, if something was needed, it had to be made. So please do not judge my brush on his looks alone, as you will miss the heart and soul of the meaning of a brush. They are made to perform the most difficult of tasks that is putting paint on any surface, from a wall in a farm to eye lashes on a portrait. Brushes are the conduit for the painter to perform. Simon English, land artist. Paraffin flame guns were designed as garden tools to scorch and subdue weeds. I use this one to set light to the landscape, burning grass and straw to create black shapes and lines that, from afar, delineate figures. Over the years, the weight and smell of the flame gun along with the sound of it being pumped up, the smoke of the coil heating then the roar of the flame as the heated paraffin burns under pressure has become evocative of all the hills and fields, figures and adventures that I have had over the last thirty years. Online: www.finchandfouracre.co.uk / www.benjaminphillips.co.uk www.rosegibbs.com / www.cargocollective.com/mattmartin www.hollyberryprojects.com / www.englandrevisited.net.

Self-portrait by Emil Svanängen.

goodbye happy songs it’s time for loney dear to sing a different tune words danielle richardson, portrait kevin morosky As the hordes of suited employees leave their workplaces to make their hurried journeys home, they ignore the sturdy Swede walking against them towards a nearby coffee shop. He does not interest them, probably because in every day life Emil Svanängen—otherwise known as Loney Dear—is an unassuming individual. Dressed in jeans and a plain t-shirt, with his blond-tinged hair in a ruffled state, he would have to stand out much more for those around him to pay him any notice. There is nothing to suggest the musical prowess with which he has wowed fans since he self-released his first album, Loney, Noir in 2007. This picture of Emil is an apt metaphor for his struggle in the music industry. He refuses to play the ‘look at me, love me’ game. He complains, “I’m being told all the time, ‘Well, the press doesn’t really like your music, and we have to convince them,’ and I don’t care about convincing people. If people don’t care about my music, I don’t care about them listening to it.” It is clear Emil needs to vent some frustration. He has played a gig in London the night before, one that was quite remarkable and moved many members of the audience. But he reacts to a casual question about how it went with a prediction that he will soon announce he will not be returning to the UK. “Well, are we honest here?” he says, “I’ve announced my last visit to England before and I’m probably announcing it again.” His problem is not with the fans, but the two-second attention span of the English music industry. “There are thirteen bands per dozen in England, and it’s like, ‘We can listen to you play, but we don’t promise we care.’ And there is something very difficult about it.” This tale is at odds with the rave reviews that Loney Dear’s live performances and studio albums have consistently provoked. It’s true enough that his brand of emotionally-charged multi-instrumental music has never made it to the mainstream. Yet this is partly his own doing: recently, Emil has made a conscious effort to move away from his catchier early material. “I’ve never really felt comfortable doing

the popular music,” he explains. “I’m striving towards something more personal, and away from that.” You can hear the shift in his latest album, Hall Music. It’s only his second recorded with a record label, after four self-released albums recorded in his parents’ basement. The work is more dramatic and abstract, embracing the melancholy that was once just a background note in his earlier up-tempo tracks. He’s now banishing that earlier sound even from his live performances. “The fast songs, the ones that sound almost happy—I don’t want to play them,” he says. “Bringing it to the stage, I realised I don’t want that.” As he talks about his music, Emil begins to relax. His work always draws on personal experience, he says, which is the source of its well of sadness. “I am a pretty sad person. Journalists often write that my music is ‘uplifting’. I don’t know, I think there’s maybe something small that’s uplifting about it, but it’s mainly serious, sincere and sad. Grieving, maybe.” The themes of the latest album linger on the sexual side of love and affection. He says, “Before that, it was more about the bigger feelings of anxiety. The warmer sides of those feelings are coming out now, I would say.” Not that the subject matter is always particularly clear: Emil is a man with a soft spot for the surreal. “I like the state of not knowing if this is surreal or not. I like that.” What keeps him going? He carries on making albums, he says, because he forgets how difficult it was last time. There are moments where it all becomes worth it, but he’s nostalgic for the time when he could self-release, as he did with the first two Loney Dear albums. “There were no expectations,” he says wistfully. “I just did what I could do, and I did it, and it was wonderful. It wouldn’t work now, probably, but it would still be fun.” But despite the frustrations, he’s clear that Loney Dear is his destiny. “To me, at the moment, this seems like what I was meant to do,” he says. “There is something about music that’s really exciting. The feeling from the things you love.”

thirty-six

hours to texas a band, a car and miles of desert

photographs and words parker fitzgerald

South by Southwest is a festival of two halves: part technology fair, part music festival. I travelled there from Portland with my friendâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s band, Greylag. Whoever was crunching the numbers at their record label figured it would be cheaper to rent a van rather than fly. So we had a big, fifteen passenger vehicle and suddenly the trip to Austin for SXSW became a road trip.

We passed through Moab, which is like the face of the moon. The mountains and the hills are mixed in with a lot of copper and iron so there are red and green rocks layered together. It was unlike anything I had ever seen. I tried doing a bunch of things with the film I shot there, and I soaked it in some whisky for a while before developing it. You have to be careful, though, because no one in their right mind would develop a role of film they know has been soaked in anything.

Texas is way too big. Everyone complains about driving though Kansas but itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a mountainous adventure compared to Eastern and Western Texas, which is flatter than flat. If you see a tree, it is a surprise. You can go through town after town of weird things. There is town called Brady whose town attraction is that itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Home of the Great Goat BBQ Cook Off.

For breakfast the second morning we stopped in Cortez, Colorado. It was about eight o’clock and everyone was waking up and getting hungry. This was at a cafe with a crazy name—I wish I could remember it—but not good crazy. The food was exactly what you would expect: gross and greasy. Awesome.

On the way back, we stopped for gas in a town called Melrose in New Mexico. There was an abandoned train station across the street and the route is used by freight trains. I was struck by how desolate these places are. It does put you in a very nostalgic place, contemplative. It makes you appreciate home.

this is not a funny story the day I discovered that tantric dance was not for me words charlotte humphery photo kirstin mckee Somewhere between the second and third hour, I began to have a serious sense of humour failure. I had powered through the first hour of the excruciating embarrassment of tantric dance on a wave of novelty and English politeness. But novelty wears off and manners can only be stretched so thin. I was staring daggers at my host and torturer and swearing under my breath by the end of the second hour. The only comfort was seeing my fellow volunteers doing the same thing. We were on a peach farm in Sicily, volunteering for WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms). I’d signed up for sorting soft fruit, but not for tantra. “Your feet are rooted and your body is a willow tree! Sway in the wind! Sway like the willow!” Sudhire, née Vincenzo, intoned enthusiastically. It is very difficult to ascend to a higher spiritual level through the medium of panpipes and rhythmic dance if you have no New Age tendencies or access to heavy-duty hallucinogens. We skipped, we hugged, we blushed profusely. Intermittently we were encouraged to find a partner and discover our carnal physicality with them. Every time the order was called there was a mad dash to pair up. We were an even number and each round someone was destined to dance with Sudhire. You had to be quick on your feet. He wouldn’t take no for an answer and, male or female, he would clasp you to his moist, plump, speedo-ed body and spin you round the hall. There are few things less conducive to carnality that the feeling of an ageing hippy’s naked beer belly pressed against you, but there was no avoiding him. He was inevitable, a force of nature; eventually everyone was gathered into his clammy embrace: American, French, Australian, Chinese and British. Of course, I didn’t appreciate Sudhire’s strangely unifying power at the time, I just wanted it to be over. I had endured the analysis of my energies and the scantily-clad poolside yoga with good grace. I had even managed, more or less, to stoically smile my way through the previous night’s tarot cards. They were an updated set full of rainbows, fractals and crystals. They seemed to suggest that my future would be trippy. Part of me regrets my inability to let go and relax into the crazy. Perhaps, if I had been able to shed my self-consciousness, the wind-chimes could have opened within me a greater understanding of my own body. Sudhire was certainly having a good time. Part of me, though, is glad of the practical experience of the impossibility of imposing your own spiritual beliefs, however deeply held, on other people. All of me was glad when it was over and we bowed to each other, hugged and fled into the night. Down the road and up the rubble track, I was the first to reach the rundown bungalow that was our temporary home. I plonked into a deckchair and stared moodily into the darkness as I felt the tension fall away. The others soon caught up, weighed down with firewood, enormous plastic bottles of Nero d’Avola and armfuls of warm white peaches. There was a lot to be grateful for. Soon the bonfire was blazing, the wine was poured and we were sticky with peach juice. There is no arguing with the Sicilian night sky—there are too many stars. With their more generous humours, everyone else was already beginning to see the funny side of the evening. It didn’t take them long to tease me out of my funk. Soon we were all being willows again, bent double laughing and clasping our wine glasses and each other. We stomped and spun with more enthusiasm than an hour earlier, before collapsing back down to earth. We tried and failed to analyse what had just happened to us. The world at large is full of oddness; the organisation of WWOOF veritably overflows with it. Some people get in touch with their spiritual side through physical contact, movement and music. Others use starlight and red wine and conversations with new friends.

I have an idea and it’s a good one joe bleakley’s firework displays are spectacular, but that is just the beginning interview amie mills, portrait pat shepherd

Joe Bleakley is a fluent, prolific talker about ideas and dreams, but he is not especially forthcoming when it comes to himself. He is least talkative of all about his best-known work: the art direction for Peter Jackson’s Lord of Rings trilogy, which was filmed in his native New Zealand. Instead, he simply explains that, from now on, he’ll be sticking to his own projects: “I ended up being accidentally attracted into the film industry. There was a seduction to it, and it was amazing. I love it. But there are really no films that I’ve worked on that I wanted to do.” Now that he can do what he loves best, Bleakley creates spectacular events. Joe is what is sometimes called an imagineer. The grand annual Telecom Christmas tree in his home town of Wellington is one of his regular projects: a vast tree constructed out of lights, right on the bay. A mound of bean bags is scattered underneath for people to lie on and watch the lights. It’s a project dear to Bleakley. “People just lie under it for hours, and it’s on all night. I’m sure there have been some Telecom babies,” he says. Another fixture is Wellington’s Island Bay Festival, which Joe has been a trustee of since 2003. Taking place in February every summer, it’s an annual nine-day festival celebrating the talent of the south coast of New Zealand. The curse of events, of course, is that they’re over so soon. Months, even years, of planning can be finished with in half an hour of glorious coloured lights. The extraordinary thing about our conversation was that, for Joe, this doesn’t seem to make any difference. His deepest and most passionate engagement are with things that, in many people’s minds, don’t actually exist. He speaks about the Sun Festival, which he organised for Wellington nearly thirty years ago, as vividly as if it was the morning after. “The photographs you will see are unbelievable,” he says. “It was the biggest firework display within New Zealand.” Bleakley talks in loving detail about a grander still Earthquake Festival that he is planning. It will start in 2013, with features added every year until 2023.

For Bleakley, the first rule of a celebration is that it must be spectacular. “It has to entertain,” says Joe. “It has to be something that people think, ‘Fuck, that was amazing.’ That’s the first thing.” But this is only the beginning. Bleakley is blistering in his criticism of the opening ceremony of last year’s Rugby World Cup in New Zealand: “Yes, it was entertaining, but the moment you went to the next level and said, ‘What did they say?’ you realised they didn’t say anything. There was no narrative, no structure.” He doesn’t mind if people don’t fathom all the context and depth of his own events: “It’s like if you go and look at a painting, and there’s a lot going on and you don’t understand it all. The meaning is what helps me design. You’re asking, ‘What are you?’ and slowly it designs itself.” The idea for the Sun Festival was initially just a great fireworks show, which would mark the opening of Wellington’s Summer City. Bleakley had travelled the world meeting firework-makers, and been inspired by the firework cultures he found. The Spanish love noise—“They don’t even care what it looks like, they just want the noisiest things you can have.” English and French firework history is full of decorative setpieces, rigged on elaborate frames with Catherine Wheels and pointportraits of people in exploding lights. The Japanese are interested only in colour: “They prefer fireworks to produce no smoke and even no sound. All their fireworks are named after the seasons, like Blossom After Thundering. You look up and the fireworks tell a beautiful story with the evolution of colour.” New Zealand, by contrast, tells no story of its own with fireworks. “They’re constantly trying to invent new fireworks all around the world, and they’re gimmicks unless your fireworks are interwoven into some kind of narrative.” So he planned to put on a firework display that would recreate the first sunrise. It was probably just as well that Bleakley pitched the idea as a simple fireworks show. It ended up as an event so ambitious that a pragmatic

Joe Bleakley’s poster for this year’s Island Bay Festival, in Wellington.

Joe Bleakley’s self-portrait.

member of the Wellington City Council may well have laughed a pitch for it out of the room. He started with a legend. It was an invented legend, as he wanted to avoid favouring tales from either European or Maori mythology. He based the story on the colours of the rainbow, with six colours as six stars who fight it out amongst themselves to keep watch over the earth, eventually coming together to make a glorious sun. The final star, indigo makes peace amongst her warlike brother stars, and becomes the moon. Bleakley invited all the schools in Wellington to make a banner for the legend. Each school also got a section of the footpath along the city’s Oriental Bay to paint rainbow colours with chalk-based paint. For the finale, Bleakley’s team rigged a central fountain to shoot fire as if it was water. “As that got really bright and intense at ground level, it built until a hundred rockets all went off at the same time, and with that the six rafts caught alight. We had big fires rigged into them.” As well as being extravagant, the events that Bleakley plans and dreams are ferociously-layered affairs. They are elegant and sentimental in their details, and sprawling, glorious tapestries in their completeness. Take his dreams of holding an Earthquake Festival in Wellington in 2013. This is an idea close to his heart: something unique and peculiarly local for his home city. One detail of his plan is to have street parties in each area. The guests of honour will be the dependents: the children, the old and the disabled. It’s a beautiful idea, and one with a deeper purpose. “By having those events,” Joe explains, “people would get to know who needs extra care in an emergency.” The whole ritual is a quiet rehearsal for making an earthquake evacuation as humanitarian as possible. This is only one of ten events that Bleakley imagines would be part of the Earthquake Festival. His final ideal is a demand that events are authentically local. Bleakley’s pitch for last year’s Rugby World Cup ceremonies was symptomatic

of his sincere localism. He started with the problem of welcoming all the teams to the country. How could the opening ceremony really be said to welcome all the teams, when the opening matches took place at stadiums all around the country, so that many teams weren’t even present? His solution was to have two opening ceremonies, one a week before the first match with all the teams present, and another one just before the kick-off of the first match. There would be no fewer than nineteen closing ceremonies, to celebrate each team as they departed. “As it is, all the other teams go home without even a farewell, and it’s like, ‘Bugger off, we’re not interested in you any more.’ This is part of our culture, to farewell people.” As it was, the ceremony was outsourced to an Australian company, and Bleakley was dismayed by their treatment of the World Cup. “They were doing the job for an economic reason, not because they felt passionate about welcoming these people. It’s not even their country: how can you get passionate about it?” This localism is the other side of his fascination with other cultures: one is a longing to locate and define his home within the other. When it comes to his love of connecting communities on a grand scale, Bleakley himself isn’t sure where the desire comes from. He says, “I don’t know. I tend to be a bit isolated, and I do wonder why all the things I do tend to be big. Am I so insecure that I want everyone to love me and then have trouble when someone does? I think a lot of it has to do with being brought up a Catholic, because everything has this meaning. You’d carry out these rituals with great cozzies and lots of bells, and they were great events.” Despite his reduction of all his film work to ‘an economic reason’, there are parallels between Bleakley and Tolkien. Both were possessed of deep devotion to their home country, with a penchant for sprawling mythologies and the grand and awe-inspiring. Bleakley isn’t one to keep things simple: he makes it as conceptually rich as possible and as layered as a twice-used canvas with picture painted over picture. He takes the emotion of wonder and turns it into an art.

food for thought takeshi suga asked people in tokyo about the dish that reminds them of home portraits takeshi suga, assistant yuki houdini

Mayuko. Taiyaki: fish-shaped cake with red bean paste. Secret talent: Singing songs from the 60s at karaoke. Amane. Simmered meat and potatoes. Secret talent: My wife doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know this, but I can do a magic trick.

Kumiko. Flounder cooked in soy sauce. Secret talent: I can wink super fast. I can show it to you if you like.

Yuki. Fish and chips reminds me of home. Secret talent: I can sleep anywhere, if it’s necessary.

Shoko. Liver. Secret talent: I’m not sure if I have one. I can do a funny face but I’d rather not do it here.

Emiko. Fried egg. Secret talent: Chopping vegetables. I can do it faster than anyone else in our kitchen.

Kazuma. Miso soup, pork and vegetables. Secret talent: Football, juggling and creating an illustration.

Sayori. Potatoes and sprouts fried in salt and pepper. Secret talent: Pouring sauce on octopus dumplings really quickly.

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One of our winning auction lots was this unclaimed suitcase. Photo: Liz Seabrook

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sold to the woman blushing in the third row I went to an auction and this is what I bought

Auctions, we thought, are surely the place where bargains and adventures are found: more exciting than a junk shop, more eccentric than ebay and better value than a vintage fair. We dreamed of finding beautiful ornaments in small village auction houses, bagging a valuable mystery suitcase from the transport lost property sell-offs

and bumping into celebrity Cash in the Attic contestants at the showâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s glossy auction-room home. Only one of these things happened to the brave people we sent off auctioneering. But, while all the bargains may have been snapped up by the doughty auction regulars, there was plenty of adventure to be had.

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auction one: old antiques and oddities words charlotte humphery, portrait trent mcminn

Name: Greenwich Auctions Partnership In their own words: “Auctioneers and valuers of Fine arts, antiques, collectables & objet d’art.” First impressions: An unassuming place. There are white vans and beaten-up Peugeots parked outside and old men sit around on plastic chairs smoking and eyeing you up suspiciously. It looks a bit like a garage, but when you get inside you realise it is a Tardis. It is a cavernous barn full of stuff: pleather sofas and questionable paintings and boxes of old magazines and a traffic bollard nailed to the wall. Punters wander through the chaos examining the lots or sit on rows of benches watching the auctioneer and waving their bidding cards.

banter and lot descriptions. He was clearly an expert, hammering out the phrasings with never a hesitation, but he wore it lightly with his South London accent, swagger and flow of jokes. The bidding: Bidding is exciting in a slightly sick-making way. The auctioneer goes so fast that you need to be on your toes to make sure you don’t miss your lot. For a brief moment you are the centre of attention in a crowded room. I was torn between giving in to the excitement and being aware that I couldn’t afford to be lured outside my budget.

A TV screen next to the podium flashes up the lot numbers and descriptions. There is a kitchen that is doing a roaring trade in mugs of strong tea and bacon sandwiches. The clink of teaspoons and coins merge with the crowd’s chatter and the auctioneer’s patter into a lively hum. It is slightly intimidating, but exciting.

I was tragically outbid on the Elvis bust. I jumped enthusiastically into the early bidding, but it was soon out of my hands. I had been worried that I wouldn’t be able to walk away but apparently I do have a limit. Elvis went for £45 and a rueful glance from me in the end. Shortly after that, following a brief bidding skirmish, I won Lot 108; a ‘Majolica-style candle holder’. It is the very definition of jolie laide—strangely lovely, gloriously garish and cripplingly ugly all rolled into one. I have something of a fetish for pretty/ugly things and the candelabrum could win awards in that category.

Up for auction: Everything you could possibly imagine. While I could skip the seventeen boxes of Spurs memorabilia, the brown patterned rugs and the china shepherdesses, there was plenty to consider. I need another bookcase; they had twelve. I also became fixated on a life-sized, mounted, plaster bust of Elvis. It was incomprehensibly weird and I wanted it.

The loot: The candelabrum is sitting on my kitchen table looking like something Gaudí, the Rococo movement and a village charity shop vomited up. I’m planning a dinner party in its honour. I am also comforting my boyfriend: on discovering that I had lost out on the Elvis bust he had sighed with relief and proclaimed that there really was a God. Now that I have collected the candelabrum he seems less sure.

The auctioneer: The auctioneer was a showman and a charmer. He was lairy and boisterous but professional. He kept up a constant stream of

The damage: Candelabrum: £10, registration: £3, catalogue: £1.50, VAT and buyer’s premium: £6. Total: £20.50.

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auction two: television’s favourite words harriet williams, portrait andrew urwin

Name: Chiswick Auctions In their own words: “The saleroom is featured almost daily on television, with programmes such as Cash in the Attic, Dickinson’s Real Deal, Flog It!, and Bargain Hunt. A visit to the saleroom on saleday will invariably bring you into contact with celebrities including the presenters of Cash in the Attic, Jennie Bond, Angela Rippon, Chris Hollins and Gloria Hunniford. Not to mention the Celebrity Cash in the Attic contestants.” First impressions: The sign on the door proclaimed that filming was indeed happening, and the buzz of the auction house was overwhelming, especially for midday on a Tuesday. The auction room was rammed, like a posh living room full of chairs and over-stuffed sofas, which were all lots in the auction. There were people everywhere, perched on the priceless antique furniture. Very nearly the first person I saw was David Dickinson. As orange and as weird as he always looks on TV, he and his team occupied fully half the auction room with cameras and sound equipment, making lots of noise and clearly irritating the auctioneer. Up for auction: Lots when I arrived were going for several hundred or thousand pounds, and I despaired of finding anything to spend my £20 budget on. I watched as overweight antiques dealers irreverently ate egg sandwiches over the chairs and waved their catalogues in the general area of the auctioneer. The most attractive things to go were jewellery, like some beautiful antique rings for several hundred pounds.

The bidding: Sensation was caused by the unexpected arrival of Michael Barrymore, who appeared next to the auctioneer and chatted with David Dickinson across the room. Everyone looked on open mouthed and, on my part, incredulous. He then proceeded to take over from the auctioneer, taking bids and making jokes. When no one bid on a gilded Victorian frame he said, “Anybody want to get framed for twenty quid? Oh that’s just me.” Surprisingly, it went down well. As the atmosphere in the auction got rowdier and less formal, I finally plucked up the courage to bid on something, a picture in a frame billed as ‘nineteenth-century.’ I waved my number wildly in the direction of Michael Barrymore, and hoped desperately that no one would outbid me. The loot: The painting was valued at £40 to 60 but, with no takers, I got it for much less. Barrymore said to me, “You’re getting a bargain there.” Satisfied that the excitement was over, I slunk out a few minutes later, only to slink back in awkwardly when I discovered the auction assistants had to take the picture down for me. Unfortunately, my painting is pretty much the ugliest and least distinguished piece of late Victorian neo gothic I’ve ever seen, as you’ll be able to tell from the picture. Still, my day at the auction was thoroughly enjoyable, and I’ll be dining out on buying a picture off Barrymore for weeks at least. The damage: Painting: £20. Auction fees: £7. Total: £27.

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auction three: small market town antiques words lisa jarmin, portrait ian clark

Name: Andrew Hilditch & Son Auctioneers They say: “Andrew Hilditch & Son Ltd. are an auction house and house clearance specialist established in 1866. Being a small family owned business they are able to provide a dedicated personal service and pride themselves on their kind and friendly approachability.” First impressions: Auctions take place in plush rooms with velvet seats and posh ceilings. I know this because I once sat through an entire episode of Cash in the Attic. So why did I find myself in a decrepit, crumbling old room? Where were all the posh Kirstie Allsopp-a-likes? And why was it so cold? Up for auction: I inspected the Lots (all 328 of them—we were in for the long haul) with the regulars. I could tell they were regulars because they’d come dressed for arctic conditions and seemed very knowledgeable about antiques. I made a few ‘hmmm’ noises as I pretended to examine everything and make notes in my leaflet. The bidding: As the auction started, I shivered in my plastic scout hut chair and tried to watch the action without moving so as not to accidentally buy anything. I was inquisitive about what sort of person would buy a bright orange suckling calf figurine. It turned out that Beardy-Tweed-Man and Body-Warmer-Woman both wanted it quite badly. And where would Asda-Bag-Lady put that chandelier? The novelty of this wore off and gave way to nausea as I realised that I was going to have to bid on something. It was all a bit too much like

having to put your hand up in class for my liking (“Lisa is a bright student but must participate more in class discussion” read every school report ever written about me). It also involved an element of competition. I am not competitive in the slightest, finding all that business rather undignified. Shopping is not a competitive sport in my book. I let two items go before I started to panic that I’d have nothing to write about if I failed to buy something, so when Lot 127 came up, a wooden box of Victorian bric-a-brac, I swallowed all pride and bid like my life depended on it. Fifteen pounds. Twenty-two. Twenty-five. My twenty pound budget went out of the window, but it was worth it to not have to go through the miserable bidding process again. Thirty pounds—sold to the lady who looks like she wants to sink through the floor with the indignity of it all. The loot: I lost some self respect, but came away with this amazing old box. It’s weighty and scratched and has a peeling red lining and rusty hinges holding it together. What I love most about it, though, is that it’s full of stuff: a handful of twinkling, tarnished costume jewellery, some silver spoons, a pocket watch, a couple of old photographs in lockets and a petrifying miniature baby doll. My son is enchanted by “mummy’s treasure chest” as we run our fingers through our spoils like pirates. It’s found a home in my living room for curious moments and games of Treasure Island on rainy afternoons. The damage: Box: £30, catalogue: £2, buyer’s premium: £6. Total: £38.

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auction four: lost and unclaimed luggage words olivia wilson, portrait liz seabrook

Name: Greasby’s Auctioneers & Valuers They say: “Greasby’s is a well known South London firm of Public Auctioneers, that was established in 1919 by Henrietta Greasby. We have operated from the original site since that date” First impressions: Down a very nondescript road and in a rather nondescript building, I found the ever-so-descript auction room of Greasby’s, which specialises in auctioning off unclaimed baggage from various public sector lost properties. With a whole wall lined with luggage, great bundles of umbrellas and a huge cabinet of mobile phones and ipods that had been left on buses or in railway stations and airports, it was a treasure trove of the left-behind. The auctioneer: A rather formidable woman with salt and pepper hair cut into a sharp bob, spectacles perched on the end of her nose, a strong London accent and brusque manner. Up for auction: One bundle of umbrellas and walking sticks contained a didgeridoo, which definitely caught my imagination, but today’s mission was to reclaim some baggage. I had my eye on the prettiest case, navy blue polka dot with a red ribbon tied round the handle, but so too had everyone else. It went for nearly sixty pounds in the end. The bidding: Bidding was pretty frenetic. I was surprised not only by the ferocity but also my own intensity of feeling. The suitcases were really popular and seeing things I wanted being taken out of my grasp made me quite indignant. “How dare they?” I caught myself thinking. The rest of the time I was panicking that I might mistakenly bid for

something I didn’t want by fidgeting and accidently moving the bidding card I held on my lap. The bidders: It was full of regulars, many of whom make a living out of auctions. There were Barry and Kevin, for instance, who we had to wait for in order to start. Best of all was a women sitting directly in front of me. She was dressed head to toe in purple velour and bid on the most bizarre lots with great authority. Anything that went for too much, she would tut, shake her head and look at me as if to bemoan the newcomers who drove the prices up. I also enjoyed the tea lady who brought food and drink orders in polystyrene on a blue plastic tray. Nothing cost more than 60p. The loot: After bidding on every single lost luggage lot before it, I eventually won a green and tan pull-along suitcase and the contents thereof. And only then, I think, because the lady next to me, who I was consistently going head to head with, took pity on my forlorn face and decided to let me have one. She had won the last eleven. After the initial excitement had worn off, owning someone else’s mislaid belongings felt a bit wrong. The items are clearly a family’s holiday clothes: gingham school dresses, small stripy aertex shirts, a roll of blank, unused sugar paper of varying sizes and a well-loved Spot the Dog book, all flaps intact. I am very fond of Spot the Dog, but I can’t help but feel that the little girl or boy who is missing it was too. I just really wish I could return the contents to their rightful owners. The damage: Suitcase: £28, deposit: £100, catalogue: £1.50, buyer’s premium and VAT: £4.50. Total: £32.50.

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for tweed and country how the industrial revolution changed britain’s clothmaking towns words johanna derry illustrations laura callaghan

Flying shuttles and spinning jennys, bobbins and looms, stitchings, fabrics and fibres—these are the things that filled my mind in the summer of 1996, as I tried to cram the entirety of Britain’s Industrial Revolution into my sun-soaked mind for GCSE history. There were epic biblical names of the inventors who built the textile machines that changed the fabric of British society, the curious titles of their fantastical machines, and the textiles themselves, proudly named after the place of their origin. They had a poetry of their own, written with the rhythm of beams and battens, rods and treadles. Sixteen years later, eighteenth-century Britain has not lost its hold on me. I decided to seek out four fabrics and see how the machines’ inexorable progress transformed the cloth and the towns where they found their origins and their names. My journey began in the village of Worstead. Six miles from the North Norfolk coast, it’s a tiny place with a towering church. The large church is a clue. In the fourteenth century, Worstead experienced a boom that made it a hub for wool-weaving, lending its name to the process of combing wool, and to a dense smooth cloth that makes a decent coat: worsted. Norfolk had been sheep country in the eleventh century, but the wool was exported to Flanders where skilled weavers and dyers transformed it into cloth that would be reimported for sale. “Textiles were the backbone of the British economy,” says Jenny Lister, a fashion curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum. “And wool was particularly strong in the eastern counties.” In 1275, to prevent the best wool in Europe from leaving the country, King Edward I imposed

the Great Tax on all wool exports. The tax was so resented that it even became a nursery rhyme, Baa Baa Black Sheep. The song goes, “One for the master and one for the dame.” The tax felt as heavy as having to give a third to the king and a third to the church. The arrival of Flemish weavers fleeing from the Black Death and the Hundred Years War on the continent, during the reigns of Edward II and III, meant the tax could be avoided, since the wool didn’t need to be exported any more. They established themselves in the area around Worstead and North Walsham, creating such a boom that a century later, the famous Norfolk letterwriter William Paston wrote to his cousin Robert, “I shall make my doublet all Worstead, for the glory of Norfolk.” This ancient industry in Norfolk was one of the fatalities of the forces of mechanisation. Its cottage-weaving industry prospered until the nineteenth century, when mechanised woollen mills in Yorkshire shifted textile manufacture to the north. While Norfolk’s economy as a whole turned its attention to innovative farming methods instead, Norfolk weavers sought a strange reprieve through the manufacture of Paisley-print shawls. The shawls are not actually from Paisley, or even originally an item of women’s clothing. The distinctive teardrop pattern is a decorative motif found on many objects from the time of the Moghul empire in India. The British saw the pattern first in Kashmir, on intricate woollen shawls spun from the fibres taken from the undercoat of a Himalayan goat. “The Kashmir shawl was perhaps the most famous of all of the materials decorated with the Paisley pattern,” says Dan Coughlin, Curator of

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Textiles at the Paisley Museum. “It was a male garment in India, worn only by those in the top ranks of society. It was extremely expensive. The Indian weavers inserted all of the minute decoration by hand, so it took two weavers over a year to produce one shawl.”

Market. It’s where the more sophisticated cocktail-drinking crowd spend Saturday nights and was once a textile industry centre. But the city’s story doesn’t begin with bobbins. Before lace, Nottingham was famous for stockings.

As the British expanded their empire through the East India Company, the shawls made their way back to Europe, where they became coveted items for aristocratic ladies of the eighteenth century. The contest was on to produce the best imitation shawls locally and quickly.

One day, an impatient Nottingham clergyman, William Lee, had become exasperated by how slowly his wife knitted his tights. He decided to build a machine that could knit them faster. Rather than being greeted with gratitude, his invention, the stocking frame, was considered so dangerous to the cottage industry of stocking-makers that Queen Elizabeth I banned it. Once the queen was dead, though, the combination of ready labour and the fact that framework knitting could be done at home to fit in around seasonal farming, meant the villages around Hinckley, Loughborough, Derby and Nottingham became centres for the manufacture of stockings, with Nottingham as the commercial hub.

“There were only a few places with the high levels of technology and weaving skills needed,” says Coughlin. Paisley, near Glasgow, was one, but Norwich led the way when an alderman named John Harvey introduced shawl manufacture to the city. From 1842, it was possible to protect patterns or designs by registering them at the Public Records Office, and in the next seven years, 315 designs for printed and woven shawls were registered by seven Norwich manufacturers alone. However, in the English-speaking world at least, Paisley won the battle of association, producing such an abundance of these imitation Indian shawls that they became synonymous with the town to become known as the Paisley shawl. Nottingham, by contrast, was an Industrial Revolution success story. In the city centre, you’ll find a labyrinth of streets known as the Lace

By 1799, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, and there were 149 hosiers, and six lacemakers in Nottingham. But in the space of just 24 years the city’s industry had switched focus entirely from stockings to lace. In 1808, a Derby man living in Nottingham named John Heathcoat worked out how to imitate handmade lace with a machine. “Machinemade lace was a diversion from hosiery at first,” explains Amanda Briggs-Goode, co-ordinator of the Lace Archive at Nottingham Trent University. “Nottingham was already a significant textile centre, with

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wealth within the city to invest in the industry, an established infrastructure for bleaching and dyeing, soft water, and strong mechanical skills.” The new technology found fertile ground for investment and development, and Nottingham’s Lace Market was born. When the textile industry left Norfolk, it ended up in Yorkshire and Lancashire, transforming them into hubs of modernisation. Cities like Leeds became melting pots of innovation. By 1813, the rising birth rate meant the sheep simply couldn’t grow wool fast enough to be woven into cloth, and it was here that Benjamin Law from Batley spotted an opportunity. “Rags were already being ripped up and turned into cushion stuffing, but with the addition of stockings, the stuffing became more fibrous,” says Katina Bill, Collections Officer for Kirklees Museums and Galleries. Benjamin Law realised that if old rags were processed some more, they could be turned into new yarn. He invented a machine that could prepare the waste material for recycling. Batley, Dewsbury and Ossett were near to the woollen mills of Leeds, where offcuts of unworn wool textiles were produced. They became the home to a new industry with the perfect conditions for success: sorting, ripping and reweaving old woollen fibres, rags, scraps and offcuts to make new material became a big and lucrative business.

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Once unremarkable hamlets and villages were transformed by industry into large interdependent mill towns. The fabric produced was called shoddy, but don’t be deceived by the name. Bill adds, “Some shoddy was of a very high quality and its dense weave meant that it was even considered suitably hard-wearing cold weather gear for one of the early, albeit unsuccessful, Everest expeditions.” Shoddy is still made, but nowadays it is described as recycled fibres. Benjamin Law’s invention demonstrated the cut-throat nature of the textile industry in the nineteenth century. Those who were ready to innovate, experiment and adapt became hugely successful; those who weren’t got left behind. Trying to concentrate on my revision all those years ago, I imagined the British Isles as one heaving, weaving mass of fabrics. The cloth on our backs made us the people that we are. Continuous waves of skilled immigrants—Flemish worsted weavers in the 1300s, French Huguenot silk weavers in the 1600s, Bangladeshi garment makers in the 1960s— seamlessly joined the country, becoming part of the weft of the nation. From Baa Baa Black Sheep to the lace on Kate Middleton’s wedding dress, each place has with its own threads and its own stories. Visit the Nottingham Trent Lace Collection for more about lace, the Bagshaw Museum for more about shoddy, and the fashion galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which reopen May 19, for more about the story of textiles and fashion since 1750.

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un amour de jeunesse mia hansen-løve made a film about her teenage romance that never died words and portrait rosanna durham

Mia Hansen-Løve’s teenage love affair ended over a decade ago. But first loves aren’t easy to forget, and the film director inhabits the emotional present tense while remembering hers. She says, “It started at the age of fourteen and ended at eighteen. I desperately loved a boy. It is a part of my life, years later. I have not forgotten it at all. The experience was the most strong and defining of my life.” Shadowing the release of Mia’s third feature film, Goodbye First Love, is a slow-burning curiosity about its autobiographical background. The story is of Parisian teenagers, Camille and Sullivan, whose relationship blossoms between school days and a summer holiday. They are tender towards each other, jealous, too, or sometimes argumentative, like siblings. They lie in bed and in the summer grass, equally swept away in a density of obsession with one another. The film’s particular heroine is Camille, whom we follow after Sullivan leaves France. Sullivan wants to explore the world and, against his parents’ wishes, he travels to South America, leaving Camille still at school in France. Following his departure, he writes long, handwritten letters that arrive in her school mailbox with less and less frequency. In Camille’s bittersweet story it is tempting to read Mia’s: to read the film not as a work of fiction but personal biography. Mia replies: “The invisible things involved in the film are extremely faithful to what I am. The scenes and the things that people actually want to know about, if I have done this or done that, well, no, they are all invented.” In fact, the film is more personal than would ever be apparent: her past is captured in ways that only Mia can talk about. You would never know from the film itself that all the locations are places from Mia’s own childhood. Sullivan and Camille spend a summer holiday in a small cottage, the location of which is near to Mia’s grandmother’s country house where she herself passed summers away from Paris. “The river, the bridge, the paths, the lake, the river. It was taken from my point of view, from how I was there.” And just as talking to me now about her first love she is careful worded, and deliberate in what she reveals, she was also afraid to give away too much of her own life in the making of

the film. “I was a little bit afraid of doing that because I didn’t know how it would feel to have all these people in my secret gardens.” Half fictional, half biographical, Goodbye First Love is an imagined documentary. Mia has traced the emotional arc of her own story: the falling in love, the breaking up and, later, the never forgetting. The end for Camille is not articulated: this is an unfinished love story. It was the same for Mia, who talks of the enduring power of her affair: “It is very much present, but was kept locked inside.” Writing the film was a journey back to the unresolved heartbreak, and an attempt to reconcile this part of her life. More than the original love itself, in the end, it is the separation that Mia has not forgotten and tried to understand in the film. After the love, there was rage. “Throughout all my adolescence, I felt that nobody would believe in the depth of my feelings and the importance that it had for all of my whole life. All those that saw me so unhappy and suffering, they would all tell me: when you’re an adult you won’t even think about it. You won’t believe that you spent so much time thinking about this person. But I was so right about the importance of this experience for me and that I would never really turn the page.” The film is also a goodbye, a way to give a frame to the experience and see its true meaning. “The purpose of the film is to create new memories in the future. When the film is over, it starts to almost replace the past. The film becomes so real that the reality of the film has a tendency to be even stronger than the feelings of the past.” Goodbye First Love was a film Mia Hansen-Løve needed to write and now, for the first time, she has been able to. The catalyst for it is a surprise: motherhood. She says, “I don’t think I could have written the film if I was not pregnant.” Not that she makes any declarations of how motherhood has transformed her. “It is too early to say how it changed me. One thing that I can say is that I was pregnant when I wrote the film. If I had not had a baby, it would have been a different film.” Goodbye First Love is out in the UK on May 4th.

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the comfort of cake a perfect sponge and something understood words alice christie illustration eleni kalorkoti

It was a one-street African town in Swaziland between the lowveld where the sugar cane grew and the mountainous highveld of forests. The metalled road stretched from our low white house, past the market where children sold oranges from neat piles on sacks and witch doctors gave consultations, past the single supermarket with shelves of strange sugar confectionery and milk in plastic bags, past the room where the old lady who made our uniforms sat behind her treadle sewing machine to the school at the dusty end of the road. As the cars and buses bumped off the end of the metalled strip clouds of red dust blew up, settling onto every surface so that each fold of your clothes leaked small gusts of the world beyond the town. I think we must have driven to school every morning because it was a long way for my little sisters to walk and anyway it was important that our white ankle socks remained pristine. On the first day we arrived in our matching kilts, silent and overwhelmed by the strangeness of the building with long verandahs and corrugated tin roof, but were sent home immediately until we could present ourselves in the correct school uniform of turquoise tunics and white shirts. The old lady slowly measured us, one by one, making us stand still while she pinned and trimmed the coarse cotton. We returned, properly dressed, to sing the Swazi national anthem surrounded by pictures of King Sobhuza and play games that were new to us outside under the flamboyant jacaranda. I must have learned something sitting at my old-fashioned wooden desk but I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t remember a single lesson except the day that Miss McDonald taught us how to bake a cake. She was young and very beautiful and although I was only ten I knew that she was hopelessly in love with the headmaster. We stood around the kitchen table of the headmasterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s house watching her weigh ingredients and line the tin with a tragic precision. Butter and sugar were creamed to an anguished perfection and then the eggs were beaten in so carefully that we held our breath to prevent the slightest change in temperature curdling the mixture. The flour was sifted onto a sheet of paper and folded in to the batter with light, elegant flicks of the wrist as though her life depended on the perfection of the cake and then Miss McDonald placed the tin into the hissing gas oven. When the cake came out it was billowy and pale caramel in colour and we ate it quickly when it was still warm, the jam leaking onto our fingers.

Lith ORR ORRgraphy Chris Orr RA, Full Steam Ahead!, 2011. Lithograph. © the artist. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.

Chris Orr RA and the Art of Chemical Printing

Tennant Gallery Until 20 May

Opening times Tuesday – Sunday, 10am – 6pm. Closed Mondays Admission Complimentary entry with a valid Royal Academy exhibition ticket. £3 without. RA Friends go free.

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cut out your piece of origami paper

paper and patterns cut out and fold a little origami box patterns harriet seed, diagrams rosalind wilson

One. Start with a square of paper, with the pattern you want to appear outwards face down.

Two. Fold it in half horizontally and unfold, then repeat vertically. Fold all the corners into the centre.

Three. Fold top and bottom edges to centre line. Unfold, leaving the two side corners folded to the centre.

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Four. Fold the side edges in to the centre.

Seven. Fold up a flap to create one side of the box, pinching in the paper along the guide folds.

Five. Fold and unfold as shown to create guide folds.

Six. Do the same on the other side. Rotate paper by 180째 and repeat steps five and six.

Eight. Fold the flap down to lie in the bottom of the box. Repeat steps 7 and 8 with the other flap.

Ta da!

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issue eleven is out in july nex t issue, we’re pack ing our bags for the road less travelled

Do you fancy exploring a city by following the route of its Monopoly board? What about pretending to be a tourist in your own town, and following sightseeing suggestions from locals? Or inventing a burst water main and inviting yourself to a friend’s for a bath? We’ve been inspired by the folk at the Laboratory of Experimental Tourism to try some unusual travel, so we’ll be setting off to do all of these and more. You can see the Laboratory’s ideas here: www.latourex.org.

Don’t forget to send us a postcard if you try one of their ideas, or make up one of your own. The photo above is by Egor Rogalev, whose photography you can also see as part of the contact sheet shoot on page 58. He says, “I took this picture somewhere in Gomel region in Belarus while travelling from St Petersburg to Kiev by car with my friends. We were impressed by the view of the white hill, so we decided to come closer.”

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colonel mustard in the kitchen with a sieve how to make your own condiments words charlotte humphery Condiments tend to sit ignored on diner tables and forgotten in the back of fridges. They are part of the unnoticed landscape of our edible existence. But, to paraphrase 90s pop royalty, they spice up our lives. They are exciting and hard working. Condiments bring food to life: think of a burger denuded of ketchup, mustard and mayo. I began to wonder why we so rarely make our own. After all, most are conceptually simple and infinitely customisable. Fired by curiosity, I pulled three favourites from the blind spot in my kitchen and set about trying to cook up my own. The scene in my kitchen was soon not unlike Georgeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Marvellous Medicine: things bubbling away on the hob and in the airing cupboard (that would be the mustard), and transforming themselves from a list of unassuming store cupboard essentials into something recognisable. I taste-tested, researched and experimented, sometimes more successfully than others. It sometimes felt like magic, sometimes like science, and it was always an excuse for chips.

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heinz-a-like ketchup Heinz started producing their ketchup in 1876 which has given them 134 years to perfect the recipe. And it is perfect. Obviously, Heinz are out to protect their ketchup monopoly. The ingredients label on a bottle of ketchup is suitably obtuse: tomatoes, spirit vinegar, sugar, salt, spice and herb extracts (contain celery), spice. That could be anything. Here’s the recipe I eventually settled on, for two cups of ketchup.

Four. Add the tinned tomatoes, tomato puree, vinegar and sugar to the spiced onion mix. Bring to the boil and simmer for an hour.

You will need:

Six. Eat with home-made potato wedges.

1 tbsp olive oil ½ an onion, finely chopped 1 garlic clove, finely chopped 1 x 400g tin chopped tomatoes ½ x 200g tube tomato puree 50g brown sugar 50ml red wine vinegar

1 clove 1 tsp fresh ginger, grated ½ tsp coriander seeds A pinch of cumin seeds A pinch of celery seeds A pinch of ground allspice A pinch of ground cayenne pepper

One. Toast the cumin and coriander seeds in a frying pan over a low heat to intensify their flavour, for 1-2 minutes. Two. Sweat the onions a pinch of salt and the olive oil over a low-medium heat until translucent, for 8-10 minutes. Three. Add the ginger, garlic and all of the spices, including the toasted cumin and coriander seeds, to the onions. Season with salt and pepper, and stir to combine evenly.

Five. Allow the tomato sauce to cool before blending until smooth with either a food processor or a hand held blender. Press the blended sauce through a fine sieve and then jar it.

Taste, 8/10: It tastes more like actual tomatoes and is a little bit spicier than Heinz, but it is delicious and closer in flavour to the original than many supermarket versions. Heinziness, 6/10: Although the flavour is pleasingly close to the original, the colour and texture is nowhere near. Home-cooked tomatobased products never come out that proud fire-engine red. Similarly, I have no idea how to replicate the way that Heinz ketchup will cling to the insides of a rigorously shaken, upturned glass bottle until it rushes out in tomato vengeance. Instead, I created a thick but runny sauce. In conclusion: I’m pleased with my ketchup: it tastes great and I’m okay with it not being red, but I have run up against a problem. Shelf life. While a bottle of commercial ketchup, Heinz or otherwise, will last approximately forever, a homemade batch of tomato sauce won’t. Realistically, it is not worth making your own ketchup for regular consumption, but if you are having a barbecue, this is a great alternative.

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sweet chilli sauce Sweet chilli sauce is sweet and sour and spicy: arguably, everything you could want from a condiment. It is also excellent to have to hand if you are eating with a person who doesn’t think a meal is complete until there are chillies present.

saucepan. Bring the mixture to the boil and then simmer for fifteen minutes, until the sauce starts to thicken.

This makes about half a cup of sweet chilli sauce. It is easy to customise how spicy your sauce is. For a mild sauce, remove all seeds and pith from the chillies; for the spiciest sauce, leave them in. I like to use about a quarter of the seeds and pith for a sauce that has a good tingle of spice but doesn’t overwhelm the other flavours.

Four. Eat with fishcakes.

You will need: 5 chillies, roughly chopped 2 garlic cloves, roughly chopped 100g white sugar 50ml white wine vinegar 50ml water 2 tbsp fish sauce 2 tbsp sherry 1 tbsp lime juice ½ tsp salt One. Blitz the chillies and garlic in a food processor to a rough puree. Two. Add all the ingredients, including the chilli garlic paste, to a

Three. Allow the mixture to cool and then serve immediately or jar.

Taste, 9/10: This is finger lickin’ good. Even if it wasn’t good, you would still need to lick your fingers a lot, as it is very sticky. It tastes excellent and hits every craving. You get sweet and sour and garlic and a kick of chilli and a depth that is lacking from lots of supermarket brands. I like that it is neither thin and vinegary nor glutinous and chemical. If you want the gelatinousness of some bottled sauces it is possible to add corn flour, but I don’t think it is necessary. Ease, 9/10: This is twenty minutes work and there is very little prep involved. It is easy to adapt the recipe to make smaller or larger quantities. You can make it alongside whatever else you are cooking and eat it fresh or it will last for a few weeks in the fridge. In conclusion: I am planning to have a small pot of homemade sweet chilli sauce in my fridge from now for forever. It seems silly not to. I may or may not have started eating it with a spoon. It is better than anything you can buy in the shops, easy and an excellent way to use up the leftover chillies that are always hanging around my cupboards. Definitely a DIY condiment worth doing.

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dijon mustard Mustard is amazing. Start with a gateway mustard, say a pale Dijon or a mild American, and the world will be your oyster. Smooth or wholegrain, sweet or spicy, there is a mustard for every occasion. It will make your life and food more exciting in many tiny ways.

One. Roughly crush the mustard seeds with a pestle and mortar.

Mustard is an ancient and indigenous condiment. The plants are native to Northern Europe and we’ve been making mustard for thousands of years. At its simplest, it can be made with just seeds and cold water but generally vinegar and salt are used to preserve and heighten the flavour. The anti-microbial triumvirate of mustard, acid and salt means that mustard is the cockroach of condiments in a good way—it is virtually indestructible and will last in your fridge almost indefinitely.

Three. For a wholegrain mustard, blitz the mustard mixture in a food processor for three minutes and then jar. For a smooth mustard, blitz the mustard mixture for six minutes and push it through a fine metal strainer before jarring.

This recipe makes about a cup of mustard. For the recipe below, I used 100ml of white wine vinegar and 100ml of lemon juice, but as long as the acidic ingredients add up to 200ml, it doesn’t matter what precise proportions of each you use. The same goes for the yellow and black mustard seeds.

Five. Eat with a ham sandwich.

You will need: 50g black mustard seeds 50g yellow mustard seeds 100ml white wine vinegar 100ml lemon juice 1 tsp salt

2 tsp dried marjoram 2 bay leaves ½ tsp ground nutmeg ½ tsp ground ginger 2 tsp dried tarragon

Two. Place all the ingredients in a bowl that gives the mustard seeds room to swell. Cover loosely, and leave for 48 hours.

Four. Store the mustard in a cool, dark place for two weeks to allow the flavour to develop.

Taste: 6/10. My mustard tastes like mustard and I will happily finish the pot I’ve made. Truthfully, though, it lacks the fieriness and complexity of professional mustards. It also requires quite a lot of equipment. Trying to push mustard through a nylon sieve is difficult and ineffective. Food magic: 8/10. You take mustard seeds, which don’t look or smell like anything special, add liquid and time and get real, recognisable mustard—magic! In conclusion: This mustard was exciting to make, but it can’t compete with the other four mustards in my fridge on taste.

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hello, reader we spoke to our subscribers in glasgow

James Oakley. What do you do? I’m a quizmaster at pub quizzes across Glasgow and Scotland. I also do the odd DJ set and acting and voiceover job. Taking the plunge to being self-employed and escaping the nine-to-five was one of the most daunting and rewarding things I have done. I first saw oh comely at an airport. I wasn’t sure it was in the right place, alongside titles like How to fix your PC and Women’s Business. I thought an art student left it there as a joke. Recommend us a book: The Incredible Adam Spark by Alan Bissett. I read it after meeting Alan a few times at social occasions, and it was starting to get embarrassing I hadn’t read his books. Glasgow is like a big cool village sometimes.

book it would be Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn. It’s a beautiful, gentle, sweet and funny book about the last days of Fleet Street and the ineffectual gentlemen of journalism. Katy Jackson. What do you do? I am living in Manchester for six months, but my home is in Glasgow. I am a graphic designer studying for a Masters in Digital Media Management at Hyper Island in Manchester. There are no teachers and no tests, yet amazing things happen because everyone wants to be there. It’s the most exciting place to learn! I also co-write a blog for unfound designers, illustrators and photographers called CannotBeFound.

Lis Ferla. What do you do? I am a legal journalist by day and a music blogger and writer by night. Recommend us a book: I’m helping out with a reading club at a local primary school with my work at the moment, and next time they have asked me to bring in a book that meant a lot to me as a child. I’m going to bring an old hardback edition of Joan Aiken’s Black Hearts in Battersea. I loved Aiken’s series: exciting adventures, a feisty heroine who didn’t let anything phase her and a historical setting to lend it an air of realism. Had they been published twenty years later, Dido Twite would be leading a movie franchise.

Sara Jane Mackenzie. What do you do? I work as a primary school teacher, and for Lush, a handmade cosmetics company. I also make clothes and teach stop-motion animation courses, as I used to build puppets for Disney and MTV. I am originally from Toronto, Canada, but have called Glasgow home for almost four years. Recommend us a book: Nalda Said by Stewart David. It’s wonderfully sad, magical and written with a unique voice of someone who experienced an almost Peter Pan-like adulthood.

Claire Foss. What do you do? I work in PR and marketing and as a freelance journalist. Recommend us a book: If I were to recommend a

Helen Ogbourn took the photograph of Issue eight below, and you can find more of her photographs at helenog.wordpress.com.

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subscribe to oh comely send us a photo of the magazine at home subscribe online at www.ohcomely.co.uk/subscribe A subscription to oh comely is ÂŁ22 for a year, and youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll get six issues through your door. You can subscribe online from ohcomely.co.uk/subscribe, or post us a cheque to the address on the back cover, made out to Adeline

Media. Include an email address so we can confirm your order. We loved these photos of the magazine. Thanks to (left to right): Daisy Lockitt, Abbey Friesen, Aki Saito, Charlotte Overton-Hart, Becky Garratt, Hannah Daisy.

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the porridge facial and other homemade treatments testing traditional beauty cures words sian meades illustrations amy borrell

When I was a teenager, I read in Bliss! magazine that mayonnaise was an excellent hair conditioner. So I slathered my hair with the white stuff the day before the school year started. The result was not the glossy mane of hair I’d hoped for. Instead, I was left with a greasy mess that was so drenched in gunk it looked wringing wet. I wanted to hide my head in new-school-year shame. Ever since, I’ve given home beauty tips a wary berth, but surely there must be some truth behind the old wives’ tales?

talcum powder for dry shampoo

tea for shiny hair

Dry shampoo is the lazy girl’s best friend. I go out dancing on school nights and sleep in when I’m supposed to wash my hair. So if you think dry shampoo is just for festivals, think again. I’ve heard that talcum powder is a good alternative if you’ve run out. (You’d think actually washing my hair is a better alternative, but let’s move on.) Alas, put the talc back on the shelf. It works for about two seconds, but shake your head just a little—as if you’ve just stepped out of a salon—and you’ll choke everyone with a cloud of lily of the valley-scented dust.

After the mayonnaise fiasco, I don’t want to put things in my hair again. But I’ve been promised that black tea will make my hair all shiny, so I’m using a cold cup of my best Assam. My housemates think I’m weird. I think I’m weird. This actually did make my hair shinier, but I’m certain that’s because I rinsed for twice as long as usual to make sure I didn’t smell like old tea bags. There’s probably a lesson there.

Verdict: Dry shampoo only costs two quid a can. Buy some more or wear a hat.

eight glasses of water a day for good skin Water will make me pretty? Just drink a lot of water and my skin will be glowing and radiant? I’m typing this while eating cake, so water had better be magic. Eight glasses a day is tougher than I expected. I don’t need eight glasses of water. I’m not even thirsty. I feel like I’m turning into a mermaid. I get through four and give up. I don’t feel extra pretty, but I did spend a lot more time in the bathroom—going to the loo, not admiring my newly radiant face.

Verdict: I think this might be a winner, but make a pot so you’ve got something to drink while your hair dries.

toothpaste for spots Ah, the favourite trick of teenage boys: a little bit of Aquafresh on your spot before you go to bed and apparently it’ll disappear into the ether. This does work, but the only problem is that your spot has got to be pretty far gone. Toothpaste will reduce the swelling and redness, but if it’s not at that stage, you’re just smearing your face in minty freshness. Verdict: Not bad for the odd sneaky spot, but don’t rely on this. And it’ll look odd if you answer the door to the postman in the morning.

Verdict: There’s water in beer, right?

oat and honey for a face mask

sea salt for foot scrub

I’m covered in breakfast. I’ve got black tea in my hair and porridge on my face. Honey is a tried and tested beauty ingredient, and since it’s in my cupboard already I might as well give it a shot. It’s sticky, but mixed with oats and massaged into my face, it’s brightening my skin up a treat. And I can eat the leftovers. Tasty.

This one is pretty simple. Just a cup of sea salt and half that amount of water. Add a drop of essential oil if you don’t want your feet to smell of chips and then massage in small circles until your feet are baby soft. It tickles, but it works a treat once you stop giggling. Verdict: A bit of tickling is worth it for your own mini pedicure.

Verdict: My face feels nice. Tastes nice, too. This is just as well, because I’ve got honey all over everything.

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How high does the quick brown fox jump over the lazy dog?

You don’t like dogs.

He clears it by a cat’s whisker.

You did a sponsored silence once. You lasted:

What about foxes?

Glacier Mints

Fantastic Mr

Well, you see, the phone rang.

Knit one, purl one?

Say Cheese: the history of coagulation, curdling and bacteria.

You’ll give it a go.

How do you organise your bookshelves?

Do you prefer the titles of popular science books before or after the colon?

Yes, but you drop a few stitches. It’s more of a freestyle, crochet look.

415.12 MAC Dewey System, ever y time.

By the colour of their spines. A rainbow – so prett y! Do you like doilies?

Yes

Life is all about relationships. How closely you work with people; how closely you don’t. You’re a stickler for the little things. People tread carefully around you, for fear of getting things wrong. You’ll happily correct their mistakes, just as long as they don’t make them again.

Before

After

You are the Sheriff of Serif. Why be square when you can curl? It’s not punctuation, it’s embroidery. The word haberdashery makes you lick your lips. Sometimes, though, fighting through the lace and the gingham to reach for a fine china teacup, you can’t help but wonder: is it ever okay to shop at IKEA?

Emoticons. Where do you stand?

No Seriously?

No. Messing. You. Say. What. You. Mean. And. You. Mean. What. You. Say. Period. (You may or may not be American.)

words molly and rob from ‘we all need words’, illustration laura callaghan

;)

Oh mi! Oh my! Yourlifeisone bigrollercoasterandsometimes it’sjustsohardtostopforbreath. Your eyes, ears and heart are full of wonder and you find the amazing in the everyday. The birds tweeting, the wind in your hair, the rain on your face. Friends find your emails a bit much, but when life is this beautiful, who cares?!!!!

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issue ten | may/jun 2012 | ÂŁ4