More Crane Wife sketches
Frankfurt’s got freezing cold pretty much overnight, so I’m sitting here in my dressing gown while the kettle boils, and procrastinating from typing up more story. Yay.
Instead, have some more biro sketches of stuff!
Black Gold review
One of my favourite things about Frankfurt so far is the fact that Monday night is Mystery English Language Film Night (known as “Sneak”). You really never know what you’re going to get. We’ve had films as awful as The Change Up and Abduction, and films as mind-blowingly awesome as Attack The Block, with everything you can imagine in between. Last night was the night of Black Gold, and here are some of my amateur thoughts upon its various successes and failings. Will contain minor spoilers, I’ll try to keep it at a minimum. Continue reading
Preliminary Sketches
I haven’t been working on any cross stitch recently. I have ideas, but they’re much more ambitious than anything I’ve ever done before, so I’m planning it all out before I make an arse of myself and waste tons of fabric and thread…
Instead I’ve been learning how to darn socks (there seem to be two main techniques, based on the size of the hole, and they are showcased very nicely here and here), reading Brideshead Revisited (so good, you guys. I’m not even exaggerating. Sure Waugh gets a bit carried away in his metaphors sometimes, and his language can be a bit excessive, but he can carry it off because the story’s so full of STUFF. It’s just wonderful and horrible and read it now.) and working, which has been very enjoyable of late. So working at Nintendo was a good idea, who knew?
I’ve also been discovering the best places for cocktails in Frankfurt. More expeditions needed before I give a full report on this, though the appletini at the Innside Hotel last night was the most potent thing I have ever put in my mouth. Take that as you will.
SO! As I said before, I have two main ideas for my next stitching project knocking around my head. They both involve blackwork. (Don’t know what blackwork is?)
Have I ever done blackwork? No. Do I have any idea how to to blackwork? Ehhhh not really. This is why I’m biding my time. Lots of sketching, lots of compiling of stitches and free sampler patterns to get used to the stitches. I am considering buying a book. All very exciting! See some sketches after the cut… Continue reading
Best-Worst lyrics from A Flash Flood of Colour
Oh look, Enter Shikari have a new album, A Flash Flood of Colour. And, if we’re to believe the band, it’s currently the best selling album in the UK. According to the lead singer Rou, this is “a victory for meaningful and socially conscious music”.
Yes, you see, between their first and second albums, Enter Shikari discovered “politics” – by which I mean they watched the film “Zeitgeist” (the “Christianity is really a pagan conspiracy to cause 9/11 and force the USA to unite currencies with Canada and Mexico and form the ‘Amero’” film, a film Rou calls “single-handedly the biggest influence on all that is Enter Shikari“), and then everything went… brilliant?
Enter Shikari don’t really do subtlety, bless ‘em. If they want to say that politicians are obstructive, they won’t just sing “Politicians are like walls”, they’ll sing:
I’m gonna paste you up,
Cover you in wallpaper,
And call you a wall.
That’s all you are to me, [...]
You can have skirting board shoes,
And plug sockets on your knees.
I’ll hang a painting on your lip,
And hang tinsel round it at Christmas.
This is a prime example of what the people at TV Tropes would call “Metaphorgotten“. Politicians are walls, and also, you can hang Christmas decorations on them. It’s hardly “The Times They Are A-Changin’”.
And this is why they’re so brilliant. Like Time Cube or Lee Mercer (“Jeb Bush is all in my house with disease”), Enter Shikari write unfettered by reality and the result is basically surreal poetry, with a magical gift for writing about ideas that anyone could agree with – “war is bad”, “large corporations exert too much control over politics” – and phrasing them so badly that you want to disagree with them solely on principle. These are the top five best/worst lyrics on A Flash Flood of Colour:
