Another commission! And this time for a much loved, nay, favourite band of mine – SHRAG! We put them on at Atta Girl over a year ago, utterly fantastic. I first saw them at Indietracks on the outdoor stage. Amelia Fletcher was in the audience so I gave her an Atta Girl zine, seeing as the night was named after one of her songs.
Anyway, the poster, I kept redrawing the girl on the right and each time it became a little bit more like Helen from Shrag, it wasn’t intentional and it doesn’t quite look like her, but I did steal her fringe! I messed about with the colouring of this for ages too… That bow tie was pastel pink for ages, just looked too sickly, there’s something grittier about a dark red bow tie (but still firmly on the border of indiepopness). Very happy with the composition of this one, it was the first sketch idea I did and it just felt right.
If you want to attend the gig this is the event: Shrag 3rd March
So I’m designing a vertical farm / hotel/ skill learning centre for 2050… And I’ve been scurrying through youtube videos as I googled “growing cress on a cotton bud” (I thought it might be interesting).
Well I’ve been thoroughly absorbed in studying my MArch and trying to earn enough pennies to survive. So fun and illustration have been lacking recently! Well, not fun as such. I went to this awesome mind opening lecture held at uni the other evening.
C J Lim presented work from his three lives. That of the real world, masterplans and architecutral commissions in his practice Studio 8. His speculative dream like work also within practice but a totally freeing way of expressing, and that of his love of food all wrapped up in the above!
His work “London in two and half dimensions” was wildly speculative absolutely lacking in practical function. But that was what I loved about it, it was the narrative and the method of expressing this. The two and half dimensions is best described by visualising a 2d architectural drawing, then popping up elements and messing with scale and focussing on the pure elements that make up the narrative.
I wanna make stuff like this! But without all the hours of cutting out the tiny tiny elements with blades and tweezers.
In which I contemplate society and liken our current situation to Flatland.
I need to put some thoughts in order and address the reactions I’ve seen of late to the riots in Birmingham specifically as that’s the city I’m experiencing right now.
Problems facing children (and adults) today:
Education maintenance allowance removed
University fees tripled
Mass redundancies
Segregated society (elaborate on later)
If you look at the first three. It tells a story, as a hypothetical teen my help is removed for education in the present, my parents are losing their jobs in the present and University is now so far out of my reach. Granted I can get a student loan for that debt. But I’m growing up in debt and the idea of further debt is a massive strain on a young person who can’t predict the future.
Experiences that I can apply:
I’ve grown up in a comfortable world. But I’ve also experienced my parents going through redundancy and eventually losing our home. I remember as a young child asking to go on a school holiday, being denied and screaming “why are we so poor!”. I find that a comical memory now because really, we were surviving just fine! We did end up in a council house and I had to join the other kids in the free dinner ticket queue at school. School is where it starts though.
Being in that dinner ticket queue made me experience a class divide on a minor scale at school. Attitudes were that I was also stupid because I was poor. I also remember a rich kid saying to my friend “My Mum loves me because she buys me things”. I knew that was a messed up message, but that cut still. When I finished my GCSEs (and got mentioned in the local paper… yeah not so stupid!) I wanted to go to the grammar school for my A-Levels. But that was the year assisted places were cut, so I couldn’t. I was pretty gutted, but the majority of my classmates didn’t even go on to do A-Levels. I remember one girl saying “there’s no way we could ever afford me going to uni. Plus I don’t think I’m clever enough” your school years are where you’re developing your sense of self worth and I think that summed it up for a lot of people.
So that was in a rural district in a predominantly white area, which probably needs mentioning as we think of the countryside as being rich and inner cities as poor. Town mouse and country mouse, I’m a country mouse originally. My lessons were:
Poor means you’re stupid
Poor means you can’t do things others can
Poor means you can’t achieve, so why bother
Poor means you aren’t loved
So that’s the affect on a young persons mind, or at least mine and the kids around me in the 90s.
Gender:
I think this is an issue. Why is it predominantly men/ young boys? There are pictures of women too. I personally feel that boys are brought up with confidence whereas girls are brought up to… hmmm… well not to be unconfident but we’re supposed to care more about what people think of us and how we look which is a very hard thing to maintain so confidence can be a struggle. Also men use commenting on women as a way of expressing their dominance. My whole life I’ve experienced this with varying levels of threat. From the boy at school who grabbed my arse roughly and told me how big it was… to the guy in the street when I was about 24 who grabbed my arse and went phwwwooooar… to the guy in the pub yesterday who made lewd comments about my behind that I subtly pretended I didn’t hear. One can get a bit of a complex!
I’m going to make an assumption that women who act like boys with attitude do it as a way of not being the victim. A way of empowering. Being tougher than a boy means not experiencing constant humiliation. It’s what we learn at school, you’re either the bully or you’re bullied. At primary school I remember joining in with some light bullying, which meant I wasn’t at the bottom of the pecking order. By secondary school I just avoided bullies, or answered them back calmly and politely which confused them…. But that’s me again.
OR maybe women who act like that just are… I don’t know enough to talk about nature vs nurture. So I guess I better drop the gender question for now.
Social Fabric
We live in a divided society, don’t we? I like to think we all live merrily together no matter our race, religion. But that’s not entirely true. We gravitate to those we relate to, we divide ourselves daily. If you’ve ever read Flatland, a comment on Victorian social hierarchy using shapes as characters. I don’t think we’re that far removed from such a social comment! Certainly there’s more opportunity to skip about through the classes. But with recent cuts I think that limits a vast amount of people from being able to do so. I don’t know if it’s naive to say that I think class/income is an even bigger divide than race/ religion? And sometimes that can get confused with a race/ religious divide? It’s more of a venn diagram perhaps rather than a cut and dry division? So many questions. The trouble is I’ve grown up in an almost entirely white apathetic to religion region so I feel like I have no reference. Hence all the question marks. I want to understand this, a big part of my new degree is urban design, if you can’t understand what an urban society is then how can you design for its future!?
Class divide I can understand more as I’ve experienced it myself. There are poor areas, there are rich areas. The gentrified areas push out and out price poorer classes. This happens all over the world. We build a very pretty new area with posh new shops, shops that as a lower middle classer I love, oooooh knitting shops, tea, veggie cafes! (That at the moment I can’t afford but I’m strangely attracted to!) and we call it progress. But that’s only because we can afford it. Apply the list of problems above and a vicious cycle is apparent… opportunities and futures insecure, income reduced, “nice” areas out of reach, class divide achieved.
Looking at Birmingham specifically. When I first moved here I tried to find the most affordable place to live, I ended up in Bearwood for a few months and found myself in quite a run down area. I quite liked living there but I totally did notice how I’d wait for a bus and was the only white middle class girl at the stop. I then lived in Harborne which was the other extreme. I looked at a house for rent in Winson Green which was also like Bearwood…. and that’s where they chose to build a prison! I feel like building things like prisons or power stations in run down areas is like building a massive monument to gloom. But then wherever they’re built there will be complaints, but if that is true does that mean people in poorer areas who complain are ignored? Perhaps that is another contributing factor, being ignored, not having a voice. That is something I can understand through Atta Girl zines, the stories we have and the affects of not having a voice.
Conclusions (a work in progress)
Birmingham is segregated into communities. Which is the natural instinct of society, to hone in on “your own”. But it’s also forced into segregated areas through gentrification so that’s a potential friction, a creation of ”Us and Them”.
I think that IS the problem. This sense of OTHER. We don’t worry about the conditions other is living in because it doesn’t affect us, we keep our blinkers on and hold onto beliefs that people want to live in the conditions they live in. Like when people say “well homeless people choose to live on the street” it takes away our responsibility for the other. Granted there will always be people who want to live somewhere that we might not but that doesn’t mean every single person is doing it by choice.
But there’s another problem! This belief that the other’s situation is bad. That it’s not what we want. All these assumptions we make! I’m making them right now!
And here is where I need to address the three ABSURD things floating around SM sites, on how to punish rioters:
Kill them / capital punishment
Take away their benefits
Take away their council houses
and the assumptions you have made in making such reactionary statements:
Kill them:
That you know for sure that person in a hoodie who was arrested was definitely stealing
That a world with capital punishment would be a good world despite abolishing it and living rather well since then
That the legal system isn’t doing anything?
Take away their benefits:
That they’re all on benefits!?
That they’re old enough to be on benefits
You’re reinforcing the stigma of being on benefits as a dirty thing. Having been rescued by benefits as a child, later when I was made redundant, and recently whilst on a low income and breaking my ankle. I know that BENEFITS AREN’T FUN! It’s not a paid holiday, it’s scary and the bare minimum to survive on. Luckily I didn’t have a mortgage, credit cards, children to worry about on top of not having enough to live on. Luckily nothing expensive yet vital to me trying to find work didn’t break whilst I was on benefits. Yes, there are families on benefits that have always lived that way. But don’t assume that anyone that wears a hoodie is on benefits. Even if they all are that attitude doesn’t help!
Take away their council houses:
You’ve assumed once again that this is only “the poor” looting. You’ve made a profile in your head of who would do this and you’re sticking by it. I’m not naive, I do believe a lot of these kids in particular probably are but you’ve assumed ALL of them are!
You’ve assumed they’re adults. Should their parents homes be taken? Maybe they live with their grandparents, should their homes be taken?
Hang on, isn’t there a legal system for punishment?
Where the hell will all these people go?
People aren’t inherently “bad” I don’t believe there’s such a thing as good and evil. I do believe there’s such a thing as a society that a) has a government that takes away from those in need b) has people in it who also put their blinkers up to those in need c) perpetuates myths about lower classes. We need to think before we speak. It’s not a simple case of person A loots, person B punishes. There is a background, there are years of conditioning. This didn’t happen last year, there has to be something that has lead to opportunistic looting, an attitude of “I can do what I want, fuck the consequences”.
But also, to try and understand is not to condone. To find reason, is not to excuse. To experience fear and uncertainty is not an excuse to lose your rationality. To perpetuate hatred is never a solution.
This isn’t a finished thought process so please comment I’ll approve anything that doesn’t use hatred, unless I can be bothered to reiterate the above monologue! (I know I haven’t mentioned the initial protest in Tottenham, the years of race related arrests particularly in London, the recent deaths of Shahzad Ali , Abdul Musavir, Mohammed Haroon.) This interview with Harriet counteracting some typical male dominating behaviour (shouting louder, gesticulating more, ignoring what she’s saying, come on Gove you numpty) is good:
Edit: I also haven’t mentioned how the looting isn’t a race issue, I talked about race divides and poverty divides in physical terms in Birmingham but failed to get around to mentioning that the looters weren’t one race, gender, class. But I am under the impression that people really fight to get their children into “good” schools in Birmingham. I remember a colleague once asking if they could borrow my address so her child could get in, blooming eck. So I guess I’m thinking this is a which school you go to thing that is enforced by class divides due to regional divides in wealth? Hmmm
Another video. The heart warming vigil, and the discussions of what would help heal society in the short term of that evening.
Here’s the game. Take a picture of your desk, tweet it… But in a chain, so your screen has a picture up of the last picture tweeted!
This started today after I thought it would be funny to respond to @pauklschmaukl’s desk tweet by tweeting a picture of my desk with his picture in it… @Duncautumnstore joined in and named it the Infinite Desk Project. The game hasn’t ended yet, the following is the chain so far. If you like you can add yours to the comments below.
@Pauklschmaukl (Didn't know what he was letting himself in for)
@Atta_Grrl (Writing the Indietracks Guide on the left there!)
@Duncautumnstore (With his @LizzLizz mouse mat!)
@griefoftwats (Spot the Mr Bump)
@BetteOuttaHell
My Little Pwny
Want to join in? Take a picture of your screen with the last picture shown and add to the comments below (link to twitpic or yfrog if easier). Remember to use the picture in the comment above you to keep it a chain. G E E K . O U T
I tuned into #Wits last night and caught the wonderful spectacle of Neil Gaiman singing. Before tonight I hadn’t even heard his voice, only read his words!
Not a natural singer, but a lovely story telling voice and I do believe his wife, Amanda Palmer is responsible for the piano there. This song sprung out of him asking Twitter to suggest a famous person, one suggestion was Joan of Arc… which rhymes with park, so it’s about what would happen if Joan of Arc was in his local park. He also asked what was a once in a lifetime act… His favourite was “a squirrel committing suicide in my toilet”. Brilliant, twitter makes me toasty inside sometimes (dead squirrels don’t, but the obscurity does)!
I also had the delight of hearing Josh Ritter perform The Curse live. Discovering that the animated video I had seen wasn’t the original one. So here both versions are:
