Do you still think that way about me now?

Progress!




Ugh, clothes! I hate clothes. If I could draw penises, I think I'd have everyone in my pictures naked. Clothes are waaaay too complicated. Ugh, the amount of erasing I did on those damn jeans :(

... Mind you, they haven't turned out half-bad. And I am obscenely pleased with my T-shirt sleeves. And my hands! My hands are awesome! :D

This Monday, I like... Anastacia by Anastacia


Image taken from the album's Wikipedia entry; album art direction & design by Julian Peploe, photography by Isabel Snyder.


Anastacia Lyn Newkirk has... let's call it a unique voice. It's not to everybody's taste. Heck, it's not even to my taste sometimes, and I like her! I thought that her first two albums were mixed bags: some great songs ("Cowboys and Kisses", "Overdue Goodbye"), some average ("I'm Outta Love", "Don't Stop (Doin' It)"), and some absolutely awful ones ("I Ask Of You", "I Dreamed You"). The awful songs tended to be the romantic ballads. It seemed to me that she was trying to force an emotional impact by exaggerating that rich, thick wobble in her voice even more than usual, and it made me embarrassed on her behalf. So I only played the albums once or twice after buying them, then stuck them in the CD rack and forgot about them.

Anastacia, though, I played regularly for several months before putting it away. It grabbed me from the chunk-a-chunk of electric guitars on the intro of the first track, "Seasons Change", and unlike the up-and-down quality of her previous albums, it stays consistently good. It's an angrier, antsier album than the first two, typified by the tracks "Left Outside Alone" and "Sick And Tired". Anger suits Anastacia's voice: the wobble turns into a growl that seems to come from the pit of her stomach, spewing bile, frustration and fear. While Not That Kind and Freak of Nature are firmly pop records, the music on Anastacia veers into rock territory with electric guitars and thumping drum beats; I much prefer this heavier sound. And the ballads on the album are less over-egged, more genuine-feeling. I can listen to "Heavy On My Heart" and "Maybe Today" without wincing.

My favourite track is "Welcome To My Truth": soaring, anthemic, triumphant. The joyful blast of the chorus's first line ("So somebody bring up the lights, I want you to see") always lifts my mood, and yes, I know it's a pretty standard musical effect of matching tune to lyrics, but I love the way the drums crash in rhythm as she sings, "I've been through it all / I've hit about a million walls". This song makes me want to dance, laugh, grab people by both hands and drag them up on stage with me. It's a glorious antidote to the sadness and suppressed rage of my other favourite track, "Sick And Tired". This latter has probably the best lyrics on the album. I particularly like the line, "So I'm floating / I'm floating on air"; it's a great image of emotional disconnection and sense of abandonment.

I see from the Wikipedia entry that this album was not released in the US. That's a pity. I think Anastacia found her stride with this album, although she herself found it a struggle (she had been diagnosed with breast cancer around the same time). It has an emotional truthfulness that is sometimes missing from her previous work, and it remains one of my favourites.

This Monday, I like... sketching to the MTV Music channels.


Edited from an image taken from Logopedia.


When I was an undergrad university student, music channels were often a default choice. As a first year experiencing insomnia, I would sneak down to the Art and Soul Room to watch VH1 until the sun rose, and in third year I spent whole evenings with my friend, Lesley, watching The Box and MTV - that's "MTV" with no other subtitle, back in the days when they still played music videos instead of "staged reality" shows about randy, drunken twentysomethings from Newcastle. But as a postgrad, I drifted away from the music channels; later on, I drifted away from contemporary rock and pop altogether, preferring to listen to Classic FM.

Recently, however, I've been finding my way back into modern music, and that has been partly due to my Sketchy Sundays. I can't watch a traditional TV show and draw at the same time, despite being female and thus an allegedly natural multi-tasker. I could turn the TV off, of course, but I like the chatter and colour of it in the background. The great thing about music videos is that you don't have to watch them, you can just listen. And if I can't think of anything to draw, I might see an image on the screen or pick up the mood of a song, which will inspire that day's picture. My usual ports of call are MTV Rocks and MTV Classic, although I also go to Magic or Kerrang! from time to time, and they have got me out of sketcher's block several times.

So there you go, music channels: recommended viewing for Sunday Sketchers.

In addendum to the previous I Like Monday, this Monday, I like... Yzma's flea speech from Disney's The Emperor's New Groove.




Seriously, the number of times my sisters and I quote this speech at each other - especially "I'LL SMASH IT WITH A HAMMER!!!!!!" XDDDDD One of the silliest parts in a very silly movie. Genius, I say!

This Monday, I like ... Disney's Lilo & Stitch.


Image taken from Wikipedia - original artist John Alvin, copyright the Walt Disney Company, Wikipedia licencing terms found here


I saw Lilo & Stitch in the cinema by default; basically, there was nothing else on that interested me, and hey, a Disney movie is usually good for a hour-and-a-half's entertainment. I had seen a couple of the teaser trailers that had been running, specifically the ones with Beauty and the Beast and the Little Mermaid, and I thought they were funny, clever and intriguing. The idea of Disney's characters crossing in and out of each other's worlds, messing with each other's stories, appealed to the mega-crossover-fanfic-lover in me. Plus, Beast gets to be all heroic and save Belle from a falling chandelier! :DDDD The character of Stitch as presented in the teasers - curious, clumsy, mischievous and a shameless flirt - was certainly different from your stereotypical Disney protagonist. AND he was an alien! Sci-fi Disney! AWESOME!

Following from the art style of director, creator and voice of Stitch himself, Chris Sanders, the movie has a distinctive look: all soft curving edges and rounded corners. Characters and objects look (for want of a better word) chunky, solidly built, and there is a pleasing range of body types on display here. Nani, Lilo's elder sister, has the best-looking thighs I've ever seen on an animated character; just watch the sequence near the beginning where she runs home after missing Lilo at the dance school. The movie is also full of colour: brilliant greens and blues, oranges and reds. Hawai'i looks beautiful here, a gorgeous tropical paradise.

And next to all that colour and comforting curves, there's the angst. Have I mentioned before how much I love angst? Yes, I'm pretty sure I have. Well, there's a lot of angst here. ( Spoilers! ) Yes, there's lots of humour, and some eminently quotable silly dialogue ("If I gave Pudge tuna, I'd be an ABOMINATION!!"; "I prefer to be called EVIL GENIUS!!!"). And the final rescue sequence gets a bit soppy. But there is a core of sadness here, of people struggling with loneliness, identity and how to fit in with a society which doesn't understand them.

And oh how I love Lilo! She reminds me a lot of what I was like as a kid. The whole thing with Scrump, the hand-made doll and the bug-eggs in her ears? I would totally have made up that same story! Hey, I used to play a game where the evil Jack-in-the-ball* routinely took all the other toys into slavery! It was awesome! :D

Quirky and damaged characters, lovely animation and a soundtrack full of great Elvis songs - I am glad there was nothing else on at the cinema that evening, or I might have missed out on one of my favourite movies of all time.


* We didn't have a Jack-in-the-box when I was young, we had one in a ball (see the first picture in the second row here)... no wonder I turned out like I did!

This Monday, I like... Disney's Beauty and the Beast:


Image taken from College Fashion. Copyright of the Walt Disney Company.


Beauty and the Beast was not a fairy tale I knew in my childhood. I remember vaguely hearing of it - I knew it involved roses somehow - but I don't think I actually read a version until my mid-to-late twenties. So the 1991 Disney classic was my first real exposure to this tale.

I first became aware of it during the televised opening ceremony of what was then Euro Disney, and is now Disneyland Paris. Angela Lansbury stood in front of the Sleeping Beauty castle and sang "Tale As Old As Time", intercut with the ballroom scene from the movie. I was amazed: the Disney princess was a brunette, not the standard-issue blonde! She wore glorious, sunflower yellow, not the expected girly pink! I was sold.

I didn't actually see the movie until my mid-teens. It didn't disappoint. It is funny, exciting, beautiful-looking. The pretty-boy Gaston as the villain chimed with my scorn for the manufactured boyband hunks and big-chinned American heartthrobs with which my peers seemed to be obsessed. The songs are wonderful. And maybe I'm biased by the fact that this movie was the first version of the story that I knew, but I also find the plot a lot stronger than in the original fairy tale. Making Beast a harsh, hot-tempered monster who has to learn how to be "human" makes more sense to me than the perfectly-genteel Beast of the version by Jeanne-Marie Beaumont (the most commonly retold one), or even the sex-obsessed-and-slow-but-otherwise-well-mannered Beast of the even earlier version by Madame Villeneuve.

Then there's the heroine. I identified so hard with Belle as a teen. A brown-haired bookworm, an outsider among her peers, whose interests don't chime with those of the 'normal' girls, a loner growing up on the outskirts of a small country town, a daydreamer who longs for real life to be like the stories she buries herself in - apart from being French and, you know, a fictitious animated character, Belle and I could have been twins. To see her get her "adventure in the great wide somewhere" was very satisfying.

People criticise Disney for their happy endings as inspiring unrealistic expectations or enforcing traditional gender roles blah blah blah. But the relationship between these two oddballs - the grouchy and socially awkward Beast, the lonely dreamer Belle - is wish-fulfillment at its best. I don't expect that the Beast-Prince has entirely lost that temper of his, or that Belle will be a conventional sit-on-the-throne-and-look-pretty queen. And honestly, what's wrong with a happy ending? People do get happy in real life too, you know, it's not always unending misery and unsatisfactory compromises!

This Monday, I like... Edouard Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole, the 5th movement:


Audio recording uploaded to YouTube here by UltimateViolin - this performance by Leonid Kogan (violinist), Kirill Kondrashin (conductor) and the London Philharmonia Orchestra, February 1959.


Otherwise known (to me, at least) as "The Happy Secretary Song", because the little 'ting!' at the end of each phrase reminds me of the bell of an old-fashioned typewriter when it reaches the end of a line. This typing pool sounds like the most upbeat in the world: slamming filing cabinets (pretty much every loud bang), scribbling signatures (at 2:19-2:32 and 5:51-6:03), spinning rollodexes (the plucking bit at 6:46-6:49), and speed-chugging coffee with glee. Even when the boss shows up at 3:00, he doesn't spoil things. He reminds me of Young Mr Grace from Are You Being Served? - not because he's old and decrepit (although he does move around very sedately), but he has that same cluelessly benevolent attitude - I can hear him saying, "You've all done very well," while benignly waving one hand in the same way the Queen does. And when he leaves, the gossip about him and the most senior personal secretary is enthusiastic but good-hearted (4:45 to 5:00).

I'd like to work there. People don't walk around the office; they skip, pirouette. Toes tap under the desks. The mailboy literally makes a song-and-dance out of distributing the post (6:56 to 7:05 - those bangs are files landing in in-trays). And always we come back to the Happy Secretary herself (first heard at 0:32), merrily typing away and smacking the return bar across with a satisfying clunk-ding!

***

I have heard this movement a number of times on Classic FM but always missed the title and name of the composer. So I sent a query at their playlist FAQ page, telling them about the typewriter bell thing blah blah and that I thought it had 'Espagnol' in the title. And they got it!! I couldn't believe it, they actually successfully ID'ed the piece from my crappy little written description!!! :DDDD I flatter myself that the Classic FM people now all know the Symphonie Espagnole as "The Happy Secretary" too. XD

The first, second, third and fourth movements of this performance can be found at the clicky-links if you want to hear the whole piece. None of them feature any more secretaries, though. :6

In other news, my Karen Hallion T-shirts landed yesterday and they are awesome and look so good and I am very happy and I really must get a digital camera that works and doesn't eat batteries like they're Jelly Tots so I can show how cool they look :DDD

More nature! This Monday, I like... hawthorn.


Image taken from Stephen Buchan's Flickr feed. Photograph is copyright Stephen Buchan.


And a good job too, because there is a lot of it in Northern Ireland! Practically every hedge around every field is made up of hawthorn. I'm told that the trees live for ten years but I'm sceptical; I'm over 30 and don't remember dad having to replant any of our hedges in that time - and they were well-established before I was born. Of course, it is possible that the hawthorn replaced itself with offshoots or germinated seeds, and in the muddle of brambles and ivy, I couldn't tell the difference between the old and the new.

This particular spring I am loving watching the hedgerows turn bright yellow-green with new leaves or white with blossom. Winter is over, the world is gearing up for summer, the birds are chittering all around. It's a good time to be alive and be out in the country, and the hawthorn is an important part of that. Why else is it that we have a veritable plague of house-sparrows around home when the TV tells us they're in decline in the UK? Could it be *gasp* because of all those hawthorn hedges, with their long, untidy shoots, close-packed mesh of thorns and branches, and that super-abundance of red fruit in autumn?

Yes, spring and autumn - those two threshold seasons, with one foot in the hot, one foot in the cold and both feet in the wet - that's when the hawthorn is at its best. Spring, because of that gorgeous shining green I mentioned earlier, and the bright white flowers with a splay of pink-tipped stamens inside (see the second image here), which from a little distance makes them look like they've got freckles. And autumn because of those berries. In fact, you say the word "autumn", I immediately think of haws (as they're most often known locally). As a child, asked to bring in autumn leaves etc. for a school nature project, haws made the majority of my haul. I remember being disappointed at the time; I would have liked to get more rosehips lol. They say that familiarity breeds contempt but in the case of hawthorn, it's bred appreciation.

Ok, I may be slightly obsessed with flowers at the moment. I blame all the wonderful spring sunshine we've been having lately. Anyway, this Monday, I like... gorse.


Image taken from Wikipedia. Photograph is copyright Andy Rogers


Although I know it better by the local name of "whin", so that's the term I'll use for the rest of this post. I prefer "whin" anyway; it sounds... well, windy and airy and fairy-like, where "gorse" sounds drab and harsh and earthbound.

Actually, both names suit it rather well. Whin grows on land that is otherwise pretty bleak: bog and rock and moor and peat moss, the kind of place where the predominant colours are shades of brown muddied with grey-green, and the soil is poor. Its leaves are replaced almost entirely by wicked green thorns, long and straight like needles. Exposed to the worst the weather can throw at it, it has remarkable resilience. For instance, there was a great hedge of whin growing along the upper end of our road. Then about five years ago, we had an extremely bad winter: snow, ice, the works. It looked like the whin had been killed completely. A few scattered skeletons of bushes remained but there wasn't a hint of green. And yet... those skeletons didn't break or rot away. They stayed. Two years later, some of them started to look green again. Two years after that, new bushes had grown. This year, all the bushes are out in bloom and it looks like we're getting our hedge back.

So yeah, it's tough and it's windswept and it looks awesome covered in cobwebs. But let's talk about the flowers because they're my favourite part. It's not just their colour - that gorgeous rich yellow - or their shape - those pert little capsules like ladies' bonnets. It's their smell. Whin smells liks coconut. Really, really like coconut. Before that bad winter I talked about earlier, I loved being along the upper end of our road when the whin was in bloom because the perfume was so strong. It was like walking into a tropical paradise - apart from the fact that I was surrounded by rush-encrusted fields and scrubby brambles, not white sand beaches and palm trees.

I would later come across an interesting twist on this in The Mermaid's Child by Jo Baker, where the protagonist encounters the scent of whin first and only years later smells a coconut, stating, "Coconuts, to me, will always smell of gorse." It startled me to realise that I really ought to think that way too, but don't... So now when I breathe in that dry, soft, sweet scent, it kinda twists my thinking upside-down, makes me consider all the knowledge and experiences I have just because I happen to live at the right time in the right place.

Whin is a golden blaze of defiant sweetness in places where sweetness is the last thing you expect to find. Maybe in two more years' time, I can walk up the road and plunge into the full coconut experience again. I live in hope :)