NOVEMBER

WATCHING

  • Curb Your Enthusiasm S11 – Larry is back and on form.

  • Maid (finished) bittersweet

  • The Card Counter – Great acting, and compelling story but wasn’t satisfied.

  • Stath Lets Flats S3 – No that into it, but want to be. It’s got a bit too silly… all of the characters are just mad, so there’s nobody to relate to…

  • Klaus - beautiful animation

  • Succession S3

  • Blue Velvet - hadn’t seen before. Mad. Confusing, but stuck with it and very memorable visuals. What I expected

  • Outlaws - gave up. Watched few episodes… not sure what it is that’s off, the plot is pretty good, maybe the cast - don’t seem to gel. Why is Christopher Walken in this?!

  • Impeachment: American crime story - Thought this was great. A really emphatic view of what it must have been like to be Monika Lewinsky.

  • House of Gucci - enjoyable… but very silly. Like a weird soap. Loved Gaga, Jared Leto annoyed me A LOT. What the fuck is that accent?! He played it super slapstick which felt odd. Wanted more crazy Gaga and murder plotting with Selma the psychic.

  • Little Fish - loved both the lead actors. A sad, interesting story about an epidemic of memory loss. Made me reflect on how awful Alzheimer’s is, and how memory in general is so important to our sense of selves. But it didn’t make me cry so something was missing (I cry at most things)

  • Parasite - was on TV and had to watch again. So many little twists I forgot. Brilliant.

  • Shiva Baby - watched on Mubi. Thought it would be funnier, but enjoyed anyway. The whole thing is pretty much set in one place - at a Shiva in someone’s house - following a teenage girl who doesn’t want to be there, and who bumps into a number of people she doesn’t want to see. There’s a claustrophobic feeling throughout and a tension that bubbles nicely.

READING

  • Sorrow and Bliss - picked it up and devoured half of it straight away. Very compelling, and a fairly ‘normal’ story of boy meets girl is made to feel totally new and very personal.

  • Betty Blue – I enjoyed it, very visual and can see how it lends itself to a film (which I’ve been told to watch) Ending is inevitable - like a lot of relationships it’s clearer from the outside looking in.

  • Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency - a gift from a friend. Essays by Olivia Laing

  • How We Got to Next – a magazine that explored the future of science, technology, and culture from 2014 to 2019.

  • Tone Knob – a nice blog on Tone of Voice by Nick Parker

LOOKING

  • RA Summer show – My favourite from the show was ‘The Musicican’ by Joy Yamusangie. Most of her work is made from a collage technique – Bold, and vibrant and just really fucking cool. The piece at the RA is from their project WATA , a collaborative film and exhibition of new works with Ronan Mckenzie. Telling the story of Mami Wata, a water deity traced back to West Africa, Central Africa, and the Caribbean.

    – Also love Katja Angeli’s abstract pieces made from Japanese paper, like deconstructed Loony Tunes characters. And Nelly Dimitranova’s ‘Experiencing British Art History’ – a series of pen drawings on colour swatches depicting famous works of art is sooooo nice.

  • https://eikekonig.com/

  • Ekeberg Sculpture park in Oslo, Norway - Holiday! Fun walking around in the snow looking at sculptures. Dali’s is great - lady with drawers

LISTENING

  • Placebo - Beautiful James. Love! It has been a while. Interview with them in the Guardian.

  • Manga Saint Hilare – New

  • Kansas Smitty’s - Liiiive! At Earth, Dalston (RIP Effes) amazing musicians. New album: Thunderplunk

  • Green Day (for some reason?! Dookie)

  • Foreign Beggars - Asylum Speakers

  • A lot of radio 6

OTHER STUFF

  • Lots of biro drawing - mainly match boxes

  • Norway! Oslo > Flåm > Bergen

OCTOBER

WATCHING

  • SUCCESSION! Series 3. Oh, I’ve missed it. Such good writing…

  • A Creative Block Story by Illustrator Celcile Dormeau – What a lovely soothing voice she has, a nice film about the creative process, and a good to watch when in a funk.

  • Balenciaga and The Simpsons

  • First Wives Club

  • The French Dispatch – Wow this was boring. I very much agree with this review.

  • Silence of the Lambs

  • Free Guy

  • The Fox Catcher – I found this really slow.

  • The Billion Dollar Code (Netflix) – Great mini-doc/series about Terra Vision, the German artist/devs behind the inspiration for Google Earth. Google come off as right cunts.

  • SNL - Romi and Kim K are great. Very much enjoyed the Kims Kourt sketch.

  • Venom - Silly lols

  • The Bone Collector

  • (New) Stath Lets Flats

  • Alma’s not normal (BBC) – Loved this so much. Really funny, but also sad and tender. Sophie Willan is brilliant (who is Alma, and also wrote the show), and also her nan is a great character.

  • Impeachment: American crime story – just started. Read a lot about this, and looking forward to seeing how Monica Lewinsky is portrayed (and Bill)

  • Hereditary – Tony Colette is amazing. I regret watching it though, I’ve never got on with horror very well and I keep having flashbacks to random terrifying scenes.

READING

LOOKING

  • I read about Circus magazine in It’s Nice That, and I love the intent, and after reading the interview with founder Jackson Bowley I had a little cyberstalk. His photography is really vivid, but at the same time seems natural and not overly polished. Love ‘im!

  • https://www.instagram.com/simpsonslibrary/

  • The Feed, Internet Cafe – Useful work thing. Tracking culture at the speed of social to maximise impact for brands. Powered by@wearesocial

  • Cat Art Show – Especially like Endre Penovac’s inky cats, and love Vanessa Stockard’s painterly cat attacking chair. She has a recurring character ‘Kevin the Kitten’ which I love, reminds me of Max Ernst and Loplop.

  • Netflix has created a whole world around the release of Sex Education Series 3, and I thought this was a nice educational website that speaks to the values of the show – well a link to the OG: The Vulva Gallery – a celebration of the Vag and vag diversity!

  • https://thissneakerdoesnotexist.com/ – I like this as a concept. Now what to steal it for…

  • https://www.typographicposters.com/ – What it says on the tin. Loads of lovely design/typography stuff.

  • Illustrator Sofia Bonati – her portraits are beautiful, and I love the mad patterns they’re enveloped in.

  • Night Cafe – an AI art tool, where you can type in whatever you want and it will generate an image. Results are quite mad, good for inspiration when you have a creative block.

  • INQUE Magazine is ‘a beautiful annual literary magazine dedicated to extraordinary new writing. Documenting what is going to be an era-defining decade, it will run no advertising, have no web version, and only ever publish 10 issues’. It is SO beautiful. Art direction by Matt Willey

LISTENING

OTHER STUFF

  • Tux and Fanny – Switch game! Haven’t played a game for ages, and this was recommended by The White Pube (and I generally trust everything they say) it is great! Really weird, and captivating and funny - games within the game, within games… LOVE IT. Then I got to a bit and got stuck - now waiting for the very lovely and responsive maker of Tux and Fanny to patch it up so I can continue and give the fly to the goddam frog.

  • Went to see David O’Doherty and the union chappel - LOVED Tim Key. David OD was good, his song about mice was especially gross/funny.

  • Grayson Perry, Normal People at Brighton Dome – Wasn’t sure what to expect from this, but enjoyed it. The first half of the show was much more coherent to me. Makes you think about what normal is, how we are all the same, but equally, see ourselves as different. Wasn’t so sure about the skew towards religion in the second half.

  • Kew Gardens - Japanese exhib; this was nice but a bit underwhelming. The hanging haiku’s 'One Thousand Springs' by artist Chiharu Shiota looked impressive, amongst the foliage n ‘all – but the exhibition by Zadok Ben David was the highlight. A room full of small black floral sculptures fills a huge box of sand, and as you make your way around them, the other side reveals a multicoloured side to the sculptures. Very cool.

  • #Peachtober illustration challenge. A few of my favourite illustrators I follow on the gram took part in this, so thought I’d give it a go – didn’t end up doing many, but got me drawing again.

  • Seen a couple of ads I liked recently: Uncommon’s ‘Change’ campaign for B&Q is nice. And ‘Jack the Mannequin’ by Mother London for Spoke was an ad I saw on TV and I actually noticed.

Jackson Bowley

SEPTEMBER

WATCHING

  • The Dead Poet’s Society

  • Count Me In (Netflix) drumming doc

  • The White Lotus - v good, great characters that you love to hate

  • Back to life season 2

  • Zola - really enjoyed this. More than I thought I would. It felt different and quick - the two main women are cast perfectly, and although it’s overall a very dark story it’s funny and feels light-hearted. There are moments (when Zola is held in the hotel room) that have a very different tone, that bring you back to the reality of it with a grimace. The cinematography is fresh, and the sound of ‘tweets’ punctuates the film nicely (which adds to the ‘brighter’ side of how the story is told). First cinema trip of the month.

  • The Sopranos (beginning again for The Saint of Newark)

  • Respect – Jennifer Hudson plays Aretha Franklin, and she’s great – but 3 hours…

  • The Chair – Very background

  • Sex Education series 3 – Love all the characters, and the utopian feel. Great cliffhanger to whet the appetite for season 4.

  • What we do in the shadows series 3

  • Finished 9 Perfect strangers – This got better, and the ending is sweet if a bit too neat.

  • The Squid Game – Battle Royale meets Takeshi’s Castle. Got addicted and binged the whole first series in a week. Really good, but WTF was that last episode!? Let it down…

READING

  • Never Let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro – For some reason, I finished reading it even though I found it really boring.

  • Who They Was by Gabriel Krauze – Very different from anything I’ve read lately, so I liked that. It was like a sort of cross between Top Boy and Clockwork Orange (but more Top Boy) Very violent and upsetting. Gabriel is the anti-hero (it’s more like an autobiography of a time) and I just kept thinking about how he had so much more privilege than the other characters in the book, but he still chose this life, which made me really not like him, but also curious about why.

  • Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid – Halfway through. Easy reading, it’s ok…

  • The threat from the illiberal left, and Imposing orthodoxy – Economist articles.

    ‘Milton Friedman once said that the “society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither”.’

  • Ageism and the Fallacy of Stale Dreams - The story of Kathryn Joosten. – A comforting, refreshing read, in a world of ‘30 under 30’ etc. Shared by the inimitable Cindy Gallop.

LOOKING

LISTENING

OTHER STUFF

IMG_5580.jpg
IMG_5672.jpg
IMG_5466.jpg
IMG_5359.jpg

AUGUST

WATCHING

  • Another Round – Great soundtrack!

  • The Book Thief

  • The Accountant

  • Rare Beasts

  • I Am - Channel 4 mini-series. Mostly pretty upsetting, but powerful. Incredible acting

  • The Million Dollar Duck – a wholesome doc about artists competing for the prize of getting their duck on a stamp

  • Black Bear – meh?! Liked it but got a bit bored…

  • Philomena - Judi Dench & Steve Cougan are great together

  • ‘The Pitch’ short by Eno Freedman Brodman – very funny and hits very close to home

  • Nine Perfect Strangers – why are there only 4 episodes??

  • When Ruby Wax Met

READING

  • Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I’ve been picking up lots of books by Japanese authors… I picked this up because I liked the cover and he won a Nobel prize. But, I’m half way through and I’m finding it dull… I also have only just discovered that there is a film, and have been recommended that. Maybe I’ll give up and watch instead

  • Sucks to be him! How Henry the vacuum cleaner became an accidental design icon

  • The pop star versus the playlist – A(nother) depressing read on the very tough job of making money from music. I constantly feel overwhelmed at the amount of music (and films, and books etc). I love music – and finding new artists, but there are just SO many. This is why I value the radio so much – and friends that are far more immersed in music than I am (and have the patience to really go for it on the playlist front). I’ve got lots of tracks I love, and know every word to, but I couldn’t tell you who made them. It takes dedication… Which leads me neatly to the next piece of reading from Ana Andjelic about curation:

  • Move Over Influencers, Here Come Curators – ‘Knowing where to go and what to do is the currency that, in the modern aspiration economy, makes curators more important than influencers’.

  • The Unlikely Story of “A Change Is Gonna Come” From The New Yorker

LOOKING

  • NESTFLIX – A sort of Wiki, made to look like Netflix, of fictional films and tv shows inside real movies and tv shows. Very meta and fun! A passion project from Lynn Fisher

  • Flowers for Sick People – this is such a nice idea. Tucker Nichols creates a bunch of flowers every day to imagined recipients; ‘Flowers for anyone that’s thrown their phone into the ocean’ – and you can request a flower painting from him to send to someone who is sick. Waaaa. So nice.

  • https://suupcover.com/hi – A website with a huge catalogue of album covers, that connects artists/designers with musicians.

  • Masahisa Fukase’s series on his two cats: Sasuke and Momoe

  • Illustrator Alex Solis ‘Icons Unmasked’ series is fun.

  • Various sketchbooks from The Sketchbook Project – This one ‘Winter Journeys’ is nice

LISTENING

  • Jeff Parker and the New Breed (recent record purchase)

  • Sam Cooke (and lots of old soul)

  • Green Tea Peng, Man-Made (bit obsessed)

  • Fred Again, Actual Life

  • Love Will Save the Day playlist #141 • 16.07.21 • Putting the soul back into summer

  • Tyler The Creator, Flower Boy

  • Fela Kuti

  • Kanye, Donda. (Disappointed)

  • SHERELLE’S track IDs - DnB

OTHER STUFF

  • What should I read next?

  • It’s Nice That cover Channel 4’s brilliant new Super Humans spot. The film explores the huge sacrifices made by Paralympians along their journey to becoming champions. To be a Paralympian there’s got to be something wrong with you – WHAT A LINE.

  • Green Vinyl - The Dutch are on a mission to make vinyl more environmentally friendly

  • I went to see Katherine Ryan’s new show filmed for Amazon – Desiree Birch was brilliant, she goes at lightning speed and has you laughing constantly, and Nick Mohammad (as Mr.Swallow) was also great – his surreal, ‘kids tv’ persona made me laugh without him saying anything. Jimmy Carr was not great – one liners he’s done too many times, and Shaun Walsh was - well he was shit. Like Michael Macintyre but with only the one observation that he plugged for his whole bit.

  • DJ Biddy (via Matt Muir, Web Curios) – A platform that lets you hire a virtual DJ.

sketch from a day at the beach in St Agnes

sketch from a day at the beach in St Agnes

IMG_4932.jpg
Katherine Ryan at the Roundhouse

Katherine Ryan at the Roundhouse

IMG_5097.jpg

JULY

WATCHING

  • Dead Pigs – a Chinese film about capitalism, watched when I was far too tired. Will try again though, as liked the half-hour I did see.

  • Space Jam: A New Legacy – ooof … Managed about half an hour

  • Summer of Soul <3

  • Midsommar – Like a demonic perfume ad.

  • The Talented Mr. Ripley – SO good. (rewatch)

  • Kathy Burke Money Talks Doc

  • Greys Anatomy (LOL What am I doing!? I can’t stop…)

    It’s not been a great month for films…

READING

LOOKING

LISTENING

OTHER STUFF

This song plants trees – a smart way of raising money

https://typatone.com/ – From Jono (see above)

https://www.sudowrite.com/

https://lovetheworkmore.com/ – The Cannes award winners without the fee: (and the ones I looked at):

IMG_4807.jpg
IMG_4727.jpg
IMG_4588.jpg
IMG_4652.jpg