Funny how the more things happen in your life, the less time you feel like writing about it online. I’ve been up and down, my health has been poor so I engrossed myself in gardening (more on that later) and practising with a new drummer and keyboardist for our band. A proper band! Who would have thought. From such humble upbringings as a stage fright inducing two piece.

I had a birthday and turned 27 to the display of a surprise party in Baby Lynch’s amongst hideous 70s decor, tretchikoff pictures, friends, cat playing cards and a cake equivalent of hotel chocolat chocolates. Boyfriend is worth his weight in gold.

I’m also contemplating ideas in my head for my business. The old formula is feeling tired, but since having the studio I can feel a new direction forming, slowly but surely. Always follow your passions, or at least that’s what 100 tumblr reblogs tell you.

Anyway, feel free to add me on instragram. I much prefer saying things with pictures than to be redistricted within 144 characters.

instagram / stealingkittens.

This past week has been a bit of a retrograde for my health, a few heart things have re-occurred so I’ve spent as much time as I can learning how to relax, watching movies and generally trying not to worry myself into the ground. I see my specialist today, so fingers crossed everything is working as it should.

So the weekend came as a welcome relief. My boyfriend and I went to the beach, I took photos with the instax (search charity shops for them!) and drove down to Cullercoats to Beaches & Cream for coffee and cake. Which when we arrived they had exactly the same gluten free orange cake as last time, which was gorgeous. Nice to see they’re still thriving, but with a cafe that beautiful with great service it’s not hard to see why.

The rest of the weekend was spent with a mini band practice with our new keyboardist who adding some melodica to a song I wrote on an old out of tune bontempi organ. Then watching Italian films like Fellini’s Amarcord and Baba Yaga, a bizarre tale about a witch who posseses a young photographer girl with a evil bondage doll. I’m not much up on films that have come out in the past 5 years so please recommend me some. x

I bought this recently at Tynemouth Market. The Sunday market felt particularly disappointing these days as it’s mainly filled with new items, craft sellers and cheap jewellery. There’s some brilliant illustrations throughout but I’ve not yet started reading it. My mind is in a flitting mood and I can’t seem to gather the attention span to read anything of than old Beatrix Potter books.

January was a good month overall, I’ve decided I want to start some monthly appraisal so I can monitor how much I am getting done versus spending my days feeling quite the opposite. I went to see an old unreleased Japanese horror about a ghost cat and a shamisen player, felt thoroughly inspired by a Mervyn Peake exhibition, took up a porcelain jewellery class (in which my mother came round and managed to smash some of them by accident), met some cool girls, bleached my hair blonde and started to feel a bit more in line and a bit more focused. Next, is to get back in touch with the music and find myself an art studio.

2011 was a funny old year. In a lot of ways I felt more mellow, more self conscious and observant than previously. A little shaky perhaps. Despite that I still managed to get things done that made my bones shake. I played three gigs with my band, first time being on stage was a scary, scary experience. I went camping and survived. I visited my Dad. Wrote less in my journals and felt a lot more melancholy towards the end of the year. I also moved home to a city I’ve wanted to live in for a long time, a home which was found only after spending half of the year looking.

So here’s to 2012. Not sure what you’ll bring, but hopefully more sunshine and a few more experiences to tie under my belt.

5. Cecil B. Demented

I saw this film a few years ago, and coming from John Waters knew it would be worth a watch (not to mention a residual intolerable girl crush on Stephn Dorf from the 90′s) . The film centres around Dorf’s title character who along with a bunch of misfit movie extremists work to capture famous actress Melanie Griffith and force her to star in their guerrilla movie. The namesake of the film being Cecil B. Demille, creator of all films grandeur during his many years with Paramount from the 1920′s. It’s spoofy and fun and hard not to like.

4. Play it Again Sam

The only film in this list not about actually making a film, but rather living vicariously through one: Casablanca. Woody Allen stars as Allan a recently divorced film critic who goes through a series of messy dating sagas all the while getting tips from the spectre of his alter ego, Mr. Humphrey Bogart. It’s got some brilliant scenes, it’s funny and I particularly loved the decor in Allan’s San Franciso apartment. This started out on Broadway and I think it translates really well to to the screen.

3. Ed Wood

Everyone’s seen Ed Wood right? The fact it was filmed in black and white endears it to me more, coupled with my love for all things Lugosi. Historically there’s a few facts and figures that are at war with each other like Ed’s true relationship with people like Bela, but who knows. For now it makes a brilliant entry into Tim Burton’s early 90′s arsenal. Not to mention Martin Landeu won the best supporting actor Oscar for playing the aging and antagonistic Lugosi.

2. Living in Oblivion

Living in Oblivion switches between black and white and colour cinematography, and is far more of a quieter black comedy than the trailer suggests. Steve Buscemi plays the brilliant an angsty director who’s attempted to make his movie are thwarted at every turn. I really need to watch this again, my copy lies somewhere in a pile of  old scribbled on vhs from my years of video+ all the good late night movies. Does video+ still event exist?

1. Sunset Boulevard

Directed by Billy Wilder Sunset Boulevard is the Hollywood film to end all Hollywood films. It’s my own personal favourite movie of all time, telling the tale of aging silent film actress Norma Desmond played superbly as artifice by Gloria Swanson – herself one of the most famous silent stars of her time. Desmond lives reclusively in her dilapidated grandiose mansion with old Eric Von Stroheim as her doting butler. The film is genius on so many levels, particularly in hindsight. An intricate story which also interweaves other Hollywood gentries taken straight from their hey day in the 1920′s: Cecil B. Demille, to Buster Keaton and Hedda Hopper, the notorious and much feared queen of the gossip columns.

I could write about this film all day, and for me, it’s one of the best films ever conceived and constructed to end all Hollywood films.

You tend to find a lot of these kind of cameras kicking about in charity shop or on ebay, usually with variable results. I quite liked the feel of this one, but having not used manual cameras for a while it takes a bit of getting used to remembering to focus/aperture/shutter instead of pointing and shooting. I started off 12 years ago shooting film on a beat up Olympus OM10 my dad gave me, and later on had the opposite problem; manual focusing with digital lenses which have no distance guide!

Film now is even more of an expensive hobby, and if you’ve found yourself a cute looking old Soviet model that didn’t come with LOMO seal of approval you might be better off asking for the negatives to be developed first to see if there’s any treasures on the film worth printing. Maybe I’m a cheapskate but even £5 in Boots seems expensive for a less than satisfactory film roll.

I didn’t use filters. Your own sunglasses can be natures cheapest visual effects tool.

That last photo was a bit of a tiny revelation. When I was at my sickest my mum used to take me for drives and we would sit in the moors on ‘Bob’s Seat’. So it was quite touching to go back and to see they’d updated the seat plaque which appears his partner has now joined him.

I feel incredibly disillusioned with the general blogging stratosphere these days. The evolution of words and expression seems to have become a homogenized expression of the same ideas, tastes and flavours.

Putting your best foot forward, and I blog therefore I am.

I guess I’ll sound like ol’ sour grapes like every other mid 20 something who’s been online far too long. But things are continuing to feel far less real, so that social interactions almost become a depressing and awkward byproduct. People re-post creative expressions that were conceived and created lovingly and time consumingly by somebody else, yet these images become specters that are supposed to reveal another individuals style and personality ala tumblr. In the words of Edwina abfab flipping through an interior design magazine locked in the living room with Saffy “I WANT TO BE ALL OF THESE THINGS!”.

I really don’t want to be all of these things and it makes me long for the days of the marginally vain, awkward and not very css forward pages that had far more fun and frivolity about them than being the 179th person to re-post it in the first place.

The internet; a place that makes you feel like to you need to own a £2k lens to take photographs of yourself and your outfits. A place where little explanation of background, media trials and evolution are expressed truthfully. Because who wants to truly be seen as anything less than perfect right?

Taken at Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, County Durham.