Category: culture

Birdies at the Barbican

Hopefully you can all see this embedded video of the finches at the Barbican in London – an installation by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. We went on a little trip yesterday evening, and had an absolutely magical time watching and listening to a room full of little birds and musical instruments.

The video is of a previous incarnation of this installation, so the environment isn’t quite the same. The floor at the Barbican is wooden decking, with little islands cut out of it which are filled with sand and grass-type plants. The guitars and cymbals are mounted in these islands. The rest of the room is white, and there are roosting boxes high up on the walls so that the birds can hide away if they want to.

The sound at the Barbican isn’t quite as dramatic or as loud as it is in the video – unless the birds were just in a particularly quiet mood yesterday. The speakers are mounted well away from the individual instruments, so it’s quite hard to tell exactly where the sound is coming from. This makes the experience slightly more surreal, and presumably helps the birds not to be terrified that they’ve just made a bass guitar go CLANG.

The birds do fly free, so if you’re nervous about that it might be a bit stressful.

But you can get really close to the finches, and pay real attention to them as they go about their birdy business. I stopped noticing the sounds after a little while, but it’s really interesting how the noises that the birds make blends in really well to the constant little feedback sounds of them landing on the guitars or the microphone cables. Every now and then there would be a flurry of activity on a cymbal or a guitar, but for me the excitement and magic of the room was getting to see the birds up close and personal, interacting with one another. The whole room was filled with quiet, respectful, smiling people. You could see that everyone was dying to get really close to the birds, but everybody kept their distance – and if you got too close, the finches would simply fly away. At one point a finch sat on a man’s foot, and he looked as though he might explode with joy whilst standing extremely still.

Paul spent ages watching and listening to one little finch that liked to sit on the cable of a microphone that was attached underneath a cymbal. His little feet made scratchy pickup sounds as he shuffled back and forth. The cymbals were really lovely to listen to. They were mounted upside down, and two were filled with seed and another with water. As the birds pecked at the cymbals to eat the seed, there was a beautifully gentle ringing sound, like the softest gong.

I spent ages watching one little finch that had fallen asleep on the neck of a guitar. He looked so comfortable, perched on the strings! His eyes were shut tight, and he was gently rocking back and forth as he slept. Bless. There were also a pair of birds that had made a nest on another guitar. They were making a lot of noise as they rearranged all the strands of grass to their satisfaction. They were also quite defensive, and would sing loudly at anyone who came too close.

The Curve Gallery at the Barbican is open from 11am-8pm every day, and until 10pm on Thurdsays. We went at about 6:30pm, which turned out to be ideal. We only had to queue for about five minutes (sometimes the wait is up to three-quarters of an hour), and we spent around an hour inside. They only allow 25 people inside the exhibition at a time, so it never feels crowded. Entry is free, and sadly you’re not allowed to take photographs inside.

I only wish I lived close enough to go back again and again.

Keeping up with you all…

I’ve just spent a large chunk of this afternoon transferring all my blog feeds out of my email account and into Google Reader. Now I have 82 blogs with 601 posts to catch up on, which could take a while!

However, this much better than looking at my Inbox and seeing 2097 messages, and not being able to tell at first glance how many of those messages are blog posts, how many are genuine emails, and how many are spam.

Hopefully using Google Reader will make everything much easier to manage. I’ll have access to everything when I’m away from my own computer (which isn’t the case with my email), I only need to click one link in order to leave comments, and I can read (most of) the posts without having to click through to the individual sites. Perfect.

Leave a comment below with the name of your blog, and I can make sure that I’m following you!

Tom Hunter: A Journey Back.


Image © Tom Hunter

I was reading the Big Issue yesterday, and suddenly did a double-take when I saw this picture. It’s from the “Travellers” series by Tom Hunter, who has several current exhibitions in London and around Europe.

When I was at University I harboured a sort of a romantic notion that I would somehow land a lovely job with a publisher in London, and live in a tiny little flat which I would paint purple. Sadly none of those things materialised in the end, but this picture is extraordinarily close to my imaginary living space.

Occasionally Paul and I will discuss the possibility of getting rid of all our belongings, and living a more minimalist lifestyle. We both like the idea of Container City, and I am madly love with these pod houses, by Eco Hab. They look like something Wallace and Grommit might build!

Usually we end up shaking our heads sadly – we’ve already built a twelve foot square shed in the garden because my sewing had drastically outgrown the house, and one look at our bookshelves will tell you that we don’t really know the meaning of the word “minimal”.

In spite of my over-developed hoarding tendencies, I do sometimes think it might be incredibly freeing, to just get rid of all the things we collect and hold on to but don’t really need. There’s so much unnecessary consumerism in this world that it might be nice to somehow step outside it and start again.

Value versus Cost.

So, we’re in a global recession. A couple of months ago I had a surprising number of orders cancelled, all at once. Most of them were for party dresses that people simply couldn’t afford to pay for any more. Never mind that the dresses were going to be hand made from beautiful fabrics, one of a kind and made to fit exactly… if the money to pay for those dresses is no longer available, the orders have to be cancelled.

This is a bit of a problem when you’re a one-woman business with bills to pay, so clearly I need to do something about it.

One solution might be to concentrate on items with a smaller price tag. If customers have less money, then it makes sense to sell items which are cheaper for them to buy. Except that I still have the same bills, so I’d need to spend more time and money on marketing and materials, for an even smaller return on my efforts.

So, what I’m seriously considering instead is going the other way, and selling items which are much more expensive than I would normally offer. This seems counterintuitive, but if I can demonstrate that these items have a much greater inherent value, then the actual cost becomes secondary.

What do I mean?

When I graduated, I worked for a small publishing company. My job was to bring the typesetting processes in-house, and thereby save the company money. They published a lot of books of “Your Town In Old Photographs”, and they were paying £7 per photo to have them all scanned. This cost roughly £1000 per book, in scanning costs alone! I suggested buying a high quality scanner, but the one I needed to do the job cost £1500. Because the price of the scanner was more than the cost of having the scanning outsourced for the next book, the company refused to pay for it. They were trying to compare £1500 to £7, and they couldn’t see past the cost of the scanner to its value for the business in the longer term.

To come back to one of my favourite subjects, shoes – Dr Martens have recently launched their “For Life” range of footwear. They’re offering a limited range of styles and colours, with a lifetime guarantee. Subject to a few conditions, when your boots wear out, you pay £20, and Dr Martens will repair them for you. MBT have a similar arrangement, where you can pay £38 and have the soles replaced.

Now MBTs are expensive – in the UK they cost up to £170. The Dr Martens For Life boots cost £110 – more than double the price of their similar non-guaranteed styles. In the current economic climate, it would be easy to think that the best thing to do is simply to buy cheap shoes. But if your cheap shoes cost £25, and they fall to pieces after three months, then you have no choice but to buy another pair. In eighteen months you’ll have spent more on cheap shoes than you would have done on one pair of Dr Martens For Life, and you could have had them repaired. Twice.

I don’t know that offering a repair service or a lifetime guarantee is the way forward for the things that I make. But I do want people to understand that my new clothes will be made from beautiful fabrics, to a very high standard, with a great deal of hand work involved. These things take time to make, and they deserve to be looked after, not cast aside like some fashionable thing that’s fallen out of favour. If I can make clothes that will last a lifetime, be passed on, and mended, and loved, then that’s a value which goes way beyond the price tag.

Whether people will be able to understand that in a time when money’s tight, is another matter entirely.

Small World.

This week I am in love with the seemingly random interconnectedness* of things.

The other day I joined Twitter.

Havi Brooks sent many people my way with her tweet (thank you!), one of whom was Randomling. She turned out to be the housemate of Miss Alice, who’d put me on to both Havi and Twitter in the first place!

This morning I came to update my Etsy shop with the brooches I’ve been making, and discovered that a few new people had chosen to “heart me” while I was away.

One of those people was Little Alouette. I didn’t recognise the name at first, but as soon as I clicked through to her shop I recognised the little fellow above. “Harper” is a wooden hippo teething ring, and I’d seen it featured by both Soule Mama and Dooce.

I may not have any particular use for a small wooden hippo, but several of my friends are having babies soon, and will be needing teething toys at some stage. So, I’m passing the link on to them… and the small world shrinks just that little bit smaller.

 

 

*It’s a word now.

Tweet tweet!

2nd February 2009 - Snow Day!

Yesterday I met a duck, and today I learned how to Tweet.

The duck in question is not the fancy Mandarin pictured above. It’s Selma, able assistant to Havi Brooks.

Miss Alice realised that I was in serious need of some help with “destuckification”, and sent me a link to Havi’s website, The Fluent Self. I may have had a little cry when I read Havi’s Is This You? page, and have since been rummaging around her blog, and downloading the destuckification sampler. You can find the sampler on the right hand side of Havi’s web pages, and I heartily recommend it. (I’m saving up for The Procrastination Dissolve-o-Matic.)

I’ve been making things all my life, but I do have a terrible problem with actually selling the things that I make. I feel pushy, trying to sell things to people, and I don’t like to be pushy. (Apparently “nice” and “pushy” don’t really go together, and I do so want to be nice.) But if I don’t tell people what I’ve made, they’ll never know that they can buy it, and that’s not really a good way to run a business. In fact it’s not running a business at all, it’s just pursuing a really expensive hobby.

My first step towards doing a bit of something vaguely resembling “networking”, is to find out how to use Twitter in a productive way. As it turns out, it’s so much more than overhearing half of a million private conversations, or finding out what the internet had for breakfast. It’s a great way of spreading little bits of news, passing on interesting links and meeting people all across the world that you wouldn’t have been able to reach in any other way.

You can read my Twitterings over in the sidebar there, or you can come and follow me. I’m eternalmagpie, of course.

Move over Facebook – Twitter is the way forward!

“There’s always a certain irresponsibility about hats…”

I was browsing through the BBC iPlayer this afternoon, looking for something to watch in the background whilst doing a spot of hand sewing.

I hadn’t realised what a lot I was missing!

 

The title above is a quote from a wonderful 1950s programme about fashion history. The series is called Men, Women and Clothes, and this episode is Fashion in Faces and Figures. Look out for a fabulously moustachio’d Benny Hill, and some lovely shots of corsets. This one’s only fifteen minutes long, and well worth watching! Unfortunately it was broadcast yesterday, but it’ll be on the iPlayer for a week, and there’s another episode on January 15th.

There’s another series just started called Style On Trial. This is a seven-parter, looking at the fashion of various decades, beginning with the 1940s. The first episode is on the iPlayer now, and episode two airs on January 14th.

Another programme that I’m particularly interested to watch is Ozwald Boateng: Why Style Matters. This one’s repeated on BBC Four tomorrow (January 10th) at 9pm. I’m quite a fan of Boateng’s menswear, and given my current interest in men’s shoes and tailoring, I think this one will be brilliant!

A little light reading…

I think it might be safe to say that my bedside reading mountain is getting a little out of control!

Bedside Reading...

As you can see from this picture, I don’t tend to read a lot of fiction these days. This makes the book on the very top of the pile a bit intimidating.

I signed up to Blog a Penguin Classic, and this is the one I was assigned – Hell’s Angels by Hunter S. Thompson.

Oddly enough I had rather been hoping for a “proper” classic, rather than a “modern” one. I feel as though I could have quite enjoyed a bit of Herman Melville or Alexandre Dumas. Now that I’ve looked at the website I see that I’ve read more of the Modern Classics than I’d thought – and I’m quite grateful that I didn’t end up with Jack Kerouac. I read On The Road because I thought I ought to, and found that I hated it.

I’m trying to stay open minded about Hell’s Angels but the subject matter of drinking, violence and motorbikes really doesn’t appeal to me in the slightest.

I need to start reading it soon though – I only have a couple of weeks left before it’s time to submit my review for Penguin!

This Is England

We finally got around to watching This Is England last night. I’ve been wanting to see the film for a long time, even though I already knew that it would be very difficult for me to watch. I’m not a big fan of racism, violence and extreme right wing politics, and those are the main topics of the film.

I’m not well-enough informed, socially, politically, or historically, to be able to talk about the film from those points of view, but what I do want to talk about is the clothes.

This Is England

If there was one style of clothing which I truly wish I could wear but never have done, it would be this. Probably with jeans rather than mini skirts, but there’s something about this style which really appeals to me. I do own two Ben Sherman shirts, although they’re both prints, not checks. I’ve owned countless pairs of Doc Martens over the past twenty years, and despite the fact that Paul makes a face every time I show him photographs, there’s something extremely appealing to me about that hair cut. I do remember going out in the 1980s wearing a white shirt, black braces and a trilby, but for all the Doc Martens I’ve ever worn, I’ve never even been tempted to buy a tall cherry red pair.

When I was a Goth, dressing was easy. Everything black, lots of eyeliner, pointy shoes or the most enormous boots I could find. For all the protestations of “individuality”, what I liked best about being a Goth was having a group that I demonstrably belonged to, and I demonstrated it with my clothes. I like dressing up, I like the music, I like bats and skulls and books about vampires. It was easy for me to be a part of that group.

But dressing like a skinhead? That’s much more problematic. When I was reading The Way We Wore, last year, it touched on a lot of the things I’ve been trying to think about coherently while I was watching the film.

The original skinheads, in the late 1950s, had nothing to do with racism and violence. Theirs was an inclusive culture, born directly out of living and working with Caribbean immigrants who’d recently started arriving in the UK. Without these groups mingling together, we’d never have had Ska and 2 Tone, and bands like Madness or The Specials. But, the economic climate in those times was terrible, and the feeling did develop that other people were coming into “our” country and taking “our” jobs and “our” houses. Racially-motivated violence was breaking out all across England, predominantly in working-class communities, and this escalated into the Notting Hill riots of 1958.

The same thing effectively happened during the early 1980s. The country was faced with record levels of unemployment, along with an increase in immigration from countries such as Pakistan. The Falklands war began in 1982, and with it came a surge of popularity for far right wing politics. The Teddy Boys, who’d been the main antagonists during the Notting Hill riots, had been all but forgotten, but skinhead, punk and the National Front became inextricably linked in the public image until the skinhead look unequivocally represented a uniform of racism and hatred.

There are countries where the skinhead image still represents what it did during the 1950s – a working-class background and the love of a certain type of music. Hel Looks, a website which documents street fashions in Sweden, demonstrates that the skinhead look is still popular. In parts of America, skinhead is more closely linked with 1970s punk.

I’ve worn some unusual clothes over the years. As a Goth, people were forever telling me to “cheer up”, or reminding me that “it’s not Hallowe’en”. Having pink hair is apparently a license for people to point and shout at me in the street. I’m more than used to being stared at because of my clothes, and not always in an appreciative manner.

But to walk down the street, in England, wearing tall cherry reds, jeans, braces and a feather cut? However much I might enjoy the style and the music, I just couldn’t do it.

(More here, from Wikipedia.)

Paying the Price.

I’ve just been reading an interesting discussion on about why customers are unwilling to pay prices which genuinely cover the cost of a handmade garment, whether it’s a reconstructed t-shirt or a couture wedding dress. I’ve had many customers – individuals and other small businesses – come to me asking for hand-made clothing, only to disappear without a trace when I told them the price.

Thanks to companies like the dreaded Primark, clothes have become cheaper and cheaper to buy, and the actual cost of their manufacture (in both monetary and human terms) is no longer reflected in their selling price.

As an independent businesswoman in the UK, I am legally obliged to pay myself a minimum wage (currently £5.52 an hour) for my work – and yet in many cases I am simply not able to do that. If I charged the full amount of what my work was actually worth, my customers wouldn’t be able to afford it, and I would make no money at all.

Unfortunately, by selling myself short, I devalue not only my own work, but also that of other business and craftspeople in a similar position, and I exacerbate the problem of customers expecting to pay cheaper prices.

If I were a computer programmer, I’d be charging an awful lot more than £5.52 an hour. Heck, if I were a plumber, I’d be charging more than ten times that! When did dressmaking, or any form of craft which requires a development of skill to learn, become such an undervalued occupation?

has written a really interesting article on the subject: Why do wedding dresses cost so much?

I’ve been the lady hand-sewing the beads onto your precious dress, and I’ve listened patiently to the complaints about the cost of the alterations when I’ve had to hem, by hand, all ten tulle petticoat layers under your skirt. I can state unequivocally that although I was paid slightly more than minimum wage for doing that job, neither I, nor the husband and wife team who ran that independent bridal store, were making our fortune from the cost of that work.

I’ve also had several brides come to me, assuming that because I was making them a “home made” dress, it would be much cheaper than one bought off the peg. In actual fact what I would be making is a couture dress, which is a different thing altogether!

Last week I wore a dress that I’d made myself, to work. One of our customers expressed surprise that the dress was “home made”, because “it looked really neat”. Now I have eleven years’ experience as a dressmaker – of course my sewing is neat! Would you react with surprise if you hired a plumber with eleven years’ experience, and he turned out to do a good job? No, and you’d pay him good money to do it.

The lady who made the comment obviously had no way of knowing that I’ve been a dressmaker for a long time, but it made me very sad that “made by hand” in her expectation was inextricably linked to “looks a bit rubbish”. The current rise in popularity of “DIY” and reconstructed clothing is also doing nothing to disabuse people of this notion, as so many sellers of this style are using the term “DIY” to apparently mean that they don’t have to finish seams or be able to sew well.

Now I’m completely self-taught, so I have no issues whatsoever about people just getting in there and having a go! I’ve written a couple of tutorials for simple skirts, and I hope to write more in the future. I also enjoy reconstructing t-shirts, and making clothes out of recycled materials. However, I do believe that if you’re going to sell your work, then there are some fairly basic standards that need to be applied. Otherwise, once again, you’re lowering the standards and expectations that apply to all of us.

I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to make a living from my dressmaking, and that makes me very sad. It’s not going to stop me from sewing, because I really enjoy it, but I do wish that it were possible for more people to understand the value of these skills that I’ve worked hard to attain.