Growed Up

Today I bought a bike. My flatmate and I rode around Victoria park for hours enjoying the sunshine and the inevitable feeling of freedom that comes with having control over your means of transportation.

We then rode along the canal back home, and around our neighborhood. All in all I'm guessing we rode more than five miles today! Go team!

Then, a few hours later, in the cafe/vintage shop that is quick becoming our new favorite haunt I found an amazing piece of vintage art from the 20s. And seeing how much we loved it, the owner (who seems oddly fascinated with the fact that we are two girls originating in two of England's bastard children countries, living in London) cut the price in half for us. We had to say yes. With our birthdays only a week apart, and upcoming, we decided to call it Our Birthday Gift to ourselves.

We bought art. And ghetto bikes. I'm an adult. And a little hipster biker chick.

New Flat, New Outlook

I am typing to you now from my phone, laying on my new queen size bed in my new flat!

I am the happiest I have felt in..... god, I think forever. This is the happiest I have ever been for this extended a period of time. I'm broke, our boiler is broken and we've had to take cold showers, we're half unpacked, I'm exhausted.... and I am having the time of my life.

Happy

I just got back to the dorms after seeing our new flat for the first time since we did the initial viewing. We both worried that it had somehow improved in our memories- that it had become bigger and brighter. But actually, we were right. It is big and bright and we cannot believe how happy we are to be moving tomorrow morning!

It isn't high spec, and it isn't anything fancy, but for two artists who want to have both a home and good place to work, it is perfect.

Moving Day Approacheth!

Yesterday we signed the contracts and they handed us some keys, and all of a sudden we realized that the new flat is OURS! How did that happen?! We move tomorrow morning, first thing.

Can you believe it? Someone actually made the mistake of thinking I was a responsible adult who can be trusted with an apartment.

UK Air Guitar Championships 2009

In contrast to my last post about seeing a beautifully crafted production of Waiting for Godot, tonight I went to go see the UK 2009 Air Guitar Championships! A good time was had by all.

Raise your imaginary goblet of rock!

(I am VERY sorry for the quality of sound and video)
The opening to the show, an all air band!

Waiting for Godot- some damn good theatre

Image stolen from here

Today I saw the most incredible stage production I have ever seen. At 2:30 the curtain went up on Waiting for Godot starring Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, and Simon Callow. What are the chances that three such famous and talented Shakespearean actors would appear on stage together? It was absolutely amazing.

I've never seen a Beckett play performed before, and this one was every bit as mysterious and cyclical as I thought it would be. For three actors with such incredibly large stage presence, they all played it very subtle and deep. I knew McKellen was an amazing actor, but I had no idea how physical an actor he was. Every step, every gesture was thought out, but evoked a character so set in his ways, so perfectly set in who he was.... even his most cartoony of moments seemed natural.

The two lead actors balanced each other beautifully- McKellan the cynic opposite Stewart the straight man. The mark of a good actor is not noticing when they are acting, and with Stewart and McKellen I found myself so enveloped in their characters and the strange hell/world they occupied that I forgot to notice that there were two very famous people who have played iconic roles, right in front of me. They actually disassociated themselves from Gandalf and Picard and became Vladamir and Estragon. They weren't even Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart anymore, they were just Vladamir and Estragon. Fucking. Amazing.

Leaving the theatre, I re-entered the world unsure of what is real.

If you have any chance in hell of scalping tickets to this show, go see it. It's worth every penny.

Celebrate

I find myself at home with a sudden head cold (no, it's not swine flu, for the last god damn time people!) and sitting in bed with little to do but drink tea and bemoan the fact that I'm not out celebrating right now.

So what do I have to celebrate, you ask?

Today my flatmate and I learned that our application for a flat in Hoxton was accepted! And not only that, but we both decided that we hated the student dorms so much that we opted to move out sooner than we originally planned. Instead of September 5th we are now moving in to our new place on August 10th. Yes, I am mere days away from a double bed, a bath tub, a real kitchen, and a living room. Can you believe it? I still don't. I am still skeptical, and sure that something will go wrong. It is too good to be true.

I've lived in a lot of different apartments, but I have always rented a room in someone else's flat. It didn't seem right to leave my stuff in the rest of the house, interrupting their routines and habits. But now? Now I can create my own living habits and my stuff can be anywhere! I can do logical things like make a place for my DVDs in the living room! I can leave my sketchbook and paints on the table without fear of being in someone's way. This is huge for me, you see. I finally get to occupy the space I have and make it my own.

Secondly, and in some ways more importantly, I would like to formally announce that I have decided to leave Central Saint Martins School of Shit and Bollocks.

This, I believe, warrants a drink. A toast, even. Raise your glasses if you will to the end of an era and beginning of another, far better one.

When I found out that Evil Tutor failed my latex project (despite telling me it was good all the way through the process) I made up my mind that I would not be returning to that awful sham they call a university, regardless of whether they wanted me to repeat 1st year or move on to 2nd year.

Words cannot describe how incredibly happy I am to be free of that place.

For the first time in years I feel inspired, eager to learn. Eager to make my own way, to go out into the world and absorb information. I want to do everything, create everything, experience everything. I feel free. I have no solid plan, just a good solid feel for the direction I want to head in. And that is liberating.

Of course I can't deny that CSM is a good name to have on your degree. Those three letters will open a lot of doors for a designer. Though, point of interest, I have come to realize that it will also close doors.

In making the decision to leave the school, I came across an interesting phenomenon in the design world. Being able to say "I graduated from St Martins" is great, but there is a certain respect I get when I say that I studied at St Martins only to realize that the reputation wasn't justified, and chose to leave. Funny, that.

In case I haven't made it painfully clear, this is not a school that will teach you anything, least of all actual, technical skills. Now I know that we all love the idea of simply drawing out a pretty sketch and handing it to someone else to make, but frankly that is bullshit. You need to follow through. True artists of any kind need to understand their materials, their craft, their process.... and often those things will inform and change their design. Half the stress/fun is in the process of trying to make one of your designs and seeing how it changes and becomes better.

The reason I got my internship with my awesome design mentor is not because I went to CSM, but because I studied at a technical fashion school and have a background in theatre and performance. I even said in my initial letter to her that "despite hailing from St Martins, I have not yet had my love for design or theatricality beaten out of me." She knew exactly what I meant.

My point is simply that there is something to be said for knowing how to make things. Any things. Whatever sort of things you want to make. And if you want to learn to make things, then St Martins is not the place to be.


So raise one more glass to the end of St Martins. And give Evil Tutor the finger for me, will you?

In the meantime I am looking into community college classes while I consider other universities. And should I decide to attend another uni, I have decided that the classes I take will not be in fashion.

I need a break.

But I also have a good solid foundation in fashion now, and it's time to start expanding outwards. In order to do this I am devoting four or five days a week to my internship to learn as much as possible from the designers I work for. And when I begin taking classes again, I want to learn to work with other materials so I can incorporate them into my designs- plastic, wood, metal, etc. I want to work in anything besides fabric and learn anything except fashion.

More shoe making and design courses are already queued up (more on that later), and from these classes I have also developed a rather subversive plan regarding my future shoe designs. See, a friend of mine at CSM asked if I was planning on continuing to learn how to make shoes, and if so, would I design and make the shoes for her final show at St Martins. I of course said yes! See, this way I get to have my final 3rd year show at St Martins by putting my shoes in the show, right under the nose of Evil Tutor and all those other fuckers who told me I was shit. BWAHAHAHAHA <---evil laughter and mustache stroking

Hell, if you've managed to read this far I think you deserve one more drink. Raise your glass one more time to the closing of a miserable year at an all-consuming, pretentious, and useless school, and the end of a year living in a moldy, tiny, uncomfortable dorm room.


Cheers.

More To Come

I have so much to fill you all in on, but I haven't had the time!

I took my shoe making course and LOVED it. There are step by step photos for you, and I will post them soon!

My other big news is that my flat mate and I found a flat we both like and are in the middle of applying for it, with the goal to move on August 10th! We are both SO excited, and a little nervous because, well, we don't look so hot on paper. We're both foreign students living for less than a year in London, and on loans. But that can't be helped. Wish us luck!

The Boy is on the plane now and heading to London. This will be the first time we've seen or spoken to each other (other than chat) since April 20th. I am excited, nervous, anxious, thrilled, freaked out, excited, anxious, crazy, nervous, thrilled, stressed, happy, nervous....

So much going on, my god.... I will fill you all in soon.

Right, Write

I miss writing.

I miss sitting in some dark little corner of a coffee shop and analyzing the world around me. I miss being inspired by things, and being critical of things.

So this afternoon I bought myself a little black Moleskin notebook and found one of my old unused sketchbooks. I bought a copy of John Berger's Ways of Seeing, set it on top of my BldgBlog book and sat down with these four things over a white americano.

I quickly found myself getting frustrated that I didn't already have something important to say. What, twenty minutes spent absorbing other people's thoughts isn't enough of an effort to make me a genius??! Gasp!

I must be patient with my brain and give it some time to stretch and warm up. It is very out of practice. So I will go to a different coffee shop tomorrow and try again. And another one the day after, until I have retrained my brain to focus, analyze, and produce vaguely intelligible sentences in response to all the life going on around me.

Just Curious

In the US, we say "giving you shit". In the UK, we say "taking the piss". Why all the exchanging of bodily excretions as terms for "making fun of"?