I've touched on it before, but I'm forever inspired by fashion lines' ability to be narrative in and of itself, to throw back to by-gone eras and drive towards the future, to speak of the mechanical, fantastical, humane and animalistic. This line is pretty gorgeous, and I feel like it breathes of rivers in spring, hillsides and pebbles beneath quick moving water, of the people that live beside it, favour it, give it wealth like it gives back to them. Love, love, love this. Plus I would wear the hell of that blue dress
Noela Stevenson is my spirit animal, and her new(ish) webseries Nimona is pretty awesome. It's funny, charming and with damn likeable characters. Plus her art is super great. (I'm a shark!) Read the series over here.
Daughter singing 'Youth' live for The Amazing Sessions on Amazing Radio is pretty close to sublime.
Also, Estelle Tang wrote a really interesting essay on empathy with abusers in fiction (particularly Australian fiction). I really recommend taking a look at it over here.
I'm totally charmed by these tiny sculptures by Diem Chau. This one is an elephant carved into the top of a graphite pencil. (found via Super Punch)
And to finish us off, a wonderful, glorious letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to an aspiring writer. You've got to sell your heart.
Also, AbeBooks has a list of literary oddities on their website, and I gotta say that I'd read an embarrassing amount of these. 'Giraffe? Giraffe!' in particular sounds like a literary masterwork. I'm also pretty fascinated by 101 More Uses for a Dead Cat (mostly because the title suggests that it's a sequel.)
This weekend I'm modelling at the Love Vintage Fair at the Brisbane Convention Centre for Bonnie Rose Vintage Clothing. I'm super excited, but also pretty nervous because it's not something I've done before. I'm also excited to experience vintage clothing. I love it generally, but I also love it as a narrative device and as a part of character. It's ability to explain, justify and flesh out a character excites me and I'm looking forward to getting excited at the fair! What are you guys up to?
There's some really, really great literary art prints over here. This Hemingway one is my favourite (and also something I require in my house).
Letters of Note recently posted correspondence between F. Scott Fitzgerald and his editor, Maxwell Perkins, regarding early drafts of The Great Gatsby. I'm a pretty huge fan of Fitzgerald generally, and it's such an interesting glimpse inside his writing process and his relationship with Perkins. Check it out over here.
I'm basically in-love with the character design of ParaNorman and the team behind that recently released a pretty awesome featurette on bringing this guy to life. It's super great.
A bit of the oldschool this week. Between 1951 and 1960, Salvador Dali did 101watercolour illustrations to accompany and interpret Dante Aligheri's poem, Salvador Dali Divine Comedy. The overall effect is really interesting and beautifully executed. Check out the full works here.
This weekend is the Finders Keepers Market,
and I have no money, but I'm still really excited to go. It's a
beautiful market full of insanely talented people. It's a pretty
special event. Otherwise, today will be spent drinking too much coffee and hopefully finishing my entry for the Young Writers Award. Hopefully. What are you guys up to?
I am totally obsessed with this mash-up of Blondie's Heart of Glass with Philip Glass (via thefoxisblack). It's beautiful musically, but it really shows off Debbie Harry's voice too, all of which makes it pretty close to sublime.
I myself write about grief all the time,
not always intentionally, but it tends to seep into characters, narrative,
setting, whatever. There’s just always an undercurrent of it. It’s a funny
thing, because I haven’t really been exposed to grief first hand, I’ve had no
great, unexpected loss, nor have I suffered a crippling break-up, but I feel
drawn to it as a narrative device and as a part of character, place and story.
I’m certainly not alone in this, writers use grief all the time. The Harry Potter series by JK Rowling relies
heavily on grief as a key component thematically and narratively, and
characters within the series are frequently exposed to grief or feel its residual
effects. Harry himself epitomises this. He feels grief at the loss of parents
he didn’t know, but he also brings that grief out in everyone around him. He looks
like his father, but with his mother’s eyes, and this acts as a reminder to the
people who knew them, and continue to grieve that loss.
Shows from Breaking Bad, American Horror
Story, Being Human, Twin Peaks all
feature grief if not as a major point, as a sub-plot to the overarching
narrative. What fascinates me though is the fact that in all of these examples,
grief is used to drive plot and character forward when, in reality, grief
frequently stagnates and cripples. Grief always represents a change, but not
necessarily in a way that’s progressive; however, narratives have turning points
to reach, characters to develop, and some sort of closure to get to. In storytelling,
grief has to be progressive and it has to end, or at least serve a purpose. Is this
why we as audiences and as storytellers find grief compelling? Why it’s so damn
watchable? Fiction provides an end to grief when reality doesn’t have to. That
could be a leap, then again, I feel like grief is something that unites and can
be shared unlike a lot of other emotions or experiences. People live diverse
lives, but the feeling of loss and grief is unanimous. You can feel grief as a
nation, as a family, as a person, you can feel it at a loss or at a gain,at a hurt or at someone else’s joy, it can be
bitter, it can be sweet, it can be angry or mean or it can simply be sad.
Whilst it’s a unanimously felt emotion,
it’s not something people are going to react similarly too, which makes it such
excellent fodder for narrative and character and such an interesting thing to
explore. The comparison can be a beautiful thing in storytelling too, Rabbit Hole (2010) is a beautiful film
about loss and it explores it through a family after the death of a child; the
coping mechanisms between the mother and father are chalk and cheese, as the
father wallows and the mother, Becca, makes desperate, angry steps forwards, simultaneously
lashing out and seeking solace wherever she can find it. You also have the grandmother,
Becca’s mother, who is still coping with the loss of her own son a number of
years earlier and spends so long reaching out for her daughter. The whole thing
ends with one of the most beautiful exchanges, as Becca asks if grief ever goes
away, and her mother is torn in her desire to reassure and her need to be
honest. Finally, she says,
“No, I don’t think it does. Not for me,
it hasn’t – has gone on for eleven years. It changes though…the weight of it, I
guess. At some point, it becomes bearable. It turns into something that you can
crawl out from under and carry around like a brick in your pocket. And you even
forget it, for a while. But then you reach in for whatever reason and – there it
is. Oh right, that. Which could be awful, but it’s not all the time. It’s not
that you like it exactly, but it’s what you’ve got instead of your son, so you
carry it around with you.”
Grief is a compelling thing, and a
feeling that gets dissected across genre and medium alike, and it’s something
that draws me into a narrative too quickly. I don’t have an answer really as to
why, but I don’t really think it’ll stop seeping into my writing either, I don’t
really think I want it to.
x
Soph.
P.S. Everyone should immediately go out
and watch Awake and Rabbit Hole and also read The Children by Charlotte Wood which is
a beautiful novel about grief and family and made me sob on a train when I first
read it. It was awesome.
I am obsessed with Annie Wu at the moment. Her art is not only wonderful and reflective of her immense talent, but she has one of the best senses for character and expression in illustration that I've seen recently. She is pretty spectacular. You can check out more of her stuff over at http://www.anniewuart.com/.
I go on and off advertising - sometimes I love it, can find the thought-out and well-scripted ads so compelling and wonderful bits of micro-cinema, but a lot of the time too watching an ad feels like being hammered with information you don't really care about in a very small space of time.
That said, the great stuff can be really, really special. Adweek has put together 10 Great TV Spots Directed by Wes Anderson, and they're all pretty great, but this one is just wonderful.
In creating the campaign, "Anderson asked more than 75 kids what they thought goes on inside Xperia
phones and recorded their answers. One kid, 8-year-old Jake Ryan from
from Long Island, gave a particularly magical response."
