beeker ideas

violently pitching

smith 52

One of the lovely things about working at Bloom is that you might get the chance to work on the Mr and Mrs Smith collection.  So we were dead excited to take delivery of the new events diary, Smith 52.

Isn't it beautiful?  Even if I say so?  Seeing all pages we'd designed one by one with their rainbow profile and the big solid cover in the flesh was brilliant. 

 

the fish

I got fish for my birthday.  I've had to introduce them because I'm now obsessed. 

This is Stringer.

And here's Wallace.

 

Stringer bullies Wallace.  A LOT.  We're worried that naming Stringer after a gangster and Wallace after the weakling who's ultimately a fatal victim of Stringer's gangsterism might have made this all too inevitable.

This is Stringer in the middle of roughing up Wallace, interrupted by the flash.  Look how mean he is.

And lastly, these are The Twins.  It's hard to get a photo of them because they're mental.

new business card

These arrived recently.  Good likeness I think.

akala

Wickedness.

fearful and irregular forms

Why do beauty and horror go?  Not one of those everday questions, but it got raised for me in a big way last week when I saw this photography exhibition.  Maybe it's like any of the big opposites - grief and euphoria, tragedy and comedy - one extreme is exacerbated, punctuated, and even made bearable by the other.  Anyway, on the first wall of his Richard Misrach's On the Beach collection he's written that he's 'come to believe that beauty can be a very powerful conveyor of difficult ideas.’  Another way of making sense of these things I suppose. But strange in its purposiveness use of beauty.  Whatever.  I've been trying to work out why these photos got to me so much.

Every year from the summer I was born, we'd go as a changing family to the same place in Cornwall. When my parents first found it it was a remote, tucked away secret. If you were teleported there right now with no information your first guess might be Greece. Corsica or Italy maybe. It's one of those small miracles on the west coast.  We returned year after year to trammel the same rough path down to the sea in (slightly bigger) bare feet or flip flops, buckets rubbing at legs sore from salty sun; for long hours marooned in creations made from the sand that seemed the same every time but can't have been; drowsily letting the sounds of the waves and children, the dogs and kite-flying mix with the water in our ears to make a kaleidoscope of sound. Sandy tents, scolding showers, stormy nights. These were perfect summers.

And then for eight years straight I didn’t go at all. Cornwall was miles away (now I finally had to try and make my own way), and I had other things to do. Friends, boyfriends, school, work.  Growing up.

Three years ago I took Matt to introduce him to it. The momentousness of going back almost spoiled  it (happily it actually didn't, and now it's fine).  Everywhere I turned there were ghosts.  Family members, dogs, memories, ideas.  Some of these things long gone in my life, but still right there on the beach. And the beach itself remained completely unchanged. I remember grabbing handfuls of sand, and listening for changes in the waves; searching for old paths - almost hoping they were gone - but it was all, still, right as it was.  Apart from one thing.  It felt...what?  Odd. Like after my growing up – which felt like it had happened alongside the world growing up in some ways (9/11, innocences lost) - after all this, how could it still be the same?  Was this beautiful, perfect place even realistic anymore?  How could it have survived absolutely intact?   It felt precarious.  Like an elderly relative no longer equipped for the world. 

And suddenly going to a place like this, a capsule of all my most cherished childhood thoughts and feelings, felt different. In fact going to the beach generally (for some reason a British beach, in particular) - with all the others to sunbathe publicly but in private as we do, with our own little make believe walls - was somehow naive.

So last week the photographs in On the Beach did all that for me, all over again.  And I'd forgotten the feeling.  After the first couple of days in Cornwall it had gone.  But this time the disconcertion was something worse.  The pictures are so vast, and there must have been around twenty maybe thirty. The scale makes them momentous right off the bat. As does the combined beauty in their expanse of uniform content from a distance: sea sometime dark, sometimes diaphonous; blistering sunshine; mud-gold sand. And as you get up close tiny figures, one in this one, a couple in the next, aerially watched on the beach or in the sea - intruded on from way above.  A man sunbathes next to the dead calm shore line, at his feet a monstrous stretch of sea, at his head, weirdly empty sand.  In the next a couple with their arms wrapped around each other stare at something strangely, making an island of their frailty in the middle of infinite water.

And then you notice these figures have strange shapes. One man on the beach is at the same time a knocked out sunbather, and also the famous figure falling from the world trade centre.  Recognition, then nausea.  So you look again: no.  But yes it is, it’s the same famous, horribly graceful pose: legs at angles, head pointing down. Then there's a man who lies on the sand, a shirt protecting his eyes from the sun, arms at rest by his sides.  But something's not right again: the shirt’s a blindfold and his arms might be tied there.  A sun worshipper and a hostage.

A rare couple of scenes are crowded – everyone on the beach, as usual watched from far enough above to make them tiny; so close to each other as we all are on the beach - exposed but separate.  Our view is intimate: the stuff you can’t see of your neighbours when you’re on the beach.  A man’s expression as he bares his face to the sun, flippers neatly laid either side of their feet.  A couple’s fingers intertwining in the tiny space between their bodies.  Everyone painfully current and temporary, frail against the beach. Our omniscient gaze makes their situations small, finite, under threat. And also a little ridiculous: why be at once so together and so separate?

So you realise in all this beauty that's shocking in its own right something sad, and even horrific.  It's beautiful in spite and because of the disrespect shown for the figures, the way observing them makes of them something sad.  Perhaps they're foolish to think they're safe? 

Course I might have got it wrong.  It might just be nice beach snaps.  But I was freaked.

blue and joy go large

Latest instalment from Daniele and Fabio and their puppet counterparts.

They've left Saatchi to give Blue and Joy full time attention (I believe the puppets were getting too famous for part time). Which is great news.

being away, and football

So here I am in America again. Feels like about 5 minutes ago I was here before. Although an awful lot has happened since then. And it's so long since I posted I'm not really sure I know how to do it any more. (Of course it's debatable I ever really did). But I'm getting that thing - I don't know if this is a common blogging malaise - where the longer I leave it, the less I think of that's worthwhile posting. At least not on a blog that still vaguely purports to be planning related.

So I thought I might jack in the planning thing, blog wise. And start to do something more like the writing I'd like to do on here. That's the plan anyway. We'll see.

Actually since I came for work last time, I've also been back on our honeymoon road trip. But that was west - San Francisco, northern California. We would have made it to Oregon had we not put the wrong fuel in the car...but in the end that didn't stop it being completely perfect. And one of the surprising things about it was how O.B.S.E.S.S.E.D I got with NFL. Out of nowhere. Anyone who knows me knows this is weird. I don't get rugby. I do get soccer when I'm enough in the mood. I loathe stuff where people get hurt a lot, like, well boxing. And on the whole I find sports analysis about as fun as stabbing my eyes out. But there I was, motel after motel, sneaking peaks at the new season's NFL coverage with something like mania.

God knows what it is. The national festivity around the new season. The beauty of it when someone breaks free to score, definitely. But really, it's in the commitment, and the danger, and the ridiculous courage involved. I think. Also, it's a lot to do with this pep talk I saw.

I wish I could give pep talks like that. Or maybe have someone who could give me them.

So we had to watch Any Given Sunday when we got back. The best bits of which were the lion growling noises they put over the action sequences. Silly, brilliant stuff.