Threads

There’s been far too much reading and thinking, thinking and reading going on in this house for my liking. Interesting, but I’ve discovered it is rubbish for my sense of direction in terms of my own work, and gives me a feeling that everything I’m doing is unworthy. So I have decided to stop reading and thinking for at least a month.

I shall make things, sew, look at pictures and read things like Terry Pratchett instead. I shall listen to music while I cook. This morning (sorry if this starts to sound like Housewife Country Living Blog) I am making cassoulet and chocolate orange cookies, reading Pratchett in between the timer buzzing, and listening to a variety of stuff meandering around my iTunes library. One thing leads to another and back again. I started with Aqualung “Memory Man” wandered down to Bombay Bicycle Club, made a short stop at Clem Snide before heading for Radiohead “In Rainbows” wanting something more strident while the meat and onions sizzled, but then getting annoyed with Thom Yorke when the sizzling stopped, heading back to Aqualung’s “Still life” instead. Tom Waits beckons, but my 16yr old son makes disapproving noises when I start that up, so he might have to wait till I can sit with the headphones on.

Might have to invest in some EXPENSIVE cordless headphones, not the cheap ones I bought a while back and moaned about (I only have myself to blame, No-postage-£5-from-Hong-Kong is never going to provide a quality product is it?)

I haven’t posted photo of what I’m sewing because it has the construction marks and guidelines all over it, and you won’t see what’s going on, so I’ll save it till I can wash out the marks and show you properly.

I have eschewed the Arty Bollocks for a while. The blog will be descriptive, pictorial and “Oooh what a lovely shade of yellow” until I get my head back where it should be.

The photos are of the clothes I bought a couple of weeks back. They have brown paper shadows attached to them on my board for me to regard while going about my business. They move about, and sometimes get discarded. When I’m sure what they are doing, I’ll make them more permanent in some way.

So I feel as if I’m in a holding pattern. I’m relying on the making to sort me out and point me the right way. Usually works.

Blimey what a week! No, actually that should read… “Blimey, what a Wednesday!”

I have been messing about with my recording again. The latest song, Keep Calm, I think it is called. Although in its short life it has had 3 titles… at some point I’ll decide…. Anyway… less blathering….

I recorded a harmonising vocal with contrasting lyric over the chorus. Don’t know why, this phrase “In a minute” came to me, and I wanted to record it. So I stuck it over the latest song. I was fairly content. I wondered what it would sound like as a man’s voice. My work, as you’ll know if you’ve followed any of this bloggery, is very rooted in the feminine and the domestic. I zapped a bit of GarageBand magic at it and there I was, singing in a very deep voice… too deep actually, but it gave me the impression, enough to do some sort of evaluation of its masculinity. Of course, it changes the song totally. The phrase itself changes the song too, but the “male” voice makes a hell of a difference as you would expect. The fact that it is not a male voice, but my “masculinised” (is that even a word?) voice also begs a few questions. So by playing about, I’ve given myself a great big headache. The gender of my work has always been important, but I’ve managed to avoid the discussion quite successfully so far. The time has come I feel, when I can avoid it no more. So, those of you that are familiar with the issues, I could do with some guidance through this ignored, uncharted territory.

My fellow students have been enormously helpful in getting me to this point, prodding and questioning.

I had also started thinking and talking about pronouns, but for some reason had not done the joined up thinking between the “male” voice and this… Most of the writing I have done has been in the first person, and because of that, some of it has been pretty uncomfortable. Last night, on my latest piece of text, I changed all the “I”s to “she”s. Suddenly it all made loads of sense. By merely changing the pronoun, I have removed myself. Or I have created a persona I can blame for everything. Then taking another leap, I removed the pronouns altogether. I now have an un-gendered piece of writing, that merely by its context, suggests femininity, probably, but not in the words themselves. Interesting.

I’m also now thinking that I have overloaded “Keep Calm” with too much stuff. A common mistake when you start working in a new way or try new media. I think I’m going to remove the new vocal, and the possibility of a masculine, or masculinised voice and save them for another, simpler piece.

I’m going to work on the piece of writing a bit more. Examine its remaining femininity. Get it to scan more happily, it’s a little clumsy here and there. Then I might post it if I feel brave enough. I shall think about whether to post all 3 versions… That might kill off the remaining readers that haven’t got fed up of me up to this point.

I know I’m doing a lot of blogging lately… hope I’m not getting boring, but my brain is whizzing and this outlet seems to help!