Kidnapping ideas 3: The Oh Comely Art Edition

First of all I feel like I need to apologize for the lack of updates lately. We’ve all been pretty busy and blogging sort of drew the shortest straw. We’ll off course try to update every week, but we might not always make it. That said, I was waiting to make a new kidnapping ideas post, because I had bought many new magazines. But again, due to too little hours in a day, I still haven’t read all of them. What I’ll do is make a bunch of shorter posts about 1 magazine in particular every time. This time it will be issue five of Oh Comely. It had so many great things again, but there were two art things that I thought were really cool!

Birds in Hats

Alice Tam was interviewed by Oh Comely about her website Birds in Hats, which is exactly what it sounds like: she draws birds in hats and they are awesome! She doesn’t go for the obvious combinations and really gives the birds a personality. One of my personal favorites is the Flamingo in a Fascinator, but she drew so many that you can pick a favorite for yourself!

Flamingo in a Fascinator

Robin in a Christmas Top Hat

England Revisited

This article/interview was about an art project by Simon English called England Revisited. In 1971 he visited 75 points across England picked carefully by writing the word ENGLAND on a map of the country. He met interesting people, found relatively unknown country spots and left notes on every mark. But 40 years later, he found himself wanting to revisited the places he had been. He took pictures, trying the find the original places he went to the first time around, which really makes you think about change. It’s interesting to see how much or how little some things change in such a big amount of time. All the pictures and video’s from his trip can be found on his website and you won’t regret taking a look. If I ever make an art work I want it to be something big and impressive like this. 

Point 16 in 1971

Point 16 in 2010

Point 33 in 1971

Point 33 in 2010

Travelling Notebooks

Besides the above art, Oh Comely also tried to make a work of their own by handing out 35 notebooks to strangers and asking them to write in them, pass them on to others and sending them back when they are full. Only two notebooks came back, which was really disappointing. I thought the idea was so great and if they want to try it again, we’ll participate and make sure the notebook will be sent on.

Comiques

In non-oh Comely related artwork: I also found a cool comic that I want to share! It’s a comic made by Anne Emond, who is a writer, illustrator and drawer of comics from Brooklyn. Her comics are mostly about herself and other people looking ridiculous, but to me they are mostly very recognizable, funny and awesome!

Frankie goes to Wayward

As said in the last post, I bought my very first issue of Frankie Magazine at Restored in Amsterdam. I found it through a guest post on Pamflet and just knew I needed to buy it!

Frankie Magazine has a really cool vibe. It uses great thick paper, amazing soft colours and is filled with great articles, shopping tit bits and good looking fashion. And next to the nice interviews they also give you tips on how to recognize vintage chairs and what to do with your spice rack or how to reuse random things lying around the house. It also comes with a pretty calendar! There are a lot of things that I liked about the magazine, but it’s just too much to write about! So I’ll only tell you about some of my favourites.

The first one is a column by Rowena Grant-Frost about her childhood dog that died recently. It was heartwarming, funny and also really sad. Anyone that has ever had a childhood pet can read it and understand how she feels.

The second article is also by Rowena (I guess I already picked a favourite), which gives you biggish ideas for small talk. She lists 15 ideas to keep a conversation going. Some of my favourites:

2. If the world depended on you sexually reproducing with Simply Red or Kenny G., who would you choose? I would choose to watch the world be consumed by a fiery fountain of lava and obsidian. But I am very selfish.

I had to look up who Kenny G. was, but I completely agree with her. Let the world burn while I watch with my dignity still intact.

11. Would you rather suckle on a monkey, or have a monkey suckle on you? The answer seems obvious, right? Who the heck would want a monkey nipple in their mouth? Well, you’d be surprised.

This one was tough! I also went for suckling a monkey right away, but they both have their downsides...

12. When was the last time you vomited? Vomiting is a rich topic for conversation. There is context to appreciate, circumstances to explain and colour and texture to describe in great detail.

I absolutely hate vomiting, but I love the stories that other people tell me about it!

14. What was the last book you finished? An unacceptable answer is: ‘I don’t read.’ If you hear this, you should shimmy towards the closest exit and get away from these people. They cannot be your friend.

Lotte and I encountered someone on work who gave us a similar answer and our response was the same. If you don’t read, there is no way we can be friends.

They also featured an article about being cool. Four writers tell their concept of cool: what it is, where it comes from, and whether we care. I really liked reading what different types of people think about what it means to be cool and what they think is cool. Caro Cooper was the last one to write a column and I really appreciated her enthusiasm in the first paragraph, when she thinks she can write about what is cool right now instead of the concept itself. The overall concensus for me was that real cool is very relative and you shouldn’t give a shit about what other people think.

I wanted to pick a third by Rowena, but I’m already acting like a crazy fangirl, so ‘ll go with 30 days from Justin Heazlewood, who’s an Australian comedian, author, actor and songwriter (busy much!) The article is about a challenge one of his friends gave him. He couldn’t say anything negative or bitch about anyone for 30 days. He writes about some of the days and how difficult it was to not bitch, and how often he did do it. I don’t think I could ever win this challenge and especially not under the circumstances he had to do this. And even though he doesn’t make the challenge, it still worked out fine in the end.

To show you what the article was like, I picked my favourite day as an example.
Day 25: Honestly, I’d stop bitching if bands ould stop being boring. Life is spent in a cocoon of loner superiority. You are above everything- never participating fully. Guarded, defensive, skeptical. It’d be kind of cool if it made you happy. I had a dream last night that I got really angry at my best friend Josh Earl. I was shouting at him about all kinds of things. He’s a performer as well. I think I’ve managed to fail this challenge on a subconscious level. That makes me feel better.

An illustrated Justin Heazlewood

I think Frankie is a great magazine and I would love to read it more often, but I do also think it is too expensive in Holland. One issue will set me back 20 euro's, which is very mean, because an issue in Australia costs only 9 dollars. If it is something you can afford, I urge you to get it, but I don't think I'll buy every issue that comes available. Maybe I should just reconsider my finances... who needs to eat anyways?

A week in the zoo: Monki Party and Swan Market

This Wednesday Lotte and I went to Amsterdam for the Monki Party. They were having a party to showcase their spring/summer 2011 collection and everyone was getting a 20% discount on everything! We decided to spend the entire day in Amsterdam and went to Restored to buy Frankie Magazine, which is a great magazine, but I’ll write more about it when I finish it. 

Lotte also bought Russh, another Australian magazine, at Athaeneum Newscentre (this is the best place to get magazines anywhere in Holland) and she bought really sweet smelling chocolate tea at Tea Bar, which is apparently delicious and even available online!

The Monki party was pretty fun. They had champagne, pink champagne, beer and non alcoholic drinks. There were two very female dj’s with very awesome moustaches and lots and lots of people. I’ve never seen a store that busy. We had to stand in line to try on the big stack of clothing for about half an hour and also had to wait the same amount of time to pay for them. But the 20% discount was worth it and we both bought some nice new items! I think it’s a really cool idea to have a party for the new collection and I hope they’ll do this again for autumn/winter.

Back in Rotterdam we went to the second edition of the Swan market. It was at Rotabs Stylecenter, which is an awesome location. The weather was delightfully sunny and the place was buzzing with people. It was nice, but we did think it was too bad that there weren’t that many new people there. We did off course, take some pictures!

Harmonica Necklace made by VanRox

Filler Inspiration Post

Due to a serious lack of inspiration I won’t be making a real writy post this week. But to still do something this week I decided to post some pictures of awesome things I came across.

First up! Chet Baker Sings.
My boyfriend and two of my friends have been having a jazz/blues fase and it turned me onto Chet Baker. He’s a jazz trumpeter and made this one album called Chet Baker Sings, which is just such a sweet, but cool album. And Chet Baker used to be quite attractive!

Just like most people on the internet, I’ve been looking at the runway pictures of fashion week and there were really cool designs! I’m already on the lookout for a really long wintercoat like the ones at Theyskens Theory. They make you look really cool and careless and I really hope the trend will carry to high street fashion stores. Otherwise I’ll just have to make one myself. That is how much I want it.

I’ve also been in love with Mary Katrantzou’s Autumn/Winter 2011-12 collection. The prints and shapes are amazing. I usually don’t go for really bold prints, but the material she uses and the style just make it work so well.

More fashion related info, I watched My Fair Lady for the first time last week and it was really good. I’m a big sucker for musicals anyways, but it had a great story and really nice outfits. Although I was a bit disappointed by the dress she wore to the gala, but I think my expectations were just a bit too high.

I’ve also watched the entire first season and what is already available of the second season of The Vampire Diaries. I thought it was going to be terrible, and to be honest the first episodes were (Who ever came up with that writing in my diary voice over monologue should be fired) but after that it got really good. It’s less violent and sexy than True Blood, but it’s funnier, has shocking stories and pretty decent characters. And also hot guys!

All the cast pictures look a bit ridicolous, but the show is really good!

The last thing I found through a somewhat old post on the Pamflet Magazine Blog. It’s a Australian Magazine called Frankie and the look reminds me a lot of Oh Comely. I haven’t read it yet, but there is one store in Amsterdam that sells it. I’ll be going there on Wednesday and I’ll let you know if it is as awesome as it looks.

There’s quite a busy week coming up. Lotte and I are going to the Monki Party for their new spring/summer collection on Wednesday, to the Swanmarket on Sunday and I also want to go to Museumnacht on Saturday (It’s a night where all the museums in town are open and host special exhibitions and stuff). So lot’s to do and hopefully more to tell that week!

Kidnapping Ideas 2: The Emma Edition

Soon I Will Be Invincible

Ok, I know I’ve tweeted about this already, but I just can’t not mention it. I’ve read Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman and it was great! I bought the book because I had read The Magicians by Lev Grossman (they’re brothers) which I loved and counting on the writing gene to run in the family, I gave it a try. Soon I will be Invincible is a book about a world where superheroes and super villains are a ‘common’ thing. It’s a sort deconstruction of the superhero/comic genre, written in witty prose and funny remarks. The book is well written and just so much fun to read. I listened to The Sound of Young America Podcast with Austin Grossman (I know, I’m such a geek) and he made a really cool point about how he could explore different things in his ‘comic-novel’ that he wouldn’t be able to do with a real comic book. In a novel you get to spend so much more time in the main characters head, so you can explore the things that are taken for granted in comics, like why they wear the costumes they wear, what it feels like to have a body that is half made of metal and what the difficulties are of wearing a really heavy velvet cape. It’s really interesting to see how they deal with all these crazy things, which adds a more human aspect to the godlike feeling most superheroes/-villains usually have.

Before this, I hadn’t read a book in a while, because I was going through an insatiable craving for magazines. I rediscovered the fun of buying and reading them not too long ago and it took up most of my free time. My interest in magazines has wavered a bit, which is a good thing, because now it won’t get to the point where I have to eat dry bread because I can’t afford a simple slice of cheese. I would love to write a superhero story one day. I love the epicness of the battles, the drama of being different and the great love stories. It’s a shame I can’t even draw a simple stickfigure, but otherwise I would’ve definitely gone into the comic business.

Emma Forrest

This month’s British Elle contained an article from Emma Forrest (I love her name!) about how it feels to leave your twenties. Emma herself was 15 when her first article was published and 16 when she got a column in the Sunday Times. In the article she writes about what it was like to grow up in the limelight and how much better she felt after turning 25. It ended with an anecdote about herself and her friend Kat Dennings (which you might know from the movie Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist) attending an Oscar-seasoned party where Emma ran into an old ex-boyfriend.

‘As I talked to him, I processed that some things do not change at all as you get older. Heartbreak now was just like the heartbreak I’s felt when I was 19, then 25; and now I was 30 and it was the same heart, the same ache. Really, my heart felt like vinyl that  had been scratched so it would always jump in that song. Kat sensed the awful, quivering moment when I was about to lose it. She marched me to the bathroom under the pretext of needing to tell me something, and before we made it past the swing door I was crying. She handed me a stiff drink. She dug a false eyelash from my cleavage when it skied there on my tears. But I couldn’t stop. ‘I’m just too old for this,’ I wailed. Then someone walked in and the evening took a strange and beautiful turn. ‘You don’t remember?’Kat asked the next morning.

‘Oh my god…’

‘Yes. And then Demi Moore hugged you.’ Neither of us had ever met her before or since. ‘She clutched you to her bosom and stroked your hair.’

‘Oh God, Kat! She did!’

‘And she kept saying, “Everything’s going to be fine, everything is going to be fine.”

And it is.

I was having a bad day while I read this, and for some reason this anecdote was so reassuring that I felt better in an instant. I’d wish we all had a Demi Moore walking around to give us a hug when we feel bad!

Her latest book is a memoir called It’s Your Voice in My Head and if it contains more of these reassuring stories, I’ll definitely love it.

Get back in your book

The last ‘idea’ I want to share with you are some really pretty pictures I found on But, Honestly, a blog by Emma Fourie (I guess I have a theme, with these Emma’s). She posted some pictures from Lissy Elle which are really impressive. I started browsing her Flickr Page and found a collection of pictures called ‘Get back in your book’. They are about ‘a collection of characters who strive to stay in the real world’. I’m a sucker for anything literary so I couldn’t help but like them! Be sure to look around on her page, there is a lot more to see.

Alice in Wonderland

Harry Potter

Wendy - Peter Pan

Beauty and the Beast

The concept reminded me of the first issue of Afterzine, where six style bloggers where asked to create a look based on their favorite book, character or cover. I thought it was fun how most of them picked a book by Haruki Murakami, I guess he’s just a very fashionable writer. If you don’t own Afterzine yet, I really urge you to buy it. It’s filled with amazing pictures, illustrations and stories. If only I could write for them! But if you do already own it, a little bird recently told me a second issue will appear around spring this year… Can’t wait! 

Kidnapping Ideas

Sometimes I read something in a book or a magazine and it makes me wish I had come up with that myself or it makes me think I should use that idea somehow. My last post about collecting was something like that, but that wasn’t all I found. I decided to relay all the cool ideas I found that inspired me somehow, so that they might be able to inspire you as well!

The Pen Society

I’m reading The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami right now. It’s a collection of short stories and there was one in there that I particularly liked. The story is called a Window and it’s about a young man who works for a small company called ‘The Pen society’. His job is called ‘Pen Master’ and he has to respond to the letters send by the members of the society. The members are mostly people wanting to learn how to write letters or people wanting some company through the mail. I thought this sounded like a great job, that I would love to have. Also it's just great fun to receive letters all the time! 

The story went on from there off course, but the idea stuck with me and I think it would be a nice idea for a company. I’m just not sure if there is a market out there for something like this. It will help the mailmen so they might be willing to finance my business proposal... 

The picture comes from a project called Mail me Art where amateurs and professionals could send in their artwork through the mail. The entries were put together in a exhibition and also a book, which is another cool idea! I love how a lot of projects nowadays try to incorporate their audience. It makes for really interesting collaborations.

The Neurotic Women's club 

Oh comely magazine (which is one of my favourite magazines) had a really cool article about women living alone written by Ellie Phillips. The Neurotic Women’s club is about women suffering from the Bridget Jones fear that ‘you will die alone, and be found three weeks later half-eaten by alsatians’. Although I had no idea what Alsatians where (they’re dogs) and I do not live alone, I understand the fear because I live in a constant state of healthy paranoia. The women in the club have made the agreement to text each other every day around a certain time to let them know they are still alive. You get a sort of buddy that you'll text the word ‘Alive’ and that will text you back the word ‘Yey’ (I assume other words could also be appropriate, but I really liked the ones she described). If you don’t hear anything from that person during that time, you’ll know something has happened and you ‘go around their flat and you break the door down’. I’m not sure if I should use it with friends of family, but I like the idea of checking in with everyone, knowing they’re ok. 
These were the ideas I liked this week. If I find some more, I'll post them!

Back from Berlin

Finally my Berlin post! I got home on Sunday, but I was just too tired from having a four hour train delay and Christmas dinner that night. Yesterday night was spent watching Dr. Who and finishing Twin Peaks, which was totally worth not writing a post (especially the Dr. Who Christmas special, it was amazing!) I was not sure what to write about my trip, because it wasn’t very fashionable or innovating. We did nice touristy things like visiting the East Side Gallery, Checkpoint Charlie and Weihnachtsmärkte. Germany apparently really loves Christmas, because there were so many markets and lights everywhere that even I kind of got enough of the holiday. But besides all this, I had a lot of fun and saw some cool things! We went to a place called Hackesche Höfe which was originally a Jewish part of town. In the second World War the entire area was damaged. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall the building was returned to its rightful owners, who turned it into a cultural community. Now it’s a marketplace for designers, artists and other creative people. There are restaurants, movie theaters and concert halls. Right now it is one of the most expensive places in Berlin, because of its booming culture and influence on the city, which I thought was pretty cool! They had some nice stores, but I mostly liked the aesthetic of the place. It’s divided in small ‘hofjes’ (there isn’t really a great English translation, but you could call it a sort of patio) surrounded by trees and nice front walls. I took most of my pictures with Lotte’s analogue camera, so I don’t have that much to show yet, but just to give you an impression:

Near to this was the magazinestore I posted about earlier Do you read me?! and all I can say was that it was great! There were so many magazines and the owner had a really cute dog! I decided to buy some German magazines, because they were the cheapest and I can’t get them at home. I bought Sleek, Zoo Magazine and Indie. They are all partly in German, which is sort of a problem. I only know a small bit of German, so I might just skip over those parts and look at all the pretty pictures. 

One of the funniest things we did was look for the grave of Hegel, a philosopher I just don’t seem to get (I had to retake a test on his book Elements of the Philosophy of Right 5 times). He was buried on a small cemetery near the magazine shop. It was a very snowy place and we looked all over for the grave but couldn’t find it! When we finally looked at the map, counted the graves and finally found him, we took so many pictures of us next to his stone, it got kind of hilarious and creepy at the same time.

I love taking pictures of cemeteries!

We also saw the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin play at the Philharmonie. It was my first classical performance and I was really impressed. They played an amazing organ symphony by Camille Saint-Saëns with this tiny Asian girl on a double bass and another small girl on the organ. I was surprised the organ was played by someone so small and adorable, because it produced a wall of sound.

I also found a new cute cultural thing called Unser Sandmännchen. It’s an East German children’s series, with the cutest main character! They had a set of small magnets with images from the show, but I didn’t buy it which I now regret. Next time I’m back in Berlin, I’ll buy them for sure!

I hope everyone had a very nice Christmas, I had a great time. If you haven’t seen Dr. Who or don’t even know it, I strongly urge you to start watching. I’ll soon post something about bowties and unlikely style icons and this last episode of Dr. Who made me love them even more. Ok,  I’ll stop praising the show now… but it’s just so good! Go watch it!

Is he dreamy with that bowtie or what?

Magazine Eye Candy

I'm packing my bags for Berlin as I write this, so all you'll get from me this week is this tiny post. I was browsing for some cool stores to visit during my stay and I found this amazing magazine store called Do you read me?!
It's a magazine store in Berlin (almost next my hotel!) with massive amounts of german and foreign magazines. If you look at the pictures you'll just see neat black walls, filled with pretty covers. I'm already planning on spending all my money in this store, buying every magazine I can't find in Holland.
I'll post some more eye candy from the store and when I get back I'll post some things about my trip!