Craft

Practicing kindness: now is our time

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So I’ve been thinking about this post for a few days now, often while ‘slightly’ under the influence, and I’m still not quite sure how to put it, but here goes. I’ve been working and volunteering in mental health type jobs for 4 years. I have spoken with many distressed and suicidal people. I have spoken with many people who’s experience of being a human is radically different to mine. The one thing I have learned is this: Empathy, kindness, the ability to listen well – These are super powers. The kind that cause a slow, incremental, healing kind of change (rather than something save-the-day glamorous like flying), but super powers no less. And the best thing about these particular super powers is that the more you use them, the more you practice them, the stronger and better they get.

This year has felt like a pretty grotty year to me. We have seen frankly irresponsible politicians using frightening and racist rhetoric to get their own way. And they have been pretty effective in this, leaving countries, families, and friends divided. It has been pretty awful to see them speak to the very worst in our natures, and to see people respond positively to that. But I am actually quite hopeful. I feel like this is a backlash against all that is progressive, and liberal, and tolerant, and kind. The backlash has been so petty and vitriolic and aggressive, so peppered with petulant language and poorly thought through arguments, that I actually think these guys are running scared. But scared people, especially scared rich people, can be destructive indeed. I see it as a direct challenge to all of us who practice daily the arts of compassion and kindness and understanding.

It’s Christmas Day as I write this. Traditionally a time, symbolically, of love and respect for our fellow humans. It is a time to reflect on the year gone past, and to think about how we will act in the year going forwards. Those of us who believe in all of this lefty woolly kindness and understanding have to step up to really walk the walk in 2017. Now is our time. It may feel like the best thing to do is hide under a rock somewhere until all the nastiness is over but that too would be irresponsible. In my life time it has never felt more important to stand up and speak out against hate and racism and misogyny. There are lots of tired, frightened people around. If we duck out of this now there will be many more. We need to talk with each other, be kind to each other, understand each other. As a people, a community, it is in our power to heal the mess these politicians have left. 

Now is our time people. Go forth, listen, and be kind.

Avoiding Christmas burnout

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I’ve been trying to do too much over the last few weeks and over the last week have been super tired. My posting here has slipped a bit because of this, but hopefully I’ll have a bit more time after I finish up work for the holidays next week. Having got my self to a state of this kind of tiredness, I’ve been thinking a bit about what people mean when they talk about self care. 

Last weekend I should have been finishing off some art work I’d been commissioned to do (which the paper cuts above are part of) and instead my boyfriend and I decided to go for a long walk and a visit to the pub. We managed to find ourselves walking as the sun was setting into this amazing burning pink orange display, just before it sank over the horizon. In the part of Kent that we live in, excitingly we have wild green parakeets. Just at sunset more and more birds took to the air so that we were treated to the sight of the silhouettes of these lovely birds set against the red sky. I would have missed it if I had been working on my commission.

When I was young my granddad used to have this catch phrase; ‘when there is work to be done we must cut out the fun’. I never really identified with it, but have found my self working harder and harder to fit in various artistic projects around a full time day job. I still have my commission to finish off this weekend, and a Christmas party to squeeze in somehow. These feel like difficult times and I am sure that many people are a bit like me just before Christmas – head down, trying to finish things. I think that maybe sometimes, when there isn’t much time, self care is as simple as lifting your head up, and looking at the sun as it dips below the horizon.

Christmas baubles

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We put up our Christmas tree today. I’s a bit earlier than usual for me but this is the first year my partner and I have lived together so rather exciting. I’m not particularly religious but I do like Christmas very much. I think I have manages to surprise the boyfriend by my secret love of sparkles and glitter. I’ve been making some bits for our tree this year as I was enjoying the process of designing and making things that are all about celebration.


These are made from polystyrene spheres. I’ve covered them with black tissue paper and hand cut papers stars or flowers depending on how you see them. I tend to use a combination of recyled papers and arts quality paper. I’ve found there is something quite meditative about slowly building up layers of paper and glue. Anyway, I think they look nice on the tree.


I really like the rituals around Christmas, particularly the traditions that have roots in cold snow bound countries and that probably originate around marking the winter solstice. Somehow for me there is something quite magical about the sparkle of ice and snow. I like having a tree, and sharing warm food and wine with people around them. I hope everyone is enjoying kicking off with their own winter traditions and their winter time making.

Musings on Mark Kermode

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I’ve not felt like writing so much in that last few weeks, I’m not entirely sure what that’s about, but I’ve been doing making type things so maybe I only have so much creative energy. But I have just started reading ‘The Good, the bad, and the multiplex’, by Mark Kermode. It’s a book that has been out for some time. It’s been lurking in my kindle library for some time. I’m not about to do a book review. I have yet to make it past Chapter 2, so have little substance to base any review on. But I am enjoying it so far, and wanted to share a musing prompted by the book.

It’s a little ranty for my tastes. I like to see a skilfully executed rant, and in his film review work he is known for some excellent rant work. But in his description of what sounded like an excruciatingly irritating visit to a multiplex cinema, I feel he may have reached peak rant. That said, the book by very elegantly explaining the role and the importance of the skill the projectionist in the art of cinema, and I liked this beginning very much.

The projectionist, he explains, is a vital part of the art work, not some who presses play on the DVD player. He then goes on to explain how the profession is slowly being wiped out across the UK by the introduction of digital technologies coupled by the arrogance of large multiplex cinema managers. Cinemas are slowly bleeding their projectionists. If you have ever had the experience of sitting in a cinema where half of the picture is slipping off the screen, or freezes half way through the movie never to start again, this is probably the explanation. You have been denied the proper care and attention of a projectionist.

He goes to to begin talking about how the desire to make money has taken over from the desire to make good art in much of commercial cinema. For me this brings together a few themes that have been floating around the news lately. One is the increasing likelihood that robots and machines will replace more and more humans in jobs, and the second is the idea that the thing that is human about artistic work is somehow unimportant, and should be subservient to the thing that makes money (any thing that makes money). As humans we are fundamentally wired to be social, and to connect with other people and understand them. At a basic biological level, we like there to be other humans about, doing things and helping each other. As a species, much of what we are about concerns this. This helping, this tending to each other’s needs is an evolutionary, competitive advantage – we tend to die if we have to do it all on our own. That there is no longer a projectionist taking care of each screen in the cinema may save the cinema money, but it costs them in skill and expertise. With the projectionist disappears it costs the cinema that very human ability to care for and respect the audience.

If going to the cinema begins to feel less special than snuggling up with a buddy on the sofa with a pizza and Netflix, why go to the cinema at all? You only pay (a rather large chunk of cash) to go to the cinema because it is meant to be a special experience. The stripping out of the things that feel human may make things seem more efficient, but it may also make audiences forget why they should show up and pay up in the first place.

 

Train delays and Sunny Worthing

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My train has been cancelled and my evening is running miserably late. Here are some lovely sunny photos of my visit to Worthing 2 weeks ago to cheer anyone else standing and waiting in a cold train station right now. 

I love these Victorian weather shelters on the beach. They had a bit of style.

Look, sunshine, the sea, blue sky. Imagine the feel of these locely tjings. Good luck, fellow travellers.

Fireworks and autumn leaves

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I’ve been enjoying autumn. Yesterday I took a drive with my partner and his mum through Kent and Sussex. It’s easy when you live in a busy city like London just how beautiful this funny little country is. It didn’t take long for us to be driving through rugged wooded countryside and small rural towns full of pretty cottages. Autumn is splendid this year. The countryside is rich in red and gold, copper and bronze. This flare up will not last long. This season, perhapse a little more than others, feels like one of nature’s ways of prodding us into mindfulness. See this moment, stare into the richness of the scene. Smell the bonfire scent on the air. For all this soon will have passed.

Last night I went to the first firework s display I’ve been to for years. My sister used to live abroad and I used to find myself out of the country around this time of year visiting her. There wasn’t a bonfire. We were by the sea and the fireworks were launched off the end of the peer, soaring into the inky dark sky and exploding, their sparkle and colour reflecting off the water. Turn away for a few moments and you would have missed it. It’s not often that we just stand and look at something beautiful, but last night the beach was full of faces turned up to the sky.

Putting things down, picking things up, starting again

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new-doc-images

Over the last few weeks I’ve been making a slow return to working on two projects that I started last year. At the beginning of last year I took a course in documentary film making and I took two courses in play writing. I’ve been interested in the process of documentary filmmaking for quite a while. A lot of my formal training has been in research methods and in the social sciences, and have some frustrations with the way that academic work gets communicated (or doesn’t) to the wider world. At the time this seemed like a good thing to understand a bit better, and a good fit with my existing skill set. I took the play writing course because I was stuck with a novel I was working with and thought it would be helpful to look at it from a different approach. But then I got hooked and decided I had to write a play, obviously. And I did, sort of.

But there were problems. The film school that I enrolled with decided to change the dates of their course without really giving me much notice and I ended up trying to do both things at the same time, and have a full time job too. It worked for a while, but then I went through some crappy nonsense in my private life, and started a new job, and it didn’t really work anymore. Up until the beginning of September I’d not really worked on either project for 12 months and was not feeling great about that as I really wanted to finish something well enough to send it ‘somewhere’. I also have a film maker in my family, my dad, who kept gently reminding me that I should, ‘Work on my film’. And he’s right, I should be working on my film, because I got lucky with a really good story and could do something really interesting with it.

It took me a bit of time to work out what the blocks were on continuing with both projects, but I think I have a list now.

  1. Space – I was living with a friend of mine at the time and didn’t really have a huge amount of space. I’m kind of messy, and didn’t want to leave my mess all over his flat, so I ended up with a kind of squashed psychological space to work in.
  2. Teaching style – on the doc film course at least I felt a little as though I didn’t gel with the tutor. I think she’s great film maker, and loved talking to her about films. But she’s very much from the observational documentary style school. I wanted to work with other artistic things, like animation and set up pieces of film. I think I felt at the time that I wasn’t really able to make ‘my’ film so I did’t make a film at all.
  3. Time and Timing – the timing was bad, I was sad and exhausted. I was still getting used to living in London having moved from Cardiff, which is a much smaller, calmer city and one that I knew very well. I did’t have time to feed my creative self and that meant I couldn’t really put the work in that was needed.
  4. The fraud police – would anything I produced actually be as good as I thought they could be?

Above are some images I finished off yesterday that will part of an animation for the documentary. I’ve been writing new scenes for the play. So what’s happened? What has changed? I can think of two things that have really worked in ‘unblocking’. The first is that I cut out a load of things that I was doing, including socialising with some people that kind of drained me a bit, and carved out that time for doing creative stuff. Small, achievable projects first, at which step by step led me back to the ‘big’ ones. I’ve also come to realise that part of my creative process involves giving projects long ‘down’ periods as this enables me to come back to them with a new perspective. So not working on either project for a year doesn’t feel un-natural with hindsight.

Second, and I think this is the big one. I moved in with the boyfriend. We got a place together that gives me more space, and that helps. But I think the real key here is him. He’s constantly and consistently supportive, and frequently cooks the dinner so I can get on with something else. He’s such a tidy organised person, and yet he tolerates my creative mess everywhere, and he does it all with humour. He’s always happy to listen to my ideas, and talk to me about that, while never once said ‘you should do this’. I think that’s enabled me to regain some creative confidence. I had been told in the past that picking the right partner was really important, and I had been a bit dismissive of that, because at the time I was single and thought I could do it all myself. Turns out that advice was pretty good advice, after all.