Inspired by a birthday present given to Isabelle OC this week (a bespoke T-shirt with a list of her loves and hates on it, which is AMAZING), I have done an A-Z of things that bring me JOY and an A-Z of things that can poop off. Behold:
FABULOSITY
STUPIDOS
What are some things that YOU hate or LOVE enough to spend two hours colouring them in on a Saturday?
Posted in Fabulosity, Fashion, Food, Friends
This proves that women are better than men
Oh, Daddy be gay
This proves that women are better than men, they can go down to hell and come straight back again
Daddy be gay and eat candy
The title of this post comes from a song that I sang last night together with a group of amazing women at the Music & Liberation exhibition at Space Station Sixty Five in London. (I don’t have my London-centric hat on either: it just toured the UK, you might have seen it already.)
The opening was attended by women from kickass bands of the 1970s and 1980s, including Ginger & Spice, Sisterhood of Spit, Clapperclaw and the York Street Band:
(c) John Walmsley 1979
These women rocked out, made music and wrote wicked songs, but were mostly unheard by the larger world. Last night, and the exhibition as a whole, was a celebration of them. I WISH I could remember the band name of the two awesome women who performed – complete with air bass guitar! – one of their songs about the invisibility of women in history:
Where are the women’s faces?
Our lives leave no traces
There is no place
For us in your chronicles
History is no place for a lady
Edit! This ace performance was by Clapperclaw. I forgot to mention you can buy a CD of recordings from lots of the bands featured in the exhibition.
Lest this all sounds totally po-faced, I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard during that performance, which was complete with the audience supplying boom-tish drum beats, the aforementioned air guitar and a pretty sexy refrain.
Go check it out, at Space Station Sixty-Five, Building One, 373 Kennington Road, London SE11 4PS, until 13 January, then the materials will be accessible in the Feminist Archive South and Glasgow Women’s Library.
Here are some images nicked from postcards from the exhibition:
Shocking Pink Benefit poster, Feminist Archive South
I think my favourite part of this is the “creche by men against sexism”.
Northern Women’s Liberation Rock Band poster from Feminist Archive South
Just outside the exhibition space is a collection of buttons, badges and pins from feminist movements past, pretty inspiring (by which I shallowly mean, “I want these to pin on my denim jacket, I’m inspired to rock some early 1980s fashion and maybe get a mullet?” plus you know feminism and stuff):
And obviously we ended the night drunk and scrawling pro-women temporary graffiti on the night bus, pretty sure we go through to people on the 59 to Streatham and maybe changed some minds and lives with this?
Posted in Fabulosity, Feminism, Folk rock, Friends
Tagged Exhibitions, Music, That London, Women
I can’t think of a finer way to celebrate the jewel in south London’s crown, the Lambeth Country Show, than to pay homage to it in gifs. Welcome to my world, it involves pigs, carrots, beer, burgers and a miniature railway.
Field of Carrots
Every year the highlight of the Lambeth Country Show is the vegetable sculpting competition and this year I entered (along with my housemates Lizzie and Josie, and our Brixton Massive Crew, Maya and Dot) with a recreation of Antony Gormley’s “Field of Dreams” and “Angel of the North” rendered in root vegetables, including carrots, parsnips, sweet potato and butternut squash.
When setting it up in the marquee, we were filmed by a television crew for some countryside cookery programme for the Beeb next year, so if you want to see a sweaty, hungover me with smudged eyeliner shrieking about whittling carrots and grinning maniacally at the camera, watch out for that…
Friday night jerk break!
After attending a public meeting about the Tesco takeover of Music Bar on Brixton Hill, we got down to a Friday night of vegetable carving. But you can’t whittle a parsnip on an empty stomach, as the saying goes, and you can’t have a proper Brixton Friday night without jerk chicken from Negril. A platter involves jerk chicken, festival dumplings, coleslaw, gravy, rice and peas, plantain, chips, salad, hot sauce. We got two.
Culmination of a dream
For years Dot has talked about Brockwell Park’s miniature railway, which has been closed for repairs. We spend many a Friday night in summer getting drunk in the park and discussing the dream: volunteering to drive the miniature train, or at least ride it. The Lambeth Country Show gods provided: for a mere £1, we got a return ticket to the dream destination.
Bonus fun: scariest funfair ride ever, though the views over the park, the lido and Herne Hill were pretty awesome.
BABE 2: PIG IN THE CITY
Another joy of the country show is the events in the main arena: the first year I went, I saw sheepdog trials done with Indian running ducks instead of sheep, and the dog bit one of the ducks and was basically an untrained miscreant, and it was brilliant. Sadly last year a torrential downfall stopped me enjoying Russian cossack war horses or whatever, so this year’s pig races (with bonus runaway pig and surly teenagers) was a highlight.
Food, friends and fabulosity
It’s impossible to eat everything on offer at the country show, but we gave it a solid effort, from breakfast coffee and scones to fresh hot doughnuts dipped in chocolate to mac and cheese with bacon to burgers to falafel wraps and everything in between, all lubricated with lager and lols.
Instagram? Instagif!
I’m a fucking moustache finger tattoo away from being an insufferable hipster with my polka dot dress, casual “oh the BBC filmed me at the country show” chat and ironic vegetable sculpting, so why not tip this thing into critical mass and GIF my INSTAGRAMS from the weekend? Game changer.
