Shhh....the Guerrilla girls

are a group of women artists who are protesting about the under-representation of women in art.
Go here to find out more about them.
Dr Joolz will love their web site it is very girly.
The article I read about them here says they are on at the Tate Modern this Saturday.
Their next target is Hollywood.
Watch out boys.

shells

'sh' words are the theme for the blog this week, and yesterday's Guardian had a great shell chart which Molly put up on her wall.
Molly always makes gardens in the sand with shells on beaches.
Here is one of them.


Molly also surrounded her garden with found objects, and I found this interesting, a sort of ephemeral sculpture.



I have always been interested in found object art as here.
Part of my interest is the transformation of one thing into another, but it is the narrative behind the transformation that I am interested in.






Here is another potential art object.
What could it become?

Shoes

is the subject of my post today.
And we think ofcourse of this project and hope their event went very well.
This is a wonderful site and well worth exploring.
I adore this site and think it is very stylish.
When I was 14 I longed for a pair of wedgy shoes.
My mother, ofcourse, thought I should wear Clarke's flats (she was so sensible and right).
In the end, I got them, from Sacha at Snob and they were marvellous, they had suede sides and a blue top.
More memories of Sacha shoes here.
Imagine what I felt when I learned that they were being re-marketed and they were over £100 to buy.
What a shame.
Platform shoes were also very in when I was a teenager and we all longed to have tartan trousers like the Bay City Rollers (the shame).
Now I mostly wear flats and I rather like my black ballet flats which go with everything.
But once in a while I break out.
As here.

I wonder if it is secretly to rebel against my mother?

A life of crime

is not to be recommended, and my encounter with a ticket bus inspector got me thinking about what is or what is not wrong.
(Obviously this blog does not condone crime in any form but likes to muse on the subject).
I have just got the Banksy book from Captain John and I was interested in the way in which he had been positioned, not as an artist, but as someone to be seen as illegal.
Yet as he says in his book,

Graffiti is not the lowest form of art. Despite having to creep about at night and lie to your mum it's actually the most honest artform available. There is no elitism or hype, it exhibits on some of the best walls a town has to offer, and nobody is put off by the price of admission.

Certainly my children love to spot a Banksy as we live where he lives in Hackney, North London, like this one, five minutes from where we live.

Banksy
Originally uploaded by Alex Donald.

Banksy makes our lives better, not worse.

Like this one, on our local bus stop wall where we sit and wait.
Banksy goes further than saying that what he does is not criminal he says that
The people who truly deface our neighbourhoods are the companies that scrawl their giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff.

Whose shoes

Is the name of a blog I am involved with. Go here to experience its true zaniness.
Hilda will love it.
What I like about it, is that Year 8 pupils are recording their experiences of shoes and narratives, and music and sport have come up as key issues.
This reminds me of the museum shoes at Clifton Park
and the record player.


We might be able to use these for our exhibition but we could put in more stuff as well.
What should we include?

Misinterpretation

Can be creative or something else.
In Isabel's statistics exam (today) they asked:
Why is a sample better than a census and her reply was that a census was more irritating and a sample is better as it is more random.
I think this is a very good reply and I hope the examiner likes it.
Also, yesterday I went to Topshop after a very exciting day in Rotherham and bought a dress, which, it has to be said, was too young for me (alas).
Luckily it was re-interpreted as being for Isabel.
Sometimes, mis-interpretation can go well, as in me being in China (see below), other times it can confuse the person.
We in Museum Studies love misinterpretation.
It disrupts the provenance of things, and makes them unsettled.
It takes away fixity.
One of my plans in this project is to ask the children to write the labels for this object.


What will they write?
PS if you have any time today, go here. It will cheer you up.If you are Dr Joolz, this is a compulsory task.
Isabel found it.

Working in China

Martin Hughes announced today that I was working in China and while I had thought I worked in Sheffield, and possibly Rotherham, I could see what he meant when I thought about this.
yes, glass cabinets research.
This is also, ofcourse, cultural geography as it is about emplacement.

Filo parcels

Yesterday we made Filo Parcels
(with thanks to Mr Seabury who teaches here).
You start with feta cheese


which you mix with parsley

filo pastry
which you cut in long halves
you then put the feta cheese mix on the filo pastry, in small quantities



on one half of a triangle like this

fold it over in a triangle shape (maths is important here)
and keep folding until you have a triangular parcel
brush it with oil

then bake them in the oven for 20 minutes


until they are brown.




Delicious!
Back to Leeds tomorrow so on the road again.

Migration

Migration
Originally uploaded by NYC Comets.

was the subject of my two-day research seminar which was here.
It was on Language, Migration and the Re-theorization of Sociolinguistic Space.
You see, that, despite everything, I had to be there.
The Who are playing at the student union this Saturday which is exciting.
I heard Anna talk about from space to spatialization in border crossing narratives,
Stef and Jim do an amazingly interesting talk on from neighbourhoods to networks in their research on multilingual spaces, and Joan from Barcelona talk about Immigration in Catalonia: Marking territory through language.
I missed Ulrika on Madagascan music but I believe it was fantastic.
I love this stuff. We are all, in a sense, migrants.
Leeds is where I practically live, I might move there as I am also there on Monday for a workshop on this project, which is also about migration.
GNER is my new camel, and even Dr Joolz is able to track my movements, due to a serendipitous meeting on Thursday here.
I was there for this project but at least I could talk to David about blogging.

Forward planning

I have just had a very good planning meeting with Dr Joolz and I feel very efficient about what will happen next (sometimes this is hard).
In this spirit I will urge you to now start PLANNING your Autumn wardrobe.
Here is Molly in her Autumn outfit.
It is big mistake to think it is summer and also soon the sales and therefore buy more gypsy skirts.
This is in fact absolutely wrong.
There is more on that crime here.
Instead you should be going to the shops in search of:
Trouser suits
Capacious heavy skirts with crinolines (I have just bought mine yippee)
Sailor jackets, heavy blue wool.
You can see here what I plan to wear in the Autumn.

DIstractions

are sometimes welcome sometimes not.
Last week it was pigeons in the exam hall.
This week it was the extreme heat.
Dr Joolz has some wonderful pictures of women in Sheffield enjoying the heat.
I have been thinking about the role of blogs in my life and I think they act very much as a distraction.
Is this good or bad?
I think mostly good, as they are a way of enjoying digital practices and play which is what this blog and seminar series is all about.
ALso, distraction slides into work, as with my reflection on Vic's blog that we turn our interest in customizing into research.
Doodling is a wonderful form of distraction.
This is Molly's computer doodle.
Likewise Dr Joolz and allotments.
In fact, I think distraction is a very creative activity and is probably where our best ideas come from.

Congratulations

all those who have survived Science, History, English Maths GCSE this week plus the parents (it was so hard and such a long week),
and also those who survived this afternoon's non-world cup watching experience.
The streets were strangely deserted, leaving lots of time and space for those who wished for peace and quiet.
As I promised, this blog offers a world-cup free space with lots of interesting activities suggested instead of TWC, including:
Playing The movies game (Barney is playing it now v. g.)
Catching up on Bridget Jones (She is having her baby -so exciting catch up here)
Watching Walk the Line (popular with Dr Joolz) with the curtains closed
Becoming a textile designer (why not? All that free time, so creative?)
The list is endless.

Soundtracks

I like Guy's idea that you have a soundtrack to the day.
There is a peculiar silence in the street when the entire 16 year old population is taking GCSE English.
A kind of low humming.
I think it is turning into a rap.

The World Cup

Reading Dr Rob's post as part of my intensive research for my module for this marvellous course ( I will finish it today Dr Joolz I promise) I found his observations on driving interesting.
As we drove back to London from Glasgow yesterday
(my narrative of migration for the day)
I observed how bad the drivers were.
The worst ones had England flags sticking out of them.
This led me to my scientific discovery.
There is a proven link between bad driving and football.
This also led to the following important statement.
This blog is a World Cup Free Zone for the next month.
Instead of anything about football we will have an alternative menu of excitement, with daily THEMES which will actively promote non sport watching.
Ideas please.
Tomorrow I thought we could start with handbags.

Ersatz

is when something is something it is not.
It is a kind of substitution, offering something of an inferior quality to the apparent reality which is apparently glorious.
I learned that on Islay when visiting my great-uncle Donald's farm, Rockside (this is to prove I have a connection with Islay) and they had a Visitor Centre, newly installed, with produce in the shop that was from Devon.
The shop could have been set in Cornwall and just happened to be in Islay but the idea of heritage was the same.
Wierd.
One is an essential tourist.
However, I have tricked you on this blog.
This picture gives an impression of heat.


Ha.
It was freezing cold.
Ersatz again.

Lucky Bleaders

That's you.
Blog readers are called bleaders according to this source.
I read this on the boat this morning, as we pulled out from Port Ellen.
Actually lucky bleaders is us.
Here are a few of our holiday snaps.

Obviously boiling.

Anna and I sometimes drank whisky on the beach.

I swam in the sea.
Now we are here.
Shopping!
Luckily it is my birthday today so I have an excuse.