Wednesday 31 August 2011

Snow Black and the Edinburgh Military Tattoo

A few weeks ago I went to the Edinburgh Tattoo, its the third time i've been because I LOVE marching bands. Every other year its been really nice weather and so this year I was feeling a bit too optimistic when i got dressed.
Since moving to Scotland about 8 years ago I've come to realise that most people here dress much more appropriately for the weather than I do, but then again, I come from a place where you get laughed at if you wear a coat when you go out on a night. Lots of Scottish people have those sensible all weather-feel like you're wearing a sleeping bag-type coats where they can stay nice and toasty and dry inside and laugh in the face of rain. But, i just cant bring myself to buy one, I don't think many people look especially good in them, but I look tragically bad in them...and so I get soaked and shivery whenever it rains.
What I have become quite apt at is borrowing other peoples clothing when mine fails to keep me warm/dry, i think its acceptable to look a bit stupid then because its obvious its not your own. For the tattoo i thought i was prepared by wearing really thick tights and a slip (layering!) but instead, my dress started to cling to me from the rain and my jumper got soggy....oh well, i managed to acquire an umbrella, a huge warm scarf and a full length wool coat...i may have looked like a car crash but i'm going to do this forever and always say no to being practical.

Monday 29 August 2011

Snow Black vs the Betel Nut beauties

It's no secret that sex sells, you only have to watch a TV advert for Lynx deodorant to see that this marketing strategy is still going strong, though I'd have to say, if you've ever smelt a man wearing lynx deodorant, the lynx effect would be more likely that you'd have women running as far away as possible from you, and not untying their bikinis (with the exception maybe of lynx africa....but even then, the bikini thing will never happen)

One man who springs to mind when I think of sex selling products is Tom Ford, the man behind some of the nicest smelling perfumes and aftershaves in existence (or i think so at least) they should sell themselves but he still insists on the most shocking of advertisements.....
here is the man himself cutting some knickers of a model....


The most shocking that I can think of is for his M7 fragrance for men, where full frontal male nudity was used for the first time in an advertisement (I have censored the image below because i don't want my blog to be adult only... (but you can google it if you must.....)


Tom Ford defended the naked images saying, "Perfume is worn on the skin,so why hide the body?"
He's got a point in some ways but, well not being male I wouldn't know the answer to this, but would men really spray eau d'toilette inside their boxers?? I don't think i want to know the answer......
Anyway, I'm sort of digressing from the point of this post...yesterday I was having a lazy afternoon on the internet, i like looking at design and photography blogs and finding someone that i like, i came across a photographer called Magna Biernat (click here to see her work) who has some really beautiful architectural photographs. Then i came across a set called "Betel Nut Beauties" images of Asian girls wearing revealing outfits say in mainly glass fronted, neon lit kiosks.



images:Magda Biernat


I did a bit of googling and found out that these "betel nut girls" are found working in kiosks around Taiwan selling betel nuts and cigarettes. Betel nut is something which is popular across Asia but it is only in Taiwan that it is sold like this, which has raised questions of exploiting the young women who work in the kiosks, and has been a source of traffic accidents...you can guess why..(to read more about them click here)
American photographer Tobie Openshaw photographed and researched betel nut beauties and describes them as "a beautiful object framed in a beautiful box" here are some of his images....



images:Tobie Openshaw


"The design of the stalls usually show the betelnut beauties as “a beautiful object framed in a beautiful box”, and sometimes that’s what I like to capture in my photographs. (Taiwanese-American artist Annemarie Ho recently set up a betelnut stall complete with betelnut beauty in NY’s Times Square, and I have had artists from fashion design to architecture approach me for help in researching the betelnut girls.) But of course I intersperse that with close-ups shot right inside the booths, show the girls as they really are – pretty, young, slightly bored and with smiles and cheerfulness sometimes coming over as a little brittle. I like to try and make the “object” real and show that she might be more than you thought you knew – and she deserves more respect than she’s getting. "
Tobie Openshaw

The discovery of the betel nut beauties was all new to me and i was fascinated by the concept and the design of the kiosks. I really don't agree with it being anything to do with female empowerment though, whilst these women aren't prostitutes, they are still exhibited like a zoo animals, and the power still lies in the male customers and the presumably male owners of the kiosks who are probably earning a nice profit whilst these girls are making enough to get them by.

My research led me to a trend in Seattle of "bikini barristas" i suppose America is home to hooters, so its little surprise that these kiosks work there. Seattle, home of starbucks, has many drive through coffee outlets and kiosks. Now, i love a good pun, they make me laugh more than they should and a business with a pun in its title is always a winner for me but, when thinking of starting my own coffee kiosk, these names never did cross my mind....

"Peek A-Brew", "Grab n' Go", "Cowgirls Espresso", "Smokin' Hot Espresso" "Java Jigglers" "Sweet Spot", and "Natte Latte"

But they are all up and running in Seattle, where, unlike the betel nut girls in their heels and mini skirts, the barristas serve coffee in nothing more but bikinis....




It seems they have caused a lot of controversy, with some being shut down after girls were offering more than coffee......i even read that one kiosk had let girls wear nothing but pasties (this confused me, where i am from, pasties are something you get from the bakery on your lunch break, turns out they are stick on nipple covers, often seen sported by strippers....nice....just what you want your coffee barrista to be wearing....)
I still have a dream of opening up my own coffee kiosk and, although the design of the kiosk and the marketing strategies have been on my mind, funnily enough, wearing a bikini hadn't came into my plans. I'm glad that I don't live in Seattle as I'm sure if it was a choice between me selling coffee, and a bikini clad girl down the road, I'd be out of business quickly. I think if i could steal any of the Taiwan kiosk designs it would be one of these though....



It's times like these that i am glad that I live in Scotland, where winters are cold and summers aren't much better. If i do get to open a kiosk then a bikini would be out of the question unless you like your coffee served by a girl with hypothermia, no, i'll be applying my winter clothing strategy of layers, lots and lots of layers...probably even in the summer. I have drawn some oufit ideas....



.... of course, every business needs a plan b back up plan if all is failing, so i've also drawn up some ideas of me as a half naked barrista because then i will be guaranteed cash(surely?-its worked for Tom Ford afterall..), but have absolutely no morals or dignity left, now, who has a good name for the kiosk?.....

Friday 26 August 2011

Snow Black plays dress up

It all started in nursery school when I used to dress up as policemen or firemen (outfits which were meant for the boys...because the girls weren't supposed to dress up and pretend to save lives or arrest people, they were meant to bathe plastic dollies....) then as I started to learn ballet, every year i'd look forward to finding out what i'd be wearing for the annual show, at girl guides my team won the dance contest and we put it down to having the best outfits (navy hotpants and red ribbon bowties on our shirts) so, from a young age, i've known of the power of the dress up game.....
At the start of this week i was running about having to do grown up things and so i play my own dress up game to feel like i actually know what i'm doing when in reality i am clueless, this has, for some reason, involved a lot of tweed......
Next week i have to make some grown up phone calls; i prefer phone calls to face to face meetings when its to do with something important because you can be anyone you want on the telephone, nevertheless, i still swear by having to wear stupidly massive high heels (the kind I rarely wear outdoors)tights, and a suit jacket to make important calls. You can be sat in your pants and your 15 year old t shirt but with shoes and a jacket somehow everything changes......and theres always the option of pressing the red button if all goes wrong...



Friday 19 August 2011

Snow Black and the Entartet exhibition, CCA Glasgow

"If you must go to art school for God's sake make the most of it ... Seldom if ever again in life will you be afforded the chance to scrutinize such an array of losers in an environment that actually encourages their most pretentious inclinations!" Daniel Clowes, director of Ghost World






Some art exhibitions inspire you, some make you really jealous that you didn't have the idea first, and some are just really rubbish, and then, I discovered this week, there are some that scare you to the point of wanting to get the hell out of the room. A darkened room, with possible trip hazards, like your long dress, and bits of gravel, yep, art can be scary so it seems...
Yesterday, after too many days indoors, I took myself to Glasgow for an afternoon of art. One of the galleries I visited was the CCA Glasgow, It has that amazing art studio smell inside, I don't know what it is exactly, but it made me feel like I was back at art class in college and it made me feel really excited to see what was in the exhibition. I've never gone from excited to disturbed in such a short time before; I was there to see the British Art Show exhibition, but as I wandered up to the first floor I found a door with a bit of a makeshift entrance sign on, next to it were some information sheets describing the exhibit behind it, It was called Entartet, and was described as a reflection of the exhibition of degenerate art which took place in Munich in 1937 (click here fro more info). I got even more excited because I'd heard of the exhibition but never really looked into it in any depth, basically government officials had raided works of modern art at public collections across Germany , an exhibition of these works was arranged with the intent of ridiculing the art and the artists, branding them "degenerate" My love of history and art meant that I was getting stupidly excited at this point about what was behind the door and didn't even bother to read on....big mistake.....
I opened the door into a really dark room, thats always bad for me because i get disorientated really easily in the dark and get convinced i'll trip over, it was also a bit weird going in alone because you've no one to turn to to say "this is a bit weird isn't it" and it was, well, a lot weird.
In the darkened room were 3 other people who I guessed were all visitors like me, and there were lots of boxes on plinths at head height, i could hear recordings of someone talking but no idea where they were coming from, someone was sat on a group of chairs in the corner so i thought i'd sit there too, and sit back to see if i could make more sense of the installation that way....as i got closer to the chairs it turned out the woman sat on one was speaking out loud whilst looking down, which was really creepy and it took me a while to figure out if it was someone really into the art or someone who was meant to be there as part of the art, either way, i decided not to sit next to them...it was then that i decided i should read what the exhibition was...a space to listen to the text of the guide book for the 1937 exhibition of degenerate art....so the crazy woman was part of the exhibit,,,and it turns out each plinth had a button to press to hear audio recordings...i pressed a few but couldn't hear because of the crazy reciting woman in the corner, i persisted, hoping for some kind of epiphany moment where i would really understand what was going on...i even stayed in the room when the other 2 people left...just me and the crazy woman...as I sat behind what can only be described as a shower curtain, with some rather nice theatre style lighting shining down on me, thinking, if anyone knew where i was right now they'd think i was such a pretentious loser, so, i'd like to clarify that even though i was sat in some mental art installation on my day off, i spent most of the time reading the leaflet that went along with it, wishing i could just see some of this degenerate art and not have to sit listening to a woman reciting something id rather have read myself on the train home, i only spent one year at art college, but one was enough to introduce me to the world of art students dressing up installations or abstract paintings with justifications that used so many long (and i'm convinced made up) words that no one but themselves had any idea what they were talking about in their crits, and it seems like those art students then went onto produce work for galleries...
The shame about entartet, i thought, was that the subject of the exhibition is so fascinating(well, for art geeks like me anyway), and i think the audio aspect should have worked, if the reciting woman was made redundant and there was something visual because it made me really frustrated that i couldn't see any of the art.... on the plus side, the frustration i felt meant that i came home and did loads of reading on the degenerate art exhibition, which made me happy because i love learning new stuff about art that i can bore people with...
Incase, by some miracle, this post has made you wonder what degenerate art was on show at the 1937 exhibition here are some examples....


Monday 15 August 2011

Snow Black and the Madonna Inn, San Luis Obispo


This week I have to do the dreaded 10 yearly task of getting my passport photo taken, I have been putting it off for weeks, I am not at all photogenic, and least likely so in a photobooth that makes my skin look paler than pale, and for some reason one eyebrow always hitches up higher than the other as the photo is taken....and this pasty, wonky eyed photo will have to last until I am 37....
The only thing encouraging me to do this is the prospect of a holiday abroad in a few months time, to push me into the dreaded booth I have been looking back at my holiday photographs from last year when I traveled around California, reminding myself how much of an idiot I am for not getting over myself and facing the booth or miss out on a holiday...
One of my favorite stops last year was a 2 night stay at the Madonna Inn, San Luis Obispo It is insane, like stepping back in time, or into a doll's house I'm not sure which. I think whoever designed its interiors must have been smoking something strong, and just being in the rooms there made me feel a bit dizzy. After half a bottle of wine from the restaurant there the room got even more insane and I found myself taking photographs of everything and chasing a helium balloon around (which i blame on the combination of wine and spending too long looking at the disco tiles in the bathroom) As it happened, I had the perfect outfit in my suitcase which fit right in to the doll's house look of the resort, a peach lace dress, floral cardigan,peachy nude tights and floral brogues....





The effect of half a bottle of wine......

Snow Black, the L.A escape and an afghan coat

Mamas and Papas-California Dreaming


Art Brut-Moving to L.A

I hate living in Edinburgh during August when the festival kicks off and the population triples. You can't get a bus anywhere without it being full of teenage students on a college holiday, you get elbowed and prodded walking up the royal mile and people walk even more infuriatingly slowly along princes street.Worst of all, someone you know always invites you to a stand up comedy show and you have to defend yourself as to why you hate stand up whilst they moan about how miserable you are. Last week I got harassed by a couple of amateur dramatic types with painted bodies and fairy wings, their optimism and overall cheeriness made me want to run away, more than ever I wished I had real dorothy shoes that I could have clicked three times to get me out of festival hell.
I've always dreamed of having enough money to run away every August as far away from the festival as possible, if i had the cash I would get the first plane out and go to L.A. As it'd be so hot I wouldn't even have to pack much, I'd live in bikinis and spend all day between the beach and the ice cream bar next to the Santa Monica Carousel. On an evening I'd wear my mam's 1970's afghan coat that I used to wear in my sixth form college days. I'd wear it over my animal print bikini and lie on the beach dreaming that I was there in the 60s and 70s listening to music like the doors-roadhouse blues

Tuesday 9 August 2011

Snow Black, Laura's visit, animals, mummies and legs at the National Museum of Scotland


Last week the lovely laura susan simmons came to stay and somewhere between drinking lots of tea, brewing the occasional alcoholic coffee, eating our way through a stupid amount of strawberries and cream and chatting for so long that getting dressed didn't always happen until mid afternoon, we had a really productive drawing and photoshopping week.
We visited the National Museum of Scotland on a really rainy day. We mainly looked around the animal world which I really liked, though I wasn't keen on the way the taxidermy fox had been mounted to the wall (impaled on a metal bracket....)....Laura got a bit freaked out about the animals being killed just to be a museum piece and really didn't like the dead baby animals, and we both felt a bit sick when we thought too much about getting the job of stuffing a giraffe...sometimes it would be better for us both if our imaginations were less vivid maybe...(read Laura's blog for more on the taxidermy and animal behavior)







Before the Victorian part of the building was refurbished I used to love sitting in the grand hall on a rainy day, the mood would change when the sky clouded over and you could sit and watch all the fish in the 1960s ponds and it felt like escaping from the city. With the refurbishment i'm quite sad that its no longer that place. Although it is still an amazing space to be in, it doesn't feel like you can stay for long, it feels more like a circulation space. I read somewhere in the architects intent that only 10 percent of visitors ever made it above the first floor gallery, so what I don't really understand is why the top floor gallery space now hosts an exhibit of marble busts because it doesn't encourage you to go any further up.
Its really confusing how they have also changed the entrance because internally it doesn't seem to work as the large entrance doors are now redundant and it makes for a really confusing space, its like everything i ever read in the psychology for architects in practice..
From the outside of the building, I'm really not keen on the new entrance either, I think that the original architect's wishes of how to enter the building should have been respected and that excavating to create a new entrance must have eaten up a lot of budget, leaving the original steps outside redundant. I'm not sure of the architect's intent with the new entrance,(Laura's guess is that it was all a bit like the Tate Modern in that you entered through a dark space at the base of the building..) I have heard of some of the design intent being related to having light and dark spaces, and so maybe the intent was to bring visitors through an underground dark space (the vaults) and escalate them up into the light (the main hall) to make a big impact, but it all seems to have got a bit lost again with bad planning of circulation routes. I think it would work if you entered the vaults and there was a really clear pathway/stair that led you straight up into the gallery but instead you have to navigate your way though exhibition pieces that don't seem to have any relation to each other or to that space. I think its a shame as the vaults have never been open to the public before and now that they are, I dont think they are being used well.
Laura and I have an aversion to any exhibitions on ancient Egypt as we both think its wrong and just plain weird to have mummies in museums. It really freaks me out and the last time I saw one in London I felt like I was going to be sick, especially when people take photographs, it's a dead person, you freaks, what are they doing with the photos when they get home?! it's wrong, it's weird,stop it! i used to love learning about ancient Egypt when i was at school and i think that if they had such strong beliefs in the afterlife and that so much care was taken in how they were prepared for burial then they should be left even if they are thousands of years old. I hope they haunt the freaks that take their photos. Needless to say, we didn't visit the ancient Egypt exhibition incase we encountered a mummy, but Laura did have a good point that maybe the exhibition should be in the vaults as, if we had been to see it, we're sure it would have been full of artifacts (and dead people) that have been buried in vault like spaces.
I will visit the museum again because I am still in love with the main hall despite being sad about it being less of a public space, but I'm not really in love with the way parts of it have been redesigned. Though, it is easy for me to be really critical when i didn't actually work on it, faced with a museum design I would probably sit and scratch my head, consume a stupid amount of tea and panic a lot before doing anything productive because I love museums and galleries and the pressure of making it successful might just tip me over...(for a much more insightful review of the building's refurbishment from a designer's perspective click here!)
Whilst there we also took a walk over to the modern part of the building to get out of the crowds, I've not been in that space for quite a while and it was quite a rushed visit. It's a shame that it seems to have lost some of its sparkle now that the Victorian part has been restored. One thing I really like about the new part is the seats that are recessed in staircases and in spaces near the lift lobbies. There's something i like about not being able to see the person sitting there from certain angles, just a pair of legs....I don't know why I like it so much, here are some sketches of my most regularly worn shoes at the moment so if you are ever at the museum and you see these legs and shoes worn by someone in a recessed seat, it may well just be me....

Tuesday 2 August 2011

Dear Santa.....

Please send me these shoes (size 5) on Christmas day, I'm giving you lots of time to save up and I promise I will be extra especially good for the rest of the year.........



love Snow Black x

Monday 1 August 2011

Snow Black and the autumn wish

My favorite seasons are autumn and winter when I can dress in fur (but only of the fake or vintage kind...) big jumpers, boots and leather gloves and go and kick some leaves around or walk in the snow...I hate summer days like today when it looks grey but it's warm and you can't seem to find what to wear without getting too hot. I want it to be autumn so i can wear my crazy patterned stockings that I bought in Milan a few years ago, i'll wear them with my mustard colour dress and favorite belt or my orange dress with a crazy big sleeve..............

The Kinks-Autumn Almanac






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