#also MY OLD TUMBLR HANDLE I listened to a lot of vampire weekend at the time ok

[elderwisp]

i just found my old blogs cc on pinterest-

THE DESCRIPTION!

[carriagelamp]

Art of Aardman

I found myself a cheap copy of the Shaun the Sheep movie, so I was rewatching a bunch of Aardman films earlier this month and decided to hunt down some books too. For anyone that doesn’t know, Aardman is a British stop-motion studio that does fantastic work like Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep, Chicken Run, Early Man… tons of cool stuff. They’re always quirky and funny and warm-hearted. This was just a very nice art book for anyone that’s a fan of Aardman stop motion and wants to see a bit extra; it shows some cool concept art and blows up the neat details in Aardman work, especially in their intricate stuff like The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!

Asterix and the Picts (Asterix and the Chariot Race, and How Obelix Fell Into The Magic Potion)

I decided to try a couple of the new Asterix comics that were done by the new team, just to see if they stand up to the old ones (that and How Obelix Fell Into The Magic Potion cause I’d never read that one before). They were pretty decent! Asterix and the Picts was my favourite of the two though I wouldn’t say either are going to contest for my favourite Asterix comic... but still! The art looks good and the stories felt like what I would expect, they made for a pleasant couple evenings of reading especially since it’s been so long since I’ve read a new Asterix comic. If you’ve never read Asterix it’s one of the biggest name French comic series in North America, as far as I know and very worth the read. It’s about a single Gaulish village that’s holding out against the invading Romans through sheer force of will, slapstick hijinks, and a magical super-strength potion brewed by their druid. Lots of fantastic visuals and cute wordplay, even in the English translations.

Bear

I found out about this bastion of Canadian literature via tumblr post that was losing its collective mind over the fact that some bizarre bear-based erotica novella somehow won the most prestigious literary prize available in Canada. Since I too found this hilarious and unspeakably bizarre I had to give it a read, obviously. And yes, the flat surface level summary is... a librarian moves out into rural Ontario and falls in love with a literal for-real not-supernatural-not-a-joke bear. And I have to say… it is actually worthy of an award, which I was not expecting given that I was there for a laugh. It has beautiful writing, and the subtextual story is pretty interesting… it kind of makes me think of The Haunting of Hill House actually in terms of themes. (Womanhood, personhood, independence, autonomy partially achieved through escaping the male gaze by claiming non-human lovers... listen if I were still in university I would right a paper comparing the two novels).

I dunno man, it’s fucking weird. Actually a well-written book, but sure is about a woman falling in love with a literal bear. Give it a read if you want something bonkers but like… high-brow bonkers.

Hunger Pangs: True Love Bites

Best book I have read in like… a while. A long while. I am not a fast reader, and I consumed 90% of this book over a weekend. It’s not at all like Terry Pratchett, but at the same time it scratched an itch for me that I haven’t had satisfied since Pratchett’s death. A very clever, hilariously funny poly romance between a disabled werewolf, an anxious vampire lord, and an incredibly powerful woman, with heaps of social satire, political commentary, and sinister undertones. The whole thing reads a bit like fanfiction and I say that in the most flattering way possible -- it is so easy to jump right in and be immediately taken over by the characters and the world and the plot, you never feel like you’re fighting to engage even though the world-building is fascinating and expansive. It welcomes you in right away, it was the book equivalent of a quilt and a hug which is something I sorely needed with all this pandemic bullshit. If you read any of the books on this list, go read that one while I sit here in pain waiting for the sequel.

Kid Paddle

I watched the cartoon of Kid Paddle as a kid and was thinking about it recently, so I decided to hunt down some of the original comics online. They’re fun and weird, with a cute art style and fantastic monsters designs. (My favourites are always about Kid either daydreaming or playing games that involve Midam’s weird warty troll creatures. It’s like a cross between Calvin and Hobbes and Foxtrot with the fun sort of quirks that I love in Belgian comics. Unfortunately, unlike Asterix, I’ve only come across these ones in French, but if you can read French it’s totally worth popping over to The Internet Archive and reading the ones they have available.

The Last Firehawk: The Golden Temple

The lastest Firehawk book. Despite being written for quite young readers, I did enjoy the early books in this series quite a bit. They’re about a young owl and squirrel who found an egg for a magical species that was believed to be extinct. With the newly hatched firehawk, the three of them head off on a mission to find an ancient firehawk magic that could save the entire forest. Very basic adventure story but a good intro to the tropes for children. Unfortunately the quality really feels like it drops with each subsequent book; this will probably be the last one I bother reading.

Lumberjanes: The Moon Is Up

I honestly think I enjoy these Lumberjanes novels even more than the comics just because it really gives time to delve into each story and examine how the camper are really thinking and feeling about everything. (Also I’m always weak for novelizations of anything.) The Moon Is Up is a book that focuses more on Jo, and takes place during the camp’s much anticipated Galaxy Wars, a competition between cabins that goes over several days. While the campers prepare for these challenges though, they also run into a strange little creature with a penchant for cheese and theft. Roanoke cabin needs to keep ahead in Galaxy Wars and somehow deal with the fearsome Moon Pirates that a closing in...

Lumberjanes v4 (Out Of Time)

One of the Lumberjanes comics, a cool, girl-focused, queer comic series. Honestly, this is just a fun series that I never got as into as I should have. My advice is honestly to skip book one because it gets better as it continues, and I’ve really been enjoying the later books now that I’ve given it another go. It follows five campers at Miss Qiunzella Thiskwin Penniquiqul Thistle Crumpet’s Camp for Hardcore Lady Types (Jo, April, Molly, Mal, and Ripley) as they handle all sorts of challenges, from friendship to crushes, camp activities to supernatural horrors, getting badges to not being brutally killed. Great if you liked the vibe of Gravity Falls but want it to be queer-er.

Mooncakes

Another queer graphic novel, but unfortunately not a very good one. It really looked appealing and I had high hopes, but the book itself really didn’t hold up… I actually couldn’t even finish it, the plot was just too… non-existent. The art is fairly mediocre once you actually look at it, especially backgrounds, and it feels very… placid. Not much conflict or excitement or even a very compelling reason to keep reading. If you just want a soft queer supernatural you may get more mileage out of it than me, but it didn’t really do it for me. There’s better queer graphic novels out there.

New Boy In Town

One of the worst books I have ever read. My girlfriend had ordered a very different book online but through a frankly stupendous error was sent this 1980s pulp romance instead. Absolutely nauseating on levels I couldn’t even begin to enumerate here. Naturally we read the whole thing out loud. Probably took us 10 times longer to finish than it warranted because I had to stop every two sentences to lose my mind. If you like bad decisions, baffling hetero courting rituals, built-in cultural Christianity without actually calling it that, and gold panning then boy howdy is this the book for you.

(seriously, you better have patience for gold-panning if you attempt this one, because I sure learn that I don’t)

Piggies

This was a picture book I enjoyed as a kid and had a reason to reread recently. Honestly it’s just very cute and simple, and the art is completely mesmerizing. Wonderful if you know a young child that would enjoy a simple goofy boardbook.

Shaun the Sheep: Tales From Mossy Bottom

Related to my Aardman fascination earlier this month. I tried reading a varieties of Shaun the Sheep books — most of which are mediocre at best — but the Tales From Mossy Bottom Farm series is genuinely good. Just chapter books, of course, but the illustrations match the series’ concept art and each story feels like it could have jumped directly out of an episode. They’re just cute and feel-good! Kinda like Footrot Flats but more for kids, and from the sheep’s perspective moreso than the dog’s.

[hetmusic]

A conversation with Declan McKenna | HumanHuman

We’ve been on the tail of young and undeniably talented songwriter Declan Mckenna for over a year now since the release of his incredibly popular debut single “Brazil”. Over the past few months, he’s developed a reputation of one of the music industry brightest talents and a knack for tackling life’s tough subjects. From anti-FIFA feelings in “Brazil” to highlighting the hardships of young transgender people in “Paracetamol” to damning religion’s grip on war in newest release “Bethlehem”, his interest in the world’s flaw are evident.

The seventeen-year-old Brit was labelled as a Promising Artist a year ago following Crack in the Road’s spot-on discovery and a slew of agrees from some of our most influential users. The support for this emerging musician is clear, and so we wanted to ask Mckenna a few questions about what this rise to the realm of known music has been like.

I remember when I first heard your music, which was the song “Brazil”, and I thought “this is the best football-related song I’ve ever heard!”

[Starts laughing] thank you!

What sparked the need to write it?

It was a bit of a weird one. I generally come up with the melodies and guitar riffs before I come up with any lyrics, so first I had this guitar riff that I really liked and then I came up with the melody but didn’t have any words for it. Then it kind of just happened! I started hearing things about the FIFA World Cup and the corruption around it. I don’t really know why or how it happened, but I ended up writing a song about it and it turned out to be the one that I recorded and released. I was just seeing all this stuff around and like most songs, I was hearing so much about it that I couldn’t really avoid writing about it.

Well you say like most songs, but it’s a pretty unique subject!

I guess so… I mean the weird thing is that when I wrote it, I didn’t expect anyone to hear it! I just wrote what I wanted to. It was just me being like “hey, this isn’t right” and then writing a song about it.

I’ve seen that the YouTube video for “Brazil” has over a million views. Did you expect the song to be so successful?

Not at all. It’s crazy and I did not expect that to come from one song I recorded in summer at a university. I made the video for it with a couple of friends in Brixton, just because we wanted to and now you’ve seen the views - it’s like, what the hell! It’s amazing and I couldn’t expect that kind of reaction to anything I’ve made. Now, I get to go to loads of places and play shows, which is great!

We kind of have to mention the Sky News interview, which is pretty cool in itself, but one thing that stuck out to me was that you said “I want to be a musician”, rather than “I am a musician.” Does that mean it still feels like it isn’t official yet?

Well, that interview was quite a while ago. Of course, a musician is a person who plays music, but for me, it’s about being a musician in a career sense. Right now, I’m just the kind of musician who plays some instruments [laughs] I don’t see it as a career yet… I mean, it sort of is, but it’s still such early days. I feel like it hasn’t really hit me yet.

Obviously you’re seventeen now, but when your music first came out you were sixteen -

Fifteen!

Wow, fifteen? Okay! Well, do you think age affects the way that people perceive your music?

It can be quite patronizing a lot of the time, just the way that people assume things. It’s normally by accident and it’s not like people are being rude or anything, but it can be quite frustrating when everything is put down to your age. People might say, “oh, that must be because of his hormones.” [laughs] It’s weird how frequent I get stuff like that. I’m like, “really?! Do you not remember being a teenager?” That’s the thing, like yeah, I am a teenager, but my entire life doesn’t revolve around that fact. Being a teenager is something that I am, but that’s it! [laughing] It’s not really that deep.

Looking back again, last year you won Glastonbury’s Emerging Talent competition. How significant has that been to your career so far?

I feel like the initial audition process for that did a lot more for me. Obviously, the competition was great, and I got a write-up in NME, which I had never had before, but in the auditions the dude who was handling the letter D entries passed on my name to a load of people and I feel like that was one of the earliest things that started pushing my music, as opposed to the actual competition and the outcome, which was more public. Although, both of those things have done crazy stuff for me! I’m pretty glad I did that. It’s weird because a lot of musicians shy away from competitions, and so do I, but I feel like that one was cool because the prize was literally a Glastonbury slot! It was a great decision because a lot of this stuff wouldn't have happened for me otherwise.

You mentioned the NME review there that described the Glastonbury show as a great performance, so have you been playing live shows for a long time?

Well then I’d been playing on my own for a couple of years just with a loop pedal, but now it’s all changed. I’ve got a band, mostly as a four-piece, but for the last few shows it’s been as a five-piece. It’s been cool playing with a band, I much prefer that. I’m all about the live shows and we’ve been playing quite a lot.

Would you say that playing live is your favourite part of being a musician?

Yeah, definitely! It’s a lot less stressful playing as a group. I find that performances are the most fun part. Everything else feels like build up to shows for me.

A lot of people do talk about how the music industry relies on live shows now.

Oh yeah, because of streaming and people aren’t buying records as much. We need to have people at shows or buying merch in order to be actually making money from the industry.

Or be Adele, then you’re alright.

[Laughs] yeah, or that!

I was listening to your music and I think my favourite song of yours is “Brew”, simply because it shows a more experimental side to your music and those guitars in the first half reminded me of The xx. I was wondering, are you often compared to other musicians?

Yeah, I get Jake Bugg a lot, which I don’t really understand. It’s like people think seventeen-year-old from the UK who plays guitar - Jake Bugg! Or Jamie T, which I also don’t get, because he like half raps and I’m not even close to that. That was one of the things about releasing my second single, to be completely different from the first one, because I just hated being compared to these other artists. Then people were like Vampire Weekend! It’s an odd one being compared because sometimes you get really good ones too. I once got Jeff Buckley, that’s such a compliment! My entire life and career is based around Jeff Buckley.

“My entire life and career is based around Jeff Buckley.”— Declan Mckenna

That actually brings me on to my next question, because I was going to ask you which artists have been most prominent for you?

Jeff Buckley is everyone’s musician, but also more importantly he’s a musician’s musician. All musicians are inspired by Jeff Buckley, and it’s the same with David Bowie who is probably one of my biggest influences in music. The Beatles too, who I love. I guess these days some more modern bands are St Vincent, TV On The Radio, Sufjan Stevens.

Oh I love him, especially Carrie & Lowell.

That’s an amazing an album! My favourite album of his is The Age of Adz, which is this really crazy industrial one.

There were the State ones too.

Yeah, he did Illinois and Michigan.

I prefer Illinois.

Yeah, Illinois is better. It has that song “Chicago” on it, that’s such a great song. I feel like that song inspired so much music after that. Bands like Elbow and even Coldplay were massively influenced by that one song.

And yet not enough people know about Sufjan!

Yeah, again it’s like he’s a musician’s musician or people who are really into music are really into Sufjan Stevens. Outside of that I don’t even know that many people who like his music. He headlined End of the Road last year which was pretty cool, which is wish I could have seen.

To go back to your music and to the track “Paracetamol”. It’s an incredibly catchy song, but with a really serious message, so why were you drawn to this struggle of young transgender people?

It was this story that was really prominent on social media, which as a teenager is something that’s quite prominent in my life. It never really got any mainstream media coverage and I was just like, why?

That was Leelah’s Law?

Leelah’s Law, yeah. There’s so much depressing news going on and although that story was sad, the message which Leelah gave in the Tumblr post that she did was very hopeful, and it wasn’t covered anywhere. I wanted to say something about it. It took a couple of months to figure out exactly what I wanted to song to be about, but once I had the idea for that, I pretty much wrote it in a day and then played it at a gig on that night. It wasn’t the finished product of the song and I came up with a couple of other bits afterwards, but yeah it was another one that happened quite quickly once I figured out what it was.

The video focusses on two fifteen-year-old protagonists trying to find their feet and their position in life, do you think it’s important to give a voice to young people and teenagers with your music?

This is something I’ve been thinking about recently. There’s not a lot of young artists who actually represent young people in a genuine way, and not in a way that’s exaggerated or overdone. In the last few years we’ve had a couple, like Earl Sweatshirt who is a role model for young and mixed-race people, and all the stuff he talks about is so honest, so relatable for people who are in similar positions to him or people who have been oppressed because of the way they are. Also Archie Marshall and his project King Krule, which I feel is a lot closer to home for me. However, I feel like right now at this moment, there’s not many artists who do that. I think it is important, not that I would compare myself lyrically to either of those artists. Loyle Carner is one that is definitely, definitely a voice for young people, even if a lot of his stories are about his personal life, but he’s very inspiring. Of course it’s important for young people to have a voice, to be given a voice and to tell stories about young people that aren’t patronizing or overdone and from the perspective of people who are actually young rather than it being written by a forty-year-old or whatever.

“There’s not a lot of young artists who actually represent young people in a genuine way, and not in a way that’s exaggerated or overdone.”— Declan Mckenna

I guess even if they try their hardest, it risks coming across as patronizing.

Exactly, it’s never real. In some ways there is a surge in young talent coming up, but I’d like to see more of it and more of it that’s genuine and represents me and other kids like me.

One really young artist I can think of is Billie Eilish, who was thirteen-years-old when her song “Ocean Eyes” came out.

Wow! I don’t think I’ve heard that. That’s insane, I’ll have to check her out.

So, what theme - political, cultural or otherwise - would you like to take on next?

I don’t know… there’s so much going on! There’s just so much to write about that now I feel like I have the problem of choosing something. I feel like I need to write a song about George Osborne because he’s such a prick! Maybe something more English this time round, because I tend to write about events that have happened in other countries and I haven’t done anything about home politics yet. There’s obviously a lot of stuff going on at the minute with that, you know, Corbyn and Cameron giving it large. Honestly, I’m not sure, because I generally just go “okay, I’m going to write about this” and I do it in like ten seconds. I guess we’ll see, although I’d like to write a kind of happier song. Most of my songs tend to be quite hopeful but with dark undertones, so I’d like to write something slightly happier.

You’re right, the songs don’t necessarily come across as unhappy, although the subject matter might be quite serious. They’re not really depressing in any way.

That’s one thing I’ve taken from The Beatles and David Bowie, because they write songs that sound really happy but actually have a serious undertone. Songs like “Oh You Pretty Things” by David Bowie and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” by The Beatles are quite child-like and playful, but are genuinely good songs and serious.

Finally, can we expect a debut record anytime soon?

Early next year. I’m going to say that, but honestly, I can’t say exactly when because I don’t know! I’m going to finish recording it this summer though.

https://humanhuman.com/articles/interview-declan-mckenna