One girl's adventures in The New Flesh

Warm Leatherette - The Normal

Couldn’t let this one pass without comment – bought to my attention by Ballardian on Twitter this morning, this bizarre and wonderful list of car crash songs on Wikipedia is well worth a browse. As a fan of Warm Leatherette and other Crash-inspired tunes, this is a real treat.

Red shoes are iconic and this brief history goes someway into explaining why, from Hans Christian Anderson to Louboutin, it’s worth a read.

[Img: Self taken iPhone snap of performance aftermath, at the Belle Epoque Ball]

“Maybe it’s crap. I hope not. But there is quite a big possibility that it might be really not worth seeing.” – Von Trier

It’s not just Nazi jokes, here’s a list of 10 other controversial things Lars Von Trier said at the press conference for Melancholia, his latest film.

I just hope all this supposed controversy doesn’t distract from what looks like another strange and beautiful work from Von Trier. I always thought it was a shame that Antichrist got known for this one extreme moment (involving scissors, I’m sure you know what I mean) which totally overshadowed the rest of what I thought was an incredible movie.

Anyway, am really looking forward to catching this when it’s released. Check out the trailer below.

New work from Traumata will be shown at the opening night of the of the This Is So Wrong exhibition at Bethnal Green’s  Resistance Gallery. Full details of the event and the exhibition are here.

The piece will be a further exploration of ritual, relics and memories, expanding on my most recent installation at Torture Garden.

From Julian Baker’s excellent Skintones series. This is me, bruised.

(Julian has a rather good blog just here, well worth checking out)

I’ve decided to stop saving wonderful things for planned future Mixtape posts that I inevitably never publish, and instead post fascinating, inspiring stuff as and when I find it.

First thing I want to totally enthusiastically urge you to check out is the work of animator David O’Reilly.

I don’t know much about Mr O’Reilly other than what I read on his website earlier today, but  can say that the first film I saw of his ‘Please Say Something’ blew my mind. Sweet and sad and touching and tragic, not to mention stunningly animated, this is so so worth the 10 minutes of your life it’ll take to watch.

Please Say Something from David OReilly on Vimeo.

Incredible right? Not suprisingly it has won a billion prizes at various film festivals

Today I saw ‘The External World’, his latest work. It’s similarly beautiful but twisted and hilarious (If you share my sense of humour) At points it reminds me of Chris Morris’s JAM and at other times it’s pretty Lynchian. But yes, recommended.

The External World from David OReilly on Vimeo.

Rabbits performance by Compulsive Behaviour, more to come soon

Excellent before & after portraits from my piece last night at The Double R Club.

More shots from the night by the brilliant, lovely Mat Ricardo on his Flickr here, and the custom outfit I’m wearing – white corset & sleeve – were made by Freyagushi Couture.

In a nameless city deluged by a continuous rain… three rabbits live with a fearful mystery

Tomorrow night I’ll be performing a new piece devised especially for The Double R Club. It’s inspired by the series David Lynch released through his website – Rabbits – and incorperates some elements I’ve been exploring in performances for a while now.

It doesn’t have a title yet, in my head I’m calling it Red Rabbit after the sinister character that appears part way through the series, so that might stick. We’ll see.

I’ve been a bit concerned about the slow, still, non-narrative nature of this piece, and how that will get over with an audience more used to surreal cabaret. Then I re-read this essay on Rabbits and found this quote from Mr. David Lynch:

“They want things to move fast, but it’s like water-skiing : when you go fast, you stay on top – you never get below the surface.”

I’m going to bare that in mind.

[For more info on The Double R Club, click here - and come along, I fully recommend it.]

My partner in crime and I drove down to Bournemouth for the bank holiday weekend to join Louis of AMF for a fashion show at Pandora’s Box fetish & burlesque event. It was great to catch up with Mr. Fleischauer and get hooked up for the occasion.

A few weekends back I was wearing a dress at some party that called for a formal dress code and felt very embarrassed and self concious about the suspension & hook scars across my back. You can see them in this picture, the older ones have faded but the most recent ones (from May) are still raised and pink. This weekend I realised I should stop being ashamed of them – they’re signs of strength after all.