i've got paws II.

i've got paws.

Suddenly the temperature has dropped from "brrr" to "holy shit, that's cold" and my gloves has turned into paws that I never take off. I feel like such a hobo.

chair-collecting day.

I hate the smell of brewery. For fuck sake, Glasgow! Stop farting me in the face! Today I took a lot of pictures from a dubble decker, high above puddles of stomach fluids and other nasty things that come from breweries. By looking at things from another angle I found some chairs.

a day on planet stingo.

I wake up feeling exhausted. The kid nextdoor is always crying. I hear its mother speak with a wordless Scotish accent from the other side of the wall, clearly upset. I also overhear a phone conversation and the word "disaster". After the shower I find a fat cat on my bed. How can she get into my room when barely I can? You have to litterally kick the door to get it open and it's physically impossible to open it while carrying two things at once for instance. This cat is either superman or an alien. Anyhow, I get the cat out quickly and I imagine that my throat is soar now. But then it always is in Glasgow. I'm drinking coffee and eating a sandwich while watching some Swedish television. A Norweigan princess educates me about angels, and apparently you can survive under water for an hour if your brain's almost frozen. Norweigans are funny, why did we ever give them up? We should all be one happy country (sharing Norways happy oil-money).
I catch bus 205 into town. I think about people who are sad and realise that I am not. Being alone and being able to enjoy it is a freakin skill not many people know how to master. Sometimes I am queen of fucking everything. A grey squerell outside the window is not however. It's been run over and lay flat and stiff as a stick on the side of the road with a tortured facial expression, if squerells can have such a thing.
In town I take some photographs and run up and down not knowing what I need exactly. Was looking for a book by Alice Monro, but found another one which I bought for 11.50. I don't know why I decided to get a book today. I never buy books if I don't have to. This one I just had to have though and I don't want to tell you why. Later on I make my way through the moving forrest of people, while playing "You Make My Dreams" by Hall & Oates. I imagine I'm in a music video and actually dance through the crowd, because that's what my feet wants to do when this song is played. Town is packed with people today and everyone seem to be farting. It smells like warm sneaky farts here and there when I have to stand still waiting for the green man or watching the drummers perform on the street. Farts always makes me think of Paul Sahre showing me how to do the word in sign language. I have now showed it to almost everyone I know. I'm not very good at party tricks.
In town I also see between 5 and 10 blind people scattered all over the place and wonder if Glasgow perhaps is a city for the blind. It's not pretty, so at least they're not missing anything. I buy some more things and feel as if I have to survive on air for a while. Almost no money left in wallet. Somehow that thought exhites me. I don't see poverty or the recession as something necessarily bad. In fact it makes me more creative and I can't help but to be freakin' positive. Bad things always brings good stories, I suddenly realise. For instance, aren't there shitloads of great books written by concentration camp survivors? Or how about Van Gogh; if he had lived a normal, happy life his art wouldn't have been as famous as it is today. A little injection of disaster is good if you can find a way to deal with it, I reckon.
It's getting dark when I steal something in a ----- store unintensionally. It doesn't make me feel bad, because it's not my fault. When you get something for free by accident you should accept it as a gift. Perhaps this is what all theifs think.
My feet are now soaking wet, because this is Glasgow and a sunny day never stays sunny here. I wait for the bus for exactly 4 minutes under my unbrella. I can see from a distance that it's packed and I have to stand up in the front. I don't mind really. As long as I can go places, I'm not complaining. I realise that's what my life is about in a way; to always be on the move to somewhere and to always be somewhere else. I wonder how other people's lives are like, if they ever feel the same. The bus is so full of complete strangers, we are a big mass of brains and hearts and guts and farts. If we crashed we'd be one big puddle of blood. The thought of them thinking something similar makes me want to hug them. I love every undiscovered friend in every city I've ever been to. Especially in New York. I think about NYC and miss it almost like a person sometimes. Ralph Charell told me that New York has a soul, it's not just bricks and stones and tourist attractions. New York is something more, and maybe you can only discover what it is if you let yourself believe you can be a better person there. I suppose this is true everywhere.
Glasgow is damped and it's making my brain freeze. But then again, in those conditions you can survive. I imagine that I'm surfing on West Indian waves as the bus slide into my stop. Regina sings "I'm the hero of the story, don't need to be saved". I open the door to the flat and feel terribly guilty for not answering a lot of emails. In fact, I'm a little more stressed out than feeling guilty. I hope you all read this and know that it's nothing personal. I then heat up some spaghetti bolognese which is already cold when it reaches my mouth. I think about how dead Nate in Six Feet Under is and make a sketchbook while watching Kobra. I'm probably a little spaced out from all the glue when I sit down to write this and now it's suddenly Sunday.

The photo was taken in Stockholm with my Diana by the way.

adobe garamond pro semi bold italic.

Wohoo! This is a massive update of what I've been doing for the last week. Have been spending x amount of hours on a ladder, painting Garamond, clouds, balloons and all kinds of things for Stuart Roy Clarke's exhibition Somewhere Across A Promised Land at Rheged Discovery Centre in Penrith. Exhibition is ongoing until February 2010.

happy halloween.

The top two characters I'd want to dress up as on a halloween party.

help! a bear.

While looking through an old folder of drawings I found this bear. It's a typical post summer camp drawing where I'm trying to revive some sort of non-existent memory of how it was like at camp. Think I felt super guilty for not doing enough drawings that summer. I never saw a bear, only thought I heard one outside my cabin one night. I imagined being eaten alive by one a lot though. Horror stories about bears were very popular among staff members. Also, I had just seen the documentary Grizzly Man prior to my trip, which is a tragically funny story about Timothy Treadwell - a grizzly maniac who lived with the bears in Alaska for 13 summers until one of them had enough and ate him. That made me look at bears in that grown-up kind of way, you know when you no longer can see anything cute and cuddly and Teddybear-ish in their appearence. I remember walking 500 yards alone at night to the highway a couple of times, making as much noise as I could to scare off the bears. That was freaky.

if you ever feel stressed out.

This is a little film from my hometown in Sweden and this is exactly how it's like living there. The song is from the soundtrack of Where The Wild Things Are, called "Food Is Still Hot", which is exactly what I feel like whenever I go home.

vintage sketchbooks.

Before I left Sweden my mother gave me some fabrics she had got from an old lady who died and left some nice stuff behind. These were proper old fabrics from the 60's or something. Lovely. And since I believe in the notion of Reduce Reuse Recycle, I returned to Glasgow and took whatever paper I had laying around, bound some books and used the fabric as nice covers. Making handmade sketchbooks is like therapy for me, so relaxing, so satisfying. Above are some photos of the books I produced this weekend. I'm sure there are loads more to come. Think I've got myself a proper hobby.

garden state day.

It's been a miserable and rainy day today so I watched Garden State. It's a pretty decent movie about a man who have to come back to his small-town home after 9 years for his mother's funeral, and simultaneously suffers from some kind of numbness for all kinds of emotions (perfect movie for a shitty day, right!). Of course he falls in love with the crazy chick in town, played by the lovely Natalie Portman, who transforms his numbness into feelings and litterly catches his tears in a cup. Don't get me wrong, I think the script was actually rather witty and interesting. It's all written and directed by Zach Braff however, who also happens to play the main character. Big fucking misstake, dude! Garden State could have been a brilliant movie with actual smart things to say. But Braff is just such a dork and when he tries to be emotionally vulnerable it's just pathetic. This is the guy from Scrubs and to me he just doesn't have what it takes to be anything else than funny. It actually bothered me throughout the whole movie and I think that's a shame.

living with the wild things.

I will now do as so many other bloggers have done and praise Where The Wild Things Are. Yes, it's a big hype around it, since the movie is out and all. A lot of hipsters around the world has embraced it because of its non-kids-movie approach, and the look of it is fenomenal to say the least. I haven't even seen the movie yet but just by hearing the music from it makes me imagine a masterpiece (I've kept the song "All is love" on repeat ever since I got the soundtrack). I can't wait until the movie reaches Europe! But really, the reason why I wanna praise Where The Things Are is because it was the first book I ever read on my own. I was 7 years old and probably had a little problem reading (who doesn't when homework books are fucking lame and boring). But one day my class went to the school library and we could pick out any book of our own choice. I saw the name Max on the back of one book and picked it out. Back in those days I thought that everyone with the name Max were as awesome as my cartoon hero Mighty Max. This Max were a bit of an anti-hero though and I remember the book to be a little frightning with all its monsters. But then there were something about it that made me borrow the book several times. I loved the illustrations and the idea of traveling to an imaginary land. And the wild side of Max was something that wasn't discussed in other books for children. My classmates borrowed books about horses and pretty things for instance. It's rather funny that my choice was about a missbehaving kid who's unleaching his inner anger with imaginary beasts... Perhaps it's not so weird that my creative alter ego name is Stingosaurus. That's what I call long-lived inspiration. Rawr!

you are missed.

Just got back to the UK again. I never thought I'd see a trip home as a vacation. But that's what it was and it was awesome. Only wish I could have stayed longer. I'd been away for a really long time. Long enough to see newly opened stores go bankrupt before I even learnt their names, meet old friends with entirely new careers and see people loosing weight and not even remember them being fat. It was strange. But nice too. Even though it's been so long it's still home. Everything tasted sweet back home; the air, the water, the atmosphere. I even started liking Stockholm. I've always had something against the capitol city. Always thought people had attitude problems and were too anti-social. This time someone told me I had a cute hat and the ticket people had time for a chat. Maybe it was just such a releaf to be back it was hard to not love everything. I guess that's a good thing. By being somewhere completely different for a while helps me to appreciate where I come from. According to Michael Moore, everyone's jelous of how we've figured everything out in Sweden. We only complain because we're bored. This time it wasn't boring to be home, it was just like heaven. And I'm so sorry for talking behind your back, but I really love you, city of Marie.

sweden bitch bag.

I have been spending some time in my mother's sewing studio and made this super-sweet carrier bag. It's perfect for grocery shopping. The print is screen printed and designed from personal experiences.

things i've learned in my life...

Last night I skimmed through a few of Stefan Sagmeister's pieces of advice in his "Things I have learned in my life so far". (For those of you who don't know, it's a book based upon wisdoms from his own diary which has been visualised typographically in a number of different creative sullotions). It made me remember a little note I gave to myself during a trip to London: "Don't buy design books. They are fucking heavy and mostly stupid - you'll learn more from life". So why the hell do I need a design book of somebody else's insights in life? That's dubbled waste of money, right?

tiny owl vs. amelie.

One is from Skansen Zoo in Stockholm and one is from a quiet neighbourhood in Mariestad. I think they look rather similar. They both have the same look in their eyes. I wonder which one is wild and which one is tamed...

home sweet home.

Woohoo! I jumped on a plane and went all the way to Mariestad to give my family a heart attack by showing up unannounced. This city is good for a few things; ice cream (Kling's Glass), coffee places and taking long walks. Naturally I brought a camera or two with me. The photo is from Kalkstensbråttet aka "Grand Canyon", about 20 kilometers from my house.

creative, not a creationist continues.

A religious dinosaur praying deeply.

portfolio book cover.

Have been working on a flashy portfolio book lately. Can't decide on the cover though. Don't know which one of these I like better. Please help me out.

park day.

I feel a lot like a 65-year old for posting these photos, but I just wanted to share some of the highlights from my very unimportant day.

i wish i could rap.

This one is a classic. I like to watch it when I'm really really bored.

museum day.

I finally went to an exhibition here in Glasgow. Those are the kind of things I think of doing but rarely do. But, like I said, today I did. Today I went to GoMA - Glasgow Museum of Modern Art. Saw the current exhibition, called Shout, about lesbian, gay, bisexual, intersex and transgender life. Quite interesting. I liked this painting by Sadie Lee (for your information the image is a scanned postcard).

zzzzzzz.

I saw this man in town. He kind of embodied my day.