Falling Sky

To Hell With Etsy

I've had a shop on Etsy for well over one & a half years now. During this time I sold 18 pieces of artwork and Etsy cheerfully took my money for the fees and commissions. I've had more than a few misgivings, and I've slowly been spreading my artwork to another online store in the hope of reaching a more European market, but still listing new work at Etsy when produced. Then last night I receive the following email, telling me... er, what exactly?

Hello,

I wanted to pass on some information to you about mature listings. Here is what our Dos and Don'ts have to say about items that may need special attention due to their content:

*Mature content is: sexual activity or content, profane language, or graphic violence as shown in an item. *These items must be tagged "mature".

*The first thumbnail image should be kept appropriate for general audiences; additional images in the listing may show the item in its entirety.

*Mature content listings will remain in all public searches by default; users can restrict results by using the exclusionary search term "NOT mature" ("opt-out" search status).

*Artful representation of the nude human figure is allowed. The context of the nudity determines if it is a mature content item (see above).

*Items are subject to staff review on a case-by-case basis. If the staff evaluates the content to be mature, you will be asked to add the tag "mature" or remove the listing entirely. Please be sure to comply with these policies! If you have any questions, feel free to contact support [!at] etsy.com

For more information about our guidelines, please read the Dos and Don'ts of Etsy: http://www.etsy.com/dosdonts.php#a4

Best,

Amber

Etsy Support

I read this over a couple of times just to be sure I wasn't missing something. Was I being asked or told to do something? I was perfectly aware of the (patronisingly titled) Dos and Don'ts of Etsy since they were first issued after their dreadful Constitution and had figured that, as my nude artwork clearly did not contain sexual content - well, no more so than the plaque on Pioneer - I clearly didn't have to do a thing. Nothing had been said since, and nothing in the above email seemed to relate to any of the artwork I was selling. Considering I haven't produced any new nude artwork for months, it couldn't have been prompted by a new piece, so what on earth was it for? Suitably perplexed, I reply:

Hello,

Why have I just received this email?
Thanks,

Jon Nagl

Ten minutes later, back comes...

Hi Jon,

Thanks for getting back to us so promptly. Please add the 'mature' tag to to nudes that you feature in your shop. Also, Etsy does not allow URLs that direct to other e-commerce sites, so we ask you to remove all links that link to outside e-commerce sites from your shop. Let us know when this is completed, so that we can give your shop the 'OK'. Thanks so much.

Best,

Amber

Etsy Support

The latter point first - I'd put a link to my Dawanda site in my profile where I was selling artwork on Etsy. It had been up there for a few months, but if they asked me to remove it, fair enough, that's understandable.

But... a mature tag? Let's just remind ourselves what that represents:

sexual activity or content, profane language, or graphic violence as shown in an item [....] Artful representation of the nude human figure is allowed. The context of the nudity determines if it is a mature content item (see above).

In other words, my life drawing artwork, unbeknownst to me, contains sexual activity and/or content. And if I added a mature tag to every nude piece I had on sale, I would be admitting as such. Friends, there is NO FUCKING WAY. And here's why.

One doesn't get to keep a lot of principles in this sordid world that wears you down with debt and depression, but if nothing else I have always stayed true to my artwork. That sounds like a terribly pretentious thing to write, but it's true - I never got into animating for advertisements (pretty much the only way a non-CGIer like myself could've progressed after four years of hand-drawn animation study) because I despised the thought of my artwork being used to sell expensive shit to children too young to understand cost, debt or having enough to make it through the month. Working minimum wage wasn't much fun, but at least I could look at myself in the mirror. What I do now for a living has absolutely no connection with the five years I spent at art college - all that I have from those times is a worn-down videotape of a short animated film and the ability to draw and paint, so it's something I'm pretty precious about, pulling out of life drawing last year when I felt I was getting too price-fixated about my pictures. My day job isn't a part of me, it's just something I do, but artwork - that's personal. Whenever I've sold a piece of work it's a thrill, not for the money (though, y'know, that doesn't hurt) but for the validation, the thought that someone felt that something I'd done was worth putting on their wall or giving to someone as a gift. What could be more of a compliment than to be paid for a piece of artwork, that money representing hours spent by that person in their own day-job? It's a hell of a feeling, assuring me that those five years weren't wasted, not in the least, and that while the work I do to pay the bills could be done by anyone with a modicum of sense and legal study, the work I've put into a painting is unique, the result - for better or worse - all mine. In other words, I give a damn about my artwork. It's not like selling supplies (which seems to be the be all and end all of Etsy these days), it's not like selling print after print of the same picture - these unique pieces matter to me, and are far more than just a commodity.

I'm trying to explain to you why this would be such a big deal to me, what that simple request represents, why my reaction is of fury and indignation. How dare they? How dare they insinuate that my drawings, my paintings are nothing but cheap titillation? That the years spent learning how to accurately depict the human body on paper or canvas was done with no higher purpose than giving someone an erection? And that most puritanically fucked-up and damaging concept of all that I've always railed against when it came to life drawing, that nudity = sex?

No. I will not accept that my artwork is 'adults-only'. I will not accept that a painting of a groin (of either gender) is pornography. I will not agree to this demented mindset that views the naked human body as something to be ashamed of. Adding one simple little 'tag' to my nude artwork would have only taken a few seconds, but it would represent an acceptance of such puritanical thinking. I responded:

Thank you for the prompt response.

The request to remove the link to outside sites is fair enough and I would have been happy to comply. However, I find the suggestion that my artwork requires tagging as 'mature' genuinely offensive considering all the artwork is expressively non-sexual and no more explicit than that seen in unrestricted public galleries. I shall therefore close my Etsy store forthwith.

Jon Nagl

Within minutes I had shut down my entire Etsy shop. It means I haven't got my money's worth from the listing fees I paid for the items that were currently on sale, but fuck it. The silver lining is that it'll now give me the impetus to list all my artwork on my Dawanda shop, rather than the selection that's currently there. In the long term, this may well end up being financially better too - with the US$ staggering around the currency markets like a doped kitten, the Euro looms nicely over UK£ right now, which is good news for anyone wanting to export to the Eurozone. Dawanda, unlike the American-hipster-centric Etsy, is very much a European site, complete with French and German language versions, so I should be reaching a new, closer audience with an exchange rate that actually benefits a UK seller. Pricing up in US$, by contrast, has been a depressing experience and one I'll be glad to leave behind, along with the whole childish, faux-naive, too-cool-for-school mindset of Etsy that's been both infuriating and at times downright unprofessional. No, I won't miss it, though I will miss the 200+ people who had favourited - oh, all right, hearted - my store and could all have been potential future customers. Whether any make it over to my new store or not, I don't know. If Dawanda should ever gets squeamish about nude artwork, I will certainly close up shop there without a second thought and take it all to jonnagl.com - but hopefully I'll never have to take such a step. One expects better from Europe, but then I'd also expected better from Etsy, which started so well and went to hell. Good riddance to prudish rubbish.

PS: Their emails to me stated at the bottom that "This email is a private conversation between you and Etsy. Please respect this confidentiality and refrain from distributing this communication without permission from Etsy." Normally I would respect such a statement, but a) I wanted others to see exactly how they communicated (ie poorly) and b) if you're going to treat my artwork with disrespect, expect to be treated the same in return.

The High Cost of Loving

Things have been pretty hectic the last few weeks, with the practical aspects of this whole marriage malarkey coming into consideration. The proposal? Man, that was the easy bit.

Now, I knew coming into this that weddings are, on the whole, rather pricey. How much so? According to this site, the average cost of a wedding in the UK is £11,000. Eleven grand! That's 11 iMacs! It's a boggling amount of money, all the more so considering it's basically funnelled into one day. Taken over 24 hours, that's £7.64 a minute. The thing is, when you look further down the page at what that total breaks down into, it gets increasingly ludicrous. £2,000 for a wedding reception, then a further £750 for the evening? £300 for printing? £400 for, er, videography? And these are average figures?

With us both being rather financially prudent (and, personally speaking, skint) there was no chance that the future missus and I would be going for anything so pricey, but the wedding industry - and, oh, what a greedy, insecurity-preying, dead-eyed industry it is - seems determined to wear down any intentions of frugality, clear thinking or common bloody sense. As the Lass noted, the magazines are appalling, presenting weddings that cost tens of thousands of pounds as though they're the norm, the implication being that anything less would be miserly and result in a cheap, cheesy and lesser wedding. For fucks sake, chair covers? I never even knew such things existed until the Lass pointed them out to me on website after website in abject horror.

[At this point in writing, I mentioned to the Lass who'd just popped into the study about the £11,000 figure. She said that she'd heard it was actually a fair bit higher these days and that the above figure was probably a few years out of date. A wee bit of Googling later and this article from the Scotsman comes up. In summary: TWENTY FUCKING THOUSAND?! (And that was two years ago, so by my calculations it must now be approximately a bazillion quid). I don't even want to think what that makes the minutely rate. If my flabber hadn't been gasted already, it truly has now. GUH!]

Anyway, it's one thing to have magazines bellowing SPEND OR BE LACKING - they can be cheerfully dismissed with a cursory curse and flung into the nearest recycling bin. My troubles came when we started researching for places to get married and hold the reception. Initially we'd thought about doing so on Skye, considering we're mouth-frothingly obsessed with the isle, but quickly realised that while it's a nice idea in theory, it'd be a pricey endeavour for all the family and friends we wanted to be present. If we lived there, there'd be no question, but as we'll still be here in the central belt for the next few years it makes much more sense to do it in Edinburgh, Glasgow or anywhere inbetween. So we scribbled down a long list of potential venues and started making enquiries. And the answers came back...

Let's be clear - we're not having a whopper of a wedding. Being the godless heathens that we are, doomed to an eternity of writhing in hell watching BBC3, we're not after any kind of church service. Registry office sounded fine, but we really liked the thought of having a Humanist service - one of the nifty points about living in Scotland is that, since 2005, Humanist celebrants are able to legally marry people in any location, just as religious ministers can. So - somewhere we can have the ceremony in the afternoon, some nice munchies afterwards for a few hours, and a bit of a do in the evening. Sounds reasonable, surely?

We looked at venues throughout Glasgow and Edinburgh. The latter were notably higher. The facility fee to hold the ceremony and reception at the Signet, for example, was priced at £6,000 + VAT and staff costs. This was about average. A small room at Surgeons Hall to hold the wedding ceremony itself for one hour - £600. For one hour. We looked at so many sites and the high figures that kept coming back left me feeling genuinely dazed and really quite drained. Likewise with catering. As the days went by, the sense grew and grew that either we'd be shelling out thousands of pounds just on venue hire, the costs inconceivable for any other occasion. One almost expected there to be an invisible wedding tax that must be paid on everything - as soon as that 'w' word is mentioned in a quote, whether it be for venue, food, photographer, car, flowers, whatever, there's a 40% mark-up on 'normal' pricing. It's as though people are expected to lose any sense of financial awareness when it comes to weddings, instead shelling out whatever ludicrous amount is quoted. The zoo, museums, galleries, gardens, hotels, centres, halls, caves... it felt more and more as though we'd have to get ourselves into debt just for one day, or otherwise go the registry office then hire a function room above a pub somewhere - which, after a week or two of this, didn't sound so bad to me at all (so long as it was CAMRA approved). No wonder threads like this are all over message boards, complaining that "[e]verywhere is too expensive, too pretentious or too popular."

There's this strange conflict at the heart of planning a wedding, or at least the stage of picking and confirming the venue. On the one hand, I know that it's the ultimate special occasion, one that we'll never have again, a genuinely once-in-a-lifetime event, and I feel that the Lass deserves the best day possible, in as wonderful a location as can be found. But on t'other hand, we're still living in the real world. We need to be saving money to make the move to Skye in the next decade, so to instead see it all go on one single day, so much money on just a few hours, seems almost obscene. So somehow, like a Venn diagram, we've tried to find a way to appease both feelings, allowing for a day that'll be lovely without sending us into a financial apoplexy.

Guess what? We did! Well, there had to be a happy ending to such a gloomy post. While I'd love to tell you where, we're keeping the locations shtum so as to guard against unwelcome guests and the paparazzi. I can tell you that we've hired one venue for ceremony and afternoon reception, then another for an evening shindig, the total of both being comfortably under 700 quid, and they're both slap bang on the Royal Mile which should be very handy for anyone arriving by train. The ceremony/reception venue is a cracking place, not what people would normally expect but I think we'll make it work perfectly (we've already concocted a theme for invites and such, though sadly it's not Lord of the Rings (imagine, an LOTR wedding! It'd be so cool! I'd make a fab Aragorn and we could get any kids to be kitted up as hobbits! Sigh...)). If it's a sunny day, it'll be stunning, but even if it's not it'll still be absolutely fine, no question about it. As for the evening, it's somewhere very distinctive yet (compared to everywhere else, anyway) very reasonably priced, and means we've got the place to ourselves, allowing our guests to eat, drink, natter, make merry and boogie their socks off well into the night. Trust me, the pictures are going to be awesome.

The moral of the story? Surprisingly, not "don't get married until you win the lottery" - rather, when you're venue-hunting, look, look and keep looking. It can be an overwhelming experience, especially if you're somewhere (such as Edinburgh) which has so many possibilities, all of which appear to be hella expensive, rattling around in your noggin. There are other places, ways you won't need to compromise your finances, you just need to keep going. Hell, once we've had our wedding, we'll be able to tell you of two perfect places in the centre of Edinburgh which offer just as much as neighbouring venues that charge double. If you've imagination, patience and a determination to not send yourselves hurtling into the swamplands of debt before you've even got rings on fingers, less really can be more.

(In case you're wondering, there'll be no chair covers at ours. Somehow, I think we'll manage.)

50, 49, 48...

Oh well, here we goes again.  Only a few months after we moved into this flat, today we signed a lease on a new flat, beginning in just under seven weeks.  Why the turn around, when only four months ago I was listing the many good things of our current place, especially when I loathe moving with such a terribly frothing passion?  One sad, simple answer - neighbour noise.  The newest tenant of this tenement building moved in not long after we did, into the flat directly beneath our own.  As we'd chosen this building precisely because the people living there are quiet and easy-going, we just assumed the newbies would be too.  And then That Fucking Night happened, and since then I've never felt really at home here.

Despite over a decade of renting, I've never experienced the sonic disruption that we've suffered as a result of a couple of eejits downstairs, old enough to know better (hmm, is that the distinct scent of a mid-life crisis I smell oozing between the floorboards?).  Every bedtime for the last few months has been approached with the same worry - will there be silence, or will there be noise?  Now, we're not talking full-on parties - that's only happened once, though was so awful that it pretty much fucked me up with regards to this place permanently - but instead the sound of television, music system or loudly-chattering voices.  See, beneath our bedroom is their kitchen which, bizarrely, they seem to prefer to use for watching late night telly or listening to music past midnight rather than the living room.  Previous occupants have presumably been using the kitchen for cooking and the living room for, well, living, hence the lack of noise trouble until these tenants.

But what can we do?  Loud parties justify calling out Noise Pollution teams, but we've got no right to be telling someone not to watch television in their kitchen even though the low-level noise from it comes straight up through the floor.  If we owned this flat, within a week of That Fucking Night we'd have had the floorboards yanked up, soundproofing added, floorboards replaced followed by further soundproofing materials and laminate flooring on top... but we don't.  The only sensible answer - leave.

You'd be surprised how easy it was to come to this decision.  Despite the good gloss I put on this flat at the beginning, it's never really felt like home.  The intrusion of sound (and, on a few occasions, the smell of cigarettes wafting up through the floorboards and stinking the flat out) has left this feeling insecure, a place where our ability to relax is dependent on what downstairs are up to on any given night.  Not even during my years in student accommodation did I ever feel like that, not once have I ever had to bang on floors or complain to landlords - until we came here.  Hell, even if the downstairs tenants left, there's no guarantee that those replacing them wouldn't do the same - and it's that sense of helplessness, that moment every night when I walk into the bedroom to get ready for kip and pause, hoping so hard that I won't hear the thudding sound of bass or wordless babbling of voices coming through the floorboards.  After all, if you can't relax in your own bedroom, where the fuck can you?  It screws with your sleep patterns, messes up your moods - I've missed at least one day of overtime work simply because a fucked-up night left me fuzzy-brained and bleary the following day.  No wonder then that I've spent the last couple of months dreaming of the day we'd get out of here and into an apartment where bedtime is free of anxiety and disturbance.

Now, while the upside of renting is the ability to sod off from a place regardless of whether a new occupant has been found, the downside is that on moving in you're initially locked into a six month contract.  Ergo, we've got to be paying for this flat until the start of September.  Still, we thought we'd start flat-hunting a couple of weeks back, partly just to have the feeling that we were doing something constructive about this.  After days of near-relentless checking of Lettingweb and Citylets, a cracker came up at A Flat In Town - enquiries were hurriedly made and one evening we sauntered over to see the place.  When we finally came out and walked down the street, both the Lass & I were practically giddy with excitement, eyes wide with an excitement spoiled only by the fear that some other sod would bagsy the place before us - and that hasn't happened since the day we first saw the Dean Village flat.

It's a beautiful apartment - expect to see many a photo/sketch in the future - in the basement, with a stunning shared back garden - expect many a painting in the future - and a nice front porch for getting an ickle herb garden going.  The building is old and solid, while speaking with the current tenants gave us the assurance that the only noise we might get would be from wee kids in a neighbouring flat.  I reckon it's safe to assume this doesn't mean some arsehole playing fucking bongo music at 1:30am (as happened here last weekend), so that's fine by me.  The ceilings are good & high, so there'll be none of the bonce-clonking against sloped ceilings that has characterised our stay here, while outside is a lovely green park that's perfect for visiting chums with young 'uns.  It's a quiet, residential area a good walk away from the city centre, a place with community, somewhere that feels like home.  With cats.  Lots of cats.  You know you'll be hearing more about that.

And today we finally signed the lease on the place.  Come the end of August, we're moving in - and unlike the last time we moved, this is happening entirely out of our choice - and we can't wait!

But, sadly, we have to.  Moving day is T-48 days away and counting.  Very frustrating, especially at bedtime, but it does give us plenty of time to plan the move - far more than last time.  We want to travel a little lighter than last time, so there'll be plenty of charity shop donations over the next few weeks.  I'm also Ebaying a load of stuff, partly to help lighten the load, mainly to help fund the horribly high cost of moving.  The second time in one year too... that's a lot of pennies that could've gone towards something much more fun, but in a situation like this it's got to be done.  Anyway, the full list of stuff I'm selling is here, but the current highlights are below.  The earliest ones end on Sunday afternoon, including the iSight which should go for a pretty penny or two, but there's also plenty of comic bargains for your pleasure, almost all of which have zero bids thus far.  And just think, every bid you make is going towards a good cause - the Move Chazzer And Nagl Away From Noisy Arseholes Fund.

NINTENDOGS: DALMATIAN & FRIENDS Nintendo DS
APPLE iSight Firewire Camera Rare Boxed!
SPLINTER CELL: PANDORA TOMORROW XBox

Black Hawk Down (DVD 2002) 2-Discs

IRON WOK JAN Vol 1 Cooking Manga! Shinji Saijyo (plus vols 2-9 seperately)

HATE Peter Bagge Original Issues #24, #26-30 (Final)
JLA #10-15 ROCK OF AGES Original Issues Grant Morrison and a load of other JLAs
BONE TPB Vol 3 Book Jeff Smith contains #13-18 + bonus and lots more Bone bundles
SANDMAN Bk 9 TPB THE KINDLY ONES Neil Gaiman (books 2-10 on sale)

Time for bed.  Wish us luck.  47 nights to go and counting, counting, counting.

Running On Empty

[written offline at home for eventual uploading using some pub or cafe's free wi-fi connection, because dial-up is just beyond the pale, especially for an impatient little oik like me]

WURRRF.  I'm a tired man today, partly thanks to having worked overtime yesterday at the Agency (resulting in the unspeakable horror that is a Monday that feels like a Tuesday.  Ghastly!), partly because I haven't really had much of a chance to relax since the move of a few weeks today.  My own bally fault of course, having used up all my annual leave over the last 12 months with far too much squandered in the process of drawing all them cows.  New leave year starts in two weeks, so it's just a case of getting through them without falling asleep at the desk, bursting into manly tears or converting to scientology.  I can feel my body yearning for a holiday, increasingly echoed by a frazzled mind, just a few days away from work (if not the city) to recharge, regain some perspective, take stock of the last few months and let this infuriating physical tension melt away.  We've planned another Skye sojourn in June but there'll have to be a few days off before then, most likely around Easter.  Anyways, I worked a short day today (oh, blessed blessed flexi-time) and am now tapping away at home while enjoying a birthday pressie from my sister (Pelican's awesome March Into The Sea EP, a powerful 20 minute track of roaring thunder and gentle beauty, it clobbers then soothes - ahhh, is that a flute? - followed by a richly-textured remix of Angel Tears from Justin 'Godflesh/Jesu' Broderick).

Lack of broadband and reliance on the knuckle-chewing doom of dial-up aside, the flat continues to please and feel more like a home.  Totoro has now been given pride of place on the living room wall, watching over us like a giant Buddha covered with hair.  We still need to buy a couple of shelves - one for CDs, one for books - before order and tidiness can be complete, but with Ikea charging a not-fucking-likely flat-fee of £35 for home delivery it may just have to wait.  Argos might be worth a look, but their TV adverts have been so brainbubblingly shit in their attempt to become a verb ("don't shop for it, Argos it"?  FUCK! OFF!) that one almost feels ideologically opposed to them.  The stairwell for the apartment has been painted over the last few days, so there's paint fumes wafting around to dizzying effect, but the bright white walls look much better as light streams down from the large skylight above.  The plants that survived the shadowy flat in Dean Village have perked up nicely and I'm gradually learning to keep my head down when walking into the workroom/guest room, what with the angled ceiling, low doorframe and my lack of radar.

Anyhoo, very chuffed to notice Friday afternoon that a Wannaburger is about to open round the corner.  Literally round the corner.  This is tremendous news, since any previous desire for one of Edinburgh's finest burgers meant entering the tourist backpack melee that is the Royal Mile, akin to a circle in Dante's Inferno during August and still thoroughly avoidable during the rest of year, up to its laminated-tartan neck in overpriced tacky tat with an international army of wankers snapping up such shit.  But no more!  The prospect of their mighty burgers, with locally-sourced nosh, reasonable prices and a generally nice vibe, being within hopping distance of the front door pleases me greatly.

Arty art art - the commissions are coming along okay, with work beginning over the weekend on the final pieces for both Brodgar and Portrait.  I've also been commissioned to do a life painting of someone, using photographs for the source material rather than them modelling in person (they're in America, so it would've been a bit of a kerfuffle).  Three commissions in as many months seems like a great start to the year, but whether it'll be maintained or turn out to be a fluke remains to be seen.  Nice to see one of the diddy landscapes from a few weeks ago get bought up too.  Etsy at the moment seems to be in a bit of a muddle, trying to decide whether nude artwork is offensive or not and what measures to take.  The draft constitution, in this respect, is a huge disappointment.

Section 6: Mature-Content Items
If an Etsy item were a movie and it would be rated R or above (appropriate only for adult audiences), we ask that you include the word "mature" in the item title and tags. We require that the first image in your item listing be PG rated (appropriate for general audiences). Keep any R-rated (or above) body parts that are photorealistic out of the first photo. Your additional images may show your item in its entirety. While Etsy requires users to be 18+ or have parental supervision, the site is searchable by the general public.
We reserve the right to remove (or ask you to remove) any listings or images which we deem inappropriate.

Whether this will make it through to the 'final' constitution (to be announced at the beginning of April) seems to be in flux, with the forums a boiling pot of polarised opinions.  The Etsy forums are a mess at the best of times, with a terrible signal:noise ratio that could only be solved with the totalitarian administration that the best online boards have, but the last few weeks have been quite dreadful.  Maybe the problem lies with me - while many chirp wildly about how they love Etsy, and the 'spirit of Etsy' is evoked by both posters and admin, I feel sod all emotional attachment to it apart from the fact it's a handy place to sell artwork.  But this talk about 'R-rated' imagery (sod all use to anyone living beyond the reach of the MPAA) and making the main thumbnail image 'PG-rated' through cropping, pixellating, black-bars... fuck that, frankly.  I wouldn't expect such behaviour from a gallery in the real world, so to see a virtual one like this consider such rules is hugely disappointing.  I'm considering alternatives at the moment and whether they're financially viable or worthwhile - the amount of artwork I've sold on Etsy thus far can be counted on one cartoon hand - but it'd be a shame to set up somewhere else after months of building up a shop and awareness there.  Damn puritans.

Recommended double-bill of the week: reading How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World by Francis Wheen, a sober yet thoroughly narked rage against the rise of unreason in society over the last few decades, and watching The Trap: What Happened To Our Dream Of Freedom, an intelligent and remarkable documentary from the reliably provocative Adam Curtis.  Both excellent, both eye-opening, both depressing, both increasing the urge to scamper away and hunker down on an island away from the world.

As Dave Grohl's Satan In The Movie Tenacious D: The Pick Of Destiny So Eloquently Put It...

FUCK!  FUCK!  FUHHHHHHCK!

Two weeks ago, during an annual inspection of the flat, the letting service rep mentioned that the landlord was contemplating selling up.  Somehow I managed not to squawk with horror and instead made it very clear that we would rather he didn't and were happy to continue renting for months to come.  The rep said they'd convey this to the landlord and see if he'd choose to leave it for now, what with us bringing in a regular monthly wodge of rent cash to his coffers.  This morning I turned on my mobile and got a voicemail which had been there since Friday lunchtime (I do have a tendency to leave the moby off for a day or two now & then) from said rep.  The landlord is selling, so we're out in two months.

It's not the end of the world, of course, but it's still crushing news bearing in mind how much the Lass & I have felt utterly at home here ever since November 2005.  If you've visited us, you'll know what a treat it is living here, with a stunning view and beautiful location, the flat nice and big yet with furnishings and carpet well-worn enough that you don't feel terrified about accidentally spilling a smidgen of tea and losing every penny of deposit in the process.  Small wonder that a grey cloud has fallen on our little heads today as we look around and realise we've just got a few weeks left in this place that we've become probably far too attached to, being tenants rather than owners.  Added to that is the unsettling feeling of not knowing where we'll actually be living come this time in May and the looming dread of flat-hunting and moving, never a pleasure.

But that's the risk of renting.  Buying is still very much not an option, no matter how many people may howl at us "you need to be on the property ladder!"  See, getting on said property ladder whilst living in Edinburgh requires a huge wodge of cash and/or the willingness to live somewhere that's either way out of the city necessitating a long daily commute or somewhere depressing and scary, necessitating a crash course in martial arts.  There's no way that Burd & I could possibly afford a property in or near Dean Village (unless, perhaps, it was in the river) but renting means we can live here.  I'm all for planning for the future, but not at the expense of the present.

So, unless two steady jobs on Skye or £200,000 magically falls into our laps, a-renting we shall continue.  After all, we're extremely desirable tenants, being non-smoking professionals with steady incomes, no pets and a pristine history of renting, the kind that letting services hunger for.  The thought of leaving this quiet, beautiful area is just too depressing to consider, so our flat-hunting is pretty much filtered down to properties within a couple of minutes walk from our front door.  Hell, from where I'm sitting right now I can see a For Rent sign on one of the apartments across the wee bridge, and we already know of a couple of others very close by.  Besides, being the rampant domestic show-offs that we are, the new place will have to be at least as gasp-worthy as our current abode.  Naturally it'll be a good size, with plenty of room for visiting guests to stay, so all youse friends and family intending to come see us this year needn't cancel your travel plans.  It's hard to imagine finding somewhere that'll feel as much like home as this flat does, but find we must, find we shall.

(Cat pic nicked from this glorious glorious website which will undoubtedly lead to a massive rise in the instances of cat pictures on this blog)

Bland Designs

[From yesterday afternoon] At this moment of writing, I'm sitting on the 1535 to Edinburgh from Newark, having already had to change twice - such is the price of travelling by rail on a Sunday.  Disturbingly, the entire carriage seems to smell of MacDonalds baps.  I've just spent the last couple of days down at Mum's in the Shire, taking it easy, catching up on reading, staying offline and photographing Moby and Sasha for future painting.  This morning I even got to don wellies for the first time in years and go a-splodging through wild muddy paths while Mum walked the dog, resulting in some fun action snaps.

It's always nice going south of the border, marveling at the comparatively flat landscape rolling off into the distance, though this time round I've been particularly aghast at some of the godawful residential developments that seem to be growing like virulent red-brick fungi around the edges of small country towns.  After seeing nothing of new builds but Grand Designs, books like this and websites like Dualchas/Hebridean Contemporary Homes over the last year, it comes as a shock to then see these huge numbers of developments around the county - and they're all absolutely fucking tedious.  It's the same damned design, same damned look, replicated all over the place with no sense of individuality, character or belonging.  Wodged close together, cramped yet devoid of community, there appear to be more and more of these things turning up in huge clusters miles away from actual villages or towns, while those forming on the outskirts of centuries-old villages are leading to small roads congested with huge cars parked on both sides.  There really appears to be no sense of consideration as to what it'll be like to live in these homes, or near them, yet - presumably in the hunger to advance up that 'property ladder' - clearly there's a market for them.

Most ridiculous of all, in Thrapston there's a new development of tall 4-6 bedroom houses right on the edge of town by the River Nene called Water's Edge.  They're not kidding - some of these houses practically are on the edge, lacking garden space of worth and ultimately requiring high walls or fences to ensure any young occupants don't go bounding into the deep waters.  What makes the 'name' of the development ironically accurate is that, come the next Nene flood, the location of the entire development means sandbags are bound to be a necessity, flood protection or not.  Back in 1998 when the centre of town was badly flooded, the area in question was submerged, with the nearest houses and businesses sandbagged to the hilt.  Wonder if they mention that in the showhomes?

Obligatory Big Brother Related Post

Just as the demented words and actions of the Bush administration can only be palatable to sane minds once filtered through the Daily Show and Keith Olbermann (thanks to the stirling work of onegoodmove.org), so the increasingly unpleasant Big Brother/Celebrity Big Brother should only be approached through the words of Grace Dent and Charlie Brooker.  Channel 4 have, in the last week, proven what has long been suspected - that they are nothing but a shower of attention-craving, nihilistic, sociopathic cunts.  Their apparent desire to revel in the basest of human attributes, to present selfishness, cruelty and ignorance as 'reality' worthy of broadcast as entertainment, came to an inevitable head of vile behaviour from certain 'housemates'.  Just as these Three Harpies have shown their true nature, so the suits behind it all have, in their actions and inaction, demonstrated just how cynical and mean-spirited they are in their hunger for attention, any attention, at any cost.

For someone who remembers when Channel 4 first came to life, it's all terribly disappointing.  Indeed, while Five has shown a remarkable rise into the world of actually-pretty-good telly over the last few years, the previously-top-notch Channel 4 has been toppling deeper and deeper into a Dante-esque hell of soulless shite.  It's pissed away every last bit of goodwill from the last century, when they supported animation, made fascinating drama and original comedies, and wasn't quite so reliant on American imports and trashy 'celeb'-based shows to fill the schedule.  Christ, the fact that Vernon Kay (succinctly described by Brooker as "a one-man walking blight on-our-culture, a dog-haired toby jug, a self-satisfied banality engine, a git, a twit, a twat and an oaf"), Russell Brand and Justin Lee Collins all have a home there pretty much says it all.  Fuck them, fuck Endemol, and fuck Channel 4.  They can take their increasingly piss-poor output and shove it up their arses.  I'm finished with it.  I'll miss Jon Snow, but that's about it.  And if, by some rare chance, there does happen to be a programme shown on that channel that I'd like to see, it won't be on their terms.

Technorati Tags: big brother, channel four

"There Is Still Time..."

As you'll no doubt have heard on the news over the last few days - nice bit of publicity-building there, Whitehall wonks - the Stern Review on the economics of climate change has finally been published.  At a chunky 570+ pages, I'm not likely to get through it any time soon, but thankfully there's an excellent 27-page summary (or, for the attention-starved, 9 pages).  Sober, pragmatic and utterly terrifying, it lacks the wide-eyed hysteria often found in global warming literature and is all the more effective and convincing for it.

The eye of an economist is clear, putting tangible economic figures to global catastrophe, where saving the world is an investment, albeit by a species rather than a company.  He writes of a realistic opportunity to be taken within the next 10 years to mitigate the predicted global disruption of increased pollution levels, emphasising the very real urgency this entails and the long-term consequences of letting things slide along BAU (business as usual).  There's hope to be found in those 27 pages, the tangible sense of a never-to-be-repeated chance to put things right, or at the very least lessen the oncoming blow.  I'm hoping so damn much that this makes it, that this report really is "the turning point" Cameron Hepburn speaks of.  Measured and specific, considered with regard to the complexities of global economics, if this doesn't result in genuine international action to reduce carbon emissions, brother, nothing will.

Will it?  I read Worldchanging and Viridian Design and feel optimistic and hopeful for the future.  I read the public comments on news sites like the BBC and Scotsman and despair that the masses are too shortsighted, too selfish, too fucking thick to let such measures take place.  Go ahead world, prove me wrong.  Please.

Untitled (Generic Frustrated Amateur Artist Grumble), 2006

Life drawing's started up again, for all you fans of artistic clotheslessness.  Yesterday's session was the first since June and was predictably rusty.  I came out with one small pastel piece that I particularly like, which is now up for sale on Etsy at a ludicrously low $30.  Frankly I think it's worth more, but as I haven't had a sale since the end of July it feels like any price is better than none at all (though it does rankle a little after having a piece of work go for £1500 just the other day...).  I've also put the Orkney dusk sky colour study up, posted earlier, for $50 - again, I figure it's worth more, but who will buy?

Etsy is proving to be a very odd place to sell, from where I'm standing.  While it's certainly a vast improvement on ebay (have you looked at the art section there? It's appalling!) there's a definite mumsy - make that momsy - vibe that abounds, both in the forums (which are embarrassingly awash in LOLs, ROFLs and LMAOs, all of which should have been banned from the internet years ago) and in the products on sale.  It's probably the nature of the beast, being more focused around crafts than art (indeed, 'art' only counts as one category out of thirty-one), but I'm getting the growing sense of being utterly out of place, flaunting my arty wares surrounded by beads, badges and baby boots.  The forums have a certain vibe about them that I can't quite put my finger on, almost like an extended clique, very American, very female.  Nothing wrong with that, sure, but on the occasions I've dipped in & posted there's been this sense of trying to join a conversation that's already in progress between existing friends.  Besides, it feels like you're speaking a different language when others are writing in no caps at all, ALL CAPS, txt spk, smiley overdose or OMG THAT IS SOOOOO CUUUUTE LMAO ROFLCOPTER!!!1!!1  You know the sort - all very well for myspace, but what if you want to talk business?

Hell, even when you do go into the art category, there's a frankly bizarre obsession with huge headed girls, some genuinely dreadful pictures and even drawings done by children that their mums - sorry, moms - believe are worthy of being sold to a complete stranger... and isn't that just a bit bloody creepy?  And while it's very sweet, I'm sure, in all honesty I'm finding it rather unsettling to think that paintings I've done are being listed alongside crayon squiggles by Aaron, 4, fresh from the fridge door.  And are the people shopping at etsy even looking for the kind of stuff I do?  More and more, I doubt it - the preference seems to be for cheaper, smaller, US-based drawings of a cute-goth variety.  The reality may be completely different to my perception, I certainly hope it is, but much of the evidence of previous sellers suggests otherwise.

Ach, I dunno, it's the end of the holiday and I'm feeling a bit tired & bitter.  I'm sure I've got work that's worth selling, but beyond ebay or etsy I'm damned if I can see how I can do so without devoting serious time and cost to setting it up.  What do you reckon?  Am I fooling myself in thinking that what I've currently got to offer is floggable online?  And if it is floggable, how should I flog?  Keep plugging away on Etsy, forget the internet & focus on 'real life' sales, or something else?

Crumbs, that's an awful lot of question marks.  If I sound frustrated, it's because the artwork I did in Orkney was such an absolute pleasure to do, people responded so positively and it's something I can do - yet rather than spend my time doing such drawings, I'll be mincing back to the office tomorrow to do the kind of work that most people (given a fat wodge of training) could do nae bother.  That doesn't seem right - nor does the fact that the Cow Parade sketchbook could have been sold, and for such a whopping amount, yet I can't even sell a piece online for $30.  In a sense I've been spoiled by the auction and Orkney, a taste of how life could be, and don't want it to count for nothing when normality resumes in a few hours time.

Is This The Most Awful Clip In Christendom?

Hello loves! Sorry all's been quiet here for the last week, while I've been shamelessly hawking my wares online - sho nuff, it's hard out here for an art pimp. There's now 23 pieces on sale - they're getting quite a lot of views, but still no sales since last Sunday. Could be that the current exchange rate between dollar and stirling is stopping potential American customers from buying, or could be that peeps just want to look at the nuddy pictures, not buy them. If Etsy could just get a dedicated stirling/euro payment system going on, it could be easier for us European types... or I could just not be particularly sellable.

ANYWAY! Various things trundling along over here. Some cow-related stuff that may come to something. Saw a fantastically roundhouse-packed film called WARRIOR KING, like ONG BAK but with added elephants, BMXs, big wrestlers and possibly the finest one-shot steadicam shot EVER! Lots & lots of fun. Last weeked we stayed in a Travel Inn for one night, covered by my good woman here, the lowlight of which was being woken at 3:30am by the aggressive monosyllabic slagging match between two arseholes, while this weekend a group of schoolage neds chucked the local rubbish bin into the Water of Leith outside our flat. Fuckers all. The city as a whole right now is teeming with people which, for a muttering misanthrope like meself, is absolutely bloody awful - I cannot wait for September to come, bringing with it wind, rain and no costumed gimps handing out flyers while guffawing wildly. FAAAAACK ORRRRRRF!!! While it's all FESTIVAL! FESTIVAL! FESTIVAL! right now, I can't afford to see anything that costs money, so instead I'm staying in, working on the new online portfolio (mono life drawings complete, the rest not so) and enjoying the vicious funnies of Time Trumpet (do click on Political Cartoon Protests) and the superb Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, from which the astonishing clip below is from. And, yes, that programme is real.