Dear Sinisterines, I write this to you by candlelight. No powercuts, simply for pleasure. What a release it is not to be working at the moment... to be living a quiet life away, posting a few letters at the local post office; digging a tiny spruce out of the patch of woodland in my parent's back garden and bedecking it with fairy lights; driving to the store and spending ages chopping vegetables, frying things and now late afternoon and a winter stew three hours into its gradual melding of flavours. Actually, it's just turned into a soupy mush, but anyways... I've taken some photos of the back of the house, with a view to designing an extension. The design will be some sort of late extra present for my parents. Away from the 'let's take the shortest easiest cheapest way to keep a client happy and get the fees coming in even if the fees are utterly lousy anyway', I hope to design something that, even if it doesn't get built, I'm actually proud of, for a change. In Glasgow yesterday, I re-visited the exhibition about Scottish Pop currently running in the city's architecture/design centre, and spent 45 mins watching an old BBC Scotland documentary all about Belle and Sebastian. It was great seeing the various members of the band in almost real life. There is this conception that they're twee and geeky, but I thought they looked and sounded like a perfectly normal bunch of Glaswegians. Their shyness is nothing unusual here, and I'd say that together they comprise a wider spectrum of personality types than their media image would imply. There was a thread of cute comic-strip animations describing the development of the band, which reminded me of the little gif animations on the sinister website. I was lying in bed awake all night mentally piecing together how to go about producing such things myself on paintshop pro... it looks time consuming, if you imagine the number of frames involved, and requires a different thought process than that for stills. Strangely, when the alarm sounded at 07:15 after no sleep, I switched it off and almost immediately fell into a semiconcious dream-state. The dream sequences were so hilarious to me I kept bursting out laughing, suppressing this only to see another bizarrely comic sitation, animated, of course. You had to be there, though... the fact that someone at a supermarket check-out buying 200 boxes of chocolate cup cakes is only the most funny thing in the world in a certain state of mind. There was also a bit that was a confusion between a live pop performance in a little stone-walled basement room with an empty swimming pool behind the stage, from which the performer had to be constantly rescued and a raid by the police who find, in an adjoining basement a single CD beneath a barred window and the concert promotors throw their heads up in the air chorusing 'not again'. Weird, but so funny, like the exact opposite of a nightmare. Talking of madness, I went to see the new film version (new to the UK, that is) of Hamlet. 'To be or not to be' is just such a brilliant and totally meaningful soliloquy. The artsy fartsy language may take a few minutes to get the hang of if, like me, you're relatively unfamiliar with Elizabethan English. You'll soon get the gist. It's also fun spotting both phrases and people that have become part of our everyday language, such as (I'd say this as an architect manque)[I was about to quote something along the lines of 'I could live in a nutshell and proclaim myself a King of infinite space, were it not that I had bad dreams' but I've searched for over an hour in the text of the play and can't find it] 'I must be cruel only to be kind' ; 'Get thee to a nunnery'; Ophelia, floating in the pool as in the famous pre-raphaelite painting; or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern [are dead: was that not a broadway play/musical?]. I suppose the rest of you all learn'd this at school... Makes me enthusiastic, though. I'm nae mad, honest! Gordon +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the undead Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "tech-heads and students" +-+ +-+ "the cardie wearing biscuit nibbling belle & sebastian list" +-+ +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "peculiarly deranged fanbase" "frighteningly named +-+ +-+ Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +----------------------------------------------------------------------+