I was wandering around on the fifth floor trying to find the right ward, when I happened on these sculptures:

They looked like Quite Pleasing Figure Sculpures at first – nice, but no big door of perception. One resembled a large version of a certain subgenre of Royal Doulton’s output in pose at least, and would not have looked out of place on a (giant, urban) version of my late gran’s mantelpiece. Soapstone? I wondered idly, scanning a large sign for the name of mum’s ward – but then a white skein of sunlight came in through the floor-to-ceiling window. And the large one glittered like a shiver. I realised then that it wasn’t soapstone but glass, shattered and put back together, green-tinged plexiglass of the kind I see a lot of at the end of my road when the bus stop gets vandalised.

These figures are, in fact, made entirely from recycled vandalised bus stop glass.

The artist is Steve Yeates. I’ve decided I like his work quite a bit.

Context is an interesting little bugger. I love these as much for the knowledge I have crunched the splinters they are moulded from underfoot on the way home from the pub as for the beauty of the form. And for me those two things were not, when I became aware of the former, easily separate for long.

Very few of the series of works these are part of are pushing envelopes in terms of posing, the nude, or traditional poses for male and female idealised nude figures. But I think in a way that’s part of what engineers the surprise of discovering the nontraditional medium.

I like them, anyway.

Backtrack a little. I’ve been watching the buildup, online, of merch releases for the impending release of the Hunger Games movie. And it’s been … interesting.

The Hunger Games trilogy is, on one level, a story about the power of capitalist consumerism and corporate agendas to influence personal narratives. It’s as much about branding, and how to sell revolution, as it is about teenagers and love triangles. It stands in neat opposition to Twilight, which has a central love triangle which powers a war between supernatural forces, because its central love triangle wrestles, regularly, with the fear that the political situation they are in is powering and motivating them. Its love story, so often viewed through a public performative TV lens, is laced with a cynical paranoia on all sides. It is a demonstration, in graphic terms, of the ways in which the personal is political.

So it’s a bitter pill, I guess, to see it being homogenised like this without even the slightest regard for its key themes. Mattel have reputedly said, and I am still hoping this is a hoax, because I have yet to see a direct announcement, that they’re contemplating the release of a Katniss Everdeen Barbie, with the marketing copy “With this Barbie Hunger Games Doll you can style Barbie just like Katniss”. The source of this much-reblogged grenade to the irony-glands is Entertainment Earth, and the lack of proper images has me clutching the hope-straw that maybe their work experience kid is having a laugh, or something.

But even if this isn’t, in the end, true, I’m still considering a prolonged exile from Forbidden Planet until the marketing push for this film dies down, because it really is like watching something eat itself.

But let’s talk design, because I do understand that films in this day and age must be merched, that Lionsgate needs to stay afloat, that this is a YA novel and that that merch must therefore be geared towards a Hot Topic-saleable model. Okay. I get that. But let’s look at some of the merch itself.

Here is a Hunger Games pillow with brooding hunk and general good-guy Peeta Mellark. He partners our heroine, Katniss, in the Games, which are a Theseus-and-the-Minotaur meets Battle Royale setup in which a boy and a girl from twelve districts in a future dystopian USA fight to the death for the amusement of the ruling classes.

Look at the DESIGN, with the face and the logo behind it and the high-contrast, okay?

And here is a Twilight throw with brooding hunk Jacob Black:

I don’t know about you, but I feel very much like the Twilight merch schema has set a certain kind of model and this has even bled into the design work. Horrible throws with posing beautiful teens in hi-contrast photoshoppy cutout, with big logos all over them. I get that it’s cool to have a Mockingjay pin, but some of this stuff boggles the mind – let’s not forget that in this story people are publically hanged and torn to pieces by government-genetically-engineered wild beasts, and that the ugliest aspects of this regime are consistently marketised and sold back to the public.

Katniss remarks, at numerous points throughout the books, on her own keen, bitter awareness that she’s being objectified constantly. Her relationship with her stylist, Cinna, enables her to put up with, and even nearly transcend – if not quite – the worst of this (“I am not pretty. I am not beautiful. I am as radiant as the sun”) but she observes partway through the second book that she’s realised, on returning to the arena, that the girls are being much more polished and shaved and waxed than the boys. The boys, however, don’t get off lightly – they’re dermatologically treated so that after a good while in the arena none of them grow beards. Essentially, the Games in which they are (in many cases quite literally) chewed up and spat out are murder and oppression packaged and primped and sold back to a weary public who have lost sight of any power they might still have. It is a leap from here to Barbie, and it is a leap I’m not quite sure what to make of; a leap that is selling itself as a hop, a skip and a jump, as it were.

I guess I feel a bit like it’d be a shame if people judged this thing on the merch. Even the word “Twilight” has become shorthand for “terrible tween franchise worthy only of disdainful shudder”, and while that’s also because Stephenie Meyer writes prose that is violently percussive in its clunkiness, I’m fundamentally quite uncomfy – to a level that’s surprised me! – with how the merch makes these books look. In the first book, Haymitch says it all when he snarks, “[Peeta] made you look desirable! And let’s face it, you can use all the help you can get in that department. You were about as romantic as dirt until he said he wanted you. Now they all do. You’re all they’re talking about.” Katniss has to willingly cosplay as a Barbie, almost, to get through the Games. So it’s – shall we say – a sore irony that we’ll all soon be able to buy a necklace based off the parachutes that bring her food each time she plays up to the image that’s been crafted for her for the cameras.

All this is nothing new, of course – in a way, this is just a larger-scale version of the way William Gibson heroine Cayce Pollard’s anti-consumerist mode of dressing in Pattern Recognition became, in and of itself, a kind of cosplay when this massively expensive jacket was manufactured – as this piece puts it, Cayce herself became “an education into how you could piece together a kind of anti-style, how to look at it, where to get it. And in the irony of ironies, the novel that is in some part about the virulence of marketing has definitely spawned its own cult.”

Gibson (who, hands up, I admit I’ve never read, and should read) puts it neatly himself in this interview, when he is asked about marketing as a force which “infects everything”:

Yeah. We all live in it. It often seems to be mainly what the culture does. And it seems to spin off higher and higher iterations of itself. Like now, the hottest entrepreneur would be offering marketing of marketing of marketing.

To get all Black Mirror for a moment, it’s probably a rite of passage for the success of any countercultural work of art that this happens; Banksy sells for thousands of pounds these days, Hot Topic is a one-stop-shop for punk trousers with all the safety pins pre-added, and if you shout loud enough about anything and get enough people listening to you, someone will send a marketing exec out to work out how to turn a profit off it. So to conclude, I think in that sense it probably does pay to be zen – Gibson himself reports being quite pleased he managed to write a jacket into existence.

It’s an unanswerable question: how do you sell an anti-capitalist cautionary sci-fi tale? I knew this’d happen, and you know, now I’ve had my rant, I can chill (I totally can. Watch me chill. WATCH ME CHILL) but it remains the case that however way you swing this, terrible pillowcases about the odds being ever in one’s kill-your-peers favour are still one hell of an aesthetic reach, and it’s all a bit like those comedy-postcard images of CCTV cameras eyeing the street by Orwell’s blue plaque.

Do it to Julia, and then tell your friends all you got was this lousy t-shirt. Or something.

Over Christmas I saw this little Occupy Sylvania! demo on Dawn Foster’s twitter feed. A few days later, I unearthed – on top of my old wardrobe at my parents’ house – a box. In the box were some of my old Sylvanian Families figurines.

It was a weird moment. Particularly in my post-traumatically-woobled state, I was really pleased to see them.

Anyway, I mentioned it on my own Twitter and a shared Sylvania-nostalgiafest ensued with a couple of friends, one of whom revealed that ENTIRELY UNBEKNOWNST TO ME there’s an official London Sylvanian Families Shop up in Finsbury Park.

So obviously then there had to be a pilgrimage.

In a blizzard, because that’s how we roll. You can’t let a snowstorm get in the way of paying a visit to a bunch of tiny flocked animal figurines. It isn’t cricket.

The shop is High Twee incarnate (so like “high Catholic” or “high Elven” for detail, orderedness, and emphasis on the sanctity of the heteronormative family unit, but helpfully bypassing the tedious amounts of singing or complicated debates about mortality common to either). The shopfront is hand painted with the Sylvanian Families logo, and the interior is wall-to-ceiling with animals grouped helpfully and obsessively by species.

Sylvanians came out in 1985 (sharing their natal year with me, in fact) and were discontinued in the UK in the late 1990s, but later made a comeback. I love them with the nostalgic fire a certain kind of childhood attachment will inevitably generate. Mind you, it’s worth prodding the fact that, on a lightly political level, they seem to be doing well at the moment, and I think it would be disingenuous to suggest that this doesn’t tie in with broader national obsessions around nostalgia, retro-revivalisms (see also: My Little Pony, union flags on bloody everything), and a certain vintagey Little England aesthetic. I won’t go too far off Tangent Cliff here, but as contextual examples, Beatrix Potter’s home topped the National Trust’s visit lists in 2009, Downton Abbey’s all over the catwalk, Keep Calm & Carry On is in every giftshop, and Upstairs Downstairs is back again. So yes, without mounting a major class politics analysis here because I’m yaying about toys, Sylvanians fit in well. This is compounded for me by the fact that the recent Royal Wedding was commemorated by Flair, who own the trademark and distribute Sylvanians in the UK, with the release of a “William and Catherine Balmoral” playset. Sylvanians were developed in Japan, but they nail, in soft-focus toy form, a whole early-to-mid twentieth century ideal vision of English provincial life; a sort of Beatrix-Blyton-Wodehouse idyll, and they are priced accordingly. (It is not hard to imagine the latest child of the Big Society’s premier family unwrapping the Regency Hotel on an imminent Christmas morning at Downing Street.)

WHAT IS THIS EVEN FOR

On the other side of the coin, Sylvanians were, and are, refreshingly free of the kind of overt gendered marketing that characterises many other “fad” toy lines of the nineties and beyond (Lego’s new intended girlcentric line is apparently booming) . The only exception is this “Girls Love…” graphic on the magazine, which is also sold from the shop. It’s a statement that’s curiously at odds with the fan club newsletter, a separate mag which I had a look at and which contains several images of boys rocking out with their tiny flock bears.

Moving from the overt for boys/for girls tack to the titular emphasis on families, though – as one friend remarked when we were poring over the chihuahuas (after “THEY HAVE CHIHUAHUAS NOW”), it’s impossible to buy anything other than a lone, parentless baby Sylvanian as a single figurine. Only grandparents come in couples. Everything else is a two-point-four (or four, or six) child family unit: mum, dad, kids. The occupation-specific sets have, for example, male doc and lady nurse, or consist of one of both male and female (bus conductors, ice cream van staff, and so on). Very occasionally, you’ll find a Lone Worker Sylvanian, like Horace the Beekeeping Bear, who became my take-home souvenir (look, okay, he has his own SPECIAL HAT) but Sylvanians with companions tend to be species-matched and in heterocentric family units.

This presumably presents a problem for the Young Adult Sylvanians of the recession era – you can buy almost every aspect of Sylvanian life as long as it doesn’t involve flatsharing or the idea that Mr Duck might want to shack up with Miss Elephant. There are a few carefully-jocular exceptions – the Ballroom Set, for example, has a female cat on vocals and a male dog on the grand piano! – “but where,” mused one of us, “do the students go?”

“Leaving aside the amount of gentry-feathers their civil partnership plans may ruffle,” I added, “what if Greg the otter and Rupert the badger want to, er… open an ice cream van?” (The answer, of course, is that this is economically insupportable because a couple of polar bears going by Mr and Mrs Beaufort have cornered the market.)

I know they’re called families, and it’s clearly a working business model to sell them as such, but I think it’s a shame one can’t organically build families – even without talking here about models of family unit that aren’t two-parent or m/f, it’d be nice to be able to assemble them even just from different types of rabbit (there are about four kinds), or even go wild and have a frog/hog ensemble (it worked for Kermit and Piggy, after all). Like several toy franchises along these lines, if you’re not in a mum-dad-kids family unit, it’s hard to buy enough of these toys for your child to be able to mirror their own setup without significant cash-outlay. Talking about our different play styles as children was also amusingly illuminating – one friend blithely ignored the neat orderings of the families once they’d been purchased, and had them staging proto-socialist battles with other toys. I remember being quite concerned about splitting them up from their proscribed sets – I used to swap their outfits, but often swapped them back again afterwards out of a kind of bizarre compulsive perfectionism (the ribbons remain TOO FIDDLY for anyone, adult or child, to easily re-tie) – but I am increasingly of the view that I was and am an odd creature when it comes to benchmarks of this sort.

After several minutes bouncing these highly important theses round the shop, we found the recursive Sylvanian Toy Shop set and our minds were wiped clean.

BUT... BUT HOW

I mean, look at it. We were standing in the Sylvanian shop holding the Sylvanian Shop toy set which had a photo on the box of a small rabbit IN THE SYLVANIAN TOY SHOP BUYING THEMSELVES A SYLVANIAN TOY SHOP *clutches head, howls at moon* so after that everybody needed a sit down and a cup of tea.

I leave you with these giant versions, which aren’t for sale, and which apparently comemmorate the special relationship between the American and UK distributors. You know in the US they’re called Calico Critters (Of Cloverleaf Corner)? For serious.

BUNZILLA

This sure got long for a post which was meant to have as its main thrust “yay for tiny animal figurines”. Hurrah! Tiny animals with hats! There.

I kind of dislike being marketed at as a “soft gamer”, or more particularly the gendered implications around my gaming proclivities, which fit me neatly into an emergent marketing demographic based around the idea of the “console-shy female”. However, it is certainly true that for the purposes of the gaming industry at large, a kitten soft, console-shy, drive-by gamer is what I am. I often forget you can game on an iPhone at all, and when I remember, it’s a bit like finding an unsullied packet of Galaxy Minstrels down the back of the sofa.

The algorithm for Will Mim Try It? involves signifiers for “twee” and “cute” with optional denominators like “word games” and an ironclad pair of algebra-brackets labelled NO SEXISM PLEASE which cheerfully throws out a further pile of stuff. For January 2012 I then flung this over the bonus post-traumatic-stress rainbow of DIVIDE BY NON-SCARY, alongside usual queries of MULTIPLY BY PRETTY, PLAYABLE IN BED-BASED CUSHION FORT Y/N, and PORTABLE FOR HORRIBLE COMMUTE Y/N.

All of which is to say I am currently being charmed in the eyeballs by The Lost City.

In my present state of general life-flux and emo wobbles, The Lost City is bonbons for the soul. Elegant and undemanding, it is filed in my brainlibrary alongside “using a really nice tea set”, or “having a bubble bath with a jar of skittles balanced on the side of the tub”.

The conceit of the thing: your grandma was an awesome explorer (one of the very first frames at the beginning shows an old photo of her all done up like Amelia Earhart, which I count as a plus) and now you’re off to retrace her steps. The world you navigate is entirely uninhabited and you progress through it by completing puzzles and collecting objects, but mainly by nodding appreciatively at bushes and waterfalls.

The feminist in me (read: all of me) was pleased with this

The graphics are what really sold this to me. You use heart-shaped stones to activate statues that can change the seasons, meaning you can promenade through it at least four times over and go “oo, flowers”. There are shafts of sunlight and babbling brooks and floaty motes of dust and satisfying TWINKLYBEANS WELL DONE SPARKLYPOO noises when you unlock magic items. And while this probably speaks more to my current state of mind than the quality of the game, I find the walled-garden-style lack of other people suits me fine.

HOORAY A RECEPTACLE FOR SPARKLY HEART SHAPED CABOODLE #1 (no, it is not a very hard game SHUT UP I LIKE IT)

HOORAY NOW IT IS SPRING I AM GODDESS OF ALL I SURVEY

Finally, it costs a grandly unassuming 69p. SIXTY-NINE PENCE. Having a bath with a bag of Skittles costs more and covers your face in food colouring.

So, yes. Lovely little trinket of a game. Which is entirely complimentary because I super dig trinkets.

So. Hi.

I’ve left this blog untouched for over a year. In that time I started up a blogging collective somewhere else. It was a success, but it was (is) also very time-consuming. And by its very nature that blog was not for, or about, me.

I’ve decided to come back here.

I was encouraged by the other personal – as opposed to political or issues-focused – blogs friends of mine have built. From the outside, they look like little internet dens. Like little cushion-forts the writers have set up and proceeded to fill with ideas that – whatever their motivation was for writing about them – they feel good writing about.

Anyway, some disclosure for the opening instruction on this post: the person giving that instruction was a counsellor, because following a sudden, violent bereavement which flung me out of my flat, back in with my parents, and into a state of emotional yo-yo-ing I am having to teach myself the navigational tools for, I am in need, you could say, of a cushion-fort right about now.  I’ve begun to envy my friends their forts, even though it’s ostensibly a trivial piece of piss to start my own.

But here’s the thing: as I once earnestly doodled, I find blogging quite intimidating. Writing, even. I struggle with it, which is ironic considering I lead a blogging collective elsewhere, but I’m very much the Stealth Ninja Editor over there.  I wrestle with extreme, self-immolating levels of perfectionism and worry about What People Will Think with every sentence I type. I wish I didn’t! I’m sure I’d be 200% more awesome if I didn’t. But I do.

I’ve decided it would be good if I could try to crack that inertia. In aid of this I began noisily listing Things I Like on Twitter to break the ice:

I do other stuff apart from shout on Twitter. I draw things, too! Click the tabs up top if you want to have a look at that.

The spam was quite relentless. I was on a roll for a while just listing things in a skittish flurry of throwaway tweets; PUNK! I shouted. LETRASET PROMARKERS! I squawked. CAKE!

Then I breathed through my nose and furrowed my brow. It can’t all be cake, I thought. One cannot blog on cake alone.

There, I thought. Surely that lends literary weight to all the cake.

Then I remembered that Worrying About Audiences is not the point of this site, and I managed to put off actually doing any blogging about anything for nearly a fortnight. And now I’m here, I have no idea if I will blog about any of these things. But it’s a start.

(And with that, once the author had spent a further week avoiding publishing this post, and hurriedly redesigned the layout using a half-working copy of Photoshop and a low-res cameraphone, the floodgates cautiously, slowly opened.)

Hello.

I’m Mim.  I’m a mid-twenties short noisy person and I live in South London.  I like to draw.

My portfolio is over here.

My tumblr is over here.

I lead a good-humouredly pop culture-orientated feminist blogging collective here.

All this means I am often frighteningly busy.

This space is just for me to have fun in.

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