Trilogy

I'm a little late to this party so forgive me if I'm sharing old news here and, if that's the case, feel free to skip right on past this post... but I finally just watched the Sia/Maddie Ziegler music-video trilogy back-to-back, in order, and it broke my brain.

In a good way.

To call these videos controversial is somewhat of an understatement, considering the kinds of criticism heaped upon them from some quarters, especially once the second video (the one in which Maddie plays some kind of inside-the-mind wolf opposite Shia LaBeouf) was released. (And then I came across a website that was going on and on about something called monarch mind control. What even?).

On the other hand I read this piece about what Sia has created on Noisey and I have to say, I agree:

"Sia’s album campaign—the videos, the performances, the responses and the counter-responses—has in itself been one of the most spectacular pieces of contemporary populist art, personally revealing, visually sensational, and entirely functional, as it served, at least in the first place, as a way for Sia to disguise her own face."

I found the videos disturbing, too, but entirely in the way that (I believe) they were intended to be. Each video features pre-teen dancing prodigy Maddie Ziegler portraying... I guess... an inner Sia? An inner Sia battling - often physically - with her inner demons, the thoughts and voices that twist and torture her. Their musical collaboration is profoundly moving, pared back, confronting, and truly beautiful.

And oh my goodness, the video for the third and final track (Big Girls Cry) is something beyond. That torturous battle: the voices within, her gradual descent, all played out on the outside and exposed for us to see... it is astonishing.

Honestly I'm a bit breathless.

Secret worlds

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds... Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.”

Credits:

* Beautiful, inspiring quote that is motivating me today, by Neil Gaiman (from The Sandman Vol 5: 'A Game of You').

* Moment in time captured at Grand Central Station, New York, by Thomas Lefebvre, licensed for unlimited use under Creative Commons.

Grey Gardens

First of all, thank you thank you thank you for all the lovely, kind, encouraging, wise comments and emails you guys left me after my rather self-indulgent complaint about work and life and motherhood the other day. You got me through AND I made all three deadlines. I promise not to be such a wet blanket again. (At least, not in the near future). (I hope).

I just watched the documentary Grey Gardens. Have you seen it? You probably have, I'm a little behind the times since it was actually released in 1975...

It goes inside the lives of mother and daughter "Big Edie" and "Little Edie" - both of their names are Edith Bouvier Beale - in their once-magnificent but now derelict East Hamptons home, Grey Gardens.

Their bigger story, of which the documentary is only a moment, is that they are "fallen from grace" socialites (and also the aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis).

I say "fallen from grace" because once upon a time they were both very rich and very beautiful, but Big Edie was an amateur singer and wanted to be an artist, of the kind that was pronounced artiste. Socialites cannot also be artistes, apparently, and that was part of what led to her husband eventually leaving her (so I've read).

Little Edie was her only daughter and was encouraged and schooled by her mother in artistic pursuits. Growing up, she wanted to be an author, a poet, a singer, a dancer. She went to New York and pursued a possibly promising career as a model and as an actor on Broadway, before her parents put paid to that. First, her Father smashed a window in which a picture of Little Edie was displayed, because he refused to see her in the public eye (I think it was gauche, or something like that I imagine, for a socialite to do modelling).

Then her parents' marriage ended. Her mother had Grey Gardens but little else, and could no longer afford to send Edie food parcels to support her life in New York. She called her back home.

Little Edie gave up her New York dreams in 1952 to live with and care for her mother in Grey Gardens. In 1974, when the documentary was filmed, they were both still there, living with about a bazillion cats and apparently some raccoons.

I watched the whole thing with a sense of unease. From the little I'd read before I saw it, I was prepared for the squalor (it's awful) and the mother-daughter arguments (frequent), but I was also ready to celebrate the joyful way the women embraced their eccentricities, and the underlying love between the two.

Those elements were there but, honestly, I couldn't get past the sense that I was intruding. It was as though both Edies were desperate to be seen in a certain way, and didn't realise that the broader context of their life in that house created a very different impression. They performed for the camera: both sang, and Little Edie danced. They pulled out old photographs of themselves to show the documentary-makers. Both women were indeed once breathtaking, but it was as though they were locked in the past. I think Little Edie said something along those lines near the start of the film, that past and present were blurred, and hard to define. I got the sense that inside her 56-year-old body, Little Edie was still 19.

Watching these ladies in their crumbling prison, I couldn't shake the feeling that Little Edie, in all her optimism and confidence and faded-but-still-evident beauty, was being exploited without knowing it.

I mean, I can watch something like Real Housewives or The Bachelor and feel kind of ick sometimes about the way these women are portrayed, and think "Why would anyone put themselves in that position?" - on TV I mean - but I don't feel too bad because, you know, they chose to do this. And these shows have been going for a pretty long time, so you can be fairly sure they knew roughly what they were getting into.

But Little Edie, locked away with her controlling/loving/controlling mother, among all those put-downs and all those cats? No, that just didn't feel right.

But then again, perhaps I need to watch it again. Because maybe Little Edie WAS being exploited but, on the other hand, maybe she was finally getting exactly what she wanted, which was to perform, at last, for an audience. I am very tangled up in my thoughts about this film!

Have you seen Grey Gardens? I'd love to know your thoughts if you have. Here it is in its entirety on YouTube, if you want to take a look:

ps. And now... The Gilmore Girls watching Grey Gardens (scary parallel alert!)

pps. And apparently Grey Gardens was also made into a film starring Drew Barrymore in 2009, and also a Broadway show, but STILL I hadn't heard of it until this week

On finding beauty

"There is so much beauty in the world. If you blink, you'll miss it." Shea Glover

"I conducted an independent project, which evidently turned into a social experiment halfway through, regarding beauty at my performing arts high school in Chicago. I want to clarify that my intentions were not to get a reaction out of people. I was simply filming beauty and this is the result."

Image credit: Ismael Nieto, licensed under Creative Commons

For your reading pleasure

Oh hi! I'd love to stay and chat but I'm busy preparing for the inaugural meeting of the Melbourne Snail Mail Social Club. Ooh-wee! I cannot wait, and promise to tell you all about it soon.

In the meantime, here are some fabulous links for your reading pleasure:

* Watch out! If you post something racist online, you might see it immortalised on a billboard near your house! 

* Truly stunning illustrations

* Get your face on a biscuit (not biscuit on your face)

* Love the idea of a housewarming welcome kit 

* Amazing 3D story books. This one is Snow White (just flick through the pictures if you don't read Japanese)

* Four words: salted honey lavender pie!

* "I am an artist." Could you say it?

* The Arts Club in London (founded by Charles Dickens!) is now a hotel!

* Postable is kind of like Snail Mail My Email. (But it's available all year round. And you pick the card. And you have to pay.)

* Get pie mailed to your door

* Keep this out of your creative-time playlist

* How to stop time, travel in time, escape time, and more

Image credit: photograph is by Annie Spratt, licensed for unlimited use under Creative Commons

Dance party

I downloaded this (free) Dance Break app on the weekend and I was the 299th person around the world to join the dance party. The idea is simple: once a day, at a random time, your phone will bleep to encourage you to dance. If you agree, it will play one great song to get you moving and you can stop what you are doing RIGHT THEN and get up and dance... along with everyone else who downloaded the app, wherever they are in the world. It's a global dance party. It's exercise. It's exuberance. It's silly. It's joy.

Will you dance with me?

Image credit: Bảo-Quân Nguyễn, licensed for unlimited use under Creative Commons

On quitting Facebook: a status update

Just over a month ago I announced my intention to quit Facebook. It probably shouldn’t have been a big deal but it turned out to be kind of a big deal and, from the comments and emails I received, I realised the idea was kind of a big deal for other people, too.

So here I am a month on to tell you how things are going.

To be succinct: it's going great! I genuinely love being free of what I hadn't even fully realised had become a millstone around my neck. For maybe three days after quitting, I'd have a moment where I'd sit down and I'd go to pull my phone out to look at Facebook and then realise it wasn't there. And do you know what, the rush of realisation wasn't loss, but HAPPINESS. Every time I forgot I didn't have Facebook and then realised it again, I felt the weight lifting and the sense of freedom ALL OVER AGAIN. It is seriously NUTS that I stuck with it so long, considering how much I must have hated it without even knowing it. And it is even more nuts that I bothered to use it, given this reaction. I suspect I may not be altogether bright.

Here are some other things I've learned and experienced about quitting Facebook, in no particular order:

1. Facebook is REALLY difficult to quit. As in, they make it super hard to get out. I didn't want to just "disable" my account and maybe come back to it later, I wanted everything gone, for good. It took some googling and tutorials and then MULTIPLE pages with tiny, almost-hidden text for me to figure out how to properly cancel my Facebook account. Even then they had a cooling-off period of several weeks. I can't remember how many (two or three or four) but I don't want to go back in to check, just in case that launches everything back up again!

2. When I'm with my kids, I'm WITH them. I'm down on the floor pushing trains over wooden tracks, instead of up on a chair half-watching them do it, while flicking through Facebook.

3. Keeping up with friends is not as difficult as I'd feared. I've been making more of a concerted effort to email, text and call my long-distance friends (and have had more time to do that since I'm not on social media), and it's been going fine. I'm sure I've missed some of their photos of their new cats or trips to the country or children's ballet concerts, but Facebook elected for me NOT to see them more than half the time anyway, so when I'm in touch with my friends, I have to ask them (shock! horror!) questions like, "What's been going on with you?" and "Oh, little Jude was in a concert? How cute! Do you have any photos?" It's not rocket science and it turns out that we (or at least I) don't need Facebook either to stay in touch with or to learn about the lives of the people we love.

4. I'm writing and painting a lot more. I didn't think quitting Facebook would have a big impact on these activities, because I didn't tend to spend time on social media during my specially carved-out "creative" times of the day. But it turns out those quick "I'll just check if anyone has messaged me" or "I'll just read what that notification was about" moments add up - and probably the fact that once in there reading a notification, I'd get distracted and end up losing precious minutes reading and scrolling whatever was there. Now, I'm loads more productive.

5. When things happen in the world, I don't always find out straight away. It's not that I can't keep up, it's just that there is certainly the possibility of a time-lag in the things I find out, versus the things that YOU find out, if you're on social media. For example, when the news broke about Paris last week, I'm fairly sure it was all over social media. I remained blissfully unaware, dead-heading the climbing roses on our front porch. Later, when I took out my phone to look at the one remaining social media app I still regularly use, Instagram, I kept seeing drawings and photographs of the Eiffel Tower. That made me suspicious, so I googled "Paris," and there the horror unfolded. If I hadn't used Instagram, I probably wouldn't have found out until later that night, watching the news. So I guess in these sorts of cases I'm a bit behind the times, because social media is THE place to get instant updates on what's going on in the world. I'm ok with that. I do think it's important to stay abreast of what's going on, both at home and abroad, but in most cases I don't think personal timeliness makes a big difference. I can't see how me knowing a few hours sooner would or could have helped anyone in Paris, nor would it have been particularly edifying to me. I'm content to read the papers, watch the news, read the websites, talk to friends: I feel like that keeps me fairly well-informed and the world won't end without me knowing it.

6. I'm reading a lot more of the blogs I love. Genuine, original content, that's positive reading, as opposed to Facebook dross that I haven't chosen. These are blogs I subscribed to because they inspired me, but rarely got around to reading before.

7. I'm commenting more on blogs. Often when I did find the time to read blogs, I'd flip through on Feedly and just mark the ones I kind of liked (sometimes to share with you) before moving on. Now, I stop and comment, creating or entering conversations. I don't do this every time, but I do it a lot more.

8. There's no getting around it, I probably AM missing out on some events and invitations. On the other hand, I don't know about them so I'm not breaking my heart over them. When it comes to personal events, I hope I'm loved enough that if my friends are planning a party and using Facebook to do it, that they'll reach out to me via email or text or some other way if they want me to come. If not, though, that's ok. We're not all everybody's best friend, and my closest friends and I have used Facebook but never relied on it as the framework of our friendships. We will carry on without it. However, the more public, open invitations are what I probably WILL miss. Fun events and festivals and meet-ups that are organised almost exclusively on Facebook. That's a shame, but again, not enough to make me want to go back. I follow a lot of blogs, so I get a lot of information there, too.

9. Not having access to the Facebook groups and events functions makes things a bit trickier, but not insurmountable. Recently I had an idea to start a kind of snail mail club. A bit like a book club, but we all get together and pool our cool stationery resources and listen to music and sip tea (or wine!) and write and decorate letters to pen-pals, friends, relatives, whoever. I'm part of an online alumni group called Blog With Pip, and this would have been RIGHT up the alley of a number of members. Ordinarily, it's the sort of thing where I would have emailed the woman who runs the group (Pip Lincolne of Meet Me at Mikes) and asked whether I could announce the club on the group page, and invite participants. That would have been handy. Instead, I emailed some friends and bloggers I knew who might be interested, and some of the members of the group who I had met in person and who I thought might enjoy this kind of club, and asked them directly. A number were keen, so we'll have our first club meeting shortly. If they want to, they can ask other people in the Blog With Pip group, or make an open invitation if the group leader is ok with that, themselves. Either way, once we find a public venue (the first one will be in my house), I'll share all the details here and invite all of YOU, so again, I think I'm ok doing this without Facebook.

10. I do miss out on membership in groups, but I can work with that. To be honest, the only group I was active in was the Blog With Pip group, and yes, I did fear missing out on the community that gave me. It is a largely positive group, full of creative people genuinely trying to support and inspire one another, and was one of the main reasons why I stuck with Facebook for as long as I did. One idea Pip had was to create a new, secret profile, and join the group under that pseudonym. I'd do it without having any Facebook "friends" so it would exclusively be an avenue to be part of the group. I may still do that. But for now, even the white-and-blue branding of the Facebook website makes me feel queasy in the stomach. I just don't want go there, in any way. I'm guarding my new-found freedom closely. So I read Pip's blog and the blogs of a lot of other members, and I keep up with what they are doing that way. It's not ideal, but it's a compromise I'm willing to make.

11. Blog traffic hasn't changed. Facebook was by far the biggest referrer of traffic to this blog, and I was aware when I made the decision to quit that my blog statistics would likely drop accordingly. This is not a particularly big blog at the best of time, so while I'm not monetised and traffic doesn't matter in any material sense, I still want to be connecting with YOU. I don't want to be writing into the ether, you know? However I was willing to take that hit, in order to be free of Facebook, my old "frenemy." To my surprise, so far, I haven't noticed any real difference in numbers.

12. Quitting is addictive. Once I'd told everyone I was quitting Facebook, I couldn't WAIT to do it. I'd said I'd wait a week (to put my affairs in order, so to speak), but my finger was itching over the "delete" button (that's speaking figuratively, of course, there is a LOT more to do than hitting "delete" - see point 1). I went into Twitter and quit that account, which wasn't much of a concern since I rarely used it. By the following day, I just couldn't wait any longer. I quit Facebook. An email came through from Mr B that same day, "I want to quit Facebook too. How do I do it?" So that night, we cancelled his Facebook and Twitter accounts too. Then I cancelled my LinkedIn account, which I hadn't updated anyway in years.

And it all feels GREAT.

Image credit: Benjamin Combs, licensed for unlimited use under Creative Commons

Weekend links

Hello! Happy Friday! Is it just me or is this weekend taking a re--a--lly long time to roll around? We are off to the Frankie Garage Sale tomorrow, assuming I succeed in getting the kids out of the house before it finishes. Other than that, I have a big pile of Halloween craft to complete, in order to get it into the post to HOPEFULLY  make it to its destination before the 31st. What are your plans for the weekend? Here are some links for your viewing and reading pleasure.

* What a delicious twist on the old-fashioned toffee-apples: bacon caramel apples

* On my to-get and to-read list: 1. Indoor Green: Living With Plants, 2. The Creativity Challenge: Design, Experiment, Test, Innovate, Build, Create, Inspire, and Unleash Your Genius

* A blind date with a book

* Really beautiful wedding suit idea

* Magical Christmas markets in Europe. Oh, to dream...

* Nature + cut-out shapes. I'm not doing this art project justice. Just look at the link!

* Apple butter sounds pretty delicious but I like this post best because of the list of "Things That Sound Like Fun with Kids, But Are Actually Not at All." I can COMPLETELY relate

* Desperate to try bonfire eggs!

* The vulnerability hangover. Sound familiar? (Me too)

* A reader Anke sent me this link when I announced my decision to quit Facebook. It's a pretty great read

* Halloween candy bark looks easy to make and wickedly delicious

And now, to see you into the weekend, I present Scout, lost in the groove. Man I love this kid!

A video posted by Naomi Bulger (@naomibulger) on Oct 21, 2015 at 6:47pm PDT

Image credit: photograph by Miguel Gomez, licensed for unrestricted use under Creative Commons

Kindness & chocolate

I watched this wonderful interview with writer, poet and holocaust survivor Francine Christophe yesterday, and it moved me to tears. What a beautiful, touching story about the power of kindness.

It's part of a new film called "Human" by Yann Arthus-Bertrand that looks to be extraordinary. You can watch the trailer and find out more here.

Image credit: Padurariu Alexandru, licensed for unrestricted use under Creative Commons

I'm quitting Facebook

I've decided to quit Facebook. This time next week, I will delete my Facebook profile, which also means my public page will come down at the same time.

If you are my friend on Facebook, and especially if you have made the effort to "like" or "follow" or whatever the terminology is these days my public page, I want to thank you for your support and the sense of community you have given me over the past eight years.

Thank you, thank you! I'm not unaware that your support has been a huge part of bringing readership and community to this blog: Facebook is far and away the biggest referrer of traffic to my blog, and I know that in freeing myself from what feel like the "shackles" of this particular social media platform, I will also be losing a lot of valuable support from the people who help make this blog a happy place for me. I wish there was a way to do it differently, but you can't have a public Facebook page without also having a private profile, so when I close the latter down, the former will go too.

Once upon a time, Facebook was a wonderful way to stay in touch with the people I love, who live all over the world. Often it was the ONLY reliable way. Email addresses change, phone numbers change, but Facebook profiles rarely do so we didn't lose touch.

Since those days, though, I feel as though Facebook has become such a negative influence in my life.

Over time, Facebook has taken it upon itself to decide whose updates I see and whose I don't, so I can no longer REALLY stay in touch with what all my friends near and far are doing, only the friends whose statuses and shared links get the most interaction (you guys are great too, but it's like only talking to the most popular people at your own birthday party: I like my quiet and shy and geeky friends too!). And when I like or follow a page or business, Facebook decides whether or not I get to see updates from them, too, so all the events and innovations and deals and campaigns I signed up to see frequently get missed.

Facebook does, however, make sure I see frighteningly-accurate advertisements. For example if I research a particular brand of audio equipment for a work article, the next time I log in to Facebook, competitor brands of the same technology will just-so-happen to be advertised in the side bar, as Facebook trawls my browser history and uses it to "target" what I see.

Facebook constantly changes up and jeopardises my privacy (this move was particularly annoying for me in avoiding a stalker-type person) and the ownership of my content (for example read 1. underneath "Sharing Your Content and Information," here), and even thinks itself entitled to conduct social experiments on me and my friends, without our permission.

But the worst of my falling out of like with Facebook is not down to Facebook's behaviour, but to my own.

I resent the time I spend on Facebook, but I use it anyway. I don't want to log in but, when I do, I'm drawn into its rabbit-hole of links and photos and videos and shared content and wind up clicking through to articles that aren't edifying and don't add anything particularly positive to my life, and insist on reading them when I should be spending time with my family. The other day I was sitting in the playroom with the children, and caught myself being terse with Scout ("YES Scout, what do you WANT?") when she "Hey Mummy hey Mummy hey Mummy"-ed me, because I was annoyed that I had had to read the same paragraph three times. It was a paragraph in an article I hadn't known existed five minutes earlier, about some celebrities I wasn't particularly interested in, but somehow here I was so desperate to read what was said and join in the comment thread relating to whatever mild controversy the story was recounting, that I ignored and then grumbled at my own children.

I'm time-poor and yet I waste my own precious time AND the time of my family on something I don't enjoy, and that's crazy. So I'm quitting.

I really hope that you and I can find ways to stay in touch and that I can keep drawing inspiration from you. We managed before social media, right? I am hoping (possibly naively) that we can do it again. So if you would like to stick around with me, I would LOVE that. The personal connections and creative inspiration found on Facebook were what drew me to it in the first place, and my love of friendship and community and creativity certainly hasn't changed, only the forum through which I hope to find those things. So if you want to stay in touch, here's how ...

* The best way is right here: I will keep this blog going, and it's a mix of personal stories from our lives, food I like to eat, places I like to go, my snail-mail and other creative projects, and a celebration of other artistic people and projects. There's a "subscribe" button on the right-hand side of this page that signs you up to receive email notifications whenever there is a new post

* You can find me on Instagram at @naomibulger

* You can send me an email at nabulger (at) gmail (dot) com

* We can write to each other the old-fashioned way! My postal address is:

Naomi Bulger PO Box 469 Carlton North Vic 3054 Australia

So that's it. Goodbye Facebook, and hello freedom. I must admit, I CAN'T WAIT until next week, when I can hit "disable my account." Already the decision to do this has lifted a weight from my shoulders.

What about you. Have you ever considered quitting Facebook? Have you already done it? What are your experiences of social media? I do realise that not everyone dislikes it as much as me, and for many people, it is a wonderful, social place. How do you keep it positive?