Not Even Doom Music

Just a quick post to say that you can pre-order the 10" of the new Mat Riviere album Not Even Doom Music NOW. When you pre-order you get to download it straight away and then you'll get your record some time in April, apparently. Buy buy buy!

I am not going to try and review it or anything but it is proper good. Breathtakingly good, even. It has been on a constant loop here since pre-orders became available a week ago. I'm proposing that we now treat December 21st as Not Even Doom Music day from now on, an annual celebration of a flipping great album. And if you buy it in the next couple of days you get some free stuff too. Click on the album title up there for more details!

Here's a trailer for the album that Mat posted on Vimeo a while ago:




S

Handmade Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone! We hope you had a dead nice Christmas Day and that the rest of the festive season is just as enjoyable for you. This year we made a conscious decision to try and buy a few more handmade Christmas presents than we have previously, so we thought we'd fill you in on the things we picked up. Sadly we were so impatient to get things wrapped up and ready for Christmas that we missed our chance to take photographs of them. As a result, all the photos in this post have been stolen from the internet.

We sold some things at the Inprint Fair in Liverpool at the start of December. We shared a stall with the amazing zine/comic maker Stef Bradley who we mentioned on here a while ago. She has an exciting new blog now which you should definitely have a look at.

One of the other sellers at the fair was Caroline Dowsett, who is pretty flipping great too. She does all kinds of neato illustrations and she is based here in Manchester. I bought one of these 'Murray Christmas' cards for Liz's mum from her. I'm not sure Liz's mum really knows who Bill Murray is, but her surname is Murray so I think she appreciated it on a different level. I also bought Liz a notepad with cats printed on the cover, which is also absolutely amazing.

When I got home I looked at Caroline's Etsy page and decided that Liz would probably also like a print of Woody Allen too. I had to stop myself from buying everything in her shop! If you like Bill Murray or Wes Anderson films, you should have a look IMMEDIATELY. You won't be disappointed.

After buying the cat notebook, I decided to get Liz some ace cat tattoos that she'd been eyeing up on Etsy for a while. They are made by super duper illustrator Harriet Gray who has an Etsy shop full of wonderful things like these and this. You can get one for £2.50 or you can choose 3 for £5.50, which is a pretty sweet deal. I also bought a pencil case with cats on it which is also great.

Carrying on with the tattoo theme, we bought our friend some tattoos from Laura Gee's Etsy shop. She has a whole range of lovely prints and cushions that are definitely worth a look too.

So what did you get for Christmas? Between us we received a truck full of sweets and generally unhealthy things, I got loads of socks (Which is good, because I can never be bothered to go and buy my own socks) and Liz got me a copy of Dead Snow on DVD, the plot of which, on IMDB, is described as: "A ski vacation turns horrific for a group of medical students, as they find themselves confronted by an unimaginable menace: Nazi zombies". I am very excited about watching it. FYI, the zombies in this movie are fast zombies, not your standard shuffling ones. Apparently the speed that zombies can move at is a contentious issue. Terrifying.

Happy New Year!

S

Cheesed Off

I have this amazing idea for a restaurant/bar type place that would specialise in cheese boards and other cheese related foodstuffs (Welsh rarebit, cauliflower cheese, that kind of thing). But that's not all. Borrowing slightly from Meatball Shop in New York, the premise would involve people ticking off the cheeses they want on a betting shop style coupon and then handing it over at the bar. Then their chosen selection of cheeses (or other cheese related foodstuff) would be prepared and taken to their table. If anybody wants to invest hundreds of thousands of pounds into this extremely niche and unprofitable business idea, let me know.

Until then, I'll have to make do with ordering my cheese boards in non-specialist eateries without being able to use a coupon to make my cheese preferences known. Bakerie, on Lever Street, does a pretty good cheese board. We went there a while ago and you get three cheeses (from about six different options), mini gherkins, pickled onions and some dead nice bread and it is flipping great (grate?). They do a meat board too, if you don't like cheese very much. Although if that is the case I'm not really sure why you have bothered to read up to this point.

Recently we went to Marble Brewery's 57 Thomas Street. I have decided that developing a penchant for real ale would really round off my 'look' (cringe). Still, no matter how hard I try, it always tastes a bit gross to me. So the fact that they do a cheese board gave me the opportunity to simultaneously try and make myself like beer while enjoying some amazing cheeses.

I can't remember what beer we had, but I actually quite enjoyed it! I think if I persevere I might actually develop a taste for it. Fingers crossed. Anyway, as the photo above clearly shows, they have a pretty massive collection of cheeses to choose from.

We went for the 9 cheeses for £10.95 between us, although I can't remember for the life of me what we ordered. Some kind of brie, the blue Cheshire, a crumbly Lancashire of some description and uh, other ones. The Bath Oliver biscuits were incredible, as was the pickle that came with it. My mouth is watering as I type.  We had a kind of smoky flavoured cheddar amongst the nine, and that was probably my favourite. They were all absolutely delicious though. Cheese!

Feel free to share your favourite cheeses below, don't keep your top fromage tips to yourself!

See yer!

S

Today by Stef Bradley

Last weekend we took our stuff to sell at the Leeds Zine Fair. It was alright! We sold quite a bit of stuff and spoke to some nice people and generally had a pretty good time. While we were having a look round the other stalls, we came across the amazing Today zine, which is written by Stef Bradley, and we liked it so much that we thought we'd devote an entire post to it. Here is that post.

Today is a comic of sorts, full of dead funny drawings that document what its creator thinks about on a day-to-day basis. From silverfish infestations and poems about winter being absolutely bobbins to the awkward situations that ensue when you take over a recently deceased person's job. It's all there. If I was writing for a high brow publication, I might describe it as a 'celebration of the minutiae of everyday life'. That's right! The minutiae!

Here's a bit of Today volume one for you to have a look at. Stef was selling the first two volumes of the zine in a pencil case type thing for FIVE POUNDS (Keep reading for sample photo of that). Bargain! We bought one and read and re-read both volumes on the way home. Liz can't even read on public transport without feeling sick but she flipping well had a go, such was her desperation to have another look.

By the time we had arrived back home, our zine super fandom had reached fever pitch. The first thing we did  was try and look for the zine on the internet. 'Surely there must be some kind of web presence for such a talent?' said neither of us. Sadly this turned out not to be the case, so we were unable to do any kind of research (Hence the poor quality of this post). So then we just had to send an overenthusiastic email to Stef, just to let her know how great her zines are. Not only did she reply, she actually sent us a free copy of the third instalment of Today! Amazing. Here's a photo with all three volumes of the zine (In order!) and the pencil case thing that comes with the first two.

As mentioned above, there's no website/blog/anything for Today at the moment. You can, however, buy stuff from Stef by emailing her if you like! Just send orders and compliments to stef bradley at live dot co dot uk and I'm sure you'll be able to come to some kind of agreement. Alternatively, you'll be able to buy the zine at the Inprint Liverpool Print Fair, which is going to be at the Shipping Forecast pub on December 9th. And in even more exciting news, she's going to be sharing a stall with us! You'll only need to visit one stall to buy all your zine related Christmas presents.

In other news, you can buy the new issue of Young Explorer on our Etsy now. It's got Phil Elverum, Haiku Salut, buses, illustrations, a competition (!) and a thing I wrote about my grandad's record collection that, if you squint, could almost be described as 'poignant'. Get on it, or something like that.

See yer!

S

Manchester Print Fair and New Etsy Things!

I am writing this post very quickly as we need to leave to go to the Manchester Print Fair in about ten minutes. I just thought I'd quickly update all of you on the new stuff we have in our shop! We're debuting the second issue of the zine today, which includes all kinds of exciting things like: Phil Elverum, Haiku Salut and the Manchester Transport Museum. 

We've also got some sexy owl greetings cards available, and, some owl badges too. The owl badges will be available to buy irl today, but you'll have to wait until next week to buy them online. Here's a picture of all the owl related things we have:

So either come down to 2022NQ today, or head over to our Etsy to get spending your hard earned.

See yer!

S

How are you feeling?

Yesterday we went to see David Shrigley's new exhibition 'How Are You Feeling?' at the Cornerhouse. We went to see his exhibition 'Brain Activity' at the Hayward Gallery in London, which the Daily Mail called 'the sickest art show ever', in February, and it was well worth the entrance money. While the exhibition at the Cornerhouse wasn't quite as big, it was FREE. The best price.

There was no taxidermy this time, with the exhibition mainly consisting of loads and loads of the drawings that he's most famous for. All the favourites were there, plus tonnes of stuff that I'd never seen before. We particularly enjoyed this one:

And here's a photo of me looking dead serious and that.

There's other stuff too. There's a couple of nap stations in case you get tired while you're making your way around the gallery. There's a short and funny animation. There's a giant naked man who, rather creepily, blinks and urinates into a bucket every now and again. Visitors are encouraged to take a seat and sketch him, like you would a life model, but we didn't have time and I can't draw so we skipped that part.

There was also a gong that you could have a go on, which was too good an opportunity to pass up.

There's all kinds of things going on around the exhibition too. Check the Cornerhouse's website for different events, although the Harry Hill guided tours of the exhibition have sold out now. Rubbish. If you're lucky enough to be able to get into town at 2pm on a Wednesday, Bakerie are selling David Shrigley Anti-Psychotic Brain Bread for the duration of the exhibition. They're baking 13 loaves a week and they're £5 each. I'm hoping to figure out a way of getting one!

The exhibition is on until January 6th, and, as mentioned previously, it's free!

See yer!

S

Threaderal Government pt. 1: William Taft

For my birthday, Liz's ace sister and incredible husband bought me THIS. It has loads of amazing posters from US presidential elections from the last 200 years in it. It is pretty amazing. As there's an election coming up very shortly, I've decided to embroider portraits of some of my favourite presidents and presidential candidates* from the 20th century.

This chap here is supposed to be William Taft, who served as president between 1909 and 1913. From what I've read about him before, he seems to have been a reasonably un-evil type bloke, but he wasn't a particularly memorable president. That said, he is the fattest ever president, which is pretty good going. Wikipedia reckons that he once got stuck in his bath tub and his staff had to come and use butter to dislodge him. Unpleasant mental image whether it's true or not.

Another fact I like about William Taft is that a town called Moron, which had been burnt down and rebuilt after a fire, was renamed Taft in his honour. Apparently the word 'moron' wasn't a derogatory term when they named it. But we can ignore that bit, can't we?

Anyway, feel free to suggest other presidents/presidential candidates for me to have a go at. I'm thinking of doing Eugene Debs next, because then I don't have to faff around with embroidering loads of hair and stuff.

*Note: this does not necessarily mean that I agree with their views, it might just be that I think they were funny looking or something daft like that.

See yer!

S