Well this could be my last ever post for my Learn To Love Yourself More blog, or maybe just the last one for a while.
You see while I have had fun completing all the assignments, I am still slightly frustrated by the amount I haven't and wanted to complete. For instance number 69 Climb to the top of a tree and take a picture of the view could have easily been included. Well not in Sunderland anyway, trust me I looked everywhere and there was not one decent tree to be found.
Now this may just be laziness on my part and it seems a shame to end it on this way but that is why I may still continue the blog at a later date when other distractions such as other university work or part time job will not get in my way.
But saying that I do feel I have time to complete one last, and very fitting assignment. Number 70 Say goodbye.
Goodbye Learning to Love You More blog Goodbye 21 Lorne Terrace (hello number 5 Belvedere Road) Goodbye Carlos Tevez Goodbye 2nd year of university Goodbye 3rd year university students who I’ve met recently Goodbye Ryan Stuart Allsop Goodbye...for now at least
As my previous post briefly explained the story of how I broke my jaw and an earlier post described my favourite scars, I feel now is a good time to show assignment number 35 Ask your family to describe what you do.
Even though the assignment does request that they don’t talk about what happened in the past, inevitably there is a link between those two assignments and this one. Except for my Dad's description who wrote:
"Ewan is Emeritus Professor of Party at the University of Sunderland."
My eldest Brother Alex (of the Beauty and the Beast fame) describes me by saying:
As far as I can tell Ewan does very little. Officially he studies journalism at Sunderland University, but I suspect that this is just a front to divert attention away from his ACTUAL occupation, which is to purposely desecrate his entire body with scars, so not only will he eventually be covered so completely in scar tissue that he can finally follow his true calling (becoming Scarman, the North East's premier Supervillan, who lurks around the back streets of Sunderland and Gateshead, kicking over bins, loitering needlessly and playing ball-games on pieces of grass where it is explicitly prohibited) but also because it's a great ice-breaker. Ewan's religion strictly prohibits employment. In his spare time he remarks to himself how hairy his arms are. At the moment he's already preparing to regret what he gets up to tomorrow night. He wears t-shirts that regularly fall foul of the Obscene Publications Act.
And finally, my dear Mum who has possibly been traumatised the most through my actions writes (her bold lettering by the way):
Well here goes. What do Ithinkthat you do? I know that you are a second year student at Sunderland Uni, studying journalism, and you live in a large shared house on a street whose address I always have to look up on my mobile. You work at the Uni bar that re opened this year and enjoy your course. Most of the time I don’t try and think what else you may be doing because of your ability to sustain physical damage, but I can always watch the best of them on Facebook. I think that you enjoy Uni and have a good set of friends. This latest assignment that you are doing seems a bit of a hoot.
Now that my blog as the backing of both the Oliver family and the Learning To Love Yourself More project itself (well, its twitter account at least @ltlym if you're interested) I'm glad to announce the completion of my latest assignment. This one is kind of like the mascot for the exhibition, one of the more popular ones when it come to the number of people also attempting it and the very first one I noticed when I first came across the project when it was advertised at the Baltic all those months ago. Ladies and Gentlemen, assignment number 63 Make an encouraging banner.
All you had to do was make a banner with a bit of encouragement that you tell yourself often and hang it somewhere where it can encourage others. I chose to use a famous Japanese proverb 'fall down 7 times, stand up 8'. Not bad eh? Certainly works for me. But then it all started to go wrong for me.
Firstly since I had to put each letter on a separate piece of coloured card, I had to do this 22 times and it took me hours. It is surprising how stressed I got cutting out bits of brightly coloured bits of card and sticking them to another piece, I seriously don't know how I used to do it all the time when I was younger and not suffer from high blood pressure.
I then had to try and hang it up where it could encourage people. I had an idea to hang it up on a gate near my uni to help people as they take the dreaded hung-over walk to a lecture. Here’s proof of me and my house mates attempting it at in the middle of the night.
Now perhaps this is just me but this was bloody hard and for a moment we thought the police were going to stop us. We gave up on the idea (for the time being at least) and went for the far easier option that thankfully other who decided to complete this assignment and just hang it up in their house. So here it is:
Now looking at this, I have to say that this is the assignment that I am most proud of achieving so far. Not only did I spend the most amount of time and effort on it but this simple idea is what the project as a whole really represents, that anyone can create art which can inspire and encourage people. My only regret is that I couldn't hang it where I wanted as the actual message would have worked far better had more people seen it. But at least I can take comfort in it, especially the amount of time I have 'fallen' over the years.
This leads me beautifully to my next assignment number 55 Photograph a significant outfit. Now hang on I know what you’re thinking, what is the link here? Well bare with me. Let me first show you the outfit.
Now the next day after finishing my banner I got a phone call from the CID letting me know that I can now collect this outfit from the police station as it was no longer needed as evidence. You see, this was the outfit In was wearing when I got assaulted in September of last year which resulted in me getting my jaw broken and unable to eat solid food for a month. He mustn't have liked that belt. A pretty grim story you must admit and one of my many fallen moments for me of recent years.
But this project is supposed to make you see the finer things in life and appreciate them so we'll talk no more on the subject except the silver lining of the storyhere.
For this post I've decided to take a slight break and instead talk about one family who are featured on the Learning to Love You More website as a family who managed to complete all 63 assignments (that is how many there were in 2007 with seven more been added to the list since.)
The Oliver family wrote a blog which gave constant updates on them completing each assignment which you can read here if you so wish. The work was then displayed at Bumbershoot 2007, a music and arts festival in Seattle.
For a while I felt a bit guilty about not completing more assignments than I have done at this point, but reading the Oliver's blog and realizing it took 6 members of the family months to complete reassured me slightly.
I have commented on their blog to let them know that I am attempting a similar blog, with less success when it comes to the number of completed assignments and the quality of work I have done in comparison. Whether they still read the blog though, it’s been nearly a year since the last post, I'll just have to wait and see.
So this is a smaller post than usual with normal services resuming from now on.
For some reason I can't really explain. I've become very nostalgic over the past few weeks. This usually only happens when my birthday is near or some other important anniversary is coming and i suddenly think "has it really been a year since such and such and yada yada?"
So with that in mind the next two assignments are seeped in nostalgia. The first one unfortunately involved me getting my drawing cap on again for number 18 Recreate a poster you had as a teenager.
Now for obvious reasons its not too hard to remember what posters I had as a teenager. One it hasn't been that long since I was a teenager. Secondly I still had these posters on my wall until very recently but since Ive moved away my bedroom has now become the 'office space'. This is very much like when you were even younger you had the same Thomas The Tank Engine wall paper until the age of about 14 when you've finally grown out of it and replace it with posters like this:
Now the second part of this assignment tells you to locate an piece of music that you were listening to as a teenager. So I should simply put one of the ones from this album, that makes sense doesn't it? thats easy enough right? Right? Wrong.
Simply because even though I had this poster for years on my wall, I never actually owned the album until I was 18 so instead I've included my favorite song from when I was 14 (the most awkward of the teenage years I feel) and still is one of my favorite of all times, The Stokes The Modern Age
Even listening to it now it reminds me of the time that everybody remembers going through and would quite happily never go through it again. Sorry for the pretty poor excuse of a video, but nowadays you're lucky to get any music on YouTube.
The second assignment not only made me think more about my past than I could of possibly hoped for, but it also got others thinking about theirs too. It is assignment number 53 Give advice to yourself in the past.
It sounds simple enough and it is. Chose a period in your life and like some sort of time traveling comedy film, give advice/warnings to yourself.
The time I chose was to give advice myself to was in the Summer of 2006. I had just finished college, still had no idea what university I was going to, what I was going to do when i got there and in a matter of months would be signing on the dole as i struggles to find full time employment.with that in mind here's my advice to myself fore the following year.
Quit smoking now, you will spend an unnecessary amount of time in hospital over the next year and this is one of the contributors to it.
On the same subject stay away form iron board style Evil Knievel stunts when drunk, although the resulting video will be legendary.
Although it may not seem like it at times, Sunderland is a better choice for you than Sheffield or Southampton.
Don’t feel guilty if you don’t achieve as much as you wanted in your year out before university, just think about everything that you did achieve and the times you had.
But at the same time plan for your future career better, sometimes it is not always best idea to ‘live in the moment’.
Go to more FC United of Manchester games with your Dad, you will start to see less of him from now on so you might as well spend time doing something you both love.
Don’t give up on the guitar, you will never be brilliant but you will always enjoy playing it.
You will get yourself into some needlessly dangerous situations with people who should know better. Even though I shouldn’t really say this, don’t worry nothing bad will happen and you’ll have some great laughs about it later.
Look forward to the summer of 2006
Now I don't have nearly enough time to go through what I have just wrote, but take it from me, this is quality advice. What I really liked about this assignment however was the response I got when I asked other people what their advice to themselves would be.
They responses ranged from ones that obviously the person thought long and hard about "Don't go on a date with the love of your life," where the person hasn't really but too much thought into it "take more hard drugs" to the ridiculous " kick the crap out of your little cousins until they are Man City fans."
For obvious reasons I will keep their anonymity, except for the last one, that was my cousin Chris and he's an idiot. But this is one where i actually wanted more people to take part and feel that the fact that it made people think about their past, even if only for a brief time and not always with rose tinted nostalgia. So as of now I have a new favorite assignment and it is number 53.
I feel it is now time to come take part is some of the assignments that I have been dreading. Not because of how uncomfortable they will make me feel or their difficulty, mainly it’s the fact that I can't draw. I have about as much talent for drawing as a duck would have for playing the didgeridoo or a toaster would have for managing your debts into one manageable piece. So it is at this point I arrive nervously at assignment number 32. Draw a scene from a movie that made you cry.
Now this really got me thinking. I’m not trying to come over a macho and hard man like because that, frankly, would be ridiculous but I can count the amount of times I've cried at a film on one hand and still have a spare thumb.
Now I remember the first film I cried at. That prestigious honor goes to the emotional roller coaster that was Homeward Bound where the older dog couldn’t escape from the ditch only to be reunited with his owner right at the end. Still makes me all teary eyed just thinking about it, and now it’s with added nostalgia.
But for this assignment I went for a more contemporary film and went with the last scene of a film that made me cry, one that appears in Wes Anderson's amazing The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
Firstly if you haven't seen this film, stop reading now and go watch it and return later. Then once you've done, finish reading and watch the other brilliant films in the Wes Anderson catalogue Rushmore and The Royal Tennenbaums and thank me later. If you have seen it, hopefully you can guess which scene I'm talking about from my picture (and let me remind you that I admit I can't draw so be nice.
For those of you who are still a bit bemused here is the scene I have tried to recreate
Now for one of my assignments (35. Ask your family to describe what you do, but more on that later) I had to ask members of my family for assistance. So I emailed my dear Mother, Father and eldest brother Alex to assist me. Alex, god bless him though I wanted him to also draw a scene in a movie which made him cry. His result is both astounding in the amount of effort he put in and shameful that his picture trumps mine in almost every single way, so here it is with his own explanation
'Ello
I've decided to draw the heart-breakingly beautiful scene from Beauty and the Beast, where the Beast (played in this piece by what looks like a giant squirrel in a dinner jacket) tells Belle that she can leave to save her father, thereby sacrificing what is perhaps his final chance to find true love. Sniff, it truly is a tear-jerker. I particularly like the use of perspective in this scene, while I found I really captured the Beast's pain in his face. Fantastic, if I do say so myself
I'm tempted to just let him do everything now purely based on this fine piece of work, and he didn't use none of this Photoshop business either, just a pure old school paint job.
I'm also curious now to see how assignment number 27. Take a picture of the sun would look if I asked Alex to do it too, I'm guessing he would produce something of such hilarity/beauty that it would completely overshadow my effort
After my completion of my first few assignments I thought it was now time to head out into the world and see what I could complete now the weather finally decided to become sunny and warm after a winter that was so cold it was pretty much soul destroying.
So it was onto my next assignment, one that I was pretty pleased with, no 8. Curate an artist's retrospective in a public place. Now I'm not to ashamed to admit that when it comes to artists, I don't particularly have a favourite or even know too much about the subject. I'm more of those 'I know what I like' type person when it comes to art and what I 'like' are the usual suspects, Dali, Francis Bacon, Lowry but not enough that I feel I can write about them and hang it up in a public place as this assignment requires.
So I did what every what every person who doesn't want to appear completely ignorant when it come to art, I made a claim for graffiti artist Banksy. I chose Banksy for two reasons really, one being that since Banksy's work will never actually appear in any exhibition, this was my way of giving him one. Secondly there is nothing that upset and depresses me more that a pathetic piece of graffiti that someone has sprayed painted in some town or city centre. So I hung up next to a fine example of what I'm talking about to suggest that unless you are going to do something anyway near this quality, seriously don't bother.
I now just have to play the waiting game to see how long it will take for someone to rip this down, so if you do see anyway please return it to its original spot of the subway near the bridge, full of rubbish graffiti .
Shortly after this successful assignment (no matter how long it stays up I still consider it a success) I somewhat failed slightly on my next assignment no.15 Hang a wind chime on a tree in a parking lot. I failed mainly because of instead of purchasing a decent wind chime because that would of taken time, effort and money. I instead I thought a novelty 99 pence one would be just as good. It wasn't. It didn't even make a noise really which really defined the point of it. Add to that the fact I couldn't find a parking lot with a tree in it and I decided to do this on a wind less day (who would of thought I would ever be disappointed that it was too nice a day?) and the result is this pretty pointless video. But never mind, it still cheered me up and I can still strike assignment number 15 off my list. Kind of. (I should point out here that I did have a recording but it wouldn't upload to my blog and now some evil human being has stolen my wind chime so I will have to do it again and when I do, it will appear here as if nothing has happened)
One I did complete with absolute satisfaction and no complaints was assignment no.23 Recreate this snapshot. Basically here is the original snapshot...
and here is my recreation with help from my dear friend Miss Pippa Whiteside. Pretty spot on I think you will all agree.
Monday, 9 March 2009
What with my first assignments now under my belt, I was in a frantic almost giddy mood deciding on which one I should complete next. Still really trying to get the easy ones out of the way I thought no.9 Draw a constellation from someone's freckles would be an easy one to strike off so here it is. Not really much else I can say about this except if you want to take part in this exhibition yourself, don't do the dishes before you have taken the picture or an unfortunate smudge may happen, which was my ingenious idea.
Now this one was the first I had to really think about. Not because of my lack of scars, I have so many I could literally have my own photo exhibition of them all, it was more a case of which one to choose. I’ve got everything from the small, like where my brother accidentally stabbed me with a letter opener, to a huge one across my head where my other brother, again accidentally, hit me full swing with a baseball bat.
Looking on the website where other people have sent in their photos, they range from the typical ones that you got when you were younger and barely remember now, to the falling over when drunk scars.
But every now and again you saw someone with horrific burns, surgery scars and even a few self harmers who are happy to point out their problems are now behind them. It is these ones that really make me think about my own scars and how each one of them is a different mini story, and it’s the same for pretty much every single person. If you want a fun game to play to see what I mean, just shout out 'lets compare scars!' next time you're at the pub with your friends, just to see what stories you do get. With this in mind here is my photo and my story.
In January of 2007 I woke up on a Sunday morning with a slight pain in my chest and struggling to breathe. As the morning went on the pain and my ability to breathe continued to worsen to the point of agony/fainting. It is at this point my Mum drove my to A+E and it was there I found out I suffered a spontaneous pneumothorax; basically my right lung had collapsed. The doctors inserted a chest drain, basically a plastic tube into my chest to drain the air, which is why they kind of look like knife wounds. They removed that when they thought my lung had healed, but when x rays showed otherwise a second one placed back in straight away followed by a third after my surgery to fully correct my lung. I also have a similar one on my left hand side after a suffered another pneumothorax last year, only not so spontaneous this time.
Now I know you’re thinking two things by now, firstly 'woah, no one wants to see pictures of you with your top off' and for that I can only apologise. Secondly you will be thinking 'crikey, this has gone a bit morbid hasn't it?" Well not really, ask me what my favourite scars and these three beauties are the answer and I get asked about them constantly. So for me this is really my version of 'I fell off a diving board in Mallorca when I was eight' and is nothing on some of the scars you can witness on the website.
Now as I have a long list of assignments to plough through, I thought it best to start off slowly and ease my way into the whole operation. So I'd looked through my list to see what I can chalk off straight away. I have started to carry around with me my list of assignments at all times nowadays like Earl Hickey from My Name is Earl, except without the perfect moustache and I'm not thinking about the consequences of my actions will take in a sort of hippie/karma way.
Now from here on out I feel that it is a good thing that I'm not taking karma or any other Buddhist preaching into account for this project as the first chance I got, I basically took the opportunity to cause mischief. As an aspiring journalist I will be dealing with press releases all the time except for this one the exhibition tells us to:
“Write up a very official press release for something that you encounter on an everyday basis and send it to at least three news publications.”
As it happened I went through something that people do encounter every day up and down the land just a matter of hours ago, waiting all day for a delivery that never comes. To cut a long story short, lots of people drinking at my house, washing machine got destroyed to the point of no return, new washing machine required, told to be in the house between the hours of 1 and 6. Although in hindsight it might as well have said between the hours of 1 and next September...and it still would of turned up sometime in November. With my rant over, here is the actual press released I distributed to three publications.
For immediate release: Man waits for new washing machine to arrive. A man living in Sunderland was told to wait for his new washing machine between the hours of 1 and 6 was left disappointed as the machine never arrived. The man who wished to remain anonymous was left furious as he mentioned how he "wanted to go outside and see the wonders that this Earth has to offer rather than stay inside all day making sure I didn't miss it." It was only after checking his voicemails later that day that he found out that the delivery address was spelt wrong and that the delivery man was looking for a different address all together. "You couldn't make it up" added the washing machine less man.
The three papers I sent this to were the Sunderland Echo (you never know they might just have printed it) The Daily Mail ( just because what I imagine the person’s face who works for this paper would look like as they read through it amused me) and the New York Times (well, you have to have ambition don't you.) As of yet I have received no reply or found my story published anywhere.
Each assignment requires the public to send in a report, be it a photo or written piece, to show they have accomplished the assignment and it is these reports that are placed on the website or at one of the many exhibitions worldwide.
The idea is that each person who takes part in these assignments has their own unique experiences in realising how simple creating something that can make you think can be if they think about their own lives.
It is my intention to complete as many of these assignments as possible, write about my experience of this and regularly update my blog depending on what assignments I completed. The main challenges that I can see is that a) I absolutely cannot draw or create anything which these assignments ask me to do and b) some assignments will be just too hard. For example assignment no 39. Take a picture of your parents kissing, my parents have been divorced for over ten years now and can't imagine they can be persuaded to kiss each other all in the name of 'art'.
The full list of assignments can be found on the website and will keep blogging any future assignments I complete from here on out.
I am currently 21 years old and am in my second year studying journalism at Sunderland university. I intend to use this blog site to write any articles/features/random reviews or opinions that may crop up into my mind. If you wish to contact me you may so at ewan.palmer@sunderland.ac.uk
