Happy Birthday Kim!

It’s been a busy few weeks with Birthdays popping up left, right and centre. As much as we would love every single post to be a tribute to our nearest and dearest, it might lack the culture (unless birthday culture is a thing…maybe it IS a thing?)

However, this one is a big one and as such it’s a big must! It’s Kim’s Birthday TODAY. Not only has she been quite simply the driving force behind the Little Ghost design and creative structure, including lots of our fashion pieces, she’s also been a bloody marvelous girl to know these past few years. AND she does all this while being the size of a Candyfloss bubble. 

Happy Birthday lovely Kim.xx

Bring me Sunshine | LG goes to Edinburgh

The sun is out. THANK GOD. London was absolutely beautiful today with lots of frozen yoghurts and frappuccinos to be had. We’ve already got a vino-on-the-common plan forming for tomorrow.

Check out these snaps. They’re taken from a recent trip to Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh that Kim took with some friends. Look at that blue sky! That’s what we’re talking about. Enjoy the sun Ghostlings.x

BERLIN: The Forger’s Tale @ Crypt Gallery

LG’s Freya Gosling visits and falls in love with the Crypt Gallery in Euston and catches some 30′s Berlin inspired art. All in a day’s work.

Long dark tunnels, arched passageways, eerily sparse lighting, crumbling headstones propped up against dusty bricks walls. All expected from a nineteenth century crypt. But modern art exhibitions? Not so much. But this is what the Crypt Gallery in St Pancras Church has done for a decade now and is one of the most atmospheric art venues I have ever been to.

The Crypt’s latest exhibition is BERLIN: The Forger’s Tale, which visually leads the viewer to inspect various aspects of Georg Bruni, a twentieth century forger who was operational in Berlin during the 1930s. Mixed media, collage and painting, as well as sculpture, found objects and sound make references to some of the best known elements of the period including artists like George Grosz, Sylvia von Harden (a favourite of LG’s), Max Beckmann and Dali, as well as contemporary jazz scenes, groups of prostitutes and snippets of propaganda posters and war photography. But these scenes of 30s Expressionism, DaDa and cabaret have been re-worked with modern elements: Grosz’s cynical pen and ink characters now clutch iPhones instead of playing cards, despair over laptops rather than scraps of food, and the faces of famous actors have been digitally pasted over the faces of soldiers in WW2 photos.

Artists Kevin Broughton and Fiona Birnie draw interesting light on the modern traumas and turmoils of today, and how dramatically our lifestyles have changed in the past two decades. They claim that Bruni’s life provides numerous parallels with contemporary life:

‘…questioning issues of identity, the importance of individual status, and our reliance on and desire for the manipulated information which contributes to and constructs our world reality…. is it still possible to relate to the past without sanitizing it y projecting our contemporary values onto it…’

Indeed, even the captions are careful to stick to the 140 characters that Twitter now ‘dictates’.

It was great also however, to come face to face once again with some of the best loved characters from 30s German culture. If you’re as obsessed with this period as we are, check out this exhibition asap, and also Bauhaus: Art as Life at the Barbican which opened this month and continues until August.

http://www.cryptgallery.org.uk/index.html
http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=12409

BERLIN: The Forger’s Tale is showing until 16th May 

Birthday Post | For Jess

It’s our girl Jess’s birthday today. Not to be too gushy, but if you’ve never met Jess then you need to, she’s not like anyone else. And from the moment you meet her, you suddenly realise that absolutely everything in your life just got a million times better.

all photos by Marcus James Wheeldon.

Globe to Globe | MACBETH/MAKBET: Teatr im. Kochanowskiego @ Globe Theatre

‘Co się stało, to już się nie odstanie’
‘What’s done is done.’

LG’s Freya Gosling takes advantage of not working this rainy Thursday to get to the Globe Theatre on the Southbank to check out part of their Globe to Globe programme: 37 plays in 37 languages. 

Gangsters. Tracksuits. Cocaine. Velour. Gloria Gaynor. And not a word of English language spoken. Not what is traditionally expected from one of Shakespeare’s best known plays. But Polish Teatr im. Kochanowskiego’s adaptation of Macbeth signifies all that Shakespearean performances should be about: theatrical imagination.

Described as a ‘carnival of stories’, the Globe to Globe season sees theatrical companies from all over the world coming together in one venue, ‘to enjoy speaking these plays in their own language, in our Globe, within the architecture Shakespeare wrote for’. And while it is arguable that these performances cannot fully express the playwright’s original theatricality without Shakespearean language, anyone who has ever studied Shakespeare or just seen one of his plays performed can confirm that language is just one faction of the plays’ multifaceted appeal.

Visually, Teatr im. Kochanowskiego’s version of The Scottish Play is stunning, with courtly clothes of nobles interpreted through shiny tight fitting suits and slicked back hair; even the King’s crown has been replaced by sequin-spangled black loafers, and the witches caterwauling about the stage giving prophecies in full drag attire, gold platforms, feather boas and neon synthetic lingerie. The cast rapidly move between dancing, fighting, fucking, drinking, snorting and eventually, mostly, dying. One friend compared Macbeth’s dragging Lady Macbeth’s dead body across the stage to the moment of despair when Romeo dances with Juliet’s dead body in Kenneth Macmillan’s ballet.

But it is the accompanying emotional intensity that really makes this performance a spectacular success, as well as the adaptation’s modern urban style effectively– less tapping than hitting –into contemporary social issues. The hierarchies in the play are represented through modern gangster culture, where men kill for alpha-male status, women are commodities to be bought, sold and abused at will, and blaring music and class-A drugs feature in a lawless life of crime and chaos. A perfect approach to a play where human emotion features so rawly and frequently; guilt, horror, disgust, desire, fury, malice, elation, depression, despair. In short, humans living to extremes, and often on the brink of total collapse.

Even the transgender-witches, who initially seem like the modern equivalent of the Porter’s light relief role in Macbeth, are given greater depths by their continued presence in the entire performance. Their leading representative, Lola, initially lusts after Banquo and pines his murder in the second half to a mournful version of ‘I will Survive’.

Altogether this performance is a feisty, firery emotional minefield coloured by cocaine, Spadex, bottles of vodka and hits from the 80s. Little Ghost loves!

Globe to Globe season continues until June 9th 2012, so get booking!

http://globetoglobe.shakespearesglobe.com/plays/macbeth/english-95

Up Close and Very Personal | Skin Deep @ HayHill

We’ve got to be careful with how we word this. Firstly, because we don’t want this to come across too pornographic but mainly because the search engine will pick up on particular words we use and the blog will only attract the sexually promiscuous, as happened when we wrote a post on Art and BDSM.

The difficulty is however that Jamie McCartney’s latest exhibition at HayHill gallery on Cork Street is sexual, it is explicit and it is completely unashamed of being so. In fact, for Skin Deep, McCartney actively forces his audience to confront what has for so long been hidden away in Art and society at large: the vagina. There, we said it.

The Great Wall of Vagina is McCartney’s most striking piece in the exhibition. It is a 9 metre long polyptych that consists of four hundred plaster casts of vulvas. The Great Wall effectively breaks down the barriers of public and private and in doing so destroys all previously conceived notions of ‘normal’. The effect it has is surprising. Despite the shock tactic and the wall’s ability to fixate, we didn’t leave the exhibition with the overwhelming sense of being unusual or different or even with the reassurance of being ‘normal’. The reason for this, we can conclude after getting up close and personal with 400 vaginas, is that normal simply does not exist. It’s not a cliché, it simply doesn’t. Instead, McCartney achieves in lifting the anxiety that has for so long encircled female genitalia.

Despite the humorous name and the spectacle created, McCartney has used his artistic ability to very cleverly confront genitalia, make it a talking point and release it from the ties of embarrassment and shame. As McCartney says: ‘It’s not vulgar, it’s vulva’.

Skin Deep also features McCartney’s latest body of work Physical Photography which photographs the human form without cameras but with honesty. The exhibition continues until June 2nd and we thoroughly recommend it.

Little Ghost in Bruges | Holiday Snaps

A fleeting trip to Bruges unfortunately no sightings of Colin Farrell or Ralph Fiennes but did allow some much needed rest, some fantastic exhibitions- including work from Picasso, Matisse, Rodin, Memling and Bosch, as well as wonderful waffles and every kind of beer under the sun- including one for the Little Ghost team:

But if you can’t get round to jetting off to Belgium, LG recommends that instead you take the time to watch ‘In Bruges’, which premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and has won BAFTAs and Golden Globe awards for its darkly comic script and A-list cast. Plus you see some great shots of the medieval city to boot!