drawings from popular and reality television by Jenny Robins. Suggestions welcome - use hashtag

Thursday, March 31, 2016

Ru Paul's Drag Race

So I'm on holiday and I have a Netflix account active. I usually only do this for one month at a time. Because I have a dangerous tendency towards television addiction. I'm a narrative junky. Which does not actually help with the Real TV Wisdom project, because I specifically set myself the rules that the quotes I draw have to be unscripted. And the shows I am most susceptible to binging on are very much scripted. So until I begin the sister project, drawings of my favourite lines from Buffy and Gilmore Girls (Ellie Cryer may have already begun this project), Netflix is not the friend of my practice. Unless you count watching the whole of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt while I paint watercolour portraits. Which I actually do. 
Anyway that whole preamble was my excuse for drawing from an old-as Ru Paul episode. It's the first one on Netflix. And what are time and space in these new days of on demand entertainment. Have you seen how long songs stay in the charts now? I love the inherent contradictory focus on supportiveness and bitchiness in this program, and I guess in drag culture, embodied here by the host's literal two faces. Its all like always be yourself and follow your dream you beautiful rainbow, unless you do something I don't like in which case you can f off and die. I also really enjoyed the crafting element of this episode (Gone with the Window) where the competing queens had to make outfits out of curtains (a reference to Scarlet O'Hara doing the same in the eponymous film, respect the pun), which shows a higher level of skill and creativity than ANTM, IMHO. 

Monday, March 21, 2016

Young, Welsh and Pretty SKint


When I see TV programs about cultural bubbles within the country I live in (The Kingdom of United, or Britain the Great, and every-time there's a box on a form you're not sure which of those you should write, or is that just my struggle?) where people have really specific standards of beauty, it makes me question my beliefs in period fashion acquired from a book on fashion through time that I used to photocopy the black and white illustrations from when I was a child to use as colouring pages. Yes that's right, we made our own fun. Maybe if people in Essex and Wales are painting themselves orange, not every woman in the mid to late nineteenth century wore a bustle, and maybe not every woman in the sixties had a Mary Quant dress.

Which is to say, obviously that's not a thing. Not all young people in Wales are in the one single sub culture, and there are people in many places that value a good hair extension and well toned bicep, without crucially also talking funny. 

Jayde Lee here, second runner up for Swansea in the 2012 Miss Universe Wales pageant and wise hairtrepreneur, offers luscious long hair for sale or rent to enable local beauty enthusiasts to fulfil their life plans. But she doesn't trust men with beards. 

You can catch Young, Welsh and Pretty Skint on Iplayer unless you're reading this from far enough in the future that you can't any more.