Deathwork Adverts & Theme Tunes
Deathwork Adverts & Theme Tunes
This year we were invited to make a DEAD GOOD advert for Art City Radio. LV ended up creating a theme tune for us (by mistake) by rewriting the lyrics to a famous song released in the year 2000.
Hello there, fellow mortal,
KV here.
How are things with you?
I’m feeling the need to pace myself.
LV is still too poorly to work at the moment. She’s currently staying with our mum (MV) for some dedicated rest and recuperation. Her gallbladder remains angry and unpredictable, ramping up LV’s pain levels without warning. She was back in A&E overnight this week. We’re waiting for a date for her surgery, which will hopefully happen before Christmas. Until then it’s a gallbladder gauntlet. Not much fun for LV.
This means DEAD GOOD is very much a one-man band for now. It’s been pretty wild and intense.
Big shout out of thanks to Suzy Jackson who I’m having weekly business coaching with. We’ve been talking openly about strategies to avoid burnout, such as saying no (or not yet) to things and accepting offers of help (oh, and re-homing two kittens).
To this end, a new member of DEAD GOOD will join us later this month. Lucy, an artist and personal assistant, will be working with us 1 day a week to help keep things on an even keel. So November will mainly see me facilitating funerals and memorials in my celebrant role, guesting on a couple of podcasts, working on the storyboards for our animations on ways to have brilliant and low-cost funerals, and attending both DEAD GOOD FILM CLUB and the Lifting the Lid online international conference.
Deathwork Adverts and Theme Tunes
Earlier this year we were invited to create an advert about our work for Art City Radio. They even paid us! In July, LV came up with this (see video below), which she wrote and then sang into her phone, before creating a jaunty video to accompany the jingle. And just like that, we have an impromtu theme tune for DEAD GOOD. Every deathy enterprise should have one.
November’s Grief Alphabet
The 1st of November is here. A month to intentionally yet informally connect with our grief/s big and small.
So we're going to start enacting our A-Z of Creative Approaches to Grief for ourselves.
Today, I started with the letter H, which goes something like:
HAVE A GO AT MAKING A DIY TEMPORARY MEMORIAL FOR SOMEONE OR SOMETHING.
I made this compostable cardboard memorial plaque for my dad.
I re-purposed my verse from the @king_ink_spoken_word communal grief poem that was created over the summer.
It felt good to slowly write it out by hand.
It felt good to use the cardboard base from last night's pizza for the plaque.
I took it to @rspb_saltholme - a place for wild birds Dad would have bloody loved, but that I never got to visit with him.
Note: I didn't leave my DIY memorial at RSPB Saltholme, in case it was mistaken for litter or unusual vandalism. I might take it out with me over the weekend to other places.
What DIY memorial would you make? What grief do you want to acknowledge?
I really do find that mindful DIY acts of remembrance are helpful no matter how old the grief is.
As previously mentioned, the DEAD GOOD illustrated grief poster is the creative output from our community arts residency with @17nineteen.
The creative grief approach for each letter came from conversations that I had with different people in Sunderland during the artist residency. I then created the A-Z and LV turned it into a visual treat.
We've created a downloadable PDF of the poster. The download is available for 5 pound coins in our webshop. Thank you to everyone who’s downloaded it so far, you excellent legends.
Now to start planning tomorrow’s grief activity, my portable pocket shrine - perhaps an ode to my past pets (the Vigurs cats - Kitty, Jess, Dot, Misty, Steve and Pommy) - before I collect two new 12-week-old kittens on Sunday.
WARNING: The next Mortal Portal piece may include some shameless kitten spam.