The idea behind True Stories Told Live is simple; people gather in a cosy pub and listen to five people tell a true story. I went last Wednesday and two novelists, a comedian, musician and legendary writer related their peculiar and everyday life-stories.

Anthony McGowan spoke about his Leeds childhood and a fateful, early-morning adventure with a crossbow where he battled with a gypsy dog. Then Aussie comedian Sarah Bennetto told us tips on how to win competitions and about getting dragged (down a dark alleyway) into an Arcade Fire gig by lead singer Win Butler.

If all this sounds deeply obscure, it is. But I recommend the evening to you. There are monthly get-togethers in Brighton, Cardiff and London. Expect to hear anything from the hilarious to the mundane.

My Dance The Skull is a publishing house printing intricate, beautiful, dark, probing and toughful zines. Run by artists Marco Cazzella and Bethania Dick, My Dance The Skull also issue cassette tapes by musicians such as Tom White. Their aim is to 'promote contemporary artists whose work is inspired by the dangerous and convulsive beauty of the everyday life.' This heady description reminded me of the darker side of Surrealist work (pieces by Hans Bellmar, for example). Anyway, I was curious about their work and asked them a couple of questions.

What was the founding ethic/idea of MDTS? 

Experiencing and showing the 'unwanted'.

Why do you publish both zines and cassette tapes?

Marco: We collect zines and short run books, so it was quite spontaneous for us decide to use a format we are familiar with. Bethania experimented with mail art and DIY zines when she was a teenager.

She also has a nice collection of tapes with songs recorded off a radio station in Brazil, many years ago. Listening to those tapes is really nice; you can hear interruptions, sounds, voices, background noise, etc. Plus, re-recording new songs on the top of old songs many times has made all those sounds overlap. It is almost like listening to a naïve version of some of the Burroughs experiments with tape-recordings.

Nowadays, I think it's fair to say that quite a lot of people are paying attention to the return of the cassette culture. The vogue is not the reason why we are doing this, though.

Who are the people behind MDTS and what's your background in the art/music world?

Bethania: Marco and I, two people, but it feels like we are only one sometimes. Life has brought us together and we are now in a sort of a mission to express the frustrations of our corrupted souls and to create awareness and confusion. We have very different backgrounds, but generally share the same views, same tastes, same delirium!

Marco studied Music and Performing Arts in the Literature and Philosophy Faculty at the University of Bologna and I can say that I am self-taught; I have no formal education in arts or music, even though art and music have been a huge part of my life and upbringing.

We listen to all types of music, but currently we are completely in love with traditional African and Asian sounds. Marco is an artist himself, one of his first drawings as a little boy was a picture of Jesus Christ making a phone call, which caused quite a stir in his Catholic Primary School in Italy.

Why did you decide to start MDTS?

Marco and Bethania: Since we first met, we always talked about starting a publishing project. The idea for MDTS mainly comes from our love of poetry and storytelling. And it is a process that starts from our guts. Well, basically we can say that our stomachs are responsible for the whole thing most of the time. A while back, Bethania came across the amazing work of Polish painter Aleksandra Waliszewska and we thought that it would be a good idea to start from there; her work is very ‘My Dance The Skull'.

Photo: My Dance The Skull at the Little Big Press Exhibition.

Discovering the work of an artist who's spent their creative life working in private, away from peoples' prying eyes and questions, is the stuff of legends. Alfred Wallis, for example, was a little known Cornish fisherman and painter, when Ben Nicholson got wind of his work in the 1920s. For the last two decades of this life, he became a much celebrated artist.

Although the Chicago based photographer Vivian Maier was no Cornish seaman, her photography has recently been exposed and feted in ways that reminded me of Wallis. At a Chicago auction several years ago John Maloof came across 3000 prints, 2000 rolls of film and 100,000 negatives by Maier. He bought the auction lot and is still sorting through this huge archive of her life and work. 

From the 1950s to the 1990s Maier was a prolific street photographer. She died in 2009 and knew nothing of the great success her photography has become. Maier's photographs are bustling with policemen, people and life; what was once a creative isolation is now everybody's business.  

In issue four, we featured a fabulous illustrated ‘conversation' between Benjamin Phillips and Soju Tanaka from Frinton Press. Soju also participated in the Elephant Family project (which we've previously featured on the blog).

He gave this elephant the title of 'Two Rooms - Sea and Desert' and it's a wonderfully cute and colorful rendition. A couple of his other designs are still for sale from Elephant Parade.

You can see more of Soju's work on his website here.

Holiday snaps are funny things. I discovered my great-grandmother's holiday slides not too long ago and managed to digitally scan them. But when we finally looked at her images, it was anyone's guess as to the city she travelled to and people she was with. Here's one from the series, and where she was no doubt inspired by the tartan dress code of the local fishermen. I guess the year to be about 1950, but I'm only going on her high-waisted wool skirt and black crepe hat that feature in some of the photos.

For issue five of oh comely, we'd like you to send us one of your holiday photos. It could be your own or one you've found, a picture from fifty years or five weeks ago. Tell us what you know about the picture. Even if that's very, very little! Where was it taken? Who's being photographed? Who's the photographer? What's the story behind the picture?

Send them to [email protected] by January 23. All files should be sent as high-res images.

The best solution yet to my post-holiday blues has been the London Short Film Festival. 2011 marks the 8th year of this festival that curiously began life as the ‘Halloween Film Festival’. Like Rushes later in the year, the LSFF is an excellent chance to soak up and enjoy the work of young filmmakers.

Screenings work around themes such as Femme Fantastiques showing "films bringing us femmes with attitude" or Here Come the Young Men, "bittersweet and hard-hitting films about growing up". There's also a helpful series of talks on the film industry, with a film surgery offering first aid for work in progress.

Photo: a still from Nadaav Soudry's short, Opera Singer.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Yes, yes, this is a little late for a New Year post. We've been busy dusting off our computers and posting piles of magazines that were ordered over the break.

But we don't think it's too late to get excited about 2011. Yesterday, we asked people on Twitter about their resolutions, and got a thought-provoking response from @KathrynSharman. 

She says on her blog, "I've never really been one for new year's resolutions. For me, they always seem to involve unrealistic dreams and/or punitive measures of denial or restraint, which is never a good way to start a year and is invariably doomed to failure."

Well, we can't help nodding in agreement to that. Instead, she advocates an ongoing 'life list', which breaks down her aspirations into do-able chunks for every day, week or month. They need to be "realistic, achievable and measurable".

That sounds very wise. Perhaps it's time to bin the resolutions and start a life list. We hope you have a realistic, achievable and measurable 2011. And a happy one too, of course.