Gogo, Cherry and I
Revenge and I

Teaching Radeo origami birds


With the amazing new Suicidegirl Katherine
With Lass, she looks like my little sister!


With the adorable Portuguese girls Illusion, Aeterna, Gossip and Discordia
The lovely Aisline and I
Cooking with Waikiki and GoGo

With my sisters PeggySue and Lass ^_^

Lylie and I first thing in the morning!


(Pictures by Cherry, GoGo, Radeo, Dwam, Sawa)

Why must I go back to reality so soon? I just had the loveliest most relaxing weekend surrounded by lovely people. I'm so grateful. Sad to be back at work and away from all my girls. We were all together to shoot some new things for SG. We worked with a really great crew and I met so many new girls. Everyone was just lovely. I also met Alissa and did a shoot with her, she's so great. I really loved everyone I met :-)

Thank you for all the amazing comments on my member review set. I really appreciate it. I love Suicidegirls :-) x

I had the most peaceful weekend. I don't know how I can complain about small things when I have all this beauty this within my reach. I suppose we have to learn to capture and stay in those moments when things frustrate and worry us. To remember that everything is transient. It is quite amazing that to be in a beautiful wild place seems to blot everything else out for me. We went to Ardnamurchan (Àird nam Murchan 'headland of the great seas'). It is a peninsula on the west of the highlands here. It's the furthest point west in the whole country, 25 miles further into the sea than Land's End down in England. This place was full of beautiful atlantic oak woods, so much moss and lichen everywhere, lots of species I had never seen before. The grass and woods were filled with hundreds of different kinds of fungi. It was quite wet and windy but it just felt fresh and beautiful. We climbed Ben Hiant. It was only a small hill, not over 600m but you got the most heavenly views of the sea and the lochs. There is no way to capture how beautiful everything is with a camera but it's nice to take pictures to remember things anyway. I feel I could live somewhere like this but I would have to work out how to make my living and that would be the hard part.





























So I have recovered for now from my frustrations about work. You all gave me really wonderful advice too. I'm hoping to respond to you all soon. Thank you.

I wrote about making books a few journals back here. Now I have finished the little case I was making for the bird books I found. I'm going to start a new project this week I hope. One of my great wishes is to be able to use my time more wisely. I just need to keep working on that.









I'm just about to go to my yoga class. I found a new place to practice in the library of the Theosophical Society building. So I go there once a week and to another school one day a week too. The new place is a beautiful old Georgian building with high painted ceilings and the walls are lined with books on all sorts of fascinating esoteric subjects. I noticed 3 whole shelves on Madame Blavatsky. My teacher is so good and she has a huge lovely dog called George who sits peacefully and sleeps while we practice. He is a Rhodesian Ridgeback the size of a small horse. All these details make the already wonderful practice even brighter. I'm trying to increase my practice and be more disciplined. It feels so good to use your body and discover its potentials.

Look out for me in 3 days x

Thank goodness for books and music to recharge your soul at the end of boring work days. I had such a dull time at work today. I have a new job which entails doing virtually nothing and I can't stand it. I really need some kind of stimulation or after a couple of hours I begin to feel like my brain is dissolving to mush. On my short lunch break I try to cram a few pages of beautiful poetry or literature and to listen to a couple of nice songs. It's a shame because it could be a really nice job if it was arranged in a different way, it's in an interesting institution full of fascinating things but instead of incorporating different areas of work necessary for the organisation, there is this unfortunate job, the one that I have, which involves nothing more than wandering round for hours waiting until someone might need to ask you a question. This great event usually happens about 10 times in a whole 8 hour day and most of the time I'm able to answer the question and complete the task in less than a minute. Sometimes I feel like I'm floating above my body watching myself banging my head against the marble floor. I tried practicing my times tables in my head today to keep my brain moving.

Of course I know that all things in life are what you make them. As Rilke says If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place. But it's so hard sometimes! I can look at the nice things in the building, I can try to make conversations with visitors but there are only so many times you can look at the same things and most of the time people just want to be left alone and I respect that. But I shouldn't complain, I'm grateful to have a job and it's taken me a long time to get this one after resigning from my last one. So many people are unemployed at the moment so one just has to be grateful and make the best of things. I try to remember that but I keep wishing that one day I will be able use all my skills, qualifications and experience and feel satisfied and fulfilled by my work and also be able to sustain myself but this may never actually happen. That shouldn't be too much to ask for but it seems to be. I feel that we shouldn't have to get as good at compromising as we have to for the work part of our lives.

I realised recently that around this time last year I left my last job. I had been working as a nursing assistant in the stroke rehabilitation ward for two years since graduating from university. Times moves so quickly. Now it's three years since I finished university and I'm in a very similar place physically and financially. I suppose there are changes inside and I like to tell myself those are the important changes but I don't know for sure if that's true sometimes! I remember when I got my masters degree, which was in Fine Art, and how I felt like I had lost my reason and desire for creating and that art world and networking and money and all that stuff was completely abhorrent to me. All I wanted to do was find out what that 'most useful' thing was that I could do with my life. So I went to work in the hospital.

After the initial shock of being so close to other humans I felt I had found the best job one could do. I really loved it in it's most fundamental sense, just being with people, being useful, helping when people needed it. I learned so much about humans, illness, death, the human body, myself. I always think about how we give up so much of our time for the work part of lives so I desperately want whatever I do to be worthwhile though how we all judge worthwhile can be so different. I think in my head it is just to be 'good' but what is that? I can only feel that it is kindness and compassion, being positive, making things more beautiful, making them 'better'. I know that everyones 'good' and 'better' are different though. It's frustrating to think that I am earning the same now, doing so little, as I was while having peoples lives in my hands and working to the point of exhaustion. Thinking about work is an endless stream of imbalance.

Of course while working in the hospital, being in an aesthetically cold environment and working in a position that left very little room for creativity, imagination, individual input or personal decisions I realised again how important art was to me and that I shouldn't ignore that. After about a year of nursing, when the adrenaline had started to die down and I had come to a point where I had perfected the day to day duties of my job I did become a little frustrated. I tried to do things to make the place more positive like making a garden for the patients on our little patio because there wasn't anything for them to do outside having physiotherapy and speech therapy. Even to do a small thing like that was a great battle because of the immense bureaucracy and no one else being all that interested. I don't blame people for not being interested in changing things though., when you are under-appreciated and underpaid doing an exhausting job and have your own life to deal with too then it's rare that anyone is going to have the desire or energy. I think that some of the things that I think are essential for a happy life are just frivolous and unnecessary to others. Though I do thing, even if making things more beautiful doesn't make things 'better' for everyone it's certainly not going to make things worse. I'm sure a lovely environment at least has subconscious positive effects on everyone.

Gosh I've been thinking about what to 'do next' since I graduated three years ago. I always feel quite confused about what to try to be a part of. I know it's a fantasy that I could live in some idyllic place away from everything and find magical ways to sustain myself but there is such a thing as alternative ways to live, that I can save the world or make everyone happy. I wonder if those people who do find real alternative ways of living do feel more free. Or I wonder if it's more satisfying to be part of something larger and to try to improve it even if you cant ever. I see all the great benefits of being part of a society but I so often wonder if the benefits are really greater than the things which you have to lose and the things you start to need because of it. All the imbalance, all the greed and stupidity. I suppose it's easy to want to give to everyone when you have nothing. I would like to find a way to work and sustain myself in which I can be good, I want to give what is the best of me to someone or something else but I want also to feel stimulated and pleasantly challenged, to use my creativity and for my mind, body and soul to feel ok. I know it's probably too much to ask for in this society but I don't think it should be too much. I do know that if we want to reap the benefits of our society then we have to compromise, be positive about all the awkward things and try to make things work for us as much as we can.

If I could just choose one path and head down it then I might find satisfaction sooner but I'm paralysed by indecision and an equal love of many many different things, all of which are extremely unlucrative pursuits may I add! I sigh.

Well that was a very dull journal, I'm sorry about that but maybe if I keep thinking things through I will eventually come to some kind of sensible decision. Maybe one of you by some great fortune knows exactly what I should do with my life?!

Anyway, this is far more interesting, at least I hope so.... I will have a new set in member review on the 29th. It was shot by Sean last winter so I'm really glad it is finally going to see the light of day. Here is a little preview.



I hope you are all well. Thank you very much for sharing your favorite sonnets with me. I discovered so many that I hadn't read before and really love. It's autumn here now and getting colder. I hope you're all cosy and well x

Do you have a favorite Shakespeare sonnet? I think that mine is number 104. It makes me a little sad though as it makes you feel it is essential to fall in love while still young so that someone can remember you in that beautiful way. I don't feel all that young though. I have lots of love but nothing strong and secure so who knows how long it will last.

To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold
Have from the forests shook three summers' pride,
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn'd
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn'd,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Ah, yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand,
Steal from his figure and no pace perceived;
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion and mine eye may be deceived:
For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred;
Ere you were born was beauty's summer dead.

All your comments on The Wolf Caught the Bird are so nice, thank you so much! I'm really glad everyone has been so enthusiastic about it. We were so excited to show you this set and we had such a nice day shooting it. As I wrote in a roundabout way in the introduction, GoGo and I did indeed meet about 6 years ago. We tried to shoot a set together on that meeting but there were technical problems with the camera and lights half way through and so the pictures never saw the light of day. I didn't really think anything of it again until this year when we met again in London and GoGo asked me if I wanted to try again. I don't think I would have asked her myself because I am quite shy about things like that. You've no idea how soft her skin is and how nice she is to kiss, though I'm sure you can imagine! Luckily we had the amazing Cherry there to shoot it for us. I love those girls.


















Sorry but I just can't choose a favorite picture I just love Cherrys photography and the pictures make me so happy because I remember those lovely days.

If you go to Cherry's latest journal she has written about the set and posted some more out-takes like these ones :-)






Hope you're all doing well xxx

Je cueillis un nid dans le squelette du lierre
Un nid doux de mousse champêtre et herbe de songe.
Yvan Goll, Tombeau du père

(I found a nest in the skeleton of the ivy
A soft nest of country moss and dream herb.)

Nids blancs vos oiseaux vont fleurir
.............................................................
Vous volerez, sentiers de plume.
Robert Ganzo, L'oeuvre poétique

(White nests your birds will flower
......................................................
You will fly, feather paths)

In one short sentence, Victory Hugo associates the images and being of the function of inhabiting. For Quasimodo he says, the cathedral had been successively "egg, nest, house, country and universe." "One might almost say he had espoused its form the way a snail does the form of its shell. It was his home, his hole, his envelope... He adhered to it, as it were, like a turtle to its carpace. This rugged cathedral was his armour." All of these images were needed to tell how an unfortunate creature assumed the contorted forms of his numerous hiding-places in the corners of this complex structure. In this way, by multiplying his images, the poet makes us aware of the powers of the various refuges. but he immediately adds a sign of moderation to the abundnce of images. "It is useless," he continues, "the warn the reader not to take literally the figures of speech that I am obliged to use here to express the strange, symmetrical, immediate, almost consubstantial flexibility of a man and an edifice."

It is striking that even our homes, where there is light, our consciousness of well-being should call for comparison with animals in their shelters. An example may be found in the following lines by the painter, Vlaminck, who, when he wrote them, was living quietly in the country: "The well-being I feel, seated in front of my fire, while bad weather rages out-of-doors, is entirely animal. A rat in its hole, a rabbit in its burrow, cows in the stable must all feel the same contentment that I feel."

[...]

Already in the world of inanimate objects, extraordinary significance is attached to nests. We want them to be perfect, to bear the mark of a very sure instinct. We ourselves marvel at the instinct, and a nest is generally considered to be one of the marvels of animal life.

Those are some excerpts from The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard who was a French phenomenologist. I wish I could type up the whole chapter for you because it's so beautiful. The book is about how we experience intimate spaces.

I found this nest a few years ago after a storm. There were no nearby trees to return it to. I didn't think there would be a chance for birds to use it again. I thus swiftly (Apus apus) collected it.



A few evenings ago I got to see a performance of Messiaen's Quartet for the end of time (Quatuor pour la fin du temps). It was one of the best musical experiences of my life. It is such a beautiful, fascinating piece and it was incredible to watch it performed live, it is a real technical feat I think. There is a really great essay on it by Alex Ross from his book The Rest is Noise which is about music in the 20th century.

The most ethereally beautiful music of the twentieth century was first heard on a brutally cold January night in 1941, at the Stalag VIIIA prisoner-of-war camp, in Görlitz, Germany. The composer was Olivier Messiaen, the work “Quartet for the End of Time.” Messiaen wrote most of it after being captured as a French soldier during the German invasion of 1940. The première took place in an unheated space in Barrack 27. A fellow-inmate drew up a program in Art Nouveau style, to which an official stamp was affixed: “Stalag VIIIA 49 geprüft [approved].” Sitting in the front row—and shivering along with the prisoners—were the German officers of the camp.

The title does not exaggerate the ambitions of the piece. An inscription in the score supplies a catastrophic image from the Book of Revelation: “In homage to the Angel of the Apocalypse, who lifts his hand toward heaven, saying, ‘There shall be time no longer.’” It is, however, the gentlest apocalypse imaginable. The “seven trumpets” and other signs of doom aren’t roaring sound-masses, as in Berlioz’s Requiem or Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony, but fiercely elegant dances, whose rhythms swing along in intricate patterns without ever obeying a regular beat. In the midst of these Second Coming jam sessions are episodes of transfixing serenity—in particular, two “Louanges,” or songs of praise. Each has a drawn-out string melody over pulsing piano chords; each builds toward a luminous climax and then vanishes into silence. The first is marked “infinitely slow”; the second, “tender, ecstatic.” Beyond that, words fail.

Last week, the Met Chamber Ensemble, an all-star group from the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, played the Quartet at Carnegie’s Weill Hall. I arrived with some mighty spiritual sounds ringing in my head; earlier that afternoon, at Lincoln Center, Philippe Herreweghe and assorted Franco-Belgian forces had presented Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis,” and the same conductor had led Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” two nights before. Messiaen’s quiet answer to the ultimate questions of fear and faith stayed with me the longest, not because he was a greater composer than Bach or Beethoven but because his reply came out of an all-too-modern landscape of legislated inhumanity. In the face of hate, this honestly Christian man did not ask, “Why, O Lord?” He said, “I love you.”

The clarinettist Rebecca Rischin has written a captivating book entitled “For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet.” Her research dispels several long-cherished myths about the 1941 première. As Messiaen told the story, he and three friends performed under the most trying circumstances—using dilapidated instruments, including a three-stringed cello—and won the hearts of five thousand hardened soldiers. In fact, the instruments, while inferior, were adequate to the task, and the crowd was more like three hundred. In Rischin’s telling, the Quartet is less a triumph of individual genius and more a collective creation. Messiaen wrote every note, certainly, but the music would never have existed without the collaboration of the prisoners—and guards—of Stalag VIIIA.

Rischin lovingly brings to life the other musicians—Étienne Pasquier, cellist; Henri Akoka, clarinettist; and Jean Le Boulaire, violinist—who played with Messiaen, the pianist at the première. You can sense something of their personalities in the instrumental parts of the Quartet. Pasquier was a wry, gentle man who might have had a major solo career if he had desired one. Akoka, as vibrant and unpredictable as the Quartet’s long clarinet solo, “Abyss of the Birds,” was an Algerian-born Jew who survived the war through blind luck and mad courage. He tried several times to escape, and, in April, 1941, he succeeded: while being transferred from one camp to another by train, he jumped from the top of a fast-moving cattle car, with his clarinet under his arm. Le Boulaire, moody and withdrawn, later abandoned the violin for acting. He took the name Jean Lanier and appeared in New Wave films such as “The Soft Skin” and “Last Year at Marienbad.” When Rischin interviewed him, she perceived him to be a bitter, unhappy man, but at the mention of Messiaen’s Quartet his eyes brightened. “It’s a jewel that’s mine and that will never belong to anyone else,” he said.

Then, there was the quasi-angelic figure of Karl-Albert Brüll, a music-loving guard at Stalag VIIIA. Excited by the presence of a significant composer, Brüll gave Messiaen pencils, erasers, and music paper, and had the composer stationed in an empty barrack so that he could work undisturbed. A guard stood at the door to turn away intruders. After the première, Brüll arranged for Messiaen’s rapid return to France, conspiring in the forging of documents. A German patriot with anti-Nazi tendencies, he kept a sympathetic watch over Jewish prisoners, repeatedly advising them not to try to escape, because they would be safer in Stalag VIIIA than in Vichy France.

Several decades later, Brüll came to Paris and rang at Messiaen’s door. For reasons that remain obscure, Messiaen declined to see him. Perhaps he didn’t remember who Brüll was; perhaps he was unable to confront this apparition from the past. He eventually tried to correct his mistake, and sent a message to the man who had made his masterpiece possible. But it was too late: Brüll had died, after being run over by a car.

- http://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/04/quartet_for_the_2.html

This is one of the movements from the quartet. The build up to 2 minutes 25 takes my breath away.



Here is Messiaen talking about birds in a beautiful documentary about him called The Crystal Liturgy.



And this one is so amusing and sweet!



I seem to be very submerged in French culture lately. Maybe it's something to do with how much I love French girls?! And speaking of which, today I was at work when I realised that a beautiful girl was staring at me from across the floor. I couldn't understand why but when I looked closer I realised that it was the divinely beautiful Feyne smiling at me. Which reminds me that you should go and see her very beautiful Kafka inspired set La Metamorphosi and leave a comment. I had a lovely but far too quick talk with her and her charming travel companion. If it's possible she's even more beautiful in reality.



And speaking of sets, very soon you will see something that Cherry, GoGo and I made for you. I'm really excited about it but I'm trying not to give too much away...



I hope you're all well. Thank you so much for the nice comments and messages as ever :-) xxx