A new profile picture is as good a reason as any to pull my finger out (of what? a pie with proverbial blackbirds, perhaps?) and warn you that you shall be seeing a lot more of me on the FP soon, so for Satan's sake watch out, my dear.

My heart yearns to spit out a good blog entry, but my head is full of razorblade butterflies due to excessive wine consumed on the wintry streets of Soho. Gavi at the Groucho club was a delight... but then I lost a button from my cape running down the stairs, Cinderella style, and the exquisite nectar turned into cheap plonk in the back of a dingy pub, and I turned into a pumpkin, and that's all how all fairytales end, at least until the next time.

But you can always find me on facebook, Tumblr and all those those necessary evils of life. And get yourself some extra genitals for Valentines. See you then.


PS Random picture:

(channeling jesus clad in a dress made of nipples)

And happy St Vicious day!
(33 years ago today Sid Vicious died of an overdose. He was 21 years old.)

Halloween frolics aside, today marks the day when the 7 billionth sprog of the human race has seen the light of day on our over-populated planet. I felt I should mention it for some miserable historical record.

I am decidedly/passionately a non-breeding specimen of our race. Nice to meet you. Talk to me.

Special New Set Blog! (photos, ramblings, and even a saucy video!)

Oooh isn't it thrilling to see an occasional Staff Review set on the Front Page? Behold a new bit of nudie from your Manko, for once not themed, not too referential nor too over-dressed. I guess this set a tribute to bohemian musehood, where I imagine I am the bird for whom a tormented exiled poet wrote this beautiful poem (which lent the ostentatious title to my set):


I have slept with you
and on waking, your mouth,
come from your dream,
gave me the taste of earth,
of sea water, of seaweed,
of the depths of your life,
and I received your kiss
moistened by the dawn
as if it came to me
from the sea that surrounds us.


(Pablo Neruda, July 12 1904 – September 23 1973)

It's strange to think that Suicidegirls.com turned 10 years old last week. I joined in October 2004; in those days girls' profiles asked "Why I did SG?" and I answered: "Because rehab is for quitters". Nearly 7 years later I'm still here, ageing disgracefully, who coulda thunk... And while I have enough class to refuse most modelling work these days, luckily for you I can never say no to Albertine, cause our shooting arrangements usually end up in outrageous adventures.

We hooked up in Naples earlier this summer, an outrageous Italian city hell-bent to bring Catholic kitsch into every nook and cranny of the crumbling old streets. After deciding that look was overdone, we got an early morning ferry to a volcanic island, completely overgrown by lemon trees.









You'd think there aren't many blonde girls in full makeup on 8am boats, judging by the speed in which I was summoned right to the captain's cabin - for courtesy espresso, which is basically a thimbleful of delicious black tarry liquid speed, and which probably accounts for the following episode. A few cups and cheesy giggles later I even got to hold the wheel of the ferry, when the leathery old captain suddenly stuck his hand down my bra!





The salty old dawg got away with a slap, because I, too, am an old sleazy pervert in a woman's body, so I could relate to his desperate urges. Plus, it was just like old Italian comedy. And after all, I was on my way to channel the muse of Pablo Neruda, who also wasn't much of a looker. Neruda was a Chilean poet who, during political exile to Italy, wrote his most erotic surrealist poetry on the very island the boat was approaching.





We took an itty bitty island bus with glammy old Italian ladies, crossed a majestic cemetery, then climbed steep black volcanic rocks to a secluded beach. Even in this wilderness there were dodgy geezers spying on us from boats and behind rocks, while I frolicked around in the buff posing for Albertine, channelling La Cicciolina with my long tresses damp with sea water...
Like this:


(the soundtrack is for the sake of kitsch, playful sarcasm and my love for Albertine)

After the shoot we met a manky scabby looking bunny, whom Albertine outright banned me from taking home to live with me and be my magickal familiar.

Before getting the boat back to civilisation, we ate an absurdly delicious pasta with sea urchin, mint, and lush local lemons.


And, of course, gelato.



There were many more Italian adventures once we got to Rome, but that's a story for another time, kids.



PS I'm now officially a public figure on FB.... Didn't really want to be, but there were so many fake ones, and this way I will at least have some content control. Imagine, some crazy sod even made a "Manko" profile so he could claim we were in a relationship and he could eagerly post soppy love messages from "me" on his wall. The creepiness of humanity knows no limits.

you missed me? Just as well. Yours truly has another SR set queued for late September. It's incredibly poetic... Secret Italian location, only accessible by a boat... and an ostentatious set title with an obnoxious sexual innuendo, really, I'm half blushing and half proud about it. Can't wait!
Let's talk poetry.
Do you have a favourite poem to share?

PS If it doesn't rhyme or if it's set to music it's still a poem.

PPS I'm now officially a public figure on FB.... Didn't want to be, but there were so many fake ones. Farcebook is the new Myspaz.

Imagine, some religious tossers believe their world ends today. I'll drink to that, good riddance to bad rubbish.

I've been on a major atheism kick lately, after that gorgeous babe Texy sent me God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens from my wishlist, and am enjoying every godless page of it like hardcore porn for intelligence.

I'm not good with religion. I was brought up catholic, then ditched that kiddy[fiddling] fairytale for the agnostic reason but I'm still incurably in love with the catholic macabre aesthetics... I try to think soberly about magick yet I play with jinxes, curses and moving energy around (it's hard to ditch that which works so well). Now and then I have a crack at Tarot, hoping to discover science in serendipity. I guess I'm rather like a junkie with all this spiritual rubbish: binges following abstinence, benders then rehabs, excess before detox... it's all terrific fun.

But keen as I am to be entertained with this cocktail of Rapture / Judgement Day / End Of The World / Zombie Apocalypse that some deranged sects have spun for us for this afternoon, (and keen to entertain you with it too, as you shall see on FP very shortly), I just can't bring myself to swallow it. I suspect that this particular holy concoction won't amuse me with a heady exuberance, such as shamanistic ritual or chanting the Vishnu can evoke, it will be a true downer with a vicious hangover of embarrassment come tomorrow.

I coulda dressed up as a gypsy and read it in tea leaves that the state of the planet coupled with the state of the fundamentalist minds is reason enough for the whole shithouse to go up in flames any minute now. But the bloody audacity to pull out a date (a date of a lovely spring Saturday!) out of thin air of insanity, while banging that forged mistranslated misinterpreted book of fairytales, what a criminal waste of wood, and of spring.

I'll leave you with some photos soon to show up on the front page, and Richard Dawkins elegantly banging the nail on the head:

"Science knows approximately how, and when, our Earth will end. In about five billion years the sun will run out of hydrogen, which will upset its self-regulating equilibrium; in its death-throes it will swell, and this planet will vaporise. Before that, we can expect, at unpredictable intervals measured in tens of millions of years, bombardment by dangerously large meteors or comets. Any one of these impacts could be catastrophic enough to destroy all life, as the one that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago nearly did. In the nearer future, it is pretty likely that human life will become extinct - the fate of almost all species that have ever lived.

In our case, as the distinguished astronomer and former president of the Royal Society Martin Rees has conjectured, extinction is likely to be self-inflicted. Destructive technology becomes more powerful by the decade, and there is an ever-increasing danger that it will fall into the hands of some holy fool (Ian McEwan's memorable phrase) whose 'tradition' glorifies death and longs for the hereafter: a 'tradition' which, not content with forecasting the end of the world, actively seeks to bring it about.

However it happens, the end of the world will be a parochial little affair, unnoticed in the universe at large. The end of the universe itself is a matter of current debate among physicists, a debate that I recommend as providing a salutary, long-term, humbling perspective on human preoccupations and follies."

Happy Valentine's day, kittens!


Gotta dash - I need to stop squeezing the cat and go get dressed for a date. I just stopped by to say that Valentine's doesn't have to be cheesy and consumerist. The older I get the more it seems to me that any excuse for love is a fine one.



However fuck roses and chocolate - 'tis a day fit for a Roman orgy or a Shinto phallus worship party. Let me know if you do anything outrageous, will ya?

Oh, bloody hell, it's that Crimbo time again? Bring me buck's fizz to bed and make it snappy, Santa!

So, my Bond Villain set!

Albertine shot it in a bleak '60ies high-rise building designed by Erno Goldfinger. Goldfinger's iconic architecture (much like his personality) was more loathed than loved, which is why Ian Fleming gave the James Bond villain his name. So I walked a concrete "street in the sky" and found a strange retro-futurist flat, built for paranoia, isolation, violence and villainy, which put me into the spirit of a twisted yet stylish baddie in Monroe curls. Enjoy the gold-painted corpse of my beautiful victim whom I mercilessly grind into the bedsheets, and meet my faithful evil feline familiar with a scarred face and an evil gaze.

Also it's rather pleasant for me to read comments from certain members with potential latent homosexual tendencies cringing: "2 pics of man ass before we see you nude.... pass", oh no, you are trying to whack off and there's a DUDE, oh no, you MUST be gay, haha. Tosser.

Anyway.
When I, the poor tragic homeless moi, strolled into that council estate to see the new flat, well I wasn't too sure. I was faced with a concrete high-rise block, a brutalist architectural relict from the 60ies. My lover thought it was awesome. J.G. Ballard had based a novel on it. It's listed in National Heritage, and yet… I'm a Victorian detached kinda girl and he's an A Clockwork Orange kinda chap. The nosy neighbour vigilante commune of purple-rinse grandmas gossiped about a rapetastic crackhouses like it was penned by Stanley Kubrick, but I've only seen artists hold mass photoshoots to preserve the beauty of this particular architectural affair. We painted the flat virginal white, and I looked marvellously virginal at it, in my paper decorators suit (the same week a criminal gang had sported exactly the same £6.99 bodysuit to rob a jewellery shop in Mayfair).


The weird thing is that this summer, when I got kicked out of my actual Victorian detached, and fucked off to Tokyo to while away the sweaty homeless days whilst not being able to face flat-searching, and I soaked my Japan sweat on a random totebag on my shoulder; the totebag had this arty print of the only other "sister building" of the house I ended up moving into when I came back to London two months later. There is a coincidence and then there is this… well, the freaky premonition.

My house is OUTSIDE. Never have I lived in a place where the outside takes over the inside, no matter how much you decorate, feed or fuck. There is so much sky in the flat that it overrides all the indoors focus. I've never lived in a high rise to ever really notice the ceiling that hangeth above my city. Say, in the late morning I peel apart my faux eyelashes to the glowing skyscrapers of the financial district. I might be going about my business of writing a diary or torturing the cat, and the dusk falls all of a sudden out of a dramatic winter sky, and I suddenly get all funny, well there's no other way to put it my dear, a butterfly unfurls and starts careening around my solar plexus! It's a surprising feeling, catches me wherever I am, makes me nostalgic and horny and yearning and complete all at once, for no reason whatsoever the world changes. It's just the way the light hits the building and attaches itself to my guts through the floor-length windows. It's marvellous. I can't help it. You go about your business and then suddenly you want to die in a glorious agony of a sunset, and it's just that there is so much SKY in your flat.






If you visit, bring sensational newspaper cuttings. I'm wallpapering the bog in black and white, it's supposed to give one a bloody marvellous paranoia whilst taking a slash.

And, of course, finally, happy alcoholidays, pals!


PS Also, I appreciate the fact that I haven't been updating too often, but I don't appreciate the turn of events that include (not exclusively) cheesetastic messages that imply I might just be one of those lovely *approachable* ladies:
"you are too adorable!! how have you been? do you have a facebook or skype to chat sometime? hope to talk to you soon"
No.
"My name is Andy from England and I just wanted to say how gorgeous you look! I was also looking at your profile and your pictures look really cute too!"
Really, bitch puhreease.
Once again: not cute. Not Lovable. No chat, skype, webcam, no, just no. Try a message in a bottle. Or a mighty stiff whiskey and ginger, with a mighty good timing. If you're lucky. Or unlucky. And don't whine if you don't like it, either.
Twat.

how many facial scars do YOU have?...New Albertine's photos make me realise I look like a Bond villain in Marilyn curls. My cat is even worse.

Life's too short to describe in more than about 420 characters, so I'm back to scribbling in my diary in green ink on DLR.
It's terribly enjoyable.

Mxxx

This post is entirely to thank a lovely random person for the Velvet Goldmine soundtrack etc that my postie presented me with today, to my utter joy and delight. I don't normally do this, however my wishlist has not been honoured extensively lately and I am too drunk to figure out how to trace my kind stranger, so please accept dainty smooches upon your cheeks dear Leigh, and rest assured that I do absolutely love your gift. Mwah and all that jazz.

(nonetheless I feel weird making a sparse post, so let me fill it up with my latest contribution to the art of ceramics that takes place on a plate and shall be shown from Stoke (UK capital of pottery) to NYC (US capital of fabulousness) sometime really soon)


Come on! Who wouldn't love to eat their breakfast off this plate design?! Deeelish!!!

Here is another stupid picture from Mankoland that is somewhat revoltingly colour-coordinated with the above:

I'm switching races for a Japanese imagining being Hawaiian in a Renaissance setting. Kudos to those who can post terms for the relevant street fashion tribes.