My vanity is having a crisis. Some days I don't even have time to put my makeup on...


I am dealing with such beautiful mess.

My studio is on the ground floor of the house, and now that the summer is here (although admittedly half-arsed here in London) I often keep the French doors open to the garden. It's a quiet residential stretch of greenery, with old trees and a hedgehog living under a holly shrub, often visited by squirrels, wood pigeons and an occasional woodpecker. And even though I am no hippy nor a Snow White, visits from animals bring me more joy than from humans.

A few weeks ago a small black cat started popping in to the room. Affectionate, purry and playful, and more than eager to help me out with my tuna steak dinner. We spent a few evenings snuggled up on a couch, nursing my hangovers and watching ANTM.

One morning, though, we found the little dear waiting outside the door to be let in, only she wasn't alone. She had brought a tiny shaky blue-eyed baby kitten along. A few hours later it was joined by a sibling. They could barely walk. Their tails were triangular and their head made up for half their body length. The little black furballs were adorable to the point of crying. We were adopted by a feline family!

Thing is, I never allowed myself to have a cat. Although I'm fascinated by the feline monsters I simply travel too much right now to have a decent relationship with an animal. But I guess she chose us, so we had to take it as a compliment and deal with it. I decided against calling up a cat shelter, the kittens were now my little blue-eyed superstars and too good for a depressing amonia-reeking cage kingdom that most shelters are. My studio was converted into a kitten nursery - we hacked a hole in the french doors and installed a catflap. Litter tray and food bowls replaced piles of my shoes, and there I was being retardedly blissed out on my unplanned parenthood of sorts.



Within days, however, we had to leave for Berlin. A week later we came back to a lovely thankyou present in the middle of my studio (predictably spoilered to help you keep your lunch in):

The little rascals were twice the size (gosh, they grow by the hour!), ready to move to solid foods, wrestling each other up the curtains and being the most beautiful creatures I've laid my hands upon. Now I'm no mother material, but it made me beam with pride to witness their first poop as much as their first purr...


Kung-fu kitten?

In a few weeks I'll need to find home for the little ones, so consider this journal entry as an ad.

I just can't look after a pride of cats long-term - I have a sneaking suspicion that the little slut has been knocked up again and is displaying evidence of brand new kitty-buns in her furry oven, so to speak. Hex on irresponsible owners who can't be arsed to neuter their cats and just chuck them out when they get pregnant!
panic
No, REALLY! I can't look after a bunch of cats! I was planning to stay out of this scenario at least until I'm 50 years old! Save them or I will give them ridiculous names! I already call this girl 'Teddy Bear'!!!




My life has indeed been full of interesting endeavours and acquaintances, cats aside even. Recently I shared fish'n'chips with legendary New York photographer Leee Black Childers who is one of the most charismatic darlings in mascara I've ever met.

After seeing the epic Chapman Brothers exhibition Fucking Hell (runs til 12 July if you're in London), he indulged me for hours with amazing stories from the Factory days, anecdotes about my idols - Warhol Superstars, his best pal Jayne County, the curse of the MainMan Records... Boys and girls, I could tell you stuff about the likes of David Bowie that'd make your hair curl. But now I have to run downstairs and have a punching match with my fabulous kitties. I'm gonna finish this with a photo of my eternal crush Candy Darling (which Leee kindly signed for me). Leee took it at Max's Kansas City, when at the very end of the night the proprietor would start playing Sometimes It's Hard to be a Woman by Tammy Wynette. It was a sign for the dragqueens to leg it while the flattering red light was still on, because once the song was over the harsh white light would come on, exposing laddered tights, disheveled wigs - and - horror of horrors - a stubble cracking through the makeup! This image is the White Light shot while Candy covers her face and hisses: "Leee! Don't show my muff!"
Classy

Missed me? Then kiss me, fucker!

As the delightfully fragrant lilac blossoms flap at my window, the black dye is casting its toxic glamour on my hair. Its pungent chemical smell strangely compliments a cup of espresso and the Japanese-brand cigarette smouldering in my lips.
It seems we're back in London... Nothing new in this town, everything's fucked as per usual.

Can't drink on public transport, can't murder anyone without papers butting in, what's a girl to do here?

I'll tell ya what. Get roped in to do catwalk for some dodgy punks, get bladdered on a quart of JD backstage and start smashing bottles in the backstreets of Hoxton. Then you get given a silver baseball bat and push around some bitches onstage. Rolling on the catwalk in spiky heels in a staged cat-fight whilst camera flashes right up your gash...

Drama culminates in snogs and scratches on your boobs just over the strips of black gaffer-tape, and then you swap skimpy outfits with a hot tranny in the back alley, feeling up her tanned £4500 tits while cabbies drive veeerrry slooowly past you...
I do love London in some sick destructive fashion, I love the cunt from the bottom of my tarry hateful heart. But only recently that heart was lost in kitschy S&M love hotels of Osaka...



So yes, Japan was fabulous as usual. To get you in the mood let's start the report with just some random visual hilarity and weirdness.
Manko fruit porn:

Fashion: observe Jizo, Buddhist patron of aborted babies, sporting a "Cheerful Little Kids Club" bib.

And of course some obligatory pornographic purikura stickers:


I experienced hanami, the spring festival when sakura blossoms snow on the land and the entire nation (usually so proper, orderly and well-behaved) decide to spend the whole week camped in parks under the blossoming trees, sitting on the blue plastic tarps, eating, smoking and drinking to the point of vomiting. Here is the view you might get from their spot:

And as the fine decadence and excess unfurls you realise that you can't even see sakura anymore through the stalls that sell most bizarre foods - from deep-fried Italian spaghetti dusted with icing sugar to custard-filled pancakes shaped like a fish.
Here's me gorging on one in Osaka:


I spent a lot of time on shinkansen, positively bulleting my way from Tokyo to Kyoto, Osaka, Hiroshima... At times I felt like I was a character in Almost Transparent Blue - urban towns under overcast sky flickering between steaming mountains; druggy feeling in my clammy claw squeezing a ballpoint pen with neon-green fingernails, scribbling stream of consciousness in my Nippon scrapbook - about the nostalgic smell of stale cigarettes in the upholstery of the seats; the carriage full of smoke and oyaji, balding liver-spotted old geezers, all with a can of beer and a fag, hacking up their tired lungs, sucking on hard sweets. It's so romantic I could die. The blue nostalgia, flashes of town names like Yokohama, flashes of sea as grey as the sky, flashes of wilderness with landscapes seemingly crafted by most talented gardeners; Pocari Sweat factory amongst the rice paddies. The conductor quietly crosses the carriage, he turns back at the doors and takes a small bow even though nobody's looking up from their beers, manga magazines or super hi-tech mobile phones. I'm wired and already drunk at 9am. Let me give you a couple of tips about the fastest train in the world. Firstly, you can always get a seat in one of the smoking carriages. Secondly, the disabled toilets are pretty spacious and having sex at 200km per hour is highly advisable.

Extreme mysticism of Kyoto, wandering in the rain under endless red tori gates, bringing inarizushi as a gift for the stone foxes who wear better makeup than mine.

I don' know what I was thinking, flying over to Japan five years running and never leaving Tokyo. Osaka is the fucking shit. If Tokyo people were London, then Osaka people would be Rome. The fashion styles are shamelessly hysterical, and I'm not talking about prissy Tokyo Lolita! (Lolita is dead but more about that later) Girls are dressed in micro shorts, patterned tights, polkadots, leopard print and lace all at once, they smoke cigarettes and look like they can rip your eyes out with their over-decorated acrylic claws. Girls are baaaad but the boys are WORSE! Big hair, skinny ripped jeans and designer wallets on chains, outrageous bling, pointy snake-skin shoes with golden spurs, pseudo-yankee plaid shirts with rolled up sleeves, embroidered bomber jackets, giant Vuitton handbags... Unisex pair look is big, sometimes the only way to tell a guy from a girl is that the guy is the one with bigger hair with more highlights.


In Osaka I also had the pleasure of meeting a brilliant illustrator Rockin' JellyBean (he draws sensational, fleshy, cum-dripping babes and if you haven't seen his work you have seriously missed out). JellyBean showed us some good rockabilly eatin'n'drinkin' establishments, the sweetest love hotels Japan has to offer, and the one most fantastic secret place I've laid my eyes upon for 26 years of me being on this planet - but I won't blab about it on the internet... I'm sure you'll understand, fantastic secret places are secret for a reason. I also got to witness a bizarre and wonderful artist duel between JellyBean and Jason Atomic, my other beloved artist. I filmed it and here it is - for the art lovers out there.


Let's do some more brash name-dropping, shall we? Here I am buying sake from a vending machine late at night with Junko Mizuno, yet another superstar of the art world.


Before I get any comments may I just quickly have a micro-rant? People keep telling me how "lucky" I am to be spending time in Japan. There's nothing lucky about it! If I hear another one of you whine to me how much you love Japan and how jealous you are of my adventures I'm honestly gonna slap you, so be warned. Here's a suggestion: stop wasting your money on overpriced hello kitty shit from ebay, SAVE UP. If you're lucky enough to have a dreamland which is just a plane ticket away then get off your lazy arse! As of this autumn you'll need ID cards to buy booze and fags from vending machines. Tedious reality is constantly catching up with our dreams... I keep meeting girls who are lost in futile daydreams about joining the frilly flock of kawaii Gothic Lolitas in Harajuku. Sisters, you've pissed about too long, lolita is dead. The only frilly dresses I've seen this year are on desperate overweight office ladies and a few gaijin kids looking very lost and confused. Fret not, Harajuku is brilliant again thanks to the return of the live bands lined up by the Yoyogi park, and the rockabilly gangs hanging out on sunny Sunday afternoons... Clad head to toe in leather, the rockers roar up on their shiny bikes to loiter, comb their quiffs in front of a full-length mirror and dance to each other next to a boombox, whilst their girlfriends look away bored; the girlfriend is just a status thing (like bikes and shoes and outfits) to show up other guys, it's such an amazingly peacock "sexless gay" scene.


Anyway. Travelling is exhausting but typing about it is even more tiring. I shall wrap this up with a tip for my aesthetically gifted readers - I've got some fabulous art prints up in the sales group.

Let's picture a girl's life as a ball of wool. Now let's imagine that the said ball is the favourite toy of a playful scratchy kitten (and for the sake of a metaphor let's call this kitten Manko). Imagine now the state of the sorry thing four years down the line... A wrecked chaos of torn thread, soaked with love and violence and saliva.

And so I've been trying to tie up a few loose ends.

One of the projects long overdue has been putting my old radio segments to practical use, and so this week I baked a little CD compilation, a Best Of my work on SG Radio.



It inhabits 11 segments and a bonus track - really just a start considering that between 2005 and 2007 my voice fouled Indie 103.1FM radiowaves in at least 87 different ways... But I had to make a start on wrapping up my [dubious] radio career somewhere, right?


TRACKLIST

It's a hand-made self-publication, obviously... Therefore those who want one for themselves should expect a very limited run, the limiting factor being my patience to burn CDs, waltz to print shop, cut/staple booklets and reapply red lipstick for kiss traces.
(PM for ordering info)

Secondly, I've been arranging my FANART folder into groups co-referencing to my photosets. It's fascinating how one picture can trigger multiple drawings. Thanks to all the fabulous creatures contributing to the collection.

All this plugging my "fabulousness" might come across as rather big-headed of me, so how about we knock it down a notch..... EDIT: here I tried to show off that I had a hate-site created in my honour, but it turned out it wouldn't be appropriate to give them any more promotion. Idiots are already good enough at advertising themselves and making sure they don't go unnoticed.
I was pretty ecstatic of the fact that some internet strangers invested their time to establish my stardom and celebrity. Sadly after a few dealings with the sad old shit behind the profile I became most disappointed. And what did I really expect, a verbal chess game with an intellectual equal?.. Naive, naive little Manko. Once taken up on their bitching, "haters" turn out to be juvenile ex-fans who'd thought I was supposed to be lovely to everyone by default, even better!- that I have attitude problems because I'm more beautiful than everyone else. (an actual quote) Makes you wanna weep, no?... If was ugly like an arsehole infested by hemorrhoids I would despise you just as equally. Well I guess it was an amusing experiment which culminated in my realising that most people are ever so dilettantish in hating that they barely know how to spell the word, that they wouldn't know hatred if it spat them in the face. And also that they don't deserve my time wasted on despising them (even though to be honest that does give me a certain pleasure).... ahhh. I think I'll take the advice of one of my pals who said " It's not just that I realised the damage people like this can do, even if it's just by forcing you to dedicate them some of your daily time; I also understood how much good can come to you from radically different people. Especially true, when you think that the people with a good influence on you are very far and between, thus making every single second wasted on idiots more than a crime."
And with that inspired thought, the hate site was deleeeeeeeted. For cyberbullying, aparently, and slander as far as I'm concerned, but above all for the crime of wasting my precious seconds.

Let's introduce some balance into this love/hate situation.
This girl loves Manko so much she want to be Manko, and who's to say that she isn't, in her fucked up little head and in the ether of internet. I find this particular fake Manko profile incredibly adorable so please don't go and scare her off - roleplayers scuttle away like cockroaches as soon as you shine some light onto their secret nasty deeds...

I went through serious trauma/enlightenment/reflection wearing that "old Manko" makeup! Spent a day being a wrinkled and deranged version of myself - imagine - Milan, early morning at an espresso bar, trying to stuff a croissant into my glued shriveled up gob, pouting and winking at myself in the mirror, singlehandedly spoiling the appetite of the local population... hysterical.

I also want to introduce you to Charles Of London. They attired me with the fabulous Plasmatics dress (for the more glamorous part of the set (fresh-faced Baby Jane character in her glory days). True punks, dirty toerag fuckers and dear friends, shit-hot indie fashion-makers, and I've been their clotheshorse for longer than I care to remember. Oh, and check out my stupid voice-over on their website.

Well, have an inspired and sensational 2008, kittens! And now I'm gonna go get that handful of painkillers and a nice cup of tea.

merry sodding spazzmas!!!

yeah yeah.... DON'T WHINE, I OWE YOU NOTHING