Better

Yesterday I put up a D-Lux version of this picture. I had nothing better to do but shoot a version with the Nikon. So, after a long deliberating with my index finger, I deleted yesterday version to give you this one. I am trying all those new application on the way. New Adobe Element 10 on trial for a month, version 11 was out by the time I finished downloading the free version10, new ViewNx and Transfer. Only my brain is the old version.
I went and explore the library this afternoon, good grace, amazing, grand, set in a XIV century catholic building with 10 meter high decorated wooden ceiling. It beats my old Maida Vale library. There isn't as many books on Irritable Bowel Syndrome though.

Brand new

I have a brand new computer, completely empty of all images I may have intentionally or accidentally taken. It feels like Robert Frank's photographs of Route 66. but on a Mac.

Traumatism

He said :"you're sad". I couldn't deny it so I left. Now he's sad.

preping

Today is a day when symbols have no signification attached to them anymore; they are just little anchors to the material world, a bit like the dots and comas of sentences. In my visual poetry, a cross has just attracted my eyes. It is possibly the capital letter of a word I am about to spell. I think nothing of christianity. Christianity , to me, is a burried body. A plastic straw is a burried body. A tree trunk is a burried body. My grand-parents are 4 burried bodies but my father was cremated and his ashes scattered on top of the mountain he cherished. Something was real though for me to be; I can not dispel all that exist around me and pretend things are dots and planes of color and light. I tell you now what was omnipresent and had the biggest impact on how I felt because I can not show it to you, not today at least : it was the rats rushing in the foliage on the side of the canal.
What you see in the picture is only half of the story. never forget that.

second layer

pour Mies

on the homefront

The heat makes it difficult to have any coherent thoughts. And possibly the small sips of Rosé at each of my two daily four courses meals .

Alleluia

The ticklish sensation of things to come is on me. Beauty all around. The light. The fear. The heat. The voice is clearer. There is no other possibility but to be alive. I might as well do it now. I have found the exact appartment I wanted and Mies will be coming soon. The golden child is by the sea side and I am with some of my oldest friends. Press the button.

Moving out and in

I spent 15mn thinking I had lost acces to the blog. Yes, a change of life is not simple.
Et voilà, we are in France...for ever. Everything is bright and the sky is bright blue EVERYDAY. In fact, from 9am to 6pm, the light is too strong for photography. I have so much to do, there is hardly anyroom for looking, for writing, for thinking; I just happened  to park the bike when I felt conpulse to take this one, first observe 2 or 3 years ago.
I will start a french blog soon,  because with all the good food I am going to eat in France, there is no way that my hips are going to stay like that of boys for very long but I will carry on with hipslikeboys until I am finished with it.

he turns his head towards the screen

she says

Déposé

I take a pile of Frieze magazines. To keep or not to keep? I open the issue on top of the pile , hoping for a sign. Issue 50, January/February 2000; I open randomly page 88/89; Yves Klein and Dino Buzzati engaged in the ritual transfer of immateriality, January 26th,1962. Andy Warhol, Invisible sculpture 1985, Area nightclub, New York.....this all looks very actual....deja vu? Touched by your presence is the article title, Ralph Rugoff on invisibility in art is the sub title. This , I take as a sign that I better keep all my issues of Frieze for it seems to prevail by exactly 12 ½ years the current art world for the Hayward Gallery summer exhibition is named Invisible and is about...Invisibility in art! Thank you Chrome, after a bit of typing I discover Ralph Rugoff is now director and curator at the Hayward gallery.

I conclude that 12 years is the time required to bring a project to term. I will bear that in mind. 

Ocimum Tenuiflorum

I just found an untitled dvd with only this pictures from summer 2010 on it.

I am reading Indian holistic literature. I have not yet dissolved. Considering the number of boxes all over the place, it would be hard pushed for me to vanished into thin air. I like the idea though.

some people

For once I want to mention someone. I don't know the guy. I just know from his website that he is 20 years younger than me and certainly a whole lot less stupid. His name is Sam Laughlin.

I have just started reading Jeanette Winterson's memoir "Why be happy when you can be normal". She is just plain good. I am puzzled by a short paragraph in chapter one. I know Jeanette has written it for me; it goes: "Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margins of the text? The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world." 

Beyond the fact that she is hinting at photographers being devoid of personal vision, it seems that for someone of such talent and perspicacity, she doesn't know a thing about contemporary photography.

Shall I send for her a copy of Roland Barthes "La Chambre Claire" even if I am not so sure he wrote about photography being as much about what is left out of the frame than on the film. Should I suggest the purchase of one of A. Broomberg and O. Chanarin image of their People in trouble (Dots) serie                         What type of photographer is she referring to? packshot photographers? sport? news? wedding photographers? fashion? film set? beauty? portrait photographers?

are you suppose to frame and shoot? I thought...

Yoko Ono shows open at the Serpentine this friday. I am sure she knows. I will inform myself. Could a reconversion as a photographer who "frame the shoot" be possible after years of trying not to show what I saw.

I am puzzled. I am thinking about jigsaw puzzle; you know, you grab a piece, you put it down and then you imagine what the next piece looks like. I love jigsaw puzzle...particularly the ones with lots of grasses and trees.

                 

this is the color I would like the sky to be.

Encore

rain rain go away, little Johnny wants to play.

Song Dong's Waste not was even better than expected. Song and I have 2 things in common: we respect and admire our elder for their strange ways and our fathers died suddenly of heart attack. In my case my mother was left alone to get on with it as I was nursing a baby in London, 600 miles away from her. She threw herself in to caring for her own parents who were in their mid eighties at the time and it is they who did the Waste not and stored every single little piece of string, metal and leather, car windows and jam jars. I pointed out to Mies how amazing that what a chinese artist has in his mind is so very similar to what I have in my mind. Is it down to my reading the Tao Te King at the tender age of 18?

If you use too much washing-up liquid, you just waste water to rinse it off.

When I walk past this improbable building-anti-collapsing structure , the smell of metal is dizzying. I have done it twice. I might do it again on Wednesday.

schrahafehrtahme

Some days, I know what is what and some days I forget to eat. Last Wednesday I spent 5 hours taking pictures of my bits and bobs, of which here are two. When I was done, I threw the lot in the rubbish bin. That was hard. Then I looked at the 250 shots; some I like, most are what they represent : rubbishes, scraps, junk...des petites merdes...des merdouilles. I felt just so utterly happy while doing those pictures. It seems madness to you, but to me, it makes sense. Tomorrow I will go to the Barbican art gallery The Curve to see Song Dong's Waste Not display of familiar objects. Right now, I am thinking about Sol Lewitt photographs of the entire content of his home that he printed into a book and called Autobiography.

When I take pictures of my bits of junk, I am trying to create a representation of my head and heart combined content; some  visual aiku. It takes me 5 hours to shoot but months and months to collect the right junk. Very few bits make it into the final draw. I am not a horder you see. In fact, I had to accept that I am a bit of a fascist when it comes to rubbish. Even when sorting out beads yesterday, I had to admit to a worrying level of insecurity that translate into rejecting pink and turquoise oval soft plastic Woolworth beads against bright orange round hard plastic ones. did you not know some beads have the right to live and some are just condemned to the bin?

Certain little insignificant things I will keep for a long long time after having done my business with, generally because they are more than 50 years old or they hold some form of emotional value to do with their place of origin, their color, or their shine factor. My oldest piece of found junk is the little rusty metal scrap that I got on a disused rail track with my boyfriend at the time Denis. Denis died in a car crash a couple of years after that and along with some photos, the little piece of rusted metal has become Denis and the memory of walking along the rail track on that very hot Sunday is linked to the memory of the railway I had to cross every day as a child on my way to school and back.

I forgot to go to sleep.

mens talk

I am shredding photos, listening to armenian music and generally worrying.

Joy

Congratulation to Ed and Lisa on the birth of their son. I have started chasing baby size yellow socks and Mies is working on a compilation of the finest british house music.