From Africa to Malaga

"There is now a great tension between Fred and me; we cannot bear each other's eyes. He wrote something about me so exact, so piercing that I felt invaded in the most secret precincts of my being. His writing about Henry also terrified me, as if he had come too close to my own fears and doubts. He writes occultly. I could barely talk after reading those pages. And he was reading my journal. He said, 'You should not let me read this, Anais'. I asked why. He seemed stunned. He bowed his head, his mouth trembled. He is like a ghost of me. Why was he stunned? Did I reveal the similitude, the recognition? He is a part of me. He could understand my entire life. I would put all my journals in his hands. I do not fear him. He is so tender with me".

If someone read all of my journals, they would know me completely. Or almost. Sometimes I leave things out of my diaries because I know I'll remember the truth and somehow it doesn't need to be written down - it's for my memories anyhow. Sometimes I'll leave it out because I'm embarrassed, or want to present it differently. Mostly I'm just horribly honest. I couldn't imagine the ramifications of someone reading all of my diaries.

My buzzwords of February: recently it's been about new music and new words, and big coffee-table books, and somehow nudity, and smoking, and not sounding like yourself, contemporary dance and Muji notebooks.

I did life modelling the other day. I've always wanted to do it, and I saw the advertisement for life models and thought, If not now, when? You are in your PRIME, Miss Brodie! It was scary. There were only about 13 people there though, and luckily I knew none of them. Fifteen pounds for an hour ain't too shabby. I'd do it again.

It's actually nice to have people look at your body completely unsexually. You're completely bare, curves and all (I lived in fear of someone taking one look at me and saying, "I think I'm going to need some bigger paper") and people are looking, deliberately, at the details of your body and looking down at their paper and then up again, and it's a constant scrutiny. It's not exactly empowering, or revelatory, or a huge confidence-boost, or anything like that that you expect, but I liked it because I like my body and I like nakedness and it's all just quite a bit fun, isn't it.

It's quite hard to justify it.
"You're essentially taking your clothes off for money?"
"Yes".
"That's what strippers do, isn't it?"
"Yes".
"...Oh".

And I'll be honest, I do it for the money, not for the joy of it. I just fortunately happen to have very little sense of modesty, and it's one way of earning money and I also happen to have this bizarre obsession with taking my clothes off.

I want this beautiful mug from Muji. And, in general, just to stock my kitchen with stuff from Muji.

 
Christ, someone get me a Lemsip, I'm dying here.

craving you

Production week again but it's going okay. Birthdays make things better, because there's nothing prettier or more exciting than candles and cake in the dark and people singing. In a black box theatre. And everywhere smells of paint and you've got good music and good people around you.

new tyres

Today my taxi driver had a go at me for not having new tyres. I simply asked him what the roads were like, amidst all the snow.

mostly rural humming

poplie, urban humming stereo.

God, it's been a mad week. Second night of the pantomime done and dusted, and done well. Over 550 people have seen the pantomime so far - that's an amazing number!
I can't sleep right now. I guess I'm a little wired because of the good show tonight, because I haven't really stopped for days, because I've got an interview in Leeds tomorrow I'm excited for (and should really, really get some rest for).

I regularly read the H+K Web Curios blog, which is so incredibly on the ball and just so damn interesting. I have to stop myself from just lifting content from it and accidentally passing it off as my own. I'm telling you this now so when I link to things that I would only have found because of the H+K blog, I'm basically telling you that it's not because I'm really good at finding quirky things on the internet. It's because I'm a whore for information, and I don't care where I get it from, and I will spread it around like butter on a crumpet. Or like a venereal disease, if we're sticking with the whore metaphor.

And so. This article is so vital for the communications industry that it reaches Biblical proportions. Particularly number 4 in the list. How often do we see those inane 'conversation-starters' on Twitter? I think that IdeasTap, for example, do a good job of connecting with their members. Their engagement with the #fridayplaylist hashtag a few weeks ago had the additional instruction to find songs with instructions in them. (My contribution, if you were wondering: Otis Redding, 'Try A Little Tenderness'). It's not inane, because it's drawing on the already-popular weekly hashtag, but it adds something and makes it more interesting to engage with. I think it coincided with a brief that they were advertising on their site as well.

Do you love visualizations? I bet you do; they're all the rage. I personally freaking love them. I'm not a particularly visual person in terms of learning by images or graphs, as I'm more wordy than that: I read a sentence over and over and I've got it stuck in my brain like some verbal barnacle. But visualizations are so clever. I probably like them in a magpie sort of way: because of the pretty colours, because the pixels move oh so quickly! etc,etc. Take a look at One Hour Per Second. It'll blow your mind. It really brings home just how fucking global YouTube (and, in turn, things like Facebook) are. They will take over the world. No doubt.
(P.S The visualization goes on forever. But hey, I can't sleep right now so what else do I have to do? And the pretty colours... - oooh, look! The nyan cat is farting rainbows!)

What of Henry's curtains? Why shoes for June?

Le Premier Homme

Just spending an afternoon reading kinky blogs rather than Camus' Le Premier Homme (which is, nevertheless, very very good).

Click that link - go on. There's a very interesting discussion on the boundaries of degradation and respect/dominant and submissive natures in the bedroom. Both the blogger and her anonymous poster who presents an opposing argument have such valid points, it's hard to know who to agree with. I do feel very strongly that what happens in the bedroom is completely separate from how I would expect to be treated in everyday life, and neither should have a bearing on the other. But then, I only have sex with men intelligent enough to recognise those boundaries and distinctions. And simultaneously, you can't deny human memory. Usually it's a great thing: you look at someone and your knees go all trembly and you can't help but remember the things that you did to each other the other night. But I can understand that that can also be a drawback: you can't forget, can't stop viewing them in the light of those sexy things you did, and so can't draw the line - or can, but it's a wobbly one - under what happens in the bedroom.

Food for thought.

So while you read sexy things, look at some nice photos too, all copyright @BinaryDad.

Degas

Degas et le nu 

First major retrospective on Degas in Paris since 1988 focusses on his nudes. At the Musée d'Orsay this year, 13th March - 1st July.
Looks like someone's going to be saving up money for Eurostar tickets. I posted a Degas to this blog very recently!