sea change on the me-dial

I just found out the meaning of holding pattern, for real. I thought it meant something completely different. Sort of like a holding pen. Somewhere where you keep agitated hens, or slaughter-ready pigs. I think that’s what I thought it was, beyond just being an expression, I mean.

Today I had a ghostwriting dilemma. For some reason I wanted to use the words sea change in a document but I knew I’d be using the wrong voice, that it was something this person would probably never say. I did it anyway. I’m not really a very good ghostwriter. In fact I’m terrible. In the stairwell or by the fluorescent coffee machine or in our last-limbed lifts (at the same time praying that we don’t plummet to our deaths) people say to me, you wrote that, didn’t you? Because it ends up sounding like me, everything does. There are just varying degrees of me on the me-dial. Like business me and plain English me and clipped policy me and fuzzy adspeak me and call-to-action markeing me and colloquial/collegial tongue-in-cheek me.

And I’m just talking about work here. But the same is true with other sorts of writing, too. The night before last I sat down to write something that wasn’t Frankie or Dorothy or work or school or this. Something completely unrelated to anything. And yet, a few hundred words in it was the same old introspective nothing-going-on wordscape with the same breed of psychologically paralysed anti-heros, mooching in barely-lit limbos (or — dare I say it — holding patterns), deafened by their own go-nowhere/downward-spiral thoughts. So I stopped writing. I think I might have painted my nails at that point.  Whatever it was it was more useful than me writing the same thing over and over — only fractionally different each time, like one of those spot the difference pictures — for the rest of my days.

Maybe it’s not quite as bad as all that. But nearly. I took these photos tonight. Some of my favourite things. And Sylvie and I had fun on the stairs. Bax isn’t quite as photogenic, but he’s equally as cute. He’s a bit of a gangly adolescent and he runs funny, sort of lopsidedly. I think he might need to see a cat chiropractor.

Another thing for the things I like/don’t like list: FANCY LETTUCE. This one’s on the don’t like list. I’ve recently confirmed as a fact that iceberg lettuce is in a league of its own, and it’s cheaper. Even the name — fancy lettuce — is stupid. Two thumbs down. I still bought it at the supermarket tonight, though. Very begrudgingly.

Can’t think of anything else for the list. Lindsay Lohan is going to jail. Someone set their mattress on fire. It’s really cold. Nope, nothing else. 

I think my favourite lyrics for tonight are from Get Big by Okkervil River. Quite hard to find decent unmuckedup lyrics online (and no, I don’t want to download the fucken ringtone). So I have patched these up a bit.

And now I am off to write the same old circadian saga. Same saga, different day. Same sagginess of the soul, no plot to speak of. It’s like the overtrodden pathways in my mulish brain won’t let me do anything else. And still I persist. I must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on. Etc. 

Once we get to the end of this song,
then it will begin again.

So you said,
in our bed.
I was watching light slip
through the blinds to find your skin.

So take your medicine
and I won't ask where you've been.
Live your lost weekend.
I know you've wanted it.
Get big, little kid.

And I can't say why each day
doesn't quite fit the space
we saved for it.
But if that space now demands
that you throw up both your hands,
that you call it quits...

Take your midnight trip
I know you've dreamed of it.
Walk your sunset strip,
because I think you've needed it
to get big, little kid.

But just remember that our love
only got this good
because of those younger days
that'd you like to outstrip.
So drink your cup down
to the dregs and leave
that club on shaking legs
with another guy,
but just remember: I'm not him.

Take your medicine and I won't ask
where you've been.
Live your lost weekend,
because I know you've wanted it
to get big, little kid.

And once we get to the end of this song,
then another will begin.

the world was here before you

on movement

I’ve been thinking about this for a while. Still life vs The Moving Thing. How to capture movement.

This is the pattern from a light machine. I liked not knowing how the picture would turn out when I took it, because of the frenzy of moving light (and also because the viewfinder was in total darkness).

I often think about how I am a shit photographer but like taking photos, and it’s a liberating thing. I can only be pleasantly surprised and if I take enough shots I’m usually guaranteed one or two worthy of the family album. And if that doesn’t work out, it’s not like I’ve wasted any film. I expect nothing of myself, and when I get lots of nothing back I go oh well, that was a good night, even if I don’t recognise the subject matter of any of the photos.

I am particularly bad at lighting and movement. I am particularly good at blurry, grainy compositions (fallback mode is often calling these ‘artistic’ when really they are just a failure to achieve the desired degree of realism through an inability to master the tool/medium).

In a way I am pleased I am a shit photographer, and don’t really have any intention of improving. If I set out to conquer it, it would only give me one more thing to lament (the shortfalls and imperfections of my efforts, for example, the picture in my head never matching up to the final result in front of me, etc).

Take art. When you start out with observational drawing you work on still life. Flowers and bowls of fruit. Tangible, inanimate, not going anywhere. Once you’ve got that down, a few years down the track, you’re set to work on naked humans. They’re frozen into poses but the angles are trickier, more prone to change and inconvenient human interruptions like breath and muscle fatigue.

Beyond that, capturing movement, doing it justice, making it believable, takes practice and patience and a trained eye no one can really teach you at school. Like any kind of artistic act where fidelity to a subject is called for, I suppose.

Take writing. Perhaps you could write about flowers and bowls forever. But even capturing the essence of a cloud, say, could prove difficult, even if you did it every day. No two clouds being the same could test a person’s powers of description. There are only so many times you can say gossamer and cotton wool and feathery. And just when you’ve succeeded in describing its form perfectly, it goes and changes on you.

Yesterday I just recommenced the troublesome (ever in its infancy) second novel after a long time dipping toes in other, shinier ponds. I commit this to writing here – the fact that Frankie has been dusted off and 1098 new words have been added to her – so as to hold myself accountable to myself (me being the only real obstacle in any of this), as witnessed by you, whoever you may be.

So anyway, as I wrote last night, I thought again about how you capture moving things (a mood or a whim, the tail-end of love or a surge of oneness with the world, the changing light in a room, the temperature of bathwater as it cools… and so on) without killing them or just failing them miserably. To catch a butterfly in a net is usually to kill it. To aim wide and miss is to let it go free. Actually I shouldn’t have brought up the butterfly. That just gets messy and leads me into a conversation with myself about art being artifice…….. and I don’t have time to go there, not right now.

You know when you read something, usually by a great writer, and identify wholeheartedly with the brittle thing they’ve managed to capture? To me, that’s the biggest measure of success, being able to do that, and to evoke that response in somebody else. So much writing is turgid and middling and just more paper pumped out into the world. Perhaps that’s why I approach Frankie with such trepidation; maybe that’s why most of my being wants to run for the hills and play spider solitaire and watch back to back episodes of Mad Men.

I’d rather do nothing at all than make lame duck words for the sake of making lame duck words.

don’t be nervous because that’s perverse

This is another Thing I Like. It’s a sort of photo montage stuck on a piece of plasticky linoey stuff, made up of art-room offcuts, given to me by Aimee, a girl I went to school with. We were at boarding school together. She gave me this in 1995.

On the back of it she has written:

To Katy

Congratulations for youre achievement.

Love from Aimee xxx

I think I remember what the achievement was, but the thing was she was always bringing me stuff. Funny stuff, mostly, and she would draw things.

Once she slipped a note under my door, saying don’t be nervous because that’s perverse. I think it was scholarship exam time. That line still comes to me out of nowhere sometimes. In my head, when I say it to myself, nervous rhymes with perverse. Actually, perverse (pervous) rhymes with nervous. It works best that way. It’s become a kind of mantra. Plus this little concave montage has been blu-tacked to many a wall over the years, taken pretty much everywhere I’ve lived, like the worry dolls.

Aimee always had paint stains all over her seventh form uniform – standard issue white linen shirt and ankle-length navy skirt. She came to boarding late in the piece, as a last-ditch attempt on her parents’ part to ground her. She was a little bit unhinged, and not in the affected artful way we all tried on then. She refrigerated her own urine and then drank it; that’s one thing I remember. She told some farfetched stories that couldn’t not be true. I think she might have also plastered herself naked to a ranchslider door once, in protest, in the presence of her parents, which may have something to do with how she ended up at boarding school, bestowing handmade gifts deep from within the darkroom, sellotaped to board.

Anyway, I just found this tonight, buried in the corner of the sunroom where I Dare Not Go.

the post where I have nothing to say, but say something anyway

This is a picture of the moon. I am about to do some decoupage butchery on it, so consider this the before picture.

I have won two trivia quizzes in four days. The only thing that is remarkable about this is how bad I am at quizzes. I have some pretty smart friends, which is probably well planned on my part. I think we won a bar tab or something.

The best things I learned tonight were that a woman invented the windscreen wiper and – actually – all the other trivia has evaporated from the small well inside my head already. Gone, within a measly hour of finishing. Which is probably why I am no good at quizzes.

I enjoy them though. Sort of in the same way as I enjoy tenpin bowling (diabolically, and usually in between glasses of revolting house wine, preferably on the nights where they dim the lights and play disco music) and wizened memories of iceskating. 

Tonight the venue had spectacularly bold carpet (I’m regretting not taking a photo) and the oozing-from-the-pores-of-the-place smell of old smoke and old brew, which made the entire outing worth it in itself.

This is a picture of a shadow, specifically the shadow my table casts in the courtyard on a sunny day. If I were to get a tattoo, I would probably get a tattoo of this. It is so much more beautiful than the table itself, which is perfectly okay but nothing you would look twice at. Plus all the paint is coming off it. 

Goes to show how a thing can be transformed, or at least appreciated in a new light. Light being the thing.

And now I will draw comparisons between the moon (figure 1) and the shadow (figure 2), because I can. It comes down to light and dark, again. Easy. The absence and presence of. The interplay. The juxtaposition. The delicately contrapuntal relationship between form (dark) and space (light). Or, in the case of the moon, form (light) and space (dark).

Can you tell I am running out of words with which to say the same thing over and over until I reach a conclusion that is acceptable to me? Whether or not it is acceptable to you is actually irrelevant (as last time I checked this had a grand total of nine page views at its record-breaking peak).

No prizes for guessing, but this is a photo of fireworks. Taken from a balcony in Roseneath where we hang out every November. They look kinda like jellyfish.

I don’t know what I am trying to illustrate here, exactly. Maybe it’s just a black and white theme. Maybe it’s just because I like all three pictures and wanted to know what they would look like next to each other. That would be okay, wouldn’t it, if that was all it meant?

(No hidden meaning, honestly. Unless you want to fashion one yourself.)