Kelly's right. This is a big ball of suck ...

Perilous times ahead

Tuesday morning I make a potentially life-changing presentation. Can't say more than though, and not just because of the cloud of tequila I've been under ever since finding out. But Tuesday all will be revealed - as either high drama or low comedy.

Why Maxine's smelled of cheese

Every week someone on my team presents something they think is a 'great idea'. We do this to look outside the medium for inspiration and to give each of the team experience in presenting. Recently, Miranda chose to present the work of American photographer Cindy Sherman. In her early work, Sherman used herself as a subject to create an implied cinematic moment that didn't really exist. In other words, she dressed like Marilyn Monroe, but wasn't impersonating her. As an exercise, we took some of the Sherman's photography and made up a 'background story'. It's neither a critique of Sherman's work nor an attempt to guess what she was doing, rather it was inspiration for a narrative that each of the team would invent.

This is mine:

Maxine’s smelled of cheese.

Rumour was that before the war, Maxine’s, the notorious meeting place of Paris’ rich, pseudo-intellectual and bored, was a cheese shop. And on the nights when the air wasn’t thick with smoke or cheap perfume or vomit, one could trace the faint ancient smell of whey and moldy curd. Newcomers to the salon would involuntarily sniff the air, unsure if the source of the moldy smell was the aging building or the aging Maxine.

It was unlikely Maxine noticed their reaction. She’d long been in the habit of graciously but dismissively greeting the ever-changing crowd, unless they were young, handsome or vaguely interested. For Maxine, her salon was less the heart of artistic Paris and more a marketplace for a stream of endless, inexperienced lovers who shared her bed but who fled when the morning light revealed the thick smear of makeup on the pillowcases, the wild frizz of her chemically black hair, the undeniable age imprinted on her naked body and the discernable smell of fromage.

And so the evenings flew by, and the crowds, invited first to distract her from the pain of losing her beloved Claude (a man who though being a gifted and generous lover had the gall to die in his own wife’s bed) stayed so long that she scarcely remembered what it was like to be alone. Except in those first hours of the day when she would get up and wash the memory and smell of last night’s lover away, tame her frizz into the stiff helmet of bobbed hair, and reapply the war mask of powder, paint and perfume.

It wasn’t until she was finished with her ritual rearmament that she noticed the shocking and curious sight of the young man sleeping, half wrapped in her sheets, spread territorially across her bed.

“Who the hell is that?”, she thought and finished her cigarette.

Deep thought for the day

'What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?'
Karen Blixen

To celebrate my downhill slide to 40 I bought a 6.1 megapixel fuck-off digital SLR camera with a 18-70mm lens, the Nikon D70.

Still learning how to use it, and I'll post evidence soon, but it feels mightly impressive.