Ow shit. Kim Jong-il died. One of the last truly whacko dictators. And he was reported to pass on from a heart attack while traveling by a train. Was that the same train that he liked staffed with former beauty queens and teen models I wonder?

On socks and boobs

It took me about 45 seconds to get addicted to these....

 

(The grippy knobbies, I mean, not the toe things.) Feeling them ALL the time, walking, flexing my soles - and when you take them off and put on regular socks, you feel like your foot is in a bucket of water. Am seriously considering getting more shoes and socks. I suppose one pair of trekking shoes and one pair of flip flops is a disgrace for a woman. Though if my life depended on it, I am certain I could dig out some army issued ladies heels, boots and of course two old pairs of training bullers.

I have skipped right over this guy, Pejić.

Lovely he may be, but he is also dumb as fuck and I am so over halfwit models. That drawer is stuck as it is with Gackt. (Aware that that man exists brings whole new light to my own species.) Regardless of my turn on for manga (where even the worst of male villains may look like little girls sometimes). I'm thinking Kuja.

I am nigh finished with the latest book, but it's too large to be printed for easy money. Granted, I am a fan of a hard cover, but hitherto I just can't afford it. Luckily I couldn't afford it even if it was half the price, so I merrily sail on, already flirting with the sequel. I stole these planets from Wiki to doodle around with a cover, but I didn't do it because I didn't have a better one, I did it because at the same time the book speaks about distant planets and my great boobs :P

Nafis

Couple of pickies of Nafis Umerkulova, a little piano wrangler I met when I shot the classical concerts taking place these holiday season. A minute Uzbek taming a grand Steinbeck certainly is a sight to behold and you know me - I tend to sit, alone, in the front line and pretend there's just music and me and the face of the people playing. Half of what I understand of sounds is what I interpret from teh expression of the musicians :) She studies in Glasgow with Katarina Majcen and she was super nice to me, when I joined the friends/family of the stars for drinks afterwards and would of course just sit and observe quietly.

On funerals, sex fairs and slaughter

It's been a week since I've tried reaching out into the world for lessons and approval, and my hands have been healing nicely. The nasty wounds on my palms (a little less stigmata and a little more psoriasis, though I could fool you) have been healing very neatly and I no longer cringe from shaking people's hands.

                In the past three days, I have gone to the extremes of human condition. Each and every one was traumatic and rejuvenating to the point of primal urge to yell.

                First was a fuck-lot-depressing funeral. I have gone to more funerals this year than all the rest of my life combined and each one was worse than the other. This time the corrupt shit-hearted faith-whore of a priest delivered such a disturbed sermon, I literally started crying. Luckily it was a funeral, but I was so upset I shook and trembled and would have had it much worse if my parents didn’t agree: this was ridiculous. We are communists (or at least one communist, one atheist and me respectfully in the middle) but we do respect other faiths if they are genuine and intimately between people and their needs to not feel small and alone, but this was simply awful. I was about to lose it when the guy said children conceived in test tubes have no chance of ever meeting the grace of that dude hanging from two sticks, so basically, because we need a little help of science to conceive, the General’s kids by me won’t stand a right to be baptized? (Though by now I think the General comprehends I would rather raise my offspring as Jewish than ever have them speak to the likes of these preachers.) If that didn’t seal my hatred of the lot, his comments on how we should be as devout as zealot Islamists in our faith – and of course no matter how much he charged for this, because they charge a lot for these masses, he still sent out the large basket and stared at people how much money they will give, more – that certainly did. I thought my dad will be upset when I put my hands in my pockets and showed my back to the creep in a dress when he approached me, but, in a moment of excellent family camaraderie, my dad did the same. We would have done much worse if this was not a funeral of our family member.

The second event, a day later, was a sex fair. We get one of these each years and as it turned out, people from all over, far across the borders, come, to check out the products and XXX starlets… I know I am a newbie and would have never gone alone if it were not for a very good friend of mine, who is the only other person I know to have the same taste in porn and speaks about sex the same cheerful, liberal way. She has also done this before, so she was not as shy as me and would explain a lot of stuff. I have to say, as far as some of the more costly products go, the temptation is indeed overwhelming. I especially liked this: http://en.lelo.com/index.php?collectionName=insignia-luxe&groupName=TIANI

…. Whereas the peoples on stage… That was a smack certain libido killer. Some people were so ugly, so sadly cheap-silicone, it made us blush. Some were just sad, old and … sad. There were very few that were not terrible and perhaps two of the visitors there would make me horny if I happened to be ovulating. The rest were just mostly sweaty single men who came to rub against ‘naughty nurses ‘in fishnets and whatever some of the others were supposed to be… Butt implants commercias or something. Then again I haven't seen these many tele-lenses and puffed up semi-professional cameras since the Nikon fair last week.

The finish day of this bizarre trio was the slaughter of the pigs in the General’s home farm. It’s still a double murder, terrible and nightmare-inducing, very cruel, very painful and to people like me, messed up. However, I tend to face the things that freak me out through a lens, so I got some good pictures. And I am a big fan of gross anatomy and like the study of internal organs, as long as there isn’t any blood involved. Plus there is something to be said about the General ripping out a pig’s spine as if he just met a Predator and fucked it up and said: “Wrong ooman, asshole.”

Imago

I woke up feeling so incredibly small today. So incredibly unborn. I felt like I should just curl up and die and stop wasting the air of this insensitive little world. Luckily I’ve felt like this before and I know what it is. In the insect world it’s called imago. Shedding a shell. 

One of the options was sending buck shots through my photography bag, but I don’t really want to kill Mark, not yet. He was kissed and neatly packed into his bag and will sleep, the gentle prince, until the spring comes. Sure, I will shoot plenty of dogs and winter family sports and places we’ll visit, but no more expecting money for my work. I have no idea how I will get the money to live, but I got it before and besides – lately most of my photography work was just simply stolen or published without my name signed and for all I tried, for all I invested, time and resources, it kept coming back to nothing. Normally I’d just abandon my ambition, because it’s been so long since I’ve been doing this – but I love my light, my colors, this beauty captured and stolen from time, too much. So March it is.

People who will want to find me will find me. People who will want to hire me will hire me. But no more evenings away from my husband, begging people for deals and clinging onto false promises like a naïve, approval starved child. I’ve given so much and achieved so little the way I’ve approached it until now.

It’s time to go to sleep and shed this shell – something that always feels awful, painful and rotten on this end and always feels like getting wings on the other. It’s time for pain and helplessness now. In spring it’ll be another story.

I have to say I love the way my brain works. Not that it's doing me any favors, but I am still in awe of its predictability. :D

            My day hasn’t been the best. Finding out yet more of my published photos have not been signed and yet more people posing as professionals have degraded my efforts, not to mention a photo shoot I’ve been really looking forward to has been cancelled and Barki seems to be a little bit sick. I’ve tried writing a single page of a book I am obliged to write and instead ended up writing fourteen pages of a book I am only writing to blow off steam that builds while I’m focusing on the research of the first. It’s not exactly Mozart – finished in the first go – but it makes for an excellent skeleton structure for the narrative I will eventually, probably, embellish. Huge chunks of the last part of my space adventure are coming together, even if in a strange and unfamiliar tone. There is a scene in which I kill my first real person, but I only wrote about three lines on the subject. The writing should probably rest for a bit, a month or so, so that I can re-read it and decide if this cold, detached, shallow and dry tone fits perfectly to the mental state of the heroine at the time of the final showdown or can I do a lot better… Either which way, it was an unexpected positive closure of a bad day.

Oddly enough, I have not listened to Tori Amos for over fifteen years. She reminds me of a period of my life when my dreams were plagued by Gaiman's Sandman (and when I say plagued I mean there were oozes of fucked up nightmares and black holes of confidence and creativity, only a numbing fear of death that extended well into my waking hours.) I hung out with a girl back then, which I still consider a filthy snake, the biblical type of someone who betrays one’s trust and friendship without the slightest emotional aftermath. Tori Amos was the backsound of bad dreams, rape issues and feeling very very left behind to die alone.

         It’s always curious to hear such a strong song again (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PAxJ_kJtkM) during a photo shoot and feel nothing but inspiration and power. How the lowly have changed :D Indeed.

         Before the doggie walk today, because I have started working more intently on the travel book, I also started writing stuff in the counter-balance mode. It’s the way I write – one part is difficult, focused and serious and the other is playful, silly, funky and comes naturally, in great bursts of color. In an hour I wrote a two-page short story for my next collection of stories, about my lovers. I wrote a piece of it to the General and he pulled my head back and aimed a fist at my bent neck, saying it will be over very quickly. He is not happy with my fictional view on open marriage. It’s probably the reaction of someone who only ever read non-fiction books. There should be a long conversation about the merits of fiction and fantasy before I read him something from my list again.

         There’s a line in that story, though, that I find worth translating :)

         “That I love books is a gross understatement. I worship books. I steal them, I forge them, I take them even from museums and monasteries. I am obsessed with preserving the tales often left between only two mouse-nibbled covers at all. To me they are like diamonds: each is precious, but there are rare samples which are more precious still. I like to wait and see who will be the one to take them home and then befriend those people.”

The Rosa Accessories catalogue shots...

Publishing some of the catalogue work... Work like this really makes you itch and hop on toetips, as you're so anxious to show it to everyone :D

The brainstorm behind the beauty of the baggies are Mateja Bobek and Nina Škoberne


The models are the magnificent Claire Pecniq, Tamara Kolenc and Levin Oparenović
Make up was done by the lovely Nea Likar
Hair by Nevenka Bobek
Stylings were from S.Oliver
The concepts, drafts and direction was by the fantastic pair Dare Vasiljevič and Tanja Špan of ARHIMETRICS