Not even have the Gods blessed us with a very mild winter, this month gets an extra day for me to meet my deadline. Ahhh, universe. How I tickle thee. :D

The Mad World* in my HDR period…

*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIMNVHfYudE (Not the video, just the song, in this version.)

Saturday was an unexpected road trip to Bled. I wasn’t planning on it, but a friend asked me to come, initially as a Rottweiler in case stuff got awkward with her ex, though it didn’t. It was a lovely day. Detached. I kind of needed it, with all the reality coming at me from all directions.

I still think something weird is going to happen. Weird as if heavy. So many ghosts from the past coming out of their graves… I cannot but imagine the crazy girl that’s been calling me insistently for the past few days, speaking in complete nonsense, isn’t trying to communicate something. It’s the better of two options; the other being her gibberish is just an empty and sad affair of someone ill.

I have to say the things she says are almost poetry. “I am at my job now - combing my hair – there cannot be a single knot left, otherwise we all know: the whole book will fall apart.”

Frankly I am not willing to get too close. Strange, I know, because normally deviations turn me on. But there’s been too much of that lately. In fact, lately, every time I think I’m the nutter, all I have to do is stand next to a real one and then the difference is brutally apparent. And they are starting to wear on me. The last person I spoke about mental illness ended up killing himself. Although he is probably a lot more free now, I still miss him. She hasn’t been entirely sane, ever, but there were times when she was just very sexy and odd, like me (minus the sexy bit), and now I’m guessing either fast-forward bipolar or hardcore paranoid schizophrenia… Either way, a total waste of my time. There is no way I can help her. Even if I spoke to her mother or her sister, all they would tell me is that she’s on and off her meds. When I talk to her on the phone, she is either speaking in complete chops of sentences, or telling me about conspiracies or asking me to help her i.d. a photo of a soul (man dead five years now) that’s going to get into a terrible accident. Even if. What can I without making things worse?

Most of what I can do is try to put the pieces of her conversation into a whole and determine that she’s not hungry, cold or homeless, and then imagine she has a message for me, just to keep from crying. The weirdest of all things is that we have only been in the same room maybe four times in my whole life in half those times I got calls that one of my family members is in the hospital. So I can’t help having that feeling and can’t really do anything about it, except waiting for it to pass. I am so painfully realistic and normal (not to mention immune to compassion), not even the slightest of paranoid cosmic conspiracy theories gets though my skin anymore.

 Bled, the somehow gloomy version

 Brezje - another one of those overdone church things, though with a cute expo of the birth-in-the-stable-episode.

Dorimu exhibit

I know I am not supposed to take photos of poppy, ever, but strange stuff is going on around me anyways and I know something's cooking - and this was a special occasion and they were not real poppy, so... Heck it. They are just too beautiful to pass :)

Today was Živa's thirtieth birthday. Yeesh, how young some people are. Živa is one half of a Dorimu (other half being her mate Saša) and together they are the dolly making duo that gave me my favorite wedding gift. After a show in the town theater tonight (The show was actually rather cool, about miners painters), they announced their exhibition in the foajer and thanked everyone that enabled them to come thus far.

Then they turned on the lights and we could see some of their prime pieces - truly impossible to decide which one of them is more awesome than the other. But of course there was one with poppies, so, my weakness shines through :P

 The Poppy pixie

 The Red Pixie, testing the wind

 Cricket

 The Golden fairy, the dream retriever

 The Green fairy, daydreams wrangler

 Ladybug boy on his swing

 Melancholy Mistress Peacock

 The elegant, not vain, Violet pixie

 The Butterfly gurmane flower taster

I gave her the drawing of myself/Dorimu, and then ate all their lollies. Naa, just kidding. I just snatched one of each for the pickies. Well, you can't wave something so adorable in front of me and expect me to be restrained. I am just not of such substance ;)))

Odd thing. Placing the pages and photos of the book I'm working on I can't but notice a sticky pattern: I relate to castles far better than I do to people. I am far more comfortable with echoes of stories and ghosts, than actual townsfolk...

Event in the city of Goga, the musical

In my homeland literature, there’s this stage piece called the Event in the City of Goga. It’s an ugly, depressing thing, telling about the citizen of a small urban unit, which are so bored and dull in their pointless, everyday existence, that they do small, mean things to one another on daily basis just to keep each-other entertained. When something bad happens, everyone gets super excited and pretends now there was some substance to their lives, but in truth everyone is blowing things out of proportion and just continues their absurd and sexually frustrated living in a stiffening, confined homestead. Imagine a small village in which someone hangs themselves and people are so thrilled they practically throw a party. That’s Goga.

Then there’s my grandma. She’s a kinky little old lady, an ex schoolmate of Methuselah, who on occasion throws everyone in an uproar. I love her and am super grateful she brought me up, but she’s a riot. She tends to convince everyone, including herself, she’s having a heart attack or tells everyone she’s having a tumor or suicide or sometimes even tries one a little. In result, everyone is running around, trying to help or cover their ass (she lives in a home which she practically runs as a great inmate godmother would), partially genuinely worried, partially hysterically upset over her fucked up sense of selfishness. Okay, everyone can understand old ladies like attention and since her doctor at times runs all the tests and finds her entirely without an illness, which is a terrible condition to have in a retirement home, or his substitute is another doctor, who is also a young wife of a very famous and utterly disliked politician, which offers granny another opportunity to rain gossip and stories… Well, when she actually gets shipped to a hospital and there IS something to tell everyone, and everybody comes and she has all the attention, she is the happiest little camper there is. Her family (namely me and often my mother, her only daughter) are often seen as two-faced beasts, as she would at times describe us as the worst of human lowlife and at times as the golden saints, the light of her life. Today was such a day. It started okay, then there was the phone call and then there was the event in the city of Goga, the musical. In the middle of the vortex was grandma, soooo happy she created a fuss, practically shining and thrilled.

I’ve said it before I will say it again. When *I* am the most sane member of this family, that is a very interesting day.

An odd day in the Capital

Today was Drej’s "Pojasni mi ljubezen" book launch press conference, to which she took me along to take photies. I was glad to go, as I expected Ljubljana to be full of masks and I wanted to see if I got anywhere near the photo exhibition that I contested in. Well, no. Of course not. And the part that nearly brought me to tears is what kind of godawful crap actually DID get exhibited as the selected best. I can understand I am not good enough, or that my photos are too shiny (I sent some of the winter wonderland), but Jesus Fuck Mary and Joseph, are you fucking kidding me? The top three, okay, perhaps not the most original work, but they were still admirable, but the rest? The least of some friggn’ original, interesting memorable examples – same crap that ALWAYS comes to the top. Naked chicks in the forest (nothing original, just a naked chick standing in a pretty forest). Dirty gypsy kids. Skinny black kids. Abandoned houses interior. Some mossy tree near a concrete all. Pebbles and pavement on the ground. Plastic egg on a plate and ugly sofas in an ugly room. For the love of…. ?! Those kind of dull, dim super ugly geometric pics and ‘poverty’ shots weren’t interesting even in the seventies, when everyone was taking them, yet alone now… It’s clear nobody considers fashion to be a high form of photographic art, or portrait for that matter (Unless it’s the same old poor people as always, possibly illiterate, from some mountains), but I have seen some SUCH amazing (new) examples lately, following fashion photographers, or animal photographers for that matter…  Like I said, this incredible garbage brought me near to tears. And as Drej put it, until I take photos of dog shit or dog licking her cunt or road kill dog rotting, I will not be a good photographer. .. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. 

On to the press conference, which was the opposite – it was bright, homey, lovely and friendly, in a such pretty ‘reading house’ place I couldn’t believe such amazing sports existed (And I want one!). there were also illustrations exhibited of some mesmerizing author, someone I was not yet familiar with and it was a female and she also did puppets (marionettes.) That brought back the sunshine.

Then we had drinks in a pub with some other authors, which was the sort of a circumstance where I play the weird cousin and stay completely and utterly quiet, looking around the room at the interesting décor and take shots. (Photographic kind, not vodka.) The ride back with a train was sunny, warm and chatty, which was kind of wonderful and after all is said and done, I do love Drej’s reasoning when she aims to make me feel better: high literature and pulp fiction can never really cross. I am not going to win any awards any time soon, but having to hold your new book in your hands just makes your whole day. 

And for some reason Somebody That I Used To Know kept playing in my head the whole time and the singer kind of reminds me of Michael Fassbender and I conjured a scene in a story, in which every thinker any time always considers the past and future to be like an hourglass and all past always seems primitive and all future always seems amazing…

The conference starting...

Cushiest book place I've seen in a while...

Kind of awesome new illustrator I've discovered...

 And the Trubar hologram in the hall :) 

The post-press thngie drinks and debate...

 

Here are some more from the old spa photoshoot, in which the lovely ladies/sirens are meant to be rescuing a happy camper/drowning fisherman... Note how some models are very good at posing? Notice their elegant and sexy and mystical poses? How about unprofessional giggling idiots? Notice those? It took about three hours to work this (just the shoot. I won't even go into the preps, because the people they hired to do make up took four hours to do one smoky eye. And we were shooting in the water, in the dark.) and the above shot is still the only one I marginally (compositionally) dare show. And trust me. Waxed dudes and skinny babes is not what makes my job worth while. During shoots like these all you ever think is 'oh, Gods', how I can't wait to get home and have a Walking Dead marathon'.

The things we do for money...

Well, when your idea of a sexy spa mermaid is this:

...and they ask you instead to do this:

... you know you've made some wrong decisions in accepting clients. But nobody is above paying bills, so often there's stuff you are not meant to argue, you're just meant to push the big button and hope it'll all be over quickly. Actually it's mostly like bad sex: people don't like each-other anyway, the chemistry is all wrong, the act itself is wildly unpleasant and the aftermath is usually a feeling of cheapness, humility and a fight. Working with ghastly models for ghastly commissioners for a ghastly pay is just one of the stages in a career. The sooner you get it over with, the better.