Cellophane Cat

Whenever there are flowers in the apartment, my cat likes to lick the cellophane wrapper on the bouquet. She likes to do this a lot.

Take the A train

Last night on the subway, I saw a couple in their twenties. She was reading “What To Expect When You’re Expecting,” and under the hem of her white polo shirt you could see that long, purplish seam that pregnant women get below their navels. Her acneic boyfriend was dozing next to her, and they were holding hands. For some reason, I found the scene inexplicably touching.

Happy Endings

You, the 41 souls who clicked around this derelict blog since midnight yesterday, are the few, the proud, the hard core, the truly special, the early adopters, the late abandoners, and I salute you. Except you, dude who found me after Googling “Pose foto lingerie.” He can take his foto and phuck off.

In other words: I’m back.

Tomorrow, the world

This photo by Sophie Keyse

To those hordes I imagine take an interest in the goings-on of my career (ahem, Mum, Dad): You can now add ‘freelance writer’ to my CV. I wrote a story for a magazine! It’s called NO and you have to go to New Zealand to buy it. But what better reason to make the trip? My editor (my! editor!) is sending me copies in the post.

Still Alive!

I’ve been embracing life in the Real World lately. Sometimes I go days without turning on my laptop. Until a minute ago, I hadn’t checked my e-mail since last Tuesday.

Jobs are good, clients are good, Sydney was good, New York is good, Washington, D.C. where I thanksgave was good; life is so unrelievingly, generically good I’m afraid I have lost a bit of the blogging muse. I expect it will return.

I did a job with a photographer who shot film — actual, grained, celluloid film from little canisters — recently. I went on a casting and met a czarming Czech who walked around the New Museum with me on a rainy afternoon. We joined a participatory exhibit and sewed a white linen quilt with a motif of randy rabbits opposite two artists and an unemployed woman. I went to the National Gallery and saw a roomful of Toulouse Lautrec and two roomsful of Rembrandt. Bought some space ice cream. Haven’t tried it yet. Every time I catch up with someone I haven’t seen in months, I’m reminded of five other friends I still haven’t rung. The real world, it turns out, is pretty nice.

(See? This is the banality of observation my brains have been chucking up lately. When I have something to say, I’ll get back in the game.)

Bright Eyes

Some unusually neontastic shit has been visited on the peepers at shoots as of late. To wit:

Exhibit A: Neon classique.

Exhibit B: Drag neon.

Exhibit C: Disheveled neon.

Trend for Spring! Trend for Spring! You heard it here first, people.

Ethereal Bogan

Even though I’ve lived outside New Zealand for several years now, there are still times when I unwittingly fall into a crack in the common language. How could “chuffed” be gibberish outside of the Antipodes? Why do Americans refuse the services of a great word like “bludge”? And why can’t a green pepper be a “capsicum” always? It’s mystifying, really.

Hence: Necessary informational preface, courtesy of Wikipedia:

The term bogan (pronounced /ˈboʊgən/, rhyming with slogan) is Australian and New Zealand English slang, usually pejorative, for a person who is, or is perceived to be, of a lower-class background. According to the stereotype, the speech and mannerisms of “bogans” indicate, poor education, cheap clothing and uncultured upbringing. ‘Bogans’ usually reside in economically disadvantaged suburbs (often outer metropolitan) or rural areas^[1].

The term is a close regional equivalent to the English term Chav or Pikey, Scottish term Ned, Irish term Scanger and the North American term White Trash. However the term ‘bogan’ is occasionally used with some affection in Australia/NZ, whereas those corresponding terms are not. (Emphasis added.)

For example:

“Cricketer Shane Warne receives regular ribbings from the Australian media for his bogan persona. His struggles with weight loss and cigarettes, the unsophisticated dietary habits, are all fodder for commentators who recoil at his uncouth habits. But Warney is the ultimate Aussie bloke: all brawn and few brains when it comes to controlling his appetites, plus a blinding addiction to blondes who are typically clones of his attractive wife.” (Emma-Kate Symons, “Spinning out of control,” The Weekend Australian (2-3 July 2005), p 19

Inspirational runway collage for a show. The clothes were plaid, the music was the kind of Courtney Love I used to scowl angrily along to in fifth form, and there were leather jackets in every second look. In fitting with the moto cross theme, half of the models wore knee pads or head gear. We were hard rock listening, Holden-fiddling, beer-drinking, stubbie-wearing, singleted boganettes and I for one had a pretty rad time at it.

Not a message you really need to give to a room of models, but hey. I tried my best to walk strong-but-not-angry, as if I were on my way to my fave drag racing spot to catch the weekend action. Or something.

(Runway photos from Zimbio.com)

In my revisionist dream closet, I bought that Eisenhower jacket I said I was going to a year ago already.

In related wardrobe plotting: I’ve decided I want this dress. I love the plaid on the bodice — it reminds me of a bush shirt — and, let’s face it, the one advantage of having a microscopically endowed chest is that you can wear low-cut scoop-necks and not look cheap. Dresses like these are practically my birth right. Or at least the reward of years of teenage curve envy. I’ll use this post as a memory jogger for next April, when the frock should be available.

In friends meeting

Sideshow Bob, is that you?

Ignore my outrageous man hands, please, and concentrate instead on the lovely ring I’m sporting. My dear friend Sophie gave it to me my first night here: It’s three rings in one, and it bears an inscription related to my 21st. (It’s not my birthday. Sophie and I fell shamelessly out of regular gift-giving habits during our respective travels these recent years.) It’s perfect because through high school, I was lucky enough to have two best friends — and not in the usual in-case-one-breaks-down catty girl sense, either.

Bec, Sophie and I were a stable, close triad from ages 13-18. We were a debating team (two of us went to nationals in sixth form), a fashion design clearinghouse, a Young Enterprise business of massive success, a trio of upwardly mobile academics who did two or three subjects apiece one or two years ahead, and a tea drinkers anonymous group with a rolling series of daily scheduled meetings. (We each take it strong with milk and 1.5 sugars, thanks.)

They were always eminently sensible friends, encouraging of good judgment, independent-spirited, and loving without peer. They generally tried with all their hearts to talk me out of all the bad decisions I made as a teenager, but never failed to understand why I made them anyway. Sophie taught me taste in music and new ways to imagine pants and how to cultivate older friends. Bec taught me to hold my own in English and that real life isn’t all seriousness. Many women remember adolescence as a period of drastic friendship instability, of fortunes that rose and fell with a hair flick and a knowing look. I don’t: I remember knowing only that while I didn’t have many friends, I had precisely as many as I needed, and that furthermore they seemed to need me back. The last New Year’s I particularly enjoyed was the one five years ago we spent just the three of us on Sumner beach with a bottle of champagne.

In some ways you miss your friends more than you miss your family, when you spend a lot of time away from home, because the family bond is definite and settled. There is the certainty of dates like Christmas, and the formality of their names on “in case of emergency please contact” forms. Family relationships, for all their potential for strife, are never at risk of simple attrition. But friends lose touch all the time.

It gives me great satisfaction to know that, having survived through years of half-written letters (upon my arrival, I gave Sophie a bundle of aborted missives dating back to one I’d started the Northern summer of 2004), birthday phonecalls only when we remembered, and silent lapses that swallowed whole seasons, ours are bonds that seem likely to endure for life. A ring with three bands seems like a perfect synecdoche for us.

Now if only we could tempt Bec back from her current Canadian moonbeam-spotting adventure, then we’d really be set.

Interlude

Finished first show of the day. Three hours until next call time: Oh whatever shall I do?

I know: Find a demo laptop in the main lounge and shamelessly blog pictures of myself. Hi Mum!

Thanks, Vaio. That accomplished, allow me to go in search of food. And cell phone credit. Tootles!

Too tired to think of a title, eyelids closing in 3, 2,…

Hair and makeup today involved a lion’s mane of crimp-fried backcombings, smooshed into a mushroom and christened with hairspray. So many volatile organic compounds descended on my cranium that, by my last exit, the hairstylist was happy to just poke and nudge my crowning glory into position with the long end of a comb. It didn’t budge.

Not that it isn’t possible to find one’s zen backstage.

Tips for dealing with multiple-hour beautifying sessions of the beauty-is-pain aesthetic praxis? Models got ‘em. We: Read On Beauty. Keep our earbuds discreetly in. Do yoga breathing. Read and highlight On Liberty. Sip Red Bull through straws. Peruse study guides for tomorrow’s Year 12 mock exams. Wonder aloud why someone asks if we want a Red Bull every two minutes but nobody seems to have any food. Such is life when it is your fate to get up close and personal with a very nice person whose job happens to be to inflict discomfort on your sensitive parts for as long as it takes.

Lookee here, someone named Getty took my picture during the runway run-through:

And then again during the real thing.

(Images Zimbio/Getty)

I bit the dust in these shoes. The 6.5″ platform pencil-point stillettoes did me in; Thank god it wasn’t during the first showing of this collection, which was the big media to-do, but during the second, which was only for buyers. (Though I’m sure tomorrow or this weekend when I feel like a spot of ego-mortification, I’ll be able to dig some pictures up — I heard definite cooings of excitement from the photographers’ pit when I found myself suddenly kneecapped after coming off the turn.) Another model tumbled in the same t-straps during the buyers’ show; I’m relieved it wasn’t worse for either of us. I didn’t roll an ankle, didn’t tear the dress, didn’t break the strap and have to hobble dejectedly back down the long gangplank, didn’t take anyone else out with me. I’ve bruised worse at concerts. If this is my fall, I can suck it up and see a bright side.

It is now 1:03 a.m. Took an hour of concerted combing, two ear-splitting hair-cuticle-screeching rubber-band removals, and one half-cup of conditioner to undo the ‘do. But the long shower was kind of blissful.

That’s all for tonight, folks. This model hit up no after parties: This model tired. Model no table-dance and Moet-drink. Model need sleep of beauty. Model enjoy friend’s couch very much. Model enjoy lateish 10 a.m. call time very, very much.