My life would be perfect, if only my Powerbook will stop preventing anyone or anything from accessing the ‘Music’ folder. But no matter. I have wireless broadband now, and my life feels much more complete. Scary, but true. A great deal of consumer services are really not necessary, but wireless broadband isn’t one of them.
Richard and I have decided to make a commitment to doing at least one set of photographs a week, and see where that takes us. Consistency, dedication, some talent and imagination and lots and lots of pornography is bound to take anyone anywhere. We were supposed to go down to Sentosa yesterday evening to do some weird school-girl sun-bathing nude at the beach shots, but it was raining too badly to do it. We went ahead and got the uniform anyway.
It started at Far East Plaza, which really is a hell-hole, especially when all the clothing there isn’t generally to your liking and it is next to impossible to find the shit you want, exactly like how you want it. One of R’s friends had gotten an ultra pink schoolgirl outfit for the last party they threw where you could take a number and get your bottom spanked by a cutesy Jap schoolgirl, and she told him there was a place at Far East Plaza you could get it. It was a very special shop in the basement.
It didn’t occur to me which one it was of course, although it was staring in my face until Richard pointed it out to me. It was this ultra pink, girly hell that was obviously paedophile haven, but girls probably wouldn’t notice it for what it really was. At least what it really was to a certain breed of men well past the age they can say they dated barely legal girls because they had the maturity of a sixteen year old (some boys maintain that state up till they hit menopause).
But before that, we’d gotten so frustrated at not being able to find IT that he’d accosted a woman that looked like she had a brood of teenage kids of her own that had whined her into taking them shopping in the faux-pas urban-hip imitation of a bit of Hirajuku. He occasionally does things that infringe onto other people’s decency that crack the hell out of me; he quite nearly walked into her, looked down and asked her if she knew where we could purchase a school uniform.
She looked at him (us) like, ‘What the Fuck you pervert’ and I went ‘Oh my God of course she wouldn’t know, you’ve gone completely bonkers’. And of course he started on about how he was sure it was located in the Basement, if only we could just find it. I told him the nice lady wouldn’t know, and the woman continued looking at us like we were a couple of perverts, and eventually it was clear she had no idea what the fuck we were talking about and would rather like to tell us we were going to hell (it was a Sunday, yesterday) and we all went away.
We eventually decided on a real uniform however and went to a real uniform store and purchased a crap blouse and a navy blue pleated skirt. It’s a bit too long and over the knees however and we’ll have to trim it, but it will do. The people selling us the stuff must have known we were a couple of weirdos.
It was raining all day though, so we stayed at home instead and took some pictures on the dining table with some thick, rough rope. I’ll post a couple of them when they dry up enough to scan, they are horribly pornographic however, and nothing too ‘artistic’* about them in the least.
However I must say, the truth about nude photography is this*: All that crap about how the light falls on a naked body and accentuates the human form is bullshit. That’s as art as third-grade grammar exercises are to writing, is as art as stickmen to life-drawing, as art as Palm-a-sutra to sex. How light falls is a technical thing, its who you shoot and how you shoot it to bring out something about the subject, something you want to say that matters. Richard got quite zealous at one point and started going on about how it really was about the way the model interacted with the photographer and the surroundings and her state of undress and the circumstance it was all taken in. People don’t paint to discover the properties of paint, just as people would be stupid to think photography is about discovering the properties of light in relation to the nude form. Silliness.
Anyway, we’ve opened a can of worms now, and we are definitely going to the beach to shoot some pervert schoolgirl stuff. We went down a couple of days back, and I thought it was funny how our dating gradient must look. So we kinda started out with Sydney and Darling Harbour, then Brick Lane in London, Mongkok in Hong Kong, and now its Sentosa. My, my.
Island Life, all I can say, is hell. Sentosa is this huge commercial thing that is attempting to sell you an artificial beach experience; its like a mall for fake beach life. Everything is crapper than in Thailand, and in Thailand, you don’t have to pay to sit on the beach and a real Mango shake is 20 Baht. To top it off, on the way back, we discover that someone had taken R’s T-Shirt –for what purposes, I do not wish to know- and there was no way we were going to get a cab out of the hell a couple of hours before mid-night.
So. We took the bus all the way to Harbour Front and he walked through the shopping mall in board shorts and only board shorts and flip-flops, and it and quite nerve-wrecking. Although I must say I wasn’t very much embarrassed about it. Its kinda funny how much life is easier to live when you convince yourself the opinions of other people you do not particularly care for are worth shit, and that anyone worth giving a shit for wouldn’t think what you think doesn’t matter, actually matters.
xoxox
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