Holla! I realize that I’ve been gone for quite awhile. But recently (or more-than-recently, as it would seem) my life has been Busy. Since my last post nearly a month ago, several Events occurred: Prize Night, at which I was awarded my school’s prize for excellence in photography (and a copy of Vanity Fair: The Portraits, which is mostly why this was the most notable of the three awards I received), and graduation, where a great number — maybe even a majority — of my friends gradu-danced off to that Big Boarding School in the Sky, also known as college.
More importantly, though, I squeezed through finals week with minimal injury and even got to leave campus a day early. On my first day back in the Midwest, I managed to get rearended at the grocery store/sent to the ER/saddled with whiplash, which sucks. But what doesn’t suck is my drawing class, which met for the first time last Wednesday and which is where I discovered that compressed charcoal is very, very, mess. What also doesn’t suck is the fact that my summer dance classes start this coming week, even if buying ballet shoes made me feel like an elephant (I wear a 14 women’s ballet shoe; the girl trying on shoes next to me wore a 2.5/3). And, for the first time in my life, I have an actual job, which means that I’ll be making $200 in a month or less and all without working in foodservice or manual labor.
And, of course, since I’ve gotten home, I’ve been taking photographs. Here are a bunch:
Of course, there’s far more, but the WordPress Dashboard isn’t cooperating with me uploading photos at the moment. Blé’s gone to Poland, so I’m out of my primary model for the moment, but luckily I have far more willing friends here than at boarding school. So, hopefully, I will write soon, and there will be more photos to come.
It’s been nearly a week, so you people have got me feeling like I owe you something. (Have you been checking out The Ridiculous Things Store, like I asked? As I said, it’s stocked more often.) This week has been the longest week of my life, no lie, even longer than preseason at the beginning of the school year. The payoff is near, though: Saturday morning I’m getting on a plane to Middle of Nowhere, USA, and getting out of here. I’m already beginning to have flight anxiety: Where am I going to put my cameras? And my lenses? (Did I mention that my dad left with my backpack when he came to visit, so for the past week I’ve been pack-less?) What about flying with unexposed film, for crying out loud?
I’m really twitchy right now. Might be from drinking diner coffee this morning, might be burgeoning spring fever. All I know is, I’ve been trying to find NyQuil all week and all I’ve found so far is 1) potheads who tell me drugs are bad 2) generic-brand Advil 3) stronger drugs that I value my health/(semblance of) sanity/scholarship too much to accept. Not to mention, shit’s expensive (or so I’ve heard). But turtles don’t do drugs, my dear readers: hugs, not drugs. (But you must understand the boundaries of “personal space” and the definition of “bad touch”.)
As you can probably tell by my excess of parentheses, I’m kind of lacking the focus to write a blog post at the moment. I also have a really annoying crick/warm spot in the center of my back, so if anyone knows how to make it go away, it would be muchly appreciated.
I get the most random spam comments. But not really, if you think about it. Lots of Russian spammers. I felt my existence validated when someone named “nigeria” left me an unspecific comment. (If you’re a real person, I’m sorry, but every Nigerian knows not to trust nigeria_people2007@yahoo.com.) My mother’s trust in Nigerians was renewed when Pop’Africana sent me an address confirmation email, after I’d almost forgotten that I’d ordered the magazine.
My spam email, for that matter, is slightly more interesting. I get lots of spam from JG Wentworth and AT&T, but more interesting are those from Christian dating websites, US healthcare, Bosley — fight your hair loss! — and “depression help” centers. I don’t recall stating anywhere on the interwebs that I was a balding Christian American without healthcare, but I’m almost certain that any depression would worsen if one’s credit card number were stolen. Once I received a series of spam emails from a supposed lawyer, informing me of the details of a lawsuit I was sure I’d never started. But I’m gullible and paranoid and they kept me up at night for a while, making me wonder if I were really suing someone for the rights to my artwork and had forgotten all about it.
On Friday I lived in a dream-world and ate black-raspberry ice cream at 10pm in an ice-cream parlor with my dance team. Yesterday I watched Little Shop of Horrors and marveled at the stage lighting and harbored a deep resentment against everyone, especially my roommate and her/our loud friends who prevented me from watching Skins in my room. Late at night I ate Lucky Charms and some of the several pounds of dark chocolate chips I received in the mail, but today I am tired and worn-out and have only my spam to remind me of who and where I am not.
It’s that time again. Yes, portfolio-building time. I told you recently that I just updated my Carbonmade portfolio, but apparently that wasn’t good enough — my photography teacher has now tasked me to create TWO portfolios, one of my best fashiony work and one of my best randomosity. With 50 freaking photographs each. Did I mention it’s due tomorrow, and I haven’t even started yet?
But the main point of this post was to tell you that I’ve started an auxiliary blog, The Ridiculous Things Store, since apparently the writings. page on here isn’t quite as functional as it could/should be. The Store should be updated more frequently than authoraiINK here (because have you noticed how posts have been slowly waning? school does that to you.) with snippets of writing and poetry. But don’t worry, I will still post my rants/photography/occasional sartorial choices here. And maybe one day Blé will post too.
Just some quick housekeeping. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of winter. But it’s never too early for spring cleaning.
In case you didn’t notice, I’ve updated (or, rather, reverted) the blog layout, because the previous one was just too cluttered for my taste and I kind of missed the simple blogginess of the very first one. Also, spent awhile reorganizing my Carbonmade portfolio — you should check it out — and changed the photographia. link back to Carbonmade, because I don’t really like Flickr at all and am sort of debating taking my photos off there in general.
Also have been lurking around Vimeo a bunch today, because I’m taking my photostalking to the next level and getting a Flip camera as an early birthday present as to achieve my dream of never-ending photographs. So I can capture life in motion as well as in still. (as an aside, Nirrimi’s two short films — but they’re more of what I think of as “never-ending photographs” — on there are kind of amazing. oh, what the heck, see one here:)
Listening to: Suzanne Vega — The Queen and the Soldier
I spend a lot of my time when not writing thinking about writing. I was thinking about this last post of 2010 (I keep wanting to type 2012 there, but even that isn’t for a while longer) and thought that maybe I’d do a photographic retrospectacular (yes, that term was ripped off from Infomania). But then I thought, Nah, I’m too lazy, and also, could I come up with enough? I think my New Year’s resolution will be to organize my digital photos by date better, because… well, I just tried to find a photo from January of this year, and either I wasn’t in possession of a camera that month or all my pictures are on a different network drive, because I couldn’t find one (decent one). But to be fair, here’s every FashionNös — do you still remember that? if so, kudos to you — cover we produced this year. In one. It’s very gray, isn’t it?
So Happy New Year and all that crap. Let’s hope that 2011 won’t suck too hard.
I’m good at missing dates. authoraiINK’s birthday was exactly one year and 14 days ago, on December 9th, 2009. Yay for a year of procrastination!
Speaking of procrastination, it’s two days ’till Christmas and we just finished building our Christmas tree. Yes, I said building: We have a much-abused, 12+ year-old artificial tree which was looking kind of misshapen because I sort of tossed (read: threw) its pieces carelessly from the box. Then I almost set our carpet on fire because I didn’t realize that one of the large bulbs in our string of lights had shattered.
But anywho. Since I’m on vacation and such, I’ve been engaged in a few of my hobbies which were neglected during school, namely 1) stalking my neighbor and 2) reading. It actually works pretty well; I go to my neighbor’s house, eat her lemon squares, take a pile of her books, and leave. So far I’ve read Crescendo, the sequel to Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick; I’ve caught up on my current favourite manga series Alice in the Country of Hearts; and I’ve gotten angry that I can’t hate the ending to Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments series because it hasn’t actually ended. It makes me angry because it’s like saying a heartfelt goodbye to someone you’re going to miss and then running into them again five minutes later.
Well, happy holidays and such. I have gifts to wrap, movies to see (The Black Swan), and Christmas trees to crush.
Not that you should — hate me, that is. I’m just reeeealy busy and sort of lack dedication with regularity-type things, or something like that. In case you hadn’t noticed, the friday foofaraw feature kind of died. Well, maybe not died, per se, but it certainly crawled into a hole and went into hibernation for a long while. And for that, I’m sorry. The main problems with being consistent with it were the facts that I’m in schoolio and all and have tons of homework, and also because I often ended up sharing all of my cool interwebsy stuff the day I found it, aka not on Friday.
I’m leaving for (American) Thanksgiving break tomorrow, so I’ll probably have tons of time to procrastinate/ write/ play the Sims 3 Late Night/ finish reading Dark Divine andL’appel du sang, which I obviously haven’t finished yet. But until then, watch some stunt cats on infoMania’s viral video film school while I daydream about watching the new Harry Potter movie.
And! Also! My awesome Threadless t-shirt has officially been shipped. So hopefully it’ll be there by the time I get back!
It’s totally Friday, everyone! If I went to a normal school, this would mean that I’d have, like, a weekend.
But I don’t. Instead, I decided to start a nice little weekly feature for you Weekenders called friday foofaraw, or interesting things that I found on the interwebs this week. Usually, if I do it right, it will include some fashion news, some audiovisual news, some photography news, some lit-news and something completely random. But since I only came up with this idea this morning, I have no randomosity and some extra photography instead. My sincerest apologies.
But, before we get to that: You might have noticed that authoraiINK. has undergone a rather extreme makeover. Because of this, some things are still quite ugly. Again, my sincerest apologies. Everything will be pretty once again… sometime.
so, without further ado: friday foofaraw, the october 8th edition.
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1. Alexander McQueen Spring/Summer 2010 Prêt-à-Porter Show
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There has been much buzz around the fashion-nets about this show and the accompanying weaved hairstyles it featured (apparently it took about 60 bottles of hairspray to keep all of that hair together). We even mentioned it at French class today; we took a “day off” and watched a few runway shows from Paris Fashion Week. I felt so knowledgeable; while the rest of my class was wondering “Why the hell are we doing this?”, I was thinking, “That’s Coco Rocha! That’s Chanel Iman!” Personally, my favorite was the Dior show, with the Chanel show coming in close second. But you can find images from McQueen’s show here, and the videos for the Dior and Chanel shows hereand here , respectively. On a semi-related note, you should have seen our teacher’s gesture when Karl Lagerfeld came out — it was trés amusing.
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2. The Social Network
Well. The oft-discussed movie about the founding of Facebook came out this week (or was it last week? or maybe even the week before it? blasted boarding school). Anyhow, the reviews for it started coming out in great volume this week. I, personally, want to see it. We all know that it’s not exactly true to the story (that would be boring on many levels), but I’ve heard that it’s both really good and completely terrible, sometimes at the same time. Maybe I’ll be able to see it before it comes out on DVD, but until then I’ll just have to rely on hearsay and other people spoiling it for me.
There is a spread in Numéro, that magazine that I still-have-not-subscribed to, shot by Ben Hassett and featuring the model Cameron Russell. You should click the picture above to view it on Fashionising.com, because it is too glamorous for my mere typographic skills to describe.
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4. A quick note: Super Sad True Love Story
I heard this book mentioned somewhere and its title compelled me to look it up. If they don’t have it at my library, I am going to cry.
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5. And, finally, a quick palette cleanser
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I saw this on Lorena’s site and felt obligated to share it with you. It’s quite refreshing after that rather icky shoot with Terry Richardson, wouldn’t you say?
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So. I hope you enjoyed the first friday foofaraw of, well… ever. With some luck it’ll be back and better than now next weekend.
Also, on the subject of the title: One day, I am going to create a utopian city called Montparscow. It will be Montréal, except with the allure of being Paris, and the inhabitants will all speak French with Russian accents. I will live there, happy forever, and write and photograph and blog for all of you. Blé, I know, will stand in a corner and laugh quietly to herself.
But we will have the best fashion magazines in my Montparscow. That is certain.
Listening to: Sade — Jezebel (Yay to Nigerian musicians!)
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Today is the Federal Republic of Nigeria’s 50th birthday. We went from rule by the British Empire to rule by British Petroleum. (Can you tell that took me all day to think up?) I wore a flag-themed outfit — well, a white button-up blouse with a green cami — in honor of the occasion, but unfortunately it was disassembled before I could capture it in photographic form.
In other news, guess who’s now a member of IFB! authoraiINK is all spiffy and categorized. But we’re, like, totes legit now. It’s kind of… awesome?
