Lunetta Earrings by Jennifer Behr.
Instagram: devyncrimson.
Instagram: devyn crimson
Earrings, found here.
Instagram: devyn crimson.
Tilfi – Charbagh Collection, found here.
“Oh, the devil will find work for idle hands to do”
(The Smiths)
The original cover featuring Terence Stamp
This is my third and final post (well at least final for now) in relation to John Fowles’ novel “The Collector”; I already wrote a book review, a post about the theme of art in the novel because Miranda was an art student, and now this post which connects the film with the song by The Smiths. Allow me to first open the Bible of misery, melancholy and self-pity: Morrissey’s Autobiography that is, and let us go to the page one hundred and sixty three and see what is there to be said about the song What Difference Does it Make? and the Terence Stamp cover picture incident:
“I nominate Pretty girls make graves as the third single, but a bastion of bearded Rough Trade battleaxes drop on me like a ton of beansprouts and argue against a song with a title that would have made Mary Wollstonecraft throw in the tea-towel. Rough Trade wheel out “What Difference Does It Make?” as the next single. I had loved the song until its defilement on “The Smiths” album; the loose swain’s saunter now sounded stiff and inflexible, the drums sounding too frightened to move, the voice sounding like something gone to its reward – or, at least, resting in peace. I use a photograph of Terence Stamp as the sleeve image partly because I am assured that clearance can be gained from Stamp through Geoff’s mutual friendship with Sandie Shaw. Once the single is issued, Terence Stamp objects and will say (years later) that ‘Morrissey did not ask for approval.’ A new shot is panicked together, wherein I imitate the Stamp shot, although I choose to hold a glass of milk in place of Stamp’s strychnine-soaked muslin cloth. I am ugly against Stamp’s glamor-handsomeness, but it will have to do, since the single has already risen to number 12. Evidently Rough Trade are quite pleased about the sudden censoring of the original sleeve, because it might mean that collectors buy the single with the new sleeve also, thus bumping up sales.”
I really adore the song Pretty girls make graves, so I agree with Morrissey. In the novel, Frederick (played in the film by Terence Stamp) drugs the beautiful art student Miranda with chloroform not with strychnine, but oh well Morrissey, I forgive you a lousy little mistake. It seems that in both covers the devil did find work for idle hands to do because they are both holding something. Even though the song and the film have nothing in common really, the cover picture was Morrissey’s homage to the films and film stars of the 1950s and 1960s that he loved. The aesthetic of the kitchen sink dramas appealed to his grim view of the world around him.
The cover with Morrissey and a glass of milk
I read quite a few interesting novels lately, but John Fowles’ debut novel “The Collector”, published in May 1963, is the most peculiar one; both the theme and the style in which it was written are fascinating. I discovered this novel by serendipity, completely randomly, but it turned out that this was exactly the kind of novel I craved. I was captivated from the very first page because from the very beginning Fowles places the reader into the mind of a seemingly ordinary, yet very unusual individual named Frederick Clegg. Frederick isn’t the Arnold Layne from Pink Floyd’s song, stealing and collecting girls knickers from the washing lines in suburban gardens of Cambridge, but he is a collector of other things; firstly the butterflies, and then one beautiful girl called Miranda he watches from afar and over time falls in love with, despite not knowing anything about her really, apart of the Art School she goes to and what she looks like. He is a socially awkward, strange individual and it’s hard to decide whether he is good or bad; the things he does are bad, but his intentions truly are not.
His early daydreams about her are very romantic and sweet, but concerning in their delusional nature: “I used to have daydreams about her, I used to think of stories where I met her, did things she admired, married her and all that. Nothing nasty, that was never until what I’ll explain later. She drew pictures and I looked after my collection (in my dreams). It was always she loving me and my collection, drawing and colouring them; working together in a beautiful modern house in a big room with one of those huge glass windows; meetings there of the Bug Section, where instead of saying almost nothing in case I made mistakes we were the popular host and hostess. She all pretty with her pale blonde hair and grey eyes and of course the other men all green round the gills.”
Other days the sweetness of these innocent daydreams takes a darker tone when he sees her spending time with other men, for he, naturally, wants her all for himself, even though Miranda doesn’t even know he exists: “The only times I didn’t have nice dreams about her being when I saw her with a certain young man, a loud noisy public-school type who had a sports car. Those were days I let myself have the bad dreams. She cried or usually knelt. Once I let myself dream I hit her across the face as I saw it done once by a chap in a telly play. Perhaps that was when it all started.”
Catherine Deneuve in UK filming 1965 British psychological horror Repulsion, London, Friday 2nd October 1964. Photo by Wilson
One day, Frederick wins a prize in the football pools and decides to buy a lonely and old countryside house. From that moment on, his daydreams and wild fantasies become serious plans; he decorates the cellar and is ready to catch his butterfly-victim Miranda. One evening he follows her after her classes: “It was all planned. And then she was near. She’d come up and round without me seeing, only twenty yards away, walking quickly. If it had been a clear night I don’t know what I’d have done. But there was this wind in the trees. Gusty. I could see there was no one behind her. Then she was right beside me, coming up the pavement. Funny, singing to herself.” After he kidnaps her, he drives her to his countryside house and locks her in the cellar. The novel is divided in three parts; the first part is seen from Frederick’s point of view, the second part is Miranda’s diary written in captivity, and a tiny bit at the end is again told from Frederick’s point of view.
Miranda’s emotions change greatly throughout the novel; at first she is frightened and thinks he must be interested only in sex, which isn’t true, but as she gets to know him, she realises just how pathetic, uneducated, uncultured and weak he truly is; a working class nobody, that is how she sees him, for she is a posh, middle-class art student. He doesn’t have a clue about art or Mozart; things that Miranda loves. Frederick also realises that Miranda is far from the girl of his dreams; she is insolent, she regularly mocks him for the way he walks and talks, decorates his house, nothing escapes her snobbish prejudice. And the most heartbreaking realisation comes in the end, when he realises that she never loved him. The realism gives this novel humanity; Frederick isn’t a cruel savage and a monster, but rather a lonely, confused, strange individual who simply wants to connect with another human being, and he tries doing that the only way he thinks it’s possible, as he says: “if she’s with me, she’ll see my good points, she’ll understand. There was always the idea she would understand.” Things aren’t always black and white and this novel shows the complexities of such a situation. Even though one would assume Miranda was a poor victim and Frederick the evil person, I grew fond of Frederick whilst reading the novel and I developed a sadness and understanding for him. I don’t think he has a cruel heart.
And now more quotes I enjoyed:
“That was the day I first gave myself the dream that came true. It began where she was being attacked by a man and I ran up and rescued her. Then somehow I was the man that attacked her, only I didn’t hurt her; I captured her and drove her off in the van to a remote house and there I kept her captive in a nice way. Gradually she came to know me and like me and the dream grew into the one about our living in a nice modern house, married, with kids and everything. It haunted me. It kept me awake at nights, it made me forget what I was doing during the day. I stayed on and on at the Cremorne. It stopped being a dream, it began to be what I pretended was really going to happen (of course, I thought it was only pretending) so I thought of ways and means — all the things I would have to arrange and think about and how I’d do it and all. I thought, I can’t ever get to know her in the ordinary way, but if she’s with me, she’ll see my good points, she’ll understand. There was always the idea she would understand.”
Apollo Butterfly, Illustrations taken from ‘The Natural History of British Butterflies’ by Edward Donovan, Printed for the author in 1792 and for F. and C. Rivington
“He’s so slow, so unimaginative, so lifeless. Like zinc white. I see it’s a sort of tyranny he has over me. He forces me to be changeable, to act. To show off. The hateful tyranny of weak people. The ordinary man is the curse of civilization. But he’s so ordinary that he’s extraordinary. He takes photographs. He wants to take a “portrait” of me. Then there were his butterflies, which I suppose were rather beautiful. Yes, rather beautifully arranged, with their poor little wings stretched out all at the same angle. And I felt for them, poor dead butterflies, my fellow-victims.”
“She’d taken her blue jumper off, she stood there in a dark green tartan dress, like a schoolgirl tunic, with a white blouse open at the throat. Her hair swept back into the pigtail. Her lovely face. She looked brave. I don’t know why, I thought of her sitting on my knees, very still, with me stroking her soft blonde hair, all out loose as I saw it after. Suddenly I said, I love you. It’s driven me mad. She said, “I see,” in a queer grave voice. She didn’t look at me any more then. I know it’s old-fashioned to say you love a woman, I never meant to do it then. In my dreams it was always we looked into each other’s eyes one day and then we kissed and nothing was said until after.”
“For some time she sat smoking, with her eyes shut, as if the sight of me tired her eyes.”
High Brown Fritillary, Illustrations taken from ‘The Natural History of British Butterflies’ by Edward Donovan, Printed for the author in 1792 and for F. and C. Rivington
The author explained the inspiration behind the novel in his journal entry for 3rd February 1963:
“The Collector. The three sources. One. My lifelong fantasy of imprisoning a girl underground. I think I must go back to early in my teens. I remember it used to be famous people Princess Margaret, various film stars. Of course, there was a sexual motive; the love-through-knowledge motive, or motif, has also been constant. The imprisoning in other words, has always been a forcing of my personality as well as my penis on the girl concerned. Variations I can recall: the harem (several girls in one room, or in a row of rooms); the threat (this involves sharing a whip, but usually not flagellation—the idea of exerted tyranny, entering as executioner); the fellow-prisoner (this by far the commonest variation: the girl is captured and put naked into the underground room; I then have myself put in it, as if I am a fellow-prisoner, and so avoid her hostility). Another common sexual fantasy is the selection board: I am given six hundred girls to choose fifty from and so on. These fantasies have long been exteriorized in my mind, of course; certainly I use the underground-room one far less since The Collector.
Two, the air-raid shelter incident.
Three, Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle.“
Two autumns ago I watched this delicious eye-candy film called “The Love Witch” (2016) directed by Anna Biller and I loved it! Now, in these late October’s crimson leafy witchy days I find myself thinking about that film again and now I must tell you all to watch it too because it is just “wow”! It is fun, strange, sensual, vibrant, over the top and very aesthetically pleasing to watch.
I love him so much it just turns to hate
I fake it so real, I am beyond fake
And someday, you will ache like I ache…
(Hole, Doll Parts)
The main character is a beautiful witch Elaine, played by Samantha Robinson, whose long silky smooth black hair, dazzling outfits and vibrant eyeshadows catch the eye of many men in town, which is unfortunate for them because she isn’t just a witch – she is a love witch. Simultaneously, she is every man’s fantasy and his doom. Her victims just fall too much in love, and yes, ironically they die of too much love. Looking at Elaine, the way she walks the way she talks, it is easy to see why no man can resist her, there is a something magnetic about her, her figure oozes confidence and sensuality. In the opening scene, she is driving her pretty red car and explaining to us how she had to move because her former husband died a mysterious death and now she is partly blamed. She starts a new life in a small and charming little town of Arcata, California and moves into a beautiful Victorian house decorated in vibrant colours and garish designs which perfectly fit this witch’s taste. There she spends her time making spells and love potions, woodoo dolls and candles, and she also enjoys painting, tea and cake like a refined Victorian lady. After suffering from love in the past, Elaine was reborn as a witch and now she is determined to use that power to get what she wants from men, and not the other way around.
The time period isn’t strictly defined, it is supposed to be set in modern times but the aesthetic definitely draws heavily from late 1960s vibrant psychedelia and early 1970s with the Victoriana influence and the Edwardian era revival; the interior design of Elaine’s house and her costumes reflect this rich exuberant mix of styles. This film is extremely aesthetically pleasing to watch and it is what draws me to the film the most; aesthetic, if it’s the kind of world that I can imagine myself living in, if the characters are wearing the kind of clothes that I would died for, then I will watch the film, regardless of its other qualities, or lack of thereof. The aesthetic is everything.
All in all, Elaine just wants to find a man to love, and who will love her in return, but her mad intense search for this man has made her too desperate, and her witchcraft skills have made her too powerful, and so what started with an innocent understandable desire to be loved turned into a wild murderous fantasy. An officer she dated tells her in one scene in the bar “What you call love is a borderline personality disorder.” And indeed, her dark hypnotising eyes with long lashes and blue eyeshadow do have a look of madness in them. Also, she has no problem with burying people such as her unfortunate lover, she has done it before, she admits… Though it was his fault, he suddenly got so clingy and emotional after they had made love. He wasn’t the strong courageous prince charming that she is waiting for.
I am doll parts, bad skin, doll heart
It stands for knife
For the rest of my life
(Hole, Doll Parts)
“The Love Witch” feels entirely like someone’s fantasy, like an acid dreams translated into the art medium of cinema, which is wonderful! It’s a world seen through rose-tinted glasses, and it has its own logic. You know it can’t be real and these things can’t be real, but somehow you want to be drawn in and just savour all its colours and vivacity. The reason for this unique, dreamy feel to the film is probably because Anna Biller was practically its main creator; she is the film’s writer, costume designer, director, producer, art director, and editor. She wanted the film to look like it belongs to the era it was set in, and therefore the vibrant colours were used on purpose, in setting and in costumes, to emulate the look of technicolor films. Anne Biller said “I like to make films with a kind of dream logic. My films are a mix of reality and fantasy, or a mix of what is happening and what people wish was happening, or what they fear will happen.”
In one scene, her poor victim Wayne, a college lecturer, takes her to his cabin in the woods, but little can he sense that she put hallucinogenic herbs in his drink and that she will destroy him. She starts undressing and he is almost blinded by the bright rainbow of her coat. Here is how the dialogue goes:
“What the hell! Your coat, it’s so bright.”
“I always line my clothing.
“You have two selves. Dark and quiet that you show the world… who do you give that to? the Rainbow?”
“I give the rainbow to you. Right now.“ And she throws the rainbow-lined coat to him and proceeds to take the rest of her clothes off.
Now let’s take a look at Elaine’s to-die-for gorgeous costumes! Here is what Anna Biller said about them:
“It’s all stuff that I fantasize about wearing, outfits I would wear if I was that put together. I used to put a lot of time into my own wardrobe, but since I’ve been making films I’ve put a lot of that energy into film wardrobes instead. I love vintage-inspired clothing, and I used vintage patterns to create her wardrobe. I wanted her to look really stylish, but also to be dressed how I imagine a 1960s witch would dress. I know some girls who dress like Elaine, and I love the way they dress and do their makeup.” She also says: “I wanted the costumes to come from Elaine’s romantic self-fantasies. I made a lot of them, and also a lot of them were vintage.”
I love the emphasis Biller put on the costumes and how they are symbolically connected to the story:
“I like for the costumes to match sets or to be harmonious with them, so in the scene when Elaine is driving her red car I put her in a red dress with red accessories. Her dress is short and casual, since she is driving and it’s daytime. She is wearing a moonstone pendant, since that’s an occult piece of jewelry. She changes costume for the next scene in the tearoom, since that’s a pink room and features ladies in hats, so for that scene she wears an appropriate Victorian-style peach dress with a hat trimmed with flowers. Trish for that scene also wears a peach outfit, but hers is a pantsuit because she is a businesswoman. In the last scene at the bar, I have Elaine in a long dress which is in a Victorian style but feels defiant and witchy because it’s in a theatrical red polyester. I put her in this dress because she is defying Griff in this scene, and I wanted her to wear something that shows her power.” (read the whole interview here.)
I love that Biller designed the costumes to correlate to the scenes, so the colour and cut of Elaine’s dress can tell us much more than we might assume at first. On two different occasions Elaine is having a tea party, first with her friend Trish in a Victorian-style tea room where she is seen wearing a dusty peach-pink dress and a pink hat, and the other time she is at home alone painting and she made tea and cake and is seen wearing this delicate yellow and white dress. In these scenes, she is not a groovy vixen out to get her net victim, no, she is a delicate princess waiting for her prince charming to show up at her doorstep with flowers and chocolates. These two dresses show the influence of late Victorian and Edwardian era on design and fashion of the late sixties and early 1970s, I already wrote about it here. Pink and yellow tea dresses, like a delicate rose and primrose, sweet and nonthreatening. Here is what Anne Biller says about these outfits:
“The tea outfits were all vintage finds, but I had to do a lot of alterations to make them right. I looked for vintage Gunne Sax dresses specifically, wanting to give Elaine the look of those vintage Bradley dolls with the big eyes, and of the prom girls, bridesmaids, and Wild West gals you’d see in movies from the ‘60s and early ‘70s. The scene itself was inspired by an actual tea room I visited once where all the ladies wore hats trimmed with flowers, and pastel colors. I really saw Elaine in that setting, with all of her princess fantasies.” (more here.)
Now, at the end, my question is: how can I steal her wardrobe, and where may I apply to live there, in such a pretty Victorian house in sunny California in some undefined era which looks a lot like sixties????
“I felt a tremendous distance between me and everything real.”
(The Rum Diary)
Rincón, Puerto Rico, picture found here.
Some time ago I watched the film “The Rum Diary”(2011) starring Johnny Depp as the main character Paul Kemp and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was just totally captivated by Kemp’s exciting lifestyle set against the vibrant backdrop of the Caribbean. The ocean, the sunsets, the rum…. ahhh. A few weeks ago, in these warm and yellow days of July, I decided to read the novel “The Rum Diary” written by Hunter S. Thompson. In took not three full pages for me to fall in love with it. I was especially intrigued by the fact that it wasn’t a work of pure fiction. Thompson actually lived and worked as a journalist in Puerto Rico in the late 1950s. He worked for the magazine El Sportivo which folded soon after his arrival but Thompson found another job as a journalist and managed to stay on the island long enough to gather inspiration for the novel which would spend almost forty years sitting in his drawer; it wasn’t published until 1998. The novel is based on Thompson’s adventures on the island, but is part-truth and part-fiction, written in the first person and told by a journalist Paul Kemp who comes to San Juan to work for the newspapers called San Juan Daily News.
“Like most of the others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right. I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles — a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other — that kept me going.”
Thompson’s writing has the same qualities which I love and admire in Jack Kerouac’s novels; they both write in a fast-paced exciting style, they both brilliantly capture the atmosphere of the place, in Thompson’s case the vividness of San Juan, and they both have a similar type of character; young, wild, rebellious, idealist, wanting more from life but ultimately just wasting time on alcohol and women, characters who are prone to jumping from one thrill to another, because boredom equals death. No time to sleep – you’ll sleep when you’re dead. Life just seems so exciting in these novels, full or endless possibilities, and even a hangover seems like the most romantic thing in the world. Kemp is so excited about coming to the island and he says: “I wanted to write all my friends and invite them down. (…) I wanted to cable them all — “Come quick stop plenty of room in the rum barrel stop no work stop big money stop drink all day stop hump all night stop hurry it may not last.”
Picture found here.
Similar to Kerouac’s novel “Tristessa”, which I love, “The Rum Diary” captures the fragile moment in time. Two North Americans going down to more exotic southern places and writing about it. Kerouac spent a year in Mexico City and Thompson spent about two years in Puerto Rico. Their experiences are tied to a specific moment in time, had they gone to those places just five years later, nothing would be the same. Through Thompson’s writing you sense a layer of sadness under the ecstasy and drunkenness that he describes; a sense of going nowhere, growing old, time passing by… Perhaps this is the source of that rush to experience things which often leads to silly decisions. I also love the way Thompson describes the place; hot air, palm trees, narrow streets with buildings jammed together and balconies that hung over the street, chatter and music coming from open windows, narrow pavements where people sell peeled oranges for a nickel each, how he feels “the foreignness of the place”, he is specific with names of places and very observant to everything that is going on around him, the things he hears, the sights, the sounds, the smells:
“I leaned back in the chair and sipped my drink. The cook was banging around in the kitchen and for some reason the piano had stopped. From inside came a babble of Spanish, an incoherent background for my scrambled thoughts. For the first time I felt the foreignness of the place, the real distance I had put between me and my last foothold. There was no reason to feel pressure, but I felt it anyway — the pressure of hot air and passing time, an idle tension that builds up in places where men sweat twenty-four hours a day.”
Hunter S. Thompson in Puerto Rico
There is also another aspect of the novel; the exploitation of the beauties and nature of the island, represented by the businessman Yeamon who befriends Kemp. The Americans from the mainland saw Puerto Rico as a source of their wealth, they planned to built hotels and exploit what there was to exploit and that makes me quite sad. “At that time the U.S. State Department was calling Puerto Rico “America’s advertisement in the Caribbean — living proof that capitalism can work in Latin America.”
In one part of the book, it’s described how the houses use to have a view of the ocean, but now the hotel at the beach has a view on the ocean, and the houses are looking at the hotel. If Capitalism isn’t devil’s idea, I don’t know what is. And now some fun and interesting quotes:
“There was a strange and unreal air about the whole world I’d come into. It was amusing and vaguely depressing at the same time. Here I was, living in a luxury hotel, racing around a half-Latin city in a toy car that looked like a cockroach and sounded like a jet fighter, sneaking down alleys and humping on the beach, scavenging for food in shark-infested waters, hounded by mobs yelling in a foreign tongue — and the whole thing was taking place in quaint old Spanish Puerto Rico, where everybody spent American dollars and drove American cars and sat around roulette wheels pretending they were in Casablanca. One part of the city looked like Tampa and the other part looked like a medieval asylum.”
“Sala’s apartment on Calle Tetuán was about as homey as a cave, a dank grotto in the very bowels of the Old City. It was not an upscale neighborhood. (…) The ceiling was twenty feet high, not a breath of clean air, no furniture except two metal cots and an improvised picnic table, and since it was on the ground floor we could never open the windows because thieves would come in off the street and sack the place. A week after Sala moved in he left one of the windows unlocked and everything he owned was stolen, even his shoes and his dirty socks. We had no refrigerator and therefore no ice, so we drank hot rum out of dirty glasses and did our best to stay out of the place as much as possible.”
“It was so hot that I began to sweat each time we stopped for a red light. Then, when we started moving again, the wind would cool me off. Sala weaved in and out of the traffic on Avenida Ponce de Leon, heading for the outskirts of town. Somewhere in Santurce we stopped to let some schoolchildren cross the street and they all began laughing at us. “La cucaracha!” they yelled. “Cucaracha! cucaracha!”
Sala looked embarrassed.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“The little bastards are calling this car a cockroach,” he muttered. “I should run a few of them down.”
***
“At six-thirty I left the bar and walked outside. It was getting dark and the big Avenida looked cool and graceful. On the other side were homes that once looked out on the beach. Now they looked out on hotels and most of them had retreated behind tall hedges and walls that cut them off from the street. Here and there I could see a patio or a screen porch where people sat beneath fans and drank rum. Somewhere up the street I heard bells, the sleepy tinkling of Brahms’ Lullaby.”
“After living there a week I’d established a fairly strict routine. I would sleep until ten or so, depending on the noise level in the street, then take a shower and walk up to Al’s for breakfast. With a few exceptions, the normal workday at the paper was from noon until eight in the evening, give or take a few hours either way. Then we would come back to Al’s for dinner. After that it was the casinos, an occasional party, or simply sitting at Al’s and listening to each other’s stories until we all got drunk and mumbled off to our beds. Sometimes I would go to Sanderson’s and usually there were people there to drink with.”
And now here is an exciting part of the book which matches the memorable scene in the film where Chenault (played by Amber Heard) is dancing in a very provocative way in a stuffy and crowded club on the isle of St Thomas:
“They had made a big circle, and in the middle of it. Chenault and the small, spade-bearded man were doing the dance. Chenault had dropped her skirt and was dancing in her panties and her white sleeveless blouse. Her partner had taken off his shirt exposing his glistening black chest. He wore nothing but a pair of tight, red toreador pants. Both of them were barefoot.”
(…) Now, as if in some kind of trance, Chenault began to unbutton her blouse. She popped the buttons slowly, like a practiced stripper, then flung the blouse aside and pranced there in nothing but her bra and panties. I thought the crowd would go crazy. They howled and pounded on furniture, shoving and climbing on each other to get a better view. The whole house shook and I thought the floor might cave in. Somewhere across the room I heard glass breaking.
(…) Now they were close together and I saw the brute reach around Chenault and unhook the strap of her bra. He undid it quickly, expertly, and she seemed unaware that now she wore nothing but her thin silk panties. The bra slid down her arms and fell to the floor. Her breasts bounced violently with the jerk and thrust of the dance. Full, pink-nippled halls of flesh, suddenly cut loose from the cotton modesty of a New York bra. (…)
Yeamon was screaming hysterically, struggling to keep his balance. “Chenault!” he shouted.
“What the hell are you doing?” He sounded desperate, but I felt paralyzed.
Pictures found here.
“They were coming together again, weaving slowly toward the middle of the circle. The noise was an overpowering roar from two hundred wild throats. Chenault still wore that dazed, ecstatic expression as the man reached out and eased her panties over her hips and down to her knees. She let them drop silently on the floor, then stepped away, breaking into the dance again, moving against him, freezing there for a moment — even the music paused — then dancing away, opening her eyes and flinging her hair from side to side.”
***
“Moberg was a degenerate. (…) Often he disappeared for days at a time. Then someone would have to track him down through the dirtiest bars in La Perla, a slum so foul that on maps of San Juan it appears as a blank space. La Perla was Moberg’s headquarters; he felt at home there, he said, and in the rest of the city — except for a few horrible bars — he was a lost soul.”
***
“Driving along the beach I remembered how much I’d enjoyed the mornings when I first came to San Juan. There is something fresh and crisp about the first hours of a Caribbean day, a happy anticipation that something is about to happen, maybe just up the street or around the next corner.”
I recently stumbled upon these photographs of Francoise Hardy taken by Jean-Marie Périer in 1964 and I wanted to share them because they are interesting. I love the sixties, I love some of her music that I’ve listened to, but also these five pictures on their own are fascinating because they show a creative process that an artist goes through; from feeling bored and uninspired, to writing and trying and being disappointed and giving up, and trying again, until that something you are working on feels right. I am sure anyone reading this and seeing these pics who is also an artist in one way or another can relate.