paperback love - sixties artgirls rule

Oh to have been a Chelsea artgirl in the sixties with not much talent but a fabulous bob ...




THE WILD BIRD
DENISE ROBINS
Through the casement windows of Elizabeth Rowe's studio in Chelsea the faint orange sunset struggled to illuminate the canvas on which Elizabeth was daubing an impossible vamp with enormous eyes, wickedly slanting, and a wicked red mouth ...

I could not resist picking up this book about an art student who inherits a mansion from the old man in the upstairs flat. Elizabeth is kind-hearted and says words like 'peeved'. She has a dalmation called Grock and an unfaithful boyfriend but all that's about to change... Sadly for me, it is a romance and kind of tepid ...

GOODBYE GEMINI
JENNI HALL

"Walked past Little Venice; climbed over a wall farther down by the canal; lousy charcoal sketch of the houseboats. Made them ethereal and romantic, while no doubt they're smelly, draughty, cramped and leaky. Wandered around rotten art gallery on one of them ..."

Goodbye Gemini (or Ask Agamemnon) is all about the freedoms and dangers of the big bad city - in this case London. Julian and Jacki, the precocious twins, live in a flat belonging to absent father. They make friends with seedy people and then something bad happens ... the novel's written backwards, which I love and features art types, houseboat parties, transvestites and rent boys. Very cool and very creepy.

Dear Me: a letter to my 16-year-old self

Inspired by Mizzz Lisa Clark who was inspired by this book.
See: http://www.dearmebooks.com/

Dear Simmone-at-16,
Understand that this is the last time you'll go on Christmas holiday with your family. You won't even remember the destination. Maybe it was Port Fairy, whatever, you were bored, bored, bored. All your friends went to Ace High to stay in a cabin and pash fake cowboys but you couldn't go because there was no supervision and it was expensive. So you hate everyone and that's why you look like such a mugwump in all the Christmas photos.

Simmone: you should be nicer to your parents, they're okay. Dad will get over the Amway thing. Mum will loosen up - she'll even get her ears pierced - can you imagine? They're actually very interesting people. They've done things. They lived through a war and were ten pound poms. Mum moved to Australia by herself, knowing no one, to work in the 'new' field of computer science. She's going to do crazy big things one day. And your Dad can make anything. And he's kind and positive and interested in possibilities. Some of your friend's Dads are drunken arseholes. I mean ,you did pretty well, really. You should stop it with the thieving and the being monosyllabic. Try doing the dishes every once in a while. Smile for fuck's sake.

At the moment you are trying to be a fifties chick. You love a film called My American Cousin. You are obsessed with videos and spend most of your weekends watching them. This won't change.

You have a letter sweater that you bought from Route 66 in Greville Street. Greville Street will never be cooler than it was in 1987. You smoke Benson & Hedges, wear Revlon's rich and famous red, have a red fall that you attach clumsily to a ponytail, and a blunt fringe that doesn't suit you at all. You're bigger than you want to be. You're always going to be bigger than you want to be. You might like to try water aerobics.

Your best friend who you used to listen to Frank Sinatra and Simon & Garfunkel with has quit school and the last time you saw her she offered you some speed and you said no - and this was a good choice ... but sixteen is the year when good choices start to go bad ... everyone drinks, all the time. You're confused about drugs. You saw a boy in a mohair jumper at the station and you've been obsessing over him for months. You'll never see him again. No matter what your horoscope says.

You like a book called The Girl Who Wanted a Boy by Paul Zindel. You think you might be that desperate. I have no advice for you except to say that beautiful boys will break your heart but at least you won't have to see them at school the next day. And really, just forget about boys and read books. Books have all the answers.

The fifties thing won't last - it's hard to stay excited about Marilyn Monroe when Marianne Faithfull is just around the corner. I wish you'd taken time out this year to look at your friends, to opt out of all the bitchiness, to be happy about being smart. You're so crazy about music. You have a record player in your room now. Every night you go to bed listening to Elvis or the Beatles or the Mamas and the Papas and this single by Sarah Vaughan from the Cactus Flower soundtrack. You're going to end up working at that record shop and it will change your life.

Yes, it is disappointing how Goldie Hawn didn't stay cute. People don't, as a general rule. And people will come and go. And it doesn't have to be so ruinous if a friend doesn't call for a while. And love will happen. And you'll live in the country, but you'll miss the sea, and you'll write books but it won't be easy but it'll be better than that air hostess job you almost applied for (but probably wouldn't have got because you ate all her mints during the interview.) You'll have a blog, and it will be embarrassing. The world will freak you out. Your dog will die, and you will be sad. Your son will tell you he loves you. You will develop sinus conditions and possibly end up being one of those old people who complains all the time.

But hey, good luck! Remember this advice from North by Northwest: Walk soft and carry a big stick. I don't know why, but it helps.
x Simmone-at-37

reading from my formative years - 1

Within a week she had dressed me in the right clothes and taught me something of life. I remember thinking her the most wonderful person and being quite embarrassingly fond of her, but she soon found me a young man to whom I could transfer my affections. To her I owed my first glimpse of elegance and my first flirtation, and I was very grateful ...

Lessons in viewpoint somewhere near Parramatta

I went to Sydney for two days. I went to go to a screenwriting forum and to catch up with friends but mostly to escape my work in progress which has become wieldy and shitful.

I also signed up for nanowrimo thinking I would work on something new and fun but have now decided to press on with wieldyshitful and maybe take out the prostitutes.

On the train I was overjoyed to overhear a conversation between three teenage boys (maybe thirteen, fourteen?) in school uniform with uniformly terrible hair.

Boy 1: Did youse do the assignment?

Boy 2: Yeah

Boy 1: Did youse do first or third person?

Boy3: Did anyone do second?

Boy1: No one does second. (points to Boy 2) So what did you do?

Boy 2: First. Wait. No. Third. Wait. What's the difference again?

Boy 1: First is me talking to you, second is you talking to me (points to Boy 3) third is him just talking and he never fuckin' shuts up.






ps - While I was away I read Fedora:

memory

In Silence of the Lambs the girl who gets kidnapped and kept in the hole in the ground so that her fat will loosen and make for good upholstery had crystals hanging in her window. But crystals are supposed to protect you, aren't they? That's what I remembered at the time, and that's what I remembered this morning. I suppose she gets out in the end so maybe they were just protecting her later ... then I remembered this guy I used to know when I was in school who took acid and went and saw Silence of the Lambs and came out saying he totally got Lector's headspace. And then I remembered how this guy was working and he used to buy us all donuts after school. Memory is weird.

oh! moments and little truths

because, after all, wasn't that what growing up was about? never having to feel foolish, uncomfortable and vulnerable again?


I read Sue Saliba's Something in the World Called Love yesterday when I was feeling overwrought because I couldn't face my tax (really!) and I feel like I want to re-read it with a highlighter and wear it around my neck like a compass. It's about a girl trying to find a home, thinking she's found one kind of love, realising it's actually another ... It's beautiful and poetic, short but stuffed with little truths and oh! moments. Something in the World Called Love took out this year's Victorian Premier's Award for Young Adult Fiction.So there.

I did an interview last week and realised for a long time I've been saying stuff like 'teenagers today are no different to when I was one' ...or 'the fads may change but the emotions stay the same ...' but I don't know that this is true. Also I say 'I write for teenagers because I still feel like a teenager' which is sort of true. Also I say how being a writer is trying on other lives but if that's true then why aren't I writing about acrobats or nuns or plumbers or zookeepers?

Ug.
Sometimes I think I'd rather just stay in bed and read all the great books in the world than try and write one.

films that should be books - books that should be films

I watched King of California the other week because i can't resist Michael Douglas being all beardy. Anyway it's about a girl whose jazz-loving bi-polar dad has just been released from the nuthouse. She's sixteen or so and has been supporting herself by working at MacDonalds and dodging social workers etc and then Dad comes back and has all sorts of crazy ideas about Spanish gold and the film becomes a treasure hunt and an exploration of father-daughter bond - which all sounds great on paper but the purpose of this rant is to say that as a film it kept losing me despite looking fabulous and lovely cast etc etc (Evan Rachel Wood plays the girl). And there's lots of interior monologue which would work perfectly in a YA book. It would have been such a great YA book. There's a beautiful little monologue at the end about the myth of California and all sorts of back story I wanted to know more about. So I'm wondering about the genesis of this film ... and that made me think about films and stories and quests and myth and how it's all tied in. So even though I didn't love this film I got a lot out of it.
Please rent it and tell me if you like it. It has a great soundtrack too with Yma Sumac and lots of musical saw (reminiscent of Jack Nitzsche's One flew Over the Cuckoos Nest).

The second half of this rant was to talk about books which should be films. I met the lovely Kathy Charles the other day and I can so see Hollywood Ending as a film - it seems only just given the milieu. But sometimes I think I could see anything as a film so it could just be the way my head works. After watching so many thousands of movies I start to see everything in terms of beginning, middle, end, close-up, slow pan and soundtrack moment. I wonder if there is scientific name for this most twentieth century condition. Movie-sick.