marilyn monroe on arthur miller

my love sleeps beside me -

in the faint light - i see his manly jaw

give way - and the mouth of his

boyhood returns

with a softness softer

its sensitiveness trembling

in stillness

his eyes must have looked out

wonderously from the cave of the little

boy - when the things he did not

understand -

he forgot

but will he look like this when he is dead

oh unbearable fact inevitable

yet sooner would i rather his love die

than him?

other voices, other rooms

in recent times i have come to suspect that i probably give away too much of myself to others, because i don't know how else to make people like me. others often tell me that i come off as somewhat enigmatic initially, but the facade is soon ruined because i tell them things about myself that i probably ought to keep secret. i don't really know why.

one of my closest friends told me recently that i am really, brutally honest, if not about others then about myself. which surprised me because i never considered myself an honest person at all, but i suppose it's true. i don't really have any problem telling people i barely know all about my personal failings, about how i feel trapped by my own social ineptitude; how i have few friends and encounter difficulty making them because of my shyness. a few months ago i would have cheerfully told people that i had never had a boyfriend, and anticipated dying alone except for 30 cats. maybe i subconsciously want them to pity me, or offer solutions, or reassure me that i'm really not all that strange.

wow, most intense post i've written in a while. it sounds like i'm all mope-y and sad but i'm really not at all. i struggle to think of a time when i was happier (omitting those nice years before life became complicated, of course). everything and everyone is beautiful. even though my life is going to change in a huge way very soon, i think i'm ready.

____________________

with your silhouette as the sunlight dims

into your eyes, where the moonlight swims

hello to never

it's just as well i had already committed to a life of sin before i read the chronicles of narnia, otherwise that beautiful writing would have converted me. example, the last paragraph of the last narnia book, after it was revealed to the children that they had been killed in a train wreck as they ascend into aslan's country -

"and, for this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. but, for them, it was only the beginning of the real story. all their life in this world and all their adventures in narnia had only been the cover, and the title page: now at last they were beginning chapter one of the great story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."

a brand new start

on the very first day of this year, as i sat in my best friend's living room about to watch the new year's eve fireworks on tv, i put my earphones in and pressed 'play' at the stroke of midnight. i picked a song from 2009 that i wanted to define the next year, in an uncharacteristic stroke of superstition. the first song i listened to in 2010, one of the most perfect and beautiful songs i have heard and one that i saw live just last friday, was this:

and it wasn't until recently that i realised that my wish for this song to happen to me this year, kind of came true.

a deeply superficial person

i don't understand when people say that andy warhol was a hack, that his work was meaningless. that's the idea, i thought. confronting the world with the lack of meaning, the purposelessness inherent in life itself, just its utter emptiness. you can look into marilyn's eyes but her gaze is unfocused and vague, a sort of thousand yard stare that goes on forever into complete nothingness. it's just the surface laid bare with nothing underneath. because that's what life is, isn't it? i think it's beautiful.

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"if you want to know all about andy warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there i am. there's nothing behind it."

- andy warhol

the stranger

"nothing, nothing mattered, and i knew why. so did he. throughout the whole absurd life i’d lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones i was living. what did other people’s deaths or a mother’s love matter to me; what did his god or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we’re all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? couldn’t he see, couldn’t he see that? everybody was privileged. there were only privileged people. the others would all be condemned one day. and he would be condemned, too.”

the stranger, albert camus

do you ever get the feeling while reading something, when all of a sudden you realise that something wonderful is happening, and with every word your life is changing? because i just got that.

summer playlist take 2

1. a minha menina - os mutantes
2. buffalo stance - neneh cherry
3. write about love - belle & sebastian
4. things i did when i was dead - no age
5. c.r.e.a.m. - wu-tang clan
6. silver soul - beach house
7. heartbreaker - girls
8. it takes a muscle - m.i.a.
9. boyfriend - best coast
10. ce jour la - sylvie vartan
11. green eyes - wavves
12. slip inside this house - primal scream
13. rock & roll - the velvet underground
14. teenage spaceship - smog
15. alright - supergrass

2009's summer playlist

touch the sky

okay i lied, i'm back. i had a sudden epiphany, and needed to express the fact that despite the fact that i found the classes incredibly grating and can't do the subjects very well at all and i find them both quite difficult, i will really, genuinely miss literature and philosophy. the subjects themselves and everything we have to study in them are so so beautiful. goodbye keats, aristotle, chekhov, sophocles, murdoch, socrates etc. - sorry for complaining about you for so long, i love you all.
________________

bright star, would i were stedfast as thou art--
not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
and watching, with eternal lids apart,
like nature's patient, sleepless eremite,
the moving waters at their priestlike task
of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
no--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
to feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
and so live ever--or else swoon to death.

- bright star, john keats

beatniks are out to make it rich

i've got my last two exams conveniently scheduled on the same day - next monday. so far i have been spending my final studying period doing the following:

________________

- drinking tea

- facebook

- going on tumblr

- making myself french toast

- making myself fairy bread

- going for long walks in the sunshine

- browsing various opshops

- not studying

yeeah, need to do something about my motivation levels. especially considering that these are my two most difficult subjects and i got a c+ and b+ on my philosophy and media practice exams, respectively. so i'm taking a leave of absence from this blog until the 15th of november. all things aside from exams, life is good.

currently listening to:

ride a white swan - t. rex

shimmy shimmy ya - ol' dirty bastard

try a little tenderness - otis redding

buffalo stance - neneh cherry

flowers

"from my rotting body, flowers shall grow and i am in them and that is eternity."
- edvard munch

a poem about marianne faithfull, by patti smith

'I was born in Hampstead. My mother wasn’t screaming so they didn’t believe she was in labor. Later I went to convent school. Later I rode in leather. Later I took some sleeping pills. I needed to lose…'
M.F.

there is a sweetness
in your little girl mouth
and the pearls you hold
in the palm of your hand
everytime you extend that hand
you break down you fantasize
you are circumsized
agonized
scourged
crowned
crucified
pierced four times
your sacred heart bleeds
drips and drips down
women weep at your feet
twelve men turn you
twelve men desire you
(ammonia clouds your armpits)
a starfish quivers in your belly
and the arrows shake out
shake out shake out
and the muscles in your heart ache
a fish slaps back your face
you roll you roll over
in the sanctuary yards
in a coarse black dress
bless your hot virgin mouth
you would be Judas
and Christ himself
you would be Mary Magdalene
the only woman
who made our savior weep
yet you would pull mandrax in
like the sacred wafer
leave me for eternal sleep
But no. I wont let you go.
I wont let you go.no.
wont let the honey drain
from your sweet sweet box
wont let the crowds blush and gasp
while you carry your cross
wont let the flower girls fan you
hind a big black hearse
wont let the pearls
crumble crumble
from your little girl mouth

time has come today

it's the night before my first year 12 exam. i probably ought to be panicking right now, because while i tend to do quite well in english without making much of an effort, i am really a bit underprepared for this. and since it's late there isn't much i can do right now but hope for the best. at the moment i'm just waiting for the terror of this to hit me.

but the plus side is, in exactly 18 days i will be free from school. and then:
* schoolies
* blondie/the pretenders on december 1
* girls on december 10
* christmas in new york
* summer
* whole life being ahead of me etc.

ps. this song is PHENOMENAL.

graduation

officially graduated from school today. it's a bizarre feeling and i don't think it's quite sunk in yet, possibly the reason why i didn't cry at all, or feel any urge to do so. of course there are still exams, but the bottom line is that today was the one of the last times the entire year 12 cohort will be together and it's so strange to think that i might never see most of these people ever again by the end of the year. i generally don't cope well at all with change but i hope that leaving school and starting all over again will be a good thing for me - i just can't comprehend this concept properly at the moment.

pressure drop

so i just found out that several months ago, my mother read something which was not intended for her and subsequently learned of my occasional use of illicit substances and smoking/drinking (and thankfully not that much apart from those, luckily noone has laid hands on my diary lately to read the most recent additions). it's really quite awkward, but she has decided to accept it as a rite of passage and move on without any stern reprimands so i can be thankful for small mercies. i still have no clue what to make of this situation though.
____________

currently listening to:

a minha menina - os mutantes

running scared - roy orbison

the tracks of my tears - the miracles

all the young punks - the clash

beauty

"i guess i could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me... but it's hard to stay mad, when there's so much beauty in the world. sometimes i feel like i'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst... and then i remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and i can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life... you have no idea what i'm talking about, i'm sure. but don't worry... you will someday." - american beauty

ghost world

the oval portrait

so i just finished watching vivre sa vie properly for the first time, and this scene and the finale it precedes is by far some of the most beautiful cinema i have ever seen.

"and in sooth some who beheld the portrait spoke of its resemblence as of a mighty marvel and a proof not less of the power of the painter than of his deep love for her whom he depicted so surpassingly well. but at length, as the labor drew nearer to its conclusion, there were admitted none into the turret, for the painter had grown wild with the ardor of his work and turned his eyes from the canvas rarely, even to regard his wife. and he would not see that the tints which he spread upon the canvas were drawn from the cheeks of her who sat beside him. and when many weeks had passed and but little remained to do save one brush upon the mouth and one tint upon the eye, the spirit of the lady again flickered up as the flame of the lamp, and then the brush was given and then the tint was placed. and for one moment, the painter stood entranced, before the work he had wrought. but in the next, while he yet gazed, he grew tremulous and aghast and crying with a loud voice: "this is indeed life itself!" turned suddenly to regard his beloved: she was dead."

in beautiful dreams

oh roy orbison, why do you depress me so.

"it's too bad that all these things

can only happen in dreams

only in dreams, in beautiful dreams"

music that has changed my life

in order of when it changed my life. nb: don't judge me.

2002

avril lavigne - yeah yeah, i know. but for whatever reason, avril struck a chord with my 9-year-old self, and misled me into thinking that if i wore cargo pants, spiky bracelets and excessive amounts of eyeliner then i was totally ~punk rock~. this misconception endured for the next 4 years of my life. thanks a lot avril.

2004

blink 182 - i had a huge crush on whiney-voiced frontman tom delonge (don't ask). really not much to say about blink in terms of musical merit so let's leave it at that.

2005
green day - i had a huge crush on the 5'7", eyelinered frontman billie joe armstrong (it just keeps getting better and better). getting into vaguely heavier but still very tame territory, and i was still inexplicably convinced that i was a "punk", how embarrassing. AND they were my first concert, sigh. eventually i started looking into green day's influences leading to....

2006

the sex pistols - finally i had escaped the influence of my friends with terrible music taste, who scoffed at johnny rotten's maniacal laughter at the start of anarchy in the uk as i drowned out their favourite "piano-rock" band, something corporate. i know they are often maligned as being a terrible band, and they probably were but deep down i still have a soft spot for the pistols, if only for partially saving me from musical purgatory.

blondie - probably the first really great band that i started heavily listening to. i don't know if it was some reference in school of rock or the mean girls soundtrack that compelled me to buy their greatest hits, but my life is all the more enriched for it..... apart from that time i tried to dye my hair platinum blonde and failed miserably.

the clash - i had a huge crush on joe strummer (still do.) i was a very anti-authoritarian child in year 8, the year i started dressing like a prostitute, wagging classes and consistently failing maths tests. for these purposes i chose know your rights as my personal soundtrack of choice. in retrospect, not their best.

the beatles - while i initially really disliked the beatles (dad used to play sgt pepper's on long car trips), by this age i was apparently mature enough to gain an appreciation of their music. additionally, around this time i realised i wasn't actually hardcore, which was a blessing for both me and my long-suffering friends. my beatlemania gained momentum and carried on through 2007 and beyond.

2007

the cure - not really that great a band but i loved them a lot back in year 9 despite almost solely listening to their poppy songs eg just like heaven, friday i'm in love etc. i also went through a worrying phase where i almost considered robert smith attractive, whew lucky i pulled out of that one relatively unscathed.
the smiths - i had a huge crush on morrissey (part of me still thinks he is my soulmate). i listened to the smiths at a point in my life when i was EXTREMELY whiney and had a disgustingly embarrassing, all-consuming real-life crush, so there are very few songs i can listen to now without feeling slightly shameful. i really did worship moz and co. at the time though and i still appreciate them a lot, i might never feel such a connection to a single band ever again even if it was based on a prolonged attack of complete pathetic-ness.
2008
the velvet underground - around the time i became completely obsessed with andy warhol, i started listening to the velvet underground, particularly their first album. vu are probably my most prolonged musical obsession as while my interest occasionally wanes, there is just so much material out there that i have yet to find and start listening to. such an amazing band. thanks, andy!

pulp - i had a huge crush on jarvis cocker, why did he have to get old and grow a beard. this was probably the start of the period when i listened almost exclusively to all-male bands that weren't really THAT great, eg suede and blur. i still listen to a few songs but played their hits so many times that i can no longer stand them in large quantities.
new order - can't quite remember when i first started properly listening to them but the trainspotting soundtrack probably had a bit to do with it. i worshipped new order and once again had the problem where i overplayed certain songs to the point where i can no longer listen to them quite so frequently. still have lots of love for the trainspotting soundtrack though.

2009
bob dylan - i owned highway 61 revisited for the longest time but for some weird reason i just couldn't get into it apart from a couple of songs (probably because back then i couldn't listen to a song longer than 4 minutes). in particular, i never got why like a rolling stone was so great - i had always skipped over it after the first 10 seconds (i know right, there was something wrong with me!). anyway one day i was doing something to my hair and couldn't be bothered skipping it, and all of a sudden it hit me, and i have never looked back. like a rolling stone is probably my favourite song of all time and i love everything related to bob dylan except for all albums after blood on the tracks (that level of brilliance can't be maintained forever y'know)
the ronettes - to be fair, i got into a LOT of girl groups last year but the ronettes were the first and most important. i will never get over the amazingness of be my baby, ever. just a timeless and beautiful and perfect band.

2010

pink floyd - i had a huge crush on syd barrett (still do). i hated pink floyd for the longest time but eventually came around one day when i watched a documentary and a) saw syd barrett, and b) heard the song brain damage. and to think i spent so many years telling my parents how lame and overrated they were, sigh.

these are only the ones that stick out, there are many more that i can't remember right now and of course the minor bands that had some influence on my journey to listening-to-semi-decent-music. and to think it all started with sk8r boi.

song lyrics that sum up my life recently

1. you do it to yourself, you do, and that's why it really hurts.

2. but will my heart be broken when the night meets the morning sun?

3. now i'm just crazy, i'm totally mad, yeah i'm just crazy and fucked in the head.

4. no fun to hang around, feeling that same old way.

5. my own friends hate my guts, so what, oh so what, who gives a fuck.

6. to your sister he explains, that you're tired of yourself and all of your creations.

7. cause i like you, yeah i like you, and i'm feeling so bohemian like you.

8. do you believe in something beautiful? then get up and be it.

9. seen enough to eye you, but i've seen too much to try you.

10. there will always be a space in my parking lot, when you need a little coke and sympathy.

wild horses

within you without you

i want a white mohair jumper and assorted dresses with peter pan collars and platinum blonde hair please, not necessarily in that order. in the past few days i have become a vegetarian and started running again and done multiple things that audrey hepburn or grace kelly would never do but i've come to terms with the fact that i'm not either of them and never will be, right now elegance and ladylike propriety seem somewhat irrelevant to my life. i have not missed meat too much and am living off egg on toast and will probably become anaemic imminently, but i don't mind, it will only make my ghostly pallor more ghost-like which is one of my self-improvement goals. all i want to do is spend all day drinking tea and reading self-help books and listening to wavves and not studying.

ps i really don't get enough spam or abuse, please direct it towards http://formspring.me/goodnightladies.

________________

currently listening to:

green eyes - wavves

like a virgin - madonna

got to give it up - marvin gaye

light my fire - the doors

favourite music video of all time

it's so beautiful.

cognitive dissonance

one hot summer’s day a fox was strolling through an orchard till he came to a bunch of grapes just ripening on a vine which had been trained over a lofty branch. “just the things to quench my thirst,” quoth he. drawing back a few paces, he took a run and a jump, and just missed the bunch. turning round again with a one, two, three, he jumped up, but with no greater success. again and again he tried after the tempting morsel, but at last had to give it up, and walked away with his nose in the air, saying: “i am sure they are sour.”

“IT IS EASY TO DESPISE WHAT YOU CANNOT ATTAIN.”
~ aesop

pills and soap

next year was supposed to be travel but now it turns out that i have a potential modelling contract that will start literally as soon as i finish my last exam, which is totally bizarre because i sort of forgot about modelling altogether for about two years, planned my fantasy life without it even being factored in and now of a sudden it's forced its way back into my consciousness again and i'm not sure quite what to do with it. the consensus is that i will not be hired for runway because at 5'8" i am far too short, but they think i will pick up quite a bit of photographic work. i don't know whether it will be particularly lucrative but since this agency is still interested even though i'm too short and too fat i assume so, which is comforting.

it's just strange because a while after i was a finalist in this modelling competition i was resigned to living a normal life, and now i don't know if it will be normal at all and i'm not sure if i like this idea or not. i could go to sydney and then hong kong and then maybe other places if i'm any good, but i don't know how to fit in all those other things that had always been a given, like university. i suppose i'll have to go back to my previous future-dream of becoming very famous, appearing in a series of arthouse films, stealing elvis costello from diana krall, being briefly married to morrissey, partying for several years and then dying tragically of a cocaine overdose at the age of 28. i'd better get started, only 11 years to go until deadline. (pun not intended)

in an unrelated matter, two posts ago it was my two-hundreth post. weird, i've never stuck with any creative endeavour for as long as i have this blog.

currently listening to:
i've gotta get a message to you - the bee gees
something in the way - nirvana
when will you come - wavves
gloria - patti smith

1979

oh elvis, how i love you so. no wonder this man is in part responsible for my ongoing obsessions with glasses and gap-teeth.

paper cuts

dressing up as b.b. in le mepris tomorrow for celebrity dress up day. noone will get it but whatever.

i'm always dreaming and it's never for real

okay so as i found out today, apparently someone i know read a blog post that involved her long long ago (like back in the starting months of my blog) and got upset. which is just awkward. this however, is weird because i deleted that post before i made my blog public to people from my school soooo, apparently my blog was being stalked by people i know somehow even before i made my blog link available and presumably still is. heaven knows how many people are reading my blog that i don't want to. the sentiment about the blog post in question is still there i suppose but i don't really care anymore, fuck school and all these petty stupid school things that everyone gets wrapped up in, sick of all this rubbish

season of the witch

school will be the death of me, it's all reaching fever pitch now with final exams beginning in a little over a month and about a gazillion assessment tasks being thrown at me in the space of the next two weeks. i've already decided to skip a party which anyone who knows me will be aware caused me to die a little inside, but my media final desperately needs to be finished as soon as possible and i have literature and philosophy to worry about and basically i am constantly on the verge of spontaneous combustion from stress. which is really unlike me, considering i have rarely at any point in my life cared about school, but i guess it counts for something now.

however i have spent hours on the ATAR score calculator recently and have decided that as long as i do decently (A or A+) on most of my exams, i may get 94-ish which will be enough to get into arts at melbourne uni, and if i get in the mid-80s i'll still get into arts at monash which is less cool but still quite decent. and once it's all over, freedom. in two months! when did this all happen so fast, i'm not ready for the real world yet!

"i used to think i was the strangest person in the world but then i thought, there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways i do. i would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. well, i hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true i’m here, and i’m just as strange as you."

- frida kahlo

currently listening to:

get ready - the temptations
heartbeat - annie
just - radiohead
territorial pissings - nirvana
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i am going to

a) stop whining, and
b) be the person i want to be, starting....

right
now.

wish me luck.

and the flames went higher

"the emptiness is a mirror turned towards my own face. i see myself in it, and i am filled with loathing and horror. through my indifference to my fellow men, i have isolated myself from their company. now i live in a world of phantoms. i am imprisoned in my dreams and fantasies."
- the seventh seal, ingmar bergman

____________

"i am sorry, did you know i couldn't last i always knew it. i wish i could meet you all again."

- candy darling

cherry flavoured antacids

distill the life that's inside of me
sit and drink pennyroyal tea
i'm anemic royalty
- pennyroyal tea, nirvana

i've been listening to nirvana and dinosaur jr. a lot lately, i'm not sure why. i never got into them that much originally but they both seem to fit right now.

i officially have 22 days of school left, ever. i'd like to say that this upsets me, but it really doesn't. school has been one of the most depressing and awful components of my life for a long time now, and the last few years have been a slow downward slide into a complete lack of motivation to do any work anymore. which is fortunate because i'm almost certainly going on a gap year next year, after so much of my time spent convincing my parents that it isn't, in fact, going to cause me to throw in the towel and never go to university. it's weird to think that i'm almost finally free, to an extent anyway.



currently listening to:
just like heaven (the cure cover) - dinosaur jr.
nothing but a heartache - the flirtations
back on the chain gang - the pretenders
daddy never understood - the folk implosion
_________________

i'm sitting in jayne mansfield's car

so like, i really need to stop pinning my hopes on things, because i always get fucked over eventually. i think my problem is that i'm one of those people that needs others to like them, but has no idea how to go about being likeable. often i wish that people could just tell me what is really, fundamentally wrong with me, and then i can fix it.
i'm going to stop now because it's going down the road of all those horrible whiney posts i used to write before i made my blog public. here is a nice song instead: