Kate Isis

2009-12-22T02:19:00.000+11:00

Kate isis has moved to

http://kate-remixed.blogspot.com/

Dives Essay assignment - "Jack Kerouac's On the road." THE IMAGE.

2009-09-17T15:43:00.004+10:00

'I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was — I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds.'

I walked, naked, to the dusty mirror hanging on a crazy angle.
Einstein hair, I thought absently. Resulting from how many days of sleep and wakefulness and inertia.
My hands reached out to the top of an ancient lowboy in order to steady myself.
My head, a spinning carousel out of control, flinging its riders off into outer space.
Around the bed lay empty bottles, water, vodka, the usual suspects.
In this dusty, dry forgotten hamlet I’d let myself finally unravel.

For all I knew the town was called Monkey Fuck.
I’d taken no notice of road signs for days, just steering the car, until I found what I was looking for.
Absolute anonymity.
The hotel, non descript.
Paid up for a week to ensure privacy.
My stuff strewn in a heap by the door.
What I wondered, was I running from?
Myself?
My life?
My past?
Or was this really what I had told myself, a forced journey to the edge of madness all for my art?

I turned and surveyed the room.
Perfect.
A place where technology and the twentieth century hadn’t yet caught up.
Dusty, old, neglected, shabby.
A lumpy bed, a woven “hilly-billyesque” mat on the floor, dust motes in the air.
And me, sodden and drunk and reeking of sweat, I’d become one with this sad little space.

The shower beckoned…….

Clean.
And hungry.
For images more than food.

Surveying the display on my camera I realised that at some stage during my undoing I had been lucid enough to capture that state of dishevelment.
Glorious pictures of absolute abandonment of anything remotely human.
Images of an empty artist that spoke more than anything I could ever set up.

Words came to me unbidden, “an artist always needs to create, no matter what their state of mind…..”
Glancing back into the mirror and there he was. Aaron.
“I suppose you want to take credit for this?”
“Not at all,” came that familiar voice. “I am merely an observer.”
I moved to set up my equipment.
Automatically clicking and connecting the various parts.
“If you sit there you’ll be in my shot.”
“I’ll only appear as a shadow, a trick of light.”
“Charlatan. Pretender. Tormentor. Comforter.”
“Ah, anger. Or is it merely your hangover talking. You’re usually far more respectful.”

I flung him a look.
Wriggled quickly into the elegant evening dress I had brought with me.
Did all of those girly things that made me look for a second like a woman with a plan.
Donned sky high heels and went to sit on the bed, remote shutter in hand.

The voice came again from behind me, “Playacting. Pretending. It’s cute but you know I prefer you in your pajamas.”
“Is that your dirty little secret?”, I shot back at him as I took my first few test shots. “You only control me when I allow you to. When I make the effort you disappear like a bad version of Caspar.”

The sound of the camera winding over caught my attention.
As an artist I’m always drawn by that sound and for minutes I sat posed, composing in my head the final image.
Perfection and chaos interwoven.

A slight touch on my shoulder, a cool hand and a whisper,
“I’m always with you kid.”
　
Way over the word limit master Dive however, this was fun. xox

OMG - The Best thing I have ever had in my mouth!!!

2009-09-06T23:51:00.003+10:00

I'm doing a birthday cake trial this weekend.
I've decided on cupcakes. delicate little cupcakes that leave you screaming for more.
So I hunted out a recipe to make them from scratch. And then I kateised it.
Vanilla bean and passionfruit sponge cupcakes with white chocolate ganache icing and a dollop of whipped cream.
Add a sugared violet for whimsy and you've got the best thing I've ever had in my mouth.
And I seriously never eat cake!

Scream Freedom. Dives essay assignment.

2009-09-01T14:07:00.000+10:00

Nastor stretched, as much as you could stretch in such limited space.
He lay there thinking to himself, “when we finally get out of here I’m going to be first.”
Nastor was destined to be pushy.
He was by far the biggest of the group assembled in this cell.
They had been cooped up here for months with no reprieve. Food had been regularly delivered but contact with the outside world was limited to what you could hear, what you could discern through these thick entombing walls.
Sometimes you could hear music, sometimes it was a persons far off screaming, or maybe it was just talking in the next room.
That was the problem, was there a next room?
What lay beyond was utterly unknown.
And how they had all come to be here was equally unknown.

There were five bodies in here, in a space designed for one.
Being entombed for months in damp darkness had made these five a family of sorts.
There was no privacy, no moment of peace. Someone’s parts always pushing at your own.
Everything was personal.
It was, for want of a better term a household in constricted chaos.
When food did come and it was spicy or tart or upsetting in some way the whole place felt it and reacted like one glutinous pulsing push. Trying to get away from the indigestion, having nowhere to go.
Occasionally it felt very much as if the walls were indeed closing in.
Everything felt tighter, more congested.
The feeling never last long but it was there. Always ready to spring at you in the darkness without warning.
The household found these repulsive goings on completely unendurable.
But endure it they must.

On this particular day Nastor looked around at his fellow inmates.
The four others were all much weaker, much smaller than he.
He would be dominant, he’d known that from the moment he arrived here.
If one survived this place, it would be him.
He’d lost count of time, of days, weeks months even.
Everything was focused on discovering a way out.

Calistomon, the smallest, worked her way over to him, amid much groaning.
“It feels different today, something will happen today.”
He regarded her with some sympathy.
She had once confided that she feared being left alone in this place. She didn’t want to be the last to leave.
He decided to make sure when he escaped that she would be right behind him.
“The others,” he thought, “well they’ll sort out their own arrangements when the time comes.”

At that moment their small world started to pulsate, to throb, and they found themselves being thrown about. Pushed together. Pulled apart, spinning, turning, upside down.
The very world itself was shifting.
The wall behind Nastor’s head suddenly gave way.
He had the feeling of being buried alive.
But he pushed at it with all his strength.
He found it resistant.
He wriggled head first.
There was space.

Hands.

Light.

A voice.

“It’s a boy.”

Yay For Spring!!!!!!

2009-08-31T15:19:00.000+10:00

Here is it in my office with the million dollar views, and I find for the first time in ages feeling free, alive, happy.
The stereo is pumping the best of the oldies, Frankie Valley, Billy Joel, Phil Collins, etc.
The sun is in full tick show off mode here and theres a slight breeze.
Earlier I was rollerblading around the house - I'm so going to have to get the floors polished - and it struck me that year 36 is almost over.
My birthday rapidly approaches.
This year we're having an afternoon tea barbecue of sorts. A lush decadent ice cream cake and much coconut rum with a few tequila shots thrown in for good measure.
99 red balloons have been promised. tiara's, and food by my favourite caterer.
I figure with all of the shit i've been through lately, its time to party.
Yes I did just use that word as a verb Dive.
I'm getting to that age where you are supposed top slow down and mature, well fuck it, I feel amazing.

The sound of a citrus fruit dropping on your tin roof.

2009-08-31T10:26:00.002+10:00

I was laying in bed the other night when I was suddenly awoken by something akin to an air raid. It took me a while to work out that it was actually the sound of an orange falling from its tree onto my tin roof, about ten feet above me.
I'll put pruning on the list of things to do.
I'm finally making progress with the unpacking. I'm determined that no box shall go unopened this time.
Which is why I guess it was counter productive to go out and buy new furniture, thus introducing new boxes to be unpacked.
I bought a new bed on the weekend. My old one sadly is being held for ransom and well, we don't negotiate with kidnappers. In a way I do feel a little sad about losing my first accquired piece of furniture. it held some great memories, named Mark, Voldemort and Nai.
However, in the spirit of all things new I set about connecting slot a with flap b and built myself a funky new bed.
I've also been busy deciding on plants. Dive's tour of Ann Boelyns former home has given me some fairly grandiose idea's about garden beds. I think I'll go for epic flowers and greener. I have the space and permission to use it as I see fit. I'm thinking white roses, daisies, petunia's for summer.
All in all, I'm feeling healthier and happier than I have in a long while.

2009-08-28T16:55:00.004+10:00

There are days when I am truly, utterly, amazingly, out of this world, happy.

Today is one of those days.

Top 16 Finalist, second year running - photography competition. I don't even care if I win, I just love the fact that I get another blow up for my wall.

And maybe the fact that I can still smell the slightest trace of him on my skin.

Heaven.

Dive's Essay Assignment. The Art Of Fear.

2009-08-27T11:04:00.003+10:00

I could hear the taunts coming from behind me as I ran.
Blindly.
“Hey you, I’m talking to you, stop.”
“I’m serious, stop and talk to me.”
“Stop, I mean it, stop.”
The woman’s voice was gravely but determined.
Searching for shelter, for a rescuer, for something that took me off this deserted street and back into safety and security.
Leave it to the boss to send me on an errand so late in the afternoon I thought.
The shops were all closing up, the streets bereft of week day feet.
I could not say exactly that I was at the point of hysteria yet.
Not totally terrified.
The woman had started to follow me soon after I left the office.
In such a big city you just don’t pay much attention to such things unless you happen to be carrying a parcel full of money.
As I ran I scrambled in my bag for my mobile phone.
Once again I had left it on my desk.
How many people had told me that I should keep it on me at all times.
Personally I really didn’t like the thing. It was intrusive.
And so it became a “non mobile” mobile phone.

I rounded a corner and came upon an intersection.
A street, an alleyway, and across from me an abandoned for the day industrial site.
I could hear the woman’s footsteps approaching.
I considered my options.
Run, which admittedly my mind was rooting for but my body was saying enough is enough.
Confront her with no weapon?
Hand over the cash?
That last option would see me fired.
Not getting to the betting agency on time to place the bosses bets was how I’d gotten this job. The last receptionist had failed to get to the betting on time.

Hmmm, confrontation I finally decided on.
And then I got angry.
At this stranger, at my boss for being a fat lazy such and such, at myself for running.
Who was this whack job following me?
I darted into the alley, looking for a weapon.
My eyes scanned over litter and garbage bags, the usual urban detritus.
Groping through the litter, through clammy takeaway containers and old newspaper, hoping not to come across the remains of a dead cat. My hand gripped cold heavy steel. An abandoned tyre iron.
When I found so astonishing a power placed within my hands, I hesitated a long time concerning the manner in which I should employ it.
I took a practice swing, listening for the footsteps that had stopped abruptly.
I could crack open a human skull with this thing.
I could defend myself.

The footsteps started again.
I gripped the handle of the tyre iron, ready to swing, remembering everything my softball coach had ever yelled at me.
The stranger appeared, walking down the alley towards me.
She stopped dead when she saw my weapon.
“What do you want?” I screamed.
She handed me a slightly crumpled parcel.
“You dropped this on the sidewalk.” she said.

The betting money.

Frankenstiens power.

2009-08-27T08:33:00.004+10:00

It's Thursday again and I am supposed to be working on my Mary Shelley piece for Master Dive.
The concept of power is an interesting one this week.
I had a stunning case of agoraphobia yesterday.
I've gone from relatively standardised shut in suburbia to having space through every window in the house, vast quantities of open space.
The result was an anxiety attack that made me curl up in a corner.
It's never happened before.
It got me thinking about Dive's quote of the week, about holding power in your hands, and what happens when your mind takes that power away from you.
I don't have answers yet, I expect my psych visit this morning shall provide me with answers or at least stronger medication.
I'll get to you shortly.

Eden.

2009-08-25T15:29:00.005+10:00

You can tell summer is fast approaching, and its not even spring yet.
And it'll be another scorcher. We haven't had rain in as long as I can remember.
With that in mind I ventured out to explore Narnia's gardens this morning.
Over grown, check.
Weedy, definately.
Redeemable - oh yeah.
What I discovered was that as well as the fruit tree's, orange, mandarin and lime, we have a strawberry patch and underneath a tangle of honeysuckle vine, a herb garden and edible flowers. Plus a grapefruit tree draping over the fence from the neighbouring property.
The dog, Joe Murphy Mutt also discovered citrus today, mistaking his tennis ball for a grapefruit.
Nothing like biting into citrus fruit and having it spray all over you.

Will my latest reinvention be as Farmer Fred? Possibly. I do like denim overalls. The bib and brace ones. How very 80's of me.
I've named the house Narnia. We have a draught horse two blocks away who roams the streets with his posse, a sheep and a dog. Who's going to argue with a draught horse?
As well as the corner billy goat who looks to be as old as Noah.
It's all a little surreal after life in the suburban Serengetti.

Dive's James Joyce 500 words....

2009-08-24T15:21:00.002+10:00

“At this intelligence, in which he seemingly evinced little interest, Mr. Bloom gazed abstractedly for the space of a half a second or so in the direction of a bucketdredger, rejoicing in the farfamed name of Eblana, moored alongside Customhouse quay and quite possibly out of repair, whereupon he observed evasively:

"Everybody gets their own ration of luck, they say."

It began as a shimmer of awareness.
From the deep shadowy recesses in my subconscious this voice penetrated.
A slow, deep, even cadence.
Comforting but alien and possibly vaguely familiar in a dejavu sort of way.
Succumbing to curiosity I opened one eye and stared across the space to where the figure sitting in the wicker chair was.
“What are you doing?” I muttered sleepily.
“You were restless so I thought I’d read to you. It always used to help you sleep.”
“Your stories were never quite so evolved. I remember you reading to me when I was a child sick with whooping cough”
“You’re older now, or shall I return to reading you the adventures of Spot the Dog?” the voice floated back across to me, friendly, a little mocking in its tone.
“How do you remember things like that?”
“It’s my job to remember you.”

I nudged myself up onto an elbow.
Things were becoming more lucid.
The figure in the chair reading to me was Aaron who sat with me during childhood illnesses, reading me stories, keeping me company.
“What are you reading to me?
“Ulysses by James Joyce. I found it on a seat on the train. I thought you might enjoy it.”
“A little long worded as a bedtime story don’t you think?”
“But we have many nights ahead of us. I’ve been here every night for a month, this is the first time you’ve noticed.”

This startled me.
“I haven’t been sick, why are you here again?”
His laugh reached out to me.
“Did you think I was only here when you were sick?”
“Yes. It‘s the only times I see you” I replied.
“Perhaps when you are sick your mind is wide open and more accepting.”
The look on my face at these words prompted him to continue.
“You don’t know who I am do you?”
“I do,” I said defensively, automatically, suddenly not so sure that I did.
“As a child,” he began, “You gave me a name.”
“ Aaron.”
“You conjured it out of thin air one night. To you I am Aaron, but I go by many names.”
I laughed to myself, “I’m dreaming,” I murmured aloud.
“What if you’re not?” he replied. “What if I were to tell you who I really was? Would it get you up out of that bed? Would it motivate you to go back to the living?”
“Who are you then?”
The figure, rose, shimmered, turned pale. Not at all human.
“I am your illness, and I grow tired of you. I have others to infect. I will return, but for now, ………..”

“Wake up Kate.”

Dive's essay assignment

2009-08-06T15:28:00.003+10:00

Then, suddenly, with great clarity and precision, he saw Bartleby's window and
the blank brick wall before him.
How often in years past had he walked the long austere corridor that ended with this view?
His mind travelled back along with the vision.
Once long ago this place had functioned, if you could possibly describe this place as functioning.
Distracted momentarily, he looked around for a place to sit.
Relieving himself of the heavy weight of burden that he carried with him.
Mental kilo’s he had come to call them.
He settled himself and for a second registered the alien feeling of the sun on his face.
But he knew if he closed his eyes the sounds would come.
The ones that disturbed him most when he was forced to come back to this place.
This would be his last time.
He tried to concentrate on Bartleby’s window, which was in fact the object of this visit.
Flashes of Bartleby standing at that window, issuing his instructions, surveying his kingdom.
Bartleby, in his early forties.
Standing ramrod straight, one hand tucked into the small of his back, his hair just starting to betray a hint of grey.
This place, he thought to himself as he shifted his weight, would do that to you. Age you prematurely.
Although Bartleby had always seemed ageless despite his physical appearance.
Bartleby almost seemed to be made up of the ether of this place.
Maybe years of working here did that to a person.
Bartleby’s window, forever protected by that inch thick glass.
Bartleby’s window now a sole surviving monument in a world of broken glass and broken lives.
Looking forever at the cheery rose red brick wall.
He had come here many years before.
Young, uncertain, untrained.
Yet hopeful, full of the zeal of youth.
Into this very room.
The memory of the atmosphere all of those years ago came back to him, so palpable he could taste it.
Memory tasted metallic and slightly gritty.
Bartleby had been his mentor, he was to be Bartleby’s successor.
Bartleby’s voice directing his instructions through the window straight at that wall in that clipped Boston accent reverberated in his memory.
“You have come to observe our techniques, young man. Ours is a closed world but one that is enriched from within. We have a mission here and you are arriving on the cusp of great discovery and progress.”
The man, once vigorous with youth had grown smaller with age. These walls had witnessed the beginning of this shift in stature in him, long before he had ever realised it was happening.
Now he stood up from the seat he had taken on his case full of equipment.
Setting up his camera, nestled sturdily on his tripod he shot perhaps a dozen pictures.
A fine front cover for his book.
Once completed he wished nothing more than to be gone from this place of horrors and packed quickly.
Manoeuvring carefully to avoid being caught in the rubble of ruins that was once the long corridor leading to Bartleby’s office.
He turned once, at the gate of the old asylum and looked back at the place where Bartleby’s window had been.

2009-08-02T20:36:00.003+10:00

This could quite easily be me in reality in the next four weeks.
The rental housing market in Australia is such that your pretty much lucky if you happen to find a place.

So here you are, swine flu, with no money for medication, scrounging your own supply at home. Finding that a pompous rude arsehole has taken all of the night time tablets and left half empty packets scattered.

Neuralgia that makes you contemplate suicide with no relief in sight.

A house to pack and nowhere to go.

And this is the lucky country is it?

Ask yourself what if?

What if you suddenly lost everything, what would you do?

2009-08-01T20:59:00.003+10:00

I swear to God the rope actually made the tyre brush the ground.

Since the begining of April this year I have been participating in the 365 self portrait project. A selfie a day for a whole year.

I've decided August is aria month. For every self portrait I'll relate it to a song thereby giving me a soundtrack by the end of the month.

So here is the first shot of Aria month.

Taking the picture was relatively easy. You just set up a tripod, adjust it up, plug in a remote trigger transceiver and away you go.

It was when I got home and started thinking what song goes with this that I ran into way too many possibilities.

"It's my life" by Bon Jovi immediately sprang to mind.

"Don't worry be happy" by Bobby McFerrin also comes to mind.

(the perverse thing about that song is that the crooner suicided)

Hmmmmm.

Suggestions anyone???????

What's Doing?

2009-07-30T18:41:00.002+10:00

Ok so I promised at some stage I'd get into just where I have been and what I have been doing.
Possibly the easiest way to explain this is to simply get you to click on the title link. This will take you to my flickr site where you will find on the right hand side of the page a set called 365.
Click on that and select slideshow and it'll show you what I have been up to for the last couple of months. Whack on some quirky kate-ish music to play along with the pics.
I say this only because Life moves fast, lots has happened.
And to tell the truth, I'm lazy and still under the influence of pig flu.!
Here come the bullet points, the abridged version if you will -

Vic no longer lives with us as of last week. After 18 months we have gone our seperate ways. It was always inevitable right from the begining, we are utterly different people and our differences will never be reconciled.
After moving in to the rental of our dreams we passed a pleasant enough summer here and then disaster struck. An evil snake bit my puppy Miss Mugwhy. It was all over in twenty minutes. She died in my arms 200 metres from the vets. The snake was sliced and diced and binned. Yes I know snakes are protected in this country but fuck it.
I recently had a breast cancer scare. Fortunately the ultra sound came back clear. But let me tell you there is definately a future rant in that whole episode.
The Thunderbolt series is set to become a book. More details on that later.
I've finally, after 2 years of struggle/depression/coming to terms with a bipolar like illness, decided to go back to work. Not back to welfare but just work. Dock in dock out get paid and run amok on weekends.
Super dad and the children continue to do well. Cruella continues to be an unstable force in their lives. And I have taken a backseat and the long view. I'm over it. In fact I am over all of the awful things humanity does to each other.
Right now my life is running on yoda logic - "It's not my fight".
Right now my hamburger is ready - I'll get back to you shortly.

2009-07-29T23:18:00.004+10:00

So I'll get to where I have been for the last few months but first I want to blow my nose.
Again and again and again.
Paul and I woke up with a nasty case of coldy fluey symptoms.
If I catch the pig who snuck into our room and breathed on us I'll sick a big bad wolf onto them.
I've claimed the prize for the definition of irony today.
Here we are, two adults struggling to breathe, both of us starved and roasting you guessed it, a shoulder of pork.
Neither of us could taste it or smell it.
I'll set the scene for the photo above. The early hours of the morning and I wake up in a daze. Completely fluey and snotty and drippy and disorientated. I remember there is some chest rub somewhere in the house and so I go get it.
Climb back into bed hoping for some relief.
And then this thought occurs to me. My tits are so big they could have quite easily helped float the Titanic for a few extra hours.
"Where the hell am I supposed to put the chest rub?"
Below my boobs is ribcage - definately not a chest.
Above my boobs is throat, again definately not a chest.
Smearing this stuff all over the tops of my tits is just a little too unsexy. And lets face it when your a s sick as I am you really need to bring sexy back or at least the illusion of it.
And then I sneezed, like flubber all over pretty much everything in the bedroom.
Screw it, I thought, I smeared with abandon. My chest, my back, the bottoms of my feet.
I even gave myself a little vapour rub Hitler moustache.
Am I feeling better?
Feck no I am not.
I shall return.

2009-07-27T21:50:00.002+10:00

Right, I'm back, blogging in solitude until I build up a readership once again.
I am blogville's own girl interrupted.
I make no apologies for this.
Shall I return to you?

AS IT TURNS OUT NO I DIDN'T.

2009-02-12T23:30:00.007+11:00

Please excuse my absence of late. Between two shrinks and a towering case of suicidal tendancies and smothering depression, well to be honest I've been less than enthused about anything really.

As a photographer a natural disaster is of course fodder for my lens. However we seem to be in the grip of what can only be described as hell on earth. Floods up north and killer fires down south. Right now I'm sitting in my office listening to rain drumming down on the roof. Its a welcome change from weeks of 40+ degree days but the state of Victoria needs this more than we do.

There was something like two hundred fires burning this morning and a death toll that stands at around 180 people. The television, newspapers and even the net is flooded with pictures of carnage. Not exactly great for anyone battling depression you might think but hey, I've at least got the perspective that my issues seem really small and insignificant compared to what we're seeing.

The photos I'm showing you were shot on Sunday after a fire had been through a place about 50 kilometres south of where I am. I watched this fire burn up over the ridge the night before, nothing on earth moves as fast as a hungry bush fire.

To all of you who have commented or dropped me a line, thanks boys and girls of blogville.

Love Katie xoxox

YES I SHALL

2009-01-21T10:18:00.002+11:00

Yes I shall post later today. I'll fill you in on all of the gossip concerning the weekend photo shoot and what actually happened. I may tell you about a certain flat mate who stole my ciggarettes and my lighter this morning on her way to work. And since it is so spectacuarly hot today I may just go and fry an egg on the pavement and report on the results.

But right now I am climbing back into the shower thanks to Dive so that I can get rid of the breakfast I just spilled down my cleavage.

Dive, you are a bad bad boy!

THE MONKEY F*CKING THE FOOTBALL!

2009-01-13T01:19:00.003+11:00

So here it is, well after midnight and my brain is still doing a crap load of thinking.
Its dilemma time which means its rant time and in America its probably Miller time.
Right now that we are all square let the whinge begin for this is a whinge make no mistake.
This is the whinge of the fuck you its all bout me new years resolution.
I have a shoot to do, a dire, gruesome, gothically inspired, Charles Dickensish suicide themed shoot.
My model is more than happy to help me produce the images.
Just when everything is coming up roses you get hit with the thorns.
The model now has to bring his son with him, because god knows this model can't actually have any time to himself without his family imposing on him.
Am I a fucking babysitting service? No.
Am I Mother Teresa? No.
I am a creative.
I am a Diva so I have been told.
I am royally pissed off.
How do I shoot contemporary suicide scenes with an 11 year old standing around carrying on because he isn't having his face stuffed with KFC or some other equally vile ADHD accelerator?
How do I shoot a convincing hanging scene with fetus extended in the room?
Its a monkey fucking a football situation and I am having a tantrum!!!!!!!!

DIGITAL DUMMIES.

2008-12-30T15:22:00.002+11:00

I've just spent half an hour reviewing some photos taken of my nephew during this year at preschool. The results are not pleasing in the least.
The problem with digital technology is those ridiculous display screens that allow you to see the picture before you take it. People rely on this instead of the tried and true method of actually looking through the viewfinder.
The results are half out of focus junk that doesn't even pass for abstract quirkiness, just laziness from the snapper.
I saw this technique being used extensively when I was teaching. The kids would take shots then be disappointed when they reviewed them. Shakiness, blur and out of focus shots.
How did I correct this? Simply by turning off that stupid display screen and getting them to look through the viewfinder. Instantly better pictures emerged.
Now maybe I am being a techo snob here but it infuriates me when you are handed work that is sub standard. You don't have to a professional photographer to get a good result or even a great result, you just need patience.
So there we are people, Turn off the damn digital display!!!!!

COMPETITION RESULTS

2008-12-24T15:19:00.002+11:00

Congratulations to Dive, Lynn, Terroni and Biddie for winning the sections of the Christmas competition.
To claim your prize simply choose the print you'd like from my blog posts or my website image therapy and send your mailing information in an email to mschaoticperfection@hotmail.com.

For the record, the statue sitting on my work desk is of a young Buddha.
My personal favourite post would have to be a tie between Bubonic Man and the Thunderbolt series which had me intrigued for months. In the coming year I am planning on doing another.

CHRISTMAS COMPETITION

2008-12-18T10:15:00.002+11:00

In the spirit of starting new Christmas traditions I've decided this year to kill two birds with one stone.
As a photographer I've little storage and many image proofs of work that I have done.
So here's the deal. From now until Christmas I'll be running a competition, the winners will receive the image of their choice mailed to where ever they happen to be in the world.
Choose your image from my aminus site that you will find in the side bar and then answer the question of your choice from below.
Most original answers win an A3 photographic image.

The Questions -

1) What statue do you think I have sitting on my work desk?

2) If you could be anyone in the world living or dead who would you be and why?

3) Your favourite kate isis post and why?

4) Or simply tell me why you should win?

Winners will be chosen christmas eve and prints will be sent in the new year.

I GUESS I'M JUST CYNICAL

2008-12-17T13:04:00.003+11:00

I was recently invited as the "and friend" to an engagement party.
What amused me was the small note enclosed which requested money to go towards the happy couples house rather than gifts.
I don't like the idea of wedding presents so I really don't go all gooey hearted at the thought of engagement presents. I see it as double dipping.
When I buy tyres for my car i get the warranty, even if i never use it I find it comforting to know that if anything does go wrong there is a money back guarantee behind the product I am investing in.
Same with the purchase of a motor vehicle, you get the warranty.
In this day and age the average Australian marriage, according to recently read stats, lasts around 8 and a half years.
This isn't a solid investment when i can walk into a shop and get a ten year warranty on a washer and dryer.
Plus whilst thinking about this request for funds from the happily engaged couple I have to factor in fertility.
If the couple go the distance and make it to the altar then there is a high chance that they will at some point procreate.
If they do this then the Australian government in all of its stupidity will give them a nice fat cheque for $7000 which they call the baby bonus.
For every bundle of joy they spit out they receive a bundle of cash.
That cash comes from my paying taxes.
So my logic is why should I pay at the engagement when down the track I'm going to be stung again?
If the happy couple make it down the aisle but then find they despise each other they end up in divorce court. If they have children they end up in family law court. One of them gets legal aid which you guessed it, my taxes are paying for.
Every four years when the government is looking to kiss some collective arse they announce tax cuts and bonuses and handouts for families. Which my taxes are paying for.
When the happy couple buy their first house they can apply for the first home buyers grant which is yet more money supplied by you guessed it - my taxes.
So doing the maths this couple are in the future going to benefit from my taxes to the tune of a tidy sum of money yet they have the audacity to ask me to kick start them on a lifetime of robbing me blind at their engagement party.
Call me cynical but I think not.

WHERE FOR ART THOU ROMEO????

2008-12-16T12:32:00.002+11:00

Is it just me or has the standard of romantic salutation dropped dramatically of late?
It seems the men of old knew how to verbally romance a girl.
"Let me compare thee to a summers day, thou art more lovely and more temperate"
Now that's nice, its pretty, its complimentary.
These days you are more likely to get "Nice knockers, baby I wanna make u cum" via text message.
When did the romantic standard slip from admiring a whole personality to the depraved delights of specified body parts and sexual acrobatics?
When a girl asks, "Romeo romeo where for art thou romeo?" it can be a little off putting to receive the reply "I'm here waiting for you to cum sit on my face"
Love and romance in the technological age has downsized.
I blame text messages, computers and those slightly disturbing "Dating" websites that are all about the one night fling.
No longer do we meet someone in St Louis, we just meet them for coffee.
Coffee is a euphemism for sex according to the chat speak on these dating websites. And you can be assured that the coffee is the evil instant kind. No time for fresh ground aromatically brewed romance, its all about the boiling water scalding the beans these days.

Personally I think i would have rather have lived in a gentler age, even if that age meant early death from a some plague. How nice it would be to have romance defined as rose petals rather than a gift wrapped dust buster.

2008-12-04T02:56:00.003+11:00

For want of a better word, this has been my more effective therapy for the past six months. Photography, teaching me to se the world through bi polar eyes without actually hating it.
Right now its 3am and i shoudl be in bed as I have a massive day to complete.
A few hours ago i got a call from my younger brother wanting me to pick him up from the psych ward. It seems you can take the girl out of welfare but they still keep calling.
Luckily i now have a few images that I can now call upon to soothe a day when it is most harsh.

Welcome to Australia, run amuck and blame it on mental incapacity.

2008-12-02T22:07:00.004+11:00

Screw it I'm still in a politcally incorrect fuck off type of mood.
I was watching the news over the last few days and saw the footage of a 43 year old sudanese import plowing down a bunch of pedestrians, killing one outright.
What pisses me off about this is that this woman is suffering post traumatic stress syndrome after seeing her husband murdered in sudan, and that was the excuse that saw no charges being laid for reckless driving or manslaughter.
And she will be eligible to apply for her learners permit again.
Sure she may have had tragedy in her life but to let this menace drive ever on our roads is just bullshit.
If she was so mentally incapacitated what was she doing behind the wheel of a car in the first place? What was her driving instructor thinking? Both of them should be facing charges. Her actions killed a person.
The least this woman could do is offer to pay for the funeral of the person whoose life she so recklessly took.
The gutless wonder didn't even have the decency to show up at the coroners enquiry.
Rude.
Her punishment should be exportation on a slow leaky boat back to the sudan.

ARE TERRORISTS TAKING INSTRUCTION FROM WILEY COYOTE?

2008-12-01T09:24:00.002+11:00

I'm in one of those unfortunate "haven't been on my meds in two weeks" kind of moods. This often leads in a shift in thinking.
I went to work at a pre school the other day and so missed the begining of the news coverage about the Mumbai massacre.
But after watching hours of witness statements about what went on I am forced to the conclusion that terrorists in general are taking their instruction not from Osama but from Wiley Coyote.
I was listening to the last remaining gunman outline a plan that was to see 5000 people killed and the hotel blown up. That was the general plan it seems.
They failed miserably in reaching their objective. The question is why?
Think about it. A nice hotel, packed with guests. You could do some real damage there.
Its obvious these so called terrorists haven't seen one decent action movie - ever.
Tourists in a somewhat flashy part of a third world country are going to be out and about late, sampling the nightlife. Thats what a holiday is for is it not?
So, Lesson One, wait till they go to bed. Westerns on holiday generally don't have to be up at the crack of dawn to kiss allahs mythical arse in prayer so a small amount of obvious homework would tell these terrosits that tourists do stay up late.
Lesson Two - Going in with all guns blazing. Kind of kills the element of surprise once you start firing. Silencers were invented for a reason. You could pop a cap in the arses of scores of sleeping tourists before anyone cottoned on to what was going on. However gunmen in general seem to like the flash and the bang. The object it seems IS terrifying the populous rather than murder. If straight out murder was on the agenda you'd use a silencer.
Gunmen the world over seem to get this wrong. Big loud noises and blood will make even the most wheelchair bound tourist pick up sticks and run away, they're just not co operative.
If the object is terror why not actually terrify? Sure big ranty gunmen are scary but hey there are plenty of things in the world far scarier. Kidnap a population, strap them into cinema seats and make them watch Oprah for hours. A huge opinionated sanctimonious coloured american with a bouffant hairdo and more money than she deserves, yep thats scary.
And as an offside observation, now that america has its first black president as people keep going on about, are the coloured people going to be the whites while the blacks will simply be Americans?
Lesson Three - Give it up. You can't top 9/11.
Lesson Four - One day the world will have an opposite day and political correctness will go out the door. If the free western world had any sense we'd pull out the troops, all of them. Peace keeping makes no difference to terrorists, it just pisses them off.
The only way to fix this problem is the Wiley Coyote way. We'll get ourselves an ACME Bacon and pork products bomb and just drop it on you.

2008-11-05T12:05:00.006+11:00

Dear Blogville,

Here are my observations of late:

In almost every action movie you will find a scene where the female lead wears a pairof boots, black pants and a black long sleeve rounded neck shirt. Arms folded across themselves and putting out serious attitude.
I need an image libraian. Someone to catalogue my ever growing range of images into something more manageable.
If you are distracted while working at the compouter you will invariably ash into your caramel tart.
A watched and anticipated msn never replies.
On the day, your white shirt will show up a stain. Best to buy a new one every time.
The whole idea of putting your best foot forward every time you leave the house is just exhausting. And visitors only turn up when you are having a birds nest hair day and couldn't be bothered brushing it.
It is a foregone conclusion that the psych - Dr V will mock me tomorrow. And I have not as yet formulated a comeback.

2008-11-04T03:00:00.002+11:00

Dear Blogville,

Well its smack on 3am and i'm wide awake. Not a great start to November. I have a feeling I have an appointment sometime today to assess how I am coping with life with some becardiganned government official bully type. Maybe I will skip it.

So whats been dfoing? Sweet FA really. Thats the main problem with Bi polar 2, you just lose track of hours, days and socks.

I can't even be bothered to post.

THE RETURN OF CYNICAL RANTISM

2008-10-29T13:48:00.002+11:00

Dear Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd,

Recently I have been advised of a new scheme of this latest government. Compulsory internet censorship for every Australian. You intend to stamp out such illegal activites as researching anything to do with euthanasia as well as targeting pro annorexia websites.
Is the spirit of "Big Brother" alive and well in your government? Are you merely bending from pressure from minority groups? Do you intend our lucky country to become as buttoned down as Cuba, China, Iran?
Will your computer be subject to censorship as well?
Censorship is a way to bind the working peasants, make sure they have no access to information while you do what exactly? What are you afraid we will find out?
And on the subject of what you should censor I notice there has been no talk about banning links to islamic websites. Those people blow shit up but that seems to be ok by you. If you were to do that you'd be labelled a racist. So let us get this straight. Australian's under this plan will not be allowed to google pro anorexia or euthanasia links on the world wide web anymore but we are free to type in terrorist cells and how to join one and jihad for dummies.
Why don't we just burn some books and gas a few jews while we are at it? Maybe throw a few dissadents to the lions as public sport.
How much more dark ages victorian era do the governments have to make this country? How much longer will politics be swayed by pressure from so called religious groups and those family first wankers? Religion and the family unit really shouldn't be making policy or influencing policy. For that matter the church also shouldn't be influencing who wins Australia Idol as they tried to do last year.
And there has also been talk that this blanket censorship is designed to stamp out child pornography. We'll rubbish to that. It won't be stopped by taking away freedom of information. It won't be stopped by banning adult websites. Just look at the high profile people going to jail over child pornography these days - judges, priests etc. The law and the clergy, the very same people screaming to censor our society.
Lets look at euthanasia. Illegal in this country. Why is it illegal in this country if its done and policed properly? You're condemning a population to die in pain. You are condemning people to years of dementia, alzheimers, bed ridden misery.
What a lucky country we are, we will have the right to die in pain, without dignity as long as no one googles the word tits we'll be just fine.
Lets wrap the whole country in Hijab right now.
We came from convict stock and you want to send us back to that era?
I find it ironic that the government would even consider censorship of this nature. By taking this course of action you are commiting political suicide and lets not forget that euthanasia is illegal in this country.
Will you also revise the basic sayings that have grown up during the last two hundred years in this country? If your plan suceeds we will never again be able to ask "what is the world coming to?" because we won't have the right to know.
Instead of grandstanding plans to lock this country up why don't you concentrate on fixing this country?
Lets fix operating theatre tables so that they don't collapse during an operation. Lets open more hospital beds so that children who have a broken arm aren't waiting in casualty for eight hours to get seen to. Lets once and for all come clean about fuel prices. There is no need for fuel prices to bounce up and down to the tune of ten cents per litre in a matter of hours on a weekly basis. Lets find enough teachers so that years 3, 4, 5and 6 aren't all crammed into one classroom. Lets actually try to get kids to learn to read and write while they are in school instead of turning out teenagers who can't do either.
Instead here is our future. In ten years time here we will be huddled in our government made ghetto with our homemade laptop trying desparately to get an outside anonymous server connection in hopes of finding out just what happened in the last episode of Prisonbreak.

Welcome to Australia - where the bloody hell are you indeed.

2008-10-27T12:45:00.002+11:00

Dear Blogville,

I've been toying with the idea of writing a message for a bottle. Of being able to pour out all of the things that I cannot say and casting it adrift to wash up on some shore. Yes, I am a romantic idealist living in a time when people communicate by text message.
Knowing my luck after pouring out all of my secrets the bottle owould wash up on some non foreign shore and I would be arrested for polluting the ocean.
I like the idea of a love letter folded into a paper boat and sent off down the curent of a creek. Not terribly practical but who wants practical?
It's spring that has brought this about. No other season makes me quite as indulgent, quite as introspective. There's something about the heady smell of gardenia and jasmine brought through your wiondow on a breeze that makes you go all frilly and silly.
And yes Dive I can imagine your response, Bah Humbug!
A few weeks ago on a spur of the moment impulse I walked into a tattoo parlour and had the words "Fly Free" inscribed on my inside left wrist. A simple reminder to me to let myself go and experience life. For so long I've felt like the bird in a cage with the door propped open yet somehow resistant to taking that small leap that would see me soar.
While researching some quotes for my first book of images I came across a gem- "Life is just a chance to grow a soul." by A. Powell Davies.
I kind of like that idea.
Last night I rocked a six week old baby to sleep. It's one of the few experiences where I hear music even in a silent room.
Think about how often that happens, the magic moment.
I haven't had that experience since my nephew Omlette was born. And I love it.

"Life is just a chance to grow a soul."
Somnething I need to remember and put into practice. I think we spend so much time protecting our souls that in the end we may never emerge from the crysalise, and who really wants to be a caterpillar all their life?

Love Katie xoxox

WHERE IS FULL?

2008-10-21T15:13:00.003+11:00

Dear Full,

It's been a while since I heard from you although I did catch the pics on Dive's blog of you racing around in the big boys toys.
Hopefully your silence has something to do with finally finding ms right now and that you are spending your days and nights doing terribly naughty things that I can't mention in a g rated letter.
As to me and what I have been up to, hmmm, lets see, where did the saga end off last time?
Photographically I have just been asked to cover a wedding shoot in december, usually I won't do weddings for love or money but I am branching out.
I entered a local competition for portraiture a few months ago and surprisingly enough I won it. I'm still sort of pinching myself a bit. I was asked recently to shoot a drumer, an 11 year old female drummer and it made me think of you and your new drum kit. How I'd love to catch you practicing, banging away with abandon on the skins, hmmm, this is supposed to be a g rated letter.
Dive seems quite crotchedy at the moment, since you're closer will you lean over and give him a little slap for us? Just a small one.
And as for this long silence of yours - WAKE UP!!!!!!!!!!
Where are you Full? Please come out of the woodwork.

Love Tiger xox

2008-10-19T22:41:00.003+11:00

Dear Dive,

I'm sitting here listening to my playlist after a day where my mood has gone from stellar to killer and back again in the space of six hours. Its this very kind of restlessness that induces one not to post, to sit around and navel gaze, to mope. In England the weather is putting on a sour faced tantrum and over here, nothing but sun, that really hot fry your melon kind that just induces heat stressed laziness so we are suffering from the same thing - can't give a fuck ed ness.
Originally I was going to post a letter to Vic the Groover who posed various theologicial questions to me. However she is two steps away and while I was cleaning the outdoor furniture I answered that question for her so here I am back to square one.
A few days ago I walked into the fruit shop to buy a lettuce. This seemingly mundane task led me on a new path in terms of photography. In fcat I had a quasi sexual moment amongst the fruit due to being bombarded with fantastic summer colour.
Lets cover a naked woman in fruit, I mused as I surveyed just how much produce I could fit into a shot and left thinking of product placement.
Let me give you the heads up. Passionfruit has abundant gorgeous colour, BUT just try washing it out of your white bedsheets.
Now all of this was done yesterday in a bid to distract myself from having to vacuum - which I promise to get around to tomorrow.
Today you have posted that you just can't get into the mood for house cleaning as you normally do on a saturday and have put on music instead. Jazz music.
Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong.
Saturday morning cleaning already comes with a predetermined soundtrack.
Mama Mia by ABBA
9 to 5 by Dolly Parton and you have to sing it with ATTITUDE.
I will survive by Gloria Gaynor.
and Eye of the Tiger by Survivor.
If anything has been proven to work on soulless saturday that soundtrack should do it. Works for me.
Happy cleaning Dive,

Love Katie xoxoxox

DEAR ENGLISH GUY AND DICKIEBO

2008-10-17T15:53:00.002+11:00

Dear English Guy,

Thanks for dropping me a line, its great to hear from you.
It’s funny that you say I seem more balanced than most people. There are days when I truly don’t feel like that. But I have embraced the therapeutic relationship and take my medication dutifully and somehow there’s starting to be silver linings on the clouds more often these days. My therapist is obsessed by a quote that read “great art is produced by great pain” or something similar. I wonder how true that really is. If taken literally then anyone suffering kidney stones must have the potential to be Van Gogh.
I think great pain produces at times very provocative art, although I don’t aspire to be Dante by any means, and that guy must have been seriously depressed.
The father and daughter shoot that I did on Sunday was a challenge from my girlfriend to capture her brother in law who doesn’t like his picture being taken. I wasn’t going to pick up the camera at all that day but after watching the interaction between child and father I couldn’t resist getting a few snaps done.
While this baby, about four months old, was busy trying to gummy her father and was on her own voyage of discovery I shot about ten photos. The light was provided by a near by window and her hair was truly alive, almost dancing.
It’s definitely not a definitive portrait of this man, merely a small slice of his afternoon.
Portraiture is a passion of mine. I’m always looking for new people to shoot and adventurous people to take part in some of my more radical shoots. If anyone reading happens to want to be involved drop me a line.
Unfortunately I do not have required permissions to publish any of the set of this sitting, but trust me they truly are magic.
Next portrait shot I do I promise to post.
Love Katie xoxoxoxox

Dear Dickiebo,

Now that question truly is interesting. If I could be anyone alive today who would I be?
There are so many inspiring people to choose from and let’s face it, why would you choose to be anyone who wasn’t inspiring?
The character Lester Burnham from the movie American Beauty said that he wanted a job with the least amount of responsibility possible. After several years in social welfare I can relate to that.
Perhaps I can see myself not as someone not necessarily instantly recognisably famous but someone who has my dream job. Mario Testino the photographer would be a fine choice although I would have to change gender.
Alternatively I’d love to be one of the safari guides in the Serengeti. Spending all day looking at lions and elephants and giraffes under that huge stretch of perfect sky is defiantly an existence that wouldn’t suck.
I think the problem with picking anyone but I would be that once you stepped into the role of being them then you’d get to see the ugly underbelly of what their lives are really like. As much as we can admire the prominent, the so called famous, the rich the powerful, the flipside of it is do they really live happily ever after?
If I could have lived at any time in history I think I would have loved to have been involved in the early explorations of the pyramids of Egypt. Definitely an explorer of some description seems somehow to fit my wanderlust longing.
At the end of the day I am finally getting to a place where I am growing comfortable in my own skin. I guess that means I’m getting older.

Love Katie xoxoxox

IN RESPONSE TO OLD K'S LETTER IN THE LAST COMMENT SECTION.

2008-10-17T10:29:00.001+11:00

Dear Old Knudsen,
It was lovely to hear from you yesterday. I apologise for being so off the radar of late.
Life is returning to normal albeit in a new and more serene setting.
Unfortunately the Lemur situation has continued here although they do a good job disguising themselves as meerkats when sitting at my dinner table. Please do consider bombing them into oblivion, I’d be much obliged.
You asked me where I see my life going now. I’ve totally given up on the idea of going back into social services. I figure that unless you can introduce shock treatment and severe slapping therapy to the parents you have no real hope of turning around this playstation generation. After six months of intensive arguing, I mean therapy with my psych I have come to the much healthier conclusion that I don’t give a rats cracker anymore. Caring just takes it out of you, destroys your wardrobe and gives you wrinkles. I no longer believe the children are our future, fuck them.
I would love to move full time into photography and am pursuing this to some extent. I refuse outright to shoot the lucrative wedding market because again, I just don’t care. I’m steadily getting commissioned to do more portrait work and this keeps me busy enough.
It’s hard to decide which kills more brain cells, potter or sex.
I have my own personal Grrrrr moment with the Potter movies. What ever happened to producers like Selznick who thought that five hours for a movie was definitely not to long, just look at Gone With The Wind, an epic novel deserves extra screen time. I think the same should apply to the Potter franchise, I think they should be true to the original books and take a fuckload long time when it comes to the films. That way legions of parents could drop off their obese playstation obsessed brats to the pictures and get a good four or five hours free time.
Sex And The City is mainly about the shoes and so it may be mind numbingly boring to all but us fashionistas.
I think males in general are definitely threatened by your global sex appeal. Whenever I think of your stunning visage I am reminded of the line from Buffy uttered by the immortal Spike “I don’t want to be this good looking and athletic but we all have crosses to bear.”
Finally just before I sign off, you asked if I were a tree what would I be? I’d have to say if I were a tree I’d be a beautiful Chinese cherry blossom tree blooming in a clearing surrounded by the thickest forest of thorny tree’s so that puppy dogs couldn’t pee around my trunk. Wet ankles are defiantly not my thing.
And now I really must end this letter and go off to find a hard hat in anticipation of the great Lemur bombing.
With much love to you,
Katie xoxoxoxox

2008-10-16T16:13:00.004+11:00

Dear Blogville at large,

As you know I haven't been committed to the idea of writing my usual lengthy diatribes as often as I once did. The reason for this is the diversification of the Kate Isis brand.
My photography has grown in leaps and bounds and now has its own special site on the world wide web, Image Therapy at Aminus.
However I do owe a huge debt to blogging and to blogville especially and I try to re establish my life in my new home I thought what better time than to re establish a dying tradition. That of the letter to a friend.
So from now on rather than rattling posts full of sarcasm and grizzles you'll get a letter. Maybe not written as I prefer in ink on beautiful crinkly paper but a letter no less.
But how to start a world wide open addressed letter?
"Dear Friend" seems to conjure up all of those annoying scams that land in your junk emails box.
"Dear World At Large"may be romantic for a message in a bottle but its to lengthy for me to commit to everyday.
"To Whom It May Concern" is far to formal.
Dear Blogville sounds about right.
So here we go...............

Dear Blogville,

It's finally a sunny day here in my part of Australia. Thankfully because the weather seems to be affecting my moods lately. A cloudy overcast shit of a day is all it takes to keep me moping around in pyjama's with frankenstein hair. Unmotivated, unpassioned, just waiting for nightfall and the excuse to go back to bed and try again tomorrow.
Today I am sitting in my offcie doing some editing of a photo set I was challenged to do at the weekend. The interaction bewteen a child and her father, and the light in these pictures is amazing.
On my stereo are the sound sof the Black Crowes "She talks to Angels", Sarah McLachlans "Building a Mystery and U2's "All I want is you." Perfect for editing, perfect for the weather.
Through the windows is wafting a great smell of jasmine. Maybe next door has a plant somewhere or its the wall of washing powder that I can see straight out of my window, either way its kind of nice today.
If I had a canvas I'd be sorely tempted to get naked and get my paints out and just nymph it up and make an abstract. Thank God for high fences.
In summary it's a creative day.
Yesterday was an entirely different story. Yesterday was argue with my shrink day. Actually the more I see him the more I like him. He makes me think, and I nearly always feel the benefit from going to see him. For the next month he has me doing a mood diary for him. Twice a day I am supposed to record my mood, a morning and night insight into how Kate feels. Should be interesting. I should also record anything else of significance. I can just see him being delivered a fully bound volume of how Kate feels.
Please excuse me for a second while I again go and crawl on the floor of the boys room in order to help find the worlds tiniest screw from my husbands glasses. You know what boys are like, they have to pull everything apart.
The time has come for me to have to leave the peace and seculsion that I have built up around me today and brave the frontiers of the supermarket in order to forage for a meal to cook the two lemurs that live with me.
For now I hope this finds you well and that your day contained at least one moment where you threw open your arms and spun.

Love Katie xoxoxox

Ok bloggers now its your turn. In order to write a daily letter I need a response. Comment, ask me the questions that you've always wanted to ask me, or ask me the questions you can't figure out in your daily crossword.

SARTORIAL DILEMMA'S

2008-10-16T10:39:00.002+11:00

Yes, I've gone girly. I'm having an Audrey Hepburn moment. I'm channeling the spirit of Jackie O.
Why?
Possibly because I have just got my hands on a copy of Sex And The City The Movie.
Maybe because whilst out on a bread and salad mission a few days ago I happened across the most girly dreamy cinderella fuck you dress I have seen in a long time.
I keep going back to admire it. Daily.
Full length strapless, pure white with black embroidery, its the dress I have been dreaming about at night.
Its not a matter of where the hell would I wear it, its a matter of love at first sight longing for something so utterly perfect and the shoes to go with it.
Think about it, great fashion moments of history?
Lady Godiva saying it with skin and just right hair.
Princess Diana emerging from the car (on the night Charles confessed to fucking a paddock cow) in that slinky screw you slip of black magic.
Hepburn in almost everything she wore.
And Fonda as Bararella in those boots. Who could forget.
Perhaps its a reaction to my new job status of Cinderella. The others who live here come to a table I have set, to a meal that I have cooked and proceed to eat zombie like and then just as zombie like they move away from the table leaving me to do the dishes.
How do you justify purchasing a dress with no purpose or place to wear it?
Diana impulse bought that notorious dress and it hung in her arsenal waiting for just the right moment.
Does fashion necessarily have to be about functionality to all who aren't supermodels or Hilton sisters or can the purchase of the extravagant slip of perfection be justifiued as "its so pretty!"?
I've just brought a wardrobe of sensible work wear, maybe this justifies the purchase of pretty?
What do you think? Fashion as pure functionality or fashion just for that once in a lifetime fuck you moment?

ALL THAT HOCUS POCUS

2008-10-11T11:47:00.002+11:00

I'd like to believe I am a skeptical old soul, not believing in that which I can't see.
The truth of the matter is somewhat murkier.
Yesterday I went to a medium and had a reading. I had my skeptical attitude on, my cynical retorts ready to fire.
The medium disarmed with hardly any resistance.
The first thing she said to me was that she sensed an animal presence slinking around at my feet.
My eyebrows raised slightly. Joe Murphy Mutt has taken to slinking around at my feet, in fact he caused my accident with my feet a few weeks ago.
She also sensed the prescence of a slinking cat. In fact I used to catch site of a slinky ghost cat at my last abode. He hasn't made himself known at the new house but she said he is definately there.
On to a little past lives voodoo prediction. Apparently I was once a lieutenant in Joan of Arcs army and was subsequently burnt at the stake.
Which is kind of funny because whenever I watch a movie with people burning at the stake I have to fast forward it, I just can't bear to watch it.
I also have strong ties to shaman and the egyptian connection in me is very strong.
The medium predicted accurately that I shut out anyone who wants to love me, I tend to turn them away without thought and she says that I am surrounded by unconditional love.
Hmmm, by my definition love always comes with strings attached - always.
She also said that I don't drink enough water, and thats certainly true.
The most surprising prediction of the session was that I am full of magic yet i don't harness it and use it to its full potential.
Abracadabra.
For $20 it was a cute way to spend a glorious sunny morning.

THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE A NEW HOME.

2008-09-29T08:01:00.007+10:00

You know, as backyards go some are roomy and spacious, others are brickworked courtyards. The following is the extension of our backyard.
If we had not decided on leaving home and moving I would never have seen this. Even though the wetlands is a well advertised part of my town I just wouldn't have gone there. To my mind the wetlands was just another check off on the school excursions program. Now it's right outside my back garden gate.
True, its no Serengetti with wild elephants roaming under an expansive blue sky but hey it doesn't suck either.
I haven't been out shooting much lately but on this walk I took with Vic I hauled along the camera. Its a damn heavy bit of kit but its permanently attached to my right hand, all two kilo's of it.
Sunset. The wetlands isn't the most advisable place to be as the sun is setting, all of the predators come out to play but hey as sunset shots go I kinda love this capture. This is my backyard, for $350 a week its amazing value.

WORDS FROM THE WALKING WOUNDED

2008-09-28T20:55:00.002+10:00

Part of getting the perfect picture is the ability to use your feet not to mention not looking down while walking across the pipeline. I did, I got dizzy, I'm far to fucking old for this and so I slid on my arse in Vic's jeans the rest of the way.

Two weeks ago I tripped over Joe Murphy Mutt and did some damage to my legs. A broken bone in the right foot, ligament damage to both legs and soft tissue damage to both feet, legs, right shoulder wrist and upper arm.

Today while going to visit the lost boy Dobby I fell and smashed my left knee thus adding to the injury toll.

Don't overdo it is something I hear alot of,now it looks like seven weeks off my feet to give it all time to rest.

And its frustrating me already.

Expect righteous cranky rantiness for the next few weeks.

ROAD RAGE

2008-09-24T06:58:00.004+10:00

Since Dive is busy bringing us the best of British with his Goodwood series I thought I'd present the flipside.
Road Rage, we all suffer from it in various forms. True not all of us get out of our vehicle with sticks and stones to break their bones but we all do alot of name calling.
Whilst going to check the mail we ran into that most annoying of creatures - AccelerBrake Betty. The dotty woman driver who can't help but drive ten kilometres under the speed limit in the right and therefore faster lane. The bitch who applies her brakes so often she could be her own driving disco light.
I personally hate this woman and always have the notion of just giving her a little tap with the bonnet of my car, just a friendly shunt down the road, possibly sending her careening off into a gutter where she belongs.
Of course its not just women who drive at snails pace. Ever come across Freeway Freddy? The dude who holds up commuters with his steady 80 kilometres an hour in the 110 zone? You can always spot him ahead of you from the line up of cars banking right to avoid the slow poke. I think they should have a separate freeway for people like these.
And then theres the Lost ones. Driving around unfamiliar territory swerving on and off the road generally making a nuisance of themselves. My advice, if in doubt take a cab.
But the one I reserve my unadulterated loathing for is the school mummy. Clogging up traffic lanes in their mini vans and hulking four wheel drives that never get used for that purpose. These people should be banned altogether. Not only have they slowed everyone down in order to get their overweight playstation addicted adhd brat the few blocks to school, then they cruise the various coffee shops till they find a likeminded coven to go cackle with.
No wonder we suffer road rage, no wonder we yell and tailgate and flip them the bird. No wonder our car horns tap out a rhythmic beat of move out of the way wanker.

YOU DECIDE CAUSE I CAN'T

2008-09-23T07:05:00.005+10:00

Following on from yesterdays musings about what makes a house a home I've decided some artwork needs to adorn the walls. Now I could go out and spend a few hundred dollars on abstract painted canvases but who has that type of money these days? Instead the compromise is printing some of my own work for the walls.
My photograpgh collection is taking on a life of its own and will soon need its own apartment just for storage but here are a few that I may consider for the walls.
Problem is narrowing it down.
So, over to you, what do you think? Which should be hung on the walls?

WHAT MAKES A HOUSE A HOME?

2008-09-22T07:02:00.002+10:00

I went to collect the mail from my old house the other day. As I was driving up the street towards the place I had called home for 13 years it occurred to me that I didn't have that going home feeling that I expected to have.
I felt totally disconnected, blase even about the house. It wasn't home. In fact when I started to think about it there's no place that feels like home to me. When I go to my parents house that doesn't feel like home either even though I spent sixteen years there.
Does that make me a Nomad? Should I give it all up and spend my days weaving camel hair extensions onto where ever I happen to be? Should I get a camel? Maybe some sheep?
In fact Feral Avenue never felt like a home, it was always just a house with lots of people and various animals living there. I put up pictures, knick knacks and potted plants and it still felt like a vacant vacuum of a place.
So what makes a house a home?
There is the standard answer that family make a home but honestly thats just crap because to me its unobtainable. 2.5 kids and a minivan is never going to be part of my future.
My husband remarked that this new place feels like a home, that Feral Avenue never did. But he couldn't put his finger on why.
My friend commented that this new place has a good positive vibe.
I find it all a little existential dilemma making.
A home is where you be yourself and do what you want right? Well here we are in a rental that feels like home except that we have a contract that disallows us to do whatever makes us feel comfortable.
You may put up a picture in this house if at first you consult beg and plead in triplicate to a bunch of urban corporate suits who don't live here. There are of course some picture hooks already established in the walls but there are also whole rooms that are vacant spaces begging for art or pictures, but no hooks.
I have no enthusiasm for unpacking any of my knicks or knacks for that matter.
You cannot put a hook out on the back deck to hang up a flowerpot. I've cunningly got around this by cable tying my window boxes to the railing. The contract says nothing about the banning of cable ties.
The front garden is a series of hedging plants, probably really cute when they were first planted but now just look overbearingly clumpy to me. I feel like getting out there with a pair of cutters and shaping them all into a row of old ladies at the lawn bowls.
And here's the other thing that bothers me about the perfect house. Snakes. I knew going in to this place that snakes were going to be a factor, we pretty much border on a natural wetlands.
Vic the Groover wa sout making friends with the back neighbours who informed her that we have a predominate population of Red Belly Black Snakes out here.
Hmmmm. While its true that at Feral Avenue we had the occasional scary mid summer visit from a brown snake, far more aggressive little tykes, so nasty in fact that not only will they inject you with venom but they will in certain cases seek you out, hunt you down and fuck you up on purpose, I can't say I relish the meeting with a red belly. They will fuck you up as well but while browns are sociopathic fuckers, red bellies are more your sulky insolent teenagers with maybe a gun in their backpacks.
My ranty point being that while we have rules about picture hooks and rules that govern occupation of the perfect house, there was no disclosure about snakes.
Every chocolate bar you see these days has the warning "May contain nuts or nut traces." I'm sure the Muslim world would be all for a warning that said "May contain bacon and send you to hell."
Well nowhere in the lengthy wordy rental contract does it say "May contain snakes." Hows that for non disclosure!
To me it may be a little thing, I'm a native of this country but to you guys, consider if you had just arrived in Australia and rented the perfect house. Wouldn't you like to know that just maybe you might get bitten?
They used to call this country Terra Australis and that pretty much sums up all of the stingey bitey things we have over here.
While perusing the rental agreement I noticed the passage about my right to pursue "quiet enjoyment" of the premises. Trust me, if i meet a native slithering thing i'm going to be anything but quiet and i swear i won't enjoy it.
But my question at the begining of this post is this, what makes a house a home?

WHERE HAS SHE BEEN?

2008-09-15T07:10:00.008+10:00

Home. At least it had been for almost 13 years. What have I been up to during my latest blog absence? Quite a bit as it turns out. We decided after much thought to sell Feral Avenue and move. As with all things we do it was a snap decision and we ended up moving lock stock and barrel twice in 11 short days.

It came down to a simple choice, house or lifestyle. In the end no stress, better lifestyle and financial breathing space won out easily.

It wasn't an easy move, so much of my life was wrapped up in the neighbourhood. It was the scene for years of the titanic struggle between good and evil. Super dad and Cruella, and promises made to a small frightened child. I have fulfilled those promises, Skitch is now safe well and can never be taken back by Cruella.
It was time to move on.

Before we left forever we signed the concrete slab of the back room. A small reminder that once we had been there. And then we proceeded on to our new life.
September 11. I turned 36 in our new house. Box city. I've yet to fully unpack the numerous boxes associated with moving over a decade of your life someplace else.
I'm planning on having a good old fashioned slumber party when we are all settled in.
But I took a breather this weekend just gone. A road trip up the coast. I haven't had a long haul drive for a while now and with music blaring and spring sun shining down Vic the Groover and I set off on a mission to retrieve her books from the northern point of our state.
Along the way we stopped for I get tunnel vision whilst driving on the highway. Bypasses may be faster but you really do have to stop and see the scenery every now and then.
Tyres for whatever reason have become a photographic theme with me. They just seem to pop up everywhere.

And this discovery alongside a winding road made me stop and go back. The Thong tree. Thongs in Australia are footwear, not dirty little pieces of fabric worn up the butt crack. There were three tree's in this grouping, all with footwear nailed to their trunks. Too funny and so Australian.
After the great book retrival and me stopping to do a quick work related photo shoot, we set off home. Unfortunately we passed Fredo's Pie Shop. And we stopped. Fredo's have the greatest range of pies I have ever seen. In fact you really are spoilt for choice. Vic and I went nuts and ended up requesting almost one of everything please. A great tub of pies came out and off we went again.

Whilst driving into the night we looked left and saw the above. Sunset over somewhere in between two other places. This is when you really appreciate the country that you live in. When it shows you just how spectacular it can be. Straight off the side of the highway and out it was for pictures. Incidentally when you are wearing socks but no shoes its best to stop and put the shoes on before jumping out to capture a moment, the moundy gravelly bits on the side of the road tend to hurt the feet and ruin the socks. So sunset was dust and we had a four hour drive through darkness to reach home.

And then halfway home we realised that a car stacked to the rafters with Vics bits and pieces provides very little stable room for transporting pies. They were for miles perched precariously behind Vics head. If we had been pulled over by the Police we would have had alot of explaining to do, a car piled high with pies and various chip packets, the detrius of a road trip, of course he would think we had been smoking the wacky weed. So what happens when you brake hard and turn left?
A pie avalanche occurs. All 31 flavours came raining down on us. A sub zero meat missile. Thank god they were cold and in their own wrappers. We really should have been expecting it although they had travelled so well they had lulled us into a false sense of security.
Pies, Great for a snack, bad travel companions.

OLD REQUESTS REVISITED

2008-08-25T13:53:00.002+10:00

I started off my morning watching the replay of the Bejing Closing ceremony. And I read the news reports lauding it as the best games ever.
I have one statement for the world. Free Tibet you arseholes.

Right, now that the political grumpiness is out of the way some of you may remember that I once wished for a space of my own, a room, one small space in my home that was mine. In a way I have finally achieved that. True, people still come trooping in there and with two computers in the room its rarely ever the quiet sanctuary that I had originally pictured. But the room is home to my stuff, my camera's, my portfolios and a huge mother of a desk.
On the walls are some of my favourite recent images and I have plans for one huge print on another wall. Seeing your work being printed in poster size gives you that same small thrill that you get when you realise hey I created something cool.
But with something like 10,000 images taken over the last year or so which is the one who wins the lucky wall prize?
Ah, when you get what you want you end up with more questions. Life is competitive that way.

IS ATTITUDE THE NEW BLACK?

2008-08-23T12:06:00.003+10:00

Screw the Book Review, its time for a kate - ism.
I give you the Pelican, Gods scariest creature. I'm almost convinced that Tim Burton invented these weirdo pre historic creatures.
Notice the attitude, the poise, the pose. It could almost be a hint from THAT book.
Monochrome dressing, arms raised for height and slimness and Attitude.
Long slender necks (just right for kissing according to Dive) but notice the pot belly protruding from under the wings?
Goes to show you that nobody is perfect, not even something designed by God.

BLONDE AMBITION

2008-08-22T13:26:00.002+10:00

Ok, moving on to the next in the series of chapters designed to make your eyes roll, to stay young you must have light coloured hair. Dye it blonde but NEVER go with ashy blonde streaks.
Hmmmmm, personally uber blonde Donatella Versace looks to be about a million years old.
Strange that today on Oprah they have Cher and Tina Turner. 61 and 68. Cher is blonde, Turner is brunette, and Turner looks so much younger.
THE BOOK LIES.
Whenever you go in desperation into that self help aisle of the bookstore you're invariably looking for a jolt, a quick fix, an afirmation.
But, if we could stop there at the threshold of the bookstore and realise, "Ok I have identified I have a problem but a book won't set things straight, only I can do that" then we would save a bundle of money.
We don't, we go and wallow in the self help section, we plunk down our hard earned cash to gain the secrets and end up with a book collection that we hide from friends and visitors.
We follow trends and fads and go on diets that make us a lethal health hazard. ( the cabbage diet comes to mind here).
I've come to the conclusion that the quest for perfection in someone elses eyes is so much more sought after than the quest for inner happiness.
Yet its happiness that I would rather have. Sure I've been barbie doll statuesque, and what woman wouldn't like to eliminate their crows feet, the muffin top, the veiny legs, whatever their personal pet hate might be, but thats just a body, just a vessel.
Right now I am sitting here with a massive case of bed hair, but I'm happy.
True I'm blonde but I've been thinking about darker streaks, chocolate brown syrupy streaks.
Age making maybe but hey, everyone has to grow up at some stage.

THE BIG BANG THEORY

2008-08-21T09:58:00.002+10:00

Bangs, or as we non americans call them, fringes seem to be the first part of growing old disgracefully young looking.
As we delve into the wisom of age cheating looks i'll skip the super hyped introduction and the first chapter which is all about catagorising you as high medium or low maintainance.
Apparently to look younger all you have to do is cut yourself a fringe or in american, some bangs. And by the way should some american read this please explain to me why you call them bangs?
I've almost always had a fringe, except for when I was born and at age five when the next door neighbours son decided to play hairdresser with me. So on this one I am covered.
Check, i have a fringe.
A longish fringe is better guys so start growing that hair.
In other wisdom a part down the middle of your head ages you. Difficult since this is me, dead straight hair, dead straight part right down the middle.
Perfect for guiding the autopsy chainsaw but apparently my part and I have to well, part. I now have to train my hair to grow to one side. Do you know how hard that is?
Over the next few weeks I will attempt to teach my old part new tricks.
So everyone, combs at the ready and pull in a sideways direction please.
Up do's are also out. As is helmet hair. And Bo Dereks plaits.
Is it just me or is it starting to sound like send in the clones? Scores of mid age women all wrestling with their combs for the perfect side part. And bangs, lets not forget the big bang theory.
The one thing I do find really irksome about this chapter is that scrunchies are out. Nasty little things that make you look ten years older.
I disagree. A scrunchie is one of lifes necessities. I don't care what the book or carrie bradshaw says, you just can't get through life without one handy.
How else do you hold back the tide of fly away hair when you are trying to do something practical?
And they come in handy in the garden as well. When you are out doing battle with the out of season aganpathus and they are looking kind of scraggly you just pop a scrunchie over the top and make them stand up nicely. I've used scrunchies to semi tame the wilderness when I am out shooting. Rather than cut off a pesky branch i just tie it back with my trusty scrunchie.
So, two chapters in and i've already had a disagreement with my new looks guru. Ah I feel the old kate starting to reappear.

VANITY FAIR

2008-08-20T10:11:00.003+10:00

Sometimes you just shouldn't listen to advice.
The advice in question pertained to my bedtime reading material which is mainly comprised of forensic case studies and world war two biographies. Nice healthy real happenings.
A while ago I was asked why I don't read any pfaff girly books. So I decided, given this new frame of medicated mind to try it. My hands reached for Olivia Goldsmith's "The Switch" something I consider way light reading. Diet literature if you will.
A woman who has just had her fortieth birthday stands naked in front of a mirror and takes a good hard look at herself. I really should have put the book down there and then.
Instead I thought thats not a bad idea, I'll try that.
In the middle of winter.
With yet another snotty cold.
Whilst having the worlds worst hair day.
You can see where this is going can't you.
I can tell you for a fact that it takes a split second to go from medicated zombie to manically depressed.
The mirror survived due to the fact its too big and obvious for me to smash.
Mirror mirror on the wall, fuck you for making me feel bad.
This overdose of reality sent me plumetting back to cranky land. the only cure was an emergency cut and colour.
And a healthy avoidance of that mirror ever since.
When did I start to get those lines under my eyes? I knew I had them, I reguarly photoshop them out. But this was the first time I had really looked and seen.
When did my mouth start to turn downwards?
Thankfully the ladies are still in decent shape otherwise the whole year would have been lost and given up to a real funk of institutional worthy depression.
Age, it seems, creeps up on us.
A few years ago when I started working in welfare I was considered the young hip cool worker. The sassy thirty something with the wardrobe that the kids wanted to borrow.
Which just goes to show you that giving a damn about people turns you into grandma without a clue.
I walked into a bookstore two days ago and actually considered getting a book teaching you how not to look old.
After this morning confrontation with the mirror, ( I couldn't avoid it, thats where the tissues were) thats exactly what I am going to do, go and buy the book and share with you the wisdom of some smartarse who can no doubt now afford a face lift and some lipo because I brought her book.
Stay tuned and we shall all learn how not to grow old gracefully.

ALL SHE WANTED WAS A HUG.

2008-08-19T21:16:00.002+10:00

Happy Birthday Ms Messy Mouse. I can't believe you made it to 18 without me wringing your neck.

With much love and hugs.xoxoxoxoxoxox

THE LAST LOW BLOW OF CHILDHOOD

2008-08-15T12:33:00.002+10:00

I come from a country thats deemed lucky.
At 18 you are supposed to become an adult. Free to vote, free to drink, free to go to an adult prison.
18, the end of childhood.
For those of you that have read me over the years you will already know the family that i write about today. Sons and daughters of Cruella, the vicious anti mummy who shadows these kids lives.
Yesterday was the eldests 18th birthday, the official end of her childhood. Cruella couldn't resist sticking the knife into her daughter, a verbally abusive put down delivered via telephone for her only daughters coming of age.
What happened to a simple Happy Birthday?
Instead she got "I can't come up there for your birthday I have other children to look after who are more important than you anyway."
Another case of us rolling our eyes and consoling a child.

CAN A MERE MORTAL CHANGE THE WORLD?

2008-07-30T13:26:00.002+10:00

I was told a story last night that proves that the comments from my last post will never be replicated.
An old man, in his late seventies was taken from a house after a period of sickness. He had been too ill to get out of his armchair for days, he hadn't eaten, he was suffering from hypothermia. He died shortly after being admited to hospital.
Is it a case of "If a tree falls in the woods does anyone hear it?"
Perhaps Pink Floyd said it better "On the turning away, from the pale and downtrodden.
And the words that they say which we won't understand, don't accept that whats happening is just a case of others suffering, or you'll find that your joining in the turning away."
Life, seems to be a series of disconnections.
And yet here I am, snuggly drugged, comfortably numbed. Taking anti depressants to cope with a depressing world.
When did the world stop becoming a place of joy and discovery? When did little boys stop sharing their lunch and thereby creating the miracle of the mountain?
Does it happen magically when you hit adulthood?
Is it the opinion of a psych who says people rarely change the world. Its impossible. (And such grounding words from the psych angered me sufficiently to tell him he was devoid of hope and full of shit)
The theory that no one can change the world I don't agree with.
Hitler changed the world. JFK changed the world. Diana changed the world.
When thinking of changing the world we invariably think of the ones in power, the almost mythic icons, the rich, the powerful, the deranged.
What can us mere mortals offer in the way of changing the world. We who possess no super powers or mega riches?
An old man called John died a few days ago.
A blanket might have changed his world.

DID JESUS INVENT SASHIMI?

2008-07-26T11:58:00.003+10:00

It a curious question to ask but you know how the mind works when you are standing in the shower.
For some reason I was thinking about the whole miracle on the mountain. The feeding of 5000 people with loaves and fishes.
The problem with the bible is that it really doesn't go into any detail about anything.
For example, how do we know there were 5000 people there? Did they have a doorcounter? Were there ticket sales? Some guy standing there with a clicker?
Call me skeptical but perhaps not all were the faithful, maybe some just came for the food.
If I took a quick survey of my immediate neighbourhood I can definately tell you that there are plenty of people around me who don't like fish yet the bible tells us that all of these people were in fact fish eaters. And there is no mention that all of the attendee's were evil whale eating japanese people. If there was the merest hint that Jesus was on a world tour then I could possibly believe the whole loaves and fishes theory.
They go into no detail about what sort of fish, how was it served?
Did Jesus invent sashimi that day? Was soy sauce provided?
I can't imagine someone as disagreeable as Judas putting up with a serving of cold raw cod without the added attraction of a slice of lemon.
Or perhaps thats why in the end Judas betrayed him, maybe Judas suffered a nasty dose of Vibrio Parahaemolyticus after eating the raw mountain fish.
And while we are on the subject, what type of bread was it? White high fibre? Stone ground wholemeal? Sourdough? Some sort of flat middle eastern origami bread?
Details, my friends make a story believable.
Did the apostles whip out a hibachi grill and cook those fish? Were there any complaints? Were Peter, Paul and Mary in charge of buttering the rolls? Were orderly lines formed or did the crowd surge? Were bibs provided? And did they use the head of John The Baptist on a platter as a serviette dispenser?
Details are severely lacking when it comes to Jesus and his exploits.

QUICK VISIT

2008-07-20T23:10:00.004+10:00

This is what I have been up to recently. Vic the Groover accompanied me on a dress shoot I did last week, I cunningly got her in on the act and here we see her in an 80's confection worthy of a Dynasty wedding.
My house is back to blessed late night silence, I will use the opportunity to do a mass edit of my work over the past two months.
But I am back on blogger to stay and i have many interesting tidbits and tales to regale you with. Like how handy dental floss really is.
Right now though I am content to say that I have managed to post today and sign offf, sit back and listen to my music played in my room at my computer work station. Finally a room of my own as become a reality.

A MINUTES SILENCE

2008-07-19T10:40:00.003+10:00

For a week my house has been a hive of activity, a hub of humanity and the breeding ground of a very edgy yabbie named Edgar.
I've yet to achieve what I set out to at the begining of the week. Its hard, almost impossible to take the kind of dark, emotion laden pictures that I am craving to create when you have an 11 year old boy residing with you who won't understand the finer points of imagery or my self healing attempt to erase my tumultuous recent past through the digital film medium.
Having to resort to taking prettified pictures all week has left me on a downer when I have visions of human bondage, slasher films and grave digging running through an over activity imagination that has been denied its creative outlet.
Is this what the term "tortured artist"means?
Right now I have a minutes blessed silence in the house, and its killing me. Another glorious beautiful day stunted by inactivity. The resident model is still snoring away in bed. One photo session on the beach at the begining of the week seems to be the limit of her activity. Pretty pictures yes, stunning images i got but its time to pay the rent, and rent paying in my house usually involves posing.
Thwarted, I wonder what I shall do with a day that stretches with promise with no pay off.
Is it time to phone a friend, or simply seize models off the street?
Kidnap is looking less felony like right now.
I was once content to simply stand and be the model, be the subject of someone elses creativity, now I have the desire to create, if only I could clone myself and keep the clone for those days when I have inspiration but no participation.
I'm frustrated, lets see where the day takes me.

A MOMENTARY LAPSE IN REASONING

2008-07-18T21:09:00.005+10:00

Ok so its been a while hasn't it.
I've been concentrating on working out whether I am a). Totally deranged, b) somewhat depressed, c) In posession of a killer personality disorder or d) all of the above.
The verdict is in. After seeing the doc this morning he has told me that not only is he happy with my progress but that I now only have to go see him when i have a need of it. That in fact I am merely bohemian and artistic in my personality and there's nothing wrong with that.
Of course the whole not sleeping issues hasn't ever been addressed but I have found a novel way around that - after dinner rum and cokes, knocks me on my arse for seven odd hours.
I have decided with absolutely no regret to axe any thoughts of welfare or going back to it unless its fun, creative, artistic and not a drain on my well being.
Not to mention I won't ever put myself through the torture of suicide shifts and endless afternoon shifts again, its day work only for this little black duck.
I've learnt quite a bit during the course of my therapy. I am who I am to quote from Vic the Groover, I'm a bohemian gypsy photographer sort, not given to the conformity of boring cardigans and brown hairdo's. I'm Kate, I'm shoeless, but rarely sockless.
Without a clue some of the time but always with a cutting edge idea for the next photo quest. Blood splattered bride is my latest obsession, the real story behind the happily never after.
So here I am back among the bloggers, my personal quest, to complete a full month of everyday posts.
Hold me to it.

WHY DO GREAT IDEA'S OCCUR IN SHITTY WEATHER?

2008-06-17T11:01:00.002+10:00

Its past midnight. You wake up and just know without a doubt that an image would look great done like this. Problem is apart from it being midnight you happen to be stuck in storm season and just know that your models will inevitably be sooky la la's about dipping their perfectly polished toes in arctic feeling water.
Frustration sets in.
You could of course leave the idea on the story board and try it in warmer weather but with warm weather comes tourists who will all head to your location on the day of a shoot. Its a guarenteed piss off factor.
If you are shooting silk and satin you ideally don't want close ups of goose pimpled bluish hypothermia flesh. Nor do you want your models figure obliterated by them wearing long johns or steamer suits.
I've been looking at grey skies for six weeks now and I am officially over it.
Someone needs to dial up a few sunny days before summer. By summer fuel prices will be so high in this country that only the super rich will be able to afford to drive. And lets face it, the bus sucks.
My morning prayer has become a sarcastic rendition of "Dear God, Judging by the weather you seem to be depressed. Take a pill, call a friend get some help and snap the hell out of it."
Last night I had one of those light bulb moments whilst trawling through my archives. I drove out into a rainy night to do a little location scouting. Something I prefer to do on foot but given the weather I won't chance a cold this year. No one likes a photographer who uses the sneezing to achieve soft focus filtering.
I've awoken to yet another shitty miserable day. I'm off to shoot my locations and plan my upcoming bridezilla goes nuts shoot - basically wedding dress hell and hijinks.
So here's me, rugged up like a big brown bear off to shoot the wide grey yonder.
Someone send me some sun.
Your mission should you choose to accept it - Bridezilla shots - The craziest place or situation you can think of for a wedding dress shoot.

THE PERFECT PORTRAIT

2008-06-13T12:07:00.003+10:00

I've come to the conclusion that I far prefer candid shots to the set up family portrait style of photography. I do both these days, studio sittings and casual portraiture. The life seems to be sapped out of a family portrait by the whole idea that this picture will be framed and displayed for "other people" to see. Therefore everyone MUST be on their best behaviour in their good clothes even if that image is so far removed from their everyday lives.
On the weekend I was down doing such a photograph. The two older chidlren had been out all night and were somewhat worse for wear during the shoot. The youngest was a fidget butt who had an attention span of about ten seconds.
The mother asked for a formal seated family shot and looking through the lens I could see that this family was grinning and bearing it. It wasn't fun and it wasn't them at all.
Personally I would have preferred to shoot them in a more relaxed candid setting. But given that the children were less than receptive to the idea it didn't work out that way and so I snapped away and dismissed them with the minimum of shots and set up.
Luckily I get to resit this family in a few weeks time. I'll get the shots that I want then.

Some days when I am out shooting scenery I get lucky and a random human being wanders into my shot. Two rapid snaps of this woman and I was done and back to the scenery. It wasn't until I downloaded the shots that I realised how much this worked. So much for hours of set up and pre planning. Candid seems to be where I'm getting better. Candid seems to produce the emotion that I am after in a shot. Candid works for me.
So I have set myself a challenge. To continue to do the formal portrait but inject a studio sitting with life and vitality. No pixie photos for this little black duck. And then learn how to sell the non obvious better shot to a family. As a child I remember the family getting dressed and trooping off to get the standard family photo for the wall. Horrid backdrops, utterly unrealistic, no life in the subjects. Cookie cutter smiles or your grounded so behave. No though of capturing the real relationships of the people that are being put through their paces. In a word Yuck.
So, todays question is this. Tell me about your favourite family snap be it formal portrait or candid capture. Why do you like it, I want to know?

WHATS YOUR IDEA OF SENSUALITY?

2008-06-06T00:05:00.002+10:00

I've been asked to do a lingere shoot.
To me a lingerie shoot should celebrate a woman, make her feel special.
I asked the husband whoose idea it was what his thoughts and expectations were of the coming shoot. What sort of photos did he have in mind.
His answer - sensual but slutty.
Ummmm, ok. Define that please.
Slutty but not something that she will be embarrassed to look at. Tits, arse and face.
I'm not sure how many women wish to be defined by the word slutty, even if its shot in soft light so it mimics sensual.
What defines sensuality in a nude portrait? What defines slutty? Where is that fine line? Does it exist or is it all down to one persons perception?
I wasn't even thinking of doing nude portraits until he dropped that pearl of artistic critcique into my lap today.
To me, a nude portraits can be sensual, it can be art. But not full frontal in your face nudity. Thats the sort of photos they make those compact digital camera's for. Snap away with abandon in your bedroom but please don't call it sensual.
I sat and thought about it.
What represents sensual to me? What do I do when a client has a half baked idea? What happens when the clients husband seems to be the driving force behind a shoot that is supposed to make her feel good but may turn into a regret? What happens if she likes the results but he doesn't feel they are slutty enough?
And back to the question - what is slutty? What is sensual?
What are your thoughts?

NOW HEAR THIS...........

2008-06-03T17:51:00.002+10:00

Doctor smarty pants has diagnosed me as having crappy attitude syndrome which sort of amuses me because I wonder what he would make of Old K on a bad day. I am apparently also negative, aggressive, a glass is half empty sort of person. I explained that I usually only drink half glasses anyway. For homework I need to go away and workout why my life is a shitty crapfest and why it is all my fault and not someone elses.
Right now my meds are causing me to want to peel the skin off my face as it feels like bugs are crawling under my skin.
And he wonders why I might be displaying the traits of crappy attitude syndrome.
On the home front Vic the Groover has lost her bounce and is rattling around like a minature nazi grumbling about the rudeness of unborn relatives. I keep telling her to be serene and realise that babies come when they are ready and not before without scalpel intervention. Labour and long labour is a wonderful thing in my eyes. If these women who will one day graduate to blocking supermarket aisles with their impossible prams don't suffer during child birth well they got off far to easy and deserve an ADHD child with a chucky complex.
Hmmmm, that sounded like a few words from my mental illness talking.
Hubby has a new mobile phone and for the last few days I have been subjected to every ringtone on teh planet. Yes Dive you'd be having a coniption fit by now. I have warned Hubby that this type of behaviour is not acceptable at all.
Right now Hubby and his Number 2 wife Vic the Groover are sitting on the lounge exchanging ring tones.
This does not help my crappy attitude syndrome at all.
So what will help?
Dressing the the ungirly groover in lingerie to practice for a shoot I have coming up.
And yes i will blog the results.
Revenge is sweet when your a cranky old cow.
Mooooooo.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN?

2008-06-01T21:14:00.002+10:00

What happens when you wait with tingling anticipation all week to destroy a mid 80"s wedding dress on a pristine stretch of Aussie beach?
You get excited despite the evil zombie tablets.
What happens when you wake up to a shitty day, no sun, smattering rain, clouds that are to damn lazy to configure in any artistically pleasing way?
You think about kicking the dog, you think about going back to bed.
Or you do this. Drive a few kilometres and do a bit of bushwalking to capture this.

BACK WITH AN ALL NEW DILEMMA.

2008-05-25T14:58:00.003+10:00

So, as you can see I haven't fallen into the abyss of blog abandonment.
I'm having an "I don't give a shit"hair month lately hence the wild swirling mass in the picture taken by Gayman when he came to visit a few weeks ago, or was it last week? Time seems to slip away from me at the moment. Days slide into more days and weeks pass.
The problem with major scale depression seems to be a lack of motivation, communication, inspiration and for me at the present time, a lack of transportation. This means no early insomnia morning jaunts to capture a sunrise.
Grrrrr.
This also means that my latest flight of fancy has to be meticulously planned and i am a spontaneous kind of girl.
I have in my possession one of those sad beruffled, sequined, beaded disasters of a 1990's wedding dress. We're talking Dynasty meets Princess Di.
I'll never wear it, in fact i'm amazed that I ever considered wearing it for my called off mid nineties marriage attempt.
I recalled that it was sitting bunched up in obscurity in a wardrobe and decided that since "trashing the dress"has become a frontier of photography that I might just put the poor thing to good use and grab myself a model and location and photograph said trashing of the dress.
I have the location scouted, I have the shots all layed out in diagrams and sketches BUT its gettiing it all together that is proving a problem.
I come across so many people who say "I hate having my photograph taken" that I am begining to think the world see's itself as far to ugly and far to serious to contemplate having any real fun. They fail to remember that in the digital age, if they really don't like the results then the delete button is a mere finger stroke away. Gone forever. Simple as that.
I'm quite used to having a camera pointed in my direction. Mr Cellophane cured me of the scowling face in front of a camera simply by always having one in his hand until I got so used to it that I don't take any notice of it anymore.
But what do you do when you are shooting a person who thinks they are the ugliest creature on earth? NOT photogenic, always look "terrible in photos? I ask them to look at the photos that have been taken of them. A pattern usually appears. Defensiveness at a camera pointed at them will make them shrink into themselves, shoulders hunched and that look of "fuck off" appears on an otherwise pleasant face.
Anyone would think I was pointing a gun at them. If I were to point a gun at them at least I would get some gorgeous shots of fear and human vulnerability. But no, I get Quasimodo saying cheese. Which is great if you happen to be the casting director for the Addams family but if you are trying to capture a person whose name isn't Gomez then all you get is a tense person dying to get away from you.
And here's the thing about saying "Cheese" - it makes your chin pointed, your mouth into something akin to those clowns at the show that you feed balls into, your eyes squint up. Say it to yourself now and notice what it does to your face.
Not very pleasant or natural is it?
So back to the wedding trashing topic. The modelI have in mind is yet to be convinced. Absolutely beautifdul face but at an age where she doesn't like her picture being taken. She is stunning and would really make the shots I want to take. I could always settle for less and use a different model but I'm set in my ways and there is a certain look I am wanting to achive with this shoot. Perhaps if i bribe her with McDonalds or chocolate.
Vic and I were at the beach yesterday doing some sand modelling and there was a wedding party present. I watched for maybe ten seconds, naff smiley pretty shots, so not my genre at all. However because the bride feels like a princess you get the shots with a minimum of fuss.
So the lesson to be learnt is make the subject of your shot feel relaxed, special, pampered, whatever it takes to make them forget that there is a camera present.
Easier said than done.

DO I?

2008-05-14T23:12:00.003+10:00

Do I intend to come back to blogging? Yes as a matter of fact I do.
Do I feel better since seeing doctor smarty pants and starting on a new course of meds? No as a matter of fact I have the worlds driest mouth and throat and could happily sit with the hose on full throttle and aimed straight down my throat. And this from a non swallower.
Do I visit you all reguarly? Yes I do but I'm in stealth mode.
Do I need sleep? When don't I?
Do I have a caffiene addiction? Yes I do.
Do I intend to fix the colour fucked mess my blog is in? Yep. Its pissing me off to.

I LOVE YOU A MILLION YELLOW ROSES

2008-05-04T12:45:00.002+10:00

I remember summers spent tripping through the jungle of your garden. Stopping to smell roses planted by my great grandmother. Clad in fabrics of times gone by. Of days spent flopped on the bench on the verandah waiting for the ice cream lady who's bells could be heard streets away. Waiting for ice cream before lunch because you said that we had been good and deserved desert before lunch.
I remember boiled eggs and milk jugs and admonishments about hand washing.
I remember laying in bed on sunday mornings (soaking you called it) counting to sixty to watch the new fangled digital clock flip over yet another number.
I remember the way you shrank in your seat when you took me to see Beverly Hills Cop. You agreed that it was a good film but the blackman had a foul mouth.
I remember snuggling next to you on winter nights, content as you read me endless requests for Pookie stories.
I remember your watch, a finicky little piece of gold that you had to wind and then shake gently back and forth to get it going.
I remember you sitting in the kitchen calmly requesting me to put your earrings in. I remember trying not to make it hurt as pushed the post through such fragile old ears, almost having to repierce the holes. And you never flinched once.
I remember a letter the postman brought me when i was just a little girl longing for pierced ears myself. Mum had said I couldn't have my ears pierced until you got yours done. And so some time in your seventies you had them pierced just for me.
I remember saturday afternoons sitting on the floor watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers dance across the screen. With you in your chiar with the round cushion in your back and grandfather asleep on the lounge.
I remember you were never alseep or napping, you were just catching forty winks.
I remember spring time wars against grubs in the garden. You really didn't like grubs, they were the enemy.
I remember waltzes while ironing and how you came to like my pub rock musical noise.
I remember the last christmas I spent with you, how you were still you but you seemed to be fading away.
Iadmit I never had the courage to see you in the nursing home. That I was gutless when it came to your last years. That I was busy or sick. That I couldn't take my beloved not recognising me. I made it about how I felt when it should have been about you who gave me so much during my life. Who was my mainstay, my talisman. Who's home was always open to me, my refuge, my shelter, my familiarity.
Its gone now, my most secure place of the past. Other people live there, walking up creeky halls never knowing the significance of the creaks. Not understanding that a certain creak in the middle of the night meant that you were up because your leg was hurting.
They don't know about a night long ago when you got up to go to the bathroom and discovered 80 balloons blown up and stuck on the walls of the kitchen. They don't know about the piece of old film reel that you had in a drawer. They don't know about the family that lived there, about the grandfather who was the very first love of my life. They don't know about the room at the end of the hall were great grandfather slept. They don't know that you once told me there was nothing to be frightened of in that big cold empty room. They don't know that the front door was seldom used, that access was always a matter of going to the side door. They'll never know about you telling off an impertinant postman who told you that the mailbox was in the wrong spot. It had always been there and thats where it would stay thank you very much.
They don't know about the woman who's house it was. And they are the poorer for it.
And the world is a poorer place because you're gone from it.
I love you a million yellow roses. xoxox

SUNRISE

2008-05-02T21:55:00.003+10:00

Yesterday was round 2 of Kate vs The Psych.

I hadn't been able to sleep at all, and by 5am I was wide awake and I just knew were I to fall asleep I'd never get to my appointment on time. So instead I went out to shoot the sunset over Nobby's beach.

I've seen many sunrises while sleep deprived but never experienced one like this. Beautiful, awe inspiring and its given me a reason why people get up so bloody early.

The psych ended up winning round two of operation pigeon hole and label, giving me a course of anti depressants.

Among the many side effects is the delightful notion of non pregnant breasts suddenly starting to possibly lactate, weigh gain, sleeplesness and headaches.

I can see how lactating breasts would be beneficial and happy making to a former bulimic infertile insomniac with a history of cluster headaches. If this should occur I fully intend to smack the psych around the head with his framed fancy certificates.

I REALLY don't like him much at the moment.

SNAPPERS ANGST

2008-04-30T03:17:00.005+10:00

I've been toying with the idea of exhibiting some of my photos in an online album.

Plenty of people are doing it and I have been spending the past few weeks immersed in other peoples galleries of work.

Its daunting. I'm often awestruck by another persons work. By their unique point of view, their perspective or what they can do with camera in hand. Capturing an angle I wouldn't have thought of or a situation that never occured to me as being photogenic.

Then again I've been chasing photogenic cobwebs lately. Literally. Spiders webs are proving interesting photographically but I've yet to take THE shot.

In perusing the best of the best you begin to wonder is my work up to standard, will anyone be interested? Your best work suddenly pales in comparison.

Out come the archives, and your left wondering why you ever picked up a camera. Everything seems somehow ordinary. And then you see the work of someone who has been blessed enough to have travelled and your own home grown images sink even further under an overly critical eye. How can a simple people shot compare to elephants on the Serengetti?
Suddenly you see your work as primative. But when I looked back I saw how far I'd come. How my style and angles and composition had changed in the last two years. I'm not great but I'm not bad either. People remain my passion and I swore I'd never be any good at landscape but its begining to pull me in, goading me to take a shot, try to see from eyes not jaded by familiarity.

I REALLY WANT TO KNOW?????

2008-04-27T00:59:00.003+10:00

Do nuns, the really religious penguin dressing kind, play the organ at vespers or do they have some non nun do it for them?
When you test eggs for freshness, are they supposed to float to the top or sink to the bottom?
And why do we do this if we don't know?
Why don't architects design houses with adequate esky/cooler storage? There is never a proper place to keep them.
Why do bad chefs keep telling Gordon Ramsey that he doesn't know what he is talking about?
Why do we celebrate ANZAC Day and say "Lest we forget" and lay wreaths at dawn and the walk away from the memorial and forget for the next 364 days?
Why do negro americans still call themselves african americans when none of them go to africa?
Why do we only discover the brilliance of an artist after they are dead?
Why is it so fucking hard to load jalbum?
Why are emo's so sad when they all hang out in massive social groups?
Why am I sitting here listening to Vic who is trawling the net to find out if the Pope has a blog?
Why does the ethnic channel run a program called "the secret to happiness" at 1:30am? Are they keeping it a secret because they don't want people to be happy. Apparently they have the secret to orgasms as well. Bastards.

FURTHER MUSINGS FROM THE WEATHER CHANNEL

2008-04-22T15:44:00.002+10:00

I went to battle with my wardrobe and managed to hang everything up, put everything away and even give away those few things that have no hope of ever fitting me again.
As I sat there surrounded by the ghosts of my former personality it struck me how much my former profession had changed me.
When I first started in welfare I was bright eyed and optomisitic. My how things have change din four years. With my very first pay check I decided that since I was working in the world of ugly and yuck that I would reward myself every pay day with something frivolous and pretty. Nothing extravagant, I wasn't nursing a yearning for the crown jewels but jewelry was what I landed upon as a reward for slogging through another fortnight of human misery and mismanagement. I found a shop that sold quirky necklaces, made out of old buttons and bits and pieces. Every fortnight I'd go and investigate and buy myself something pretty.
The problem was that you can't wear pretty while working with youth who will use your necklace to strangle you.
For a while I dutifully stripped off everything pretty whilst on my shifts. Plain jeans that could be washed in boiling hot water and disinfectant and a plain t shirt that could be thrown in the bin after every shift. Yep some of the kids I worked with were that bad. Some days I'd come home and climb into a shower fully clothed.
I redyed my hair a brilliant shade of fuck you pink, if I couldn't wear pretty I'd carry it around with me in some form. But the powers that be decided that I needed to conform. That brown sensible hair was much preferred.
Slowly this industry took away all that was positive and pretty.
If my work life had been satisfying, if management had actually ran the programs that they boasted about, if life hadn't been a series of shifts where you went to bed and didn't sleep, and didn't eat and weren't stuck in a drafty dodgy house that wore you down because as a casual support worker you found there was no support on offer, well maybe I wouldn't be going through a major scale depression right now.
Going through my volumous closet today I saw the relics of my past self.
I came across the one piece of lingere that I will keep until I die, the guarenteed make them cum in the pants piece of pretty that my tits defiantly won't fit into anymore.
I found the Craig shirt. A black see through sequined little number that makes me feel ten years younger.
And there on its hanger is the Cinderella dress. Last worn at my brother in laws wedding. The one dress that I'd live in, that I'd be happy doing dishes in because its pretty.
I have a see through over blouse, a cute green little thing that I wear over a singlet. Nothing wrong or slutty about it. But my former boss decided that it was wrong to wear it because the male clients may be aroused by the thought of the top. Honestly its such utter rubbish but I stopped wearing it.
And as my former occupation stripped away the layers of originality that made up me, eroded my confidence, made me a plastic parody of what conformity wanted me to wear I stopped wearing these things altogether. I stopped caring what I looked like. And I didn't even realise it was happening.
On my travels in the last few weeks I found and fell in love with a pink pashmina. Pretty and impractical as you really can't work in it or drive whilst wearing it but I brought it anyway.
Out came all of my jewelry today, the stuff I had taken off and put away and forgot about.
Now I'm wondering should I go back, can i go back to wearing the clothes that really make me feel good or will they feel foreign on me now?
Will the gorgeous leopard print boots still give me that fuck you attitude? That attitude that makes you want to crawl sensuously acrosss the floor when ever you put them on or will they just feel silly now? Like a costume?
Can the old Kate re emerge?

DROWNING IN WEATHER

2008-04-22T11:59:00.002+10:00

Another day of another month of another year and I wake up to grey skies and rain. Now I don't mind a few rainy days, apparently water is good for the planet so I let the occasional rain day slide, its my way of being a greenie. But it feels like it has been raining for years here.
Sucessive rain days lead you to doing things that you would put off on a more sunny day. And after so many cold cruel wet days I am forced finally to tackle the big mess.
The big mess is the carnival of clothes that have rehoused themselves around my bedroom. I had a shitty moment a few weeks ago and packed all of my clothes. Then decided on the balance that running away from home was too much bother and the clothes in question have been having a vacation all over my room.
I go back to school next tuesday and don't fancy the 7am "oh shit what to wear" question so its come to this. The weather gods are forcing me to clean up my room.
Confronting your entire wardrobe at once is something best done on a sunny day with the windows open, a vodka in hand and a joint.
Yep wacky weed I figure, is the only way to fold and hang all of those gorgeous clothes that you brought and can never wear because two seconds after you got it home your tits enlarged. This happens alot. I try something on and it fits beautifully. I take it home and hang it up. When I go to wear it my tits have enlarged to the button popping point of no return. By this time I've usually lost the damn receipt so I am stuck with yet another material creation perfect for a girl not sporting a double d chest of drawers on her chest.
Note to all women wishing for bigger boobs - stop wishing right now, one day God will grant you impossibly big boobs and you'll never have another thing to wear again - ever. Bra's will never again be pretty, they'll be industrial sized practical when you are really yearning for victoria's secret pretty. Shirts will be skimpy across the chest and volumous everywhere else. I have a major collection of gorgeous shirts that just don't fit.
Anyone wanna start a "my tits screwed me over" shirt exchange program?
Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your blouses!
Once I get through all of the blouses I'll confront the shoe nest.
Being a bit of a Carrie Bradshaw when it comes to shoes, I have a mountain of them and naturally I stick to wearing one tatty pair of white tennis shoes. Boots in particular are my weakness. Storage is becoming a problem. The solution is simple, divest myself of shoes I don't wear. Simple, easy, space saving. NOT ON YOUR NELLY. I may not have worn shoes for a while but I won't ever give them up. Not even the suede cowboy boots that pinch my ankles and really fucking hurt to walk in.
So I'm off, armed with my Trinny and Susannah bibles which tell me to purge and throw away. I'll ignore them naturally but if anyone wants me you'll find me narnia bound wading through my wardrobe.

CONUNDRUMS CONTINUED - A CAUTIONARY TALE.

2008-04-17T00:01:00.003+10:00

A long long time ago,
I can still remember
when this child used to make me smile........
Once upon a time a marriage ended. Badly.
As with all bad break ups there was a long period of hostilities. And children were involved. A family split, torn apart by greed, deceit, power games and a redneck farmer.
A seven year odyssey through the courts ensued.
Sitting at the side of a father seperated from his child.
For the love of a child we walked the corridors of an unjust family law system. We battled a society so convinced that only a mother was fit to raise a small child.
We drove for hours through the night to sit at a meeting place and wait in vain when she denied access without calling.
I watched with some heartache as this father was alienated from his youngest child. I hugged the older two children who had been adandoned, unloved, not understanding that adults can be supremely cruel, even ones who go by the name of mummy.
Eventually she, the evil Cruella had the stick forcibly removed and we started to rebuild a relationship with out little lost boy.
For the love of a sweet innocent child we fought.
This school holidays we've been sent evil Dobby. And yes he has learnt to spell. Courtesy it seems of watching Adam Sandler dvd's.
Yes that is the word Fuck he's written on my window.

SCHOOL HOLIDAY CONUNDRUMS

2008-04-15T20:11:00.004+10:00

It all comes down to this. Two weeks off school. Time to catch up on assignment work, time to catch up on reading, and as of yesterday I have three bookings for shoots this week.

A cynical friend remarked that because I'm not charging for a shoot at the moment thats why I am being asked. Maybe so, I see it as good practice. I have 200 hours of voluntary work placement to do for my Tafe course so why not do voluntary hours in photography? It's all about the experience isn't it?

Fortunately I have a live in model who not only lets me dress her up but also lets me draw on her for my 3D canvases.

How much of my assignment am I really going to get done?

THE STATE OF CONFUSION.

2008-04-09T09:38:00.004+10:00

LITTLE BOY BLUES.

So I'm back. Not entirely recommitted to the process is blogging. It's not that I have nothing to say about many and varied subjects. Its more a matter of clear head space to say such things in an articulate manner.
Plus I've gone and stuffed my space bar so it's typing long sentences and then having to retrace my steps and edit EVERYTHING.
With the photography I'm learning that what I want to do far outstrips my technical skills. I'm full of idea's. Full of knowing what I want to shoot and frustrated that I can't yet achieve it.
Primarily I want to concentrate on people photography. People are always a subject of fascination to me. But not the happy smiley version of cheese photography. I want to capture misery, tears, frustration, anger, all of those complex emotions that make us human. Its strange that emotion so often feels like its in colour but more and more I find it best being represented in black and white. Anger is red, sadness is blue, happiness is yellow, purple, pink etc. Landscapes on the other hand are pretty but I just don't always have an eye for landscapes, my head is usually in the clouds thinking about something else, far to busy to contemplate the scene around me.
I've been asked to take some coastline shots and not knowing exactly what the client will want its a matter of taking 400 shots and hoping I come up with the goods.Thats what I hate about requested photo's. Its usually a vague request.
I want this. If I shoot this then they'll say yes thats what I want but from a different angle, a different perspective, can you photoshop the people / seagulls/ space alien out of it?
The next class in photography is scheduled for september, which leaves me beached fish gasping for direction for months.
GRRRRRRRRR

THIS IS WHY I DON'T READ THE NEWS.

2008-04-04T12:29:00.002+11:00

Usually of a morning I read my emails and then switch to the news service to peruse what has been going on in the big bad wide world.
This morning I found a hum dinger.
Researchers have come to the conclusion that if you are insomniac and don't get enough sleep OR you sleep more than nine hours a night and get to much sleep - YOU GAIN WEIGHT.
To stay a happy thin person you must get 8 hours of quality sleep per night, not more and not less otherwise your arse and hips suffer.
If you happen to believe that God designed the miraculous machine that is the human body then the joke is on you. God is up there laughing his arse off right now.
Personally I don't realise at what exact time I drift off to sleep these days. So how am I supposed to moderate my body to getting 8 hours only? If I wake myself up too early I'm fucked and will get celulite, if I sleep too late I'll end up with tuck shop lady arms.
As if life doesn't hand you enough pressure.
And furthermore your sleep must be of a restive quality otherwise look out arse your developing your own sattilite station.
Scientists - couldn't cure cancer or aids if they tried but have been sucessful in perfecting techniques to give you more to worry about.

IT'S A DAY WHEN.......

2008-04-03T23:36:00.002+11:00

It's one of those days when things crystalise and become clear.
Its one of those days when someone trying to help cook dinner mistakes cream cheese for mayonaise. Just ask Vic.
It's one of those days when I have to think back to last weekend and smile remembering running amuck in sydney with a six foot rabbit.
It's one of those days when I have been up and close and touchy feely with the stationery section of borders books. I have soooo got to go back to work and earn a paycheck to pay for my stationery obsession.
It's a day when I get invited to a party to take photo's.
It's a day when I get to photograph a naked girl in a shower.
It's the day after the whipper snipper smashed the back glass door.
And its the day Joe Murphy mutt decided to jump on said smashed door and spray glass shards all through the kitchen.
It's a day when you log on and your instant messenger regurgitates the ghost of fuck ups past.
It's a day when you just want to sit and watch a Harry Potter, and its a day when after three attempts I've given up.
Its a day when I have resisted the call of the gorgeously expensive cheese that lures me from the fridge every time I walk in the kitchen.
Its a day when I will give in to that urge.
The cheese is satanic.
It's yet another Kate day.

POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE.

2008-03-31T20:10:00.012+11:00

Mirror image attitudes.

When a big guitar gets dwarfed by a six foot rabbit.

For Dutch Ovening Coyote Ugly women who you don't want back.

Kind of sums up my relationship with Voldemort.

For effective advertising,product placement is vital.

Vic the Groover discovers her inner Viking.

Alcoholic aid or something far more sinister? You work it out.

Honest lawyers or just an unfortunate name?

What hallmark aren't telling you. This is what happens when touchy feely card giving days go wrong.

RANDOM WISDOM

2008-03-26T11:46:00.002+11:00

When you really need to be somewhere in the morning your alarm will wake you up - long enough for you to turn it off and keep sleeping.
Bright yellow underwear is the only sure fire colour to motivate and energise you - and I should know, I've experimented. Bright patterns, cheeky slogans, nothing gets the job done as well as knowing you are wearing fluro yellow knickers under your sensible clothes.
Directions given to a must see place are always bound to have you going in the wrong direction.
Ice cream only tastes good when you weren't expecting it.
The one weekend a year that you have free to enjoy your holiday house will be the same weekend everyone else has the same idea. And as an aside it will rain all weekend.
When you've got the subject framed correctly, lighting seems perfect, and your about to take the Pulitzer winner, you'll get motion blur and an unusable photograph.
You only ever see your ex on the day you wear a tracksuit and didn't blowdry your hair.
If you thoroughly clean your house, you wont get visitors until the next bomb has gone off.
You only ever run out of conditioner once you've rinsed and repeated and are standing there with soap in your eyes.
Your "favourite things" can often have hidden meanings. "Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes" - White never stays clean. "Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes" - cause you've slipped on a snowy pavement, broken your hip and are in the process of freezing to death. "Brown paper packages tied up with string" - you've just recieved your shipment of adult products from a dirty book store. These are a few of my favourite things???? Hmmmmmm. Julie Andrews was kind of twisted for a nun wasn't she?
You buy the perfect dress, and find you have nowhere to wear it. When you do find somewhere to wear it - it doesn't fit you.
You write the perfect email, witty, word perfect, and the computer eats it before sending it.
You decide to embrace exercise and go walking every day to improve your fitness, and then it rains for a month.

THE DRAMA'S OF ADULT EDUCATION

2008-03-25T07:58:00.003+11:00

Tuesday around 8am and I'm sitting here in a towel deciding what to wear and where to park. Its a school day. Which means coping with horrendous mummy traffic, trying in vain to try to find a space in a carpark built for fifty on a campus of 400. It's all about getting through a day with no breakfast because I was tired and didn't get to bed early last night. Its about making lunch choices that are good for me and ending up with the standard educational diet, a smoke and a coke.
It's about coping with the curveball of a teacher that they threw at us last week. More about this educator later.
It's six hours of sitting in an overly cold air conditioned room because the albino secretary who controls the temp is a human with a busted furnance, its always too cold or way to hot.
Its about sitting in a class room with a coal train rumbling past making the room shake, and I mean the whole room keeps up a rhythmic hypnotic jiggle all day that makes your stomach turn.
Today will turn outto be one of two things, wrting copious notes that I will have to rewrite as Tafe is chaotic and notes are always untidy or spending hours in a dour library researching stuff I don't really care about. Spending six hours in class writing dry facts or spending the whole day just chatting. How do you take notes on chatting?
It's a day of deciphering Tafe speak as our educators insist on talking in industry jargon instead of just speaking in plain english and getting to the point.
Its a three hour class this afternoon with a teacher who I can't stand looking at. It's really just plain scary and it really needs to buy a bra and actually wear it.
But mainly right now, its about getting there through stupid mummy traffic and endless 40 kilometre an hour school zones.
I've said it before - my aim is better at 40 kph, all the better to mow down some school children when i'd rather hit the mummies who insist on polluting the roads with their wagons on the morning school run. Cut the apron strings ladies and make your fat spoilt six year olds take the bus to school or here's a novel idea, make them walk, it was good enough for me at school age.

Off I go into the wild blue yonder. I'll be back to bitch about scary and braless this afternoon.

TAKE A GIRL AND GIVE HER AN SLR.

2008-03-24T00:28:00.000+11:00

Vic, Hubby and Kate on the hunt for an after midnight photo oportunity in Sydney on Good Friday. What else are you supposed to do when hallmark and religion teams up to close the shops for a day?

Learning the fine art of flashless night shooting in what can only be called the interesting architctural bits graveyard in the heart of Sydney.

TIme out at Darling Harbour. This place has the best children's park. There should be more of this sort of stuff in parks and playgrounds all over the country.

BUT...........................

Returning to your childhood has its pitfalls as I found out.
A slippery dip, lots of fun until half way down you realise the fucker is soaking wet and you end up with a wet arse when you're a mere 200 kilometres from home at 2am!

Shooting in Sydney means steps,and alot of walking. The boots are sooooo lush but just try walking on slippery opera house steps in new platforms. Sneakers are a definate requirement of the photographers kit.

Vic works out that sizest height issues may be remedied by climbing a big arse sculpture. Remind me to take a net next time I venture out with the pixie.

Conceding that I am not Priscilla, Queen of the desert, the lush platform boots, gorgeous as they are will not be my choice of footwear for shoots henceforth. My feet now hate me. Lucky for me Vic was there to share the burden of my aching feet.

My photography instructor Mr Cellophane and Vic the Groover following the not quite yellow brick road from the Opera House.

A happy snap, an exhausted Katie. A great night's instruction. Hope you all had a great Easter.

CHANCE ENCOUNTERS CHANGE YOUR OUTLOOK

2008-03-20T14:16:00.002+11:00

Yesterday.
The begining of a very melancholy song.
Yesterday was crap. The car induced a panic attack and so I skipped school simply because I couldn't make myself drive.
Mr Cellophane came up to cheer me up and we went out shooting. Just random stuff and set up captures for a dawn project i'm thinking about.
By coincidence we went into town. Wednesday night is usually pretty dead in town. I spotted the water fairy out on the dock island and asked cellophane to pull over to see if I could get a clear shot.
What happened next is the reason for the grin today.
Along came a group of people dressed in toga's. A university party on the move.
And then I saw him. A much younger version of that prick Voldemort.
Hello gorgeous can I sit on your lap? Or at least take a picture?
We shot several pictures and they were great about it.
What made me grin? The realisation that Voldemort isn't all that special. That he isn't the great immortal only one. In fact he's duplicated. And I met the far better version last night. This one actually had a personality as well.
Small things, little coincidences, all baby steps to breaking the bastards hold on me.
Yay for katie.

THE PHOTOGRAPHERS DILEMMA

2008-03-17T12:03:00.003+11:00

Subject matter. They say you can find inspiration and photo opportunities anywhere.

This is what I came up with for a portrait of a friend of mine. This sums him up far more than a face shot.
But I am rapidly becoming bored with the faces I have readily accessible to shoot.
Over the last few weeks I've been watching a tv series on photography. It's broad spectrum tells a little about all kinds of photography, from portraiture to landscape scenes, discussing the great, the good and the celebrity famous. I deal mainly in human drama, human faces, human scenes. Pretty trees and mountains just don't interest me enough to point a camera at them.
I've written before about my first commissioned portrait shoot. It went well, and it did produce some gorgeous prints but it bored me. Standard portrait work is too much like those naff ordinary pixie photo set ups that you see in suburban supermarkets. Sure you get a picture of the family, or the kids, it might even be cute, but how much of a person's personality do you really capture when you pose a baby in a bucket with a backdrop of teddy bears?
Mass production family photo's piss me off. Standard poses, standard groupings and everyone in the best clothes on best behaviour, smile or else. I don't know how many times I've walked through a shopping mall and watched as a mother has plonked down an obviously tired and cranky baby and then expected them to smile like a cherub for the photographer. Good photos require the right time setting. Give the baby a nap, let it wake up, let it get over the I've just woken up grisles and then think about a getting a photo done. Who in their right mind is going to want to sit up and smile when they have a yard of wet cloth strapped to their backsides?

Same with wedding portraits. Sure they may be bread and butter work to a photographer but not exactly brimming with originality. It's a case of look through an album and choose the image that you want to be that day. The pose in front of a ruin of an old iron shed complete with rusty bomb of a car as a background is the one I particuarly loathe.
And while its true that I can do all of the standard portraiture work, capture the happy couple, take the smiley family shots, it's not something that ultimately excites me as an artist.
For the past twelve months I've done alot of natural shots, people just being people. Now I want to add the quirky twist to the naturalness. Still concentrating on capturing a person and what they love doing, or what they hate doing, but adding an element that just isn't supposed to be there.
This will be my project for the next six months.

The world of props is beckoning and I'm a girl who loves to shop.

THE GUILTY PLEA - DOES IT STOP THE TRUTH BEING REVEALED?

2008-03-13T14:18:00.000+11:00

I've had occasion to hear more than I would like to know about a recent murder inquiry. A story about two people who murdered a best friend.
I won't go into specific details due to the ongoing court process but its a story I've been following in the wake of a guilty plea.
Its a story that the media have gotten ahold of and sensationalised to death.
Its the guilty plea that concerns me. Especially in this case.
Charged with both murder and accesory after the fact, the DPP drops the murder wrap when one ( the female of the pair charged) pleads guilty to accesory only.
Strange in itself. If you had the evidence to charge with murder why accept a lesser plea?
To save time and tax payers money? Because the other party involved (the male) has already pleaded and been sentenced?
It might be saving the tax payers money, it might be saving the victims family from the trauma of a trial but I still think its sloppy copping.
In normal cases we are tried and convicted in front of a jury of our peers, supposedly.
With a guilty plea entered does it stop the whole truth from coming out?
Pleading to a lesser charge is by way a defence so that the whole truth doesn't come out.
We are an emotive society. We don't want the victims family to suffer through a trial. We pedestal the unfortunate victim. They instantly become clean living saints no matter what the truth may be. Now I'm not saying that the victims are guilty of anything or deserved their often grisly fate but angelising the victims doesn't serve a jury or the public in general in any way. It should not matter how the victim lived, it shoud not matter that they went to church every sunday or volunteered at the local disabled school or whatever angelic qualities come to light after death. We should not let it cloud our judgement but time and again we do.
We trial by law and not by morals but often as juries we also convict not only on a legal basis but on a moral one. And the only morals on trial are the accused. We can't say we don't. In the majority of really vicious cases who would fail to be affected morally by what a jury hears and see's. They say its all about law but people are not robots. They have feelings, they have family, you can't help but think how you'd feel if it happened to you.
By which I mean society as a whole reads the sensationalised views of a newspaper columist and believes it as gospel. The more "shocking" the crime the more societies moral outcry. They hear the victim impact statements made by family or friends, they read the interviews in the aftermath of a court decision. Its all biased. Based on emotion.

The accused in a crime is trialed not only by a court but by every action he's ever performed. Every rumour, every allegation, proven or false is brought to light in newspaper columns if not in court.
If you have a male and female accused we so often want to think that the female was under duress, that she herself was a victim of the evil man. Society has been brainwashed into thinking that females as a whole are the fairer, gentler sex.

Point of fact females are the more vicious, the more brutal, the nastier of the two sexes. Put aside for a second the idea of physical strength being the masculine and therefore dominant strength.

Manipulation, emotional blackmail, vindictiveness, jealousy, all traits displayed by both sexes. Now the feminists will jump up and down and say these are all traits exhibited by the domestically violent man. And its true, they are.

Manipulation, emotional blackmail, vindictiveness, jealousy, persecution. Go to any high school and see the same evidence in a group of teenage girls. These are skills honed in the playground. Who doesn't know of a person who was the victim of bullying, of persecution or ostracism at school? Get a group of three girls together and odds are one will be left out.

All of these personality traits are seen to be morally repugnant. In teenage girls we write it off as girls being nasty and catty, in a murder case they take on a far more sinister meaning.

When a man murders we condemn, when a woman commits murder we try to reason.

Yet there's the evidence of females being as capable of the nastier range of human traits as a man.

When a mother murders a child the old post natal depression card is played.
When a woman assists in a murder she's obvioulsy the victim of the man.
Apologists for female behaviour are thick on the ground.
The case in question, the one I have been following, the man was sentenced to 19 years, the woman was sentenced yesterday to a maximum of three years and a minimum of 18 months. Murder your best friend and get out of jail in a year and a half.
Sounds like a sweet deal.
Cop a plea, agree to one charge while the other is dropped or turn states evidence and dob in your fellow partner in crime and get a reduced sentence.
What also happens is that the truth never really comes out.

WHERE I'M AT.

2008-03-08T12:46:00.003+11:00

I've been wondering what to post.
I could quite easily do the lazy thing and post a meme, I'm sure a quick blog cruise would reveal plenty of meme's. a whole year of posting inane facts about myself and my opinions. Not exactly my style of writing.
I'll give you the update.
I finally seem to have conquered the insomnia and I am sleeping through the night. Yay for small mercies.
I'm settling into my course, and finally feel I am ready to go back to the fray, face the cold face of the work I choose to do.
I'm due on the shrinks couch at the end of the month. However I am more settled now than I was and the need doesn't seem as immediate.
I'm seriously thinking of going and doing a photography course to up the technical side of knowledge. It won't help one little bit in dealing with the every day stresses of being a residential support youth worker but when I'm out shooting its the only time I really feel like every cell in this old and tired body is alive. I'm starting to get more and more frustrated when I am out on a shoot. I want to do more, I want to be able to reproduce what the minds creative eye tells you would be a great shot. I just have to study up on the techniques. I did my first professional type portrait shoot a few weeks ago. It went well and yes its true I learnt a lot but studio work doesn't hook my creative side, its far too limited by space at the moment. Oh to possess an old industrial loft. Great structure, amazing light.
Thats the problem with the cookie cutter architecture of the modern suburban home. It feels cramped when you want space, it defies all attempts at creating balanced natural light.
What I'd ultimately love is an old house of generous proportions. Old timber casement windows and natural light, be it daylight of moonlight, streaming through curtains.
I'm quite drawn to the fantasy quality of the photographs of someone like David Lachappelle. Glorious gothic stuff, sets built in opulent space, lighting thats a dream. Scope for the imagination to run wild.
(All of this hardly goes hand in hand with the mundane realities of working out a homeless person's accomodation needs.)
Subject matter is another area of frustration. I grow weary of the same faces appearing before my lens. The same poses, the same attitudes. I want to play with my subjects, create a fantasy world of colour and light and attitude but its a matter of (sigh) time, and space, and light.
I want to shoot people doing what they love but adding a quirky element to the composition.
Right now I'm craving a high wing back chair. The sort of thing you'd imagine Dumbledore relaxing in. For some reason this chair has a lush bright red fabric in my minds eye.
I hate the idea of shooting becoming a series of poses for a camera, look at me and make me look pretty poses. It bores me, traditional portraiture. I want to photograph frustration, tears, agony, joy, puzzlement, utter boredom.
It's more of a compliment to my work when I hear a person exclaim "Thats so him" on viewing a photo of a four year old boy with that cheeky grin. When a person see's and acknowledges that devilish glint to a seemingly innocent sweet little girls eyes. When you capture that one moment when the personality shines through. It's safe to say I'd rather capture the essence, the personality of a subject rather than simply their face. The animation of a person.
So thats where I am at the moment, stifled vison and sleepy nights. I guess a girl can't have everything.

EXPLAINING YOUR LIFE AWAY

2008-03-03T11:59:00.002+11:00

So, I'm almost a week out from my major meltdown.
Last night I slept a full night for the first time in 8 months. When I say full night I mean Joe Murphy Mutt did wake me up to be let out but I went staright back to sleep after that.
On Friday I decided to be pro active and rang to make an appointment with the shrink my doctor wants me to see.
I get the recpetionist who asks me my name and then asks what she can do for me.
She's decidely friendly at this point in the conversation although I note she hasn't given me her name.
I tell her that I have a referral from my doctor to see the shrink and would like to make an appointment.
"And what is the appointment regarding?" she asks.
This kind of throws me a little. I'm calling a shrinks office and want to make an appoointment because I have a referral from my doctor. Isn't it kind of obvious what its regarding?
I tell her again that I have a doctors referral and want to make an appointment.
Thats when the conversation becomes a little narky.
The secretary insists that I tell her exactly what I want to see the shrink about.
Now I find that just a little too personal to be telling just anyone and frankly its none of her god damned business.
The secretary huffs self importantly down the line.
"Well I'll have to take your name and number and have the doctor call you back then."
My eyebrows rose skywards so rapdily I'll never need a face lift.
I gave her the information but got no appointment out of it.
The clunk of her hanging up sounded final.
I waited the rest of the day and no call back was forth coming.
If this is patient care then how the hell does anyone get fixed?
Was there some sort of secret password to gain access that my doctor had forgotten to give me?
It doesn't bode well for a good relationship with a therapist when this is how your first contact gets treated.
How do people with masisvely larger problems than mine handle the gestapo secretary? Do they just give up? Do they form the impression that help is there but not available?
Does this sort of treatment add to the suicide rate?
I'm going to give it another try today - the making of an appointment. If I don't get results again I'm ringing my own doctor back and getting her to suspend her pollyanna person anad call them for me.
My GP looks and dresses like a victorian doll but get her riled up and look out. She is very effective in blasting a shot of haughty unimpressedness down a phone line at a hapless secretary and will even tell off another doctor quite happily.
I wonder what happens to people who don't have this type of back up and support?
And when did customer service become so rude?

IN DEFENCE OF HARRY

2008-03-01T16:11:00.002+11:00

There are a few things that deep within this mess of emotions I feel strongly enough to write about. Harry's recent treatment by the media is one of them. It disgusts me. I'm told that I see issues as black and white and thats a bad thing. In this case here's the black and white kate take.
The media, for so long intrusive in the cause of a story being "
in the public interest" really should be sent to the tower and locked up forever over this.
So he's a royal, so he's rich, so he's been spoilt and protected all of his life. So what.
He's out earning a living, being far more productive than the older generation of Windsors have ever been. People are so quick to critcise this kid, he's boozy Harry, he's drugged Harry, he's all of the above and he's media fodder. Imagine having to live your life like that.
His father, the next King of England gets up in the morning, has a minion run his bath and squeeze his toothpaste. There's a word for people like that - parasite.
The royal family have this tradition of sending their young men into the armed forces. Why wouldn't a young man who has been trained to do a job want to go and serve his country?
And now the foreign media have leaked his prescence in a war zone and forced Harry to return to the palaces and the hipocrisy of british royalty at home.
Why did they do it? Was it newsworthy? Are they going to do cover stories on the thousands of other people who are serving?
When Harry arrives back in England, the first time he goes out at night he'll be photographed, spread all over a magazine cover, back where the media wolves can tear him apart for being unproductive, spoilt lazy, drugged and drunk.
It's the ultimate set up, the ultimate can't win no matter what you do story.
The kid can't hold a normal job, he can't have a girlfriend, he can't make the same mistakes his entire generation makes without someone somewhere reporting it.
We have laws against that sort of intrusion to protect our own kids. And yet it was one of Australia's magazines that broke the silence and forced Harry onto a plane home.
Well shame on them, they just lost a customer.

2008-02-27T17:14:00.001+11:00

DUE TO HAVING A MAJOR MELTDOWN AND NOT BEING ABLE TO COPE WITH THE MOST BASIC OF HUMAN NECESSITIES AT THE PRESENT TIME, I'M SHUTTING DOWN FOR A WHILE.
I'M A COMPLETE MESS BOYS AND GIRLS AND CAN'T THINK STRAIGHT RIGHT NOW.
MUCH LOVE AND HUGS

KATE ISIS. XOXOXO

FUN FACTS FROM THE FIRST DAY OF CLASS.

2008-02-26T21:18:00.002+11:00

Today we learnt the sinister meaning of the saying "Rule of thumb"
1910 - Australia.
In a land we call the lucky country there was a law that men were legally allowed to beat their wives and children with a stick as long as the stick was not more than the thickness of the mans thumb.
Beatings could be administered up till 10pm at night.
The reason for the curfewing of late night beatings?
So that a working male in an adjoining house was not disturbed after 10pm by the sounds of said beating.

Grisly huh?

OSCAR

2008-02-25T20:29:00.002+11:00

Here we go again, a bunch of self important over paid people celebrating themselves and their achievements in "acting."
Tonight careers will be made, careers will be broken, mud will be slung and noses will be out of joint. Cashed up celebs will hook up, break up, break out and come out. All of them wearing clothes that cost enough to fund a community project for a year or more.
Now I have nothing against clothes, in fact I am salivating over a pair of $1200 balenciaga boots. Yummy.
They say its all about entertaining us. Making 50 million dollars to entertain me for an hour and a half?
I wonder what the paramedic bent over trying to revive a hep soaked junkie in a backstreeet thinks of 50 million dollar salaries. I wonder what the woman teaching your child to read thinks of the limousines. I wonder what the little asian guy who gets up at 3am to bake me my bread rolls thinks of a woman wearing a years salary in fabric as a dress. And what does the child who goes to bed hungry tonight think of the pretty women wearing a million dollars worth of jewelry?
Value for money? God no.

THE WEEKEND CATCH UP.

2008-02-24T13:10:00.004+11:00

What do you do when blog retardation meets sleep deprivation? You don't post, you don't have energy to wind up to a good rant, in fact you become indifferent to the whole merry go round. And I for one like Merry go rounds.
Its sunday morning, ok its sunday afternoon, and I'm sitting here freshly awake listening to vics version of flamenco guitar fuck me music. Its a flippy slippy jazz thing.
My eyebrows would raise in that slightly cynical fashion that they adopt but even my eyebrows are tired.
Its been a turbulent week. I watched a childs loss of innocence that all in the world is right the other day. He was having the concept of pets getting old and dying explained to him. As comprehension dawned his little face just fell.

It wasn't until I got home and reviewed the images that I saw this. The total loss of innocence. And the spooky thing was a day later, just after Master Omlette was whisked away to spend a weekend with his father, the family dog died.

In other developments I got accepted to do the course of my choice this week. I went and dutifully enrolled. One of the less agreeable side effects of getting an education is the parking problem. I came back to my car to find that some young wanker in a beat up crappy car had parked me in. I was not amused. It was only 10:30am and this meant I could have been stuck there for eternity or at least 4pm waiting for the little mugger to emerge from a class. Or I could have attempted the impossible and ended up putting the tow ball threw his passenger door - a tempting thought but what if it got stuck there? After fifteen minutes of patient fuming I was rewarded by the guy who had parked next to me coming out and sucessfully moving his car, giving me enough room to get out. Being somewhat molified I still left the perpetrator a note "Learn to park you fuckwit!" I fully intend to take the matter up with the campus when I go back on tuesday, I haven't officially started classes and I am already millitant minded.

Vic has been home for two days and I learnt a startling fact about me, I stop breathing in my sleep. Its not that sort of thing you can find out by yourself. That might explain why I am always tired. Apnea - who knew.

I went and had my first massage on Friday. A Hot Stone Massage. What an interesting experience. None of the scary weirdness that Maria experienced for Valentines day thank god. But to have someone rub you with rocks well, like I said it was different. I was informed that the muscles in my neck and shoulders felt like concrete and were at the begining unmovable, is that a bad thing I asked? Yes apparently it is. By the end of the hour it felt like the Vampire association had drained me of all blood and the concept of standing up and getting dressed was a hard task. I felt light headed and wondered how the hell I was going to drive home. Then yesterday the pain started as she said it would, A slight feeling of "tenderness" in the muscles. So this is how steak feels when you bash it with a mallet?

My project for the afternoon is a craptastic garden special. I figure any rennovation or home improvement needs to start at the entrance of the craptastic house. You'll get pictures during the week.

Apart from that I'm almost ready to post my ranty scathing opinion of the australian justice system, I haven't been able to post it because of a person currently being tried and sentenced.

I've also been told that I see the world in black and white, that I have no compassion or empathy. I intend to write a strongly worded rebuttal to that this week, in fact its simmering away in drafts. Drafts is a fine feature. I can rant and post later and you gotta be happy with that.

THE BIGGEST LOSER

2008-02-19T12:33:00.002+11:00

I've been watching the Australian version of "The Biggest Loser" and a few things struck me about the content during last nights weigh in show.
The losing team were somewhat chastisted for losing the mimimum amount of weight, not the spectacular 7 - 8 kilo's per person results that the other team achieved.
Weight loss for life is supposed to be a gradual thing. When you take an overweight person and push their body to lose massive amounts of weight per week your left with the carcass of the saggy baggy elephant. Its not healthy. To chastise a person who only loses a kilo or two a week well thats insane, A kilo or two is about what you should be losing per week.
They vote people off every week and last nights decision was based on someone who wasn't as motivated as the rest of the team, someone who's weight loss hadn't inspired great gasps and sighs as chunks of kilo's came off every week.
The show is morally bankrupt. Take a group of grossly overweight people and film them trying to lose weight. Inject the tear jerking stories of how if they don't lose the weight they won't live to see their children grow up and then boot them off for not doing it fast enough. Give them a major cash prize at the end of it to compete for. A million dollars might be a grand prize but so is a life without heart disease or ridcule because of their size.
Why not keep them all on the show since their condtion is potentially life threatening and then see who weighs least at the end?
We live in a vote them off each week society. Its sick.
American trainer Bob was quoted as saying that the Australians are too laid back and aren't as motivated as the American contestants who will spend all day in the gym. Well how realistic is that? How many normal people have the time to spend all day in the gym?
That sort of life isn't sustainable in the real every day world where you still have to pay bills, go to work and do all of the normal things. Who has time these days to get to the gym every day for two to three hours?
The contestants who are voted off are followed up and filmed in their weight loss efforts at home. Lats nights report was that the one voted off was going to the gym twice a day.
Well naturally who wants to be the still fat one at the shows grand finale?
Reality shows are anything but real.
What happens when all of the weight comes off? Do they stop going to the gym or do they just cut back? And what do they do with all of that saggy baggy flesh thats left over? A quick nip and tuck? Lets swap stretch marks for surgery scars.
Its a double edged sword, when doing something good for you is bad for you.
Take anti depressants, supposedly there to help you feel better.
How it works is beyond me. The number one side effect of anti depressants is weight gain.
How can you begin to feel good about yourself when, in a shape driven society you pack on a few pounds. Sure my homicidal mood swings are much better but my arse is out of control.
Its enough to make you go out and kill a skinny person.
And that other charming little side effect - suicide.
In welfare we look at social indictators when dealing with clients. Those factors which have contributed to people being in a certain situation.
If you apply the same theory to weight gain in people then the social indictaors rest on the heads of the giants. KFC, McDonalds, Sony and their generation killing Playstation.
Rather than a Mc Cafe perhaps McDonalds needs to put in a McGym.
Rather than 11 secret fats and oils KFC need to be honest and just start selling chicken skin in a bucket, after all who really eats the chicken?
And Playstation, don't even get me started on the evils of sitting on your arse for hours playing sports games.
So who's the biggest loser? We are for watching it. We are for not standing up and saying, "hey they all need to be there to lose the weight. Don't vote them off for our entertainment."

RESCUE REMEDY

2008-02-18T14:41:00.003+11:00

Friends, Romans , country men, lend me your ears.
More to the point its time to lend me your wisdom.
For three years I've been suffering from insomnia. I've had it.
I have been officially sent round the twist by my inability to sleep like a normal human being.
I'm scouting for a remedy.
Pills are out, a slight suspicion that I might do a ledger keeps me from drugging myself to sleep on a nightly basis. So what is the non prescription answer to this problem?
Any suggestions people? Basically it comes down to this, for three years this has ruled my life. I'm talking self harm, suicidal thoughts the whole nine yards. So give me everything you've got, tips about warm milk to voodoo remedies will be taken.

RUSHING REVISITED

2008-02-18T02:35:00.002+11:00

I'm still a little reeling after my date with the tower of terror. All of a sudden I KNEW what it was like when Wiley Coyote stepped off those cartoons cliff. A split second of air time and then the plummet. Its one of life's oddest experiences, your arse feels like its twenty five feet beneath you - talk about long waisted - while your head is still in the clouds, and then the rushing and you're altogether like a stretchy gumby toy sprung back into shape.
I came off the ride with hands shaking so badly there was no chance of a quick nerve relieving ciggarette, I would have dropped it a half dozen times. In fact as quit methods go thats not a bad one. Just hoist me up a few floors and drop me every time I think a ciggarette is a good idea, I'll soon get the picture.
The whole gang were surprised that I'd go on that particular ride, I think they see me as the carousel or ferris wheel type these days. This is what comes of dying your hair a respectable brown and shunning the fluro pink. Once I used to look like a rainbow hued clown, now my activities seem to be popping a nice safe ping pong ball in a clowns mouth, thats how much fun I project.
Point of fact clowns are just plain wrong, they've been on my wrong list for years and marked never to be released from Isis loathing.
But to get back to the rushing tower of terror, don't you wish life could be like that sometimes? Get over relationships just by letting it all rush away. Its an amusement parks version of being royally flushed.
Its a metaphor for so many things, rebirth, destruction, giving something away, all can be encapsulated into that feeling, that final moment when something or someone finally leaves your life.
Did I have a mid air ephiphany? Maybe?

YOUNG AND STUPID ...... AND LOVING IT.

2008-02-16T00:01:00.000+11:00

Usually I'm the sensible one. The one who holds all of the phones, minds the kids and administers the band aids. When did I get so old? When did having a good time constitute a good book and an early bed with freshly made sheets? Usually I won't go out with the neighbourhood family, I have a double standard abnout alcohol. Men can get as drunk as they like, in fact they can drink themselves into a coma. But women, well theres nothing as sad as a middle aged woman binge drinking , and so I tend not to go out with the urban family.
Tonight the annual Maitland Show was on and in a last minute decision we decided to go with them all.
I can't say I have ever been one for the hurly burly rides of the carnival, even as a kid I was somewhat serious.
Possibly because take a good look at carnies, those who are they're own grandpa. These people put these rides together. Do I necessarily trust my life to a man made amusement ride put together by Cletus the slack jawed yokel?
Eventually the strait laced throw caution to the wind. And so here I was, presented with a ride whoose sole intention seemed to be hoisting you seven stories above the earth and then dropping you free fall back to earth.
And it was fucking brilliant. I wanna go again.

LIFE IS ALWAYS STRANGER THAN FICTION.

2008-02-15T21:26:00.005+11:00

My noxious and annoying mobile phone woke me this morning.
A series of beeps never endingly emmanating from the thing.
Usually I'd ignore it but this just went on and on.
When I answered it, a text from an ex lover, "Mmmmmmmmmm"
Followed by half a dozen more blank texts from the same person.
What The and Fuck?
So curious I texted this once articulate guy and asked why he's suddenly become a text mute?
Turns out his one year old son had been playing with his phone.
Like father like son.
The moral of the story is, never sleep with mobile on your bedside table - go buy an alarm clock and disable the snooze button, that way it only beeps once when you want it to.
Today I'm with Dive - Mobile phones suck.

ABC WEDNESDAY - D

2008-02-13T00:20:00.000+11:00

D IS FOR DREAM.

To be Young, to dream of fantastic destinies that are possible, if only for an afternoon.

THE NATIONAL APOLOGY TO THE ABORIGINALS.

2008-02-12T12:13:00.000+11:00

This Wednesday see's the day the Australian Government formally apologises to the "Stolen Generation" of the Aboriginal community. This has been a matter of contention in this country for many years.
It's a split thinking issue, personally I don't need my government to make an apology on behalf of the Australian people and therefore they're apologising on my behalf for something that I wasn't personally involved in, in fact I wasn't even born when this was happening.
So I don't see the need to say sorry, or for anyone to say sorry on my behalf.
To say sorry admits guilt. I'm not guilty.
There are those who say that "Sorry" is just an admission that we feel remorse for has happened to that generation of people who were forcibly removed or given over to the government of the day and the religious establishment who took aboriginal children and placed them in either white families or institutions to learn to be white.
That I can understand. Unfortunately its not just that generation we are dealing with but every sucessive generation who will hold onto to that as part of a long list of excuses why they are so downtrodden in our society. I'm not saying the hwole white vs black thing has been solved, but honestly the words "Get over it" spring to mind.

I recieved an email a few days ago about this subject and I'll print it in its entirity.
"We feel that we must apologise for building hundreds of homes for you, which you have vandalised and destroyed.
We apologise for giving you law and order which has helped prevent you from slaughtering one another and using the unfortunate for food purposes.
We apologise for developing large farms and properties, which today feed you, where before, you had the benefits of living off the land and starving during droughts.
We apologise for providing you with warm clothing made of fabric to replace the animal skins you used before.
We apologise for building roads and railway tracks between cities and building cars so that you no longer have to walk over harsh terrain.
We apologise for paying off your vehicles when you fail to pay the instalments.
We apologise for giving you free travel anywhere, whenever.
We apologise for giving each and every member of your family $100.00 and free travel to attend an aboriginal funeral.
We apologise for not charging you rent on any lands when white people have to pay.
We apologise for giving you interest free loans.
We apologise for developing oil wells and minerals, including gold and diamonds which you never used and had no idea of their value.
We apologise for developing Ayers rock and Kakadu, and handing them over to you so that you get all the money.
We apologise for allowing taxpayers money to be paid towards a daughters' wedding ($8,000.00 each daughter).
We apologise for giving you $1.7 billion per year for your 250,000 people, which is $48,000.00 per aboriginal man, woman and child.
We apologise for working hard to pay taxes that finance your welfare, medical care, education, etc to the tune of $1.2 billion each year.
We apologise for you having to approach the aboriginal affairs department to verify the above figures. For the trouble you will have identifying the "uncle toms" in your own community who are getting richer and leaving some of you living in squalor and poverty.
We do apologise. We really do. We are only too happy to take back all the above and return you to the paradise of the "outback", whenever you are ready."

Now I agree that the government should say sorry for the treatment of those who were forced to be white. Some of the stolen generation were subjected to brutality at the hands of government and religious institutions forcibly removing children and attempting to make them white. That email however does pose some questions in terms of equality. I wonder where every other Australians' $100 and free travel to go to a funeral is? I wonder where the $8000 dollars for every female bride is? Certainly the rest of the country doesn't recieve this.

In the majority of people I have spoken to about this issue the consensus is that the indigenous population kicks up a fuss about not being equal. They want to be seen to be on equal footing but still want the cash and land handouts. Rather than a handout they need a hand up.

While its important to realise what has been done to the indigenous population since white settlement I don't think it falls only on our government of the day to say sorry. Where is the apology from the Queen who supposedly rules this country from her throne in britan? Wheres the apology for using this country as a dumping ground? For introducing european settlement, along with colds, flus and childhood diseases that wiped out part of the population of indigenous natives?
Where is the apology from the religious institutions that participated in the brutalisation of this group of natives? In fact to go a step further, when the indigenous people start screaming for compensation as they will, where are the religious institutions hands if not stuffed inside their deep pockets protecting their millions?
Why should the Australian tax payer pay compenstaion when already we ALL lack standards of education, standards of health care?

And where is the apology from the indigenous people themselves? How can you talk about being equal when you discriminate as a group just as much as you accuse the white people of doing?

National Sorry Day will solve nothing.

BABY LUST

2008-02-11T23:46:00.000+11:00

I finally get the whole Mrs Robinson thing.
I used to think that mid thirties something ladies who found an intestest in toy boys was on the skankier side of life.
Today I met my photgraphic dream and compared to my age he's a baby.
Gorgeous eyes, magnetic presence and I'd so love to shoot this guy.
The interest is decidely non sexual, but I usually look at younger guys and dismiss them out of hand. Its all of that boxer shorts sticking out the top of the pants dressing that puts me off.
I'm not a professional enough photographer yet to have been given the handbook on whether we suffer from lens crush.
Put it this way people, I could shoot this guy all day and smile all week.

TO SLEEP PERCHANCE TO DREAM

2008-02-10T12:59:00.000+11:00

I sit here typing and yet I'm not really here at all. Ripped from sleep by yet another bout of "la dream tragique."
Nightmares for what ever reason they occur disturb us at the best of times. To me, a person fightng chronic insomnia its a double blow. Finally, eventually I fall into something akin to a normal person's sleep only to have the fabric of netherworld reality torn like freddy fingers on a drape.
My eyes, could they be photographed this morning are hollow, sunken, I finally understand that terminology. You have to wear that terminology to truly understand the feeling of your eye sockets being halved empty walnut shell sized objects that struggle to see. Vision swims up through a haze, your head still reeling from lack of sleep, your body screaming at you to rest.
Nope, not me, I'm determined to cure the insomnia and the sleeping pattern in a non "Ledger" kind of way.
This morning I pondered the necessity of the before bed abulutions, the donning of pyjamas and the crawling into a freshly made bed. Some of lifes little pleasures unless your insomniac. When you lay there hour after hour and watch the sun rise wide awake these pleasures become over rated.
To tumble headlong into dream at the tender hour of 7am. And be ripped torn and tossed about in a nightmare of hurricane intensity. Frequently waking only to discover that the body is still in dire need of rest, you fall back into the same dream, and it builds like a crescendo until finally your driven from sleep, chest pounding, with walnut empty eye sockets, and the rest of the day is spent half lived. And then like a bad shampoo its a case of rinse and repeat - for about a year and a half now.
I really can understand how people abuse sleeping tablets, hence the reason I refuse to see the doctor about this.
The non tablet cure for insomnia is to persist with it, to keep at it, to try and have a good nights sleep by following the bedtime rules, nothing to eat after a certain time, (try sticking to that with raging bulimia) no caffiene, drink plenty of water and get up each morning and go out in the sun to reset your body clock.
None of this works over a prolonged period of time. I may get one or two nights decent sleep but it never sets a pattern.
Right now I would sell my soul for a weeks worth of early bedtimes and all night sleeps.

EXHAUSTION.

2008-02-08T21:03:00.000+11:00

The life of a modern day Courtesan can be anything be peaceful.
You have the look, which changes depending on someone elses whim.
You contend with people who want a piece of you, who want you to be something or someone or somewhere when it suits them.
You are the ultimate fantasy toy.
You are by turns witty or cynical or shy or any number of expected emotions.
You are invisible until requested.
You spend a great deal of time alone, but when the paramour calls you must be available, happy, pleasing - Its fucking exhausting.
And when the courtesan is having a bad day well, its not like you are allowed to voice it.
To have a differing opinion, sometimes a crime, one for which you sit through endless hours of being told why your view is wrong.
To make a decision on your own seems to be forbidden.
Somedays you just want to throw your head back and scream to the heavens, somedays you don't want to be wanted.
As the sparkling diamond once sang - One day I'll fly away, leave all this to yesterday.

ABC WEDNESDAY - C

2008-02-06T22:47:00.000+11:00

C IS FOR CONTEMPLATE.

Dobs has always seemed older than his age. In fact he's something of a little old man.