showered, fed, doing breathing exercises.
i am the man with a plan.
this too shall pass.
i have one plan and if i have one plan, that means i`ll come up with others and sure enough they`re already forming.
or as uncle says `one more thing`
it`s always one more thing isn`t it.
fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck!
FUCK!
nothing is ever fucking easy. after how many phone calls to the embassy and promises to call as soon as they have my packet and a fucking call today, mind you. no we don`t have your packet. fucking morons.
vic gets a call to say, oh yeah, we have the packet but you`re certificate of character is out of date and needs to be renewed before we can issue your visa and btw you have to do this before feb 9 or you`ll have to do your medical over and if you don`t mind you have to come in, in person.
there a few problems with all of this:
1. i can`t afford to go back to trinidad to get another certificate.
1b. [update] i don`t have to go, i just can get it updated, but it`s going to take two weeks.
2. i can`t really afford to barbados [but i`m going to have to]
2b. i can`t afford to take the time off to fly to bardbados either.
3. if i miss the window, [which gives me all of next week to get the shit together, while doing this current project which needs to be finished by feb 6] which is feb 9, i can`t afford to do another medical again either.
so at any angle we have been ass fucked with a sandpaper and barbed wire condom without so much as a peck on the cheek.
if anyone has any suggestions, i`m willing to listen.
i have a plan, but all the variables are completely out of my control and the blood is thumping a little to loudly in my temples at the moment for me to come up with alternate version.
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immigration
today marks the beginning of four days of location photography.
my first photo shoot here starts in about two hours. i`m a little nervous, i`ve never worked with this photographer before, we`re shooting models on location, also new to me.
but this is what i live for, the challenge. the concept is done and approved, this is the execution, the details, making sure everything is the way you want it, all of it has to pull together.
from my limited interaction with the photographer he seems skilled and willing to take instructions. i really hate the know it all ones who ignore your suggestions. but i suppose i use the same argument, you`re the client, i`m the professional, fuck off and let me do my job.
i`m looking forward to the next couple of days. i`m not an adrenaline junkie, per se, but i do enjoy working under pressure and the thrill of the deadline. and this job is going to the wire. after the four days of photography, i have to produce finished art for outdoor material – bus sides, bus backs, billboards, plus newspaper advertising in time for the launch feb 8. tentative approval date for client is a week from today.
i`m not sure why all of this makes me so giddy, if it`s my first campaign here, the general quality of the work, my level of involvement in the project or all of the above. i feel good about it and not that i don`t always give my best, but there`s a little extra effort on my part to make sure that it all comes together on time.
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art direction, photo shoot
i`m serious.
prostitution should be legal and taxed. george carlin summed it up best, “fucking is legal, selling is legal, why shouldn`t selling fucking be legal?”
seriously, i think it would help on various levels. in an ideal society, you`d have to be of legal age, get registered, get tested regularly, display your certificates, a simple supply and demand situation.
with the age verification and registration it should help keep anyone underage out of the business. it`s not necessarily going to stop some sexual offenders, but in the case of violent clients, it can be reported and anyone still found trading sex slaves and paying for sex with children, can be lost in the deepest darkest dungeon.
i`m still processing this on a purely emotional level, i suppose it would require some investigation, but i think it`s a viable idea.
we need to start with education however. there are too many hang ups about sexuality.
we need to start with our children, i`m not saying teach them the karma sutra, but we have to get to recognise their bodies without shame or stigma, none of the pee pee and na na, bullshit. teach them about their bodies, how to identify it and what an appropriate touch is.
as they grow older teach about the choices, abstinence is an ideal, but we were all teenagers once, so it would better to equip the with all the facts and try to stop burdening them with guilt.
we need to put aside our own hang ups as well, the systems we have in place now are not working, can it really hurt to try something else?
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prostitution
i don`t really talk about my children here, because i don`t think it`s appropriate, but it`s not so much the measure of impropriety, it`s the fear i have for them.
i would kill anyone that anyone that tries to do them harm. i`m not an especially violent person, no matter how much i rant here. it`s just an outlet, i vent and i move on. when it comes to my children i make no bones about it, i will kill someone.
i`ve said before and i reiterate, i firmly believe that children should be dressed their age. i`m liberal in a great many aspects of my life but i`m perfectly willing to go medieval to protect my children. i think anything two consenting adults chose to get up to in their own company is fine.
however pedophilia is the most depraved and appalling of sins in my book and i`ve been reading this new york times article and i`ve had to take it in stages of because how badly it upsets me.
All the girls I spoke to said that their captors were both psychologically and physically abusive. Andrea told me that she and the other children she was held with were frequently beaten to keep them off-balance and obedient. Sometimes they were videotaped while being forced to have sex with adults or one another. Often, she said, she was asked to play roles: the therapist`s patient or the obedient daughter. Her cell of sex traffickers offered three age ranges of sex partners — toddler to age 4, 5 to 12 and teens — as well as what she called a “damage group.“ “In the damage group they can hit you or do anything they wanted,“ she explained. “Though sex always hurts when you are little, so it`s always violent, everything was much more painful once you were placed in the damage group.
what kind of depraved, damaged human being would find sex with children desirable, there is no rehabilitation, there is no counselling, these people have to be eliminated, plain and simple. there are some people that would blame the lack of morals in society today, but i don`t i think something is fundamentally wrong with these people.
these are the people i fear. i worry about them everyday, if i could lock my children away in a tower until they were of age i would. but we`ve taught them as best we can, how to say no, what`s an inappropriate touch, not to go anywhere with anyone they don`t know, but reading stuff like this you wonder if it`s enough.
i know their situation is not even vaguely similar to the children in the article but that something like that happens in the world everyday is enough to fill me with dread.
addendum: a pair of interesting looks at the original NYT story, here and here
it`s monday, you`re probably struggling through your day,
here is the cure to what ails you, take a couple of these and leave a comment.
i should warn however, that these are in no way safe for a work environment. use with discretion.
i love music. i`m a fan. i can`t say i never played air guitar, but i was more prone to play air`bass.
my fantasy job in the music business would be sound engineer however. i love good quality sound where you can hear the individual components contributing to the overall harmony.
most of my music collection is on my laptop, 20Gb of mp3s that run the gamut from metallica and tool to ella, miles, nina and the duke to wagner, bach and beethoven to fatboy slim, moby and paul oakenfold to stevie and marvin to slick rick and missy to johnny cash plus a large collection of soundtracks that allow me to indulge in my musical eccentricities.
i`m a child of the 80s, so i grew up with the big hair bands and the popular music of the era, but i also had a large brit pop influence. we had a six hour countdown show every saturday, the host was a british expat and would cover billboard pop and country as well as the british charts. i remember getting my first `job` in the early 80s so i could buy a radio to listen to the show. my mother didn`t want to listen to six hours of `that noise` every saturday so she struck a deal with me, if i was willing to do the chores i could get my own radio. i did and for years whatever i was doing on a saturday i was locked on to it.
but that wasn`t the be all and end all of my musical education, on sundays my mother would go through her fairly extensive record collection and introduce me to a variety of things. we had a record player where you could stick in five lps at a time and as one finished, the other drop onto the turntable.
bob marley, miles davis, ella fitzgerald, marvin, aretha, the sounds of motown, soundtracks from the sound of music, my fair lady, singing in the rain. i would be on the couch reading while my mother made lunch and the records would play on. when i got to high school and everybody was `discovering` marley and the conscious lyrics, i was amazed, because the first bob marley record i`d heard was punky reggae party which was pretty much a party song.
i also spent a great deal of my formative years at my aunt`s house and her children were already in their late teens by the time i was aware of music, so i had their musical influences as well, abba, hendrix, pink floyd.
added to all of this was the music i discovered on my own, prince, metallica, doug e fresh, run dmc. my basic rule of thumb for music is that i was willing to give it a listen, not for the lyrically quality a lot of the time but for character of the music. it`s how it affects me on a visceral level.
i can`t make a blanket statement like a lot of music today is shit, but it certainly lacks a lot of charm and character, i don`t listen to much of today`s r&b because when you`ve been weaned on the classic most of the stuff out there is just a waste of studio time. it`s formulaic crap and that tends to go across the board.
the mass commercialisation of music and shorter attention spans have lead to mass production, it`s not art any more it`s about what sells. take it inagadda da vida, it`s a 17 minute drug and alcohol fuelled opus. in today`s three minute airplay ready market it would have never gotten made. same thing for concept albums, yes there is there`s the new outkast double album but that isn`t norm. in the 70s, a band wasn`t a real band until they`d done a concept or experimental album.
even though metallica has become the bane of music downloaders everywhere and became in my humble somewhat soulless and unoriginal after the black album did a magnificent piece of work with s&m which features them play with the san fransisco symphony orchestra, it`s an amazing piece of work and shows a level of creativity that is notable absent from the industry.
god i`m just going on. and i haven`t even covered the local music scene. my hands hurt and i`m hungry, so i`m going to stop here and continue later.
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music
and we can nibble on a wall or two even.
i hadn`t planned on posting again for the day, but this required getting off my chest.
i just had dinner delivered. pizza. hawaiian. the delivery guy asks “are you going to eat that?” i look at him puzzled as to why i would order something, pay good money and not eat it. the bewilderment at his question was obviously showing on my face, he adds, “there`s ham on it”
and it dawns on me, my hair. right.
since i moved here i`ve come to realise that in jamaica, rastafari holds the patent on dreadlocks or something equally insipid. this is not the first time it`s happened.
ok let me back track, if you don`t know according to what sect of rastafari you belong to, you don`t:
eat meat at all
eat swine
eat salt
eat food prepared by a woman menstruating
i`m sure i`ve missed some but it basically changes depending on who your talk to.
on with our story. yes, on with our story.
i went to burger king one day for lunch and order a whopper with bacon and cheese, again the question, “you sure you want that?” i shrugged it off.
but in the last week, i`ve had to answer the same question posed to me by various people i interact with on a daily basis. the conversation goes like this:
“are you rastafarian?”
“no.”
“ok”
“are you christian?”
“no. i don`t deal well with organised religion”
“ok.”
“so why you have your hair like that?”
“because straw… [insert odd look here] nevermind, i made a decision to grow my hair, a social experiment, a statement…”
“oh ok”
and the conversation usually degenerates from there.
i have to laugh or i`m going to cry, as i said last week, assumption is the mother of all fuck ups. dreadlocks does not a rastafari make. i`ve never been a vegetarian, i eat pork. lots of it actually, as often as i can. i`ve been growing my hair for eight years and will probably cut in two years. i haven`t made a decision about that yet. so i can safely say. i predate revlon rasta trend by about at least a good two years. and while i`m on the topic about assumptions people make about me because of my hair which i forgot to mention last time, i`m not a some jacque st. john caribbean stud either, but that`s the subject of a whole other post.
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dreadlocks, rastafarian
i`m feeling the need for ink.
i`m ready to finish my back. actually i`ve been ready for months but time and schedules never meshed.
if you`re squeamish, i suggest you stop reading now.
ok, then, onward, be forewarned there`s some odd, possibly disgusting stuff later on.
my first really tattoo was the 13″ sun on my left shoulder. it took three sittings of about three hours each. i sat there on the chair in the upstairs balcony of darren`s [my tattoo guy] in st.james, a suburb of sorts of port of spain.
i was muttering the bene gesserit mantra and crushing my friend sam`s hand. the pain was intense, i have never experienced anything like it, before or since, even with the volume of work that`s been done on me to date.
darren likes to ink me cause since my back i just sit there, no flinching, no bitching. he joked about making a how to video with me, i sit and read, watch tv, basically just let him work.
that`s how it works, i go to him with an idea and he just run amok, with the exception of the orubus on my right arm, everything else started out with an idea i had.
i have to say i like the pain, not the immediate pain while i`m getting inked but there`s a point just afterwards when your skin is raised, the sheer sensitivity of the skin when even the slightest breezes invokes a reaction.
not that kind, get your mind out of the gutter.
then there is the smell. it`s fresh blood, ink and torn flesh. it seems to evoke some sort of reaction from the dark recess of my reptilian brain. i like.
this is supposed to be my final major work, no more after this, but getting inked is addictive, the pain, the smell. i think i said it before when i did my left arm and since then i`ve done my right arm and started this major work on my back.
i know i`ll probably end up doing something else. but there is a degree of trust with darren that i`m not sure i`ll be able to find with anyone else. which means i`ll probably have to pay him a visit before i leave to join vic.
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ink
question of the day or week in this case
If you were offered a commercial (90-SECONDS) spot during prime-time television to SAY or PROMOTE anything you wanted, how would you use this time
choices, choices, choices.
i would promote tolerance. for religion, for sexuality, for ethnicity, for our fellow man. think about the affect on you before you judge.
a lot of the worlds ills could be solved with a little more tolerance.
