Where's my fucking boombox?

"What kind of men have you met exactly? We're all different. How young are they? I don't like your generalising of 'all men' here, that's sexist."

My friends lover meets the awkward silence, the wall of  exhaustion at this predictable response.

"95% of men really does deserve a generalisation, we all have these experiences, you can't know that better than we do."

She has heard it all before.



Navigating the world as a free woman has taught me a very strange lesson. Men are afraid of free women. As a married woman you can flirt, you can be provocative, you can pretty much behave as you like and make any gestures you feel like, men will love it. Before their hearts break and their tears pour into my cup of male tears. But with no repercussions. As a married woman you don't, by default, create any assumption that you mean it. There is no obligation to follow through, no want of commitment. And I mean from my side, not theirs! Many a man wants to commit to one already taken.
This is not the case when you are free. I can not speak with passion anymore, I can not be the one who throws stones on a balcony window, I can not live as I feel in the same way anymore.. Even if I now were to behave in the same way as I used to, with the same intentions, I am now a danger to mens liberty. They conjure up images of snares and traps and emotional outbursts are strictly reserved for the logic of the male mind. Men still imagine us as machines with a code that will get them things and it seems they are the ones who needs to make all of the decisions and take all action or the world will end! And of course we are all scurrying around looking for a stable relationship because were will we be without a head of our house hold..! It does not matter how little intention there is for a practical seriousness, they will find the evidence and pull away in horror. Charming.
It makes me sad though, how badly it affects us all, how we change to please while respecting them a little bit less every time...we all stand there, with our restricted emotions, our carefully chosen words because a mere 'hello' in the wrong tone will signal want of excessive commitment. Free women are the least liberated of all in this particular way.. It makes life unnecessarily boring.
I think my point is, if you feel targeted by this, which 95% of men will, I have one thing to say: All we want is to be allowed to feel freely, without shame or plan or retribution because feelings does not equal commitment. Lighten the fuck up. There is no need to be afraid. Suck that cowardliness right up,  just because we are free does not make you a better catch. Clearly.

As someone once said to me, emotional intelligence is the only kind of intelligence that counts.

"Yeah, it's true, we're not allowed to express feelings, only men can do that, although I'm not a fan of it from either sides."

She rolls her eyes.

But of course he, the man standing in front of me wading through the awkward silence, is different. Just like all the other ones who behave exactly the same way. Just so different.

In the festive spirit

Introducing Irene

Irene was always the name for all my creativity, the things too pretentious, too risky, too much of me for the stability of my world not to be offended... In a sense I am willingly splitting my personality for this: Irene is free. 

In about a months time I'll be selling some of my creations at the Mill Road Winter Fair (1st of December to be exact) so look out or the red hood! But until then, I'm facing the intimidating world o the internet... 

Moral support very much appreciated. 

 https://www.instagram.com/rebeckairene/

A lost world.

Sometimes a glimpse of the past can show you just how far away you really got when you ran. And you can never really go back. Because you're not the same anymore.

Not one of them.

Details from A Social Study of 1873.

2011

Silence. (or, how loving men is a conatsant disappointment)

"What are you reading at the moment?"

My 24 year old beard-growing, fashionably-anxious, pretensions-bookreader of a coworker asks me as we are stacking baby clothes. I know he wants me to say something classical to balance out the paperback modernity of our less pretensions colleague. Or even better; The Infinite Jest.

"I don't have time to read. It's taken me 2 weeks so far to get half way through 'A social history of outrageous fashion'."

I'll live up to expectation another day. For now I quite like that he imagines my life to be a fast pace opium den full of men playing guitars. But fiction never drew me in as much as facts...

"..copycat female undergraduates has taken up smoking and so mimicking the superior sex. If the fashion for women wearing trousers ever extended to the college, men, in order to preserve the difference between the sexes, will be driven to wearing kilts!"

- master of Trinity college Cambridge,1936

It strikes me sometimes that being a man is mainly defined by not being a woman. Not wearing the same clothes. Not talking or behaving the same. Sometimes I wonder if that is the reason why so many of our generation resort to silence. Women can do so many things now that being "a man" is becoming being nothing? I have known literally 3 men in my life that didn't clam up in silence as a defence mechanism in the face of emotions or difficulty. 3 men in my whole life. Is disconnecting in silence really the last thing that's reserved for men now that we've got aggression AND trousers? I can safely assume one of the reasons I find silence so incomprehensible is that one of the 3 is my father. But I also remember how his need to speak made him weak in other peoples eyes. Silence leads to disconnect, to thoughts of being alone and to wishing for a fucking cabin in the woods. No one likes the strong silent man because he isn't strong, he is a half formed person in a fragile exoskeleton of masculinity and strength is no where near as loveable as warmth.
In the 'social history of outrageous fashion' is 50% dudes telling women how to be more attractive, more loveable. I think we should flip that one around because I am so sick of the silence and the exoskeletons. It's impossible to truly care for someone who constantly tries to disconnect or be different or think opposites attract (such a blatantly patriarchal saying btw) instead of finding common ground but somehow it's still expected. It is not in my nature. It's just a fucking disappointment.

All I can do is tell my son every day that he is loved and his feelings are important and that more words are better than less and that listening and talking go together like a dance. And much like "no glove no love" I'll just have to hope it makes more sense in the future.

"No time to read?! See, this is why I'll never have children, I'm just a selfish bastard that way"

Leaves with a teasing smile.

On the other side.

In the dim light of my Mill road bedroom I look out on the empty street. I think of the time I snook into the cinema to see Titanic as an 11 year old and how it started a teenage idea of adulthood that was finished off by Cruel Intentions a few years later. I am far far away from those days. A different country, a different language..a different expression on my face. Yet there were things first noticed then that I've never really understood until just now. 

Is this what they call a 30-years-crisis?

 The last 3 years have felt much like falling down a rabbit hole. I have screamed and cried and bled and fought for my life and loved and danced and risked and reached far beyond the lengths of arms. And wished oh how I have wished.. I have lost almost everything familiar and experienced things I never thought possible, both good and bad to the extremes. I have seen the highs and the lows, many times quite literally... From a rainy alleyway saying goodbye for the last time that taught me that silence is the difference between 'maybe' and 'never' to following the river and the cold rooms of nr 9 and the candle lit medieval halls.. I shall never forget where it was the underground wires led me.. Through loneliness and destitution, friends I made and lost while I found the dark side of this enlightened town. And one day, just an unordinary day, I felt the warm wind blow through my hair, the silence no longer enforced and I realised I was on the other side of the rabbit hole. It all looks different. But the ground feels stable again and I hear that familiar voice...the voice of my own mind. Quietly returning.

I know what it feels like now. Truly. I know how it feels to let go...to leave everything I ever wanted behind me and start again. 

Don't feel bad. Just like in my teenage films, I didn't leave empty handed either x

Waking up. 32, undeniable eye wrinkles now, vintage dress and on my way into the unknown.
Forever changed.

But I think I finally made it.

the Wild Side

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDFD7FS2_UM

the Cave

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg0J9VGCwl4

the Fire

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G9SozS4pBY&t=23s

Man-tears for Adam.

Let's just take a break and talk about this: How fucking tired aren't we all of the man confessing his sins and getting a gold star? Don't get me wrong, I love some self insight in a man but come on, women self examine every single day, publicly, with far more accuracy but much like the man who "only gives compliments when you least expect it" (meaning when you don't need it and it's really just an exercise of power) the man who accurately describes his behaviour gets pandered to like our lives depend on it. Which it does! Because if he doesn't stop the world with his amazing intellect he will withdraw into the metaphorical man cave. He had no plans of changing anyway. How are our lives so shit that the mere promise of a man "trying" to change, just the one(!!), makes us drop everything and rush to praise him? That's what you're really getting. But I suppose that's all you ever really wanted because that doesn't require any of that hard emotional labour that is being a decent person, you can just jog on, being "your self". And another day of misogyny can pass by.

*Inspired by the hipster who finally got to confess his violence against women on national TV and "regretting it so much" that he will try to stop.* 

Adam

One single man tear runs slowly down one cheek in a dark but still extremely sharp picture on an hd TV.

the Slummer

 

"What good does all the research 

of the Impressionists do them
when they never 

got the right person to stand near the tree 

when the sun sank"

"Slumming commenced with a curiosity to see the sights, 

and when it became fashionable to go 'slumming' 

ladies and gentlemen were induced to don common clothes 

and go out in the highways and 

byways to see people of whom

 they had heard, 

but of whom they were as ignorant as if they were inhabitants 

of a strange country."

 September 14, 1884

the Fallen Women

"We caught the tread of dancing feet,
We loitered down the moonlit street,
And stopped beneath the harlot's house. 

.

.

We watched the ghostly dancers spin
To sound of horn and violin,
Like black leaves wheeling in the wind.  

.

.

Sometimes a horrible marionette
Came out, and smoked its cigarette
Upon the steps like a live thing. 

Then, turning to my love, I said,
'The dead are dancing with the dead,
The dust is whirling with the dust.'

But she--she heard the violin,
And left my side, and entered in:
Love passed into the house of lust."

- the Harlot's House

 Oscar Wilde

the Street Musician

"The class of men in the street bands is, very generally,those who can't read music, but play by ear..."

Through cobbled streets so cold and damp
The Knocker-Upper man goes creeping
Tap-tapping at the window pane
To wake the town from sleeping.

He said “Eh thee up and stir thi'self
The factory ooter’s blowin’
So get up from your nice warm bed
To work you must be goin’”

Day in day out the year about
Though snow or rain are fallin
You’d hear his clogs along the street
You’d hear his voice a’callin’

- English folk song

the Pickpocket

"Picking pockets..is the daringest thing that a boy can do"

"The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who takes things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law."

- the Goose and the Common

the Grisette

"Grisettes are companions of bohemians but sometimes leave them for bourgeois lovers."


"Work - work - work,
Till the brain begins to swim;
Work - work - work,
Till the eyes are heavy and dim!
Seam, and gusset, and band,
Band, and gusset, and seam,

Till over the buttons I fall asleep,

And sew them on in a dream!

"Oh, Men, with Sisters dear!
Oh, men, with Mothers and Wives!
It is not linen you're wearing out,
But human creatures' lives!
Stitch - stitch - stitch,
In poverty, hunger and dirt,
Sewing at once, with a double thread,
A Shroud as well as a Shirt"

-the song of the shirt, Thomas Hood

Destitution

My mind is tired...exhausted hands write these lines of defiance. Do you know why wild roses became my favourites? They grew out of a pile of rocks by the roadside,knocked about and constantly cut. Still beautiful. Still sharp and bright. Though dirty and torn.. 

Push me, leave me, deport me, ruin me, I will still create. I will do this til it kills me and then blood can pour through the memories because This Will Last. Because it has to. Because I need it to.

A new era of my photographs is starting, has started already. It will be darker. Grittier. Closer. But more alive. It's pictures of a lost and chaotic transition through poverty and the people that follows me through it. One day this will all be over. In the meantime..I'll call this part of my artistic exploration "on the edge of destitution".

Let's begin.

Time for a little feminism again

12 days of Christmas

"Listen, I need you to do something for me. I need you to tell them after I'm gone..."

How did I ever think that on a day like today I'd finish it? Her decade as well...the subconscious has a way of intertwining the new and the old and so will I. There is no point in going against, I will follow the stream and it will take me where I need to go. Swept away by a velvety blue. This will contain both the beginning and the end of my journey through the spirits of Christmas. I call this my 12 days of Christmas.

"I really thought I would be the first one to make this phone call..my heart..my recklessness."

"So did I. But it seems it's not working out that way."

The first three people were made in such detail, I had energy and ambition for them! It is far easier to make the house fit the people than to make the people fit the house and it seems like a more realistic way to go about it. I wanted their faces to be expressive in an exaggerated way, like in the caricatures I saw at the exhibition, slightly real but slightly ridiculous. Only one is based on a real person, I call him Geoffrey. I don't particularly like the lady, but the little boy made me laugh to tears! Those teeth..!


"Hey, do you remember that first night? on your balcony. That book was so hilarious!"



The houses grew out of just two pictures of opposite sides of Petty Cury from the 1870's so I took some artistic liberties. Petty Cury in the 1850's wasn't a particularly good place to live, it was full of backstreet slums and very old houses but it had shops and was one of the streets leading to the market place. I wanted to make a picturesque street with sharp edges.
There is the bakers, mrs Lovett, with the Christmas food display. "He regarded it as her greatest achievement since their marriage." A quote from a Christmas carol. Now, that is supposed to be said by one of the "nice guys" so it really sets the tone here! Forget the children and any ambitions mrs Cratchit might be having, it's the dinner that counts.
Next to the bakery is the passageway for carriges arriving to the inn. 
In case you haven't noticed though, after you are done shopping for puddings and pies you can always have a shave upstairs. Blood splatter is only coincidental.

"Of course I don't..I would do the very same thing. I will love you forever, remember that."

 Walk a little further and you come to the seamstress and toy shop. It's the same house..or is it? The way into the toy shop is through the passage way so you'll have to wait until the morning but the seamstresses door is always open. Not literally. It is now because someone is about to close the door after putting down all those presents. There is a fire lit upstairs. A red scarf and a silhouette framed on the wall. The sign, not in colour, oh no, not in the 1850's, tells us very clearly there is no sewing machine involved in the making of the dresses. On the back it tells another story... While becoming a city seamstress was popular, it allowed you to keep your femininity, it was hard and often led to prostitution. As if not everything did...



Outside the toy shop there is a snowball fight going on! One child in the window and another hiding in the passageway. A man hit by an accidental snowball has dropped his hat. Who knows where that came from... The teenage girl notices nothing, she is mesmerised by the toys in the window, the marbles most of all. And the dominoes. "the true meaning of Christmas: consumerism!" proclaims the text behind the curtains. It was after all the Victorians that created our notion of Christmas.

"I will wait for you on the other side. Good night..."


Lastly we come to the Public house, the inn, the Falcon. This is allegedly a pub that was on Petty Cury at this time, I have taken a guess and set it in the largest house. On the street the two first people meet. Her crinoline makes her impossible to reach, there were popular jokes advising husbands to register their wives at the fire insurance company. "Hands off barmaids". Much like with the little girl of a chimney sweep I like the idea of that not even then could rigid sexism and gender roles have been 100% enforced. It wasn't a time of industrious improvement and women burning up in their wide skirted fashions all the time. It was a time of children falling asleep on gin but somewhere, if only just once, maybe not even for good, something slips through the cracks. In the windows of the pub there are only shadows. But on the second floor a faint purple light and two travel bags. One like the male version of the other. The window is open and curtains fall out...

"..strangely familiar."

"A little bit of fantasy is a good thing"

The snow has fallen on this street but it isn't quite finished. It needs a street sign. At least one, probably more people are missing...There are a few more days of Christmas. Maybe til then... 

"Be serious - just for a moment."