FUKOWSKI

“The park grass looked greener, the park benches looked better and the flowers were trying harder.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

Goddaaaammmmm Bukowskiiiiiii........ Ham on Rye is a great book. Honest and dark, it broods and festers its way through Charles Bukowski's early years. I laughed a lot because he writes funny shit like this ......

“The dog approached again, cautiously. I found the bologna sandwich, ripped off a chunk, wiped the cheap watery mustard off, then placed it on the sidewalk.
The dog walked up to the bit of sandwich, put his nose to it, sniffed, then turned and walked off. This time he didn't look back. He accelerated down the street.
No wonder I had been depressed all my life. I wasn't getting proper nourishment. ” ― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

...and I cried my eyes out because in parts it was just heart breaking, Charles never got to go to the school dance instead google eyed and alone he is watching the beautiful young couples melting into each other on the dancefloor through the window. Upon which he is found by the campus  janitor and promptly told to fuck off. The reasons why Charles is not at the school dance are as follows....

1. he didnt want to go

2. no one would go with him 

3. he hates everyone 

So for some reason something about this scene connected with me because i started crying for the guy and it wasnt even regular crying it was different it was sobbing....it was actually hard to breathe properly after a minute or two.....and its bizarre because he was such an asshole to everyone but i knew he had the potential to be good.....there were eclipses of kindness....and ....i have a thing about potential in people.

Anyway it was just so unbelievably sad and desperate and unfair but i was still engaged with myself enough to know that the younger, ebullient, popular, athletic me would not have actually wanted to have to go to a dance with him and wear his wilting orchid on my wrist. I am aware that this older version of me would have probably fallen in love with him, believing he would love me back after he had hated me for a bit and i would understand him and he would soften, would become a sunflower...a rose....golden, he would blossom into something beautiful that all living things would adore and be drawn to like moths to a flame.

Pity is different to empathy...it's not a feeling you want to hold or caress or kiss on the forehead, its more like one you want to put in a drawer you never use, so you never have to think about it again. EVER. Sad things are very hard to comprehend........you natural reaction to pity will probably make you hate yourself.

FRONT & BACK

Givenchy Resort 2013 (dog) & Givenchy Resort 2012 (bball).
Cool Cooler Coolest.

STUDIOMUSIC

A playlist I made of some of my favourite songs and reasons why i dig them for the website, StudioMusic. I love knowing the reasons why people love certain tracks, music is so unbelievably personal. I'm always a little overwhlemed by how a song can time-warp me to another place, its never just the sound but everything that you associate with it... it's kind of an involuntary surrender to it all when you hear one that really gets you.....hence bawling your eyes out in front of total strangers when a particular song comes on the radio.

DRAW IN LIGHT

The only thing better than having a jumper named after you isssss......... having 2 jumpers named after you. Here is my second namesake that i love from the Draw in Light pre S/S 13 lookbook that I styled. You can view the whole collection here. Photographed by the absolute gentleman that is Ben Weller.

GOODBYE FOREVER

I am 10 years old and i'm kneeling in front of a shoe box. My pet rabbit is in it, he’s dead. It’s a shoe box from the high tops my mum got for me for free from her friend who worked for Puma….Puma was not cool when I was younger. I wanted Nike Air Jordans desperately. I remember feeling disappointed with the high tops I had and feeling sad that I felt dissappointed and actually maybe feeling bad that I didn’t love the shoes my mom had got me then feeling bad cos I loved my mom so much and I should have felt gratefull instead.

Anyway that’s why my rabbit was buried in a puma shoe box intsead of an air jordan box which I felt at the time would have been much better for him…you know like a really good coffin….a cool coffin.

So he’s in there and he looks like he’s sleeping and I’m feeling fucking distraught contemplating saying goodbye forever….and of course I’m crying and my nose is running and it's a terrible situation. I’ve taken a white face cloth from the hot press and tucked it around his little body like a blanket and i've put in some grass and a carrot for the journey to the next world which is obviously rabbit heaven cos my dad had told me our dog Banjo had gone to dog heaven when trying to stopper my 12th hour of crying and grief at the loss of him so I was naturally presuming there was a special heaven for each kind of animal somewhere they could all get on...etc

Now that I think about it that sucks cos I really hope if I ever end up in heaven all my pets are there….that would be amazing. Imagine being surrounded by all the pets you ever owned in your life when you got to heaven….that would be awesome.

INDUSTRIE MAGAZINE

Thank you Industrie Magazine for the interview, which you can read here and thanks to the very talented Linda Brownlee for taking my portrait.

SPRING CLEANIN'

My website has had a spring clean and update. Check it out here.

TEEN VOGUE MAY ISSUE

Jewellery shoot I styled for  the May issue of Teen Vogue, shot by Matt Irwin.

TWIN VI

Twin VI has finally landed like a mind boggling ring of crop circles in the middle of a corn field only visible from space or maybe Waterstones or Colette in Paris or Opening Ceremony in nyc and lots of other good bookstores and newsagents ...you cant miss it cos it comes fully equipped with it's very own high viz health and safety orange cover that i totally dig.

It's filled with cool stuff like interviews with Kim Ann Foxman who i have a crush on, she is a girl but looks like a very beautiful boy, actress Imogen Poots shot by Colin Dodgson (above), artist Javier Perez, Sue Davies OBE founder of the photographers gallery, also my buddy Kate Merry illustrates one of my fav writers around Karley Sciortino's (slutever) feature on the kunst of self love. www.twinfactory.co.uk

BLOOMIN

SS12 shoot I styled for Twin VI with photographer Jason Kibbler. There were two days spent in the most beautiful little flower shop in Brooklyn NYC with super cool Valerija Kileva and the little dreamboat Matthew Hitt with whom i had some great poetry and literature love ins, on the couch in the winniebago. Matt is like a modern day lord Byron. Beauty and Intelligence.

Sooooo nice to be surrounded by plants and flowers for two days.... it smelled so good.

Hair by James Pecis and Make up by Benjamin Puckey

HARMONY

Shoot for Twin VI with my buddy and photographer Colin Dodgson. A day spent romping around my house with model/musician (Vava Vultures) Harmony. I kinda love that all my fav things are featured in this shoot like shark face who lives on my couch, my courtyard, my fridge, my magnolia tree, my shower puff......most of all i love the full Celine look on my car. Celine VS Mazda MX5.Hair by Teji and Make up by Shinobu

DRAW IN LIGHT

Draw in Light is run by two hot girls called Polly and Harry, i consult on the label which is easy because their clothes are awesome and i love working with them.  They named a jumper from the AW 12  collection after me ...how cool is that! It came all wrapped up in this beautiful little box. Here i am wearing the Celestine jumper, i love it!!! Thanks Harry and Polly. Check out Draw in Light here.

ELLEUK.COM

Thanks Alannah Sparks for interviewing me for  Elleuk.com and thanks Niall O Brien for the photo to go with it.

LEVIS MENS FIT PORTFOLIO

The Levis mens fit portfolio that i worked on with photographer Christophe Coenon. He shot the whole thing on large format polaroid which was super chilled i think we did about 3 polaroids max per image.  Oldskool. You can view all the images here.

KANYEVIL

Okay so i must admit i love it when people are mean to other people who think they are awesome and actually come across as total douches people liiiiikkkkkeeeeee.......kanye

he takes himself waaaaayyyyyyyyy too seriously

it makes me really happy that someone stuck googley eyes on him and made him look silly i bet this would really piss him off.

GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS PAST

For my dad's birthday a couple of years ago i got him some Koi fish, he'd just built a pond in the garden...carved it out, sunk it in and heaved a great big boulder/stone into the middle of it.....into which he had painstakingly drilled a hole into so he could pump water through it and out of the top. It's actually a bit more than a pond really, he calls it the pool of two hearts, as there is another one, up slightly higher that feeds into the bottom pool with the big stone in it via a waterfall, so they're connected and don't exist happily without each other. It represents him and my mum which is seriously cute and kinda romantic to the max.

Anyway the other day i was thinking about when Sissy Spacek throws that big old fish in to the vegetable patch in badlands and its kinda tragic and it got me thinking about the ones i got my dad for his birthday...there was one in particular called ghost he was pure white and very beautiful. He grew like you wouldn't believe.... it got to where he was so big it was unnerving...you know when a fish gets to a certain size and somewhere in the back of your mind you know that you can't just flush them down the toilet sending them back to their mother ocean like all the goldfish you ever owned in your life......well it kinda gets you a bit nervous like you may actually have to comtemplate digging it a grave, burying it...eating it.... or offering it to the cat.

I was watching him  this one day and he was suckering all the green stuff off the big boulder...loudly it was a big epic sucking sound in the world when fish are meant to be quiet...the rock had become a great  big slimey algae popsicle. It was kinda cool watching him be a valid animal and not just a fish cos now not only was he massive and significant but he was noisy too.

In the winter on 2010 our lake froze over and was so solid we could all walk on it, my whole family and tehre are 7 of us...all except my aunty angela she walked around the lake and thought we were all mad. Of course the pond froze over too....i don't know if we all forgot or it just didn't occur to us ...as the weather was extreme and not usual but the fish died that christmas we didn't actually know until the thaw came. It was pretty heartbreaking and i remember thinking oh god were they all just hanging out under there like you do when you get a snow day off school and everyone just has a laugh and goes sledging and builds snowmen..etc..so i presume they were all just under havin a bit of a gas you know just waiting for the ice to melt and then it didnt.

I like to think they all just fainted from lack of oxygen and by the time they were dead they were not even aware that they had died you know..... hmmmm the reality i think was probably less idylic than that.

It was like the time my mom was minding my brothers love birds (he'd been given them by a girlfriend on valentines day (i thought this was a rad present but they were quite annoying actually) my mum would pop them out on the picnic table in the garden for fresh air in the day time,  anyway this one time she was late home from some event and the weather took a funny turn and temperature plummetted and by the time she got home they were dead....little sticky feet up. flat out. back down...gone from the world. My mum was all 'oohhhh god love them.... they died together so romantic' i was thinking.... hmmmm yeah they froze to death to be honest.....i'm thinking not so romantic unless its televised... no broken hearts in that cage.

It got me to thinking about leo and kate in titanic when he freezes to death and she lets him go and he floats down into the deep murky depth of the ocean and old winslet the survivor holds it together floating on her door or piece of furniture or whatever it was.. i mean i always thought she coulda just budged up and let old leo squeeze on but she didnt.......to be fair i bawled so hard at this scene my face changed shape.

yeah freezing to death...never pretty...unless youre like a wooly mammoth or something.