Before I landed in Biarritz in July, my MySpace Page was a carefully manicured lawn. Flickring was my scrapbook and practically my full length mirror. I added Facebook to my arsenal and occasionally opened mail from Friendster. But lately, I don’t fish around on Small World. I don’t upload, stumble!, google, youtube, or filter feeds. I sometimes ichat, usually gchat, but don’t download. Instead, I test out pens and spend the extra dollar or two for a good one. I collect good journals and fill them. I draw. I’ve traded in my mechanical hand for the tendons and small bones of my own.
My eyes widened at an article from a friend in my inbox, a continuum of the siren calls from afar bringing me back, stirring me from my pestle and mortar stupor. It was an article about a ‘Girl Power’ (a term whose skin tingling triteness makes my neck rotate, Body Snatchers style) but wiping away the image of pink hearts with boxing gloves, I see it’s about the now tired story of a 17 year old raking in millions, this one making cute graphics for MySpace layouts and rejecting the million(s) dollar buyout offer saying, ‘whatever.’
The Internet social networking phenom turneth surprisingly s–l–o–w–l–y and yours truly has Internetitis that began suddenly this summer. (It’s happened before). I am antsy behind the screen and want to finish quickly and get on with things.
In Paris, with all the downtrodden faces and ladies who dejeuner clinging to their well-tailored coats, it was easy to fall back in love with the online world, updating and uploading and sprucing up my online life (hence the sparkling new Girl on the street home replete with video).
But since I’ve been facing the majestic ocean (facing NY from the Atlantic shores of France), I haven’t been much in the mood for uploading, or downloading, or browsing, or searching, least of all doing any online enterprising. My own personal writing is filled with “Look Up” and “Research Laters” and I have to say, it’s amazingly productive to leave these things undone.
I lately read novels the way I downloaded iTunes TV shows when I first arrived in Paris in winter. I write with a pen, I read from paper, and I draw every day. Colored pencils and carbon pencils, a touch of sea water or Evian from the spray can to make it aquarelle. Always of people, usually at the seaside, and my rule is they have to be there in the flesh. When they leave, they leave. I get what I can. I capture life. Life lived and breathed, belly out, nipples to the left and right on an 85 year old. Cuddling or napping teenagers. Friends chatting and having a Pastis or a pression. Toes digging in the sand or curled one on top of another on a boardwalk chaise.
I capture life and not the Eskimo kisses of circuits rubbing together on austere motherboards. With the drawing, I’m not ready to quit the day job (what day job?) but I’m not half bad either. I find it’s like my old stealth trend snapshots, heart racing, trying to get that last gesture in before I’m caught, but the material both in my tin pencil case and and my subjects are broader and more challenging.
None of that matters when I say, I’m proud of this latest success story, which came naturally, I’m sure, and not with a lot of planners and strategists second guessing the market and planting clever traps in women’s paths. I’m sure it happened through community and kismet. Of course, she’ll need planners and strategists if it grows to outsized proportions so the story can continue and sustain and that will be where people who do what I do, professionally, step in to make the unselfconscious conscious.
I haven’t read this article yet myself but I got the gist so without further ado, here is her wildfire idea, another one that leaves the corporate suits scratching at their blown out dos…
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