Posted: May 27th, 2011 | Author: Daniela Vladimirova | Filed under: self-portrait | Tags: family, growing, inconsiderate, parents | 2 Comments »
All dying couples look for practical things that would give more substance to their unity. The gravity of the action depends on how inconsiderate they are: Some of them go and get a dog, others buy things – a house, a bigger car -, some get married, others open a shared bank account, but the thoughtless majority do the worst possible thing: they procreate.
When you suddenly find yourself with this thing in your hands – be it a puppy, a baby, a property certificate, a bible-long signed contract from the bank – you realize what you really care for. I guess that this is what happened to my parents when I was born.
Because I served as a big bang – after me, galaxies started drifting apart and getting bigger and bigger. They were completely unprepared to this and so it took them some time to fuck everything up in a more consistent and definitive way. I became a huge battlefield, trenches and all, for their recriminations. Obviously, what they hated in each other was exactly what they had first fallen in love with.
“Don’t smile so much” – said my father, because my mother’s smile was her most distinctive feature. “Don’t be so gloomy” – said my mother, because my father’s gravity was what she had first liked about him. Their sole purpose, for a few years, became the erasing of the other’s influence from my character. At age 5, I was discrete (you must be, with single parents), mature, obedient, never disturbed the peace and was used at being wrong, whatever I did and no matter how hard I tried.
At the moment of its biggest expansion, when I was 11 and we were about to move to Italy, my family was thus composed:
It was a real mess at Christmas.
After that, it started shrinking. When we left the country, my dad stayed in Bulgaria; my mother died 7 years later; and then a few of my grandparents, and so on. Nothing endured, nothing withstood the strain. The parental kind of love died away with time, everybody always had some very important work to do and postponed and procrastinated. So I unconsciously looked for a sit-com sort of putative family. Just anybody could do the trick, as long as they respected certain rules.
From high-school years till the verge of the age of reason, all my friends were from 10 to 15 years older than me. They all formed happy couples: softly spoken, harmonious, patient. He was always tall and strong, she was usually well dressed and very feminine, or intellectually stimulating. And I wanted to be like her, I wanted her to love me and approve of me, with all the subtle and hostile competition psychodynamics you usually put in place with your mother when you’re a teenager (“I can be like you, only better”).
Their authority was unquestionable. The power forces: completely unequal. And the more confounding the whole relationship became, the more I strived to conform to it – until I finally got rid of the phallic stage, some 20 years too late. I guess that this is the reason why I love Woody Allen so much. And also why I’m doomed to act like a five-year-old, now that I’m past thirty: it’s because when I was five I acted like a thirty-year-old.
Posted: April 22nd, 2011 | Author: Daniela Vladimirova | Filed under: self-portrait | Tags: photos, soul, thread, wool, yarn | No Comments »
Check it out: 31 years but in prefect conditions. It can become tangled. It can be torn. It can be unravelled. It can help you if you get lost: just pick one end of the thread. At times it won’t get out and has to be strained and pulled vigorously. It keeps you warm at night, or in winter. It has its own story: it has been spun and wrapped by skilful hands, thrown to cats to play with, recovered and re-wrapped, tied and snapped, on the whole it’s used but well kept.
Posted: March 25th, 2011 | Author: Daniela Vladimirova | Filed under: self-portrait | Tags: conflict, contradiction, femininity, italy, sophia coppola | No Comments »
Watched Somewhere by Sophia Coppola, a few months ago, and placed it somewhere in the middle of my personal Sophia Coppola chart (between Lost in Translation – in pole position – and Marie Antoinette – last). Or more or less in the middle between prodigy and pointlessness. But one scene I really liked was Laura Chiatti having breakfast with the little girl in the hotel room in Milan, and asking her the question “do you have a boyfriend?”. That was a perfect little gem: Elle Fanning’s mortification was absolutely timely, and something I could really relate to.
You hear that question very often, in Italy, probably since kindergarten. And I’ve always hated this constant sexualization of every relationship. It’s embarrassing and unfitting – an appropriate answer would be “And what about you? Do you still fuck your husband?”, but you never have enough presence of mind when it happens. It’s maybe because I’m naïve or because I’ve had a protracted childhood, but I bear this image in my mind: of young girls like baby giraffes or some other sort of long legged and clumsy cub – a fawn that hasn’t yet lost the spots on its fur, stuff like that.
And so, my personal concept of femininity has arisen from previous structures and subsequent clashes, just like this. I came here and wasn’t like that. And I was too old to try and conform at all costs. The conflict was really poignant. When I was at junior-high my girlfriends were all first and foremost massively interested in their looks; hallowed; loved every living creature – but especially the small and young ones; perfectionist; dressed in pink; prudish and easily shocked; pietistic; completely dedicated to smothering all unpleasant feelings; replacing any emotion with forms of the Pathetic.
Therefore, to be feminine required: suffocating all conflict and expressing it through fake-submissive claims and collateral remarks; whining; getting yourself up like a Christmas tree; undergoing a lobotomy which erases all bad language; being flirty and captivating with every specimen of the opposite sex (so that you had a ready answer for “do you have a boyfriend?”).
Humph: I’ve just made a list of all my discarded selves. I refused all of it tout court. They wore pink and light blue – I wore black and red. They had long and beautiful hair – I cut it all. They used “whoops-a-daisy” – I swore. They cooed and sweet-talked over every cot and doghouse – I exclaimed I hated cats. They loved and shrieked in enthusiasm at each rosy/tender thing – I became a dry critic of all kitsch. They batted and fluttered eyelashes – I groaned. I feel a return of all anger – how can you possibly love everything in this world? It’s obviously impracticable, you’re a human being, with all your teeth and nails and feelings. You must be phony – it’s the only explanation. And my anger means that I’m not free yet, and that these representations are alive and at work in my life, that I’m yet puerile and unable to restore them.
There is a fundamental ambiguity between good and beautiful, in the Italian language, which is at the origin of all this, I think. You can say that a cup of coffee is delicious or fine-looking, and it would mean the same. There’s the assumption that the surface corresponds to the inside, that form is content. It has certainly made this the most beautiful country in the world. But it took me 20 years to unravel this ball of wool.
So, for the coming week, I’ve decided to buy a pink dress full of rhinestone, indulge my vanity, wear cheap jewellery and complain. Just for once, for the hell of it.
Posted: January 26th, 2011 | Author: Daniela Vladimirova | Filed under: self-portrait | Tags: 50mm, art, knowledge, love, photomanipulation, self portrait | 1 Comment »
I know I could enable the webcam of the laptop I’m using to write this and watch myself, but that would make me look distorted and unreal. And in this way I can’t see my eyes looking at themselves, or what I look like when I’m watching somebody, so the contrivance is biased and inaccurate. Plus, it’s invasive and makes me see myself from a disrespectful distance. No one looks at me or talks to me that close – it would be misleading, vicious, presuming, intruding, kitsch – so I’m not doing it – I’m curious and eager about the real thing.
I’ll put on a prime and place it in front of me. The results will be blurry because with the widest aperture available I won’t know what’s on focus. The lens multiplication caused by my cheap DSLR’s APS-C sensor makes it particularly hard: my 50mm becomes an 80mm. I can’t see myself – probably it’s focusing on a tuft of hair around the ears or the tip of my nose. The shallow depth is what I like most, so I’m not going to reduce aperture, even though I know that this is what keeps me away from good pictures.
Because it feels so much more real – even if physically my eyes aren’t bent like that. I watch selectively. That selection is exactly what I’d like to reproduce, even if it takes forever. I’m interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you [1], I want to see myself the way you see me.
It’s not an amusement, or an obsession. It’s not a social rite: I’m not taking pics of my dog or my drunk friends dancing in the disco to tag them and show them to everyone. I arrogantly shun the white-washed-faces flashing in the dark. I don’t need to show I was somewhere (in an iPhone+FourSquare style).
I want to see the differences. I’m the person I know better, but I also am the only one who can never see myself except as an image – I’ll know what my eyes look like only if they are reflected by the mirror or the lens. And yet all these things that I do and feel and think and say every day must have changed me a bit, just let me check where that thing went: Look, a new white hair, a dimple, a line of laughter. I’ll run and check the camera in a fever, after I’ve finished. As if I was looking at a brown envelope sent to me by the private detective I hired. I want evidence. Hungrily, I’ll look for the days and the subtle variations in time and life and custom. I want to trace the geography of events. I have my small vanities. I long to know what my hair looks like. A mirror wouldn’t do – I can fake it, I can study my expression and try and look silly, or funny, or simply good, and that’s not what I want. I want to know just what I was like right now.
Photography is rapacious – it has the stupid presumption that the world is nothing but a set of pictures [2]. Subconsciously, I’m trying to (deceiving myself I’m going to) usurp what’s in front of me under the form of a token (“I saw this, it happened just before my eyes, and I’ll never forget it”). It’s the same when I take pictures of people. “You belong to me, and I want to remember you – for those future moments when I’ll think tearfully of you and miss you”. The thoughts of sadness are essential to the medium, if all photographs are memento mori.” [3] Pictures I take of my beloved ones are an elegiac act of love. I even remember quarreling in the past, reinforcing the you don’t love me argument saying “You never take pictures of me”. Unshakable claim!
Shooting pictures is a way to record what’s worthy of being documented. When I turn the lens towards my own self, I’m saying “I am important, I deserve to be recorded – I am/was here – I lived”. It’s a way to include myself in what I love (because you take pictures of me means you love me – for the same reason as before). It is a short circuit – an augmenting and protraction of my eyes, a clash of eyeballs. Its emotional charge means nothing to others. And yet I’ll go on shooting self-portraits. It’s insolent and completely insufficient, as self-expression. It’s my (half-done) way to say: This is what I am. Or, put more simply: I am.
[1] Roland Barthes,
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
[2] “Le monde est fait pour aboutir à un beau livre” – S. Mallarmé
[3] Susan Sontag,
On Photography
Posted: December 3rd, 2010 | Author: Daniela Vladimirova | Filed under: self-portrait | Tags: contest, eat, feed, lestrigones, lunch, peristalsis, table | No Comments »
Just a few words to explain what this is about.
I’ve been a hearty eater for 20 years. I wake up in the morning and if I say I’m not hungry you would better call an ambulance. You can probably tell that from half of my holiday pics. But in particular moments, when I find myself in the Big Haste and lose a bit of balance, I grow convulsively hungry, I forget to chew and simply devour what I lay my hands on, gorging my appetite instead of actually savouring what’s in front of me. All my meals coincide with brief periods of selective amnesia, a dreamless sleep.
In the past few months, I’ve been regularly eating as if there was no tomorrow.
Eating competitively.
Eating as if all those around me had asked me to eat as a proof of love.
As if, like when I was a kid, I had been confined to the table until you finish it all.
Blunting myself at fixed intervals. Growing dull for hours, my heart beating convulsively, everything else sacrificed to the goddess Peristalsis in the temple of the Lestrigones.
And then, last week I dreamt that I was in the very room that witnesses my daily feed contests, where I said to myself (disguised as a non-existent friend that was growing fatter and fatter every day) “Stop it now. You go on eating like that and all your beauty will be gone, and you’ll die”. I saw her face’s transformation, hour-long, into a grimace of sheer pain. The people whom I thought were glad to see me eat that much approving of my words. “True, that way she’ll die, and you were the one who had to tell her, you and no one else”.
So this is a sort of mantra, against growing too comfortable, forgetting, neglecting my balance of body and spirit, for something pointless. “I’ve finished my meat. Can I go play now?”
Posted: November 5th, 2010 | Author: Daniela Vladimirova | Filed under: self-portrait | Tags: addiction, addictive, like, social networks, twitter | No Comments »
You can’t do anything about it – if you have an addictive behaviour, whatever you like turns into a bad habit.
Buying stationery, cigarettes with red wine, point-and-click adventure games, bollocking your employees, sexual roleplay, love mitosis, costume-dramas, self-help books, Indie electro, social networks. By the way, I know this looks like my “likes” section on Facebook, but you can safely put the guesswork out of it – it’s not completely autobiographic.
Now Twitter: I’m playfully keeping an eye on myself as I become addicted to it.
I mean: ain’t it perfect? It’s reliable and predictable, you usually start by hating it, but then you reach a tolerance phase, and all of a sudden you start feeling its absence…
Your tragic antecedent is your curiosity: you sign up just for a second (“let me have a look”), you think you might “just go in and use the toilet”, then you consider it for self promotion reasons, and all of a sudden something funny happens and you’re damned – there you are, tweeting at a double, triple, quadruple rate. You set up Twitter widgets in your blogs and install tiny-url services and start looking for your favourite social-network aggregator.
Do me a favour: don’t ever show me anything I might find remotely interesting. Please!
Posted: June 7th, 2010 | Author: Daniela Vladimirova | Filed under: self-portrait | Tags: 2008, anesthesia, annus mirabilis, blurry, chamomile, end, epiphany, fade-out, feeling, god, marx, months, music, script, self-slaughter, soundtrack, taxes, torture, valerian, year | 2 Comments »
Here’s part two of the script I started last week: Annus mirabilis.
AUGUST
While having breakfast at a bar, D witnesses the death of a 30 year old woman sitting right behind her, who has a sudden heart attack. Moment of being for D. She is linked directly to God. She agrees with Marjane Satrapi that God looks a bit like Marx. She gathers the following conclusions: that life can change, but it won’t change by itself. The utilitarian vision of the invisible hand guiding you towards what’s good for you is actually a fraud, and you have to reach out for what you think is best and claim it for yourself. And the other half of this truth is immediately transparent: that you have to stay away from what is harmful for you. That being good isn’t enough, that it won’t change things you dislike around you; it can only give you access to cloud nine, eventually (a fact she seriously doubts, and God doesn’t give the slightest hint about it, either), but won’t have any impact on your present life. As a result, she leaves her home and goes to stay at a couple of friends’ house for a month, and then at her step-father’s, while her flat is being cleared up at her request. Admitting these truths makes her seriously wish to be buried alive, or deep-frozen.
Brian Eno – By This River ♫ ♪
SEPTEMBER
After a few days spent freely floating around the known universe in Major Tom fashion, D receives the taxes she’s to pay for the remainder of the year and is sharply pulled back to earth: they’re just short of 15.000 Euros, to be paid in 5 easy monthly installments. How do they look? Like a plain PDF sitting in her mailbox. All her inheritance is gone. However, the strange correspondence between the amount of taxes and the sum of money she’s just come to own makes her start to believe in luck coming her way. During this time, she carries on on her routine of horse doses of chamomile tea and valerian at 4 o’clock each morning and a ritual of self-inflicted punishment and utter psychic torture at 4 o’clock each afternoon. By the end of the month, she goes back living in her own flat, alone.
Antony and The Johnsons – Hitler in My Heart ♫ ♪
OCTOBER
D quits her job. Her company (God bless them) accepts to work with her as a freelancer again. She spends the rest of the month calculating how many days, hours, minutes, seconds, coffee breaks, cigarette breaks, lunch breaks, emails she has to send, how many steps of the stair she has to walk up and down, and so on, ‘til the last day in her office, which is also her birthday. She lives in a routine made of parting from and welcoming back her ex once a week, which can be condensed in the phases: “Go away” / “But I love you now” / “Stay then” / “Oh well, I’m not sure”.
[Note for me: look for appropriate onomatopoeia for sounds of slaughter, struggles, and shattered pottery. Also keep an updated record of all the weapons that have flown around the house.]
Fiona Apple – Tymps (The Sick in the Head Song) ♪ ♫
Completely dejected and worn out, in
NOVEMBER
after a warm embrace, good wishes and a necessary goodbye, we find D at home, alone with the dog.
She doesn’t remember the precise outline of what happened to her in that month, so everything must be depicted as some sort of blurry holing up.
[Cartoon of D rambling around the house wrapped in her duvet in a constant slumber, working and repeating every action or sentence tons of times.]
Balance of the month: she issues the highest invoice of her entire working life; she buys a camera; she spends all her nights on pathetic chats/phone calls with friends, strangers, anyone; she draws a fantastic tree growing hearts.
Beck – Chemtrails ♫ ♪
DECEMBER
D decides to pick up all the pieces of herself. Time for some serious suffering mixed with anticipation and new projects. Which, now that I think of it, is a good description for the first step toward happiness: happiness being something else from the absence of pain (an aponia only achieved by a life under self-imposed anesthesia and which eventually leads to emptiness and staleness), but a balance and an acceptance of joy and sadness, two things that can’t go alone. She receives daily calls from people reminding her to eat and sleep, as she spends most of her time drawing and taking pictures and writing. She is hallucinating and is seriously convinced of being devoid of all skin. When asking around, she finds out that this is what they call “to feel”. She cries out loud watching Disney movies. She laughs heartily at merry things. She starts to go through extraordinary epiphanies (completely drug-free), processing all the year’s events, and expressing them. And, just before the year’s over, like a Lady Lazarus, she comes back to life by letting everything go and welcoming annihilating emotions and frequent losses of control, a herald of the infinite pleasures to come.
Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly – Once More With Feeling ♪ ♫
All the obvious “feminist-Cinderella” implications, all the retribution and compensation involved are just perfect for my purpose, don’t you think? The happy-ever-after is just implied, even doubtful, which is also great, a bit like the ending of “Portrait of a Lady”. It could be made into a movie, maybe, and all the hints at happiness could be ideal from an emotional point of view, and would eventually lead to a fantastic sequel. Speaking of which, I have my own theory: that joy is difficult to tell. One usually tries to give away pain and sadness and keeps bliss to oneself. It’s a feeling we wish to contain and not to let go. That’s why most of the time people speak in wonderful detail about their hard times, and skip their present joy with a very convenient
fade out.
Feist – Mushaboom ♫ ♪
Posted: June 2nd, 2010 | Author: Daniela Vladimirova | Filed under: self-portrait | Tags: laundry, oleander, perfect day, rays, relax, solitude, sun, terrace, toddler, writing | No Comments »
Sitting absent-mindedly on the terrace, trying to gather the last three rays of light with the untannable skin on my legs, before a huge cloud hides the sun, after having picked up a random book from the unread shelf of my bookcase. It’s As I Lay Dying. Started reading inattentively, the mind busy with flash-guns and reflectors, with my tenses (present, past, future) all messed up. Got caught by words. Reached without breathing page two, then ran quickly into the flat again with the strong urge to write something. Anything. About my Asian neighbour’s colourful laundry I was watching earlier. About the earsplitting scent of oleander coming from below. About the dog sitting with his head on my right foot.
It is a strange day, made of a relaxed solitude. I must have felt like this the day after the one I started walking for the first time. Toddling without somebody else’s hand to keep me standing on my feet. Let’s not forget it.
Posted: May 31st, 2010 | Author: Daniela Vladimirova | Filed under: self-portrait | Tags: 2008, academics, aunt, baby-talk, betrayal, D, death, flat, funeral, grandmother, graphic novel, home, inheritance, job, latin literature, love, rome, script, self sacrifice, soundtrack, the wall, untidy, work, year | 1 Comment »
I’m planning a graphic novel – here’s the outline of the script. It’s set in 2008 and covers a year of the main character’s life. By the way, any reference to real people and facts is purely and completely deliberate.
Being an online draft, the good part is that I can tweak it and spice it up. Oh, ah… I guess it should be pretty obvious, but to listen to the soundtrack, you just need to click on the name of the track.
JANUARY
A glimpse in D’s life: her hopes, her history, her friends. She has a job, has another job, has a third job, has a dog, has a partner, has a home in a huge rented and untidy flat, has a degree and an ongoing specialization, has a car, has a bank loan, has friends.
[Note for me: OK, I know this is hard, but try and make it look different from Sliding Doors]
Björk – Hyperballad ♫ ♪
FEBRUARY
D signs an agreement as permanent employee at the company for which she used to work as freelancer earlier. She has to drive from 2 to 4 hours every day, obtains a wonderful room in the attic, writes an average of 52 emails a day and is always the last to leave at night. Her office is near the sea, at the very end of Eur in Rome, and at times, at 8 o’clock in the evening, the breeze is salty and her car covered in sand.
[Note for me: insert a retrospective hint about how she may be unconsciously striving to stay away from home.]
Jamiroquai – Black Capricorn Day ♪ ♫
MARCH
D’s alcoholic, personality disordered, ballet dancing grandmother K kicks the bucket after they hadn’t spoken to each other for 7 years.
Retrospective, back in 2001: K’s last words to D – “you lousy slut”. K’s last words to D’s younger brother C, who was 11 at the time: “I thought you were dead, just like your mother”, K’s only daughter.
Back in 2008: K’s partner, knowing that C and D are her only heirs, thinks it best not to tell a word about her death until they find it out a month or so later. It turns out K’s house in Italy had been sold the day before she died.
[Note for me: series of cartoons illustrating the events around K’s death, for example: 1) K’s partner is given an Oscar for the category “Best Luck in 2008”; 2) K’s partner is secretly trying out the solidity of the biggest frying pan in the house; 3) we catch a furtive ray of light secretly glimmering in the eye of the appointed notary.]
D spends entire months at banks and municipalities and lawyers and has to cope with constant nausea.
Radiohead – Knives Out ♪ ♫
APRIL
D’s step-grand-mother (I’ll leave you a minute to resolve this equation…) dies. D’s brother and D herself are, again, among her heirs, and their aunt N thinks it best not to tell them: who knows? They might think of relieving her of her toilet or of some other useful part of her 50 sqm flat in the dingy fringes of Sofia. D’s so sick of all these things that lets N get away with just a single burst of explosive anger on D’s part. N ends her call saying she loves D and C tenderly and cares deeply about them. They never hear from her again.
Thom Yorke – Analyse ♫ ♪
MAY
[It’s time for some Psychological Peek in D’s character].
No missed funerals in May. D’s last exam at University: Latin Literature. It’s worth noting that the worst or hardest moments of D’s life all coincide with the brightest highlights of her academic performance – which is a wonderful insight into her way of functioning: when the shit hits the air conditioning, she switches off and works as an automaton. She gets the highest mark of the whole session, without having ever studied Latin her whole life, from the most resentful gang of constipated scholars the learning world has ever known, all determined to ruin her ego from the very onset.
[Note for me: intertextual hints to the Judges in the final part of The Wall].
Fiona Apple – Extraordinary Machine ♫ ♪
JUNE
[Note for me: tread carefully.]
D’s beloved half has very important things to do about his future. So why should D bother about her own problems, when his are so significant? D goes on working like before, while having a hard time to make her own, private company called family work as best as she can, which means she’s helping out financially and practically, with all the time and skills and patience and money she has. She starts having very bad dreams.
The Dø – On My Shoulders ♪ ♫
JULY
D has to settle some financial matters in Sofia, so she leaves – all alone, for the first time. Everything goes completely wrong, from the Lost-like turbulence on the plane, to some terrible toothaches which eventually lead to her wisdom tooth being pulled out. Fully disfigured, she goes back home to a strange silent universe. Even though on her way back she’s taken a few free days from work, she finds herself constantly alone at home, or relatively alone at the seaside or at weddings or at cocktail parties. There’s a reason, as she’ll soon discover. And the reason has a fascinating Mediterranean look, olive skin, dark long hair and captivating manners, with an atrocious penchant for baby-talk. D reaches a higher level of self awareness through her newly discovered killer instincts [Note for me: Uma Thurman in Kill Bill], as well as some innate detective abilities [Note for me: Lara Croft or other videogame female character].
[Final note for me: use the Shakespearean insulter for new ideas; for example "Would thou were clean enough to spit on", etc.]
Aimee Mann – Amateur ♪ ♫
To be
continued…
>>
Posted: February 10th, 2010 | Author: Daniela Vladimirova | Filed under: love, self-portrait | 2 Comments »
