jolie-etoile

I see her with her feathered hair, brown, caught with a ribbon, her pride. The music explodes and John Lennon takes her hand. For one moment they dance and the air is filled with a smooth satin yellow that spins around her, and flows down to the kitchen. Where Mother has just pulled out TV dinners and she stops and the yellow fills her up like a hot air balloon and the house is quiet and loud.

not us (bar blah blah, christmas 1999.) frame by frame in stilled sepia, we watched them roll up one after another, spilling in off the street cheered unreasonably. seasonal delirium drawn in by the warm, easy evening lights, and the complimentary house whites - and the close-shaven bleach-teethed boys, sharply suited in similar mirror-imagery, slickened and endeavouring to exchange cards and fashionably blueprinted exploits. deep ugliness obscured by embossed lettering and expensive watches. fondling the serving girls with immaculate hands - a hand on the arm, a paw on the thigh, drunkenly gathering courage from your numbers as the