Musings of Khlari

Musings of Khlari

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Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Remembered poem.....

Well, here's a fragment of a poem I wrote in about 1990.....which Andy made me think of yesterday..... You can't judge a book by it's cover, but I wish I had known you were paperback My twenty-five pence Penguin lover A sturdy spine is what you lack.

dark imaginings by khlari @ 4/20/2005 12:37:00 PM

Thursday, April 14, 2005

Oops, been vamping even....The Blood and The Shadow...a new gothic/vamp evening at the Dev in Camden, co-hosted by The London Vampyre Group

dark imaginings by khlari @ 4/14/2005 12:38:00 PM

Haven't written much for the last few days....ben out vamping.......

dark imaginings by khlari @ 4/14/2005 12:35:00 PM

Monday, April 11, 2005

Don't call me Jane...........THAT song.......

dark imaginings by khlari @ 4/11/2005 12:29:00 AM

Sunday, April 10, 2005
Falling Out of Love with the French - Confessions of a Fallen Francophile

Once upon a time, I was a committed Francophile. Somewhere between the ages of 11 and 18, I metamorphosed into a garlic-loving paid up worshipper of the French nation. Everything about England was boring. Everything. Why have Stew when you can have Pot au Feu? Sunday dinner pales into insignificance against a Roti d'Agneau, Sauce a l'ail. Shopping...well , fighting tourists along Oxford Street compared to wafting down the Place Vendome......and the French art of flanerie.......flaner le long des boulevards......there isn't even a word for flaner in English......stroll? It doesn't encapsulate the full word, just walking, hanging, breathing in the ambience.........Clothes? The English just looked like ragbags tied in the middle with string compared to the visions of elegance in Dior, Saint-Laurent and Lacroix that I eagerly sought in the pages of French Vogue, Elle and Marie-Claire. The list was seemingly endless- perfume......Hmm, at the time Tweed and Charlie vying aginst L'Air du Temps and Chanel No 5? Drink? Hmmm warm Newcastle Brown or deliciously chilled Veuve Clicquot? Writers....well, in England we had a bunch of sanctimonious Victorians who took pride in the fact they never got a shag for God's sake - in France they were all rounders, drinking, shagging, partying and generally dying of unmentionable diseases at the age of 29. What about painters? Ours all died at 97 after painting scores of haywains- theirs drank absinthe, smoked opium and lived in brothels- dying of syphilis seemed to be a common feature...... By the age of 16 I was desparate to be called Colette-Cherie de Sainte Bon-Bon de la Croix, born in Montmartre, of a dubious artist father and a disreputable consumpitve opera-singer mother. I wanted to mix in the demi-mondaine world of artists and excitement that all of this offered..... There was just one catch in all of this. I had never actually BEEN to France - apart from a flying visit with my parents, aged 3, after which my father had lost all his money and the peak of holiday excitement reached the dizzy heights of Clacton on Sea. This had to be remedied. I worked on perfecting my French, so that when the fascinating painter in an opera cloak spotted me wafting along the Champs-Elysees I could be up to the task. After a series of brief visits from the ages of 16-25, I finally and irrevocably got my heart's desire......though the world of work had steered me away from the glamourous world of art and hedonism that was Paris, to the mundane life of a youth worker in West Yorkshire. European exchanges.......how apt. I was (by accident, no-one else was available) sent on a Paris conference for the weekend....... Then it happened. I met the sexy Frenchman who was blown away by my charme a l'anglaise.......and four months later, moved to France for good. A dream come true. I threw myself into the intricate task of becoming, for all intents and purposes, French. I mastered the delicate culinary tasks of Blanquette de Veau and Mayonnaise-making, and sat back to imbibe the pure and delicious air of...Frenchness....that reigned. I was here, in my spiritual home, my Englishness being a mere and insignificant accident of birth that had finally been remedied. And then......little by little....something else happened. No-one was more surprised than me. In the town where I lived, a chic quartier in the richissime Banlieue-Ouest, lived lots of English diplomats and their wives.....I shunned them for their refusal to learn French, their obstinacy in shopping in the English Delicatessen in Le Vesinet...when in Rome, and all that sort of thing.....Then I understood. The French didn't actually care, we would never belong, even if we had lived for 94 of our 97 years in France, we would still be La petite anglaise. Then it began to dawn on me that the French were actually....really boring. When you have had 8,000 helpings of Gigot d'Agneau at different houses and they all taste the same. Then you realise you can't pop out for a kebab or a curry- because there aren't any. You can actually only shop in the Place Vendome if you are as rich as Stephanie of Monaco - the other choice being out of town centres commercial, with the same chainstores, Pecca, Camaieu, Prisunic, all selling in any one 'season' exactly the same clothes. If that season's 'look' doesn't suit you - that's tough. Not to mention the bottom question. Frenchwomen do not have bottoms. God knows what they sit on. Now mine is, well, normal, not grotesque or anything, yet finding trousers was impossible. Englishwomens' bottoms just don't fit into them. My friend Catherine and I once spent a whole afternoon on the Metro cofirming this fact (I'm surprised we didn't get arrested, looking at womens' bottoms)..it's just patently unfair, as they all eat like pigs that they should have such skinny behinds.Some stores even class a size 12 at 'outsize'. Frenchwomen all look the same. They all become blonde at 40, with an identikit chignon. They go from basketball boots and jeans straight to a matriarch look, 23 going on 50, and ultra-respectable. There is no inbetween, it's black and white. They wear the same clothes all the time, and call them 'les classiques'. No one-off craziness for an evening, everything is built to last, and expensive to prove the point. And tedious to the extreme. Now, to flanerie. I thought I'd be really good at this effortless wafting around....but all you pick up is mad Algerians asking if you want to marry them....stand around for more than 30 seconds on any Parisian street and some strange man comes up to you and offers his services, and asks for your phone number. Apparently, because you look foreign.....(you can take that down to 10 seconds in the Gare St Lazare...). As a woman, in fact, anywhere you go you are fair game for every middle aged married lothario.....even my English students (generally government officials or high-ranking managers in companies such as Renault), felt that it was perfectly acceptable to suggest looking at my underwear. Then you realise. All the Frenchwomen have wedding rings. They all get married at 22 to avoid this, then their husbands go off bedhopping and so do they. In the end, I bought myself a chistmas cracker type ring as protection. French make-up and perfume is, I'm afraid to say, still excellent. I am, I'm afraid writing this wearing Clarins moisturiser and La Roche-Posay foundation. But it is the be-all and end all of Frenchwomens' life, this search to keep the man they snared at 22. They are forever dieting and prinking and preening and at the beauty parlour, beacuse it's all they have. In France, you don't have fun, you have Family. With a capital F. They have 34 children called things like Marie-Laure-Celeste and Charles-Louis-Sebastien and spend all their time working in girly jobs then go to the beauty parlour, come home and and cook a 27 course dinner for the piggy husband (who doesn't give a damn about what he looks like) and all the little piggies. Then get up and do the same again. Till they die. I just hate them because they have perfect fingernails and never ladder their tights. Now, writers have gone seriously downhill. Now they all seem to be middle aged men pontificating about their mid-life crises and appearing on late night interview programmes about their mid-life crises. Or philisophers, like Bernard-Henri Levy, who appear to spend the whole day gazing and their navels then theorizing on them, No drinking, no roistering, nada. Female witers who are any good, like Amelie Nothomb are just regarded as weirdos and/or perverts.Painters possibly even worse, so up their own bottoms it's untrue. I say it's because they took the absinthe away personally. Now I know why the word bourgeois was invented. To describe the average French person. Go to a dinner party for example. Where you are served, invariably the same thing over and over again, Gigot, Blanquette, Plateau de Fruits de Mer......and wine. Oh Goody, I see you cheering up. Don't get too excited. You'll only get one glass. 'What!!!!' I hear you cry, 'this is the land of wine and song!' Ha! You're a woman. In France women don't drink. point. You'll be sick of the 'diet and beauty parlour and isn't little Charles-Henri-Jerome a genius who'll be going to Sciences-Po (French LSE) when he's 18' conversation, closeted with the women, and desparate to get pissed to alleviate the tedium. But Odile-Cecile after one glass has put her hand over it, giggling in a puerile fashion, 'Oh no, I'll be tipsy!' Followed by Marie-Louise-Agnes, and Caroline-Beatrice.....'I'll have one!!!!!!' You say enthusiastically, and the gimlet eyes of the whole room turn on you. Might as well have ALCOHOLIC tattooed on your forehead. You've just failed membership of the velvet-hairband good-girls club. Don't mention any exs either. That will put you on the pile marked Slut. No raucous nights out with the girls for them, no hobbies, no fun. They don't get Bridget Jones. They asked me if she had always been an alcoholic. I didn't try The Rocky Horror Show, luckily. This might all be due to French Music......great, you say, Plastic Bertrand! No, he was Belgian. Too interesting to be French. The first time I heard French music, i thought honestly that it was April Fools' Day.......It sounds like something that my Mum would listen to....or rather my Grandma, even my Mum is more hip than this. Everything through from 1930 to now sounds exactly the bloody same. Edith Piaf could top the charts now. All romantic ballads and les slows (sloppy snog-songs), sung by identikit Sacha Distel lookalikes. Claude Francois, Patrick Sebastien, Serge Lama, all crooning the same drivel, or stuff that sounds like a headline vaudeville song from the Black and White Minstrel Show. Only departure from this was Serge Gainsbourg (yes, that one that wrote Je t'aime moi non plus.....) but even he has a problem. His ex-wife. She was English, Jane Birkin, has lived in France for 40 years but still speaks French like she learned it yesterday.So if you are an English girl with a French other half who happens to like SG, guess what, ha ha ha SOOOOO funny- you are La Petite Jane Birkin......You sound just like Jane Birkin! You might be making an effort, but, La Petite Jane. Don't call me Jane. The key feature in all of this is individuality. The French love to be the same as everyone else. Eccentricity is a crime, there is no margin. My ex's favourite cry was 'people will stare at you!' He could never get my reply 'Good.' They all want to be the same, in their little appartements, eating the same food , driving the same cars, wearing the same clothes, watching the same TV (now French TV is TRULY appalling). They want their bourgeois little lives and deaths without ever deviating from the norm. These people who I believed to be wild, cretive, accepting of difference, enjoying life to the full, are as repressed as 1950s England- Balai dans le cul (Broom up the bottom). They are terrified of anything that might upset the bourgeois equilibrium.they don't hink, they just want to follow. And worst of all, many of them firmly believe Jean-Marie le Pen is a nice man. They think the English are wild, and liberated (hence Frenchmen going after English girls). Smalltown French life is like Bexhill on sea c 1948. Without the excitement. Most of them have never even been to Nantes, let alone Paris. Most French people never even go abroad. Frightened it might shake their convictions, shake their opinions? On second thoughts, I wouldn't like to see Jean-Marie le Pen as a tourist. They can keep him. I only realised how much I love England after seven years in France. Here, though we don't believe it, there is a certain freedom to be yourself and live the way you want to. You can dress the way you want, and find clothes to dress in. You can think the way you like, and are sure to find at least a group of people who agree with you and your view on life. Social life is more like an urban family, a network of linked friends, not the all-encompassing French notion of blood 'Family'. Women don't get stared at going out alone, looked at like they're tarts, women have a life, not merely an existence and the beck and call of hubby. Living together- well, none of my friends are married. Children? Well, it's up to you. Nobody imposes an overwheming social more any more, there are many, which seem to co-exist quite peaceably side by side, parallel normalities........ Finally, I've realised that what I have in England is more real and tangible, more me. I have traded in the flashy and bourgeois French model for one that thinks with me not aginst me, equally eccentric, and English! Being pragmatically English, he seems to have no problems accepting the souvenir of my extended holiday, now six years old. I've never been happier in my life.That's another key point - we are just so much more laid back than the French - what they call derisively Le Phlegme Anglais....we don't make a fuss, we just accept it and get on with it. I have traded in the velvet hairband and got my goth gear out of mothballs. And I think, I am finally happy with what and who I am. Maybe the French love affair was a kind of escapism, a fundamental discontentment with my life. Maybe I wanted to be something else because I didn't like what I was or where I was from. This seemed to be a common reason for running off to France among my English friends in Paris. Wanting something they felt they didn't have. But now I've done it, and I've learned my lesson. Better the devil you know. I don't want to escape now, I 'm too happy where I am. Could go out and get a kebab.....or a curry, mind you! Vive la Difference!

dark imaginings by khlari @ 4/10/2005 10:10:00 PM

Janey Morris Being 'Abnormal'

dark imaginings by khlari @ 4/10/2005 01:14:00 AM

Saturday, April 09, 2005
The Perils of Persephone, the Cataclysms of Khlari......a (non) Victorian Gothic Horror Story, or How I was Born in the Wrong Century

Well, what brings me here...as I've said it is a very long, convoluted and bizarre story, involving lots of moving around and a plot worthy of Ann Radcliffe.......... I haven't written for so long, so forgive me if I am a little out of practice, not since I did a Creative Writing course in 1991 in Manchester.....then life kind of intervened.... Until I was about 25 or 26, writing was something as essential to me as breathing, it was something I did every day, both in a diary form and also in poetry and prose, some more successful, some not. if you had told me that I couldn't write any more I think I would have preferred giving up eating rather than writing. From childhood I have always expressed myself much more easily on the page than in other ways. Sometimes if I have something difficult to say I even write it rather than say it. I was a wordy, nerdy child with my head perpetually in a book. Sport was (um, and still is,) anathema, other people were punished by being sent to the library, I used to try and be sent there, yea I begged and pleaded. If I were a character in Buffy....I'd have to be Willow...... I had catholic and eclectic taste, anything from heavy Victorian tearjerker novels through to C.S. Lewis and First World War Poetry. well after that I had to do a degree in English and Art History, natch. As a child I then imagined that I would one day use this vast and bizarre knowledge to some ultimate advantage, that I would be the Doyenne of a literary circle, painting a little, writing, having brilliant tea parties in my Bloomsbury drawing room, surrounded by like minded aesthetes.......a Virginia Woolf, a Vita Sackville-West haring across Europe on mad adventures........ But alas, as the subtitle of my piece proves, I was...Born in the Wrong Century. This one does not value the literary types......far from being an advantage it is somehow seen as symbolic of some kind of inner weirdness. Eccentricity is just not fashionable, blandness is the norm. I wanted to be some kind of dramatic beturbanned Ottoline Morrell, or Sarah Bernhardt dressed in emerald velvet, reposing on a crimson chaise longue..... I don't actually want to dress in FCUK and Gap and look just the same as everyone else....why? I wanted the looks of a Pre-Raphaelite Janey Morris, I never longed for the beach-blondeness of Farah Fawcett and her ilk. While my friends were getting suntans, I was preserving my deathly pallor with my nose in a book. But apparently I HAVE A PROBLEM. THIS IS NOT 'NORMAL'. When I left the heady and inspiring world of academia, this posed a problem to everyone I met......I don't 'go to the gym' (yeuch), I like Vampires (sure sign of inner strangeness), team games make me want to vomit. But outside, we were more interested in whether I could type than whether I had read the entire works of Zola in French, or whether I had an opinion on whether Gauguin was superior to Matisse. They just don't care......what was once seen as the sign of education and wide knowledge is now seen as at the least inconvenient, and generally as 'rather peculiar'. I say BRING IT BACK!!!! I still want to be the centre of a heady circle of artists, a Mme de Stael with her Salon, Suzanne Valadon surrounded by Impressionists. I was born in the wrong place at the wrong time. Where is the value in ordinariness? Why should I have to pretend to be ordinary when I don't feel it inside? I don't ask the ordinary ones to be me, chacun a son gout, so why can't they respect my right to be me. It's all about the way society values skills, and some of us just have skills that according to everyone else are not right for the 21st century, they don't fit into narrow societal norms.....we can't change our nature, I am not going to suddenly begin to love Arsenal and Accountancy.....But I don't see why they should be more of a cardinal value than art, and beauty......I don't want to be an identikit drone either.......I don't like the uniform any more than I like the values, I'd rather be pretty peculiar than ugly dowdy just to look the same as everyone else.....hell that's me...told you I wasn't normal! But who decided on 'normal' anyway? Nobody asked me. I can still have my fantasies though........and I still quite fancy a chaise longue......whoops...sorry, didn't mean to offend you...was I being 'abnormal' again? Hmm, will just go and get a sensible job and buy some neutral beige clothes......or maybe I would rather chop my own head of with a butter knife....it would be a mercy killing. I'm sure one of my abnormal friends would oblige. I'm not the only weirdo you know. You see I see my skills weird as they may seem, as valuable, and my individuality as an essential part of me.....so if you kill those.......well you might as well kill me. now, about that chaise longue........

dark imaginings by khlari @ 4/09/2005 11:57:00 PM

but unfortunately this was the one they meant...........not the cool one.....hmmm, was probably the way my hair went attempting valiantly to pogo to X-ray spex, come to think of it. Seriously, am having a little Lene renaissance too....bizarrely started this several days BEFORE the commet!

dark imaginings by khlari @ 4/09/2005 06:56:00 PM

Bit less deranged and a little more gothy here.......

dark imaginings by khlari @ 4/09/2005 06:54:00 PM

guess the pigtails are a little more Lene than Rose............oh, and the deranged look.....

dark imaginings by khlari @ 4/09/2005 06:52:00 PM

I just wanted to be Rose Mc Dowall..........mind you, wouldn't say no to Lene either...see what you think!

dark imaginings by khlari @ 4/09/2005 06:41:00 PM

Spot that cultural influence...it's strange as my image re-evolved gradually when I came back from France, rosebud by rosebud and ribbon by ribbon........then everyone kept remarking on my similarity to Strawberry Switchblade.....mind you the other week was told I looked like Lene Lovich............

dark imaginings by khlari @ 4/09/2005 06:40:00 PM

Whoops didn't actually mean to send that like that. Loved them in the 80s and as I've just found a brilliant site with downloads and vids (their stuff is really hard to get hold of...deleted) have been having a home-made strawberryfest! the link is simply www.strawberryswitchblade.net

dark imaginings by khlari @ 4/09/2005 06:37:00 PM

More about things I like....currently doing the blast from the past thing and listening to the wonderful STRAWBERRY SWITCHBLADE!

dark imaginings by khlari @ 4/09/2005 06:35:00 PM

Et voila.....me and mini-moi, my little froglet Morgane......I was doing a photo session and she felt obliged to join in..........

dark imaginings by khlari @ 4/09/2005 06:20:00 PM

That rare thing...a photo of me that I actually like..........

dark imaginings by khlari @ 4/09/2005 06:19:00 PM

well, afraid this is me...I did warn you........

dark imaginings by khlari @ 4/09/2005 05:25:00 PM

Khlari's Musing #1

Well, here we go, this is the moment......well, not many people, actually, have been waiting for, my first blog......this is all thanks to Andy, so here goes to his link..... http://spicycauldron.blogspot.com I suppose I should tell you something about myself then. My name is Khlari, I'm 37 years of age, sometime teacher, youth worker, lecturer, bookshop manager, and all time goth......as you'll see. I was born and currently live in North London,but over the years have lived in places as diverse as Manchester, Stockport, Todmorden, Hebden Bridge, Liege, Bradford, Marly le Roi and Sables d'Olonne...... Finally managed to upload the picture....afraid I'm still a bit of a techno bimbo sometimes......... More about myself? Well, I live with my boyfriend, herefore known as TraditionalGoth, and my daughter Morgane who is six........and I'm currently unemployed......very, very, long story involving marrying a frog, father of froglet Morgane ...who turned out to be a frog, not a prince.......he was really French, I'm not joking! then running away back to England 2 years ago after 7 years in France............. I'll tell you the story one day. Likes? mmmmm? vampyres, corsets, my beloved New Rocks, Transylvania, Sylvia Plath, Frida Kahlo, poetry, writing, painting.....in no particular order! Dislikes? Bigots, fascists, shallow people, liars, Margaret Thatcher and net curtains.....again in no particular order......... Favourite Links? www.camdengothic.com my two best friends and their clothes........ www.revamped.co.uk London Vampyre Group Motto in Life? Je ne regrette rien........ Bisous Khlari xxx

dark imaginings by khlari @ 4/09/2005 04:58:00 PM

The crazed ramblings of a deluded goth
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Delve into the crypt to read my earlier musings
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April 2005
May 2005
September 2005
October 2005
November 2005
December 2005
January 2006
February 2006
March 2006
April 2006
May 2006