Boom, Bust and The Seven Cows

Various friends have written to me regarding the recent financial turbulence and have asked me for my view on what I think will happen. Well, sorry guys, I’m no prophet. No-one can see the future.

Right?

Then Pharaoh said to Joseph, "In my dream I was standing on the bank of the Nile, when out of the river there came up seven cows, fat and sleek, and they grazed among the reeds. After them, seven other cows came up—scrawny and very ugly and lean. I had never seen such ugly cows in all the land of Egypt. The lean, ugly cows ate up the seven fat cows that came up first. But even after they ate them, no one could tell that they had done so; they looked just as ugly as before. Then I woke up."

Then Joseph said to Pharaoh, "The dreams of Pharaoh are one and the same. God has revealed to Pharaoh what he is about to do. The seven good cows are seven years, and the seven good heads of grain are seven years; it is one and the same dream. The seven lean, ugly cows that came up afterward are seven years, and so are the seven worthless heads of grain scorched by the east wind: They are seven years of famine."

Genesis 41 - Pharaoh's Dreams

Previous empirical analyses of U.S. stock index prices show overwhelming evidence of a seven-year wave in the stock market that is part of the overall economic cycle. This cycle is synchronized with the widely known Kondratiev wave that is thought to be fifty to sixty years in duration. The economic cycle runs through four main stages on about a seven year cycle. It goes boom, bust, stagnant, recovery and then repeats ad infinitum.

The economy last hit rock bottom in November 2001. Despite the amazing global economic expansion since then, seven years later (give or take a month or so) here we are again.

According to the economic theorists, this would now put the recovery at around 2015, which by sheer coincidence (?) is what Suze Orman (whom Stephen called the “seer of seers”) predicted in an unguarded moment.

Seven good cows, seven bad.

Who says the Bible can’t predict the future, eh?

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Amy

And that’s the last I’m saying about money matters for a while. Many of you will no doubt be relieved to hear it.

(BTW, in case anyone is wondering, no I'm not religious.)

The Secret

This one’s for Chris.

You all know Monsieur St. James of course. The author of the leading blog Univers d’Artistes, he is at the centre of our nude photographic community and inspires us on a daily basis with his tireless dedication to showing us the very best that the nude photographic world has to offer. By sharing with us fantastic interviews, articles and most importantly the work of different photographic artists, Chris has created something unique and wonderful. But the real reason I’m mentioning him here is because he is probably one of the wisest men you’ll ever come across. Why? Because he has realised something which not many folks figure out: just how effective art can be as a healing tool.

A recent study at the Università degli Studi di Bari in Italy showed that when a group of people were asked to contemplate a series of paintings, their pain was found to be a third less intense when they were looking at beautiful artistic imagery. This has actually been known in the UK for some time. In another study by Dr Lee Elliot Major, research director at the Sutton Trust, it was demonstrated that paintings in hospitals really do help patients, both in terms of longevity and recovery times. I guess we are lucky here in the UK that our National Health Service thought that this research was important enough to actually do something about it as part of its national healthcare policy.



When I visited St Bart’s Hospital in London earlier this year, I noticed William Hogarth’s painting Pool of Bethesda (above) still hanging on the grand staircase, and even my local hospital (a shining beacon in free local healthcare) has a whole section of the hospital dedicated to the best and the brightest in the art world. As well as having its own art gallery, the entire corridor (which runs the entire length of the hospital and is nearly half a mile end to end) is covered in beautiful paintings donated by both talented patients and well known artists. Like many others, I have spent hours there drinking in the fantastic art (O.K. I admit the coffee there is pretty good too!)

Such exhibitions never fail to lift patients, to inspire them, to give them hope. The opportunity to enjoy something creative offers not only a distraction from physical discomforts and endless medical procedures, but it also gives focus and the invitation to participate in something more fundamental, more important than these crappy bodies we are trapped in. Through studying art, patients get to engage in something outside themselves, something more spiritual, and through this participation, so begins the healing process. The body may remain broken and in pain, but the mind, the soul, is growing, expanding in the presence of beauty, reaching for the eternal.

When my body is giving me hell, when I’m feeling pretty darn awful, what do I do? I go look at the finest that the photographic art world has to offer, and that would of course be the work of all you photographers reading this. If I appear to be getting overly sentimental, then do excuse me. Maybe the healing power of art is something you have to experience on a personal level before you realise its potential. But Chris and I, and thousands more like us, we know The Secret:

Art heals the spirit, which in turn heals the body.

And that makes you, the photographers and artists out there reading this, more valuable to us than you could ever know.

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Ivory Flame

A week in the life of…

This week has been fairly typical.

In no particular order we’ve had:

1. A model digitally alter and publish one of Rich’s (kick ass) photos of her, despite knowing she was breaking the terms of her modelling agreement, despite being expressly forbidden to modify the photograph and after she had asked Rich never to publish it (and no, he still hasn’t.)

2. Rich was called a GWC by a second model who was asking for a shoot, plus I was called a perv who liked her husband to spend time feeling up other women, all because I politely pointed out that it is our policy not to let models’ photographer-boyfriends act as chaperones (largely because they invariably rip off Rich’s work, although I didn’t say that.) The photographer-boyfriend then proceeded to spam us, constantly asking for bookings with lurid descriptions of how his girlfriend played with herself. Did he think that insulting us would somehow result in us gagging for a shoot with his girlfriend? What kind of gentleman makes his living by selling his lady in that way? The mind boggles.

3. After putting up a fairly innocent picture of myself blogging nude a week or so ago, I have been asked how many times a week I have sex with my husband, asked to describe in detail varying intimate parts of my anatomy, two photographers have sent me explicit photographs of themselves naked, and one photographer has tried to trace where I live and where my kids go to school.

And do you know what?

THIS IS A NORMAL WEEK.

At what point did we accept this as typical behaviour? At what point did we learn to accept this at all?

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The utterly fabulous Alexis Summers

Lastly, despite not putting our real surnames anywhere on this web site but thanks to Google’s sooper-dooper new search algorithms which detail everything about you including your inside leg measurement, this blog has now been discovered by some of our day-job resellers. I’m now getting lots of flirty emails with kisses attached. Not quite the marketing tactic I had in mind, but hey, times are hard and we must take what publicity we can get. I’ve decided I don’t particularly care as long as they keep buying our software.

*****Welcome, day-job resellers!*****

We love you! Please visit more often! Pretty please? I promise to put my photos back up?!!! (Actually thinking about it, maybe sales will increase if I delete them all. Whatever works, you know?)

OffTheNet

Feelin' wuff. Bad head.
Back soon(ish), when I'm feelin' a wee bit better.

In the meantime, here's Rachel to brighten your week.

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A little something

That you might find interesting.



Mike Figgis on Life Captured from Lifecaptured on Vimeo

Nude, naked and everything in-between

“To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen by others.”
John Berger

“Is Richard photographing naked women again?” asked my mother-in-law disapprovingly a couple of weeks ago. She asks this question periodically in the vain hope that he’s given up photography.

“Yes he is, and by the way, the ladies in question are nude, not naked,” I corrected sternly.

She looked at me blankly. “What’s the difference?” she asked.

Hmm. Good question. We talk about nudes a heck of a lot in the photographic bloggie world. Technically nude and naked are synonyms. They both mean “without clothing.” However there are fundamental differences between the two, depending on how or when you use them. It’s all dependent on your state of mind, you see.

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HoneyB

In common usage, nude is used in an artistic context. I don’t advertise myself as a naked model because that would sound vaguely rude. I would describe myself as a nude model. The implication here is that nude has no lewd connotation. It sounds classier, innocent, untainted by sexual intent. A nude is seen by others as a beautiful man or woman who exudes confidence and self-knowledge. If you pose nude, you are sure of yourself, at one with your natural body shape, you are not ashamed of being unclothed. Au contraire, you revel in it, you are using your beauty and confidence for the higher purpose of creating art. Nudes are therefore elevated to a higher level, a representation of immortality. In ancient Greece, nude statues of Goddesses did not represent ordinary females, rather they depicted super-women. The emphasis was on perfection and form rather than an individual’s characteristics or physical sexuality.

On the other hand naked has more of a personal edge and implies a more carnal element. If I left a note for Rich saying, “Come upstairs, I’m nude” he’d assume I was in the studio waiting for a shoot, but if instead I wrote, “Come upstairs, I’m naked” he’d zip-up to the bedroom quicker than you could say “hot, nekkid and juicy.” See what I mean? In this context naked has a more erotic feel to it, a naughtier and more forbidden element. It certainly doesn’t imply art.

Whether or not we sexualise it, I do think that the word naked can be somewhat disturbing because it reminds us of our own mortality and our limitations. Used in a non-sexual and more innocent context, it reminds us that we were all born naked, vulnerable and frail, not only physically but psychically unprotected too. Think of the phrase “the naked truth” which means stripped of bias or exposing the reality of a situation. When we are naked we are laid bare, the mask is taken off and we are our real true selves.

Now let’s consider another example:

This afternoon I may well go outside to do some gardening. As it is warm outside, I will doubtless be weeding the garden whilst stark naked. As I’m not currently in the best ever physical shape, I’ll be letting it all hang out. It won’t be pretty. Later on I might take a shower, pour myself a glass of chardonnay and hopefully nip upstairs to the studio for a shoot. I’ll then point my toes, suck my stomach in, assume a sultry expression, try not to drool, and pray that Rich is genius enough to rustle up a photo which portrays me as the gorgeous nude model L-von-B which I’m certainly not “in real life.” At no time will I be wearing clothes, but both scenarios are very different because both the context and the intent are different. The first scene is the truth (me in the garden, naked, personal, the individual body stripped bare), the second is a manufactured fantasy image, almost inhuman, where I am just a model, an object of art rather than a person, a mere tool used to convey an artistic message of light, form and (cough) perfection. Thanks to the photographer’s abilities, I am transformed from an ordinary flabby mother of three into something other than I really am.

IMO, this profound charge between these two states is primarily a psychological development. As Donald Kuspit said in The Troubling Nude, the transformation from nakedness into nudity is “a spiritual change…the naked body conveys the state of the soul before the change, the nude body conveys its condition afterwards.”

If by now you’re getting a bit bewildered by all of this, don’t worry, you’re not alone. This highly important and life-changing debate has been discussed by the finest minds for centuries, and modern scholars are still arguing about it. Nude v. naked sure sounds easy enough when you consider my garden/art-nude scenario above, but sometimes it’s not quite as clear-cut as that.

Now let’s all take a moment to consider the following vaguely glamoury image of the boobalicious HoneyB.

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Honey's Beautiful Boobies

(Aside: yes I know you’re all shocked right out of your chairs right now, and I do understand your amazement as this is clearly not our resident artiste’s usual tasteful B+W fine-art style, but Rich did take it I assure you. What can I say? The man has hidden depths. Or not, as the case may be.)

Now if you can tear your eyes away from Honey playing with her…er…mighty mammaries, let me leave you with this burning question. Bearing in mind the relevance of context and intent, is she naked or nude?

The Nekkid Bloggers

Work is light at the moment. Too light. You can always tell when our day-job business isn’t doing so well because I start waffling away like there’s no tomorrow. Rich finds blogging stressful but I find that it is a distraction from the pressures of real life. On rare occasions when I write what I feel is a real cracker of a post, it can even give me an adrenaline rush that’s nearly as good as sex (yeah, I'm weird that way.) Rich says I’m addicted (to blogging, not sex, although the poor chap is ever hopeful.)

Sometimes it hits me just how much of our lives we’re all giving up to post this stuff. In short, blogging is bloody hard work. In the same way a photographer will seek to realise his creative vision from a seed of an idea in his head, the same birthing process applies to writing a blog post. In both cases you have to create something from nothing. The seed is ugly, crude and inelegant at first, but then it grows and after the umpteenth re-write it suddenly crystallises into something coherent, and at that point I know it’s ready.

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"Seed" (Yeah, I know, I'm kinda like a giant pink blob, but I like it)

The average life-span for a blog is currently 8 months. Boggling I know, but over 95% of blogs are over by the time this milestone is reached. Thankfully I mainly follow the remaining 5 percent. The blogs that Rich and I enjoy, usually have similar longevity and posting patterns and we now know many of the blog authors so well that they have become friends.

If you’ve been regularly blogging several times a week for more than a year then you’ll know enough about the cycles of blogging to recognise when a fellow blogger is experiencing a bit of a downer. It’s inevitable that bloggers sometimes experience some degree of existential angst, particularly with art blogs because artists typically pour all of their emotions into their art forms, and IMO blogging can be just as much a creative artistic process as painting or photography. Such moments of self-doubt are actually a form of “blog depression” and most blog authors experience it at some point. Sometimes I too get so lost up my own ass that I just can’t write any more and I want to delete the whole bloody thing. Of course the bloggie pressure is just imagined…I’m taking it all too seriously and losing my sense of proportion. (Rich usually gives me a good kick up my big blobby pink butt when that happens.)

Absolutely everyone questions their blogging at some point. Am I becoming boring? Do I have to constantly produce new and different content to keep people interested? Should I have a blog makeover? Am I posting the same as everyone else? Why aren’t more people commenting? Was it something I wrote? Am I fat? Do I smell? Is anybody reading this crap? Shall I give up?

When you reach that point, congratulations, you have finally reached the zen-like state of Bloggie-Self-Enlightenment. It’s important to question oneself, otherwise how will your blogging grow?

The harsh reality is that yes, you might be lucky enough to have hundreds (even thousands) of regular readers. However don’t kid yourself. You are nothing more to most of them than a tiny little free T.V. entertainment channel. Because you run a rude, nude blog, very few of them are ever going to admit to reading your pornographic filth (which it isn’t of course, but I bet most of their wives wouldn’t share that assessment.) Thus although your hits might be off the scale and your readers might love your writing and images, only an extremely small percentage of them will actually leave comments. This means that nude bloggers actually have a much tougher time than other regular bloggers, and you will need to be more determined and self-assured than ever in order to keep going in the face of the deafening silence of the blogosphere. Just remember that ultimately it doesn’t really matter if anyone is reading your blog or not. You need to do it for yourself, otherwise you’ll just go stark raving crazy and your blog will eventually consume you (in fact there’s a strong probability that this will happen anyway.)

As for how long your blog will last, some blogs die young, some age gracefully. Which will you choose? My own recommendation is to stay in it for the long haul. Once you get past the initial couple of years, you really start building something, and by that I mean not only a philosophy and style particular to your own blog, but more importantly you start to make friends and create a real community. And when that happens, your life will be rich indeed.

As for myself, when I get a bit disillusioned with the whole caboodle, I take a step back and refer to the very helpful Manual On Blog Depression. If you’re a long term blogger, go ahead and download the pdf here. Consider it the equivalent of Aunty Lin giving you a blob of homework. And if you don’t recognise yourself somewhere in there over the last few years, then I’ll buy you a beer.

Photographers are forever, not just for Christmas

A couple of nights ago my four year old daughter and I were browsing Vogue together in our lilac scented bubble bath (because girls just wanna smell yummy) and we decided that we would ask her father for a nice big diamond each for Christmas (couriered via Father-Christmas-Express, naturally.) After all, girls love sparkly things, and what better way to demonstrate a guy’s lurve for his favourite laydeez than by buying them the ultimate symbol of love and devotion?

Rich was surprisingly vocal regarding the reasons why Father Christmas would not be supplying our present of choice. As I recall the words “money,” “broke” and “unrealistic” were used a lot. The Fluffy laydeez went to bed mightily disappointed that night.

Because I’ve always been spoilt and I invariably get what I want (even if I have to wait for it) I did not give up so easily. I really wanted that diamond, and it had to be real and pretty sizeable too because only anything over two carats would signify “forever.” I mean there’s just no point if it’s not genuinely hewn from real diamond rock by impoverished and exploited slaves in Sierra Leone, smuggled via the illegal black market and purchased lovingly off Ebay for $999. Only the bottomless corruption of the conflict diamond trade can equate to true love as your stunning jewel sparkles merrily on your finger. You are wearing not only a symbol of ultimate devotion, but a slice of suffering and exploitation. What girl could possibly resist?

Hmm. After reading about the horrors of the diamond trade, I don’t think that even I could ask for real diamonds, which is really saying something considering I’m a accountant/ex-lawyer and thus by definition I have no discernable morals at all.

Not one to admit defeat so easily, after much internet research I’ve subsequently hatched a cunning plan.

The solution?

Artificial diamonds.

Yes, yes I know what you’re thinking. Tacky, tacky, tacky.

Not so my dear friends because...behold…the latest artificial diamond technology will tenderly gather up the sacred ashes of your dearly departed and transform them into a rock the size of your choice.

Ooh, what a fabulous idea! And as we all know when you’re talking about men, size is everything. The bigger the size of your dearly departed, the bigger the rock. Portly men clearly offer the greatest potential when considering your future art-piece. Worried about ethical issues ladies? No problem I assure you. It’s merely the recycling of your loved one into a unique work of art. Surely the ultimate in green ethics? Preserve your husband, save the planet.

And think of the potential to honour your beloved hubby. Imagine how your best yummy mummy friend will congratulate you on your latest stunning rock which you are proudly showing off at the Saturday night dinner party. “Where did you get that fantastic ring, Meryl? It’s huge!”

“Well, funny you should ask that, Alice. Actually it’s Bert. You know he died recently. Very sad. He looks more beautiful than ever in the afterlife, don’t you think? And just look at his size! He’s at least two and a half carats now, you know. Jeez, I really loved that man ‘o’ mine and now we’re together again for all eternity. Guess that’s what marriage is all about.”

The moral of this story? Watch what you eat, and whatever you do, don’t upset the wife. You never know, she might decide that you’re worth more dead than alive and realise that diamonds can indeed be forever.

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A tempting Christmas pressie for all you laydeez out there? (Click to enlarge)