BPAL

New BPAL's came last night

Stardust is brilliant. It smells exactly like life as a party girl -- champagne and red bull (which I think smells like sweet tarts anyway). It's really perfect, and I may have to get a second bottle, since it's an LE.

Lenore is lovely. Almost masculine in the bottle, and may be more so (I hope so) on me. It smells more nearly to what I thought Beatrice was going to smell like (which, btw, I think smells like whatever Snape should smell like mixed with a vat of cherry cough syrup -- absurd and nearly interesting, but I don't wear it much).

Samhain and Devil's Night also both arrived and are both strongly, strongly not for me, and so will be sold or swapped.

In the frimp department, Tisiphone was boring and White Rabbit really revolted me, and I've not tried the others yet. But truly, Stardust is exactly this time of year, four or five years ago. i really like it, but I'm not sure how I feel about it yet.

remembering Sydney

I feel like each year on LJ people's end of the year summaries are posted earlier and earlier. Certianly, I've been working on mine a bit in my head. Last year, I did post mine earlier, because of the impending departure to Sydney. This year, it's strange to think of not escaping this cold, not going there, especially as all teh Australian's on my flist bitch about how hot it's gotten there.

I find myself listening to a lot of the same CDs I was listening to right before I left. Scissor Sisters primarily. That's a strange thing -- I mean I think they are a painfully brilliant and funny band, but the associations are so specific for me -- that album is like a week of fantasy utterly not tied into any other aspect of my fantasy life -- like an utter flash in the pan celebrity crush that got a weird fantasy narrative involving being in Oz grafted onto it. Strange and no idea why. But I can't hear a few tracks off that disk without remembering sitting in my office daydreaming about it. It makes me giggle. And it makes me miss Sydney.

What's interesting to me is what was important to me going down there, and what turned out to be important, both in my real life and my fantasy life, varried and surprised me. Things that were a joke because quasi-serious (like directing), things I thought mattered (I really wanted to fuck an Aussie and didn't get to) totally didn't. And even my personal and petty pilgrimages wound up taking on very different shapes than I thought they would. There were lots of celebrity moments (Heath Ledger in sushi-e, and working with a whole bunch of people we've never heard of in America who are quite the gossip sheet items there and a strolling down the street thing I wound up choosing nevert to really talk about, for reasons I'm still unsure of). And NIDA was, of course, both exalting and utterly hellbent on making me cry.

I miss the way food tastes there. I miss the Trop. And the Wall. And feeling uncomfortable out at Bondi and getting lost on the buses and the stupid ShittyRail transfer I was always making at Martin Place. I miss coconut ice, gay porn and 32-page notebooks for school from my favourite Darlinghurst newsstand. I miss looking in bar windows and wondering how I could be there and feel such things so weren't for me. I miss cantelope gelato. I miss ordering absinthe in restaurants and drinking champagne in the NIDA lobby. I miss my Macbeth, rehearsing in the NIDA courtyard and wrestling the prop knives he made from sticks in the bush behind his house out of his hands, while the children's program kids watched from the balcony and applauded. I really miss my daily sandwich from the over-priced NIDA cafe, being cut in line by eight-year-olds fighting over the last Cherry Ripe, and the aesthetic perfection of the two dollar coin. I miss the Opera House and the wind and my science fiction city, San Bennedetto lemon soda, sausage rolls and being so far away from everything such that it didn't feel dissimilar to the isolation of being twelve and not ever listening to any of the music on the radio. I miss the time I fell down the stairs and all of us being assholes in McDonalds while I explained our fries taste different in the States. I miss bills just after dawn, and the way my striding up to Oxford street clicking my heels to The One You Want at 8am felt nearly the same as being alone in New Orleans ten years ago at night, waiting for some dark childhood fantasy destiny to find me and hurt me and make me perfect.

I blinked back tears nearly constantly in Sydney; the quality of the light is different there and seems to insist on making everything matter, especially the stuff you want to think is petty and wish you had the balls to admit to another living soul.

When you live in New York City, you rarely look up, except at night, and alone. And when I came back, I looked up during the day much more and figured out how to squint to see my lost world, to reverse the angle of the light, to recognize a place that has a very different relationship than New York to modernity and all its materials.