Taddeo, tits, canicule

She's lost it and she don't give a fuck

There is an interesting thing happening on Instagram and that is, that Lisa Taddeo has lost it. In a good way, I think. Though losing it on instagram is a particular thing and perhaps some might say can never be good, but it is a mouthpiece, isn’t it, with which to project ideas loud and far and why the fuck not. Matt and I discuss this - I want to say a lot - but that’s not true as he can’t stand talking about Instagram because he’s not on it and never really has been, because he is not a taker of the photos. I have always been a taker of the photos and a sharer of the photos, not because I have anything to say but because I take good photos. It is a curse, to be a photo-taker, it gets you embroiled in all kinds of social discussions you never intended - initially, innocently, you simply wanted to share a photo.

A photo is not a photo is not a photo.

Here is a photo of where I’m sitting right now. In the Récollets residents’ garden. I just passed Brigitte Fontaine but more about that later. It’s fucking hot and instead of lying in my room with the fan on watching reruns of Australian Story I have come to the garden with a paper bag of items which I have already consumed: the end of a baguette, a cut-off bit of chevre frais bought from a pompous gay guy on the rue du Château d’Eau because the markets were shut, the remainders of the rosé i saved from the other night, a glass full of glaçons the guy in Café A gave me reluctantly when i cut to the side of the queue. Here are the remainders, which I photographed and in my mind composed the caption: French portrait, well it was something better when I took it and now i’ve forgotten the brilliant caption I had, but then I just realised, why do I have to have a caption now, why is my head full of captions all the time, like it used to when I was in advertising, everything a slogan. Now it’s not just cunts like me that have slogans in their heads all the time it’s any cunt that’s on social media, which is everyone, except Matt.

Now i’ve had to change to the other side of the table to avoid the sun, and now I’m in the same position I was sitting when the other night I met with the other residents. I talked with Fredrik/Marisol, a prolific Swedish author who is both male and female, and who signs off their emails F/M, which I find satisfying and I must ask if they sought an ‘M’ name for their female person so it would be F/M but in Swedish it’s probably a whole other thing. They (iel they say in French - a mix of ‘il’ and ‘elle’) invited me to a tranny bar last night to dance, for which I had no clothes, only black, and they said they had a pink whig and a red skirt they could dress me up in but in the end it was too hot and I was too hungover so I stayed in and watched the Icelandic film The Love that Remains, the shittest title of all time for the most magnificent film, and then I watched the Chantal Akerman film Saute Ma Ville and an interview with Akerman who said, of course, it’s the reverse to Jeanne Dielmann, which was a revelation as it was shot 8 years before Jeanne Dielmann. I would have thought the reverse.

It’s an interesting time. Here I am, thinking, and spewing freely, as if I’m a student again, arrived here in this exact building in 2004, 22 years ago, no clue who or where I was. I have lived here with Matt, with the Potato, hurried out of here one afternoon almost birthing her in the cloître, waving goodbye to Chrystel who didn’t know then she’d not see me again until I had a toddler. The toddler, out the window, playing in the park with Matt, with her school friends in her little red jacket, enfants rouges, all the ages and the people gone by. I keep thinking I should write about this feeling, this being back here like this, alone for the first time since I met Séb, really, since I was 28, now I’m fucken 50 and I have these tits.

I really don’t know where the tits came from, HRT, or fat, or just weight or ageing, but they are not aged boobs, they are prime meat, I showed them to Katrin in a toilet in Melbourne, I need to show them to people, it’s a crime for them to stay hidden, sorry, I shouldn’t say that, they belong to only one person - two - three, though she desperately does not want to see them, but really, perhaps someone could at least paint them for me. I should get a photo of these tits before they sag, I did write about the great pregnancy tits in The Sea in the Metro, but that was a different thing, they had a purpose.

I am here, alone, with my tits and my watery rosé and I just saw a video of a man bent over his dead son on the ground, howling in disbelief, though the sound was off, moving back and forth, back to the dead boy, up to the sky, back to the dead body, back to the sky. And I feel bad and awful and sick and then think, I elect people to make sure this doesn’t happen, and they don’t feel bad. I feel bad and I’m sitting here and i can do nothing but feel bad, or do all the small things I do which have made no seeming difference and anyway I elect people to ensure these things do not happen. I suppose I am ranting in this unhinged way because like Lisa Taddeo I am not insane, I fiiiiiinally watched Catch 22 with my dad before leaving for Paris - after 22 years of him saying ‘how about Catch 22?’ - and can’t stop thinking about that insanity - the wanting to leave the war due to ‘insanity’ but they can’t grant you that because you cannot be insane for wanting to leave the war. How tired can we get of trying to be sane when everything is so insane it is impossible to be sane and in fact those that are outwardly insane like Lisa Taddeo - who is very not insane - well she might be but her actions are not insane her actions are that of a sane person in this insane predicament we find ourselves in - she might be the sanest person on the planet right now. Though Matt would say she’s insane to be on instagram, and, if on instagram, insane to be shouting into instagram, which is not a mouthpiece but a capsule of insanity, a microcosm of a mouthpiece for the narcissistic and the insane. Sweat drips down the inside of my dress. Boob sweat perhaps, that’s a new thing. Fuck my boobs, what business do they have on my body now? What purpose? I don’t want to be a woman, now, I never really did, and I certainly do not want to attract the regards of men or other as i walk down the street, I long to be invisible, and then to play with my tits long into the night, my tits that are for me and me only. But what is the point of me if nobody is looking?

(Nobody, actually, is looking, I should add. But I should like to KEEP IT THAT WAY.)

I said to a friend yesterday that I sense this period, of a month alone at the Récollets, is a time of transformation. I don’t know what that means, but I sense it. I sense the madness in time, in the space to allow myself to breathe, my tits to breathe, my perspective has always been in terms of the other, my impact on others and what I should be, to them, and the pictures I should create for them, and like Lisa Taddeo, I’m over it, though my fight is not with CAA or Big Literature, fortunately my lack of success has kept me from vultures. Perhaps I want to be mad. I am thinking a lot of Vali Myers, the witch of Positano, I am thinking of Brigitte Fontaine and her late-night calls to the radio, Il est minuit sur FIP, et Brigitte Fontaine à quelque chose à vous dire, I am thinking of Chantal A and her unhinged short films even she doesn’t understand yet, that will later be ‘art’, and of Nan Goldin’s sister on the railroad tracks, too wild, too ‘much’.

Do you feel tired?

Too hot. The sun keeps finding me.

Vali found shade