Last week was a week of bumping into people at the taxi stand. I bumped into an ex intern who had gone completely blonde, and was on her way to a church fete. That was right after my appointment with
Dr Yim at the
Forum. Then there was
PPX after lunch on the day I had to race back to the office to look at the
February proofs. PPX reminded me how long it's been since I posted on the blog and I promised I would, and so here's something for him, a page or so from a diary I threw away in a (vain) bid to spring clean. Goodbye youth, goodbye:
K's First Kiss
I knew
K would be there at
Steven’s Christmas eve party, which he threw at his rented black and white bungalow atop a gentle slope near
Orchard Road. K was already there, the centre of an adulating circle, as he always was, when I arrived with
R and
Mr B.
He could be high on something, but one really couldn’t tell with K.
Just after midnight, we decided to leave. Mr B wanted to go dance at the bar in
Club Street, so we said our protracted goodbyes, and just before we stepped into the velvety darkness of the trees in the garden, K took my face in his hands and kissed me on the mouth. K tasted of wine and gum. I half thought he might be wanting to pass on an E to me, as he used to do, but there was no pill in my mouth.
R pretended he didn’t notice and Mr B was already drunk and really didn’t notice.
On Boxing Day, quite hungover, we went to watch a movie at the Mall. I’d been thinking all night and all day about K’s kiss, and what it could have meant, even as I was sitting through the movie. Was it just the drinks or drugs? But K was one of those that could drive perfectly straight even when stoned (he just gripped the wheel a little bit too tight and leaned stiffly forward) and I’ve witnessed him order a three course-dinner when he was completely off his face. He didn’t eat any of it, but he ordered it, and sat through the meal, drinking the wine automatically.
Imagine my surprise when we actually bumped into K in the supermarket right after the movie, when Mr B was having a coffee and R was eating a burger and I was sucking and chewing on a bubble tea.
K was with
Jim, an old friend of ours, buying beer for a party; it was all a bit awkward. I was aware that R was studying me, and only Mr B seemed blissfully unaware. Jim asked me to join them for the party. “But we have dinner, and I’ve got to work tomorrow,” I said because Jim didn’t ask my friends, just me, but mostly because K didn’t ask me. He was talking to Mr B intently.
The next afternoon, Jim called me to chat.
He said that K gave him my number and that K told him that we hadn’t been talking for a while. “It’s been months,” I said. “Why rake this up?”
“You should ask him out for coffee,” insisted Jim.
“K can call me if he wants to talk or have coffee or whatever, he has my number,” I said, when I really wanted to say that the Christmas eve kiss reminded me of K’s first kiss so many years ago.
The inspiring Eiko Ishioka, art director and costume designer, died on 26 January at 73. Ms Ishioka, a designer who brought an eerie, sensual surrealism to film and theater, album covers, the 2008 Olympics (above) and Cirque du Soleil, in the process earning an Oscar, a Grammy and various other honours, died of pancreatic cancer in Tokyo.
Her aesthetics married East and West — she lived Manhattan for many years. An Oscar winner for Bram Stoker's Dracula, Ms Ishioka also costumed The Fall (2006), an adventure fantasy, and Immortals (2011), a tale of ancient Greece.
The young Ishioka began her career in the advertising division of the cosmetics giant Shiseido. She opened her own design company in the early 1970s, with clients like Parco, for whom she created her iconic advertising works for more than a decade. For instance, she created a Parco commercial in which, over a minute and a half, Faye Dunaway wordlessly peels and eats an egg. I've posted this commercial before.
She also designed costumes for Grace Jones’s 2009 tourin 2009 and directed Bjork’s music video Cocoon. Her books include Eiko by Eiko(1983) and Eiko on Stage(2000
