FALL DOWN SEVEN TIMES, GET UP EIGHT...

Haha, scared you there, sorry. At some point I took a screenshot of some of the THREE THOUSAND do-not-enter signs Google helpfully replaced every single one of the images of this blog with earlier in the year, for no reason, with no apology. 

I have now replaced every . single . one . of the photos, manually, by hand, one by one. 

It was... an experience. Once I got back into the deepest recesses of the archives, I discovered some embarrassingly written posts and even some funny ones - let's face it, I was amusing in 2007.

This was a huge inconvenience, took such an enormous amount of my time that I stopped counting, and at times I was tempted to just delete the whole thing. Most people might think why on earth would you bother? No one blogs anymore anyway... 

I think the answer to that is that I'm stubborn. You mess with my shit, I'm going to put it right. 

Anyway let's replace these nasty round signs with a more pleasing screenshot. I think I'll have to delete the above one soon actually. It's making me feel ill. 

That's better. 

Do feel free to peruse the archives, while I... well I don't quite know what I'm going to do with all this spare time on my hands now. 

{Joan Didion in her Corvette, Julian Wasser}

PYRE...

It was this blog's eighth birthday yesterday and I was unsure what to do. Throw a party, or a wake? I considered putting it on a boat, setting fire to it and pushing it out into the Serpentine lake to watch it burn from a distance while sipping Pimm's. Since the whole "all my images were irretrievably deleted by Google" debacle I have been feeling unenthused. But honestly, as I've posted here less and less frequently over the past year or so, except to link to articles I've written elsewhere, I've become stuck about what to do with this blog. Mired in indecision, I've done nothing. Do I end it, but leave it up like a flag in the sand, with its extensive archives that sometimes weigh me down with their sheer volume? Make it redirect to something new and fresh, which other friends have done with seemingly no separation anxiety? The thing is, I get attached. I'm attached to this blog! I want to do something new, but I don't want to throw it away. Neither do I want to just limp along with it, so that it becomes crap and feels like a chore. It doesn't feel like a chore (except the current task of re-uploading 3000 images) but it does feel like I'm long overdue for a change. Blogger itself will soon be defunct and I'm really not ok with this whole compulsory invasive syncing thing Google is pushing forward. I've made my Twitter and Instagram accounts private and did the same with Flickr when they recently "improved" it by destroying everything that was good about it.

What to do, what to do? I'd like to have something new and amazing and fresh - but my web design skills, such as they are, cannot translate the superfresh ideas inside my head into reality.

Er, halp?

UNE SERIE NOIRE...

Time to get over the barrier of not wanting to write a new post. I'm not going to go on about how life is a rollercoaster, although that bloody song has been stuck in my head for the past six weeks and it's probably stuck in yours now. Suffice to say, a series of unexpected events has occurred recently, including but not limited to: my car being stolen, me having French lessons, then going to Paris and having a lovely time, Lola having a serious freak accident while I was in Paris (she's ok now), me seeing Patti Smith at the Royal Festival Hall with C, going on a whirlwind trip to Andalusia, and thanks to Google, losing every single image from this blog - all 2,500 of them going back to 2006 - which can only be rectified by me manually. re-uploading. every. single. image. one. by. one. Which I'm doing, but this takes hours and hours and days of mind numbingly tedious work. Although I now don't trust Google for a second so I don't know what I'm going to do about being trapped in their clutches in future. And there will possibly be a post forthcoming, warning people how not to get all your blog images surprise irrevocably deleted by Google at some point. So that happened, and a load of other stuff - some really, really bad, and some really, really good.

Here is a token picture of what the sun is supposed to look like, and does, in Andalusia.

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT LOLA...

It is a fine and delicate line when one has a blog named after a cat. If it becomes too feline oriented, people start introducing you by saying, "She's got this cat blog," or family members say things like, "I'm sorry you're not having any success except with your cat blog interviews," and you become despairing. You slow down on a fine feature like Bloggers + Cats, then Karl Lagerfeld followed by Kim Kardashian get kittens and the entire world's media becomes cat obsessed and starts interviewing them.

If there is not enough feline content you are sent emails addressed to "Dear Lola," - this happens anyway, and she can't answer them unfortunately because she can't type. But still, what I'm saying is it's hard to get the balance right - Depeche Mode were right all along.

 In case anyone still thinks I'm Lola, here is what actual Lola's been up to the last couple of months.

    

ONE MORE...

One more photo from Paris last month, before I resume normal blogging activities. Although, I'm not sure what normal blogging looks like anymore. It's all gone a bit weird, hasn't it? I mean, the internet/blogging side of things. Instagram obviously has a lot to do with that, but as wonderful as Instagram is, I can't write on it. But I don't seem to be writing much here anymore, and I don't want this blog to turn into a list of links to articles I've written elsewhere. Can people even be bothered to read combinations of words that aren't tweet sized anymore? And what will happen if everyone stops blogging and you lose touch with people you were internet buds with? If you're like me, there'll be a core of people you met through blogging that you've become good friends with, some you meet up with once in a while or when you're in each others cities, others you've met once or twice and then a whole swathe of people you're blog friendly with, but who, if they stopped blogging tomorrow you'd never see again and you only know them by their blog name. What about them!? And then at some point in future you'd go wandering round Sydney or Rekyavik or somewhere wondering if you've just walked past their house or are sitting next to them at a cafe they mentioned three years before. Am I the only one who predicts these tragic scenarios?! (I don't follow everyone on Twitter, I hate Facebook and I often don't put 2+2 together with who's on Instagram or Pinterest unless the name is the same.)

 I've been carrying around two rolls of film to get developed for the last couple of weeks - the last months have been so busy in the best possible way, but I feel like I haven't shared much of that here. I might have shared stuff about Paris or Rome, but home sweet home London hasn't got a look in here and that, unbelievably, is where I've been having the most fun. Now I've been stopped in my tracks - first by a pulled neck muscle, now by the grossest, most spectacularly germtastic cold I've ever had. So I'm going to sit here and think about what to do with this blog now, which turned seven years old last week.

CHOUPETTE'S 15 MINUTES...

© Slim Aarons

It has come to our attention that numerous mainstream news outlets have run features on Choupette Lagerfeld, the big KL's kitten. Fashionista, in an alleged "interview" asks "Choupette" about her daily habits and rituals, favourite foods and past times. Choupette's alleged Twitter account currently has 7,783 followers.

This is clearly a thinly veiled attempt to jump on our Bloggers + Cats bandwagon and frankly, if Choupette and her team of ghost-tweeters had any class, their first port of call would have been to contact the internet's foremost authority on cat interviews since September 2009 (that's us) and plaintively beg for our consideration. I might have made an allowance, even though technically daddy Karl may have a lot of iPods but he is in fact not a blogger and is therefore ineligible. 

Never mind - we're kind of over Choupette now anyway.

There will be a new Bloggers + Cats post forthcoming, and it will rule.

AM NOT DEAD...

In fact quite the opposite! Have been roaming a lot lately, most recently in Rome. More soon - baci! x

{Can't find a credit for First photo of Monica Vitti credit: AP, the second the internet is telling me is by Helmut Newton - could be possible I suppose, but unlikely?}

ONE BEAUTIFUL THING...

At last, I scored a second hand edition of Allure to complete my collection of Diana Vreeland books. The others are: Diana Vreeland by Eleanor Dwight, Why Don't You - The Bazaar Years by John Esten, The Eye Has To Travel by Lisa Immordino Vreeland and of course, D.V. by D.V. Is it possible to do a PhD in a person?!

Allure was always the one I was fussy about: I didn't want the new (2010), smaller edition - but I didn't want to pay a fortune for a first edition. Finally after years of intermittent searches I found a second edition of the original large cloth bound book in near perfect condition. And it is large - I'm going to have to buy a bigger coffee table to accommodate it.

The book of 165 black and white images selected by D.V. with her commentary recorded by Christopher Hemphill is quite unnerving to flick through, when you're used to seeing thousands of images a day. Here, some look like photocopies, or are reproduced from paparazzi pictures. How long would 165 images take to scroll through on tumblr - 20 seconds?

The arrival of this book coincided with the arrival of what I've felt as a sea change for me, to do with the  internet and blogging - and primarily about imagery. I feel and really hope that it's going to end up being a positive change.

I could never get into tumblr. I always want to know WHO took the picture, WHERE or WHO is it, what's the story behind it? Pinterest is sometimes better for this, but often you click back and back to find the source, only for it to lead you to a random uncredited tumblr post. It infuriates me so much! It's not even totally to do with the issue of crediting, just that scrolling through an endless stream of imagery, even beautiful inspiring imagery ceases to be that...inspiring.

Of course if the original of any one of those images were put in an empty room on a white wall, it would still have an impact, but - as I joked to a friend this week: haven't we finished filing all the photos of Jane Birkin by now?

The way I choose to see it that it was necessary for people, once suddenly exposed to this huge trove of incredible iconic images on the internet, to catalogue and sort them - to make sense of them. But now it feels as if they're being sorted and re-sorted almost mindlessly. It's like gorging on photos until you overdose. That's how it feels to me anyway, and that's why you won't have seen many external images here - or many images at all lately. I'm obviously re-cleansing my image chakra - ommm.

Imagine Vreeland having to clip out tiny pictures from newspapers that caught her eye and get them blown up bigger for her inspiration board. And many of those enduring images getting re-blogged a million times are from Vreeland's era, or rather reign, at Harper's Bazaar and Vogue.

(Yep, it was a lot easier for me to pull the below picture from Google Images and at a better resolution than its reproduction in Allure. I still had to look at the book for the credit though, as it was nowhere to be found online.)

Diana Vreeland at Vogue 1966 ©James Karales/Look

As Vreeland says in Allure:
"...it's the suggestion of something else. Of course, nowadays, nothing suggests anything - except advertising. We've all seen far too many pictures. I think the visual road has become over-travelled and over-crowded." She said this in 1980 - pre-internet!


I feel that it's time for the internet to go in the direction of producing things that are new, of value and of genuine beauty and originality. Not that no one is doing that at all, but the general, mainstream direction of the bloggy/inspiration part of the internet has to go that way. I feel it's going to happen soon.

REPORTS OF MY DEMISE ARE GREATLY EXAGGERATED...

I've been here there and everywhere - well, apart from here evidently. Does two weeks without a post constitute internet death still, or are things more flexible these days? I have only this paltry handful of Instagrams to offer the internet today. Tomorrow, we'll see. Or the next day.

TRIFLING NEWS...

1. If you left a comment on my last post, it probably got eaten in the whole Blogger fail of last week, so sorry about that. I'm aware that this blog is probably long overdue some kind of epic re-design and change of platform (particularly since I realised Blogger is actually eating my older posts and after the three day world panic provoking outage of Blogger last week), but even if this makes me super old school and I'm still blogging on the equivalent of cassette tape, a shiny new home for Lola Is Beauty isn't on the cards at the moment. Though I'd love to have the time and energy to do something like that, I just don't. I'm kind of fond of Blogger anyway: it does what it says on the tin, (most of the time) so I shall just keep scribbling away in this old journal until Blogger is obsolete no doubt! But I am going to move a few things around a bit here - you will notice a "Lately I'm Into" links list at left: this is really for my friends who are too lazy to bother actually finding/reading good stuff on the internet, but want/need to look like they know what's going on and always ask me for personalised lists of current recommendations. As hinted at by the not very inspired title, it will change around frequently and the rest of my links are still always there.

2. I know most of you haven't been able to sleep wondering if I got my hair cut. Well - I was subjected to not one, but a number of hair interventions, in the sense of when Elton made Donatella go to rehab, rather than people randomly snipping bits off my locks. After some hardcore phone berating, one of my friends actually came round to my house to continue her case in person against me having my hair chopped off! (In retrospect - thank you.) I acquiesce - everyone was right, I'm in too much of a weird transitional phase to go round lopping off all my hair, even if it was tempting. I realised the thing that was annoying me was that after having to have it cut it was mid-length and I cannot bear mid-anything: mid-length, Middleton, mid-range - as a wise person once said, people who stand in the middle of the road deserve to get run over. I just have to stop being impatient and wait for it to grow. But I have found a third way - apparently there's this miraculous invention called a hairclip and when I use it, it looks like my hair is short, but it's still there. Who knew? So I just had a good trim and bought a Mason Pearson hairbrush, which the sound of me using makes Lola gallop at high speed into the room I'm in and assume the "I'm now ready to be groomed" position. It's hilarious. And no, I am not using the most expensive hairbrush in the world on her.

FROM THE DESK OF LOLA...

I'm so happy people have been enjoying the Bloggers + Cats series. Thank you so much for all the love, links, tweets etc. I've decided to make it every other week from now on though, so that this blog doesn't evolve completely into an online version of Cat Fancy magazine. This will mean I have more time to post about other important regular Lola Is Beauty issues like shoes, gallivanting, Paris yearnings, teapots, cherry blossoms and the occasional Shetland pony in-between cat posts. So this week is cat free, but please let me know in the comments if there are any amazing blogger felines I haven't interviewed yet who you're dying to know more about.

{Isabelle Huppert - dream cat interviewee. It's impossible to find a credit for this most tumblrized image - does anyone know?}

...

I've got some kind of internet malaise this week, hence the quietness here. My daily internet meanderings are usually inspirational, but recently the amount of information I take in on a daily basis has become more draining than anything, which is no one's fault but my own. I'm struggling to keep up with all the things I must read - but what would happen if I didn't? Not much probably. So I've been limiting my internet time, sticking with reading a fairly tedious and very long book, drinking lots of tea, writing stuff down in a journal and turning this new year round and round, trying to get a feel for what might be good to do with it.

 p.s. here's a pic of Lola's favourite Christmas present.

10➔11...

It feels strange to say this, but 2010 was a good year. What am I saying, good? 2010 was a sterling year. (*I'm excluding the first 3 months of it which thankfully turned out to be just a hangover from the previous Years of Bleakness.) It might sound funny to say that here, as you would barely know it from reading my posts, but trust me. So thank you 2010 - you made me feel like myself again. It's weird to think how this blog is to thank for much of the goodness that's come my way this year. (I think it might have secret magic powers...) And thank you, everyone who visits this little corner - those who've been there from the start, those who I now count as friends, those who are here every day and those who are just peeking. Happy New Year!

{photos: Li Hui}

10...

Miss Woo from Cheapskate Chic gave me the "I love your blog" prize. Thank you! Cor, it feels as if I haven't done a tag since the olden days of blogging, when there were only two streetstyle blogs and people still bought newspapers every day.

I have to answer the 10 questions and pass it onto 10 of my favourite blogs.

1. Why did you create the blog?

It was so long ago I can't remember...no, ok, I may be an ancient grandma of blogging but I do remember not really knowing exactly what a blog was about 6 years ago and being curious. I had been writing daily for years, but mostly in journals that no one ever saw and a few articles here and there. One day before a trip to Paris I Googled the words Paris, fashion and blog and Elisabeth's blog La Coquette came up first. As soon as I started reading it I remember thinking, "Oh my god, this is amazing/perfect for me/I have got to start one of these blog things immediately!" So I did - and a whole new world opened up for me, (including meeting my now dear friend Elisabeth).

VIA...

One blog that has really intrigued me in the past few months is Via.  I love delving into artist Liivia Sirola's every day life. Her photographs are beautiful - soft and mysterious - the writing even more mysterious to me because I can't read a word of Finnish. It took me ages to work out that "Vanhemmat Tekstit" means "Older Posts"! Google Translate seems to have a fair amount of difficulty with Finnish as well, but some of the translations can lead to oddly heightened poetic phrases, which I'm sure were even more so in the original. This sense of mystery coupled with Liivia's ability to capture the ephemeral in her photography (light, steam, frost) makes me feel like I'm visiting another world each time I click over there; one that is filled with nature, steaming cups of coffee, baking, walks through fallen leaves and knitting things to keep warm throughout the winter.

{All photos: Liivia Sirola. Used with permission.}

HOUSEKEEPING...

*I'm back on Twitter again. You can follow me if you feel so inclined.

*This photo is totally amazing. {Via Them Thangs}

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO US...

We're back in London and today is the FIFTH anniversary of Lola Is Beauty. I can't believe it's been five years - aren't you bored of me by now?

What to say, whoo hoo? I still love doing this so here's to another five!

{my iPhone photos from Paris}

7...

If Jane and Ephemerette passed the versatile blogger award on to me - merci beaucoup! So now I have to reveal seven things about myself and pass the award onto some of my favourite blogs...

Seven things I like. I cheated a bit, but surely the things you like reveal something about you?

1. The number 7.

2. Being an autodidact. I only learned this word the other day - hey, sometimes things take a bit longer when you're self taught. Phew! I feel so much more legit now that I have a fancy concise word to justify describe the way I learn.

3. This home.

4. American Apparel underwear. No, seriously I do! It doesn't look anywhere near as sleazy if you don't pull those slutty poses like they do on the website, which I'm not linking to. It's very well cut as well. Though I read somewhere that AA is "on the brink of total collapse" so I'm stocking up on more micro mesh triangle bras and low slung briefs. (Sooo not linking - far too many nipples.) I'm trying to forget that I also read Dov Charney tries all the underwear (just the underwear samples we hope) on himself.

5. I like the idea of dyeing the ends of my hair faded pink. (Like 10% of that.) I've been ruminating on this for a few months, though as yet I haven't reached for the Manic Panic. But I have dark hair, so to get your hair pink, you have to bleach it first. But if it was just the ends, you could have it cut out when you got bored of it...(this is how my ruminating process goes.)

6. The high waisted black silky shorts I bought at Warehouse for £13 in the sale.

7. Illesteva's lookbook models.

I'm giving the award to:

Toujours Toi
So Much To Tell You
Scout Holiday
Ringo, Have a Banana
Kempt
Jeana Sohn


{photo: Mike Vorrasi}

A CASA...

I promise I haven't spent the entire week floating in a swimming pool - that was just last weekend. I'm afraid that, when the weather turns to sweet, wonderful summer I start skiving off. I can't believe it, it's been like summer for two weeks. Unbelievable. It can't last.

Lola and I have been hanging around at home with all the windows open, meeting up with friends, wearing short shorts in public, drinking San Pellegrino Limonata (not Lola) and generally appreciating summer in a way that's only possible in the knowledge that it could all go away tomorrow.

I promise I'll be back in the next couple of days with some clothes for sale and some proper posts that don't involve swimming pools.

FOG...

I'm lost in a fog this week, so apologies if the blog isn't up to much. I feel like one of the subjects in these photos: moving in a barely discernable blur at warp speed.

{photos: Alexey Titarenko's City of Shadows series via Them Thangs}