Sweet Dream Baby

I'm finding beauty and its trailer trash sibling glamour, exhausting. Its unrelenting parade across our papers, screens, shared spaces is becoming depressing to me.

Celebrities stare out of the pages of magazines empty of any back story. They are anonymous in their ubiquity. They inhabit a landscape as barren and as pitiful as a cold nuclear winter but with even less meaning.

Repetition is no replacement for originality. How many times do we have to see the face of Natalie Portman before we are forced to turn away out of sheer  boredom and exhaustion.

How is the continuing  drip drip no, torrent of pretty images in anyway refreshing to our tired, benighted sight?

Many complain that what you see ain't what you get. Post production erases all imperfections, takes away an inch or two here, adds some extra curves there. The face, the body is no more than a set a digitalised pixals that have no reality other than in the program code running "Photoshop". Looking at those images what does the individual behind the face, inhabiting that body feel? An unbridgeable gap, a shocking disconnection, a betrayal or a sullen resignation that that's the price you have to pay to stay fresh in the minds of the fashion editors and their quixotic readership.

Don't those who pose realise that with each photo-shoot, each publicity opportunity their features, their looks bleach out a little.

And yet....My phone has a series of photographs of Marilyn Monroe: possibly one of the most photographed faces ever. I never tire of looking at her.