Justine (not her real name) was a student in my A-level English class. She didn't go a bundle on D.H. Lawrence ('The Rainbow') or Thackeray ('Vanity Fair'). I wondered if that was because she was Canadian, too culturally removed. Her father was on assignment in London working for some record company (EMI possibly). It did occur to me that maybe those novels were just too long for her transatlantic attention span! But she didn't much like William Blake either ('Songs of Innocence and Experience'), couldn't accept that the poet saw and conversed with angels. And as for Shakespeare...
In fact she didn't have a lot of time for English Literature, period (as she would have put it). Art was what she did have an enthusiasm for, her main subject. I think economics was the third one but I'm not sure. Her attendance and attention were sporadic at best over the course of eighteen months. She came across as a rich girl doing us a favour by filling in time in class, when what she really wanted to be doing was photographing the stars.
expensive camera gear
Mummy was said to be an actress, though she might as well have been from Arcturus, she seemed so spaced out on the occasions I saw her at parents' evenings. Daddy was clearly firmly of this planet, and concerned for his daughter's prospects, though he indulged her, bought her a load of expensive camera gear, including a home darkroom, and through his industry connections got her on the invite list for a raft of gigs in London, which had a thriving punk and new wave scene going at the time, and which proved a constant distraction from her studies.Justine, it seemed, was fixated on becoming a rock photographer, a female Mick Rock or Anton Corbijn (two rising stars of the medium). I don't know if she'd heard of Jenny Lens who was making a name for herself in Los Angeles and New York at the same time, covering the emerging US punk scene, or Lynn Goldsmith who left Elektra Records in New York in the mid-1970s to concentrate on rock photography. Justine derived her simple self-belief from the DIY ethos of the punk bands she photographed and though she'd tried submitting her work to the music press, it seemed the editors were less than impressed. In truth it was (and probably still is) a highly competitive field and you have to have talent. I know personally of only one female photographer from that era who managed to establish a lasting reputation in the field, and that is Penny Smith.
To move this story on, Justine's father apparently decided to break his daughter's cycle of rejections by arranging for her to be the official photographer for a newly signed band on the label he worked for. She was to go on tour with Slowly Boiling Frog, document their shows and offstage antics and shoot the cover for their debut long-player. This was, conveniently or otherwise, in the Easter holidays just months before A-level exams.Hearsay is that the project didn't go well. Justine never retuned to school after Easter. I gathered from the rumor mill of her school friends that she's had some sort of breakdown, possibly involving sex and drugs, and that her father had placed her in a sanitorium in Switzerland. As for Slowly Boiling Frog, nothing much was ever heard again. I surfed the net for any information and all I could turn up was one very poor quality unattributed photograph. I wonder if...
Slowly Boiling Frog
The last I heard from or about Justine was a postcard that arrived addressed to me at the school bearing a Swiss stamp. It read: "The stars are very beautiful here. Their color amazes me. I have finally seen angels. I thought you would like to know. J"I'm not sure why I decided to share all that with you. I hadn't given her any thought in nearly half a century. Of that class at least one went on to become an author and another appeared on the Christmas series of University Challenge a few years ago. I'd like to think we are all stars in our own nighttime.the real stars
In lieu of a new poem this week, I'm linking you to something I posted seven years ago because it contains one of my favorite poems, 'Stephanie Re-Maps The Stars'. If you've not read it before (or even if you have) please take a look. The blog is hyperlinked here and is called: Saturday Night SurveillanceFinally, as a musical bonus, a beautiful song by one of my favorite bands of that long ago era. I'd happily have this played at my funeral. It's by the fabulous Plummet Airlines and it's titled:Stars Will Shine.Thanks as ever for reading my stuff, S ;-)
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