Saturday, August 31, 2013

Miranda Kerr turns porn star as she channels Italian actress Cicciolina

Miranda Kerr photographed by Russel James_2010

Miranda Kerr turns porn star as she channels Italian actress Cicciolina for magazine shoot

29 Aug 2013

Miranda Kerr channels adult film star Cicciolina for magazine shootOk, so she's not really turned to adult entertainment but she does flash a boob!



Miranda Kerr channels adult film star Cicciolina for magazine shoot

Getty/Sebastian Faena
We're so used to seeing her in bikinis, sexy lingerie and even some topless shots, but who'd have thought that one day Miranda Kerr would turn to porn?
Well, actually, she hasn't really, and even channelling a world-famous adult entertainment star for a magazine shoot, Miranda still manages to look like butter wouldn't melt.
The Australian model teamed up with V Magazine for a photo shoot like no other, certainly a far cry from the Victoria's Secrets ones, that's for sure!
And we're sure that Italian porn star Cicciolina wouldn't exactly be too disappointed with the end result either.
Miranda, 30, is seen posing on a farm in lace and chiffon and even flashes one of her boobs for the shoot, but it's about as pornographic as a Vogue spread!


Bright-eyed beauty Miranda Kerr Embodies the arcadian essence of singer and adult film star Cicciolina, the political leader of Italy's Party of Lover
Mind you don't drop them!

Sebastian Faena for V Magazine

The mother of one actually looks more like a fairy princess in one shot in which she's wearing a white dress with long lace sleeves with a hippie floral headband.
In another, she is wearing a short white dress that shows off her enviable long legs, with a pink lace bolero-style top covering her shoulders as she demurely holds some boxes of eggs.
But it's not all girl-next-door (although if she did look like that, no man would leave his house!) - in one shot she actually flashes a nipple, showing off her sexually playful side - lucky old Orlando, eh?
Cicciolina, was born IIona Staller in Hungary in 1951 but married and settled in Italy and made most of her porn films there. She was elected to the Italian Government in 1987 but still made porn films while she was an MP.
She is also known for making her political speeches while exposing one breast - can you imagine that happening here? The scandal!
More of Miranda's shoot can be seen in the September edition of V Magazine, on sale now, or at Vmagazine.com





Friday, August 30, 2013

Miranda Kerr / Photoshoot

Miranda Kerr suffers embarrassing wardrobe malfunction and reveals both boobs during photoshoot

The former Victoria's Secret model was rescued by an assistant on set after the nippy disaster
Kerr blimey!

Kerr blimey!
It would appear super-hot Miranda Kerr made a proper boob(s) out of herself on a photoshoot.
The 30-year-old has made a career out of wearing fancy underwear for Victoria’s Secret and it’s an unfortunate coincidence this mishap happened just two weeks after quitting the bra makers.
Miranda was on set for to promote a make-up range when her black jumper slipped away from her grip and flashed her boobs for the entire crew.
The mum-of-one eventually rescued her modesty as an assistant desperately attempted to cover up and rescue further embarrassment.

Miranda Kerr goes topless for a moment
"Ohh, can anyone else feel that breeze?"

Insight News & Features
It's likely that somewhere there’s a teenage lad sitting in a field of four-leaf clovers, covered in his own eyes lashes, making a few casual wishes hanging out with a genie and a magic lamp.
Either that or it’s a cynical way to get some extra attention for the KORA Cosmetics range the Australian hottie was promoting.
Speaking about the brand she said: “KORA Organics is a reflection of my passion for living a healthy, balanced organic lifestyle that I want to share.”

Miranda Kerr goes topless for a moment
We've always wondered what type of nipples she had

Insight News & Features
Ahead of a photoshoot for KORA in March, she was involved in a traffic accident and was pictured wearing a neck brace.
Her spokesperson described her as being “in a lot of pain” after the crash in Los Angeles.
A car ploughed into the vehicle Miranda and her assistant were in.
As well as back injuries and whiplash, the ex-Victoria's Secret model also had to have an MRI scan following the accident.

Ooh-la-la

STM PICTURES
As you'd expect, Miranda didn't feel to chipper after the smash, with her spokesperson Annie Kelly telling Australia's 9 News: "She is in a lot of pain, but really we are just glad it was not more serious."           
The model – who is married to Hollywood star Orlando Bloom – still looked glamorous despite the blush-worthy incident.

Miranda Kerr's latest photoshoot for Victoria's Secret lingerie
Just look at how perfect she is

Victoria's Secret
Speaking about her decision to leave Victoria’s Secret recently she said: ''The thing is, I've been modelling since I was 13. 'I'm now entering a new phase in my life.
"I have felt this coming since my son was born and, after I became a mother, I realised I needed to prioritise my time."


GALLERY






















Thursday, August 29, 2013

Matteo Pericoli's New York City views

Matteo Pericoli's New York City views


Matteo Pericoli found fame with his 22ft fold-out drawing of Manhattan's skyline. His new book shows the city through the windows of New York's artists and writers, from Annie Leibovitz to Philip Glass, David Byrne to Nora Ephron, with their thoughts on what those views mean to them
by Sean O'Hagan
The Observer, Sunday, 1 August 2010

Matteo Pericoli
The view from Philip Glass's New York apartment by Matteo Pericoli
The country singer Rosanne Cash glimpses two iconic New York landmarks through her apartment window: the Empire State building and the Chelsea hotel. She is lucky. From his window, the composer Philip Glass sees only "water tanks, air conditioning, exhaust pipes". But he loves his view all the same.
The screenwriter Nora Ephron looks out at the Chrysler building framed in a single pane: "the absolute epitome of every glittery dream I have ever had about New York". The satirist Stephen Colbert stares out at a towering "telecommunications skyscraper whose peak bristles with microwave transmitters" and thinks mostly about cancer. David Byrne, as if trapped in one of his elliptical songs, gazes out of his window at the windows of other people, some of whom he occasionally catches looking back at him. Peter Carey's novelistic imagination conjures up "dead people" walking past his window – "the famous showman, PT Barnum, passing along Broadway to arrange the wedding of Tom Thumb".
The view from one's window is, as the artist Matteo Pericoli puts it, "one of the least designable things about the buildings we call home, but the one that perhaps affects us most deeply every day". Pericoli, who is best known for his epic book, Manhattan Unfurled, a 22ft fold-out drawing of the New York skyline, has now turned his attention to a more intimate, but no less intriguing, subject: what New York's writers and artists see when they look out of their windows. It's a simple idea that yields surprising results – about the nature of urban living, about the creative imaginations of those who choose to live and work in a city and, perhaps most intriguingly, about Pericoli's own unique and slightly obsessive way of seeing.
"When you draw something, it often becomes more interesting somehow," he says, when I call him in Turin, where he now lives. "It is not just representation, it's more about telling a story. These drawings are not about how I see, but how I think. They are a kind of thinking process brought to life through lines."
Pericoli has found that the people who grant him access to the views from their windows are "constantly surprised by the results in a way that they would not be surprised by a photograph or even a painting". What he captures, he says, "is not a transient moment, but a presence of some kind".
Looking at Pericoli's line drawings in their beautiful simplicity, their wealth of detail and their mastery of line and perspective, you can see what he means. His drawing of the view from Glass's window is one of my favourites, a rendering of an often invisible or overlooked New York of water towers, warehouses and air conditioning machines, what Glass calls "the infrastructure of New York in plain view".
Sometimes, too, the window views seem to be accidental metaphors: the architect Daniel Libeskind looks out at towering stone buildings that seem to enclose his apartment; the skyline that the contemporary artist Nick Ghiz sees is interrupted by a bent steel pipe that is sculptural; the former mayor of New York, Ed Koch, has a window that, as he puts it, "allows the light to shine though unimpeded". Tom Wolfe says that he chose his apartment solely for the view – "To this day, I haven't really seen the apartment, only what's outside it." Ephron, paradoxically, chose her home in spite of the beauty of her vista: "When I write, I face away from it otherwise I would never get anything done."
Matteo Pericoli initially trained as an architect in Milan and it shows in every line, every shadow, every shape. He moved to New York in 1995 to work for Richard Meier & Partners, and ironically began working on a design for the Jubilee church in Rome. While cycling the seven kilometres to and from work every day, he began to think about drawing the Manhattan skyline in its entirety. The resulting book, Manhattan Unfurled, took just over two years to complete. The end result was two 37ft scrolls of the east and west side of Manhattan that were then condensed to what the publishers called "a 22ft-long accordion fold-out".
In early September 2001, Pericoli received the very first printed copies ofManhattan Unfurled. Two days later, the twin towers of the World Trade Centre disappeared from the skyline in the terrorist attacks of 11 September. "Suddenly, there was New York before 9/11 and New York after 9/11, and I had portrayed a New York skyline that was past tense. It was a very strange time for me because I had such a relationship with the place. You spend so much time looking at these buildings and then drawing them that the lines enter your brain and are embedded there."
The critical acclaim that greeted the publication of Manhattan Unfurledhelped him gain access to the apartments and houses of the likes of Tom Wolfe, Graydon Carter (editor of Vanity Fair), Annie Leibovitz and Steve Martin. Leibovitz presented him with a series of photographs she had made of her window view, but he insisted on working in his own way, stamping his own presence on the subject. "I don't draw a fleeting moment, I try to capture a sense of wholeness, of permanence."
The actor Steve Martin's view across Central Park was "so iconic, so fairy tale" that Pericoli decided not to include it. "It was just what you would expect; there were no surprises." Others, whom he will not name, refused him access. "Many people wanted to guard their private view and I respect that. It also made me feel happy in the sense that what I was doing had some deeper meaning."
For Manhattan Unfurled, Pericoli began by journeying around New York on the Circle Line cruise boat, photographing the skyline. For his current project, London Unfurled, he walked the length of the Thames, from Hammersmith to the Isle of Dogs, and back again, photographing constantly. "I am gently obsessive," he says, understating the case somewhat. "I walk 10 metres, then stop and photograph. All along the north side of the river, then back along the south. It was two incredibly intense weeks in which I took 6,300 photographs and destroyed a pair of shoes."
Pericoli has worked out that 50 photographs add up to 20 centimetres of drawing. As before, he worked on a long roll of architectural drawing paper, "10 to 15 centimetres at a time, never looking back at what I have completed, never worrying about, or erasing small mistakes. It's all there, the cityscape and the voyage of discovery that I undertake when I put it on to the paper."
When I spoke to him this week, he had just completed an 11.5m section of drawing that takes in Hammersmith to the Isle of Dogs. He has, he says, another 8.1m to go before he gets to the Gherkin. "I try not to think about the Gherkin too much but I can tell you I drew 900 lines, maybe more."
Pericoli will not see the drawing of London in its entirety until he has finished it. "This is just how I work, but also, on a more practical level, my house is just not big enough for me to keep unfurling the drawing. This way, you must trust yourself and your instinct and your ability. And, of course, the drawing gets better as I do it. In a way, I am rolling back time when I finally look at the whole thing."
Since 2000, Pericoli has followed his obsession, giving up architecture altogether to concentrate on his epic and intimate drawings. He now lives in Turin and travels the world to work. His drawings have appeared in theNew Yorker, the New York Timesla Stampa and Vanity Fair. Jet-lagged American Airlines passengers can see his most epic works as they stagger into the arrivals hall at JFK airport in New York: a 397ft panoramic mural called Skyline of the World. Cityscapes, whether large and small, epic or intimate, seem to hold an inordinate fascination for him. What does he think underlies his obsession?
"Always, I am trying to understand what makes a city work," he says, without hesitation. "In New York, I am an outsider and I have found that New Yorkers are strangely incurious about their city. So few New Yorkers take the Circle Line to look at Manhattan. This is interesting to me. What they see mostly is a little piece of New York through their window. But, there are millions of windows, millions of views, millions of tiny New Yorks. In a way, I would like to draw them all but that, of course, is impossible. Instead, I try to somehow synthesise the city, get close to its essence. This is what drives me and what drives me a little mad. The more complex the view, the more I have to synthesise to tell the story. In the end, I guess I am more like a short story writer than an artist."
For more information on Matteo Pericoli visit his websitewww.matteopericoli.com or Facebook pagewww.facebook.com/pages/Matteo-Pericoli/39173777082





Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Christine Baranski / The Proust Questionnaire



 Risko

Christine Baranski

THE PROUST QUESTIONNAIRE


The award-winning stage and screen actress shares her taste for music, classical literature, and midafternoon martinis.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
At sunset or under the stars on the dock of our lake house just being with my family and pals.
What is your greatest fear?
That we will have waited too long to save the earth from environmental catastrophe.
Which historical figure do you most identify with?
Cleopatra.
Which living person do you most admire?
Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani girl who was shot for advocating that girls be educated.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
My competitive side, the one that keeps score.
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Pettiness, arrogance, boorishness.
What is your greatest extravagance?
A midafternoon martini.
What is your favorite journey?
Any one that takes me home … and, of course, the creative one.
What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Self-denial.
On what occasion do you lie?
In an extreme situation requiring hope or delicacy … backstage, for instance.
What do you dislike most about your appearance?
It depends on the lighting.
Which living person do you most despise?
I’m not giving that S.O.B. any free publicity.
Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
“No worry” and “Oh wow … ”
What is your greatest regret?
That I can’t remember every detail of what has been a wonderful life.
What or who is the greatest love of your life?
Easy: my home and family.
When and where were you happiest?
Connecticut, summers of ’84 and ’87, when I was pregnant with my daughters.
Which talent would you most like to have?
Any form of musicianship at the virtuoso level.
What is your current state of mind?
Oh wow …
If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
I would be free of guilt, forever.
If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be?
My only sibling, Michael Baranski, would still be alive.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
That my years of work as an actress provided my two daughters with a first-rate education through graduate school.
If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what do you think it would be?
A heron.
If you could choose what to come back as, what would it be?
A guy … with a heroic sense of destiny, perhaps a New Age Winston Churchill.
What is your most treasured possession?
My physical and mental health.
What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Being stuck indefinitely in an airport when I’m desperate to get home.
Where would you like to live?
In the hearts and minds of my audience.
What is your favorite occupation?
Performing … in comedies, dramas, or musicals; onstage, in film, or on TV; as lawyers or lushes … it’s a great gig.
What do you most value in your friends?
That they can pick up where we left off.
Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
Hero: Odysseus. Heroine: Isabel Archer.
What is it that you most dislike?
The disappearance of a neighborhood bookstore.
How would you like to die?
Decades from now, on my way to rehearsal.
What is your motto?
“Wake up expecting things.”




A book that changed me / How Henry Miller's anti-establishment rant liberated me from little England



A book 

that changed

 me 


How Henry Miller's anti-establishment rant liberated me from little England


Living in self-imposed exile in 70s Paris, I found the intellectual revolution I'd been searching for in Colossus of Maroussi

John Vidal
Wednesday 28 August 2013


I
t was winter 1973. I was young and living in Paris – back then a wildly romantic but quite dangerous place. I had fallen for a French girl and run away from a dull job in London. After a few months she had left me, and I was stranded alone in the cold grey heart of Europe.

So I shivered in a cold-water flat in Montmartre and spent my time eking out coffee, smoking Gitanes and talking to everyone and anyone in any language we could muster. You could learn bad French or Spanish and live well on just seven hours of teaching English a week.
Paris was bone-grey and lonely, and I hated it. But there was no way back – and even if there had been, to what? This was a new life, beyond the social and intellectual straitjacket of parochial England, its tribal politics, drab cities and smothering politeness. After 15 years' toiling in English educational factories, bunged up with textbooks, manners, literature and theory, I wanted neither work nor authority figures – I was burning for expression, experience, ideas and meaning.
Henry Miller's Colossus of Maroussi was tinder for the blaze to come. I had found a dog-eared copy and, knowing nothing of the man or his reputation, devoured it. Written in 1939 as all Europe prepared for inevitable war, it was superficially a travelogue and a character study of the great Greek poet George Katsimbalis. In fact it was a celebration of friendship, spirit and life – all that seemed authentic and valuable and which was on the point of being destroyed.
I had no idea if it was fact or fiction, but I saw parallels in our situations. We were both on the road, poor as tramps, living in a foreign country with no possessions, responsibilities or certain future. We both suspected that the man with the fewest needs was the happiest. Miller had gone to Greece to escape the war clouds, and there I was living with Chileans fleeing a military junta and Vietnam draft dodgers. The cold war was raging, Middle East conflict was brewing, the price of oil was quadrupling, and nuclear conflagration seemed entirely possible. Students were rioting, hippies were rampant and there was a sense of social disorder and deep generational divide.

Into this heady political and social mix came Miller's hilarious and breathtaking demolition of the stupidity, greed and hypocrisy of those who had wrought continuing poverty, war and despair on Europe and the world. His emotional investigation of the wild Greek spirit was not just a spit in the eye of the European establishment – who, if they had read Maroussi would have dismissed him as patently dislodged, inflamed, surreal and even mad – but a giant gob in the face of all that was curmudgeonly and mean. There was no hint of objectivity, balance or fairness. This joyful rant expressed the rage and the hopes of mine and every other generation.
His targets were many and random. He swooped on an unsuspecting Frenchwoman for no other reason than she was bourgeoise, and emitted "the stench of the past" ("I repudiate you, your walls, your tempered, hand-laundered climate, I leave you to wither in your own trimmed lard"); he peered through a telescope, saw the rings of Saturn and spent three pages condemning the planet ("a living symbol of gloom, morbidity, disaster, fatality, the single repository of all the despair and defeat to which the human race from time immemorial has succumbed)".

Newspapers got short shrift for spreading lies, hatred, greed, envy and malice; lawyers, technologies, capitalism, communism and Catholicism were all excoriated. He dismissed Christmas as "sour, moth-eaten, bilious, crapulous, worm-eaten and mildewed" and denounced America for its obsessions with wealth and power. His passions burst at the seams, his prose streamed in long paragraphs, words falling over themselves in their haste to be read.
But it was Miller the poet and peacemaker who, I now think, made me reflect most. The fight, he said, was not against disease or poverty or even tyrants. These were just the symptoms of bad thinking.
It was not enough to overthrow governments or masters; total revolution of thought was needed: "Every war is a defeat to the human spirit, as long as we refuse to think in terms of world good … Life demands that we offer spirit, soul, intelligence, goodwill. As long as we refuse to think in terms of world good and world order we shall murder and betray one another … till the crack of doom. Man kills through fear; once we start slaying there is no end of it."

Phew. I read the book and immediately gave it away, not bearing for it to be unshared. I had entered a new realm. I had confirmed that my responsibilities were not just to myself, or to little England, but to the imagination and to something far greater than my present parlous condition. My immediate miserableness and loneliness were as nothing. And so what if I had nothing to show for life, no house or job, money or prospects? I too was a millionaire in spirit. I too had self-belief.
I walked the next day in the Jardin du Luxembourg and passed two middle-aged women wrapped in furs and with lapdogs on leads. One of the women spat at my feet and muttered, "gauchiste!" I could not remember being so pleased. Happy as a kite, I echoed Miller, shouting back: "Je m'enfou de votre civilisation!" I strode on, laughed and never looked back. A few days later, I took the train to Greece.


Tuesday, August 27, 2013

The Strange Tale Of Iggy The Eskimo

Iggy outtake (Mick Rock)

The Strange Tale Of Iggy The Eskimo 

by Mark Blake



The Strange Tale Of Iggy The Eskimo
If there is one image of Syd Barrett that never ceases to fascinate it's the back cover of his debut album, The Madcap Laughs. The reason: the mysterious naked woman perched on a stool with her head thrown back and face obscured by swathes of long dark hair. Syd's companion was known only as "Iggy The Eskimo". But as Barrett fans have been wondering since 1970 - who was Iggy and where did she go?
Photographer Mick Rock believed that his cover girl had "married a rich guy and moved off the scene". Barrett's old flatmate, the artist Duggie Fields, heard that "Iggy had become involved with one of the voguish religious cults of the time", before adding to the mythology with a story of once seeing her disembarking from a Number 31 bus in Kensington, wearing a 1940s-era gold lamé dress, and very little else.
In 2002, Mick's coffee-table book Psychedelic Renegades featured more shots of Syd and Iggy posing outside the Earls Court mansion block, alongside Barrett's abandoned Pontiac. Rock's photos found their way onto most Pink Floyd fansites, where Iggy had acquired cult status. Before long, The Holy Church Of Iggy The Inuit, a fansite in her honour, had appeared, its webmaster, Felix Atagong, sifting through ever scrap of information gleaned from MOJO and elsewhere with a forensic scientist's attention to detail. Among Felix's discoveries was a November 1966 issue of NME which featured a photo of "Iggy who is half eskimo" dancing at South Kensington's Cromwellian club.
While researching my Pink Floyd biography (2007's Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story Of Pink Floyd) I quizzed everyone about Iggy's whereabouts. Anthony Stern, formerly a schoolmate of David Gilmour's, told me he had met her at a Hendrix gig and had just discovered photos he had taken of her on a houseboat in Chelsea; Anthony had also filmed Iggy dancing in Russell Square. Meanwhile, former Middle Earth club DJJeff Dexter recalled meeting "the mysterious-looking" Iggy in 1963, when she was a "part of a group of very wonderful looking South London girls" that danced at The Orchid Ballroom in Purley. Jeff even hatched a plan with his friend, the late DJ and Shadows songwriter Ian "Sammy" Samwell, to turn Iggy and two of her friends into "a British version of The Supremes. We booked a studio but unfortunately none of them could sing." Believing that Iggy may have gone to school in Thornton Heath, Jeff and Anthony contacted The Croydon Guardian, who ran an article - So Where Did She Go To, My Lovely - enquiring after the whereabouts of the girl "who entirely captured the spirit of the '60s".
Then, in March 2010, MOJO received a letter from ex-Cambridge mod Pete Brown, who had "shared some wild nights on the town with Iggy in the 1970s". Pete informed us that Iggy had been last heard of in the '80s "working at a racing stables... and has since been keeping her whereabouts quiet." Pete sent a copy of the letter to The Croydon Guardian, whose reporter traced Iggy through the stables and phoned her out of the blue. Their subsequent article included a handful of quotes from its reluctant subject, including the words: "I have now left that life behind me." Which is why it came as a surprise when my mobile rang late one Saturday night. "It's Iggy!" declared the voice at the other end, as if I would have known that already. "I've been reading what you wrote about me in MOJO... about the pictures of my bottom."
The local newspaper's call had prompted Iggy to borrow a neighbour's computer and go online for the first time. She was amazed to discover MOJO, the fansites, the photos, and the wild speculation and misinformation about her time with Syd Barrett. Which is why, in October 2010, I found myself stepping off a train at an otherwise deserted Sussex railway station to be met by the woman that had once graced the cover of The Madcap Laughs. Three hours in a local gastro-pub and countless phone calls later, Iggy pieced together her story. Some of it was printed in MOJO 207, the rest is here...
Firstly, why Iggy? "My real name is Evelyn," she explains. "But when I was a child, my neighbour's young daughter could never pronounce Evelyn, and always called me Iggy. Now everyone calls me as Iggy. But 'The Eskimo' nickname was a joke. That was something I told the photographer from the NME when he took my picture at The Cromwellian." Iggy's father was a British army officer, who served alongside Louis Mountbatten, and attended the official handover ceremony from Great Britain to India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharial Nehru in 1947. "My father also knew all about Mountbatten's wife's affair with Nehru," she adds mischievously. During a spell of leave, he had travelled to a remote village in the Himalayas "where he met the woman that would become my mother." Iggy was born in Pakistan, and attended army schools in India and Aden, before the family moved to England. But not, as believed, Thornton Heath. "I grew up by the seaside," she reveals. "I went to art school. I became a mod in Brighton, and saw the fights with the rockers, and I met The Who when they were on Ready Steady Go! I loved soul music, loved The Righteous Brothers, and I loved dancing, so I used to go to all the clubs - The Orchid Ballroom in Purley, where I met lovely Jeff Dexter, The Cromwellian, The Flamingo, The Roaring Twenties..."
It was at The Cromwellian that Iggy encountered Eric Clapton. "I didn't know who he was at first," she insists. "He took me to meet Lionel Bart and to a party at Brian Epstein's place..." By the mid-'60s Iggy had become a Zelig-like presence on the capital's music scene, sometimes in the company of Keith Moon, Brian Jones, Keith Richards.... She saw Hendrix make his UK debut at the Bag O' Nails in November '66, and in February '67, narrowly avoided the police raid at Richards' country pile, in West Wittering: "The night before, I decided not to go, thank God." A year later, still in the Stones' orbit, she found herself watching the recording sessions for what became Sympathy For The Devil.
By then, Iggy had made her film debut. In 1967, IN Gear was a short documentary screened as a supporting film in cinemas around the country. Its theme was Swinging London, including the chic Kings Road clothes shop Granny Takes A Trip, a place, according to the breathless narrator that "conforms to the non-conformist image of the !" A mini-skirted Iggy can be seenin one silent clip, sifting through a rack of clothes and chatting with Granny's co-owner Nigel Waymouth.
By 1967, pop music had changed. The summer before, Iggy had met Syd Barrett's girlfriend Jenny Spires, and drifted into the Floyd's social clique, showing up at the UFO club nights where Pink Floyd played regularly: "When I recently watched that Syd Barrett documentary [The Pink Floyd & Syd Barrett & Story] and saw Syd in the kaftan, chanting [on Pow R Toc H], the memories came rushing back," she explains. "I'd been there. I'd seen that." In April '67, Iggy joined the counter-culture throng in Alexandra Palace for The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream - "all 14 hours of it!" - where Floyd played a hypnotic set at dawn.
By early 1968, though Barrett had been replaced by David Gilmour, and, according to many, was on a drug-fuelled downward spiral. Towards the end of the year, he moved into a new place with his level-headed friend, the would-be artist Duggie Fields. The pair took over a two-bedroom flat at 29 Wetherby Mansions in Earls Court. Around January '69, at Jenny Spires' suggestion, Iggy, needing a place to stay, moved in. She hooked up with Barrett, but shared a musical bond with Fields: "Duggie and I were into soul music, and Syd used to laugh at me dancing around to Motown."
As Iggy told MOJO 207: "I didn't know Syd had been a pop star." Elaborating further, "I didn't make the connection between him and the person I had seen at UFO. I knew he was beautiful looking and he had real presence, but that was all." Once, when she picked up his acoustic guitar, fooling around, he took it off her and started playing properly. "I was overwhelmed. The way he played the guitar, the way he moved. He said, 'Do you think I look good?'," she laughs. "I said, 'You look amazing. Wow!' He then said, 'Would you listen to this?' And he bought out this big, old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorder, and said, 'Tell me what you think'." Syd then played her the songs that would end up on The Madcap Laughs. One track, Terrapin, made an immediate impression. "I said, 'That's quite catchy', and, of course, I don't think Syd was really into catchy...It was a long tape, and he didn't demand any opinion, but just asked if I thought it was OK. At the end he said 'Someone at EMI - I cannot remember the name - wants me to make a record. How would you feel about having a rock star boyfriend?'"


Iggy outtake (Mick Rock)

While there are many reports of Barrett being withdrawn and even aggressive at this time, Iggy remembers it differently. "People talk about Syd's madness and his dark side, but I never saw it," she states. "We had a wonderful giggly time. There were no sinister moments." Only briefly did she glimpse a more troubled side to his personality. "One day, he said to me, 'How do you feel? Are you sad?' I was naked, and he went and got some paint and painted two great big eyes on my breasts with two tears coming down, and on my belly button he painted an arrow and underneath that a picture of me with a big belly, and said, 'There could be life in there. I could give you life.' But I didn't want that at all. So I panicked, and scrubbed it off." He was also uncomfortable with some aspects of fame, as Iggy discovered on a night out with Syd to The Speakeasy, a music-biz haunt in Margaret Street. "We'd persuaded Syd to go, but it was full of posers," she admits. "There were a few of us there. Someone asked the DJ to put on See Emily Play, which was a stupid thing to do." A hit for Pink Floyd more than two years before, the dance-floor cleared. "So I went on and started dancing, but Syd ran off. He was obviously very sensitive about it all."
"We had a wonderful giggly time. There were no sinister moments."
In March '69, Barrett began recording The Madcap Laughs at Abbey Road, but his erratic behaviour in the studio resulted in Roger Waters and David Gilmour helping to oversee the sessions. Gilmour was now living in Richmond Mansions, a block so close to Wetherby Mansions that he could almost see into Syd and Duggie's kitchen window. One evening, Syd announced that he had to go out. Iggy wanted to go with him, but Barrett insisted she remain at the flat. "I think I thought he was seeing another woman," she says. "I got a bit jealous, a bit pouty - very silly. Duggie knew where Syd had gone but wouldn't tell me." With Syd gone, Iggy decided to pay a visit to David Gilmour instead. Fields helped Iggy back-comb her hair, plaster her face with make-up and paint her lips black. "I looked like Medusa. Like a banshee. Duggie then took me round to Dave's place. Dave was very beautiful and very cool, and his flat was nicer than Syd and Duggie's - it was warmer for a start. Dave opened the door, took one look at me, but didn't bat an eyelid."
When Iggy walked in, she saw Syd sat in Gilmour's living room. "I went in, shouting, 'OK, where is she?' thinking there was a woman hiding in one of the rooms. But, of course, the meeting had been with Dave about the record they were making together." Barrett left Iggy with Gilmour, but rather the worse for wear, she knocked the stylus on his record player accidentally scratching his copy of Pink Floyd's brand new album. "I have no idea what album it was, only that it was their new album," Iggy sighs. (The likely candidate seems to beSoundtrack From The Film More) "So Dave threw me out... If he ever reads this I would like to say sorry for scratching his record." Back at Wetherby Mansions, Barrett was unfazed by her planned defection: "Syd just said, 'Come in love, and I'll make you a cup of tea'. How sweet."
By now, Barrett had prepared his bedroom forThe Madcap... cover shoot, painting most of the floorboards orange and mauve. On the morning of the shoot, Syd asked Iggy to help finish the job. "He jumped off the mattress and said, 'Quick, grab a paint brush.' He did one stripe and I did another. If you look at Mick Rock's pictures, I have paint on the soles of my feet." When Rock arrived with the Floyd's sleeve designer Storm Thorgerson to take the photos, a naked Iggy went to put some clothes on. "But Syd said, 'No, don't'. That was his wicked sense of humour. I put the kohl around his eyes that day and tousled up his hair: come on Syd, give us a smile, moody, moody, moody! But he knew exactly what he was doing. He was as sharp as anything. He set the tone. He was the manipulator."
"Syd just said, 'Come in love, and I'll make you a cup of tea'. How sweet."
Iggy joined Syd for further photos outside the flat. Later, Rock recalled showing Barrett one of the pictures and Syd mysteriously scratching around Iggy's image; an act that has acquired some significance among Barrett's more earnest devotees. "They're making something out of nothing," she insists. "Later on, Syd showed me one of the pictures and said, 'You like that one, don't you? I know why, because of your cheekbones'. I think I was sucking on a cigarette, and, yes, I was being vain, I liked the way my cheekbones looked. So he tore the pic in half and gave it to me. There was nothing more to it than that." Strangely, Iggy also recalls other photographs being taken that day, which have never appeared since. "I don't think Storm and Mick were very impressed by them. If you've ever seen the cover of the Rod Stewart album,Blondes Have More Fun, they were a bit like that... Of me and Syd. There were others of me and Syd, as well, which remind me of the picture of John and Yoko [on Two Virgins] which came out later. I'd love to see those pictures now."
Before long, Iggy had drifted out of Wetherby Mansions and out of Syd's life as quickly as she had drifted in. When she returned later, Duggie told her: "Syd's not here. He's gone back to Cambridge. Don't bother trying to find him." She never saw him again, and is adamant she only became aware of her presence on the cover ofThe Madcap Laughs after being phoned by the Croydon Guardian: "I went to a boot sale with my husband... When I saw the cover, I thought, Oh yes, that is my bottom."
Although the stories of her marrying a rich banker and joining a religious cult are untrue, there is a kernel of truth: after Syd, Iggy began seeing a wealthy businessman who was also a scientologist. However Duggie Fields' recollection of spotting Iggy climbing off a bus in a gold lamé dress is not in dispute: "It was a beautiful dress that cost £50." Still a fixture on the music scene, Iggy recalls accompanying 'Pink Fairies' drummer Twink to the Isle Of Wight Festival and turning up "for the very first Glastonbury... ". But in 1978 Iggy married her husband, Andrew, and "left that life behind me".
"I heard on the radio that Syd died, and I felt sad, but it was so long ago," she says. Since reading about those times in MOJO, the memories of the people and the places have slowly come back to her. "Mick Rock took some beautiful picture of me," she smiles. "But, of course, I wish I'd been paid some money for them. Still, it is amazing that people have been looking for me... and that someone has even set up a website. I still don't know what to make of all this." The fascination continues. Last week, Iggy called to tell me she had found a poem online written about her by a professor at a university in Missouri. "And it's in French," she said, sounding astonished. "'Iggy l'esquimo, Fille De Le Space'...it goes. I never believed anyone would ever write a poem for me."
by Mark Blake 
Thanks to: Felix Atagong, Jeff Dexter and Anthony Stern
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 4:54 PM GMT 20/01/2011
http://www.mojo4music.com/blog/2011/01/iggy_the_eskimo_1.html