green rolling hills

Had a beautiful dream last night....

I was in the Scottish highlands (or at least, what I would like them to be - only time I was there I was in cities).

All of the scenery was hyperrealistic: the sky a little too blue, distant objects a little too flat and close, like it was painted by someone with a great eye for color but limited sense of perspective.

The grass on the mountains was so green it practically vibrated! It was moist and tickled my hands when I touched it. So beautiful I felt my heart leap in my sleep at the sight of it :)

I was staying in a very modern cottage type of thing - stone and wood, but it was as if the stones were laser cut to be exactly identical, and the wooden planks of the floor were just a tad too regular to be real.

Behind the cottage was a minimal, futuristic chrome bridge with guard rails that led out to a small outcropping of rock just offshore, on which the ruin of a tower stood. It was so sanitized, to see this irregular shape surrounded by excessively shiny white metal. The water was bright aqua and the white sands of the ocean floor were visible - again, too perfect to be real.

It always blows my mind when I have a dream that involves touch and small details like this - truly hits home the power of the human mind to create it's own realities.

Fashion extremes dept: Male beauty(?)

Could it get a bit more schizophrenic? Flipping through my latest i-D I found these two ads one after the other:

Jean-Paul Gaultier has come up with the first makeup line for men, accompanied by advertising featuring a bronzed, buffed (as in polished) guy with just the slightest hint of contouring and gloss. Not bad, I guess. The model they chose doesn't look too effeminate - if anything, it reminds me of old photos of Rudolph Valentino - all patent-leather hair and smouldering eyes. He made it work, so why not make the tools available to modern guys who don't want to dig through their girlfriend's purse?

On the other hand, Yves St. Laurent is pushing a more natural model (emphatically not work safe). The ad is controversial in some quarters, not only for the full frontal nudity, but also because the model isn't waxed to within an inch of his life. According to the article, "[They] really wanted someone who really looked like a guy."

I prefer Fashionable Guy #2 - he looks real and touchable and far more interesting than JPG's Pretty Man. While I admit that there are a few guys who can carry off androgyny and eyeliner extremely well, they are in the minority. However, I don't fancy heavily painted women either, so this may just be a personal preference on my part.

I also gotta say, it's refreshing to see a guy with hair where he's supposed to have it! Completely shaved may be aesthetically pleasing but is almost antiseptically TOO perfect, IMHO. My jury is still out about the full frontal though - there's something to be said for leaving things to the imagination :P

What do you think?