As I move through my 45th year, I am seeing so many things more clearly. Life seems a lot less complex than it did twenty years ago. And yet, the older I get, the more nostalgic I feel for my youth. I am bathing in a cliche. I have been watching films from the early ’80s and I have been remembering what it feels like to be desired the way only young women are. But it isn’t just that — it’s the energy, hope and life force one feels when they’re just starting out. It came with a whole bunch of neurosis. This is the ugly truth of it. In most ways, it is better to be older.

Some young women really remind me of what it felt like to be a young woman – and though I have no idea what will happen to them as they age – they seem to capture the swagger, the sexual confidence, the vulnerability and the child-like wonder of being a woman between the ages of 20 and 25. At that time in my own life I already felt old. I had no idea, really, who I was and how temporary it would all be.

If I could impart this to young women I would: it doesn’t last. Enjoy the flame while it burns.

The women that remind me of those days are:

Blake Lively

Katy Perry

And especially Daisy Lowe

For me to have this blog. No reason whatsoever. Any chattering I want to do I can do on Facebook. And yet, and yet. I am therefore I blog. Or is it, I blog therefore I am? Either way, Jane Campion is bringing a movie about John Keats on the awards circuit this year and I’m kind of excited about it. The film is called Bright Star. And it’s just played Cannes. I don’t really pay much attention to what people say out of Cannes unless it’s unanimous bad or unanimous good. So far, there is nothing particularly dramatic either way so I’ll just wait to see what I think of it. And I can’t wait. Campion is one of the better directors out there, someone who really never did “sell out” and easily could have.

The title comes from this poem:

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art–
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors–
No–yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever–or else swoon to death.

This is neither here nor there. Just saying.

This is making the rounds.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

I have gotten shit over the years for giving Nicole Kidman a hard time for her, well, her face stuff. When surgery changes someone to the point where they are no longer themselves it messes with their ability to disappear into a role. But if you add Botox into the mix and lip thickener and whatever else you have a person who can’t play an authentic character and should only play those types of women who cling to their youth. Hey, I don’t entirely blame them. It must be freaky to see yourself age on screen. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have casting directors or producers tell you you can’t have a role because you’re too old. In this culture, in that business it sucks to get old. I mean, unless you’re Katharine Hepburn.

So Kidman used to look like this:

Note the cute curl in her upper lip, the corkscrew curls…this is Kidman during the early Tom Cruise phase.

And here is how Kidman looks now:

I’m sure she must think she looks good. Maybe a lot of people think she looks good. And she looks okay to me. She just doesn’t look like herself two decades later.

It isn’t just Kidman, of course. Faye Dunaway, Meg Ryan, maybe now Madonna. I don’t know if it’s such a good or interesting aim to choose not to age, or choose to cling to youth or to look ageless. I’m not sure it’s good or bad. But I do know that most of the time, goddamned it all to hell, it sucks being a woman.

Scott Lewis photographs to stir the soul.