I make a lot of my own clothes, and as I've entered cronedom I've become much more conscious of fabric qualities over fancy construction.  Which leads one back to hand-sewing everything; the tensions generated by hand and needle yield a much better result than machine stitching natural fibre fabrics.  It's strange how the seemingly lax plain stitch holds your silk tunic and sack dresses together like no one's business, resulting in virtually zero seam pulling and holing etc.  There's also some indefinable quality in hand sewn garments; they just sit and hang better.  It's the same with natural colours over synthetic dyes.  There are quite a few shades that just die horribly when attempted with modern chemicals; apricot, red, blue-greens and purples.  Even the black that's been so treasured and ubiquitous for the last 40 or so years is really quite a horrible, revenant thing when compared to those found in vintage rugs and old school textiles.  Blacks derived from indigo are sublime in contrast.  The industrial versions may seem brighter or more stable at first, but after looking at them for more than a few moments, the eye feels tricked and assaulted.

I don't really know where I'm going with this so just watch the fucking doc.

Nars Rouge Basque (pictured) is closest by a mile, but still redder, glossier and more conventional on the lip.  Nars Golshan and Bite Beauty Crushed Chili share a chunk of its DNA but they are, again, closer to red, even if I deem them neutrals.  MAC Chili looks like Marrakesh's twin if you haven't seen the former in a while; upon comparison it's surprisingly brighter and yellower.  MAC Paramount is quite a bit darker and a definite coppery brown rather than rusty.  MAC Auburn pencil is darker and cooler.  MAC Brick pencil is far redder.  MAC Retro is oddly apposite, yielding a similarly muted, mid-tone effect from different ingredients, being cooler and more dirty-sullen-rosy, so if you can't werk Marrakesh, but are hurting for something moyen, look into that guy.  I'm really enjoying this shade and advise you to pick it up... if you can find the damn thing.  Get your shit together, MAC.

The moon was a jewel at god knows what in the morning a few days ago, so I took some pics.
 
After all this time, I still don't know shit about cameras or exposure or aperture priority etc. and you can probably tell.  I was quite proud of myself for finding the ISO button in the dark and knowing to dial in one direction instead of the other.  Normally I would be embarrassed, having to admit such abject ignorance, but when it comes to photography I just don't care.  It's such a fucking vainglorious and utterly bullshit conceit, all that framing and recording, as though you were somehow responsible for the beauty or intrigue of the result.  Unless you create objects to photograph, calm your auteur hauteur and realise that your genius eye is a commonplace thing, and that you might as well be taking brass rubbings for all that you actually contribute.  Photographers can only ever convey what they once looked at; BFD.  We should be grateful we've had the opportunity and just leave it at that.

With that in mind, I have a lot of (exemptionalist and nepotistic) respect for my partner's images and his impressive technical knowledge.  He pursues photography as a craft and a science, striving to better represent the natural world that he values so much.  It's not a vanity project.

Anyway, I prefer the one below lol.

Though I might be white and therefore privileged beyond the average POC hair experience, the degree of policing and assumption I've personally encountered would probably surprise a centre-part Becky.  The suuuper-subtle inquiries about my background (they mean ethnicity) by that strange clade of people who are low-key preoccupied with one's precise degree of Anglo-Saxonicity; big hair and dark eyes get their pursuivant nostrils twitching.  Am I... something else?  The pervasive cultural insistence on curly (they mean mad) hair's link to certain kinds of personalities and conduct.  All those wilful, temperamentally incontinent and usually doomed literary heroines: they don't have flat lobs.​  Then there's the inquisitive strangers who feel entitled to physically touch your fucking hair (old ladies at bus stops: okay.  Jelly queens honking about your wig game: can deal.  Creepers in the seat behind you on the bus: not fucking okay).  And oh yes, the fetishisation from dipshits who think you're going to flip their penis for real with your feral, folicularly-driven sluttiness.  
​
And last but not least, the reason why I haven't been to a salon in twenty years- that look they give you.  As though your head was going to explode and infect theirs with your unruly aberrance.  The wistful yanking of your curls out to their real (they mean straight) length; it could be so much flatter and longer!  The clueless, disinterested butchering.  The completely unsolicited attempts to blow it straight.  The last peremptory ho to try this was astounded and dismayed that I preferred my natural texture and actually congratulated me on being able to 'come to terms with it'.  That was the very last time I paid someone with a fucking pixie cut on a homely-arse five-head to touch my shit.

So now I cut and dye my own damn hair, wash it once or twice a week, air dry and don't brush.  Recently I started using Deva Curl Let It Be finishing spray and I like it well enough; Deva products are fairly natural-ingredient based and non-irritant and I'm just grateful they don't make my hair situation more difficult.  I wouldn't boost them to anyone who wasn't interested in cutting down on synthetic nasties in their personal care regime as I don't think their performance is substantially better than anything else I've tried.

Washing your hair with Sabun soap is a bit of a trip, requiring you to let go of a few deep-core assumptions.  The dread of having to de-tangle non-conditioned hair is hard to understand unless you've held a fistful of your own crispy, broken frizz.  I've come to accept that the artificial shine furnished by conventional Eurocentric products just isn't in curly hair's best interest.  The softer natural lustre provided by organically-derived lipids is what curls need for texture stability and preservation.  This might be old news to people of colour, but curly white peeps just get pointed at white-people product and told we're not doing it right when that shit doesn't work. 

The Sabun lather feels rather unconventional on the head. It's important to get an even, all-over lather going, especially if you're longer, and to rinse thoroughly, working from back to front with warm water, to distribute the oils.  While still wet (don't even towel dry, just enough to stop it dripping), spray in your favourite anti-frizz product and either big-comb through or just work it down the length manually.  Scrunch gently to reinstate your curl shape.  Then leave it alone.  There's sometimes a slightly greasy feel while it's drying and it's hard to believe your hair won't feel heavy or dull, but I promise the finished product does not.  Allow an extra half an hour of air-dry time if you're on the clock.  

For me, the Sabun+spray allows my natural texture to reform peaceably without frizz, and doesn't bring on greasy-root syndrome by denaturing the scalp. It dispels that itchy product buildup that plagues us sensitive types and doesn't aggravate my psoriasis (it doesn't make it any better, but what does?).  It hasn't stripped my colour, which is a semi-permanent black.  And as a final blessing, the Sabun imparts a weirdly obedient cast to your hair; it stays placid and arrangeable.  The result is natural, snaky curl instead of morale-destroying fluff.  I am really pleased with how aggressively archaic it looks.

No one is paying me to say any of this.  I just want to share this rare positive experience with widely available, eco-friendly and inexpensive products.  The Sabun is about $7 per enormous bar in New Zealand; the Deva Curl spray is about $35 which is a lot, but for me it's lasted a long time and it replaces the $15 per bottle I dropped on shampoo and conditioner.  And both are so much better than tipping litres of industrial chemicals down the drain. Taking one damn product into the shower is incredibly liberating.  Give it a try if you have dry, frizz-prone hair and have lost patience with conventional shampoos and conditioners.

We live in a beautiful place.  It enjoyed some 20C the other day, which was a record for the month.
June is supposed to be winter, with temps between 5 and 10 C.
I personally feel as though this super-ugly climate clusterfuck stuff is going to kick off much sooner than most people realise; it is already underway in more marginal parts of the world.  We don't have kids, have never owned a car, don't fly and live very modestly, but we'll still be eating shit along with everyone who couldn't be bothered to do one fucking thing to be less of an environmental catastrophe.  Cheers, arseholes.  Cheers.

"We rode into Samarkand, and the buildings were the first that I had ever seen... the shapes were like things in dreams, and I asked Kala'amātya if the wind had made them out of stone... he said the i'ss'it had made them through their labour, which I didn't believe.  I had never stood between two walls, and I walked along with my hands on my head thinking they'd fall on me, until little i'ss'it started walking beside us doing the same.  I thought I was doing well until a camel train came in from the east and passed on either side, and I got down on my hands and knees and threw up in the road.  It was like the entire world had crashed into my head.  I lost it and passed out.  They had to carry me to Kala'amātya’s house.

It was a palace of whiteness, and... what are those things?  Rectangles... I had never seen a rectangle before.  Everything made out of straight lines... another universe, and it all belonged to him.  In the courtyard there was a kind of water that did as it was told... a chahār bāgh, with peach trees and Persian roses, and I couldn't look at them and smell them at the same time.  I just stared and stared and couldn't speak."

"A runner had gone ahead to let them know we were coming, and all the women of the house came pouring into the garden... Uighur, Russian, Rajastani, Greek, local girls, all in their best clothes so that they looked... like birds had married flowers... with gold and silver on their necks and arms, and bells tied in their hair, and they smelled of everything wonderful... champa and cinnamon and attar.  And they were doing this strange thing with their mouths...”  Sachiin pulled up the corners of his own into the shape of a smile with two fingers.  “They were happy to see him.  Sobh bexeyr, Kala'amātya.” he intoned, recalling the lilting, knowing fondness of their greeting.  “Before that, I could have counted the number of people who'd been pleased to see my brother on two fingers, but there they were, smiling at him like he was the sun in winter, bringing us water and asking who I was.  Their hands were warm, and every woman was a different shape and colour, which was so strange to me... even their voices were a hundred kinds of gold, the words tied like a necklace, with empty spaces in between.  

They took me into the house and fed me fruit and honey, brought new clothes and washed my feet and laughed and called me bakareh... virgin... because I was so modest and stupid.  All I could do was stare at them, but I decided then and there that exile was the life for me, and eating dirt at twenty thousand feet could go straight to fucking hell for all I cared.”

“I bet it could...” Susan laughed, but the colours of the image darkened with his silence while she drew another mouthful from the bottle.  “How long before it started going bad?”  

He sighed.
“I don’t know.  I don’t remember everything.” 
“Yes you do.”

“It took about a year.  We stayed with Kala'amātya, and he lived large.  Every summer he would put a corps together and go off fighting, then hit the silk route caravans when that slowed down... all of that paid out, and he was gone for half the year.  Rana stayed in her room at first and kept threatening to go home, but I could feel it changing... I could see, every time I tried to talk to her, that something was going wrong inside her head, I think because in her heart, she couldn’t leave the mountains.  It was like watching a wound turn bad.  I knew what was coming, but I didn’t know how to stop it.   

In summer most of the women did their own thing, the witches heading up into the mountains to study, some riding with my brother or with their own crews... hoes heading west to work the Caspian boats... but with Kala'amātya gone so long, the girls who stayed home started looking at me a certain way.  I didn’t think that Rana cared or even knew... stupid, I know, but I was stupid... I had no idea that people went crazy over that sort of thing.  

One day she came to me and said ‘Sachiin... did you know that you may kill these creatures, merely by striking them?’  And I walked out into the garden and found that she had beaten one of the kitchen girls to death.  In autumn, when Kala'amātya came home, he threw her out into the street.  I tried to talk him round but he threw me out and told me... a'ma sa'anae sahai'is siith nala elaiinae... come back when you've had enough.

Living alone with Rana was... hellish, really, in ways I had never imagined, but if I ran to his house she would follow me and beat his slaves.  After a while, when I left she would just walk into the bazar and kill whoever she got hold of... twist their arms and legs off.  That would go on until I came back.  One year Avi'ashān arrived, from nowhere, and then Nyāti, looking for him... everything was coming apart in the mountains, with Ana'siām'ilye disgraced... people were leaving every day and going into the sea, but we didn't know until they told us.  For a while, Nyāti handled Rana better than I could, but it didn’t last.  Losing the mountains was the final straw for her.  Kala'amātya would ask me... nala siith i’nala elaiinae... have you had enough, Sachiin?  But I could never say yes, because I knew once I did, everything he'd do to make her go into the sea would be on my head.  When I looked at her mad face, I knew I was too weak and vain to think of myself as the one who had wished death on her."  The snow slowed in the darkness until each mote seemed shed in bitter accord with his account.  "If I hadn’t been that way, who knows how many people would have lived another day... Kala'amātya might have had the time he needed with Helaine.  Her death wasn’t even Rana’s fault.” he admitted, his voice so quiet that she closed her eyes to hear it.  “It was mine.”  He brushed the snow from his hair.  “His never saying it is hard... I wish he'd grab me by the throat and dangle me off forty storeys... but he won't.”

Susan leant over her lap and assured herself of his attention before speaking to his admission.

“When my parents died they were on their way to pick me up from my aunt’s house." she sighed.  "I was supposed to stay the weekend but she’d found some cigarettes and I don’t know... condoms, I think it was... in my handbag, something completely stupid and we’d had this horrible fight, so I wanted to go home.  I had to go and live with her after the accident.  I asked her once if she blamed me, and she said yes... she blamed me, my parents, the car, the other driver, the weather... herself… but she said that's just what you do when you’ve lost someone.  I was shocked at first, then I thought, god, I actually blame her, so I understood.  That's just... normal.”  When he opened his mouth she shook her head.  “That’s not my point, though.  Your brother isn’t normal, and I don't think he blames you.  Mostly he’s just glad to have you... you're lucky to have each other.  And I am glad to have you..." she smiled.  "You don't miss her, do you?" 

"Rana?  No... it feels like something that was biting my arm has gone away.  After everything she did, it's just... peaceful."

The dowager moon breathed her last into the clouds, her glow borne earthwards in the silver cells of every frozen element, as though the air were haunted by expiring spectres, their light extinguished as they met the ground.    

"I wonder if they knew when they first saw him..." she murmured.  "The priestesses... did they know he was the end of them, or did they make him Kala'amātya?"

"I've never known.  Helaine once told me we all take our own lives, one way or another, and I like to think Ana'siām'ilye was cutting her own throat with those blackthorn branches.  That would be..."

​"Poetic." Susan smiled.  "You're very zen about the strangest things."

He shrugged.

"What can you do?  I'm not the sharpest apple in the bucket."

She spluttered liquor and wiped it from her chin.

"Well, we're probably made for each other, then.  Priestesses never get it right."

Susan shuffled on her knees toward the window with the sleeping bag, grinning at his wary face then lifting the bottle to his lips, its contents prompting him to shudder at the flash of bitter fruit and ethanol.  

"Mmm... génial..." he coughed.  "Merde, c'est bordelique."  He turned his head from the kiss she bestowed in remediation.  "Cloudcheeks, I'm too cold..."
"I don't care." she insisted, taking his face in her hands.  His mouth was perfumed by the hueless liquor, tasting of distant apple and anise, and of the newborn winter descending behind him, the season that had settled in his skin and drawn his pupils into snake-like straits.  She pressed her lips to his left lid, chuckling as their warmth reversed the transformation, if only unilaterally.  "Is this you, when you're at home?"  The cover cosseted their voices as she pulled it over their heads.  He nodded, and she kissed him again, taking his hands and drawing them beneath her jersey so that they closed upon her waist, their breathtaking differential sliding slowly into novel, delicious inverse on her skin.
"You're making me feel like an enigma wrapped in a something else." he whispered.
"I know there'll always be some monsterism, but most of you is five-star." Susan admitted.  He sighed softly against her neck.
"That kind of talk just won you a super-deluxe trip downtown."
"Speak more French..." she urged, grasping his neck as he hoisted them both out of the window and dumped her down onto the pine needles.
"Je ne peux pas le faire... pour le principe... c'est pour ton bien..." he murmured while she dragged his shirt over his head and struggled to assist in the removal of her trousers, stifling the laughter prompted by discombobulation.  "I do miss parts of summer, if I'm honest... the only thing standing between me and la petit gâteau was half a foot of fresh air, or knicker elastic that was suicidal anyway..."  He paused to suck the cache of freckles on the face of her thigh.
"I miss mattresses.  Missionary with a mattress... it always feels like I'm going to hell for it with you.  I don't know how you manage it."  She closed her eyes as her legs were persuaded into dissociation.
"Practice."
"Whatever you're doing has to stay under the blanket, and en francais."
"Ça va sans dire."
​


CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
​© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce

Yes, and fuck it all; beautiful it may be, but Lonely Heart's performance sucks massive arse, in practical terms.  It is the Keanu of the Velvet Matte line; picturesque and useless.  Puzzingly for such an irreproachable stable of pencils, this shade is problematic in a basic, cheap-arse sort of way, suffering all the cardinal sins of separation, migration, line settling, patchiness and cementitious mouth-feel.  I  was gobsmacked when I applied it for the first few times, amazed by the crappiness of the result.

It's true that I have been an apologist for lesser shades and am all about recouping value with amendment.  Just like Keanu, Lonely Heart is too beautiful to ignore and I am still experimenting with redemptive measures that won't pollute its divine tonality.  Look at the hand swatches; see how it resists looking unsophisticated, even in the strongest warm sunlight?  Looking at it on the back of the palm, you would never suspect the kind of fuckery it pulls when applied where it counts.  

​I tried it over Urban Decay Ultimate Ozone primer pencil and, while that dealt with the clumping/patchy issue, the resulting finish made the Sahara look positively dewy and felt like Moroccan leather layer cake.  It also abolished the lovely violet leaning Lonely Heart gleaned from my natural lip, so I CPR'd that rosewood tint with some dabs of Bite Licorice.  It looked good.  For ten minutes.  Before quickly lapsing into muddy, clown-ring horror.  Mixing it with the recent and beautemous Bite Beauty Clove liquid lipstick (I will review it soon) offers some degree of salvation; 'tis still a tragic compromise.

Resist Lonely Heart.  Enjoy the pictures and dream of what could have been.

L2R, MAC unless stated: Russian Red, Nars Lonely Heart, Paramount
​Nars Audacious Deborah, Chilli, Jasper, Auburn pencil natural outdoor light

Some people want to complain about trains but I like them, even when they're bouncing me out of a great sex dream at 3.47am with brake screech and hard rumbles.  Every time a train goes past, 34785 trucks don't.  Think of it that way.

Will some arsehole please reinstate the formerly awesome Dunedin to Christchurch passenger service, because that route is dope and NZ busses are spectacularly ghettto.  Only here would an incredibly scenic and already extant line like that, between two major centres godammit, sit idle for years.

I might be the last person to know about this band but I'm on it now, okay?  Fuck.

White's warm/cool and pure/dirty variations can look fucking horrific within spitting distance of each other.  Check prospective tonalities against neighbouring plants before you dig the hole and achieve this outrage aux bonnes mœurs in your own demesne.

Despite the drawbacks, some people are all about a white rose, no matter what.  If you're one of them, you've probably been pointed in Glamis Castle's direction.  It's a David Austin baby from his middle period and I'll get to the significance of that later.

The top left pic is by no means the full measure of this unfortunate tendency.  GC is planted on its own in an area with great ventilation and extra fert etc., but still it poxes up like the fucking Toxic Avenger, hangs on to the offending foliage and joins forces with its nasty dad, Graham Thomas, in spraying plague around the garden.  I suspect them of rusting my garlic during bad years.  Behold its tangled, thorny fugliness below.

It's only a little camera so there are some technical challenges but I like how it blows out, just like an eye.

The harbour is an unusually three-dimensional place, strictly contained by rims of hill and either expanded or compressed by cloud.  On a bright cirrus day the blues are infinite, stained yellow by the slanted sunlight and pulled from azure into turquoise.  Then the northeast cloud rolls in from the ocean, pouring through the gates at Taiaroa and over the Hare hill to set a leaden lid on everything, lying so low you feel as though your hands could brush its undercarriage.  One is a palatial ballroom, the other a mist-dripping cellar.  I like both.

This isn't drone footage.  We climbed up to the lookout hill on foot to get these pics and that series of abrupt inclines sucks with lunch on board, let me tell you.  I had to stop once on the last leg to reoxygenate and felt like an aged fatarse, but had my chagrin assuaged by the pall of cigarette smoke from some lazy random who had driven the whole way to the top.  I gave up smoking twenty years ago and have never owned a car.  

​Superiority intensifies.  

A towering complex of feral Tasmanian Blue Gums, Monterey Pines and Cyprus sp. flourish in the uninhabited belts of hillside encircling Port.  Passionfruit and Muehlenbeckia vines entangle their lower storeys and tend to safeguard them from dipshits with chainsaws; birds sing all day from this ribbon of humanless green, fantails and warblers swooshing down over your head as you walk the Back Beach road that runs parallel.  

Unfortunately, this miniature forest also seethes with feral possums, who demolish the regenerating native vegetation.  We trap them for The Halo Project, a predator-reduction initiative linked to the local Orokonui Sanctuary, and they have just begun an intensive push to get their numbers down toward elimination.

There is often a curiously gaudy, oversaturated effect to the autumn light that falls on the paddocks in Sawyers Bay; I think it's the heavy volumes of water carried by the fresh grass that glows and amplifies the yellow tones.  This scene illustrates that effect at about half-strength.  When it's fully lit, the quilted, undulant farmland looks almost candied through the smudgy pines, but it usually passes before you can get a lens on it.  Annoying.

The South Island is not much more than a brief affront to the vast volumes and momentums of the Southern Ocean, a montane blip to winds and oceans that scream virtually unimpeded around the tail end of the planet.  So we get a lot of visible atmospheric stratification, with clouds headed this way and that on their various business.  High horsetails usually mean trouble is a few days out, so you'd better get shit done in the garden before that cold southerly slams into and bows the big front windows and covers the road with pine needles and huge ribbons of gum bark.  Bubbly cumulus lazily mass and disperse just a hundred meters or so over the harbour; the same shape will be born, over and over, in the lee of an island and the space of half an hour.  

Everything worth knowing is annotated in this rhythm, all meaning, all process, all denouement.  

​I agree with his reflections-as-portals premise in that I avoid looking into puddles when baked.
see the rest here