the Blackthorn Orphans
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The Blackthorn Orphans Serialization:  Beltane 3

31/1/2016

 
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The hushed sound of movement over the cedar needles carpeting the ground around them lifted Bede’s head in the pre-dawn darkness.  From the heart of the expiring fire a figure lifted a blackened branch and brought it with her, weaving a slow path through the bodies strewn about them.  Bede watched her white legs moving beneath the carnivore print of her stolen dress; ignoring all but William’s sleeping form, she stood so closely by him that her hooked toes almost brushed his careless arm.  Slowly, she lifted the branch in both hands.  

“Rana...” murmured Bede, keeping his gaze deferential as he addressed her. “Il’jiit Sachiin il’avai’ia shai’la.”

She looked down on the object of her foray with eyes that streamed unceasingly, conceding nothing of her intent, and for an airless moment he believed his petition had failed.  But with the charred limb in her hands the creature turned instead toward the pale face of the house standing beyond the unmown veldt.



Edward’s sedan stood at the edge of the grove, front doors splayed and headlights dimly-coloured by the dying battery.  Susan had lain with her head under her pillow against both the music that had issued from its system and various arrivals and departures; the ordeal greatly reduced her compunction at hauling a garbage bag of bottles and cans amongst the fallen.  The bollchu vat lay on its side like the body of an abandoned spacecraft, the French contingent scattered as though by a percussive blast around the hearth and amid the clean bones of the spit roast, vodka bottles and discarded clothing.  One of them groaned, feet lying in the beer-doused charcoal, and pulled his shirt over his head.  Susan plucked up the packet of Continental cigarettes beside him and lit one for herself.  The body she took to be William’s lay on its face in a bed of needles, hands upturned by its sides.  She lifted the clattering rubbish and dropped it beside his head.

“Answerphone.” he murmured without moving, the word muffled by his posture. 

“Mr Lamb, I just wanted you to know I used the kitchen tongs to pick up a used condom, so you'll have to buy some new ones.  Tongs, I mean.  I couldn’t find a shovel.”

“In the car.”

“What is?”

​“The shovel.  In the boot.  Check the... no, wait...”  With a deep breath and supreme effort William rolled over and sat up.  “Don’t."  Beneath his open shirt pine needles had stuck to the demonic features drawn in several shades of lipstick over his chest and stomach; a long tongue descended from the pictograph's chin to the region still marginally concealed by the deranged buttons of his fly.  The same colours were smeared around his mouth, over his ears and on each side of his neck.  She stared at the strange imperviousness of his smooth features to the abuse accorded them, handing him the cigarettes.  He placed one between his lips.  “And er... don’t turn around.” he added, flagging the sound of someone struggling with their jeans and urinating in the trees behind her.  

"I still have South African techno stuck in my head."

“Sorry... alujha DJs." he sighed, unaware of the minor indiscretion.  "I'm so sorry about this... it’s all that fucking texting nowdays... fucking... médias social... all OMG, GTFO, LOL... every petite boum you put on gets out of hand.” William explained.  He held out his hand to her and she relented, hauling him to his feet, from which he kicked an automatic pistol beneath the legs of its faineant owner before it could attract her attention.  “B’s still here, I think... we’ll get it sorted.  Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried.  I'm the housekeeper... you're the groundskeeper.” she assured him, dropping her cigarette onto the remains of the fire and walking after him to his brother’s car.  He sat down in the front seat, staring blankly at his reflection in the mirror and using his shirt to wipe the colour from his face.  “I do need to talk to you about something, though, if you’re up to it.”  

“I know it was loud, and I will make it up to you... in fact, have some time off... go crazy til Ed gets back.  I’ll get Luc and Étienne some aprons.” he sighed.  “They’ve probably got their own.”

​“Mr Lamb...”  He closed his eyes at the sound of it and she smiled briefly to herself.  “I was in my room last night and... I saw something.”  There was a note of hesitancy in her voice and he looked up from making an attempt to start the car.  Someone had stowed a shopping bag stuffed with the gigantic terminal buds of two dozen marijuana plants on the back seat, filling the interior with their thick olive smell.  “I think it’s probably better if I just show you.” she concluded.

Susan helped him to his feet once more and together they traversed the lawn; the golden pheasants had been joined by the young peacock gifted by a guest and the jewelled quartet clucked contentedly by the pool where they picked winged ants from the sandstone.  She led him into the shade beside the house, walking backwards from it and peering up into the lime-green canopy to point out a limb some six metres from the ground.  

“I’d dozed off and then realised I’d forgotten to close the curtains, so I sat up, and there was someone sitting there.  The light shines into the tree, so I saw it really clearly... they were looking right at me.”  She frowned back at him, surprised to see that he required no persuasion.  He walked to the trunk while she continued.  “On that branch there... the one that comes out toward the window."

William emptied his pockets onto the ground and caught the lowest limb, swinging upward and climbing into the elm.  Susan located his feet amongst the dappled, glowing foliage.

"Right there, where you are." she called.  He sat against the trunk and saw the silvery bloom had been rubbed from the bark before him, supporting her claim.  From his position he could see directly into the garret, the paisley of her quilt and the lax drape of the clothing hanging from the bedside chair all perfectly apparent. 

“If I had to tap a pervert it would be Luc, but his victims are usually more than willing... and I don't think he was climbing anything after Cay was done.” he replied.
“If he was the one inside with you, it wasn’t him...”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes... it was a woman.”

Descending, he hung for a moment and allowed his grip to slide from the bark as he digested her remark.  Though it was only faintly-limned, she did not enjoy the way his unease correlated with her own.  

“Dark hair, some sort of dress, definitely female.” she added, folding her arms.  “I don’t mean to be a princess or anything, but my rooms are private... maybe you could let people know that next time you have a... thing?  Anyway... I just wanted to tell you.”  William frowned as she lifted his black record bag from the grass.   "Um... is this yours?"  He accepted it from her, shaking the dew from it.  "You said something about me having the day off..."

He shrugged absently.

"Pas de probléme."

​"I wouldn’t mind a swim later.  Let me know when everyone’s gone.” she called, pausing in the sun by the corner of the building to shed her apron and pull the pins from her hair, the prospect of a providential afternoon lighting her grin.  William murmured a distracted reply, then looked back across the lawn to Bede, who stood alone before the grove.

CONTINUED NEXT WEEK

© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce

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Photos du Jour: local birds, Port Chalmers

29/1/2016

 
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Geese, Back Beach / Black Swans, Sawyers Bay / Bathing Gull, Back Beach
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BELOW  This year we are especially privileged to host a trio of native Bellbird (Anthornis melanura) chicks fledged in a nest across the road (edit- there has been a second brood since this first one).  This is the first time we've seen successful breeding of this once-beleaguered species in our urban-ish area and hope it is a sign of things to come.  

​Birds might not seem like a big deal, but to us this is like having tigers raising cubs in your yard.
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Hostile Witness Film Review: Sicario, Everest.

28/1/2016

 
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Sicario (2015, Denis Villeneuve)
I was crossing all the toes and fingers in anticipation of this one.  Sadly, Sicario isn’t as good as you’ve probably heard, which gives me no pleasure.  If it had preserved the clean procedural tension of the opening half hour we would have been fine, but from the moment the camera started to linger on an overkill number of corpses decomposing behind drywall a cheesy, manipulative flavour kicked in and it was a downhill drag from there.  Sigh.  Emily Blunt is Kate, FBI SWAT boss battling southern-state drug cartel activity sucked into a murky, border-busting Special Ops initiative by Josh Brolin's CIA spook, who is in turn facilitating the mysterious Alejandro (Benico Del Toro) in some sort of personalised revenge trajectory wherein their interests more or less align.  

If the utterly depraved dynamics of the continental American drug war are really news to you, Sicario might possess more of the galvanic momentum it was obviously striving for.  In lieu of that shock value we both felt it offered little in the way of novel perspective or characterisation to relieve that sense of no-shit-sherlock redundancy.  It stumbles from the moment it veers away from impersonal momentum into the organisms involved, defying logic and resorting to laboured misogynistic diminution to make its feeble point.

Josh Brolin's CIA guy is the self-regarding median douche he always brings to the fucking table, which was annoying.  But it's Emily Blunt who really made me want to kick the screen.  Blunt has never sold me anything; as the Young Victoria she couldn’t even stand there in a fucking dress without pissing me off with that complacent duckface.  She is too static, too leaden, too self-conscious and projects all three deficits here as the FBI agent with an er… heart of naive gold.  Despite her character riding the pointy end into contra-cartel action on the daily, she remains a delicate principled flower, apparently, requiring male protection and supervision at every juncture.  Not since Jason Bourne has someone seemed so utterly fucking baffled by their own trajectory but you know… bitches be crazy.  The story so palpably aches to trail breathlessly after the macho Del Toro, wrong’d, ambiguous antihero, that Blunt’s hapless nark feels as superfluous and derisory to the audience as she does to her fellow protagonists.  Benicio is mmmgood but I wish someone would really twist his arm and make him work all that recessed potential.

I can see why generic male critics creamed their pants over 
Sicario. ​It’s everything they want movies to be- sneakily androcentric, essentially uncomplicated whilst affecting complexity, technically praiseworthy, vaguely familiar (it rips chunks out of Zero Dark Thirty and even The Usual Suspects with gay abandon) and reductively cynical.  

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It could also be argued that it's a racist portrayal of a demonstrably stateless scourge, its lip service to the grim equity of violence on both sides overridden by a juvenile, forked-tongued insistence on the true form of the beast, which seems to hable español.  

Visually Sicario is sharp, diverting and moderately creative, though I had an issue with its rendering of the penultimate action in alt. spectrums because that shit was budget.  It may be worth watching but that's not much consolation when one considers just what might have been.


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Everest  (2015, Baltasar Kormákur) 
Even if you're profoundly disinterested in the technical achievement it represents, Everest's fantastically pin-sharp and gin-clear cinematography is the best reason to watch this otherwise pretty standard disaster/survivor yarn dramatising portions of Rob Hall and Scott Fischer's fatal 1996 expeditions.  That, and Jason (Zero Dark Thirty) Clarke, who I had no fucking idea was Australian although that does explain his decent Newzullindish (not sure why our idiom seems to defeat virtually everyone; it's just a flattened affect, off-British variant, ff's.)  He is committed, buyable and engaging as the doomed Hall, as is Jake Gyllenhaal, who always delivers when relieved of the lead.  Then there's Josh Brolin, who always brings the Josh Brolin, no matter what.

Disappointingly, it is the consistently awesome Emily Watson who shits the tonal bed with her cringeworthy accent and overwrought fretting although, to be fair, Keira Knightley really takes the sloppy hysterics cake; thankfully she is relegated to smallish servings.  And that's all there is to Everest, really.  Don't go in expecting Tolstoy and you might find it moderately diverting.  

I'll award a consolation gold star for the eschewal of cheap pain-porn and stupidly villainous characterisations in its handling of a multi-axial tragedy that attracts vituperative revisionism and partisan dick-waving to this day.  Having read a number of opposing narratives, Everest doesn't seem like a particularly outrageous distortion to me, but then I find the whole concept of scrabbling over sacred mountains monstrously egotistical and deeply offensive.  Sorry.

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Monday slash Tuesday slash longest days slash Jacqueline & fuck Penelope

26/1/2016

 
Disgusting midsummer jankiness.  Don't know if that happens in the northern hemisphere, but down here summer drags on so fucking long that the midpoint is like the central pole in a stinky tent full of stale beer smells and dull light and dead grass and melting road tar and, inevitably, unsightly sunburnt people squeezed into the sort of short shorts and sleeveless tops they have no earthly fucking business with.  It really doesn't have to be this way.  Due to a moderate bingo-flap situation I never, in a rare concession to public decency, under any circumstances leave the house without adequate sleevage so the acres of underarm fat currently bulging and girning at one are especially egregious as I gently sweat into my bra and search for something else to visually alight upon.  Cue some pants-dodger with neglected and/or prolapsed varicose veins. 
Also: can skinny picayune* hipsters please attend a few leg days before you roll that shit up, and calm the fuck down with the obsessively over-curated tattoo sleeves?  A thousand Tumblr-cribbing hours won't improve your chances of looking like someone carelessly arrayed in the charmingly artisanal mementos of their chaotic personal creativity.  At all.  I see you, bitch.  (* I learned this word a month ago and am honoured to début it in this context.)
It's not that I hate hipsters per se.  A really top-shelf OG autochthon hipster in full kit is a comprehensively beautiful thing, anyone trying to confute that is just declaring their jelly and that's utterly devoid of sarcasm on my part.  Successful (note important caveat) hipsters aesthetically trounce the dowdy civilians who revile them on those very grounds.  

​Acceptance is the noblest course of action.

The only real thing I dislike about them are their haughty sui generis affectations.  Denying you're part of a subculture from inside the roiling bowels of that particular subculture is just silly. 
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Which is probably easy for me to say.  I'm retired from being thrown out of bars for getting into fights with mooby school-leavers with undershot jaws who've called me a goth to impress the people they've been sent to buy beer for.  Yummy mummy cunts can visibly revile my impact on little Chester and Penelope's unformed sensibilities from behind their lattés and I probably won't flip their table and put them in a headlock.  Personal growth has delivered me from petty reactivity and one day junior aspirants will come to understand that being called a ---- is just the sound that homely sausage makes when it's cased in polyester.
Okay, so there is a fair level of foundational bad character in play here but boredom is largely to blame and heat always makes me unpleasant.  We've had a week of warm, sloppy drizzle with the prospect of it dragging on til Friday.  The lilies are rotting on their stems.  Souvenir de la Malmaison looks like someone glued globs of used toilet paper to a fucking rose bush and the idea of being trapped inside with nothing else to do really shits all over writing for pleasure, which should always have an edge of the illicit to it, i.e. I really should be chopping firewood / reciprocating orally / showering right now.

                              *  *   *


Jacqueline.  Think this is my preferred FF song (after Michael) and not just because that's why we only work when we need the money is biographical. 
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Naming songs after people is one of my favourite things ever and if I ever do an album, every track will get a random anthropomorphic title regardless of content.  

​Chester won't even be about people with weak moustaches, nascent porn addictions and IBS.

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liked these illustrations by Vladimir Stankovic

25/1/2016

 
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The Seance (rebels of the universe deciding on humanity)  /  Bunyip

See more of his drawings  H E R E

The Blackthorn Orphans Serialization:  Beltane 2

24/1/2016

 
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When William dreamed it was often of remembered things, visions charged with partial, elusive significance, faces and voices, joys and horrors, the tenderness of familiar hands and the still-bitter sting of recrimination.  At other times, long passages of mnemonic life returned to him in their entirety and he would awaken to an alien world that seemed far less material than the departing dream.  Lying on the ground beneath the tree, his outline painted dim red by the distant glow of the fire, he wiped blindly at his face and rolled onto his back beside a hookah that had fallen into a similar recumbence.  Around the makeshift hearth half a dozen figures were still partially sensible, but they were greatly outnumbered by those who had succumbed.


Sachiin's painted saddle creaked as he stood in his stirrups and slid down the cloth swathing his face, the glare thrown up from sinuous crescents of pearl-coloured sand drawing his pupils into slivers.  Muttering, he caught the pommel and climbed up to balance barefoot on the mare's back while the horse dozed, blinking away the flies clustered around her eyes.  Even this new vantage was frustrated by the layers of fractious air boiling over the distant wadi that was the focus of his interest, obscuring the size of the Frankish corps monopolizing its ephemeral waters, if not their telltale colours, glimpsed as they flapped listlessly.  His ears were of little use to him, the dunes' curvaceous interfluence perverting all sound loud enough to carry through them, and he sat back down, patience dissolved as much by bitter introspection as the day they had been forced to wait for water.  Behind him the band of Imazighan mercenaries of his brother's retinue had dismounted and erected a shelter from portions of their voluminous blue alasho, contriving a small chip fire for tea and gossiping in the luxury of shade.  Kala'amātya himself sat on his brown mare with his back to the sun, coaxing a needle and thread through a length of unfinished bridle.

“Rhissa says that to his reckoning, a sound black goat is worth more than any woman he has shared a tent with thus far.” he related, referring to the topic of nomad conjecture.  Sachiin swung the plume of a balding swat past his nose, eyes narrow.

“A goat is worth three score chebel pressed to overflowing with the shaitans.” he muttered.  His brother made a brief protective sign with his right hand.
“Siith ilsii y’li sivai'isha.  Such blasphemy."

Swinging a leg over the neck of his horse, Sachiin hunched in a manner befitting his mood.

​“I am far more sinned against than sinning.”
“What more can you wish from life than to pass summer in the desert, fattening Rana’s purse while she eats grapes by the Loire?” Kala'amātya observed, leaning over to bite through the thread.  Sachiin stared hard at the back of his head.
"Was it not enough to carp like a fishwife all the way to Palestine?  I wish only for some great wave to sweep her into the sea." Sachiin murmured dully, staring down at his horse's shadow.  "And you besides.  You will both cry out to me in your despair, but I will be deaf to your entreaties.”

Kala'amātya accepted a cup from one of the nomads.

“Forswear servitude and you'll have no need of fickle calamity.”
“Foreswear your accursed counsel..."  Sachiin grasped his head as though it were beset by hornets.   "Does nothing else concern you?  If my wife were to fall into the Garabogazköl tomorrow, you would drag her out, for fear of having to discuss some other matter."

His brother regarded him with an expression almost private in its obscurity, though its unflattering gist was familiar enough to him.  Shaking his head, he emptied the last of his water over his veil and glanced back at the conclave behind him as they unfurled prayer rugs and kneeled within their mirhabs.

“Which spirit do they plague with their wailing?”
“The god of the Arabs." Kala'amātya replied, stowing his handiwork.  "Or of the Franks.  They seem like enough, to my benighted pagan eye.” 
"La'iah... they are mujahidîn, in both camps.”
“I have never been paid so well to murder strangers, and thus the holiness of this affair can scarcely be questioned.”
Sachiin lay back on his horse's rump and shaded his eyes with his hand.
"May the Mother turn their flesh to ice.  What of their number?”

Devoting his full attention to the mirage-shrouded detachment, Kala'amātya counted off the men and horses until the tortured air defeated him.  The corps before them were almost unaccountably distant from their beleaguered stronghold; news of the débacle at Acre had flown through the Levant and he surmised that they had fled the very conditions they had created.  His immersion in the region's perverse vicissitudes since turning south from Samarkand had taught him contempt for all involved and greatly sharpened his rapacity.  He consulted the nomads from his horse before returning a verdict.

“Rhissa says there are twice as many Christians as one sees, since the white devils carry witches and djenoun with them to increase their number at will."

Sachiin replied without looking up from studying the jewel tied around his neck, its Carolingian artistry marking it as the keepsake of some noble Frank.

“Rhissa has passed too many days in the erg."  
"He has seen this evil prodigy many times."
"If there were witches to be had nearby, my yard would drag me thither and it does not.  I say there be forty Christians, and that they be Templar.”  

Kala'amātya’s mount swung its tasseled head impatiently.  Sitting up, Sachiin opened his mouth with the intention of supporting his own assertion as a line of French knights broke over the crest of the dune and fell upon them in a heaving charge of airborne sand and dark, colossal horseflesh.  His mare flew up on her hind legs and was struck by two leviathan contemporaries as the line braked around them on the slope, under the crimson and white of their banners; they toppled together, flattened against the sand and harrowed by the cleated hooves of the chargers thundering over them.  Wrapping himself around a stout black limb, Sachiin felled the hapless animal into a heap of sweating flesh and tangled caparison, rendering its knight as helpless as a cast beetle in his cocoon of padded mail, left leg crushed by the floundering weight of his steed.  Sachiin swung his sword but lost the credit to his brother, the latter thrusting a captured standard through the bars of the victim’s visor from his saddle.  Kala'amātya planted it through the helm and another Templar stallion ploughed head-first over the haft, its rider snapped in two as he was whipped face-first into the ground.  Catching the charger's harness as it kicked onto its feet Sachiin swung up and turned the beast with hands and heels, riding hard into the shoulder of another.  He was thrown against the rider scrabbling for a hold on its slick neck and dragged himself into the saddle behind him, hauling back the gorget from the christian's throat and ripping the quillon from his waist.  The point of the blade burst through the man's nape, almost into his own neck; while his victim bucked beneath the impaling steel Sachiin rode again at the moiling Franks, employing the body before him as a shield against their wheeling maces.

At some small distance Kala'amātya dropped from his horse and took a stroke to the back from an unseated knight; when he did not bleed red or falter, the perpetrator was stiffly transfixed, crying out as his head was seized by the stranger he had so rashly engaged.  His scream drowned in whistling, liquid gutturals as his adversary ripped back his chin and tore out his throat with pointed, blade-like teeth, the slick veins and snapping grey chords spat in a mass onto the ground.  The knight fell like a lopped branch and Kala'amātya drew his knives, wearing the fresh blood under his bleached stare into the fracas.

Obliging a nomad who lay pleading to be dispatched, Sachiin caught a chopping blow that opened his left arm, striking at the offender before pausing to wipe the jetted blood from his eyes.  In his momentary distraction he took a mace to the side of his skull from a knight looming behind them, its ball head clouting him flat, the first of two converging avengers hoisting an axe with both mailed fists.  The blade fell and bit deeply though he fended its haft with his arm, shearing flesh from his throat and bouncing on the diamond-hard matter of his spine.  Dust flooded the darkness in his chest; he dropped his arms to his sides and performed a convulsion that satisfied his assassins though with their backs turned he rolled quickly, wrapped his oozing neck with his head cloth and reclaimed his lost sword.

They had been reinforced by a band of tribesmen who rode hard at the occidentals with their diverse blades.  Listing slightly, Sachiin made his way through the edge of the fighting, swinging at those that blundered into him.  He killed a screaming standard bearer amid the last knot of Franks afoot, dropping here and there to relieve Templar corpses of their rings and religious jewels with expert fingers.  On the flank of the dune his brother broke a helmless knight's jaw and knocked the man onto his face, punching twin blades into his shoulders.  Shucking them free, Kala'amātya seized the thatch of pale, sweat-greased hair atop his head and sliced a broad swatch from his scalp, stowing it with the other bloodied trophies in his belt.  As though grasping at their own deaths the unhorsed men descended on him, insensate or already losing their blood to the parched sand, to have their glistening bones bared to the sun, to be docked of limbs and cut down with weapons impounded from their own hands by an adversary as silent and automated as any nightmare agent.  Their desperation met no answer, nor could his victims impress any memorial upon him, their faces two blurred shades of the same dull colour, their appeals and threats unheeded mime.  In the midst of killing Kala'amātya enjoyed a privileged and intimate tranquility born of rhythm and stilled detachment, in which no troubles save the geometric challenges of violence could survive, muting the few blows that broke his guard and the intolerable heat that forced the dying to slough their mail and gambesons like a clutch of frantic crustaceans.  A slew of bruise-coloured innards slithered from the belly of a senior knight when he opened it with both knives, the mass raveling almost to the ground; their owner stared down at them while he was relieved of his head.  Stepping backward, Kala'amātya was called out of himself by a sound more remote than the encircling tumult and turned with his brother toward the shrilling cries of the remaining nomads, staring with them to the south.

A cloak of stinging, gale-borne sand swept over the dunes, thickening to lurid orange as it whelmed them, choking the screams of men and horses, as hot as a belch from a kiln and roaring like a funneled blaze.  Sachiin felt it scour his face and bank around the tumbled bodies at his feet and climbed out for fear of immurement.  The sun receded to a dead, flat coral disc, though he dared not remove the cloth from his eyes, crouching in the lee of the mounded dead to ride out the storm.

Only when the hiss of the habub died away with its swing to the north did he lower his veil.  Kala'amātya leant over to haul him up onto his horse, his face and long blue sleeves crusted with blood, a thick wad of bicoloured banners tied about his neck for safekeeping.  Whistling for his brother's mare, they waited while she jogged down the dune toward them, trailing her reins.  Half a mile away across the sand a small band drove a covey of stumbling captives toward a ribbon of sang de boeuf sunset, the colour hovering beneath thundercloud that spat bifurcated lightning at the horizon, the two skies meeting with the sound of clashing stone.

“The Caliph promised a mare from his own stable for each of these, so I will go to Baghdad and hold him to his word." Kala'amātya advised, referring to his looted pennants.  "We may find riches enough to stave off a beating from your beloved.”

Sachiin eased himself into his own saddle as his mount drew alongside, rocking back and forth to seat it squarely on her withers then devoting himself to scraping grit from the wounds in his neck with claws that slid from the end of his fingers.  His voice returned as his throat began to close.

“No such gold exists.”
"Sai a' si ina'abiih ilalae'an..."
"If I abandon Rana, I trade an idle scourge for one that slavers on my trail." 

His brother raised a hand to the nomads stripping a christian bailiff in passing.

​"If you mean to return to her you can make your own way.  I will not suffer you while you abide her."
"And in that, you could not oblige her more, so what am I to do?"
“Cut out the dead flesh where you find it.” Kala'amātya recommended.
“My dead flesh has a name and face.”
“Her kind had no thought for mine.”

Able to devise no meaningful rebuttal, Sachiin turned his horse from beside his brother's as rain began to pound the dunes in the wine-coloured dusk, riding for the deserted wadi on his own.

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



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Christmas Holidays, West Coast of New Zealand 2015, Part 2

19/1/2016

 
You can view the first part of this series  H E R E.
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We went a bit north from Granity to Gentle Annie beach, at the mouth of the Mokihinui river.  This incredibly beautiful and ecologically important watercourse was earmarked to be dammed by fucking Meridian Energy despite NZ's perennial electricity glut.  Still think New Zealand's clean and green?  100% Pure my shiny arse.  The NZ government was proposing to inundate one of the few remaining areas of unfucked native forest and last-stand habitat that had survived its attentions with a dam that might as well have straddled the Alpine Fault, a massive strike-slip fault line overdue for an epic 8+ earthquake.  So stewardship.  Much conservation.
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The Mokihinui was saved from industrial ruination in 2012 by both flat projected demand for electricity and protracted legal challenges from parties like the NZ Forest and Bird Society, of which we are members (it's a great org so check out their site).

​So it was a humbling privilege to finally stand on the shore and know we played a teeny little part in its protection.  We urge you to join and support your own local and national conservation societies.  Even tree-huggers (why the fuck is that a pejorative term?), hippies, green ferals and pacifists can afford baby-eating lawyers when we pool our resources :)
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Think this is some sort of Cyanea jellyfish.  There were dozens of them washed up in various stages of development and in the company of Sea Gooseberries, a kind of gelatinous salp (as modelled by my grand-nephew Isayah to the upper left there).

They either lost their stinging undercarriages during their rough trip over the bar or I've completely misidentified them and they're something else entirely.

Stare deep into the jelly.
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Hamish: beach snorter.  My mother's bichon x maltese x schnauzer.
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There's a nicely-laid out camping ground on the other side of the river mouth.  I commend Gentle Annie to the fiscally challenged, spawn-encumbered traveller and that's a disinterested recommendation; as someone who spent half their childhood in the wilds of northern Australia, I do not camp unless someone burns my fucking house down.
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Plant porn pit stop.  Like the rest of New Zealand, Buller can certainly be a bloody cold and miserable place but it tends to shirk most of the frost that restricts what we can grow further south.

Above: Metrosideros excelsa 'Aurea', the delicious and uncommon Yellow Pohutukawa. descended from a pair of natural variants growing on Motiti Island up north.  While there are white and even yellow Ratas (a closely related Metrosideros) kicking around, the broader, more curvaceous leaves with those pale furred undersides on this plant distinguish it from those guys.

Right: Meryta sinclairii, the glossy and highly fabulous Puka. Meryta is a tropical family but don't despair- I have a plant in my decidedly temperate Dunedin garden, so if you're in a maritime 9 zone, try giving a Puka a home.  Why?  Kermit-green paddle leaves up to half a metre long and these crazy berry bunches on female plants remind one that New Zealand is a Pacific island as well as the illegitimate child of Antartica.  Just don't stand next to one while it's raining; the slightest breeze results in twenty litres of water dumped down your back by the leaves. 
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Bovidae: something else that I could photograph all day.  This is the first crop of calves my sister has raised for sale.  

Cows are strange, mercurial beasts, gifted with the sort of prudence most hominids can only dream of (someone should put them in charge of the banking sector) and yet hostage to an insatiable and perverse curiosity (alright so maybe the finance thing was a bad idea).  We have tremendous respect and affection for them though we occasionally eat of their flesh; they are one of the more fortunate species in the New Zealand farming system, being almost exclusively free-range and mostly grass fed.  So don't let anti-meat hysterics tar your perception with accounts of American-style feedlot/cornfed/hormone horrors.  Most beef cows here spend their lives fairly peacefully in decent conditions and that, to me, forms the basis of the equity that should underpin all domestic husbandry.  Dairy cows are perhaps not as fortunate and that is why we drink organic milk where humanly possible- their co ops tend to prioritise animal welfare as well as minimising their wider environmental impacts.
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Across the road from my sister's place is the steep haul up to dozy, depopulated Millerton and the foredoomed Stockton coal mine, where her partner and much of the surrounding region is still tenuously employed.  It is scheduled for sale/closure due to the collapse of Solid Energy, the government's coal concern, lately run into the ground by crackhead overcapitalisation and a staggeringly moronic inability to accept fossil fuel's inevitable relegation.  This is the view north from the top of the hill, one of two I couldn't decide between so you're getting both.  

It was a stinking hot day, I had a cold, we couldn't find the path to the local alleged spectacular waterfall and the tar from the abandoned roads we were slogging up and down was sticking to my two-sizes too small borrowed Crocs, which should have been punishment enough in themselves.
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We located the Millerton Incline, a ruined narrow gauge train line previously used to cart coal down a dangerous grade as was the fashion at the time. The small weir and attendant bush (below) is definitely worth snuffling out, being a soigné microcosm of the surrounding vegetative vastness.  By this point my mood had deteriorated to stage 3 sunburnt overtired emo, meaning documentation fell a wee bit by the wayside.
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Don't look at the waterfall yet!  Check out those Dracophyllum elegantissimum pics you were hanging out for (above/below).

Now you can look at the waterfall.  Apologies for the dreaded lunchtime lighting and its histogram-fucking flatness; our timing was actually fortuitous since this cascade is in shitty dull shadow for 80% of the day.
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The New Zealand bush is noted for its disorientating and somewhat nightmarish qualities.  It tends to be opaque, remote, inedible, damp, trackless, endlessly river-y and either too hot or too cold for comfort.  I know I bang on about it, but the number of visiting and even local trampers who end up as either galaxid or nothofagus food is a bit disturbing.  Even to a dedicated misanthropist?  We have to pay for your search and rescue fuckery.  There, fixed it.

Next time: We walk the Charming Creek track end to end, which is fantastic.
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*   View the first part of this series here   *   View the third part here (soon)  *   Other photoessays   *


Monday slash Tuesday slash Montage of Heck slash the ancient guts of the dead volcano underneath our house.

19/1/2016

 
But first.
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​That feels better.
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I have said this before but we really do live on top of an old volcano; if a volcano can be said to have a cake hole, our house is sitting on its tonsils, basically.

I think these are vesicular 'a'a formations but I'm probably wrong because I don't know shit about lava.  These conglomerates live at the foot of the cliff over the road from our house and are being very slowly tongued to death by Sawyers Bay.  

​Oh well.  There are worse ways to go.
Speaking of ancient history, we got round to watching Montage of Heck after deferring it for so long.  I've talked about Cobain before, but whatever.  MoH was good, a really seamless blend of live shit and animation, faithful to the times and impeccably sourced if hard to watch and a little too easy on Kurt.

What a honking piece of human bird lime Courtney Love was/is, poisoned and poisoning, mediocre in every respect except her appetite for attention which was, to give credit where it's due, pretty fucking awe-inspiring.
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I have met a dozen Courtneys in my time- male, female, variously horrific in their fathomless entitlement and depraved modi.  I've met some Kurts, too, those darkly shiny human wonders, so exceptional and so deeply fucked, at once violently infantile and hyper-evolved and just fucking impossible to deal with.  People give him a pass because they either don't know or forget that no one can make them do a tiny sliver of any shit they're not inclined to.  

​His parents sucked, if that's news to anyone, and beyond what was revealed in MoH, too.
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I was struck by the extent to which Wendy (the nominal mother) resembled Courtney, both in their auto-dramatising  self-excusing bullshit and rode-hard physicality.  The way they both just shrug at their own catastrophic failures; such snaky protagonists appropriating passivity when it suited them makes me want to kick them across the room so fucking hard.  But in the end, Cobain was a dick about a lot of things and it really was all on him.  As much as I understand recourse to habitual narcotics, it's hard to defend people who decide to procreate and then go back to jamming that dirty shit into their arms.  Even if the people who were supposed to love him greased the wheels, he probably knew that better than anyone involved.  Black diamonds like Cobain outsmart themselves along with everyone else.    

Give Montage of Heck a spin when you get a chance.  It's probably a better prospect sans all that initial hype.
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Think I might do part II of the holiday post this week, but I haven't written it yet so ummm yep.

*   Selected Ravings   *   Photoessays- me speak with colours mmm good   *   Some other shit   *


liked this work by Boris Pelcer

18/1/2016

 
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See more of his work  H E R E

The Blackthorn Orphans Serialization:  Beltane

16/1/2016

 
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“Bonsoir, Edouard!  Nous sommes ici pour nique votre maison, ça va?”  

Cajoling French bounced up the stairs and grew louder still as the number of fluent speakers crowding the entrance hall expanded exponentially, their exchanges punctuated by booming, confluent laughter.  Susan could hear William’s voice in the disturbance as she stood on the landing with her dinner plate, unwilling to descend into the throng disgorged from the squadron of vehicles that had flattened the front lawn.  They were a largely homogenous cohort, smelling of hair product and hashish and stentorian pour homme, sporting coppery suntanned limbs, polo shirts, piercings and conspicuous masculine bravado, from which she guessed their awarness of Edward’s absence.  

They espied her in the midst of their grinning surveys, one young man tugging William’s sleeve and nodding back at her from beneath his dark crop.

“Sachiin... qui est cette fille?  T'as vu ce cul?  Ask her to come down...”

William glanced up at her.  

“Christabel... nous avons bollchu...” he called, with an introductory wave of his arm toward the door.  An enormous vat of dented metal was dragged laboriously inside by a party of attendants; after them came a girl in black, librarian glasses framing her heavily-kohled eyes, accompanied by a stranger who, from his resemblance to her employers seemed to be the elusive guest to which William had referred.  Bede glanced up at her and gave a brief, acknowledging smile before following his companion into the drawing room.  

“I think I’ll just go up.” Susan replied.  “Oh... your brother called while you were out... he said he’ll be back in about an hour.  Something about the flight being nobbled.”  William fell silent, stilled along with those of his companions still in earshot, and she waited while the full implications of her advisory settled upon them, smirking at the effect.  “I’m joking.” she added, finally. 

"Spank her, Guillaume!" his friend cried.

"I'm too scared to now." he confessed.  "But it's May Eve... you have to give us a kiss, poupée.  Bad luck not to." William announced.  She murmured to herself, then clumped halfway down the stairs where she leant out over the balustrade to oblige him.  William fended off Luc's demand for the same consideration and grasped the bannisters, drawing himself up to meet her.  Susan touched her lips to his forehead, then to the corner of his smile when he turned it to her.

​“They could have taken that around the side.”  She nodded at the huge vat and the manner in which its handlers were struggling to pass it through the drawing room door.
“They’re from Languedoc and their parents were cousins... if you upset them, they start crying and shitting their pants.”
“Hey, serpent-visage... tais-toi!  My mother she is a whore, not an inbred!  Remember that when you are fucking her, eh?” called one of the subjects of his caution.
“You’re not coming down?”  William reached out to slap Luc's head in the midst of the lurid demonstration the latter had begun for her benefit.  "I'll lock him in the garage..."  
“Scorsese marathon.” she shrugged, nodding up the stairs.  “Have a good one.”

Gouging the parterre with the feet of the cumbersome vat, the party crossed the lawn beside the pool and disappeared from Susan’s window view into the distant trees with William’s ghettoblaster, culling firewood from the edge of the orchard as they went.  Their site settled upon, Bede accepted the bollchu ladle to the disgust of the French contingent who clamoured for precedence.

“My god...” he grimaced.  “If it wasn’t Prometheus who taught werewolves to make bathub absinthe, it must have been someone else who’s liver regenerated overnight.  Sachiin, this is Fred... we met in Venice." he added, referring to the darkly-clad girl.

"Frederica." she said quickly.

"You may not be charmed, but I am." William smiled at her. 

"She’s ah, fully au fait, in case you were wondering.”  The girl sat down between them in the tall grass, pushing it back from her knees and adjusting her glasses; William looked from one to the other and let his mouth drop open.  “She’s very learned, you realize... art school.”  Bede smiled nervously; their host had not recovered from their initial revelation. 
"This was a really stupid idea..." Frederica confided to her companion.
"No no... you are... probably... entitled, under the circumstances... it's just... fucking hell... B's a bigger chickenshit than I am." William admitted, regarding his friend with the ghost of a frown.  “Art school?  You’ve heard of my brother then?  Serious artist... ugly oils on canvas, looks like a rotten bird hit an angry windscreen?”
“Sure... his stuff's blowing up right now.  This place is amazing... it would be so great to get in here with medium format before all the work's done.” she sighed as she looked back over her shoulder through the trees.  William scratched at his head for a moment and almost replied before he was interrupted by the youth behind them.

“This place is like the bomb!” the latter agreed.  “We can go crazy here!  Not like France, you know, with all the stupid rule an asshole vampyre death squad... fuck the cochon noir, I tell you... I will fuck them up the ass, an then Étienne, he can have them after with his tiny baby cock.  But Sachiin, allez... we need to bring you an your brother home with us... it’s no good.”  Bede lay back against the grass and propped his head on his hands, glancing down his nose at William.  “...An Unite de Recherche d’Anomalie... fuck you too, eh?  Loupgarous put you into plastic bags.” 

“That was you guys?” asked William, looking to his cousin.  Luc patted his stomach, lowered his chin and emitted a tremendous belch as though it were the opening note of baritone part.  

“Not er, exactement... maybe we have some help from Auberjonois..."

"You do his fucking garden."

​"N'importe quoi... Léon an Étienne, they polish wood also.”  A pine cone struck the back of the smirking speaker’s head, loosed from the hand of Étienne.

​“Thank you baby Jesus.” William murmured at the contingent of local alujha sauntering past the pool toward them, bearing gifts and greeting their Continental counterparts with sly digital gestures and other vulgarisms.  Upon arrival in the grove they dumped a sack of charcoal, petrol tin and the gutted, headless carcass of a small ungulate down on the grass.  Clothing and accents aside, they resembled their compeers closely, their disconcerting vitality a ubiquitous equivalence.  The foremost wiped the grease from the carcass on the back of his jeans and lit a cigarette, his faded leprechaun-green mohawk tied down in a tail.  He nodded toward the vat of bollchu with parental pride.

“Ladies..."
"Ca-leb." William smirked.
"You like this batch a’ b?  We knocked back the artemesia by... shit... half, I guess, hit it with some sativa, Sticky Gerald's Aphex Doom clone, man... we put in like an acre of that shit under a fuckin badass dual rig..."  The newcomer shook his head as though he barely believed his own temerity.  "Brought a few pounds down... oh yeah, and scopolia, we got scopolia like you wouldn’t fuckin believe this year, coming up along the interstate... we got that up while things were gibbous, so it’s extra fuckin gamey... Mallet dropped some amanita in along the way, he’s a sneaky bastard.  So yeah, maybe... don’t go operating machinery.  Do we set some shit on fire now, or will old Ed bust a fucking vessel?  Don’t want him at the farm in a bad fuckin mood because we eighty-sixed his lawn... we don’t have to cook it... just thought, y’know, it’s more fuckin polite...”

William glanced at Frederica, who stared in horror at the florid colours of the caracass lying within an arm’s length of her leg.

“I think we'll go with the fire.” he advised.  They watched the party toss the collection of dead branches into a pile and douse it liberally with solvent before leaping backward as the whole went up in a great burst of jacinth flame.  As one, the trio crabbed back against the trees to avoid the singeing heat and the sight of the meat being loaded onto its spit to the sound of whooping approval.  “If only carnivores would just drop the shit and eat each other.” William sighed, sharing the girl’s disapprobation.  “So you’re baelna rather than dralna?"

She blew her heavy black bang from her forehead.

“Oh yeah it’s baelna alright... I have a hard enough time just like, cutting the heads off flowers, so I don’t know if I'll ever be really ready to get jumped in by the kitten-skinners... guess I’ll go with the Green side of things til I get disillusioned with society.” Frederica mused over the oblivious cackling of the other guests.
“Don't feel too bad... the green side of the Craft's probably OG... it’s just that the Red girls use machetes on anyone who says that.  Have you...”  William suppressed a smile, shaking his head at the ground.  “Met Nyāti?”
“Nope.  Don't do mama drama.”  She spoke and smiled with the perfect ease of someone never punished for the expression of either.  “I'm not scene.  Nothing political... I mean, it’s great that there’s a community, but I really do not like vampyres, and the lunar side of things...”  She looked pointedly over her shoulder.  “Not so much either.”

“Nobody likes vampyres...” William assured her.  

​“Look, it’s really fine.  I don’t do hardcore, no one else is involved...” 
“Frederica, believe me when I say you can’t trust the normals..." Bede interjected.  "It’s not that we don’t enjoy their company, it’s just that when adversity strikes, they’re heavily inclined to drop the portcullis on your head in their haste to differentiate themselves.  You must be careful, and that does mean being affiliated.  For the peer review if nothing else.”

​“You guys... now you’re freaking me out.” Frederica complained.

“Hey...” Caleb agreed, interrupting his eavesdropping to lean over and hand them the bollchu ladle.  “Better to freak you out now than toss a fuckin medical waste dump for your bodyparts later... try that shit in summer.  Lamb... you mind if I put out a call?  I got some friends who know some people...”
“Do these people have a pulse?”
“Hell yeah.  Some of them’ll let you take a core temp.  I’ll hook you up.”  The sound of car doors slammed on the road outside the house rendered the gesture redundant, however; the bollchu master grinned and slicked down his mohawk in concupiscent expectation as a throng of heavily-painted and thickly-bejewelled women rounded the side of the house, bearing shopping bags bulging with alcohol and foodstuffs.  “Gotta love the kitten-skinners.  They always bring a fuckin plate.” 
“Caleb, hopefully they’ll get drunk and do stuff to us, so let’s just think about what we say before we say it and concentrate on getting bad-touched.” William reminded him earnestly.  Frederica stood up and brushed off her legs.

"I think I'll get back... I'm halfway through a thing... gotta turn it in by the weekend, so..."

She reached down to shake William's hand again before beginning the walk back to the house with Bede, in time to pass the incoming dralna party.  Smoke swooped down through the seated conclave and they waved it away with complaining hands.  William smiled a greeting to the witches that murmured and trailed their fingers through his hair as they passed him by.

“B... why are really you here?” he asked without preamble as the latter returned.  “She's nice, but you’re her summer bitch, and Nyāti sure as hell didn’t cross the Atlantic to have a thing with an art school witch."  Behind them, the growing volume of Luc and Caleb's exchange overrode Bede's halting reply.

"Everyone say to me, Luc, don't take your nice clothes, Americans they are all salopes but that's not true... they are fucking coincé an I have no baiser at all!  C'est naze!"  The locals pricked up their ears and scowled, Caleb shaking his head regretfully.
"That's a pretty hard thing t'say about my people there Luc... cuts me deep when a man can't find a slut in a freakin slutstorm and dammit, I'll fuck you myself if it makes you feel more welcome." he promised.  "I'll peg anything that twerks my way, and you sure as hell aint the worst that ever has, jesus... I'd call you pretty if it weren't a fuckin week off the full." he added, referring to the three-quarter moon overhead.  

​"Fancy talk won't get you to the cigare, mon ami." Luc suggested, insouciant.  

"He's more brokeback than downtown." William warned.  "You'll be lucky if he spits in his hand."  

Those between them shuffled back; proximity did not visibly deflate either protagonist, and Luc shook out his arms, cracking his neck to one side.

"Allez?" he inquired.
"Fuckin A." laughed Caleb, unbuckling his belt to the acclaim of their companions.  Bollchu got the better of their physical coordination and sent them staggering sideways through the fire, Caleb throwing the Frenchman down into the grass beyond the charcoal where they tongued and pawed at one another hungrily while spectators dug dollar bills and cigarettes from their pockets, showering them with palpable encouragement.  Their trajectory spawned an argument between the squabbling cooks, who cried out in two languages as the crudely-spitted carcass dived into the cinders in a burst of sparks and ashes.  

William shook his head as they began to trade accusations.  

“Étienne... qu'est-ce que tu fous... eat it, or bury it.” he called, leaning sideways to avoid the rustic clinch absorbing his two friends as it rolled in his direction.  Pouring scorn, the witches displaced the fire’s scowling attendants and usurped their duties, swigging from vodka bottles and demanding the bollchu ladle.

CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce


*  You can read the whole book here gratis because writing is a fucking mug's game   *


RubyHue Lipstick Review: Mac So Chaud

14/1/2016

 
So Chaud, I've ducked you for years, trying to convince myself that MAC Lady Danger will do, then regretting that basic notion only to decide that I must have you right now then discovering you are unavailable in the heat of that exigent moment.  Trifling ho!       
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So Chaud is a lot cleaner than Lady Danger's double-down tomato, devoid of brown and richly, totally saturated.  It's almost true orange, not as cooly sour or yellow as the infamous MAC Morange which is fairly unflattering if not unwearable (just sayin) for most people.  

Frustratingly, the swatches diminish the quite meaningful differences between LD and SC.  MAC veterans will be able to look at these tube shots and know that's not Lady Danger standing there, but it's on the actual face that So Chaud really becomes distinct.  LD reads loud, bright and hot traffic-light red when worn.  SC is not as massively vibrant; it's strong and balanced rather than screechy and could not be termed red by any stretch of the imagination.

Orange isn't everyone's cup of tea and can be aesthetically challenging even when it is.  So Chaud is magnificent on neutral to warm-leaning complexions, be they pale, golden or deep.  Cool-toned, sallow-tending or ashy punters should probably look elsewhere for a statement shade and I can't see it doing dark eye circles, stale tans or toner-deficient blondes any favours either, so it's possibly not something to pic up on impulse.  Not that you really can since it's one of those annoyingly elusive Pro shades.
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MAC So Chaud (matte) is a delicious pillar of hypnotic orange.  These two tabletop tube shots are pretty accurate, especially that one to the left there which is fairly darn close to reality.  On my dark lips it turns oooh, maybe 5% deeper, but doesn't head in a redder direction.  At all.  You will be wearing a straight shot of orange-orange, so abandon all thoughts of coral or peach.
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When I recommend SC to warmer babes, that's not to say you need to be orange all over to give it a good home.  I'm the opposite of tanned myself; even though I still look like a fucking glow worm at the height of summer, there is enough yellow in my eyes and freckles to overcome any other potentially cockblocking undertones.  It's one of the few oranges to give full and importantly lasting coverage to my strongly pigmented lips, which answers the prayers of people who can't usually wear the shade for this reason.  So Chaud does makes my unbleached teeth look slightly more yellow than they are, and if you have epic staining issues I'd avoid it, but oh well- who smiles in public anyway? 
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The formula is truly 100% delightful, smooth, richly pigmented and buttery, like a cross between an Amplified and a Matte; you can even brush it onto the lip at half-strength for a sheer, almost-pastel look without patchiness, which is fantastically useful.
In line with this malleability, the finish is slightly off-matte, even if the wear time is typically matte-tastic.  There are no technical issues at all- no bleeding, no patchiness, dryness, clag or discomfort.  In common with most of the products I perversely deny myself, So Chaud turns out to be one of the most comprehensively great items I've encountered and I fucking love it unreservedly.
L2R All MAC unless stated:
​Russian Red, So Chaud, Lady Danger, Chili, Strange Journey (LE), Urban Decay F-Bomb.
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* These are unflashed and taken in a range of outdoor afternoon light.  Camera sensors (and computer screens) tend to have trouble rendering the differences between orange and red.  Photographer's trick- stare at one of the reds at either end of the swatches, then at So Chaud- your eyes should become more sensitive to the contrast.

Below Left: So Chaud, MAC Ruffian Red (LE)  Not a bad shot, colour-wise.  You can see how the intensity and brightness of the orange is buildable in this squiggle.  Ruffian Red is a definite red with warm and orange undertones.   
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​Russian Red, So Chaud, Lady Danger, Chili, Strange Journey (LE), Urban Decay F-Bomb.
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*   Love Lipstick?  So do I.  More RubyHue Lipstick Review   *


Roses I didn't think I'd be impressed by, but am: Westerland, Tamora & Strawberry Hill

13/1/2016

 
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Westerland I thought would be one of those burnt-orange Seventies climbers that fucked your eyes in the bum, had no real scent but would at least busily consume a dud area in the garden. 

With this in mind, I threw an own-root cutting of it in behind some blackcurrant bushes, remembered to water it once and pretty much forgot it existed.  A couple months later I wondered what that blob of peach stuff was back there in that shady bit and discovered Westerland was not only exploding but flowering.  

​And a glorious creature it is, sort of like a shabbylicious Compassion with its tumbled mess of frilled marshmallow and apricot jam with a burst of deep golden stamens and fantastic dimensionality.  There is a decent, typical Hybrid Tea scent too, on a par in my garden with something like Old Port, supposedly a perfume superstar. 
I'd rate it a 7/10 for smell.  

These pictures look oversaturated but they're taken in gentle morning light and are fairly true to life, as you can tell from the mild tones on the surrounding timber.  Westerland really 
is this pretty, and apparently perfectly able to survive a crappy soil and insufficient light situation.

Next up in the heavily-dissed but actually rather spectacular category is the David Austin Rose, Tamora (below).  If you're staring into that endless creamy cognac and amber gradient wondering if it smells as good as it looks, in a word- yes.
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The literature says myrrh and/or maunders on in improbable and inaccurate directions.  Myrrh is certainly the anchoring note, but Tamora's fragrance is complex when fresh, with strong competing notes of warm green citrus peel, almost Kaffir-lime-like, and a glob of Manuka honey headspace.  The DA site says 'lilac and mimosa' but if that's lilac, I'm a fucking Komodo Dragon.  However you frame it, the scent gets a solid 8/10 for strength and character.

The yearling bush is slightly leggy in competition with a monster astilbe that was crowding it, but the emergent shoots are clean, glossy, mid-green and possess those cool flat cinnabar spines that I've seen cropping up on a couple of my newer DA roses.  One of its parents, Gloire de Dijon, is a lank, reluctant waste of space in my garden and the shovel's coming for it if it hasn't got its shit together by the end of the summer, incidentally.  You can't choose your family.
This guy is the unexpectedly lovely Strawberry Hill, which is blessed with the kind of warm meringue or confection pink that you don't often find in real-life roses.  This light is making it look a little blue, but it really is a mid yellow-pink, as per the colours you can see toward the centre of the rose.  

It holds these flattish blooms in a range of sizes high over an ample complement of glossy lime-green foliage and bright reddish thorns, recovering well from the fucking blackbird who insisted on landing on it and snapping off half its baby branches in spring.  
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The joyous idiosyncrasy of that foliage might make it a poor match for other vintage-style roses in a formal scheme, but I love it.  DA recommends it for an imperfect site and after watching it flower and power away in half-day tree shade, I concur.
Strawberry Hill's scent is an onomatopoeic version of its candy colour ; a fat-fisted face-punch of sweet myrrh and melty almond nougat.  8/10.

*   More vegetal beauty   *   Roses   *   Selected Ravings   *


Monday slash Tuesday slash random nailbrush blues

12/1/2016

 
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Shifting a tonne of big-arse rocks is not exactly an alluring prospect and we've got no money for expedient additions.  I'm not usually this design-challenged, but as you can probably tell by the budget nature of this MsT instalment, inspiration isn't exactly oozing from my apertures at the moment.  It was a toss between whining about this shit and showing you pictures of this disgusting object a friend found in Germany.  I decided to do both.
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Kierkegaard would say there's no reason not to do shit like that and my own hedonic animus stopped vomiting down the back of someone else's sofa long enough to concur wholeheartedly.  
​
As penance I'm thinking about writing a few horticultural pieces this year for the basic broke-joke novice who doesn't know an osteospermum from an arisaema.
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I don't know what to do with the centre island in my front lol, garden, which is just a fucking weird wedged-shaped wasteland of old concrete slabs and balding gravel, with < this bullshit rock installation in the middle against the house.
It's full of nice plants that have been jammed into available soil pockets and, as you can see, look like a bunch of unholy gibbering shite together.
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A pink were-nailbrush.  It looks like... like something surgically extracted from Nicki Minaj or a Kardashian?  After unexplained fever and rashes?

​Lol- unexplained.  

I blame the white chocolate, pistachio and rosewater ganache-injected donut I ate on Friday for this echo-chamber lassitude, and rebuke thee Satan for making me the kind of person who enjoys jamming a steel confectioner's plunger into a such a passive and yielding mass.
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 Just because gardening can seem intimidating and exclusive and I'd like to help other weirdos get into something rewarding.

I am aware that all this is boring the tits off you.  It's boring them off me.

Anyway, here's a bit of Tori Amos.  R's more of a professed Toriite than moi but Boys for Pele and Choirgirl Hotel are definitely the flavour of the blood in The Blackthorn Orphans' tangled veins.
EDIT: Oh and yeah- have you seen Making a Murderer yet?  That 10-hour Netflix documentary about American police fitting up a white trash family for rape and then murder etc that everyone's banging on about?  For once the hype is righteous; it is a fucking awesome piece of work and horribly chilling cautionary tale (don't talk to the cops, ever) of systemic failure and corruption worthy of every free-thinking person's time.  It shocked the shit out of us, and we consider ourselves neither fans of the current law enforcement establishment nor particularly naive about its dark-sided shenanigans.

Set aside a weekend to watch it.  Then write off the rest of that week as you walk around gobsmacked by the implications.  There are ways and means of accessing it online for those of us lucky enough to live in the rest of the world wink wink.

EDIT EDIT: RIP David Bowie.  He didn't mean that much to me personally and seemed a wee bit too happy to accept credit for stuff he neither came up with nor epitomised, so I'm not going to wank on.

No links.  Look in the damn sidebar.  I put a whole bunch of shit over there.


liked these rare historic posters in the Guardian

11/1/2016

 
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You can find out about their context in this G gallery.  I prefer them mysterious and randomised.

​You can actually buy copies of them
here at Centuryguild.net.

*   More fantastic work by other people   *   Photoessays   *


The Blackthorn Orphans Serialization: Inferi Invidia 3

9/1/2016

 
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​Rabbit slippers, the plastic eyes of their animal faces scuffed to the appearance of blindness, hushed Susan's progress through an alluring window of license.  Wandering outside her uniform and working hours was a sapid novelty expanded by solitude; she peered out at the night from the gallery before attending to the objects standing at its far end.  A punching bag of oxblood leather hung on a chain in the eastern corner like some alien drupe, a dozen others stacked against the wall.  To its left three easels stood draped in drop-cloths.  Reaching into her pocket, she dragged out a blue jelly snake and put its head between her teeth, lifting the corner of the longest cowl.

The hidden work proved to be a line drawing of a blackbird's stiffly-plicated corpse.  She frowned, twisting the snake around a finger while it occurred to her that the image, so clean of ghosting corrections, was a print; bending at the knee, she touched a finger to the paper, gathering a smear of graphite that sent her sharply backward, looking downward for the feathered body she half-expected at her feet.  Such ex nihilo virtuosity cauterized her interest and drove her quickly from the studio.

The floorboards provided a record of the building’s fortunes, scarred with circles of raised grain where windows had admitted rain, holed through and crumbling along the skirting in episodes of rot.  The half-moon was bright enough to stand in for the artificial lighting wholly absent from large sections of the upper story.  On the wall before the stairs the goat head remained silkily hirsute and haughtily dissociative.  The blond intruder’s attempt to access William’s suite gave Susan cause to question the dignity of the enterprise, armed even as she was with an invitation.  It was more difficult than she imagined to try the handles; they proved unlocked, and sliding past, she stood a foot inside without progressing any further, whelmed by the shadow-stroked array before her.

The rooms were served by the second of the balconies to the rear of the house, and the moon gazed through its glassed doors onto a gigantic tester bed standing at the centre of the flamboyant chaos, its frame sending its spiraling elephantine pillars toward the ceiling.  The undulant mattress wore hand-sewn ticking striped with bright mint green and leaked white feathers onto the floor.  Two copper lanterns, their sturdy candles half-expended, stood on a coffer of crimson-stained timber at the end of the bed, its grain ticked as though with flecks of gold.  Serpent-headed orobouros had been carved into the face of each compartment.  

Along one side of the bed sat a battalion of smaller boxes and miniature chests of brass-bound fruitwood, mottled quill and mink-black lacquer with lids ajar, ravished by a careless inventory.  Some held little bales of yellowed linen while their neighbours plainly displayed the fierce, primary gleam of artisan jewels, Turkoman carnelian, thick Swat and Berber silver and limpid Indian enamels.  Other chests had been pushed back against the persimmon walls to leave a generous aisle on either side of the frame, though these ways were compromised by spidery crates of wine and a mound of clothing dumped on the ground beside the french doors.  Her slippers were slowed by the delicious thickness of the lambswool tulu lying underfoot, their tousled motifs starkly blocked in walnut brown and scarlet.  Two small anterooms lay to either side, one revealing a glimpse of a pedestal basin and aged white tiles, the other lying in darkness.  The bizarre and diffuse luxury seemed to follow, in handmade abstracts, the principles of an organic wilderness, the bed posts forest stalwarts, the chests like outcrops between plains of shaggy carpet, their crazed geometry and drunken flowers wearing the kilterless flourishes of some vast nomadic domain.  A narrow space at the head of the bed offered her a place to marshal her thoughts and Susan sank down, lifting a paper scroll she had briefly flattened with her leg.  

It unraveled in her lap, exposing its contents to the light over her shoulder.  A progression of Japanese images painted in masterful outline and delicate colour began with a courtesan greeting a prospect on a blossom-veiled bridge.  It progressed swiftly into the unflinching depiction of her entire repertoire, as requested by the client who seemed as inexhaustible as his purse.  The end of the scroll lapsed down her legs while she followed the heroine’s explicit adventures, through the bohemian sector of Edo, a forest infested with amorous trolls, a colony of long-deprived scholars and a rustic fishing port, before she was returned with perfect sang-froid to her quarters in the Floating World.  Susan exclaimed softly to herself and lifted her gaze toward the door glass where a face reflected dimly behind her own sent the scroll coiling down her shins, William’s unnerving smile greeting her beneath the hood of his sweatshirt.  He knelt on the far side of the bed and reached for something underneath it.

“Wow, I was looking for that shunga everywhere.” he grinned, crossing the mattress on all fours and sitting beside her to peruse the abandoned erotica.  “I love the en levrette... his face is priceless.  Utamaro knew posh girls like the back of his hairy hand but no one rocks a horny troll party like Hokusai.  Have you seen a bag in here?  Black record bag, sort of falling to pieces?”

As he pushed back his hood Susan vacated the bed and stumbled backward over a crate of wine. 

“I er... I was just over this way, and I... didn’t think you were... um, home...”

He smiled again.

“It's not like I'm clutching any pearls, Christabel... it's my porn." he laughed.  "Bede... you haven’t seen Bede here, have you?  My height, looks like me, pony hair?”  He patted his pockets in a cloud of distraction.

“Sorry, no.  I’ll um, go...” she offered, hoping to duck past him.

“No no no... you need a drink after that lot.”

“I can’t.  The agency has a fit if they find out you drink at work.”

​“If Opal La Rue told me I couldn't drink, I'd chug a magnum in her lap and piss my damn pants.  What does your agency say about rifling through porn or...”  He leant forward with one brow raised, peering downward.  “Pocket snakes?"

She scowled, holding to the sentiment, then laughing, tugging the packet of jellies from her cardigan and offering him one.  He pulled it free and sucked its length into his mouth, chewing briefly before ejecting it into his hand.

"You didn't even know what that was, did you?" she chuckled, to which he shook his head, wide-eyed.  "Did your mother never tell you about putting strange things in your mouth?"

​"I know what you're saying.  It might not be a lolly next time."

Susan looked back down at the scroll.

“I thought it was artistic.” she insisted, watching him drag an oak tray from under the bed and blow the dust from its row of crystal tumblers.  Another manual foray produced a box of lizard-skinned fruit and a bottle half full of grass-green liquid that roiled with an active content barely contained by solution.  Accepting a glass from him, she looked around for a place to sit, not daring to resume her seat on the bed and eventually composing herself upon a rug beside it; William followed her lead, setting the bottle in the midst of his folded legs.  She watched him sip his drink and peel the skin from one of the nameless fruits, lapsing from discursive verve into that other of his native states, a perfected and halcyon placidity that settled like leaves and stilled his face and hands, the striping on his sweatshirt at once feline and felonious.  “What is this?” she exclaimed, holding her glass to the candle light.

"Bollchu.  Friends make it at home, and they’re usually pretty f..."  He consulted her expression and she nodded earnest encouragement.

"Please say fuck... if I don't hear someone swear in the next twenty four hours I'll probably throw myself off the roof."

"Well, as I meant to say, they're usually pretty fucked up when they cook, so sometimes it’s baby water, sometimes it’s devil piss.  Cul sec." 

She demurred, still eyeing the liquor doubtfully.

"It's just that bollchu sounds like a sneeze, and it's... green."
"Everything good is bad, in some way."  Whilst his smile did not convince her, she she took a mouthful and almost choked on it, the virulent potion scorching her throat and leaping into her sinuses like plumes of flame.  Her watering eyes returned to the scroll once more.
"Can you read Japanese?"

He reached back for it and smoothed it out over his legs, contemplating the shunga's commentary and glancing at her expectant smile, though after some ponderous reckoning William suppressed one of his own.

"No." he confessed, gaze falling to the newsprint hanging from a crate of wine.  "But ah, attends en peu...recherche de la météo d'une ville en France ou dans le monde... pluie, brouillard... frais..."  As he read she drifted back against an uncertain assortment of cushions, watching the understated vowels fall from his lips as though they were shapes in a parade of purring and vaporous curlicues that encircled her slowly, given soft wings by his voice.  Though she did not notice William reached out and pushed the cardboard box toward her without taking his eyes from the page or breaking his analgesic narrative.  She sat in a diaphanous contentment that dropped to a slight frown at its conclusion, her blush returning.

"What was that?"
"Weather for the Paris metropolitan area, nineteen forty nine."  He leant forward and picked her right hand from her knee, turning it over.  “Hmmm... firstborn... alone... sweet tooth... something about twins.” he added, frowning at the lines crossing her palm.
“I’m a Gemini... how did you know that?”
“I read resumés.”  He took more fruit from the box and set it in her hand.  "Longan.  They look like eyeballs but please don't let that stop you."  Knocking back the liquid in her glass, Susan took a deep breath while it went down, attempting to peel the leathery drupe and grimacing at the sight of the gelatinous flesh beneath.  "Better than rubber snakes." he promised.  He was correct, the webbed grey pulp melting in a fragrant jellybean savour.  She spat out the staring black seed and accepted another.

"I might have the wrong end of the stick, but... there was a blonde woman, with a lot of Dolce and Gabbana... I caught her trying to break into your room.”  
"Kali ni'ah... the Rachel.  What did she say?” 
“I don’t remember much, but she wasn’t very happy.”  Susan glanced at his reaction.  While not obviously immodest or ill-fitting, there was something in the way he wore clothing that was persistently suggestive, his body so resistant to containment that it reminded her of colonial portraiture, of indigénes standing in the stiff, alien garments foisted on them by studio photographers.  The curious quality was so pronounced that she was almost relieved when he dragged the pullover from his head and discarded it, though the aging T-shirt beneath, skewed sideways across his shoulders, revealed a white stripe of skin over the low waist of his jeans.  Her gaze wandered toward to it as he spoke.

​“No one believes this, but Rachel is really, really not my fault.  My brother says I should hit it with the big gauge, but that’s his answer to everything... if a bus full of crippled kids was parked across the drive, he’d yoink the fucking handbrake so he wouldn’t lose his reservation."  His phone began to flash again.
"Is she really that bad?"
"She's hell on donk rims."
"But you're still... together?"

He sagged visibly, pouring himself another deep shot of the green liquor.

"No... I've tried escaping, but I just... I fail.  Behind all this er, masculinité formidable, I'm a big dumb chickenshit."  William confessed.  "It's just... I don't know... too easy to be cruel.”  She watched him fumble with the telephone.  “Now you’re wishing I only drank alone.  Don’t worry, I’m totally notorious for my overfamiliarity, it’s not anything you’ve done in a previous life.  Putain!  I hate this fucking thing!”

Susan shrugged at his struggle with the appliance in question.

"Turn it off."

He looked to her again, uncertain.

​"I don't know how.  I just leave where I can't hear it."
"Yes, I know."  Leaning over her lap, she took it from him and flicked through its menu until its lights died.  "There you go.  She did seem a bit mental... that Rachel."  She frowned and plucked a piece of longan skin from her teeth.  “When someone’s nutty, you're not helping them by letting them go on, though.  All you can do is say no to them and mean it... if you're serious about wanting them to go away.”  She looked back at him pointedly, and he rolled his eyes at his own acedia.  “Nutters are like everyone else, really.  They might be crazy, but they’re not stupid.  If there’s nothing in it for them, then they’ll give up eventually.”

The warm smell of her skin was somewhat diluted by the liquor and incense that hung about the chamber, though it had begun to disturb his ease and made him want to stare at her in spite of her perspicacity.  Her hair was contained in a small tail and she wore an rust-coloured dress beneath a emerald cardigan, the elemental hues intensifying one another, recalling to him the fluttering finery of Ayubid mujahidîn and the courtyard gardens of Bactrian merchants, their sunbaked walls pinning back the scouring wastes.  Her gifts did not amount to the passive, expectant beauty that had so long defeated his esteem; the bright pneuma of something greater moved within her, humbling the liberties he was so accustomed to taking.

​“I actually spoke to him the other day... your brother.” Susan confessed.  William laughed as he rolled a longan between his teeth.  “It’s not funny!" she scolded.  "I didn't know if he was going to fire me or eat my liver.” 
“Don't worry, it’s not you.  He pink slips me every day of the year, in his mind... he’d fire the entire fucking population for breathing too loudly if he thought he was just head of human resources and not the fucking boss of everything.”
“He's not always like that, is he?”

He leant forward, urging her to do the same so that their heads almost met in an attitude of conspiracy.  

"Yeah, pretty much.  We just let him clank his chains and chase us off the lawn.” he whispered.  “It’s not that he’s all bad... it’s just that people tend to er, qu'est-ce que c'est... die of exposure looking for the good bits.  It's like the top of Chomolungma... you know it exists, you can even see it sometimes, but you prefer oxygen to glory.”  Her eyes brightened at Edward’s memory, dread diffusing back into circulation.  “It was worse, believe me.  A lot worse.  At least I’ve got him telling me to fuck off.  That’s a step up from just the look.”  William attempted the expression himself and was able to frame the livid shape of it, if not the caustic colour required by an entirely successful projection.  "I'll only say this once... don't put your tongue on him... we're not insured for it."

​"Now I'm going to think that every time I see him.  Should I know why he's like that?"
"There are reasons."  He struggled with the available terms.  "Er... some parts are missing.  Product may differ from photo after assembly..."
"It's private, in other words." she offered.  He nodded, relieved.  "Why live with him, then?"
"Let's just say he needs supervision and I'm independently broke."
"So that's not your BMW in the garage?"

He lay back against the frame, rolling his tongue behind his teeth.

"You've gone right off me now, haven't you?"

Susan chuckled and caught sight of her watch as she leant back with her glass.

​“This’s late for me.” she told him, looking once more around the room.  The skirt of her dress clung to her tights as she stood up, and she dipped quickly to smooth it down.  “See you at work I suppose.  Thanks for the pint.”

William stretched out slowly on the floor with the bottle, his arm cushioning his head and framing his wide smile.

“What are their names?” he called, watching her frown in the doorway.
“Who?”
“The rabbits.”
Smiling down at her slippers, she shook her head and walked on into the hall.
“None of your business.”        


CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce           

*   You can read the whole Book here for free   *  Or you could pay for it   *


Sweetmeat presents: Michiel Huisman.  Yeah.  Uh huh.  No, go on- I'm listening.

8/1/2016

 

​Michiel Huisman misplaced his hairbrush.
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Michiel Huisman holds sheep incorrectly.
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Michiel Huisman is too big for that Vespa.  
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​I'll allow it


​in my pants.

Christmas Holidays, West Coast of New Zealand 2015- Part 1

6/1/2016

 
We don't usually go anywhere at xmas.  Partly because we can't afford it, partly due to too-hard basket factors but mostly because we already live in one of the places by the sea that other people rent for their xmas holidays.  But driving frantically and at length on dangerous roads from one beach town to its exact analogue on the opposite coast is traditional in New Zealand, so this year we set redundancy aside and went to stay at my sister's house in Granity, the place that featured in my winter road trip posts.

Last time we took the Lewis Pass over the Southern Alps but this time we cut inland via Arthur's Pass.  It's a slight time saving from Dunedin and a different, more hardcore alpine landscape to distract oneself from other peoples' driving, which is important during two hour's worth of narrow, madly sinuous cliff-side blind corners.
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(Keeping It Real Tourist Advisory- while the Arthur's is undeniably beautiful, it's not a cycleway at all and the number of obviously inexperienced cycle trip peeps trying to negotiate this zero-margin route was fucking crazy.  If you're coming here on a bike tour expecting a mature, Euro-style infrastructure and driver consideration, you're shit out of luck.)  

Soggy weather shut down any attempts at documentation so you'll just have to image a bunch of heavily-wooded tilt thrust mountains.  

Left- Kea, the local hoodrat parrots that hang around tourist areas on the Arthur's, waiting to jack your pies, steal your shiny objects and peel the rubber fixings off your vehicles. 
Think really hardened, brazen café sparrows crossed with those bastard temple monkeys and throw in a penetrating cackle at your expense.  We fed them the slightly slimy sausage rolls from the Arthur's Pass Café (Keas are omnivorous, not discerning) as a punitive measure but they were all like whatever, ate them, burped in our faces and went off to start shit somewhere else.  Tangentially, R says the coffee at AP Café is fine; while I find the pies gravy-heavy and pedestrian, my hot chocolate didn't kill me and because I am a a dirty sleaze bag, I noticed they had a tall dark drink of coffee-guy with a Scottish (?) accent and confiding manner cue Hannibal Lecter fava bean sucking noise.
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Right- The Pohutukawas (poe-hoo-too-car-wha), in full bloom when we arrived.  Strong sunlight fuzzes up their brilliant crimson to an almost hallucinogenic extent.  They're somewhat cheesy introductions from the North Island, dominating the popular imagination in the way northern conifers have come to symbolise a generic xmas in Europe.
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My sister's place is an old weatherboard  miner's cottage sitting between this long stand of post-glacial hills and a yard that peters down toward the beach.  She went down the all-white road during its last interior do-over including floors, which pains me.  I do like its déshabillé-ity; she's sort of over it.
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I could photograph these hills all day.  The hypnotic density and textures of their cloaking vegetation is sometimes difficult to credit even with the naked eye.  

​Wekas stalk the flax swamp at their feet, crossing the road to raid gardens and get into the rubbish, replacing feral cats which in olden times were possibly some sort of local delicacy.  Lol.  I didn't see any and did not enquire.
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Sparkle, the ancient pig dog and Rita, my final niece.  2.5 years and a full dose of ham under her figurative belt.  She likes masks, the same books over and over, picking all the flowers and getting her own way.  Don't we all?
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She is the Wizard of No, blasting those that displease her with the majestic power of her manual directives, committing all five fingers of power to her anathemas.  I made her the red tigon mask and call her on her bullshit when she's bitching at bedtime.  We get along fine.
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Settling in to the spare room.  ^ An example of the fairly high-grade local junq.  I usually hit the charity shop hard but it was fucking closed this time.
Xmas day comes and goes. Only the strong survive.
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And now we make party.  Badminton party.  We haven't played for 20 years and never in a borrowed fucked up chicken mask.  Just following orders.
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Full moon through the dying cabbage trees in the back yard.  The Tasman Sea is eroding this part of the coast, regularly inundating the rear of these adjacent properties and salting up the water table.  Residents are stuck between spending remedial money they don't really have on houses that might not have a future anyway and someday writing the whole neighbourhood off, which will probably happen in my lifetime.  Local councils are impoverished by the death of coal mining and our national representatives are a pack of depraved arseclowns, so I don't envy their plight.  
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The offending beach, to the north and south.  It is so peaceful and benign in its rapacity.
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Felix is a hardcore beach tweaker; sand and water are his amphetamines.  He does not stop.  

​Ever.

Sparkle is similarly moved by this environment but dignity and arthritis intervene these days.
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If the beach looks empty, it's because it usually is.  Avoid the clichéd destinations and New Zealand offers almost endless scope for turning up your nose at other tossers and going somewhere else to get the whole place to yourself.  
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Below right- the West Coast is a geological orgy.  Local rivers and beaches serve up an endless selection of marble, agate, schist, quartz, nephrite, bowenite, pyrite, micaceous shit and other lithic porn for all your pointless stonehoarding requirements.  We never leave without a large bag(s) of tumbled precious.
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Stone deity and offerings, a recent innovation.  Local stone carver installation, not traditional Maori religious practice.  

Not sure it's working.
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Let's go down the road a wee bit.
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Dozing Standardbred, the local trotting breed.
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Unimpressed by our lack of vegetable offerings and/or firm excursion plans. 
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Cottages; always so cute when you're not the ones shuffling buckets around under the leaks or nailing new bearers to the timber turning to dust under the front room or cussing out the rat nest in the toilet wall or I've made my point.  

​
We love fucked-out old hoopty places, will probably always live in one and find new houses generally about as appealing as the refrigerated corpses of strangers dead of unknown causes.  New carpet solvents and windows that form a seal make me anxious.  

​WTF curtains, rotting piles, timber beetles and lumpy walls 4 eva.
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Sunset and the sandfly hour.  If you're heading to coastal New Zealand in the warmer months, check local sources for the biting insect situation > because that shit can literally make or break your stay and I mean literally literally.  Though there's no (known) communicable disease issue, they can be utterly intolerable.  

​If it seems like there's some sort of direct and highly ironic relationship between the scenic value of an area and the density of its sandflies, that's because there is- the little fuckers favour rivers, undisturbed forest and beaches.  
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The west coast is infamous for its clouds of hungry Austrosimulium and this year we were treated to both local species, A australense and A. ungulates. which was awesome.
If you're reactive, you'll end up covered in a pox-like mass of red welts that swell and itch and burn and keep you awake as you scratch little ulcers into their surface because skinlessness is the preferable state.  I counted thirty-four bites around one ankle before reaching for the insect spray, and I hate that stinky toxic shit.  

​Singing black clouds were dancing around my head while I waited for the shot below.  I had to run back to the house before they took me away to meet their evil queen and/or persuaded me to resume smoking.
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Part 2  H E R E- jellyfish and waterfalls; more obscure New Zealand. 

*   Photoessays   *   Selected Ravings- real good written-down thinkings   *   


liked these pieces by Mark Fleming

6/1/2016

 
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Migration  a commentary on urban nature.  You can see the rest of it  H E R E

Monday slash Tuesday slash 2016

5/1/2016

 
Auspicious clouds blowing out of the south on the first day of the year.

Auspicious in that they're fairly weird for here.  What does it all mean?
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Rain.  
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I think they're cirrus but the literature is fucking confusing, so I could be talking out my arse about that.  Could not decide if these are c. uncinus (mares' tails), c. fibratus, or even decaying cirrus vertebratus (fish bones).  Cloud nerds can go ahead and classify that shit to their hearts' content in the privacy of their mothers' basements. 
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I love clouds.

They are beautiful, transient strangers, a perfect demonstration of the attractions and dissolutions that form and then rescind us.  

​Or some shit like that.  
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You know fucking Donald Trump and more importantly Donald Trump's Fucking Hair (people think the former wears the latter, but it's the other way around) hate clouds and all forms of humidity.  They don't recognise net worth, disregard your immigration policies and you can't pay them to go away. 

Their inevitability pleases me greatly.

​ 
In morbid news- RIP Lemmy.  While I generally thought Motörhead boring except for Ace of Spades, I appreciated the perversity of his modus vivendi and glorious sartorial policy.

We are living in a post-Lemmy world.  That was always going to be a surprise.
  Full umlaut salute; snake eyes watching you.
Does this year feel different to you?  It sort of does to me, which is a bit weird since I don't really respect many chronological designations and barely know which day of the fucking week it is most of the time.  2016 has this strange, ether-y sort of character, like something running on fumes.   It actually feels uncharted to me, whereas 2015 was like a retread right from the beginning.

Ambiguity; worse things have happened.


I've added a new 'Back to Top of the Page' button that will save you having to scroll like a demon.  It's that little grey thingy in the far right bottom corner that appears when you scroll down.  I set it to the fastest possible return speed just for the cheap thrills.  You're welcome.  And if you've had enough of being fat after xmas, check out my advice on losing shitloads of weight, for people who can't lose weight.  I still haven't put any back on and it's been a few years now so I'm not talking out of my arse about that.

We might ease into the new year with some holiday shots.

Happy New Year

1/1/2016

 
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2016.
Let's try not to fuck this one up.

Even though the macrodemocratic process has been chain-whipped to death and dumped under a pile of soggy cardboard in an alley somewhere, its irrelevance makes way for other things.

We can all devise and participate in new ways of relating to both each other and our environment.
We can never be priced out of or excluded from creativity and private autonomy.

How are you going to exercise yours?


We're still recovering from going on holiday for the first time in decades, but we got some good shots so we'll post them soon.  Abnormal transmission will resume probably on Monday the 4th.
Cheers queers
​K 



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