I might have showed you a few of these images before but I thought I'd do a few themed photo posts this week to keep the workload light.  We're still super-busy with dreary adult actually-doing-shit commitments but fear not, there is no wholesome underlying ethic.  We will shed our stupid man suits and return to our usual programme of louche et fainéant shiz in a mini-jiffy.  We're also in the middle of documenting our annual quince jelly-making orgy so expect a presentation on that in the NF.  

I know I haven't been reviewing many fillums of late and must confess to something of a neural blockage in that respect, being locked in the struggle to review 12 Years a Slave for about eight weeks now and finding myself unable to express my thoughts on The Act of Killing at all.  WTF.  I know quite a few peeps are keen to see these films whilst harbouring concern about their disturbing/bummer potential and I feel you on that, so I'll make a better effort soon since one of these projects is mandatory viewing and the other not so much.

Look out for the next bit of the book, posted as per usual on Friday; it's getting good.
And a sort of hot.
And creepy.  

Just like seaweed.

Unused to the single-minded steering wheel, Susan wrestled the Jaguar with both hands into the darkness of a corner parking space, riding the accelerator and edging its nose into a row of bushes before William jerked the handbrake and sat quietly, swallowing a smile.  

“Did anybody die?” she demanded; he wisely reserved his response.  The expansive carpark was generously-proportioned but poorly lit, the pale blue globes atop their silver poles casting a glow that barely troubled the tarmac.  From patting at her hair in the rear view mirror she gazed across the acre of grounds laid out around the gallery complex, clothed in supine vegetation in the two shades of oily grey-green specified by an architect rightly concerned by any vertical challenge to his structural child.  “Are you sure this is the right place?  It looks like the tinned fruit factory on the way to my Nana’s.”  

He chuckled at her observation and sniffed at the breeze.

"Well, I smell brain farts and ulcerating insecurity so we can't be too far off."  They turned a frown to one another, possessed of a coinciding disinclination.  Susan brushed a spiderweb from his shoulder, then climbed onto her knees, leaning over the console to kiss him again with less haste and more venturesome enterprise, standing her hands on his legs.  The sound of footfalls on the tarmac, like deer hooves trotting over ice, caused her to look past him at a face resolving in the darkness over the passenger door.

"Privet, milaya moya.  Don’t worry, darlinks.  I wait.” it said.  The remark was languid and feminine, but its Slavic accent cut the English consonants and tumbled the snarling letter.  William leant out to allow the creature to press her lips to each side of his face.

“Susan, Petrouchka Belyaev..." he sighed.  "Strange but not a stranger."

The diminutive intruder leant against the vehicle in a high-collared coat of dense red fox, examining Susan with stone-coloured doll’s eyes in a face of startling, dead-white delicacy.  Her hair draped her shoulders in heavy, bitter chocolate falls from a part on her right brow; it would have formed a luxurious adjunct to an extraordinary beauty had not some process scoured life from its materials and dosed her grey gaze with nightmarish, autonomic avidity, its staring pupils fixed in that dilated state of her decease.  Susan was strangely moved by the sight of such expired loveliness, a counterpoint unto itself in its repulsive allure.

“Ahh... I see... he write to me of you... you are the vila of his every dream, this Susan he fall so much in love with...”  Susan’s blush came as much from the creature’s unblinking scrutiny as from the nature of her declaration.  Strings of amber lurking about the latter's neck clicked together softly when she moved, the vampyre reading her in an instant.  "I would delight to be once more so foolish.”  

William shook his head at Susan’s silent inquiry.

“Never tell a five hundred year old devushka anything private.”
“I think your child bride is very well inform.” Petrouchka observed, extending a glove toward him and rolling her fingers expectantly.  “You have key?  Perhaps... you have car for me?”
“Just the house.  You can’t drive it into a river.”

She turned back to Susan.  

“You give yourself to monster, in a place for motor vehicle?  What did your mother tell you?”  William stared at her pointedly, and she stared back, batting her silky lashes and leaning both elbows on the door.  “Do you know, kotik, that in his land, the young men are train for century by priestess, to please a woman?  They don’t teach that at the Sorbonne.  Make him take you somewhere nice.”
“You can’t have the car, but I’ve cleared you staying, so as long as you mow some lawns everything should be okay.”  Secreting the keys he gave her in her coat, she smirked and slid her hands after them into her unseen pockets.  “There is a guard and er... Ed’s cranky concubine.” William counseled.  
“Your brother?  He have girlfriend?  Ni khuya sebe!  No, I don’t believe.”
“Believe.  And I wouldn’t breathe too hard in her direction... just... don't.  There’s a room at the end of the attic.  And Pet, there’s some surveillance, so keep it low.”
She clicked her fingers in irritation.
"Vse zayebalo... even here there is trouble?"

As though offering to demonstrate, a long black vintage ambulance roared into the car park in an arc that lurched to a halt nearby, the colour dying in its staring headlights.  The rear doors were kicked apart to disgorge a scarcely creditable density of passengers, some already bickering and shoving at each other as their shoes hit the tarmac, complaining as they lit their cigarettes.  In the dim light Susan glanced back at Petrouchka, comparing her blank, undifferentiated pallor to that of the new arrivals.  The driver slid down from the running board in a vivid fuchsia evening gown that drooped under the weight of its aurora borealis beading and became entangled in its heels, forcing the wearer to double over and hoist the hem, exposing crooked, goatish legs and orange fishnets.  The glittering apparition changed course toward the Jaguar upon espying it.  Petrouchka turned to examine Siobhan with an air of acute distaste.

“I don’t like this country.  Too many troll, not enough bridge.” she muttered.

“There’d be room aplenny if it weren’t fer th’ weight a fuckin paynim trash slidin off a tuna boat ten tahmes a fuckin night... if it aint the spics it’s the fuckin chinks, an if it aint them it’s beet-suckin Russ’in cooter.”  The volume of Siobhan’s assertions grew with the creature’s proximity and it nodded from Petrouchka toward William.  “Him an ol’ Happy Face don’t need nobody cumberin ‘em on the way t’ flushin the rest a us down the shitter with th’ help a that Opal cunt.” the vampyre urged, leaning over the door to glare at him and then offer a clammy hand to Susan.  She made no move to reciprocate.  “Huh... ahm espyin fe-male but ah kint hear a fuckin word outta it... ye gotta tell meh what ye do t’git em lahk that, cause mah way hurts th’ fuckin resale value.” 

Petrouchka excluded Siobhan from her farewell and disappeared into the darkness that had purveyed her.  The impatient mass that spilled from the back of the ambulance dissipated in an analogous manner, setting off across the carpark in their spangled, ironic evening wear, clutching ratted furs, tiaras and bedazzled handbags, save for a few that remained with the vehicle.  Siobhan took to leering across the car at Susan once more, then rolling its little black eyes down at William.

“Ah got eyes fer a tight piece a tail... if that’s what they handin round jest fer puttin on th’ fuckin uniform, mebbe ah oughta sign up an take th’ fuckin week off.”
“What’s all this?” William inquired.  Siobhan hoiked and looked back over its shoulder; a male passenger in jeans and a red-checked rodeo shirt re-emerged from the vehicle with something long and pale in his right hand, walking past the lamp post toward another bank of cars; Susan recognized him from the bollchu party.
“Mess of us got t’thinkin we might git along t’ Ed’s hoe-wrangle, git ol’ Opal squittin red bubbles heh heh heh.  That there’s Caleb...” it told Susan.  “He aint too fuckin smart, but ye don’t need Yale fer this shit.”  Perceiving Siobhan's commentary, Caleb called in their direction while William returned his brief salute.

"Yeah, I heard that, y' dirty neckfucker.  I'll get to you later." the lycanthrope promised.

He strode along the line of vehicles ensconced beneath the down lights, paused before a racing green Mercedes and swung the baseball bat in both hands into its windscreen, stepping back from the car into the darkness at the edge of the vacant bays.  The screaming alarm attracted two security guards from the margins of the gallery; they conferred beneath the silver awning for a moment before setting off toward the car park.  

"Er, maybe... something about discretion being the better part of something else..." William ventured, exchanging seats with Susan at her behest.  She slid down beside the door, peering over it almost unwillingly; behind the guards who stared at the perplexing damage to the Mercedes three figures precipitated from the shadow as though constructed of its motile darkness, each one grasping a long, blunt weapon.  She was, for once, entirely grateful for the velocity of their departure.

C O N T I N U E D   N E X T   W E E K
© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce

jamesnord
I love this image for so many reasons, technically and artistically.  It reminds me of a Chinese scroll painting with its subtle colours and composition, eloquent expression and the way the subject grades into the setting via texture.
Beautiful work.

I don't like Depeche Mode and sort of want to fight them, MMA styles.  Individually or together- whatever dude- I have the feeling I could take them.  Useless is therefore both a guilty pleasure and an especially perverse theme song and, just to sprinkle a little more pepper in my own eyes on a wednesday, the version you see here is not even my favourite.  I much prefer the Kruder/Dorfmeister remix (below).  Grudging props to any video shot in a quarry, though, especially one featuring something that looks suspiciously like a two-finger solo on a mint-green Gretch.  Lol.  That's entertainment.  

But fuck guitars.  The bass part is the shit and I highly recommend it for all your contemplative pedestrian/tuning out the sound of other people talking requirements.  When I'm at home I plug a fuzz (that nice silver Boss one) into my bass and play pointlessly embellished not-right versions of it to pass the time, to the delight of no one.

I did say it was a theme song.

I'm currently high as a dragon kite on solvents due to my commitments as a painter on a building site, since no one thinks writers should earn money any other way apparently, and am especially pissy since the only person with a radio A: insists on using it; B: loves classic hits and C: enjoys humming along to them and D: is 100%  tone deaf.  So if it's a light couple of blog weeks, blame toluene, dismissive Western attitudes towards artists and Elton fucking fuckity fuckhead John.

Interested in human sexuality?  Questioning your own?  Wondering why you're home jerking off when everyone thinks being bi should double your chances? (it doesn't, btw.)
Check out this thought-provoking piece in the NYT about the social and biological reality of swinging both ways (or not) and how the world perceives those of us who aren't especially dogmatic about the gender of our partners.  Did you know that's a thought crime in some circles?  Lol, if you've lived through the past two decades, of course you do.  I found myself nodding fit to bust over the bit about gender as well as sexual identity and all the questions that little doozy raises, and am pleased young folks are questioning received wisdom in that direction.

Where do we get off personally?  The Lovely R's straight as the straightest thing on earth and identifies as strongly male as far as gender goes.  I'm bi, and mentally sort of come down in the middle between the boy-girl polarities, gender-wise.  The fact that I've always attracted super-straight, overtly male men has long been mysterious to me, since I've never felt especially/conventionally girly and just assumed I'd end up with another ambiguous weirdo.  But I look very female and it turns out my tits have been trolling for straight action whether I liked it or not.  And another thing... I'm not attracted to butch girls, but my massively straight partner is while considering me pretty femme.  WTF.  Complicated, isn't it? 

I think it's safe to say we're not getting to the bottom of this shit any time soon.  Do read the article though; it might give you somewhere to start and it'll definitely give you something to argue about.

Ongoing Mitosis in a Drosophila melanogaster embryo
Fluorescent microscopy, 160x magnification by Karin Langenberg via biovisual
Green is DNA in mitosis.   Red is a nuclear protein.

o_o

There's a nice representative patch of native flora including some relict old growth surrounding a walk called Graham's Bush extending up that valley to the centre right.  We'll blog that trip one day.  Note the hideous industrial eyesore to the centre left; we have Port Otago Inc. to thank for that largely pointless excrescence.  It looks like it's gleaming; maybe you can polish a turd.

We left our dog at home because he is an unpredictable jerk in public and experience counsels us against attempting to suppress his desire for world domination/cyclist chastisement whilst carrying expensive camera equipment.

Above: Pivot slightly to the north of the abovementioned cone at the same spot and you're into this view of Otago peninsula, Quarantine and Goat Islands, from right to left respectively.  Yes they're sort of concatenated in this pic but life is full of challenges and I prefer clouds to topographical distinction so your expressions of anger and confusion are pretty much falling on deaf ears.  This is why I'm not a parent.

We're almost at Back Beach, but I'm not going to post pics of it.  There is neither an object nor an end to this journey, until we get hungry and go home for lunch.

Above right: Monterey Pines all the way home.  Hopefully there'll be a decent crop of mushrooms elbowing their way through the needles after a few days of rain.  We collect a number of delicious species from this slope but it's also home to quite a few toxic ones, so we don't recommend it to the dufus shroom virgin.  There's also a fair chance we might fall fifty metres onto the pointy rocks at the foot of the cliff.  That's natural selection for you.

Edward had lost count of the vaguely acquainted women that had broken from Opal’s preview party to attempt over-familiar congratulations, the most insistent dressing his clean pallor with itching stains in pink and coral gloss.  That braving an early arrival to secure an audience with the artist was a tactic lacking originality became quickly evident, and having expended the advantage to no avail they were left to clutch their drinks and keep their offers open via wretched bouts of hard posing.  Opal had selected Edward’s official consort for the evening carefully, burdening him with the daughter of prominent patrons in a salute to their lack of discernment and pecuniary restraint.  Leighton Sotherby-Aldrich hovered beside him looking every second of her eighteen years, smelling of her stylist's perfume and the blood that oozed from the margins of her bitten-down fingernails.  Her high-school ponytail had been recently amputated and she marked its loss by stroking at its ghostly length before returning the hand to her mouth; she shied at unexpected movement, stretching Edward’s nerves toward the limit of their considerable elasticity.  Opal cast several pointed glances toward them, standing before the largest of his paintings wrapped in black, swagged chiffon.  Leighton lifted a hand and ripped another strip of saliva-softened fingernail from the raw quick of her thumb.  



 The tiny silver hand seemed to sweep too slowly around the face of Susan’s watch; she looked up from the earrings laid out between her elbows into the dressing table mirror, popping her jaw.  The black straps of her dress kept sliding from her shoulders and she tugged the neckline down to keep them in place, then decided that the result was too revealing, picking up the hairspray can to add another dose of lacquer to the pinned-up style she had already begun to regret.  Philip had effected the shade of willow-pattern blue she had requested but the alteration sat uneasily in her reflection.  She chose tiny diamond drops and pushed them through her ears.

The bed legs groaned across the floorboards as she dragged them toward the windows, pushing the frame beneath them with her knees and kneeling upon the mattress to lean out over the sill, toward the casement William had patched for her.  The breeze sweeping upward from the wall fluttered the thin silk velvet of her dress against her body; with her hand on the latch she held herself in grim, determined stasis until fear lost its grip and fell away, allowing her to gaze down at the ground with a word in praise of her own fortitude.  Still smiling, she stooped for her shoes on her way toward the door.

William stood in the hall before the line of picture windows, watching the hot white face of a three-quarter moon through the tallest branches.  The solemnity of the suit that he had peculated from his brother's collection surprised her; she stared at it as she walked past him, pausing, then sitting down on the chair that had escaped the disused room.  Her reaction perturbed him, persisting as he came to her and knelt to fasten the straps on her shoes, his hands conferring a small cascade of incidental pleasures that distracted her momentarily.  

"You look..."
"Like I'm here to collect the body of your great uncle?" he proposed, grimacing slightly.  "I don't know about this get up... it's always Halloween for Kala'amātya..."
"Be quiet... I’m trying to think of the word.” she told him.  "You look lovely, actually."  She lowered her head and her voice together, looking down at her toes as they wriggled in her shoes.  "Too lovely."  He glanced up but she shook her head with her eyes screwed closed.  "I can't... I mean..."  She brought her hands to her mouth.  "It would be bestiality... wouldn't it?"  
“Oh... you mean... oh.  If you like...”
“It’s not funny!” Susan insisted, putting out her foot again.  “The left one’s still loose.”  To her relief the demanded amendment removed his gaze toward the ground.  He smoothed the silver-shot stocking down over her ankle, the sensation annulling her rebuttal, and his hands ascended and closed on her velvet-clad rump, drawing it toward him over the seat.  The silken lining of her dress slid beneath her as her knees parted wide on either side of him, her protestations falling spineless and propitiated.  The sight of him so close made her blood lurch in the darkness of her vessels, flushing through her chest and burning in its empty spaces as though she had held her breath too long.  
“Christabel, this is the woods, and we are animals, and that is all there ever is.” he told her, taking her hand and pressing it to the side of his throat, where her fingers settled, sensing the slow, eccentric cadence sounded by the chambers of his heart, a variant of her own, the rhythm that underscored all discourse.  He bent to kiss the eider-soft slope of her neck and the warm swell of her cheek, the quiet colour of her eyes disappearing beneath their lids under the influence of his impalpable curare, so subtly narcotic that she wondered if he had been devised by some opprobrious authority to stamp a face on sin.  Her hands opened on his shoulders and came together at his nape, bringing his mouth to hers before some conflicting notion intervened.  He felt and tasted as he looked, cool and lunar, faintly honeyed, inviting so much more that she forgot herself and wound her arms and legs around him.  Opening her eyes she saw that his were closed, his artlessness chastising her.  Susan let him go and sat back slowly.   

“We should go...” she smiled, belying her own suggestion by unbuttoning his shirt.  “I mean... to this thing...”  She wiped her pink gloss gently from his mouth, her own lips parting as her thumb slid between his teeth, exclaiming softly at her own immodesty.  "We could... no.  We should just go.  I think I used too much hairspray.” 
“Your hair is making my hair jealous.” William assured her.  She glanced down at her cleavage, tugging at the bra that rode too high beneath the velvet and pinched beneath her arms; reaching back, she swore, loosed the catch and shucked it off, pulling it from the neck of her dress and throwing it away along the hall.  Susan consulted her reflection in the window pane, then his expression, his wide-eyed, blinking smile mutely applauding the measure.  
"Come on." she insisted, striding away down the hall.




Edward watched his phone ring unanswered in his hand, and slid it back into his jacket, feeling his own perverse resolve transforming into a regret of far greater mass.  None of the dubious interlopers of his worst expectation had showed their faces, though the night was still emerging from its infancy.  Not even the addicts and alcoholics in the invited crowd had begun to exhibit the behaviours for which the small but determined corps of paparazzi loitering outside were patiently waiting, kept from the gallery entrance by an equally dedicated phalanx of security.  Leighton Sotherby-Aldrich stared at him like a laboratory monkey sucking on the bars of its cage, her shallow breath drawn past an abolished overbite.

“I’m not allowed any pets but I did have an alpaca... I came home from school last summer and he was gone... no one'll tell me what happened.  I asked the maids and they won't say... they know, though...” she murmured, shrinking again inside her gaily-hued, single-shouldered gown.  “I guess you’ve never lost anyone you cared about.  Some people are lucky.  You probably have a really pretty girlfriend waiting for you.”  The idea seemed to at once depress and console her.




Lilian stood before the rack that housed her working wardrobe, her black crocodile suitcase lying open on Edward's bed, patient and empty.  Together the two objects stood against her intention to decamp and declared it token.  Too many of her belongings had found a home for her to effect the cauterised departure of her desires; with both arms she pulled her clothes from the stand and dropped them onto the case, where they slid away amid their plastic garment bags and lay like loose, discarded skins. 

The scarlet counterpane was cool beneath her cheek as she knelt and lay her head and shoulders on the bed, reminded of its owner even in an absence still notionally preferable to his presence.  The sunless heat and enslaving duress of their engagements mocked her like a scourge, limned in black-lit detail when she closed her eyes.  With his voice still in her head her hand pushed down between her legs but found no welcome; so completely had he come to embody physical exaction that the thought of administering it herself had degraded into counterfeit.  Her phone flashed again on the beside table, throwing gentian light against the wall, and she turned her face from it, Edward’s tortious resolve, both in refusal and pursuit, heaping stones on her desire to leave and lighting flames under the need to stay.  

Seeking a path between the two, she rose and made for William’s rooms.  In his black coat she found the turquoise capsules that he had kept from her the night before and turned the heavy garment upside down, shaking it until the thud of his silver zippo and the flutter of a small packet of foil came to rest on the carpet at her feet.




Sweat trickled down the side of Josephine’s neck and behind her ears, heat and blood gathering in the crown of her skull.  She hung from the ceiling in the hall of her apartment, arms rolling slowly down as she exhaled, making fists with her toes in their padded black suspension boots.  Her midriff twitched, stressed by the vigour of her exertion but she hung a while longer before reaching for the phone on the wall beside her and speed dialing, swinging gently as she caught her breath.  Her gaze drifted toward the thrice-deadlocked door at the end of the pale hall.

“Hey, Shaw.” she murmured.  "What's up?"

His tone reflected enthusiasm for any interruption to the boredom of his station.

"Not a lot.  They took off a while back, so I got the place to myself."

She rolled up and unhooked her boots from the railing.

"Did you get into the house yet?"
"Negative.  One's still withholding permission, and I don't want to push it."

She shook her head to herself.

"I don't know how down I'd be with no access.  Not with everything we're supposed to be coming back with."
"I never said I was down with it." he replied, holding the phone to his shoulder while he bent to reset one of the monitor units at the foot of the wall.
“Thought you liked the programme.”
“I like it fine when it doesn't kick me out in front of any cross hairs.”

Wiping the sweat from her neck with her towel, Josephine considered his reply for an interval that ran long enough to disperse the smack of impropriety. 

“They don't call O’Connor the Expender because he gives a damn.”
“He’s called that?”
“No one told you that before you signed on?” she smirked, pushing the advantage.  "You said the house and grounds are clear..."  He said nothing, though she could hear him rise and press the phone back to his ear.  "Ever thought about black-bagging it?"
"Yeah, I thought about it, but I get mugged at just for sticking to the script around here and..."
"Hey, forget I called.  Probably better I fly solo anyway." she interjected.
"They'll pick up any entry..."
"It always looks that way when you don't have too many intrudes under your belt.  Like I said, forget I called."  Josephine glanced down the hall again while another silence worked its hidden levers.  Shaw looked back at the huge white house.

"You'll need to make it out here in under thirty." 

C O N T I N U E D   N E X T   W E E K
© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce

They can be broken off by the impatient gardener and potted onto form more plants.  I'm going to let this guy go crazy and form the Medusa-type mass that make big old specimens such a sight to behold.

One of the older aloes in cultivation, mitriformis is predictably undemanding.  At least that's been my experience.  It would probably be just fine planted out in a well-drained spot since our conditions are almost identical to its original habitat (maritime climate, humidity, sea fogs, not stupidly hot etc).  But the flowering plant is such a pretty example that I'm going to cosset it in a pot for a while.  Despite its reputation for favouring certain substrates (sandstone for mitriformis, granite for distans) almost exclusively when in situ, this species has done perfectly well in my care with little-to-no soil PH/composition consideration, so I doubt it's worth tearing your hair out trying to source special mixes.  Like virtually all my succulents, they spend winter in an unheated open shelter and it doesn't seem to have fazed them in the least.

This is an extremely beautiful and rewarding aloe and an easy plant for the beginner.

 Fred Tougas
I don't know if this is Kyoto, but these colours and the weight of the eaves overhead are almost exactly akin to my own memories of visiting this city as a tween.

Come on now.  Look me right in the third eye and tell me you knew exactly, precisely what this word meant with not a shadow of a fucking doubt.  That it wasn't just something ye olde timey you'd heard kicking around and sort of nodded in response to but never really bothered with.  I've always heard it and thought one of two things (and sometimes both): small ribald purse or talkative breadstick.  The sound of it has always annoyed me faintly for some reason.  
According to my Apple Dictionary it means 1- a thing of little importance; a very easy task. 2-  a game in which small balls are hit and then allowed to roll down a sloping board on which there are holes, each numbered with the score achieved if a ball goes into it, with pins acting as obstructions. 3 - a short, light piece of music, esp. one for the piano.
Synonyms include there weren't any listed.  I'll have a go myself.  1 - trifle. 2- n/a 3- impromptu (?)
Remarks. If Bagatelle was a person they would definitely be male, on the far side of 50 wearing a rather threadbare white shirt, open to the navel, with more nicotine-yellow hair framed by that slightly discoloured placket than remains on the upper quadrant of his head, which is otherwise cloaked in a once-blonde prince valiant-type do.  Gold watch (9 kt) and lots of pistol gestures that would begin to look slightly despairing after 11.30pm and three too many Black Russians.  Would probably live on a decrepit boat with disintegrating bamboo blinds.  No pets.  They'd tie him down, man.

It's forgiving on flaky lips, feels slightly emollient and has what I'd call a superior mouth-feel to a lot of its unshiny sisters; not too stiff and you can press your lips together without bunching the pigment.  After wiping it off at the end of the day I expected my lips to be thirsty and definitely stained, but to my great astonishment, the stuff about it being full of moisturising ingredients actually appeared to be true!  What next- the freaking Ragnarök?  My mouth looked and felt perfectly fine, as though I'd worn something actively protective.  o_0

I've represented Terre de Feu twice in this hand swatch to demonstrate how workable it is, even in a hasty straight-from-the-tube application.  The first on the left is one pass, the next is about three.  With a brush you can achieve a translucent stain-like effect in a deep boysenberry pink, with fairly good lasting power.  You can shade and contour and get painterly; MUAs should look into TdF for this reason.  With a heavier hand you get a sophisticated medium berry; go a bit harder and you can set the dial to full-on goth.  If this is where you usually come out, I'd stick to Diva- you'll go through a lot less product and that's important to remember since Terre de Feu brings a shitty little two grams to the party compared to the standard MAC three.  Here in NZ, Nars is more expensive and that is not cool.  The twist-up mechanism seems okay, but the thinner product is more vulnerable to breakage than the MAC sticks; me no like that either.

 Elizabeth Rose Thompson

With his attitude of engrossment in his newspaper Edward might have lulled the less familiar observer into believing their entrée to the drawing room had gone unnoticed.  Lilian knew better, and said nothing as she set a kitchen chair against the wall, where she sat down with the bowl of crackling cereal that served as both diurnal meals.  The afternoon had pushed two broad, glowing arms into the shadowed chamber through the doors; her own indifference to domestic convention allowed her to appreciate the beauty of an empty room, though not, she suspected, to the same extent as her companion.  Resting the bowl on her bare thigh she sucked the spoon and returned it to the cereal.

“What's that called... when you can’t think what the fuck you were just doing?  Or if you did it?  Starts with D.” she asked, her voice echoing slightly.  
“Dissociation.” Edward replied.  He glanced at her briefly; her small grey T-shirt and brief skirt emphasized the condition she had begun to lose.  “It’s associated with insomnia.”
“Did I say I was dissociative?” she muttered.  An inquisitive bird rustled high in the chimney spout, the soot dislodged by its sortie dusting the tiles before the empty hearth.  “What if you get a dissociative thing, and when you come out of it you’re on the other side of the house, or like... in the garden, and you don’t know what just happened?”  

Edward stood largely in the shade of his own body; the pages cast a little of the daylight back toward his features but in profile they were unintelligible, except to Lilian, who saw his gaze shift in a slightly less methodical manner across the text.  

“Dissociative fugue."
"That's bad, right?"
"A number of discreet conditions involve fugue states and somatic passivity.  I’m not a psychiatrist.”
“Susan asked me if she should wear the black thing from the store to your show tonight.  Your brother's taking her."  She leant back in her chair, letting it rest against the wall.  "To your show.  You know... the one you’re going to.”   
“I’m contractually obliged to attend.” 
“I’m contractually obliged to split my fucking take-home with local Vice.”  When he maintained his silence she tapped the spoon against the edge of the bowl.  “You just fucking get along to that thing, Lamb... pat some scrawny ass, suck it in for the paps, make like you're not getting intrusive thoughts about spreader bars.  Opal'll love you for it, she’ll book you a whole bunch of gigs just like it and I can go get a real fucking job.”
“You told me you had no intention of ever attending anything like that.  You were very specific about it.” Edward reminded her, folding the paper over and dropping it next to the three he had already digested before selecting another.
“Fuck no, I didn’t want to go back then.  Now I do.”
“You also said something about loathing everything associated with art.”
“And you gave me the idea that you weren’t a hustling bitch who’d sell my ass out first chance you got.”  She regarded him bitterly from her chair.  “So when you’re done blowing Opal for one more fucking C note or whatever, ask yourself how flush you feel.”
“I would prefer you stayed here tonight.”
"Are you out of your mind?" Lilian demanded, incredulous.  "What am I, your butterface shamefuck?  Lock it up til you want to get it wet?  Give it to me straight, Lamb, right now, or I swear I’ll be gone when you get back.”

He looked up from his paper.

“It’s not your reputation that keeps me from taking this public.  It’s mine.”    

With her pale eyes intent on his Lilian sat still for short while, then stood, firing the bowl at the skirting board as she remembered its weight in her hand.  On the landing Susan held her tongue as she stalked past and a moment later observed the other party disappearing into the garage, waiting for the sound of Edward’s vehicle to recede along the drive before descending into the passage that led toward his library.

It took a great deal of her courage to brave his private station, its black desk and chair seeming almost to impersonate him in the static, watchful seclusion.  The narrow panes of glazing stood aloof; she gazed around herself, rubbing her fingers together before dragging the chair out from behind the desk and setting it carefully before the shelving.  At the very edge of her reach one of the small compartments yielded; she took down the closest volume and cradled its heather-brown and half-defeated binding in both hands.

The pages, far more ancient even than its protective shell, revealed the xylographic text and woodcut illustration of an incunabula, the stiff paper shedding pale matter from its ragged edges onto the inside of her wrists.  It was a bestiary, peopled with a catalogue of smiling, bright-eyed chimeras, thorny bears, monoceri, purple goats, golden, horned, hybrid panthers and sardonic basilisks, accorded their enduring colours by hand.  Scowling at the rubricated Latin she confined herself to a study of the images, though no anthropomorphi stood amongst them, no vampyres or werebeasts nor anything resembling the brothers' own confounding order.  On discovering her William stood for a short while in his amusement, then crossed the room behind her on bare feet and breathed a short remark into her ear.
“Certa amittimus dum incerta petimus.” 

Susan exclaimed and began to totter, dropping the incunabula.  He caught it in a puff of dust.  

"Stop doing that!" she hissed, keeping her voice low.  As her face regained its colour she ignored his proffered hand, bending at the knees until they were of equal stature to peruse his features from that novel perspective.  "One of your eyes is completely different to the other, like you were made from different bits..." 
"I think we were." he confessed.  She sighed, opening the volume he had handed back to her and flipping speculatively through its pages.
“That is incredibly creepy.  What do you think you are, scientifically?”  
His expression became dry and weary. 
"A rose by any other name, in the dark, still walks in beauty or whatever.  I am open to being captured and handled by Sir David Attenborough, but I wouldn’t let anyone else do it.”  He smiled again.  “Present company excluded.”  
“What do you want, then?  I’m busy.”
“Philip’s here.”
“I don’t know a Philip.”
“My spectacular folicular technician.”  He rolled his eyes.  “He does hair.  Sort of... now, so come on.” 
“What’s wrong with my hair?  You're hurting my brain.  I don’t like arty things... can we not just stay in and watch a movie?”

He took her hand as she stepped down and began to drag her from the room, then along the corridor outside; she muttered to herself as he shepherded her before him up the stairs.

“Pink elastic.” he remarked, abstractly, until she discerned the subject of his observation and slapped her skirt against the back of her legs with both hands, stepping against the wall so that he was forced to precede her.  “At least you’re wearing some." he laughed.  "I had no such good fortune when you violated my personal sanctity at gunpoint.”
“If I'd known that I would have turned the bloody thing on myself." Susan assured him.

Against her private expectations, Philip the friseur presented as a tall, scrupulously gym-fit man of forty in a fitted, wet-look T-shirt, the limpid black fabric embracing both the barbells in his nipples and the impressive girth of his toast-brown biceps.  Wraithlike, sculpted sideburns descended from a fauxhawk of the same pale shade.  He awaited them in William’s ensuite bathroom with his kit bags and glossy, transparent apron, the stern centrepiece in a scene of unimpeachable professionalism.  Philip smiled for William as he ushered Susan into the chamber, but greeted the latter with an undisguised lack of enthusiasm.

“You know I’m always here for you... why make me regret it?” he sighed in an aside, eyes sliding in Susan’s direction as the latter sat on the edge of the bath.  Pushing William down into the kitchen chair he began to draw handfuls of the latter's parti-coloured mane toward himself, bemoaning its amateur modification.  “I could put a thousand homosexual hours into this mess and a day later you’d be back to ghetto homefried.”  Philip turned to look at Susan accusingly.  “Did you do this?  Friends don’t let friends go Midnite Madder.”
“She’s completely innocent, and it was Wicked Cherry anyway.”  William chewed his finger absently.  “Wicked Cherry, Nuclear Red... and okay, maybe there was a drunken Midnite Madder incident.”
“Lucky you're a gruesome freak of nature that grows hair like nothing should.”

Susan looked up at the remark and then at William, who smiled tranquilly.

“Christabel... what do you want done?” he inquired, squinting as his head was bent forward and his hair combed out with a punitive hand.
“I wouldn’t mind a decent haircut.” she murmured, returning Philip’s glance.  “If you do those.”
“You know, she sounds like Midnite Madder.” the technician decided.  Laying back his head and staring up at him, William succeeded in softening Philip's expression, the capitulation manifested in his handling of the comb.  “Speaking of female ruination... I heard someone had to peel that Rachelle Whateley off your slutty sectors in front of a hundred weeping innocents.  Why do I now feel the need to scrub myself so intensively?”
“Rumours of my participation are exaggerated.”
“Have you seen her lately?  Don’t go looking is all I’ll say...”
“Why?” Susan inquired.
“My god, she’s been on a hyper sci fi bender since this here weaned her off the panty pork.”  Philip warmed to his subject, shaking out a black dye cape and laying it carefully over William’s shoulders.  “Dickmatized right off the deep end.  Opal La Rue’s ready to choke a bitch... all that time she spent corn-feeding that trainwreck... can you imagine?  Where was I?  Oh yeah... she cut Rachelle’s ass off cold when all the bills came back to her... ice cold.  So then Rachelle brings it with the plastic rampage until those camel toes at D&G cut up her last card, in front of everyone...”  He winced tightly.  “I had to throw her out of Salon Philip, which is a shame... fabulous natural body.  Just fabulous.  If she dies with that rogue weave on her head I will kill her all over again for going into the light looking like something waxed right off a taint in Reykjavík.”  He began to mix up the colourant in a little black bowl.  “It’s bad, but it’s epic bad, so you can’t complain.”  Susan’s expression contradicted him.  "Bitch please... don’t give me some vaginal monologue about how much you love Rachelle... you don’t.  That sensation you’re experiencing is pleasure.  You love what I just told you.  Love it.” Philip assured her.  “My sources confirmed she beat down her therapist with a lampstand when he tried to ease up her prescription shit... which I guess downgrades her from troubled heiress to crazy crack whore.  Oh the humanity.”  With William’s hair wrapped into clingfilm, Philip turned his attention toward Susan, who took the chair and frowned into the mirror.  “I know... why don't you just tell me what to do?” he suggested.  

Despite the declaration it did not take Philip long to devise the treatment she required, nor did it impair his ability to impart the lurid foibles of his diverse clientele.  The timer presiding over William chimed an end to his confinement and he reached in to wrestle with the taps over the bath tub while Susan’s colour was concluded.  She frowned again at the distinctive sound of garments being shed onto the tiles.  

“Is he taking his clothes off again?” she demanded, bringing a hand up to the side of her face.  
“Oh god, won't someone do something?" Philip sighed, shaking his head as he enjoyed the shower curtain's nominal opacity.  "So, so nasty." 
“Have you finished this?” she sighed, pointing to her own head.  Philip shrugged, noncommital, and she ducked out of the bathroom.

C O N T I N U E D   N E X T   W E E K
© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce

Hypsilophodonts wade across a Bioluminiscent Pond 
Paleoart by ChrisMasna  Jan 2 2014

Ever think you'd see that?

I am particularly pleased with this one (below left).  That's pretty much straight out of the camera.  Even the most static and mundane scenes become lycanthropic in the dark; this looks like some sort of haunted moor when it fact it is just a weedy old slope on an unkempt street 50 m from our house.  If we'd gone off overseas on some conspicuously purposeful hyperadult quest for inspiration like all serious artists are supposed to, we'd have missed it completely.  
"Sometimes the great hissing gulf between what is perfectly feasible and that which is not going to happen because you are too fucking lazy and perverse is electroplated with a very special kind of accidental gold." - Albert Einstein.

The harbour can be an eerie place at night, especially in that sort of airless dead calm that happens under a full moon.  It is contained by hills that stretch all the way down either side of its sinuous flanks and somewhere out over the black water seabirds bark and croak and screech and wheel, though you can see neither them nor the marine largess of which they are partaking.  These familiar birds seem such diurnal creatures that you have trouble imagining their business continuing into the night, but it follows the tides and therefore the moon.  Our avian neighbours can see a range of ultraviolet cues invisible to us; how does the sea seem to them as they circle above in darkness- dressed with washes of luminous blue and green?  I really don't know, but it is a visual language to which we are deaf and blind.

I could spend a good few hours taking repetitive orange shots of streetlights at dusk, but R got to this one first ^  
Damn his eyes.

I looked up and this was happening and it didn't give a toss about my stupid personal bullshit or anyone else's.