A year or so ago I was lucky enough to score a large cache of old Indian and southeast Asian textiles on a local auction site, and for very little money (because we po).  As I began to ease the individual pieces out of their plastic shrouds it became apparent that we had done quite well.  Enjoying them in the privacy of our own home feels rather selfish and we'd like to share these delightful works of art with a wider audience. 

We began this series with a post on a couple of Banjara gala and encourage you to read that first for an overview of this sort of thing. 

Domestic textiles, especially tribal work, have long been seen as the poorer cousin twice-removed of the princely silks and ikat favoured by prominent collectors and institutions, but with the latter examples being priced so far out of many enthusiasts' reach in recent years, perhaps these 'homelier' items are starting to get the attention they deserve.  There's nothing basic about this gorgeous gem-like Baluch breast panel.  The casual trade often just calls these pieces 'tribal Afghan' or 'Kuchi' but I'm going to stick my neck out with the specific attribution because of the characteristic nature of the motifs.

These are sections from voluminous robe-like dresses simply constructed from plain fabric- homespun or trade cloth- then embellished by the female relatives of the recipient.  I don't know if these older panels were saved for use in newer garments and assume they're being salvaged mainly for sale these days, but exemplary tribal textiles and dowery work were historically treasured and recycled, for instance into appliqué covers and festive hangings.

The field is dominated by hooked designs that are variously interpreted as stars, spiders, scorpions, flowers or ram horns etc etc; as with all tribal iconography, some derivations are obvious and others are deeply obscured in the earliest cycles of shamanistic ritual practice and not even the peoples who utilise them are sure of the distinction.  It is sufficient to say they are intended as protective amulets and their efficacy is derived from the very ancient principle of confusing the scrutiny of malevolent forces with visual sophistry.  Note the imperfect symmetry in the outer guards; these seemingly purposeful misalignments are also found in rugs.  You can see a detail of the reverse below.

I guesstimate this piece was made in the first half, maybe even the first quarter of the 20th C.  

In contrast is this suspiciously tourist-friendly niqaab type-construction below (I have neither the patience nor inclination to unravel the intricacies of veiling terminology), recently acquired from a bazar in northern Afghanistan that began life as a circa 1980's dress front.  Although I don't know which group produced this work, the material differences are obvious and the sizzling modern palette certainly underlines the gulf between contemporary and traditional dyestuffs.  Personally, I enjoy both the mellowed harmony of the older piece and the eye-humping garishness of this later example.

Did you hear about this?  John Key, our dipshit dear leader, has been busted pulling the hair of a café waitress on a number of occasions because... well, no one's really proposed a good reason.  And because this is the kind of retarded embarrassing shit we're actually living in this country, Im not going to write an alliterative haiku about it.  No, don't try and talk me round.  We called this dead-eyed frontispiece years ago and it gives us no pleasure to be proved right.  

If we can all take a moment to get our heads around the kind of deeply fucked personal entitlement required to actually reach out and repeatedly yank a stranger's hair, perhaps we're getting closer to understanding how soulless monetarists perceive the world per se: as essentially theirs, and populated by the kind of docile stock unit who should by now be conditioned to dumbly accept their betters' assaultive proclivities.  Tragically, I believe John Key when he professes surprise at the response to his actions; if there's anything more self-evident than his complete disregard for anyone outside his minute cohort, that thing has yet to slide its throbbing pink arsehole over the windscreen of my personal perception.  I should probably be grateful.
 
Sitting in the wreckage of a once comprehensively equitable country on its slide toward ghetto hell while its citizens vote it one of the happiest places on earth is just... I don't even know what that is any more.  I feel as though apathy on a cellular level, as a sort of nitrous-flavoured gut-rotting mental lollipop, has finally been attained and everyone's just closing their eyes and sucking hard now while they shuffle off to the mall to spectate the sweatshopped crap they can't afford.  I noticed that the other day when I was forced to visit a fucking Kmart; there were lots of people just sort of waddling and mouth breathing and gawping, but very few buying anything apart from empty carbs.  We are a foodhall feedlot now burdened with the kind of political representation we clearly deserve.   Felicitations.

Fuck that shit.  The cure for macrosubjection is microresistance and every conscious act of kindness, empathy and creativity is a step away from these drooling shitheels and their tail-gobbling agenda.  Let's try to head in that direction.  What could be less selfish than forcing you to listen to Nick Cave?  He's a bit of a fucking tool too but at least he's not just one of a range of fragrant evils on a ballot paper.  Yet.

I don't know what I'm posting this week so just shut the hell up about that :)

Josephine’s white blouse came away from her body as though it had never consented to the association, leaving no impression on her tanned skin even where it had been tucked into the waist of her skirt.  The plain fabric of her underwear agreed wholly with the lean asexuality implied by the rest of her clothing; she wore it across the glassy floor of the testing lab toward the chair allocated by her technician, a south-east Asian woman of avian proportions.  She seemed almost a facet of the room’s modular inventory of drawers and stainless, swipe-card shelves in her pale blue scrubs.  The polished glazing behind her reflected both women; the technician consulted the inoculation program specified on the screen beside her and sat down on her own wheeled chair, arranging the hygienic appurtenances on the trolley before her.  Refrigeration units lining the walls filled the dead air with their cyclic hum and sighing respiration.  

Before the woman had finished laying out her tube racks the light beside the sliding door summoned her to a cosseted exchange behind it, and O’Connor returned to Josephine in her stead, turning back the white cuffs from the end of his shirt sleeves.  She looked from him toward the instruments on the trolley between them, skeptical at first that he intended anything more than to disturb her.  For a moment he appeared to consider the box of latex gloves, but passed them over, tearing a white swab from its wrapper.  Taking up her arm, he inflated the cuff about her bicep and awaited the streaks of venous blue that rose in answer to constriction, his grip warmer than her own skin, his narrow thumb raising her vein and holding it proud.  The cold swab struck like a snake bite against the inside of her elbow.  

He chose a syringe and slid its point into her skin.  It blurred against the wall of the vessel and rolled off to one side. 

“Let’s just go with the butterfly." O'Connor suggested, holding her arm against any instinctive contraction.  "It’s a nice gauge.”

“I want to know where we’re going.”

"Where're any of us going?  Where’s Trent going, now that he’s at one with all that aluminum siding?”  No flicker afflicted her gaze, even when he stubbed the lip of a tube against the buried needle.  His smile loosened up as her blood raced through the canula and flooded the glossy vacuum, hot between his fingers.  “Honestly, I opposed your transfer... I didn’t want another token floater reaming me with her gender card... but you held your fire, and I told myself you were too fragged to come at me that way.”  He shook his head.  “But you were just wearing that skin to get by me.”  She lifted her shoulders, caught between objection and restraint, one barely constraining the other.  A third recourse presented slowly as though with the colour that streamed from her arm into the glass, standing in the rack before her eyes like strikes against her.  Josephine lay back in the chair in perfunctory invitation.  “And there it is.  Relax.  I don't put my dick in my mistakes.  But while we're being candid, can I just ask... was carbonizing Mr Trent business or recreation?”  When she declined to respond O'Connor chuckled, capping the canula.  “Guess I just volunteered for a mystery vehicle fire.”  

Boxes full of vaccine ampules tinkled against each other as he eased open the refrigerator door, making his selection with a smile, perusing labels and collecting dilutant.  The oily suspension in the first vial shimmered, shaken quickly in his fist then drawn up by the hypodermic.

“Terminal cams in Frankfurt picked up the British girl on her own, heading east, then we were blessed by a local snitch, diming foreign nationals around US interests.  Let’s see... what else can I tell you in good conscience?  You’ll head out in two teams... attached to a four-man hub… small arms, unsupported...” 

"Interlaken knows you're sending us on deuce gear?"

O'Connor frowned at her, closing his hand around the syringe.

“What kind of obsessive, homicidal narcissist needs to ask if she’s on a doomed bag run with every other walking liability I could muster?”  He stabbed the vaccine down into her thigh.  “Happy trails.” he added, leaving it standing in her flesh.

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

NZ Flax species are members of the agave family, which is widely exploited by a number of disparate indigenous cultures.  BELOW Unknown wahine (Maori woman) wearing a traditional cloak made from pounded flax fibre (wiki).

BELOW a Kete, or 'kit' bag as they are popularly known, again made from flax fibre.  Although there are quite a few fine old examples floating around, I believe that the best are distinguished not by age, but by their technical and artistic merit and many awesome ketes are being made today.  I alternate between contemporary handbags and kete.  You'll get around three years out of a well-constructed one before the corners start to fray and then you can either retire it to a wall somewhere or onto the fire or compost heap :)  A dignified end.  I've posted this piece before in an earlier photoessay from this gallery but you'll just have to deal.

Intention and context must be respected if we are to survive as a matrix of mature cultures and not just lurch from one pissy Twittermob/fundamentalist-da-fay to the next, because that shit ends in loss and tears.  

I also thought it might be closer to MAC Rebel than it is, a concern that struck me as I pulled it out of the box.  You can see from the swatches that they're not really close- Rebel is much more purple.  Their gloss level is similar, with Amarone being a little more slippy and a little more flattering on the lip, so if you fancy Rebel or even MAC Girl About Town but feel you look like a twit in them, go for this instead.  It's in a similar direction, will possibly fulfil your fuchsia desires and is more muted and universally wearable.  Totally safe for work.

Another thing it has in common with my other Bite stuff is the ability to be rich and glossy without bleeding into my wrinkles, which is super-weird and super-awesome.  Amarone as one of the few lustrous shades of any intensity that I can wear without checking the mirror every five minutes to make sure it has neither roamed toward my earlobes and/or evanesced completely.

I see it as a prettifier and a delightful, low-key alternative to the stronger matte and Amplified pinks that have predominated lately.  Things like MAC GAT, Full Fuchsia and all those big shades in the new Nars Audacious line aren't for everyone.  I love its half backed-off look on the lip.  Blend it with either Bite Cranberry (for more punch) or Rhubarb (to make it even more demure).  Bite are cruelty-free and formulate with largely organic/natural compounds.

Neptunian Haze, Big Sur, CA 03/2015 
120 mm film

Due to pressing external matters and a hardcore Sopranos binge, there'll be another lipstick review this week.  And maybe something a little extra to make you feel loved in the midst of all this bimbo shit.    

Right now we'll have a little retrospective something by former local act Pluto.  They were cute while they lasted.

Puts on cape and claps along / will bite you if you interfere  0_0

Dahlias: so old skool and yet somehow so next season.  The Lovely R caught this one a few weeks ago and it's sad to see them all soggy and collapsing now with the first cold snap of autumn.  I suppose we should just be grateful that some vandalising numbnuts didn't poison them.  This crazy purple variety really is this eye-freakingly lurid against its fleshy beryl-green leaves in late summer.

You can see more of our garden H E R E  and especially H E R E: I'd sort of forgotten what a nice catalogue of images we've amassed.  Have a look if you have the time.  It's a great way to kill half an hour.

In its cryptic, pristine harmonies of form and saturated colour the forest might have seemed to Susan a sympathetic refuge, at least to that part of her most weary of her own shape.  Its disregard was perfect but its anamorphic scale, crowded so unremittingly over watershed ridges and stream-hewn valleys, resisted idle appreciation and began by late afternoon to inspire sentiments that shared their hue with its sombre, tannic shade.  Dryad saddles, iron-grey and corpuscle-red, flourished in tiers upon parasitized boles footed with golden hordes of leather shanks.  Sullen, bronze-eyed vipers basked on moss mounded like velveteen malachite, their muted livery overlaid with glossy opaline under scattered scales of sunlight, unseen as she followed William beneath the canopy.  Its deciduous component was bleached tired lime and livid golds by the late season, borne on stout, diverging rafters that sheltered both their callow saplings and perishing progenitors.  The latter were pressed deeply into the earth under their own ponderous weight, taller supine than Susan stood on both feet, shorn roots and broken crowns draped in moss and absinthe-coloured lichen, indistinguishable from each other in decay.  Fallen boughs were lesser shapes amongst the dead leviathans and lay both arched and lax like old mens’ arms in infinite variation.

Her tread had long ceased to remind her of the burn in both legs; stripes of smudged mold on her forearms were tokens of missteps arrested by the flashbulb timing of her companion’s hooked grasp on her clothing, the ease afforded by his profound physical advantage throwing her own breathless efforts once more into unflattering contrast.  William walked with his head slightly inclined, draped by a lace-like line of sunlight where the leaves were cast in ornamenting shadow over his back and down the length of his arms.  Appetence pursued her, the rhythm of her stride and breathing speaking to inclinations gratified but not assuaged by the taste she had enjoyed under the votive oak.  She felt herself naked and sunlit, and the gorgeous, transportive pleasures of his mouth and hands, enjoying them privately while he braced himself against a nest of bramble canes and pinned it back for her.  Turning sideways, she shuffled past, halting with her back to him; his free hand slid into the warmth between her thighs as he leant down and licked the nape of her neck.  

"How do you know?" she smiled.

"It's my job."

"Don't... I'll be picking out thorns for a year." she murmured, the slow stroke of his hand staying her almost to the point of disregard for her own caution.  She sighed and ducked out of the brambles, waiting while he extricated himself and allowing him ahead of her again.  He helped her over a steep case of rock onto the apex of the hill, a long plateau shouldered by two greater masses.  Susan wished heartily for some view of their wider surrounds but the rise afforded no particular outlook, waist-high grass crowding the level ground between the trees.  “At least look knackered.” she grinned, drinking from her bottle and wiping at her chin.  William lapsed back slackly, flattening the grass beneath him and lying with his arms upturned beside his head.  “I said knackered.” she complained.  He encircled her calves with his legs then rose on his knees to hook his fingers into the back of her jeans, biting softly at the flesh on her hip.  She whispered over the chiming sounds of his teeth on the button of her fly and the zip descending, her mouth falling open as he used his own to its greatest effect.  A small stone sailed across the clearing and struck the trunk of the tree overhead, then his skull, prompting him to curse and rise; he held up a hand to her inquiry while she closed her jeans.  Twenty metres distant through the overgrown glade the manual elements of Edward's silent communique earned a reply in kind.

“House, half a click north, empty... stay behind me, I run, you run.” William related.

Susan mouthed the first word back to him as he picked up her pack, but swallowed her frowning incredulity, crossing the grass behind him and keeping her head down as they discovered the narrow suggestion of a path.  It led into the trees, the intensity of the gloom beneath compelling her to close and accustom her eyes while he stood and scanned it for himself.  William crooked a finger to her, picking up a stick to trace the spoor that deer had trundled by a large stone in the midst of the way, directing her attention to a small russet shape amongst the leaves banked behind it.  When she shrugged, he stroked back the litter to reveal another brown point, then two more, until she recognized them as the rusted teeth in a pair of grinning iron jaws lying armed beneath the featherweight debris.  She whispered expletives; he used the twig to indicate again the discursive tracks of the other creatures and Susan nodded at the exemplar, appalled by the size of the gaping snare as they stepped around it.

The structure to which Edward had referred loomed in beech shadow, the netted branches squeaking and groaning against each other in a stir from the east.  Seeming a simple black shape from its south end, it extended itself as she approached into a windowless longhouse under a single hooded gable, standing on shoulder-high piles of oak and walled with pit-sawn slabs greened with moss.  The roof and beaten paths on either side were masked from any aerial view by the limbs interlaced along its length.  Edward returned from his reconnoiter and made one more sweep of the space between the piles.

“What is this?” she asked, unscrewing her bottle.    

"An eidiré."  William exchanged more densely-phrased gestures with his brother.  "Alujha summer house."

"Old school?"  

He nodded.  A line of steps had been hacked into a trunk set against the north corner; he made a silent offer of the interior, to which she shook her head emphatically.  Edward had already set off on a more intimate examination of their surrounds, and William climbed into the longhouse on his own.  Fatigue settled on her unexpectedly as she sat down at the edge of the dirt path, inducing her to lay her head upon her knees though she regretted the shade immediately, its stagnant pall thick with floating spores sifted from the timbers overhead.  The ground between the  piles was rank and bald of vegetation.  Toward its midst she found a strange coherence amid the stale, paddled mud and drew out her torch, playing it over two coiled chains, their fat links crudely-fashioned and corroded, extended from a collar of iron encircling the foot of a pillar.  Another shape lying between them, half-swallowed by the mud, prompted her to reach into the darkness with a stick to pry it loose.  Its slack curve refused her at first, then pulled free.  It was a woman's shoe, its scuffed red patent heavy with engulfing soil, the diamantés on its narrow ankle strap stained grey and lustreless.  Susan reversed out of the shadow and dropped the stick from her grasp, taking herself swiftly to the steps in William's wake.

The eidiré’s lateral scale was far more impressive from within, daylight falling through the eaves and slatted walls to lie in stripes upon the floor, its jet-like timbers polished by bare feet and bedding to an ambiguous lustre, on which the soles of her boots squeaked loudly, keeping her still.  A flat stone slab formed an open hearth beneath a cooking frame, the iron tripod rubbed with fat.  The thatch and timber were soaked with the dirty ghost of smoke and the rude bass notes of barbarous masculinity, full of a low and shuffling fougére green and animalic elements that touched her like unbidden hands in a darkness already congested with the black taint of proscription.  Her companion's glance at her discomfort was overlaid by the silvered green of its internal structures.

“Tastes evil.” she murmured.  
"Nāmeré.” he replied, miming a pair of breasts against his chest and crossing them out emphatically.  “Heavy duty no-skirt beef." 
"There were women on Caleb’s hahdri... what about Gévaudan?" 
"It's loose in the New World, and Auberjonois is a geris alujh, a bear wolf... méchant loup... he can do what the fuck he likes."  William scowled at the smell of the hearth.  "These dickheads are sausage party fundamentalists."    
"What would happen if they caught me in here?"
He smirked.
"Their balls would crawl up their arseholes."

“They would chain you to a tree and use you like a midden until the next moon.” said Edward, his shape filling the doorway in silhouette.  He reached up into the rafters with one hand, sliding fingers along the central beam in a swift, purposeful sweep, his gaze briefly challenging her own until she turned from him.  Eager for the distraction, she counted off the number of berths on the floor, their presence worn into the timbers like the dim, inscrutable casts impressed by medieval saints in the course of their austerities.  The restless sounds of her clothing as she moved began to trouble her and she dropped both hands to her sides, shrugging back her shoulders uncomfortably.

“There could be thirty people sleeping here." she asserted, looking to William.  "Where are they all?”

“This is all laid up... they're on their way to winter quarters.”

Outside the longhouse the afternoon seemed blinding despite the ponderous clouds that had begun to catch on the hills and gather thickly overhead.  She watched her companions step down onto the path with the same strange, remote expression, as though some fraction of their attention had departed to course their surroundings independent of conscious instruction.  Her ruminations tangled in the chains beneath the eidiré and payed their spectre out behind her, the other filthy, despairing artifact adding its weight to the drag.  A train of wind pushed through the trees and blew the moldering litter past her boots as the first cold splashes of rain dropped through the branches, striking her cheeks.  Edward glanced at the sky while William took her arm and directed her around another trap set into the final stretch of visible path.  The sight of another deliberate mass through the saplings and brambles of a second clearing stopped her in her tracks, the great black walls of an even larger alujha barracks standing not ten minute's walk from the first.  Edward walked on alone to satisfy himself of its desertion and she leant heavily against the tree behind her, sheltering from the rain beneath her parka hood; the forest shifted again, tilting southwards as the incoming front blew a sudden clout across the rise.

"Sachiin... if something happens, if we get split up... I don't want to end up chained to one of those things." she said quietly, nodding toward the longhouse.  William did not reply, but set down her pack and crouched beside it, delving blindly amid its contents.  Sliding the handgun he had pressed on her from the pocket of her parka, she held it out to him, wiping at her nose.  "I know you know the best way, and I need to know, so just... show me how to do it." she urged.  "Please."  He shook his head and whispered in his own tongue, and she glanced toward Edward's return from the eidiré; he took the weapon from her and replaced it, upside down, in her grasp.

"Put it in your mouth.  Go up an inch from the base of your skull and keep that line." he advised over his shoulder on his way to resuming point.



Her breath threw plumes of thick white vapour as she stood staring dumbly at William, rain dripping from her chin onto her boots.  They marched on inside her skull as she held the end of the tent with hands that glowed, crimson and freezing, inside her wet gloves.  The wind had stripped the leaves from the tallest beeches, leaving a short black-stone bluff and its footing of bracken to offer a brake from the rain that had already worked beneath her parka and soaked her jeans, nightfall chilling it down to wet specks of slush that pressed a cold burn to her face.

They crowded the wedge of level ground, William stamping down the ferns to cushion the tent from the earth.  When she did not avail herself of it immediately he reached out and helped her from her parka, its padded folds clinging like a hundred years of dead, wet skin.  Even within the thickness of her sleeping bag she took a long time to recover while he sat crossed-legged beside her like a placid giant beneath the mottled fabric, as undiminished by the day’s travails as she was beaten by them.  Leaning over his lap, he unzipped the bottom of the bag and eased her feet onto his legs; she groaned, protesting the removal of her socks.  Her heels wept thickly, having been rubbed raw by her boots and he muttered to himself as he examined the damage, licking each short length of birch bark he had taken from his pocket and pressing them to her blisters.  Satisfied, William split a packet of soba and foisted the contents upon her.  She lay with the stiff noodles between her teeth, eyes closed, prompting him to take two cigarettes between his lips and shake his head at her pleading look, pointing sternly to the packaged meal.  The taste of cold miso was strangely appalling, thick and gamey as she chewed the gelid mass, glancing at him reproachfully.  With it swallowed down, she lay back while William tucked the cigarettes into the box.  The bag's hood puffed slowly around her ears.  He smiled sideways at her.

"Tu m'impressionnes."

"How long do I get?"

"Four hours."  He saw that it taxed her to question him and reassured her preemptively.  "I don't actually have to sleep, poupée, it's just pure fucking laziness on my part."
"How can you... not sleep... your brain must be.... it..."  Her breathing devolved into a snore before she could complete the sentence, and he listened with a frown to the slight catch in her chest until she rolled over.  Outside, the rain subsided into a cold, expended calm.  

He changed places with his brother when Edward’s watch came to an end, the latter so silent that it was a cramp in Susan’s back that opened her eyes, his seated vigil concerned solely with the ground beyond the tent.  In his right hand he held not the gun that she had expected, but a long, inornate knife, its edge turned out in an avid white plane, the black stock folded in his fingers.  Closing her eyes again, she dredged both the empirical and apocryphal for something equal to the task of getting past him, drawing a wide and satisfying blank.  How often he had been weighed thus by fraught companions, valued by the lethal ounce like some fabled poison, was likewise beyond her.  When she looked at him again, his gaze had descended through the floor of the tent, past the life secreted in the darkness of the soil and deep into the stone beneath, lending him an attitude of sorrowful reclusion so plain that she was reminded once more of its cause.  Susan wondered if that distant protagonist shivered with the same untended wound.  

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

 Postcards from the ruins: life at the desolate edge of eastern Europe
Decaying factories, boys dressed as dancing bears and flooded villages where only the church steeple remains: photographer Tamas Dezso has spent years on the margins of society in Romania and Hungary, capturing the ruins of the Soviet era – and the people who still live there

NIGHTCRAWLER   (Dan Gilroy, 2014)  While contempt doesn't begin to describe my reaction to what masquerades as dramatic social commentary these days, there is just so much dingy misanthropic gold in Nightcrawler that all notions of voyeurism are subverted.  Jake Gyllenhaal and his tadpole stare are Lou, the low-ball sociopath who takes up chasing lurid footage on spec for local LA news stations (if it bleeds, it leads etc), accompanied by Rick, his hapless apprentice.  As his professional stock rises Lou butts heads with veteran rival Bill Paxton and courts Rene Russo's Nina, sleazy editor and principle client, until his drive to capture footage shifts from the reactive to the creative.  

That none of what devolves feels particularly outlandish is a pretty effective indictment of our prevailing reality and while Nightcrawler is a critique, Gilroy is canny enough to impose hypnotic choreography on all that yucky verité, keeping everything tightly kinetic and smoothly lineal in the process of crafting reportage into fable.  The nocturnal vehicular footage rewards both the action gourmand and the technical/aesthetic connoisseur and we appreciated the contrast drawn between the drab banality of violence and its conflation into monetised spectacle.  In fact, we appreciated most of what Nightcrawler was shovelling.

I have time for Gyllenhaal because he (more often than not) rewards indulgence with the kind of off-kilter shit that he pulls here, although in absolutely nailing a supporting turn that could have gone so very wrong, Riz Ahmed almost jacks his thespy thunder.  Paxton brings a lot of... standard Paxton, and I can't decide how I feel about Russo's numbed Nina; she did good without knocking me out of my shoes, and that was all that was really required.  Brief moments of uneven tonality are the thing's only real defect, the ultimate scene striking us as a bit of glib disappointment after the stunningly angular catharsis that precedes it.  But don’t let this deter you; if Nightcrawler leaves you feeling like you’ve been licking tar, it has a point, and you won’t be able to drag your eyeballs off it.

DIRTY WARS  (Richard Rowleycor, 2013)  Despite its generic title and relative lack of fanfare, Dirty Wars sets itself apart in a genre obsessed with embedded access by mining the sinister lack of scrutiny enjoyed by one of the American military's most reprehensible tentacles, JSOC, or Joint Special Operations Command.  If that sounds like an acronym you couldn't satirise, the reality as explored by veteran war journalist Jeremy Scahill will wipe that cynic's smirk right off your face.   From Afghanistan to Yemen and Somalia, Scahill's poignant attempts to penetrate JSOC's truly terrifying political and operational impunity and to make sense of the horrific scale and limitless scope of their arbitrary carnage comprises a profoundly moving and disturbing experience.  Beautifully filmed under terrible conditions, thoughtfully constructed and deeply personal, Dirty Wars benefits greatly from its human pulse, dismantling distance and objectification to unite us with those at the opposite end of a process that victimises us all.  Mandatory viewing.

THE IMITATION GAME   (Morten Tyldum, 2014) For a biopic, The Imitation Game sure as hell knew how to ballroom dance around a subject without ever making meaningful contact.  Most literate adults are already aware of the whole Alan Turing / Enigma encryption / gay and persecuted / Bletchley Park milieu blah blah etc. etc., and if you number amongst them, don't expect to be goosed with any stunning insights or novel interpretations.  Or moistened by gobsmacking performances; for once, the paucity of heavyweight gongs afforded TIG (despite the relentless campaigning) hinted at method behind the fillum establishment's madness, and it's my opinion that the adapted screenplay Oscar was massively undeserved.  In trying to scrutinise such highly unconventional personalities and their accomplishments through plain vanilla goggles, this movie squandered such an amazing critical mass of historic material that I'm as much saddened as annoyed.

It's just too low-functioning.  And never grows legs, staggering all over the place breaking shit in the attempt, welding a mass of laughably stock characters, clichéd assumptions about gender and sexuality and a dirty-windscreen view of history into something lumpen, pointlessly fractured and even sort of amorphously offensive.  From the drippy private school scenes of romantic awakening to Alan's streaking away from his problems across a field of dewy Englishness, The Imitation Game just felt like a gently wafted, scone-scented Cumbercentric fart, with a side of Kiera Knightley as Kiera Knightley: privileged vintage crumpet. You might have guessed by now that I'm not down with either Knightley or Benedict's shtick, but I like to think of that prejudice as something deeply rooted in their respective creative realities.  That the latter was medium-competent in 12 Years a Slave just underlines the embarrassing distance between Tyldum and Steve McQueen.  Thumbs down.

He is precisely the sort of nasty sub-prime intrinsic malcontent that always gets me seriously predatory and his concern-trolling of the dreadful Paula Deen was a masterclass in the correct treatment of egregious low-hanging fruit.  I love his nonhairdo, random tattoos and shabbylicious realness and treasure the idea that he'd make me some really great profiteroles if I blew him in the shower.  You couldn't take it home but why the fuck would you want to?

Some slack jawed dickhead drilled and poisoned three of our largest trees and another group on our neighbour's land sometime in the last couple of weeks.  We only just noticed our lovely specimens turning grey brown when we went up to clear the vegetable garden a few days ago.  We're pretty devastated, and totally outraged that someone we don't know from a hole in the fucking ground has come within a few metres of the house to vandalise such flourishing lifeforms for no discernible reason.  But you know how it is; they were probably dwarfing somebody's penis.  Can't wait to pay an arborist $$$ to fell trees I've grown from seed.  We've decided to get the cops involved because fuck it.  

All this begs a few ethical questions.  I'm not a very nice person to begin with and can't help but wonder what (obviously nonexistent) social contract would we be breaking in returning that favour, given the treatment we've been subjected to.  My private policy has always been active reciprocation and I know this has stomped more than one ugly situation before it could sprout shitty wings.  And that's the trouble- more often than not, in my experience it's been stoic restraint that has fed escalation more than anything else.  Going against my molecular inclinations and being all mature and philosophical has hardly ever paid off.

Is restraint just and reasonable, or just expedient?  Walking the cop through what this turd had done felt so lazy and ineffectual, and it probably was.  But  I could never dump a litre of Roundup on blameless vegetation in retribution, even if it did suffer the misfortune of association with the perpetrator in this instance, and even if it did exalt my inner rage monkey at 3am.    

Modern life metes out both insulated privilege and systemic disadvantage to precisely the wrong people, in a process that feels as though it is accelerating.  I struggle increasingly to find satisfaction in merely not being that guy that I hate, whether they're some local prick or the monetarists driving our social policy or speeding drivers or Japanese whalers.  So many arseholes exploiting the peace.  I thought getting older might mean getting wiser, but I feel like I'm just getting angrier.  

Hold my hand while we look at ducks.

In other news, there's nothing like a cold fucking bra in the morning to tell you which way the season's headed.  First time getting dressed in front of the fire this year.

I think there'll be some film reviews this week.

it
is 
going 

down 

behind
the
mountain

The violence of the sound that hacked into her placid dream accompanied a pair of hands that tore the zip down beneath her chin.  Susan choked, struggling inside the sleeping bag until a blank set of features swung into focus, glowing as coldly as the constellations in the blackness overhead.  One of the hands sealed her mouth, forcing her to expend her cry against its palm; that it was Edward who accosted her was a notion barren of relief as he hoisted her out of the enfolding quilt with the kind of impatience that she might have reserved for a toppled piece of furniture.  The sky was still wholly innocent of diurnal influence as she stood blinking at her assailant, who glanced back at her as though she were proof of something bitterly suspected.  He snatched up her tote bag and tipped its contents onto the ground, sorting them with so unfailing a sense of purpose that she could think of no coherent rebuke.  William hissed at him as he leapt down from the slope overhead, pulling her back from the edge of the adjacent incline in her witless disorientation.  Edward threw her soap, cigarettes, sunscreen and caramel toffee down the hillside before applying the same unbidden scrutiny to her pack, prompting her to snatch it from his grasp.

“Will you stop doing that?” she cried.  He wrenched it back from her hand, turning his yellow stare on his brother as the latter yanked the pack away from him.  

"Thi'ii sai'inae ra'ana." the intruder sneered with scathing emphasis, lifting the hood of his sweatshirt.  “Nai’il a’ si hahdri.  Ae ishah esai sai’inae il’avani sha siith la’anith’le si alujha liis’ala nya.”  He strode away into the darkness from which he had arrived.

Still mazed, Susan stooped to gather up what she could find of her scattered belongings.

"Fucking hell... what was that?" 
"You can smell that stuff a long way out..." William admitted reluctantly, holding out her bag as she replaced its inventory.
"Mardy bastard.  He didn't think I'd show up, did he?" she insisted, glancing at him, and then in the direction the offender had taken.  He shook his head while she straightened out and huffed a weary sigh.



At the bottom of the ridge another rise marked an abrupt shift in vegetation, leaving behind the gentler deciduous character of the lower hills.  A nameless conifer stood in infinite swathes of barely-varied repetition, its thin craquelure bark rendered in bruised cyan by both the hour and the vapor laced about them, lower limbs atrophied by shade into barbed and naked quills.  She followed William carefully, ducking the jutting tinder while he turned from a game trail to cut across the slope.

“How do you know where we’re going?”  She projected the whisper over the sound of her own shuffling footfalls.

"We're following two hundred and seventy-five pounds of bad attitude and it’s not exactly hiding its light under a schnitzel.” he advised.  Narrowing her eyes, she stared hard over the incline in a vain attempt to mark the evidence to which he referred.  William nodded down at the ground beside his bare feet; she took out her torch, passing it over the dead needles, a series of faint, slurred scuffs in the litter coming together in almost magical association at his suggestion.

The hill rose to the north in a lopsided fashion, exposing a cliff like a diadem of rifted black stone that stared away over their heads toward the south.  A tangle of fingerling rivulets rushed down through fissures underfoot, the clay refusing the trees' questing roots and forcing them on broad, veining forays.  Their branches gathered the mist and released it as fickle precipitation, dropping on her head and into the collar of her parka and she put the pen light between her teeth, freeing her hands to negotiate the treacherous going.  In William's silence she became aware of her own toiling progress and halted, embarrassed, only to shriek aloud at the whooshing shape of a bird, its undercarriage ghosting suddenly from the darkness as it grasped a neighbouring branch.  Its pupils shrank in their gilded orange grounds when her light struck its face.

“Eye od, iss ah ow.” she cried, torch still clutched between her teeth.  The great bird clapped its beak and regarded them with skepticism beneath two wildly-feathered tufts, like the upswept, autonomous brows of some aged academic.  William uttered a clicking, onomatopoeic version of its remarks and was rewarded with a flare of densely-barred wings, their intricate, striated beauty couched in bisque and dusty brown.  Susan's smile was answered by his own, his eyes closing against the light she swung into his face.  She chuckled, though her grin fell to a frown as the beam pushed past him through mist that had drawn back in floating shreds from the way ahead; she set off after the glimpsed impression, catching each trunk in turn to keep her footing.

The feeble beam jumped over the deer trail, then a pair of filthy, mud-streaked jeans and she started backward, slowing her scrambling retreat when the figure remained in its curious association with the trunk of a wayside pine.  With the torch aimed at the ground she discovered army boots pasted with clay where their toes had been dragged, the ploughing trail concluding behind them and confused by a scurried blurring of the mud to either side.  Susan drew a girding breath and passed light over the shape cosseted inside a makeshift suite of winter garments.  Alive, the stranger had been dark-haired and strongly-built; an army-issue anorak swathed the body beneath the point where it hung from the stump of a branch, unseen face crushed against the trunk.  The splintered wood thrust through the left eye protruded wetly from the rear of the skull, parting hair like some inverted facial feature.  She looked away, and then leant over, awaiting any reaction her stomach might have reserved.   

"This wasn't..."
“Kala'amātya's not that fancy.” William promised.  Though her eyes would have seemed black to her own gaze, he could find no shelter from their stern indigo detail, and leant back on a tree, the pack squeaking against the bark.  “It’s... old school.” he offered.   
“I can see that.”
“Have a gun...”  He handed her the pistol from the back of his trousers. 
"I don't think it helped him." Susan murmured, staring with a new intent through the transient brume, the naked boles surrounding them like the pillars of some endless concourse.  The ground was clammy and unwelcome underneath her as she sat down in a hunch.  "You said there wouldn't be anyone out here."  
"There wasn't, last time." he sighed.  In studying the lifeless figure she found little to deter her from the details of its misfortune despite the chill settling around them, soaked through with the lean grey smell of ashes in the encircling darkness, as though the trees dreamed of their own deaths.  She held up a hand, William helping her to her feet and following the lead that she assumed.

A half-mile through the pines brought them to the end of their unnerving exclusivity, at a place where the cliff allowed room for another of the broad, sloughed hollows where a huge scale of clay had once slid clear.  At its far corner stood a structure hewn out of raw wood, its sagging silvered walls and low, round beams studded with branch stubs so that it seemed some sinister contrivance by the trees themselves.  Water struck its bark and sod roof from the limbs overhead.  William handed her the pack, knowing its weight would slow her and used the delay to inspect the hovel on his own.

Another male corpse lay crumpled in camouflage drab beneath the dripping eaves.  The figure's symmetry had been ruined by a beating that had snapped its longest bones and caved the ribs on either side of its spine, leaving the bloodsoaked parka to settle in the novel hollows.  The stranger's looped and serpentine innards had been ripped through a wound in his left flank; by the debris that they had gathered in their glistening swags, William guessed the man had trailed them for some time over rough ground.  He shook his head gravely at Susan's approach, nodding toward the corner of the hut as an alternative.    

To her surprise a tiny fire, little more than a half-dozen burning cones, hissed against a ring of damp stones in the lee of the hovel, a can of red beans simmering on the flames, its sooted label emblazoned with cyrillic characters.  In her intent upon the hearth she was startled again by a broken moan from the foot of the wall, where another stranger sat before the stones, blond and many days unshaven, wearing the lower half of his army fatigues beneath a plagiarized football shirt of bloodstained red and dirty white.  A golden saint gleamed on a chain around his neck, over blurry tattoos of mingled sharks and pudgy birds.  The dry timber used to batter his companion had been split and driven through his thighs into the ground beneath, pinning him irrevocably.  Very little blood had issued from the pinched and bulging wounds, packed so tightly with torn fabric and intruding wood that they offered no hope of palliative haemorrhage, though the smell leaking into the underlying clay answered streaks of septic colour inside his trousers.  She walked to the furthest edge of the firelight while William questioned him in careful Russian, at which the man spat, replying in his own tongue.

“He's Ukranian, the others were locals... running deserter candy down from Lviv.” he told Susan, lifting the beans off the fire and setting them down beside her.  She squatted with her back to the smuggler, too oppressed to pertain much more to his condition.  Hunger overcame disgust and dug the spoon from her pack, the beans warm and saline in her mouth as she shoveled them in.
“Is that old school?” she muttered. 
"It's dujju nahat... the coward’s death.  He must have tried to run.”
"From who?"  William looked out into the trees; the silence confirmed her worst suspicions, stilling her spoon in the can.  

Her stare flew to Edward as the latter walked into the feeble glow, a box of ammunition beneath his arm.  He set his burden down, took the can from her hands and walked around the hearth toward the smuggler, stooping to wave the smell toward the hungry man; the prospect roused him and he reached for them, careless of the pain incurred.  Edward questioned him bluntly and repaid his grunting denial by removing the beans and dropping them once more beside Susan, where they tipped sideways. 

"If this is alujha, can you not... talk to them or something?" she proposed.  William shook his head, gazing around them.
"They're not like Caleb and Annick... they're jihādī crews, from all over.  If you're not on a lunar cycle, siith el'la ai'ev si se'lae."  He brought his hands together then waved them apart in an expression of the fatal, absolutist sentiment he described.  "Alujha live and breathe their hahdris, their naján... if they lose them, they're fucked, and that's what's happening.  Everyone's losing their land.  The cartels won't help them, so... they either end up eating a ten gauge in a squat somewhere or fighting for whatever's left... places like this.  Only the psychos survive."

Susan spoke despairingly to herself, letting her head fall into her arms.

“Who gets the branch through the face and who gets the sticks through the legs?”
"I can take you back into town..."
“You saw those oiks on the plane... that place is as bad as out here.”  The sun had begun to thin the failing mist and granted sequined lustre to every drop of water gathered by the trees, though its doubtful beauty did not engage her.  
"What is he doing?" she demanded, of Edward's silence.  William glanced at him.
"Running the numbers.  A dozen of them, two of us, one of you... three days before the full...”  

Susan studied their subject in the light of the unwelcome logistics, the shift in his aspect impressing her deeply.  The fire had eaten away the twigs and cones and had settled into a pile of pulsing red brands, the colour painted on the surface of his gaze, and she scoured his heedless countenance while the brutal mechanics of expediency absorbed him.  He had shed the skin she barely knew, emerging raw and altered from the violence of that secret process, his scattered landmarks, mapped at such great cost, riven and abolished.  He startled her again by skirting the fire and stooping to haul the smuggler upright by his collar, opening with an oblique motion of his left hand the man’s unguarded throat, cutting easily through the soft complex of veins and tendons.  Blood fled the cursive wound in a silky-looking mass as his victim pitched sideways, eyes dimmed, waxy scalp glowing through his dirty hair.  She tucked her head against her shoulder, drawing up her knees.

"Shoot him or something...”
“It’s too loud.” William assured her.  “And you never have to do that twice.”  

Edward exchanged his rifle for the dead man's superior Russian model and threw the latter’s side arms away into the trees where he had hidden the scrambled elements of the other smuggled ordinance.  Susan glowered up at him as he stood examining the action of his stolen weapon.

"You might as well have stayed in Commoriom Drive and gotten paid to fucking murder people." she told him.  His eyes pulled focus at her remark; he reached over the fire to seize her, dragging her though her boots ploughed through the sparking hearth, sweeping coals onto the foot of her pack.  He marched her swiftly past the shack to the body of the beaten smuggler despite the ferocity of her objections and bent down to tear the coat from the corpse, substantially uncovering its stiffly mottled form.  With his fist grasping her collar he made sure she had gained her fill of all that it had suffered before and after death, that the invidious details had found a home behind the gaze she shuttered tightly.  

"You are female... you can only dream of ending up like this if these alujha find you." he told her, disuse lending his voice the clarity of new glass.  Susan shoved back at him, pulling free and almost tripping over the body's broken legs as William came at his brother, having beaten the embers from her pack.  Edward took an uncontested blow, shouldered him aside and quit them, pausing to reclaim the few items he had left by the fire on his way east.

 The thin warmth of the morning’s first unimpeded rays struck her face as they emerged from the edge of the pines and climbed downward over ground sloping steeply and unevenly.  Thistles pricked through the legs of her jeans as she made her own way to the narrow, sunken curvature of another river, walled on its far side by a towering scarp of forest.  The water was an explicit demarcation between the cline behind them, long accustomed to incursion, and primal, unchallenged arborea; its stalwarts crowded right to the edge of the far bank, too starkly massive for the axe, the proud volunteers on the clearing beyond scions of a puissant archetype, its league-long shadow creeping backward with the sun's ascent.  Where the ground rose from the root-sewn cut two sauropodian spruce stood abreast of one another, long, pale staffs of light dropping through their heads into the depths of the water beneath.  Branches sawn from their pointed crowns had left vacancies exposing the thickly-crusted trunks where the bark had been adzed from two great discs of naked, whey-pale wood, forming totem eyes that glared across the river.  Their scale and foreboding import served its hostile edict well.  Monstrous plumes of fern, twining bindweed and other supple subordinates choked their feet as though in worshipful rapture, trailing their roots and whiplike greenwood in the river.

Edward stood at its edge.  She turned from staring up at the íve to study him in the same mercenary earnest, sitting down on a stone to do so.

"So through all this, there's a pile of rocks crawling with rats with our name on it?" Susan inquired, her appraisal concluded.
"I don't think too many rats would bother with it." William admitted.
"How far?"
"If we weren't staring down the barrel of a full moon, I'd say... five easy days, but we are, so you'll have to do it in three.”  The wind came up around the river bend and swept a pall of corrugation across its surface, moving the dry grass against their legs.  
“What if we don’t get there in time?"  

"Sai ilsii nais ii'syln si sa'ilya." Edward observed unexpectedly, prompting her to look back to his brother.

"He said you won't survive the night."
Brushing the dust from her water bottle, she lifted what remained in it to her lips.
"Anything else I should know?"

William edged a pile of little stones into a berm with his bare toes.

“Just the usual rural bullshit... if the weather turns, we could be forced to sit out a month, and you’ve got food for maybe two weeks.  That's not a dealbreaker... you can eat flesh and there's plenty around.  But if something happens to you, there's no opiates, no antibiotics.” he explained.  "Sorry, cloudcheeks..."
"It's not your fault." Susan sighed.  "I should have brought some."
“If I have to make a run for pharms with these alujha fucksticks in the way, it’d be forty eight hours, minimum, and you’ll be left chewing wood with that there tap dancing on your fucking morale.” he added, nodding at his brother.    
"He doesn't speak English any more." she reminded him.  They shared a private smile.
"It's the distance, more than anything.  Three days... it's not enough time.”  

Her dark, dry eyes caught Edward’s gaze.  

“There you go... it might not be a dead loss.  I might not make it, and I'll probably break something trying.  I could be begging you to shoot me in twenty four hours, so don't bother looking like I'm the one who'll get you fucking killed."  She turned back to William.  "Do you think he's ever wondered why he's out here on his own?"

Dissent lapsing, he waited while she hauled herself to her feet and walked with him to the water’s edge.  She knelt to fill their bottles and slake her thirst; to her surprise, her two companions began to shed their packs and weapons, then their uppermost items of clothing, descending to their knees beside the river.  From its shallows they each lifted a dripping hand and touched it to their heads, murmuring a private orison, abashing her own thoughtless entitlement.  William glanced at her silent inquiry.

“Puja... thanking you, Great Mother, for not smiting us in advance, and for the use of your gracious amenities, sincerely, your loyal servant Sachiin, PS, please don’t smite my godless bitch either, I’m not done with her arse, thanks again, yours truly amen etc.”

“She’ll smite you for calling me your godless bitch.”

“She knows I mean well.”  They watched Edward assume his burden of ordinance and pick up half the water she had collected, wading out into the river alone.  William waited until he had disappeared between the two gigantic spruce before granting her a look of secretive admiration.  “Nice burn back there, but I’d wait til he gets off his rag before tweaking him again.”
“Yes, well now he’s got my fucking drinking water, hasn’t he?” she whispered.
“If you think about his romantic orientation Christabel, the kick he gets from yanking your chain is probably semi-erotic, so er, yeah... keep that in mind.”  With her boots tied across her shoulders, Susan climbed awkwardly onto William's own as he knelt for her; he secured her legs and rose so quickly to his full height that she cried out and clutched his chin with both hands, urging him to stand still.  “I am standing still.” he replied.  She gazed around them with his rifle balanced across her thighs, directing him via her grasp on his ears.  

"How can you stand being so far off the ground?  Be careful..." she added, sucking in a breath when he stepped down into the water.  It rose to lap the bare soles of her feet while he paused in the midst of the stream to negotiate a sunken snag; she bent low and pressed her face into his hair.  "I think I would have flown all this way just to smell you."

"And that's perfectly healthy and normal.  But we have to get to Pet’s without giving Chucky an excuse to take a run at the gristle-munchers." he advised discreetly.  "He’d chew through fucking lead to start shit with someone.  If we do bump into dog, we front for our sweet fucking lives... if they poke us with their sweaty trouser wood, we let them, sha bai?"
"I can't wait.  Oh fuck...” she cried as his last packet of cigarettes floated free of his inundated breast pocket.  He lurched sideways, threatening to tip her into the river and caught them, setting them on his head for the remainder of their crossing. 

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

analogue photo
Ponte
 Michele Tassinari  (micheletassinari.tumblr.com)

Broadly speaking, you and I both know luxury brands are shamelessly jacking our discretionary and that's all there is to it.  There isn't a lippy on earth we should be paying that kind of money for.  But if you're asking if Deborah is $60 worth of lipstick within that outrageous context, then yes, to be fair, I got what I paid for.  The packaging is solid and grown up, there is a decent amount of product, the quality is absolutely there and I could detect no objectionable characteristics.  There is the slightest scent of ripped cardboard upon application (it's the waxes) but it doesn't last.

MAC Photo is yellower and more sheer.  Deborah is far more editorial than grunge.  It's more... modernist interior, if you know what I mean; in a word, sophisticated, and I'd go so far as to say a bit of gravitas is definitely required to wear it successfully, so probably not something for your tween niece, lol.  It's a fully adult thing.

Brushed on thinly, Deborah yields a medium chestnut warmed by the underlying blush of your lips. This is much prettier than brown phobics might imagine and will read quite neutral on some deeper complexions.  In fact, its refined tonality will make it useful to a wide spectrum of African and Subcontinental connoisseurs looking for something a bit more high-concept than your average beigey day shade.

They seem so contra and insolent after so long in the fashiony wilderness.  While everyone else is doing Dragon Girl et al (yawn), I'm all like, futuristic, yo.  And haven't gotten any chocolate starfish jokes yet.