True Red isn't even red, strictly speaking, but I was hankering for what I imagined it would bring to my collection.  That turns out to be an incredibly gorgeous coral and scarlet-tinged orange in a luxurious Amplified finish.  Doido!  I can't believe I've bought so much Amplified lately.  My mattes are getting all pissy and outnumbered.  

There's some confusion about the exact nature of the shade online, so I put extra effort into getting these images true to life, waiting for really neutral midday winter sun.  Without tooting my own horn too much I can assure you they're almost perfectly representational on my iMac monitor, particularly the first shot above left, so have a good look if you're thinking of swooping on this shade.  Don't wait too long- it's LE.

Corally-type things always get me bracing for obvious lipcreases but that's not the case here; the shade is impressively smooth and even, settling down to a just-moist finish that resembles buffed furniture wax.  Wear?  Four hours, no touchups, hardly any bleeding, very little migration.  Amplified works its magic again.  

Marcin Oleksak 
Gdansk, Poland     Via Bēhance

Edward left his sedan in the midst of the road and strode down the drive even as the truck listed heavily toward him, the driver loath to concede precious velocity.  The sun emerged briefly from behind cloud as he came toward the house through the exhaust smoke, pausing to confiscate his shotgun from Lilian's grasp and shucking the cartridges into his pockets.  

"Find somewhere else." he told Susan, leaving her halting explanation on the doorstep.  

In the drawing room Lilian watched him stand in tensile preoccupation; he studied her closely before walking to the kitchen and returning with her handbag, pouring its contents onto the kilim and inspected three vials of medication.   
“Clozapine...” he related coldly.
“The really fucking hilarious thing is that it’s not working." she assured him.  "And you don't get to stand there and judge my ass... this is all down to you anyway.”
“What is it about me that drives you to antipsychotics?”
“Everything.  It’s everything.  I can’t fucking sleep, I can’t work, I can’t stop fucking myself in the head... my mother died in long-term care... she was as crazy as the fucking day is long and I can’t go that way...”  She took an involuntary breath and lowered her voice, speaking with a brittle, deliberate restraint echoed in the fists into which both hands retreated.  “I am... I'm having delusional thoughts.  They're about you.”  

He stood looking back at her but said nothing as he set the bottle on the mantle.  She pressed the tips of her fingers to the crease between her brows, keeping her eyes closed.

“Okay, so... Meredith fired my ass for that shit at the store, so now I’m going back to work.”
“You can't with things as they are.” he told her.  Lilian found it hard to look at him, even when he turned slightly toward the doorway.  “Are you expecting anyone?”

Another vehicle had taken advantage of the unsecured gates to ease down the drive in low gear, a dark sedan with the dull orange globe of a magnetic beacon seated behind the windscreen.  Edward left her in the drawing room to intercept its passengers.  They rose slowly on either side of the car; two detectives, one in a hooded jacket and T-shirt, the other in a tight black pullover that displayed the outline of the holster strapped to his chest, approached the door, their posture weighted with an uneasy mix of caution and swagger.  He let his anger bleed out while they looked him over and made some decisions of their own.

“We’re looking for a Lilian Frost... she’s here, right?” the hooded jacket proposed, flashing his credentials.  He was broadly, indelicately handsome, his deeply-creased brow marked by a hybrid state of expectation and suspicion, his tan the product of time spent on other people’s yachts.  Lilian usurped Edward’s reply, walking out into the hall to investigate the visitation and they trailed her back into the drawing room.  “You know Mr Lamb, we’d really prefer to conduct this interview in private, so if you wouldn’t mind stepping out...” the hooded jacket suggested smoothly.  He extinguished their expectations by staring back at them as he crossed the room and stood before the French doors.  They looked down over the contents of her handbag where they still littered the ground beside the hearth.  “Lilian Natalia Frost...” he smirked in her direction.  “It’s just a small matter today.  I’m sure we can settle this without any unpleasantness.”
“What the fuck do you want?” she snapped.
“That would be the drop you failed to make at the precinct a few months back.  We’re aware you just lost your position down at your little porn store, what with all the felonious activity that’s occurred there overnight... but we’re going to be needing the sum owed before we can think about tolerating your primary operation.”  
“Who told you I was here?”  
“A concerned member of the public provided us with your details.”  The detective smoothed a palm over his exuberant, toast-brown cowlick.  “Cash or bank cheque, or you can come downtown and make it right in person... I’m all set for option two, but Noah here’s queerer than a three buck note and wants a payday.  Maybe we can uh, split the difference, if it’s all the same to you.”  
Lilian picked a thread from her sleeve, shaking her head.
“I’m tapped out, so you crazy clowns can go right ahead and fuck yourselves.” she advised.  Glancing to Edward, she directed a small, sarcastic gesture of encouragement at him.  “Bent vice cops.  Throw them a coin, they'll do a little dance.  Hell...” she added, nodding at the black sweater.  “Look at those dick-sucking lips.  He’s probably gonna do one anyway.”
“Ms Frost, you ah... you need to dial back that attitude.  You and this here've pissed some upstanding, deep-pocket types off hard and you’re not in a position to yank our dicks... we did you a favour coming down here and playing nice... we don’t have to play that way.  I prefer not to myself.  Now... we started out at twenty K, I know that, but what you just said reminded me that we got Christmas coming and mouths to feed, so now it’s thirty.” the hooded jacket warned her, standing restlessly and looking to his companion, then to Edward, who seemed to have begun to exert a gravitational effect on his attention.  
“Is there something you'd like to say to me specifically?” Edward asked.
“Would it kill you to step in and cut a cheque?  Best money you ever spent, I can guarantee it.”

Lilian smoothed her hand against the side of her neck, watching them discuss her position without interjecting.

“She doesn’t want to pay.” Edward replied.  
“Maybe I didn’t explain this right.  She pays, or she comes downtown and works off every fucking dime in the ladycage while we lose her paperwork.”

The errant detectives looked from Edward to Lilian in an effort to discover the source of the strange reciprocation that had begun to prevail, of unintelligible exchange as the pair ignored the ultimatum in favour of each other.  Against the dark wall the pale woman evinced so little interest in them that her disregard became a provocation in itself, and the hooded jacket shook his head, tugging handcuffs from his trousers.
“You don’t think we’re stupid, do you, because I could easily get offended.”
She smiled, but not at him.
“I guess cock doesn't take the edge off for you like it does for me.”
He pulled up short of her.
“Uh oh... look what you just did.”  Snatching her wrist he turned her around, shaking out the silver cuffs with a dramatic flourish.  She stood still at first, then yanked free, and he caught her arm again and sank a short punch into the back of her floating ribs.  Her arms fell as though cut from her body and her mouth clenched, biting down on the small sound that almost escaped her.  
“Dale...” the other detective murmured.  “Don’t fuck her up.  This asshole’s going for his lawyer as soon as we’re in the car.”  Neither man enjoyed the expression on her face when she lifted it and looked to her companion; Edward’s golden eyes remained on hers while her escort shoved her forward, yanking her elbows back toward him in an attempt to correct her course against the slow pace she insisted on, her cryptic smile appalling the man beside the door.  “Dale...”
“Pitch a fucking cork in it, would you Noah?  No one knows shit about this... it’s a free ride.”  He dragged her closer to the door.  “Get this crazy bitch in the car before her head starts spinning round.”

Lilian slumped onto the thick plastic coating the rear of the sedan while her custodians took their own seats before her.  In the warm confines the mens' conflicting colognes fought the smell of exhaled smoke and resident, endocrine masculinity.  She coughed once and tasted copper.  Edward filled the doorway as he paused and glanced in both directions across the garden; from watching him intently, the second detective turned to his companion.
“Dale... key.” he urged, looking down at the strip of chrome lining the door glass beneath his elbow, suddenly cold enough to bleed through his woollen sleeve.   
“Jesus, will you fucking learn to front sometime?  I’m not peeling outta here because this freak follows me into the friggin lot.  He’s pissed... his piece is going and there’s not a damn thing he can do about it.  I’d be pissed too.” the handsome man chuckled, turning with his arm over the back of his seat to smirk at Lilian while he fished the car key from his pocket.  She sat with her cuffed hands at the small of her back, head laid against the rest and her gaze drifting to his own, growing slowly darker as though with cloud shadow as her lips parted.  In doing so, he missed the sight of Edward’s face as the latter bent to stare in through the windscreen at them; as he turned back the detective found that he could neither instruct him to retreat, nor admonish the voice that slid over his shoulder.  The keys in his fist became as cold as winter stone, sucking the heat from his hand.

“You can’t move.” she whispered, the sound of the breath drawn through her throat thickly loaded with impelling intonation.  It bled into his skull and thickened his blood, backing it up behind the valves in his neck.  The second detective glanced at his side window and snapped at his companion for the keys again.  Though the latter heard him, he sat locked in immobility.  Edward stepped back from the car door and Lilian curled against the seat, closing her eyes.

The window glass flew inward in a burst of icy fragments that struck both men and bounced back to land in her lap like uncut diamonds.  The black pullover was sucked from his seat, his body scouring the glass that still sagged in the frame, dragged out into the open air, legs beating against the steering wheel.  On the drive his hoarse cry was snapped short by the collapse of his face, his assailant crushing it into the cobblestones and cracking his neck into segments.  Edward rose, crossing the windscreen like an eclipse toward the passenger side, terror tearing its occupant out of inertia and pushing his heavy, stubborn hands toward the shotgun between the front seats.  The door beside him was wrenched open; in seizing and hauling him sideways Edward wrested the man’s grip from the weapon; his cry was punched into a higher key by his shoulders striking the grass, where he writhed like a fat snake as he was dragged from the drive by his ankle.  While on his back he recalled the pistol secreted in his trousers, and with his stare still on his assailant he tore the gun free; Lilian flinched behind her window at the crack of the shot, watching Edward knock the weapon from his grasp, stamp his elbow to the ground and snap the detective's arm cleanly, leaving it to fall at a nauseous angle while he stoved a suite of prone ribs with the toe of his boot.  

He took a moment to reach down and confiscate the keys from his victim’s belt before returning to the sedan.  She knelt while he unlocked her cuffs, wiping her hair from her eyes as she climbed out and returned with him toward her tormentor, the man lying on the grass with his mouth moving to shape words that would not attend his summons.  Bending slowly, Lilian retrieved the pistol from the ground and passed it to her companion, and Edward thanked her, trained it on the detective’s hip and pulled the trigger.  They took an unhurried measure of his agony, but when the screams began to displease her, he aimed into the man's gaping face and fired again.

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

The Lovely R spits the dummy and changes his subject.  This is one third of our See No Evil (sanbiki no sari) monkeys.  R remarks- "This was Silver Efex 2 with a tweaked film preset.  Again this is my Vivitar plastic fantastic manual focus macro lens.  Old school.  You have to move the aperture ring.  Get off my lawn!"

What do you tell someone about a Cohen Brothers movie?  You'll love it, trust me.  Not at all formulaic.  Action packed.  Stuffed to the gills with loveable rogues.  That would be a pretty universal no.  Ever met someone who can articulate precisely why they pay to see one?  Again, no.  Even so, what I'm about to say is tantamount to blasphemy- Barton Fink and No Country for Old Men bored me more than anything, I think them overrated and the prospect of more Cohenic genius feels... like being invited to spectate hot sex between two people I dislike.  Ambivalent.  I'll confess also to feelings of confusion and dismay at the promise of folk music; to not knowing when they're taking the piss because it all looks like a pisstake to me.  And you know, it got so much darn festival oxygen... I'll cop to scowling at that too. 

To the uninitiated, it's probably most useful to declare the Cohens consistent, if nothing else; consistently adult, consistently juvenile, consistently earnest, sarcastic, innovative, reiterative; simple and complicated.  Inside Llewyn Davis is all of these things, and... sort of... less.  Though fortunately more than the sum of its parts.

Davis is a folk singer and human ingrown toenail shuffling between couches in Greenwich Village, 1961, down to his last hundy after losing his offsider to suicide.  The narrative doubles back over itself in a series of loops familiar to anyone afflicted by the creative impulse; getting dicked by your representation, arbitrary rejection, the desultory mining of played-out friendships, petty rivalries, the bloodied perversity, the weight of your own limbs as you drift inexorably toward the prospect of abandoning the only thing that keeps you breathing.  The universality of both these unhappy truths and their masochistic savour lie at the heart of ILD's success.  There is no catharsis, no wind machine, no mercy, no gilding of the dour lily that is Llewyn himself- that wight at once too good and too darn faulty to prevail- only the karmic spiral and moments of painfully intimate identification.  Full marks to Oscar Isaac for delivering such perfect and unlovely pitch; he is excellent in all respects.  As are Goodman, who refines that glorious shit with every innings, a grunting Hedlund and his mesmerising dirt lip and others comprising a top-shelf constellation of minor players.  Both Mulligan and her character are less convincing; I know Jean is supposed to thwacketh with bitter wings, but her delivery felt too screechy and uneven to be convincingly screechy and uneven, if you know what I mean.  It felt stiff, a little tone-deaf, and while one might lay this at the feet of the writing in this instance, tone and assurance are problems I've had with many of Mulligan's performances, except for her work in McQueen's despondent Shame. 

As with most of their previous stuff, Llewyn Davis enjoys the faintest spritz of eau de magical realism, or at least a whiff of its metaphorical cousin once removed.  While some find this flirtation charming, I find it slightly craven and even cynically appropriative at this stage, utilising its devices and traction without incurring the scorn so often flung at the genre.  Would it kill the Cohens to quit their borrowing and go the whole hog, just one darn time; to bite off something more than they might be comfortable chewing?  And while yes, we see the sweaters, irksome are the punches pulled instead of landed squarely on the face of the matter to hand, given Llewyn's potential as a weapon and indulgent folk's low-hanging fruit.  Too much tee hee, not enough burn.

Visually, ILD benefits inestimably from typically beautiful, if understated compositions and a soft, depleted palette, an autumnal Kodachrome that is such a relief from the garish treatments trotted out of late (serves me right for fucking myself in the eyes with shit like Pacific Rim.)  Aurally, it profits from some fine vocal performances from the players themselves, which impressed me retrospectively.  I'm clueless as to the depth and value of the oeuvre's in-jokes, but I'm sure there are plenty of easter eggs arrayed for the cognoscenti.  The Cohens' artless and/or cruelly puerile delight in directing our attention to every curious tic and bizarre convention they've observed is a guilty and eternal pleasure.  And of course, anyone who can exploit Justin Timberlake's conceit to the extent that he'll submit to being the panto horse's arse like he does here deserves marshmallows in their hot chocolate; the spectacle is all the more amusing for the victim believing himself privy to the whole spectrum of ironic implication.  Do you think he ever really sees himself?  Lol.  Me either.   

Flicks like Inside Llewyn Davis will always present critical challenges.  Working obscure subject matter into wilful gold can be its own reward and just as gratifying to a thoughtful audience.  It can seem petty to castigate a mature modus for being, well, mature, but it's important to question when and if peak Cohen has tipped over into just preaching to a bunch of breathless converts.  Superfans will probably lap up every umber moment with some sort of artisanal spoon, and now that I've kicked it around in my head for 24 hours, I'm more convinced of ILD's subtle merits than when the credits were rolling.  Not sure if I would have had the nerve to try and sell this story to anyone myself, but that's why I'm not a respected auteur.  The fact that they sold it to me is a peculiar achievement.   Inside Llewyn Davis is available on iTunes now, at least in NZ.

Seven Syllables Of A Haiku Obscured By A Vegan Hotdog, 2014
Alt-Lit
**credit**

This is a totally unglamorous and  yawn-inducing post to anyone neither interested in gardening nor food, so philistines falling laxly into either category are excused and can go back to fondling their piercings (noticed how many fresh lip hoops there are lately?  Is there a 1994 wormhole out there?) and sending nudie selfies to randoms.  

We've been growing our own garlic for about 6 years now, favouring a local heritage Printanor-type pink skinned variety, yes in part because of the wank value but mostly because of its superior taste and resistance to things like rust, since we don't spray or much bother with strenuous shit like active cultivation.  These plants will have to pretty much look after themselves once we've done them the tremendous favour of sticking them in dirt, so if you're lazy or organically inclined, we advise you ask around about tried and true varieties in your area.  Don't rule out modern strains if you've heard good things, though.  

Growing garlic can be both stupidly simple and frustratingly arcane.  In a good year (whatever that means- we're still scratching our heads) you'll get masses of great fist-sized bulbs with little to no effort; in less propitious seasons you'll end up with pissy little plants that expend what energy they've stored cheating you with their sneaky, snaky flower stalks.  Up til now I've always planted in autumn, following the advice of several online garlic gardens, but that's gotten me two years of early flowering and diminishing returns, so this time we're going with tradition and setting out the cloves in the end of June, just after the (southern hemisphere) winter solstice.  Garlic is easy to grow but primo bulbs are apparently dependent on all kinds of temperature and moisture constraints.  From what I can gather, a good fat set seems to require a cool winter and spring and a hot, dry summer, especially around harvest.  In our zone 9 maritime conditions, one season can extend a long way into another and rain is guaranteed, so we're probably suboptimal; my onions are often mediocre too.  Oh well- the Allium family is fundamental to our food chain and the commercial crop tends to be quite heavily sprayed, so ho-hum home-grown is better than nothing. 

Anyways.  What you're seeing to the right here are examples of the garlic I'm about to plant (L 2 R) nice big Printanor clove from my mother's garden, a robust brownish-papered variety from a friend's crop (thanks Jared)  and one of my own crappy little cloves from the last harvest.  Choose the fattest cloves from the outside of your bulbs, avoiding any that are fungal, holed, budding weirdly or bruised.  Some peeps peel theirs but I don't think this makes a difference to strike or yield.  I've often wondered if clove size really does matter, so I'll be keeping an eye on this crop with that in mind.

ABOVE   I know it's boring, but do dig it over well before you plant.  The garlic will get a much better start.  I'm not adding fertiliser at this point since this is nice dirt and I prefer to wait till the plants are in active growth before feeding them.  I'll use a few handfuls of sheep poo and some blood and bone, scattered between the plants as soon as the green tops start showing.  Don't let the fert touch the sides of the new plants or the stalks might burn/rot out.

Scott Scheidly’s Pink!

You're welcome.

In sleeping, William lay in infantile abandon, entirely unconscious of her scrutiny.  He neither snored nor spoke nor shifted restlessly, sinking into sleep as quickly as he had settled with the intention.  The early hour had breathed a chill into the house for the first time since her arrival and Susan pulled her cabled green cardigan over her arms at the end of the bed, rubbing at the tights on her legs.  She smiled to herself as a large, thick-legged spider made its way down from the headboard and walked out over William's hip, pausing on that indeterminate region where his stomach departed his ribcage.  A sudden and determined tread crossed the quilt under the pheasant that had roosted on the frame and the fowl snaked forward and snatched up the arachnid, clucking excitedly as it flapped down onto the floor with its prize.  He murmured incomprehensibly and she frowned at his senseless profile. 
“What?”
"It's too early... come closer." he sighed.  She shuffled around the bed toward him, swearing when he belied his sloth by throwing her down onto the mattress and leaping upon her with active predacity; she squirmed and complained under the dark blue sheets that settled over them.  “I said you’re sexy when you’re cranky, in Urdu.”
“Teach me something.” Susan insisted while he used his teeth to loose the buttons of her cardigan.
"Mai urdu nahi bolti.”
“Mai... ur... just tell me what it means.”
“I do not speak Urdu.” he smiled.  "French is so much easier... say défonce-moi, bête de la montagne... doucement... profondément..."  She cackled as he shucked her tights down, planting her feet, hauling them up then breaking free and scrambling to the foot of the bed, only to be dragged back under the quilt, her shrieks obscuring the sound of the tread approaching the door.  Neither of them were prepared for the force with which it flew open, admitting Edward in a black temper.  

“Get up.” he snapped.  “Into town.  Now.”
“What the fuck?" William complained, throwing down the counterpane.  “Do you think you can walk your crazy white arse out of here?”  
“Just go, it looks important.” Susan insisted, brushing down her skirt.
"Is it?” he demanded of his brother.  Edward’s mood required no elucidation, and William reached across her for his trousers.

Lilian met them in the hallway in the midst of tying back her hair, scowling beside the phone held to her ear by her shoulder as she followed them down the stairs.

“Stay here.” Edward told her.  She hung up and stuffed the appliance into her bag.
“I swear Lamb if you say that one more time I'm going to fucking stab you.  Stay here shit... some cocksucker smashed up the store and sprayed my fucking name in dayglo over everything.  Meredith just reamed me like a Dutch bitch.”  They waited behind Edward while he unlocked the door into the garage.
“I want pictures.” he told her.  “Send them to my phone.”
“Why’re you here?” she demanded of William, dropping down into the passenger side; he glanced up from lighting a joint on the back seat.  
“He’s second key on my deposit boxes.” Edward informed her.  William leant forward, trading looks with her.  “Someone hacked my operating accounts.” he hissed.
“No fucking way... what did they get?” Lilian exclaimed.  She glanced back to William for an interpretation of his brother’s mute demeanour; the latter sat back and sucked in his bottom lip.



Susan stood before the coffee machine as the front door slammed.  Lilian stalked into the kitchen, slumping down into a chair beside the window before acknowledging her presence with a glance.  The silence between them, loaded from the outset, became as contentious as any ill-chosen words and Susan turned toward the sink, casting about for something to say.

“William called a while ago... something garbled, about banks...” she offered.  The blonde woman struck a light, sat back and smoked half her cigarette before responding.
“I feel like... you're looking at me a certain way." she asserted, lowering her chin and devoting her gaze to the ash she tapped into the china bowl before her.  Unsure how to reply, Susan chose not to, and her companion let the challenge slide.  "La Rue hacked Lamb's account, ripped off all the dry-cleaned cash.  Then someone busted into the boutique, smashed it up and sprayed how they’re gonna do me all over the whole fucking thing.  Whatever kind of shit went down between Lamb and Opal's gotta be bad, because no one goes this fugazi over losing a single fucking client.”  Lilian's stare became bitter.  “But you wouldn’t know about that, right?”  
“I really don't." Susan sighed, shrugging at the suspicion that settled on her skin like soap scum.  "Did you have money in the shop?”
“No... but no day job, no visible means of support.  No visible means and every douche with a badge is on you like a fucking carcinoma, so no trade.  No trade, no fucking money.”  She delved into her handbag and a bottle of pills bounced from it onto the table, rolling and dropping at Susan’s feet; the latter could not help but glance at the label upon retrieving them but the discovery recoiled on her, souring the coffee in her mouth.  
“This is..."  She looked up incredulously.  "You can't just take these... they're dangerous..."
“Too late.  Who was that bitch last night, the Russian freak?”  Lilian asked the question without looking at her.
“She's... a friend of William’s... but... you can't...” 

Frowning again as Susan's reply tailed off into an incredulous stare, the blonde woman turned toward the window and the low chug of the large vehicle outside, perceiving the white bulk of a removal truck backing up to the gates.  She took out her phone while the occupants jumped down and came for the chain impeding them with an enormous pair of bolt cutters.  Susan left her talking to Edward and went to the porch, standing with hands on hips while the intruders guided the truck along the drive.  It pulled up halfway, its three large, unshaven attendants sporting wife-beater shirts and sagging track pants.  

“This is private property..." she exclaimed, walking around to address the driver, who rolled himself a cigarette behind the wheel.  "What the bloody hell's going on?"
“This’s called seizing goods to the value of this right here, according to that right there.” he informed her, handing over a writ.  Lilian addressed him as she descended the steps.  
“Put it back in gear you greasy fuck or I go get the ten gauge.” she warned, staring up into the cab.  The men glanced at each other and began to chuckle, shaking their heads and lowering the cleated ramp toward the cobblestones, the chain stays rattling as they paid out.  She disappeared into the house while Susan attempted to decipher the smeary documentation, reappearing with the weapon she’d described in both hands, smiling like a sadist at an invalid.  The packers fell back onto the lawn on either side of her while the driver exclaimed profanely into his mirror, struggling with the gearstick as she raised the heavy barrels.

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

FOX // first of animal series // credit

This smallish Danish film caught my eye a year or so ago in the course of reading someone else's praise of recent Scandinavian productions.  I wholeheartedly agreed with the sentiment that something's going very right up there, particularly with the Danish stuff and A Hijacking is a great example of whatever concerted and judicious process is taking place.  

It opens without preamble into the banalities of life on board a commercial freight ship in the midst of the Indian Ocean, observations centring on Mikkel (Johan Philip Asbæk) the cook, and his long-anticipated reunion with his distant wife and child.  From there we are removed to the shipping co's Danish HQ, where flinty CEO Peter Ludvigsen (Søren Malling) has both beady eyes set squarely on his operation's bottom line.  When Somali pirates board the ship, the crew become the subject of gruelling negotiations between the mercurial Omar, the pirates' broker, and Ludvigsen, who must weigh the advice he receives from his consultant against everything he knows and feels. 

Lindholm recognises and respects the bounds of this scenario.  He eschews the florid dramatics that would doubtlessly pad the greasy bulk of an American studio production of this nature, laying down verité in midst of the opening titles and embellishing that homely substance with more of the same.  Three metres back from the screen I could smell the holed-up crew and their slop buckets and feel the tasteful laminate bruising Ludvigsen's Copenhangen elbows.  He thoroughly exploits the yawning blank drawn by a western audience pondering a Somali pirate's bottom line and uses the same viewer's suspicion of corporate intent to screw that lid on even tighter.  Sidelining the captain and thereby removing all chance of deferral to authority forces the players to deal with themselves and their captors; the latter's twitchy opacity is well-delineated, underscored by the lack of subtitles.  The sheer drudgery of long-distance negotiation becomes almost insupportable.  I got up and walked around a room a couple of times in the course of the film as physical removal began to feel necessary.  That hasn't happened for a while.  I was also deeply appreciative of the attention paid to the real, personalised price of violence and trauma, a rare concession in a piece so dependent on masculine imperative.

By militating against common expectation, Lindholm is inviting the kind of critique that more conventional practitioners avoid and under this scrutiny, against a figurative ocean of possibilities, some aspects of A Hijacking felt narrow and parsimonious.  Life onboard is sketched out via doco-type capture at the expense of virtually any visual flourishes, and to me this feels like a lack of vision, a wasted opportunity to co-opt the geographic immensity that would surely have seemed like a dreadful co-conspirator.  When it finally unfolds, the violent incident we were bound for seems a little... superfluous, mistimed, even gratuitous, more like a lapse than anything else.   The refusal to present the plodding machina of the pirates' advent certainly deserves applause, but what might have looked like discipline under other circumstances conspired with the no-frills production values to get me wondering if they just didn't have the budget for it.  Ditto for Lindholm's script- it's tight, and perhaps too threadbare when considered retrospectively.  I would have liked a little more from this fecund scenario. 

That said, A Hijacking is an uncut, unexpected gem, taut and gruelling, a thing well told and simply-executed.  I thoroughly recommend it.  Available on iTunes.

My second effort.  This is NIK Silver efex pinhole B&W filter slightly customised + selenium 3 toner then a bit of Selective Colour shiz.  When I reduced the file size and posted it into drafts I was confronted with a really gross blob of festering purply artefacts across the middle of the image even after I abolished a lot of the toning boo!  A sharp eye might still pick them out.  This is technically a bit of a fail but I like it anyway.

I was walking to the butcher's shop on saturday and was stopped in my tracks by this fucking fantastic election propaganda by Wellington collective Toothfish, hanging in the window of the local record store.  Awesome aesthetic tour de force and succinct scrape-up of all our bitter feelings toward National and their cannibalistic monetarist fuckery. 

For those of you unfamiliar with New Zealand's, lol, politics, this is John Key, our odious multimillionaire PM and notional head of the National Party; national might sound inclusive but they're being ironic with that shit and no, the dead fish eyes are not artistic licence.  Neither is the eminence of the symbol arrayed behind and upon him.  

These depraved arseclowns spend their time in office rigging 'free market' mechanisms in favour of the already-affluent, distributing cash incentives to oil and mining companies, crafting elaborate punitive measures against welfare recipients and blocking desperately-needed environmental and social legislation.  John's mates have been squealing about the unfairness of this particular portrayal given that his mum's Jewish.  Ha ha ha ha ha ha unfairness.  From people who think equity is something that happens when you raise the rent on your investment properties.  I don't know about you, but overprivileged white men being sensitive about another overprivileged white man's ethnicity after spending years of their own lives marginalising anyone who doesn't fit that description pretty much makes me want to choke an overprivileged white guy.  Bitch, please.  Cry me a river of gilded tears.  It's probably tax deductible.  Vote Green!

Like dead boughs thrust into the ground, the coppice wood had shed its green wreaths and given up its majesty, a blasted subject of winter under snow that lay glittering like milled salt.  A pair of figures walked together through its midst; a fair woman in a hooded mantle of ticked white fur, tied over a dress of plain black wool, her companion's breeches and weary indigo tunic suited more to the desert than the snow, though heat and cold were alike to him in their irrelevance.  Helaine regretted the shallow drag of her hem upon the perfect white despite their following a spoor that had churned it elsewhere to marbled, frozen sepia and laced it with the smell of stale clothes and sweating desperation.  They proceeded at a pace befitting the course of their conversation rather than the urgency of any chase.  In following behind, she tested him, altering her pace by subtle degrees and satisfying herself that he was attending to her as well as the notional purpose of their foray.  

“You were sleeping when I awoke.” she observed, stepping over a fallen branch.  “Your eyes were closed, at least.  I wish I had known you long enough to tell if it is the season or my company that moves you to such a measure.”    
“It is the season.” Kala'amātya replied.  She had become accustomed to his use of abridgment against investigation, and was no longer discouraged by it.
“You’re certain?”
“When I am weary of myself or my companions, I ride for the horizon.”  

Helaine paused and lifted the mantle on her shoulders.  Her breath became a pall of steam that curled back about the trim of her hood.

“Sage advice.” she admitted, watching him disguise his own bare footfalls in the confusion left by the harried beast, so that they were indistinguishable amid the riven mud.  His black braid was knotted at his nape to keep it clear of the lunate wood and dappled horn slung across his shoulder; her speculation could not resolve it into any utile shape, though she had guessed its purpose.  A long receptacle of leather, dyed deep green, hung from his hip, full of thick, dark-shafted arrows.  “You have not yet told me anything of the East.” she reminded him.  “A swineherd’s daughter knows more of Cathay than I.”
“What would you know?”
“What is the first difference that strikes you?”
Her companion devoted himself to the problem.
“That it surpasses the West, both in freedom and constraint.”
“And what else?”
“There is no shame accorded the flesh, nor to acts of desire... they are considered wholesome enough to attract official exhortation, a far greater deterrent than hellfire.”
“Why then do the merchants return with such prudish tales?”
“They confuse shame with discretion.”  Over the bare heads of the trees a flight of fractious crows, black satin cyphers against the sky, croaked and clapped at one another as they passed by.   
“I have heard that women are collected like tulips by princes and burghers alike... whoever can bear the cost of the venture.”
“It is common enough outside the Christian kingdoms.”
“I cannot imagine success in such an exploit.”
“The ancients remarked that you amass the haram you deserve.  Anyone envying a house of fifty concubines need only return a day late and a gift short.”  They smiled to each other briefly, and she lifted her sleeve to her face, breathing warmth against it.
“And you have contrived this arrangement on your own behalf?”
“I attempted, and greatly desired, to live alone inside a town upon my exile, but was soon enough convinced that I had erred.” he replied.  “What is a house without women, the women asked of me.” 
“As well they might.  These women... were they not slaves?"
"Some."
"Where does one purchase the most beautiful girls?”
“Why do you ask?”  His guard, lying latent, rose at her inquiries like the stiffly-drawn posture of some rankled beast rising from repose.
“Idleness...” she admitted.
“Byzantium, Cordoba, Tripoli.  In these times, the bazar excels the suq.” Kala'amātya related.  Helaine's gaze departed him toward the most distant trees.
“Strange sport, to choose flesh from a yard amid cattle beasts."  She slid her hands into her cloak.  "It is no easy thing to live as a chattel."
“It is not my taste to lie with slaves.”
“You think yourself above such practices...”  
Her contention earned her the full measure of his stare. 
“I was born the least of a race raised to serve another's will, and I do not flatter myself on that account.  But I care not for whatever I might compel from someone to whom I am fearful or loathsome... and I am both, more often than not.”   

Helaine perceived the offence she had given and regretted it.

“Thus I know you to be something other than a male of my own race, and far more than the stars of your birth.” she told him.  He was not sure how to receive the commendation amid the defence he had already ordered; his eyes found hers briefly before he returned them to the trail.
"Your friend does not believe it."
"Petrouchka regrets far more than my regard for you."

They walked on, climbing a slow rise over which the trail laboured visibly.

"What of your husband?" Kala'amātya asked.  
"What of him?"
"It is told to me that he does not treat you kindly when he learns I am gone.”  His knowledge of this private trouble was greeted with a frown.
“Do not concern yourself with him.  He has loathed the sight of me since finding the sign upon my face...”  Helaine touched a hand to the black line on her forehead.  “Though I own that his people did contract for me in ignorance of it.  He does not lately brave the threshold.”
“I will dispatch him for you.”  
She shook her head.
“It would please his family too well.  It suits my purposes to have him drunk and foolish and fearful in town, where he can best be heeded.”  The memory of her betrothal aroused unwelcome reminiscences, and she was glad of the hood that shaded her face.  That she had not convinced him of the merit of her designs was declared by the set of his shoulders as he walked before her.  “Men have taught me to cherish their dread over all other forms of their regard." she reminded him.  "Even Petrouchka would allow that I had no great love of either sex, before your advent.”  That he was again affected was a thing he struggled mutely to disguise, and they walked for some time in silence.  "I can only wonder what you were seeking when you brought yourself to me." 
“A wrathful, unquiet spirit.”
“Such is your curse.” she chuckled.  “Do the unquiet spirits of your haram await you somewhere, lamenting the alluring horizon?”
“The women of my Bukhara house had their throats cut in my absence, and since then I have kept none who will suffer on my account.”
“I am sorry for them.  But I treasured the notion that I had charmed you from the trees, when in fact you merely adjudged me sufficiently formidable and infamous...” she said with a smirk as she lifted her skirts to step across a fallen sapling.  “You do woundeth vanity, Kala'amātya.”

They had followed the path of man and beast to the edge of the wood, where it crashed over the cusp of a tall bank sloping to the edge of a frozen river, the trees on its far side a dark redoubt against the sky.  The ice-choked water had formed a blank and tacit plain footed with great swathes of windblown, frost-scoured floes.  Her companion drew the length of wood over his shoulder, slid twisted rawhide from his belt and strung the span, transforming the nameless instrument into the recurved bow that he had carried since his service in the Eastern steppe.  Thus configured, it was two thirds as tall as he; she reached out and took it from him, finding herself barely able to draw the stiff line between the two siyah, her fingers burning with the effort.

“Infamy is not the whole of my requirement.” he replied, belatedly. 
"I would give much to know the rest of it." 
"I cannot think why."
"Because I may call the dead from a fathom of earth, but after three seasons and though you honour my bed, I awake to find you dreamless, I partake of food you will not taste, and I question devils on your account who shrug at my demands as though already beholden to you.  I am not accustomed to elusion."  She watched him select seven arrows and set them head-first into the snow, shaking her head at her own confoundment.  "Do I please you, Kala'amātya?  What would you have from me?"  

He looked to her from inspecting the crane feather fletches, and spoke with oracular candour.

“You please me, and my tastes are simple.  We are all Narcissus.  In you, I find myself.”  

She handed him the bow, her cold hand closing on his own; all the disparities between them, the colours, shapes and origins, could not belie his answer.

“I never thought to say this, in this flesh nor any other, but I would have you if it blackened the ground beneath me.” Helaine told him.  "If not you, then no one."  He considered the elegance of her unpainted face, the echoing simplicity of the slender black insignia upon her forehead.  Her lies were sweeter than her honesty, the latter like the taste of his own blood in his mouth, but infinitely dearer to him.
“Then it is well that we are suited.” he replied.     

Where the frozen bank and ruined reed beds met the water, five fur-swathed figures were too engrossed in the speedy commission of their task to perceive their discovery.  Having cut the muddy trail through the wood in driving the stolen cattle beast, they had slaughtered it where it had fallen, cast in the uncertain river ice, hacking at its steaming flesh with blood-slicked axes while its legs still kicked and stuttered.  The poachers holed the carcass and dragged its entrails over the snow preparatory to their division, the colours matching the stench arising from them, swept back up the bank toward the trees.  Two men began to quarter the hind legs with swords while another stuffed a sack with the rough, warm chunks of meat tossed back toward him, scolding the crows that had drifted down from the trees to stand behind them like an audience of minor devils.  

“It would please me to see why you are so feared.” Helaine suggested.
“It is superstition.” he replied modestly.  She smiled at the arrangement of his arrows, and drew the last two from the row, tucking them beneath her mantle.  Turning from her, Kala'amātya plucked the first arrow from the snow and nocked it swiftly, adjudged the breeze and drew the rawhide to his jaw, a taut clap sounding as he released it, all the more sinister for its stiff attenuation.  She raised a hand against the sky and followed its arc with her gaze, watching it bow its fatal head toward the ground.  The impact was a thing she almost felt in her own flesh as it punched into the spine of the tallest poacher and dropped him face down into the bloodied snow, where he thrashed, his cries turning his companions toward him.  One by one they arose from their crouches, frozen in place by the mysterious throes that had grasped their fellow; Kala'amātya sent an arrow into the neck of the youngest, a tall, blonde boy in a goatskin cloak, and another through the chest of his father, felling them beside the heifer.  
“You will remain here into summer?” Helaine inquired, kicking the snow from her skirt.  At the foot of the slope the fallen trio were abandoned by the remaining poachers, who sheathed their swords and began to surge through the drifts along the edge of the river, their deep blue cloaks flapping on their backs.  A shaft drove through the thigh of the foremost, slowing him to a standstill in time to see his companion pierced at the hip, screaming shrilly and dragging the disabled leg in his desperation to escape the unseen archer.  
“I am betrothed to the Duc d’Orleans from May.  We are to chastise Huguenots for their unchristian conduct.”
“But I have fed you all this winter... surely I and not Gaston should have the benefit of that.  I shall write to him and have you released from this odious duty.  Were I less infamous, you might have something of a care for my welfare in your absence.”  She handed back the superfluous arrows.  “Your brother’s wife would murder me, given the chance.”   
“And Petrouchka Belyaev would hang and quarter me."
"Would you not feel the same?" she reminded him.
"I would... and therefore favour discretion.  And I fear I would not survive my attempt to subject you to the auspices of a fond protector."  Kala'amātya turned another of his rare smiles toward her, and she replied in kind.  "Though after so long unlamented, it is a fine thing to be missed.” he confessed, manually directing her attention to the second brace of victims.  “Militia scouts.” 
“It seems I have fed them too.” Helaine observed, noting that while the first trio were tenant farmers, the other pair wore the winter garments issued by antagonistic magistrates.  He slung his bow in favour of his shoto blades, each as long as his forearm and as bright as shards of mirror glass.  
“How would you have them?”

She raised a hand and tapped her chin.  

“Take a hand and an eye from each.  I will call up the wolves... if either of them stumbles home they’ll have a tale to tell, if nothing else.”  

Down by the river his living victims espied him as he descended the bank, and made a desperate change of course, scrabbling over the frozen reeds and out onto the ice, where they scurried and toppled over, driving the arrows into their flesh.  Passing the dead lying in silent arrangement around the heifer, he paused to wrench the shafts from their stiffening flesh and replace them in his quiver.

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

As a dreadful child I, along with other juvenile naturalists, used to invade the slightly scary granite boulder caves on a isthmus at the edge of the Arafura Sea and gently pluck the little bats from where they were blamelessly nestling on the ceilings.  They were almost unbelievably tiny under all their silky grey fur and pretty uncomplaining, happy enough to be warm and contained as long as we didn't do anything sudden or mean.  As it became dark we would stand on the beach and open our hands; the little bats would crawl to the end of our fingers and then flit away into the blood-warm and ember-red evening.
I know they're vectors for some pretty gross diseases, but so are people.  I regret nothing.
> East Woody Island, Arnhem Land, Australia.
(pic beachsafe.org.au)

Happy Thoughts   Trevor Drummond   littlebrickbox.com