HOUSE Serge Lutens STYLE/FLAVOUR floral/soliflore DATE OF ISSUE 2000 LISTED NOTES rose, geranium, clove, vanilla, gaiac, honey, musk. Rose soliflores, in fact soliflores in general, do not speak to the very core of my being. Perhaps I can make an exception for A La Nuit, that soporific, sloe-eyed jasmine, and for a good champaca- if I am ever to find an example of that elusive paragon, since it seems doomed to cloying, pandering adulteration. What is a freaking soliflore anyway, you might well ask; literally, it is a scent based on or consisting wholly of a single nominated flower, a conceit that many find tiresome given the fact that virtually nothing smells exclusively of itself. You might conclude that this endeavour often ends in gakky disaster, and you would be right- tuberose (it burns!) and vanilla being much abused in the tortuous pursuit of simplicity. Having just qualified my initial statement into oblivion, I might as well go the whole hog and admit to enjoying Sa Majesté la Rose, if not to the same extent as, say… Muscs Koublai Khan or… quite a few other things. Equivocation is annoying, isn't it? I agree, wholeheartedly. But I just don't know if I can love a simple singleton; I need layers, enigmas, imponderables. Should my exorbitant requirements colour your own opinion of such an expertly composed and well-executed scent? Probably not. Sa Majesté opens with the best of all possible roses. Serge himself references Turkish, Bulgarian and Moroccan sources which suggests the inclusion of both rosa damascena (heavy, fat, fruity) and rosa centifolia (bright, sweet), the basis of those respective harvests. The scent is truly a thing of hybrid perfection, collating all those narrow, fractionated ideas that we have gathered and stowed and arranging them in an authentic sequence. We are greeted with cloudy dawn pink and feather-grey top notes that express the first taste of a new flower still quartered in its native thorns. There is bloomy purple fruit threaded with a notional honey, more like deliquescent sweetness than the mellifluous substance itself, devoid of any skunky complexity. Clasping this central emphasis is a cold, limpid note of dew supported by the fibrous, wooded bitterness of fresh sap, the shaded green of leaves and the ghost of the cool dirt at the feet of it all, a loamy darkness anchoring the velvet hum. The rose is the story and there is not too much else to report; I find that any flanking notes owe much of their presence or absence to temperature and detect a nip of carnation and a smudge of white musk on a warm day. Honey and sleepy clove fire up slowly in the tail. Sa Majesté's appeal, even to girning skeptics like myself, lies in the fact that it is a rose dans le jardin, possessed of brilliant dimensionality and precious, organic context. So many rose-based fumes wrench the poor thing off the bush and stuff it in a cloudy vase with violets and jasmine, becoming what porn is to sex- the dance without the music. Down that road lies toilet duck and nana soap and Stella and all their dreadful kin, but here we are smelling more than boiled petals, skirting the droopy glass-bound exiles and stepping outside into the parterre. Vive la différence. Trust Uncle Serge to deliver the good stuff. Sa Majesté la Rose has a half-life of twenty thousand earth years on my (very fixative) skin; be prepared for that. As with Chergui I always spray it low to combat the rogue-volitile element that can ambush you on a hot day. I find it clean-wearing but others have reported souring in short order, so if you're a sweaty little number apply it somewhere cool and dry. It plays well with others; I've layered it with Sonoma Ambre Noir, SL Louve, Santal Majuscule and Arabie (lol- try it!) with pleasing results. A brave male could certainly pull this off (with discretion, on a nice cool day) but that is highly dependent on personal chemistry and intestinal fortitude. Receiving more compliments on Sa Majesté la Rose than all of my other scents put together points to two things; that it's perdy, and that my tastes are generally perverse. I tend to prefer smelling like I just sat on tropical fruit or got some jungle stuck in my hair or defiled some place of worship or recently wrestled a hermetic Taoist to the ground; that I like Sa Majesté says a lot in its favour. Do try before you buy, though. 50ml edp. Available online. Céili O'Keefe. A Jewish tailor and fox terrier owner; a Wellington carpenter and staunch family-man—not your typical anarchist-cum-bomber stereotypes. Yet one hundred years ago today, Philip Josephs and Carl Mumme were two founding members of the Freedom Group—one of New Zealand's first anarchist collectives. Nice piece on this here- link Tom et Jarmusch. Le plaisir était pour moi. Are you waiting for 'Only Lovers Left Alive' too? Well it's finally got a bloody distribution deal eeeeeeeeee!! So shouldn't be too much longer. T I L D A A A A ! Patience is supposedly a virtue, but fuck that. If I asked you which country or culture the figure above originated in, you could be forgiven for nominating the Pacific Northwest; it is so reminiscent of Tlingit or Haida work that it's difficult to believe it was created on the other side of that vast ocean, namely the Massim region centering around Milne Bay in Papua New Guinea. It is the ornate terminal from a long sago stirring implement. The complex of island cultures to the east of the Papuan mainland are home to some of the most technically and artistically proficient pre-metallurgical expressions you are likely to encounter. The range of objects is gobsmacking, from the little black stone mortar to the left, to the enormous 'walking masks' required by the elaborate malagan mortuary ceremonies, and we have photographed some of the figures related to this practice for the next vol of this series. These marks are horribly difficult to capture even under the best of conditions, being massively three-dimensional and, like all great works, arrogant in their disregard of the uninformed; in the displays they were also dimly lit, the largest piece defeating us on our first attempt to convey something of its baroque magnificence. We shall try again. Please enjoy the other pieces pictured here, and again, please respect the Otago Museum's copyright. Nusanusa, a prow figure attached to the tomakos or enormous black war canoes of the Solomon Islands. These craft are used in both fishing and headhunting expeditions around the neighbouring communities. Nusanusa are usually carved of heavy hardwood and inlaid with hand-cut mother of pearl motifs, ensuring their power as a protective and auspicious ally on fishing runs and as an intimidatory agency on belligerent forays. They have always reminded me of Baron Samedi, one of the senior loas from the voudoun tradition. They are piercingly, uniquely sinister, almost vampiric in their avidity. Coconut bowl, Marquesas Islands Below: the coral head of a coconut grater from the Cook Islands. Despite it's unglamorous domestic utility, it is a thing of unexpected beauty, the combination of stoic black hardwood, pristine flaxen binding and honeycombed coral an almost surrealistic arrangement of unrelated elements. To use the grater, you seat yourself on the stool built into the (unseen) end of the implement and slough the white meat from inside the halved nut with the coral. The lovely grain behind it is the belly of a huge timber feasting bowl. H a p p y B i r t h d a y to Ms J O n l y 49 t o d a y Life doth progress secrets conceal'd liketh the prawn that is not peeled. This is mad, but only if you think you're sane. While Moon is a shitty, uninspired video, it is one of my favourite songs and probably the one I open TBO with in my head. There was a time when I would have gladly taped Björk into a plastic bag and locked her in a trunk somewhere (the cute phase circa Debut), but she has worn me down and while I don't embrace the sometimes precious/self indulgent aspect of her work, I do acknowledge the need for everyone to be able to looloo/lala without fear of persecution. Except this video really pisses me off. The song's imagery is so incandescently passionate and I would have loved to see more sacral bones and orbits and everything else that might have happened; the dress ups and thunder eggs... not so much. I know Bjork looks a certain way, and that is tempting to costumiers and god only knows I leave the house looking like a head-on with a nasty circus half the time, but I feel there is something more and other that her visual collaborators could be doing. Don't ask me what, exactly. I'll get back to you on that. She has elegant little hands. I never noticed that before. Sorry if some of you are seeing whacky images on the mobile version at the moment; if you are on an iPad you can remedy this by shutting down and then restarting your browser (four finger swipe up, press and hold on browser icon, tap the wee red minus symbol). Josephine Jones brought her night-vision visor to her eyes, adjusting the flattened green rendition of the surrounding darkness with its dials. Its casing creaked as she leant forward, propping her elbows on the bonnet of a Range Rover to quarter the ivy-strangled wall and the wilding darkness beyond, high on the shoulder of the hill over Commoriom Drive. The road formed a stripe of vacant negative alongside an enclave contrived by pre-Depression magnates seeking acreage to compliment their brownstones. Its clement, arboreal seclusion had matured just as duties and reversals had forced the clans from their demesnes, leaving them largely unoccupied and deeply neglected. One of the oldest of the derelict estates stood back from the road behind a set of leaning iron gates, lampless and barely weather-tight. Its wan Edwardian expanse had once staged Gibson-girl opium soirées and sinister flapper scandals, though it had settled in its abandon to accommodating encroaching wildlife. Josephine cursed the care with which it had been chosen by her elusive subjects, handing the instrument to her companion. Trent drew deeply on his fraying cigarette, its tip bright against his sunken cheek; the wet smell of marijuana drifted over her and she surveyed him through the smoke. He was on the furthest side of middle age and possessed a gnarled physique that bordered on the grotesque, his features constructed of the same rude, tanned matter, hawk nose thinning to an empurpled cere. Despite his martial aspect he moved with a carelessness that seemed like rebellion against invisible constraint. His boots were deeply creased and mud-encrusted. "Where were you before this shit?” he grunted. “Bag van... research.” she replied, folding her arms.. “Meat wagons? Guess it aint bad now like it used to be. I heard stories’ll make you piss blood.” She knew he was only exaggerating slightly, having spent a decade shoveling human fatalities and the creatures that had predated them into the backs of vans flagged with unassuming commercial livery. Trent returned her interest obliquely from behind the visor. Amid her early thirties, she might have passed for almost any age in the preceding decade with her height, her tight, clean olive skin and deer-brown eyes, her ash-blonde pony tail bleached by summers in the field. The man relished her youth even less than her competence to operate every piece of surveillence equipment in the vehicle behind them; he was certain that her face required make-up and her abstention was a puzzling irritation. A taxi slowed to a crawl as it was directed toward the gates, its occupants disembarking with plastic shopping bags. She hauled back the heavy lens that tipped her camera forward on its monopod. Through the glass, the pair before the iron gates were almost indistinguishably alike, glowing even at the edge of the hooded streetlight, the last in an elderly chain. One gave its bags to the other and appeared to search its garments with its hands, then they walked to the boundary wall, negotiating it with an ease that almost bested Josephine’s attempt to record the process, the first dropping out of sight while the second stood for a moment on top of the masonry. She switched her view to active infra-red, the expanded spectrum revealing a number of unsettling properties. Its face and hands bled out into the shadows, visible only with movement; unknown structures in its eyes collected ambient light into two points of floating occult green. From gazing at the street they shifted suddenly and flared, and in a moment of smothering fright she thought it stared directly through the lens. Her companion chuckled. “Seaworld should be dealing with these freaks. They got everything fuckin jumping and back-flipping... they got a fuckin killer whale too scared to take a shit. Put it in a fuckin cage and terrorise it's what I say. Works fine on the bloodsuckers, even seen it work on howlers.” “Sanguivores will tolerate confinement with minimal protocols. They'd cut the metamorphs loose if their material wasn't so valuable, and they're the best indication of what to expect from this genera.” “What a sack of bullshit... head shed just aint got the stones to pick them up.” he laughed contemptuously. “Meanwhile they’re out there freeballin and flipping us off.” He hoisted himself into the driver’s side while Josephine remained, staring down into the darkness, letting him swear at her recalcitrance before returning to the car and stowing her equipment. He knocked his filthy boots together in a sarcastic concession and rolled another joint despite her visible disgust. * R A H A T L O U K O U M “Sure this is the one? Looks empty.” The cab driver hooked an arm around the seat beside him and peered down the winding cobbled drive toward the neglected address of her description. The girl sitting in the back of his car checked the ballpoint inscription on her hand. “Two three one Commoriom Drive... can you see a number?” she asked, scanning the ivy. The driver frowned, her accent dampening his already deficient interest, but the sun dropped a ray over the unmown field beyond the vine-choked palisade, glowing lime-green in the fresh grass and illuming three brass numerals beside the gates. “There you go, two three one. That’ll be fifty bucks.” Her mouth dropped open at the price of the fare and she sat for a moment, almost prompted to challenge it before shaking her head to herself, counting out a crumpled ball of notes and dragging her suitcase from the malodorous trunk. One side of the gates swung inward when she shoved hard at the rusted curlicue, voicing a low, drawn-out complaint. The sinuous drive presented signs of habitation; the rubbish bins stood choked with bottles ready for removal and an elderly motor scooter lay on its side in the lawn at the place where the last gasp of air had escaped the front tyre. A pair of black boots crouched in the half-timbered porch, split up the back with some sort of blade, thorny twigs entangled in their laces. Raising her hand to quash a sneeze, she looked around again and depressed the doorbell firmly. A fat green spider lowered itself slowly, paying out a thread of sticky gossamer, ocelli gleaming as the breeze turned it in a circle. Sparrows declaimed noisily behind her while she waited. Leaving the porch, she peered vainly through dust-dimmed banks of windows to the east; several were cracked in their frames of blackened oak, the wood exuding streaks of copper brown over the lower course of plaster. Back at the door she rang the bell again and hitched up the strap of her bag, its embroidered mirrorwork catching the sun and throwing reflections across the panels surrounding her. Shaking her head, she puffed a sigh and set off across the garden, abandoning her suitcase. Crushed underfoot, the lawn loosed drifts of sportive moths and gave up a dewy vetiver, the quiet, smoky smell of the sun in its depths cooled by notes of moss and stone exhaled by the trees, their influence like that of blue buried in green. They formed an arboretum to the rear of the colossal pile, crowded with exotic fin-de-siécle beauties purveyed by peripatetic botanists alongside those classic species treasured for their nobility; though untended, it had rejoiced in that very desuetude, forming a trackless and bewilderingly exuberant folly that ran as far as she could see toward the south. Chinese elms threw roan-blue shade across the house, their leaves like rounds cut from the gilt skin of an idol, feathery aruncus and tardy feral tulips clustered underneath, still losing crimson petals to the breeze. Beyond them she discovered the corner of a relict orchard, valiant, bisque-white blossom still studding the boughs of the decurving pears. She was surprised again by the outline of a parterre in the neighbouring sward, a pool set in its midst and trimmed with blocks of sesame sandstone; it held a foot of rainwater and the leaves of the previous autumn. The sun and the cicadas' seamless chanting pushed her hand into her bag in search of her hat, passerine habitués scolding her intrusion from both sides of the clearing. Indecision sat her on the low wall at the foot of the parterre and had closed her eyes in the shade of her brim by the time sound began to drift from the orchard toward her. Brushing off her skirt, she walked along the pool and into the fruit trees, pursuing the noises encrypted by the breeze. One overgrown aisle turned into another, crossed with fallen branches and draped with swags of morning glory. The voice came to her again, morphing from softly-mitigated babel into words with a slow rhythm and the suggestion of purpose. She bent down with her hands on her knees and peered beneath the rows, espying two bare feet, their calves and a tattered hem of hand-worked cloth in sober blue and and ivory. Their owner stood beneath a pear, murmuring a recitative. “a’ma, shali, a’nii s’ae kala ae s’ae siithra, s’ae silya rani ae s’ae jiiani imaanae... il bai’issan avai’ia e’shii assil nai’iim.” She squinted through the boughs as she rounded the last tree and beheld the stranger in his entirety. He reached toward a dark shape in the leaves that shifted and thrummed, a delinquent swam of honey bees, which he coaxed onto the piece of branch he held aloft for them. Their warm, gold-soaked drone expressed their conciliatory mood and they came together, persuaded to descend. Lowering the swarm toward himself, he looked to her with wide sloe eyes full of irradiant, dissimilar green, their disparity redoubled by the shadow-dappled sunlight striking them unequally. Something in his face spoke of moderate surprise, which she reflected tenfold. “Are you... Mr Lamb?” she began uncertainly. “Is this not a very good time?” “They’re much happier than they were.” he assured her, referring to the bees. Around his feet a trio of parti-coloured birds pecked busily at the insects that had fallen into the grass, their legs forming a fulcrum between their elaborate tails and pursy bodies. He wedged the branch into a crook. “I’m sorry...” she murmured. “I must have... are you... Edward Lamb?” She stepped sideways in the midst of her inquiry to avoid the drowsy passage of an insect. Nothing could have persuaded her that he answered to that name. “No, I’m William. William Lamb.” he smiled, holding out a hand. She stared up, first at the violent sanguine of his hair, then his face, its ice-white, almost specular brilliance agreeing with the coolness of his grasp, like the shade that she had left beneath the elms. “Susan Christabel.” the girl replied. His features obeyed a severe, disturbing symmetry, their oblique arrangement forming an uneasy accord with the droll set of his mouth. He was as tall as any scion of the Masai or Rendille, though taken together, his conflicting attributes defeated the cartography applied by her subconscious, her uncertainty compounded by his garb and the language that had drifted through the trees. With her hand still in his grasp her gaze followed the breadth of his naked shoulder and descended to the ikat cloth rolled loosely about his hips, frowning again at the insecurity of its careless configuration. Susan reached down into her bag, withdrawing a letter of referral. William attempted to peruse the document conscientiously though his eyes drifted from the page toward the visitor with a frequency of which he was not entirely conscious. She was of relatively unimpressive stature, but the black pinafore that pinched her at the waist did nothing to disguise her softly-fleshed proportions, nor the watermelon pink flushed over her cheeks by the hot sun. When the breeze drifted toward him it conveyed the scent of her afternoon skin, sandalwood soap and the raspberry croissant that she had eaten in the car. Small silver hoops trimmed her ears and she had removed one from her nose; the hair beneath her fisherman's hat, streaked mottled tortoiseshell by a brush with peroxide, would have lain upon her shoulders if it had not been pinned behind her ears. The document informed him that Opal La Rue had arranged her appointment and he frowned, then smiled remedially, revealing exemplary teeth. “You’re English?” he inquired. She nodded. “You?” “Oh... no.” Suspicion lifted her dark owl eyes, a sable, spotless blue, and he smiled again, referring to her unresolved inquiry. “Burmese.” The word floated, briefly orphaned, until she ascertained he was referring to himself. "Or Tibetan. I'm not sure. If I'd known you were coming, I would have put on a tie." William returned the letter. The visitor remained unsmiling. “Want to see the house?” She stared past his shoulder. “Will they be alright there?” “Who?” “The bees.” He stepped back against the trees to let her past. “Of course.” Susan trudged behind her host toward the house, her eyes on the lawn as she weighed her distance from the city, the taxi fare and the possibility of charging it to her agency, and a dozen other practicalities that clamoured for attention. Behind them, the pheasants began to crow in an absent fashion, their efforts to recall him losing out to their preoccupation with their meal. When he spoke again she looked up, and was confronted for the first time by a great expanse of blackline figures sprawling from two points low down on his hips and devouring the surface of his back and shoulders. It was composed of wild, interfluent zoomorphisms in an arrangement more insistent than disorder but less immediately gratifying than any elegant literal schematic, elements merging and yet retaining independence. Dotted points of the same dark colour followed their outlines like diacritic glyphs, the whole composition raised and uniformly scarified. Two answering forms, transfigured beast’s heads garlanded with spirals, spilled down the backs of his arms and reached halfway to his elbows. She closed her mouth to prevent the escape of any exclamation. “Pool.” William told her as they passed it. “Don’t worry, I’m working on it. House... it's, er... vintage...” He led her up to a pair of French doors in the rear wall, densely swagged with overgrown clematis, its simple musk-pink buds opening almost shyly. "Are you superstitious?" She shook her head, then nodded; he reached up into the vine and tapped the lintel buried beneath, uttering three words in the language that had drawn her to the orchard. Susan stepped inside at the behest of his smile. They climbed up into a cavernously dark and previously formal drawing room centred on a hearth tiled with satiny, striated malachite. The boards creaked under an elderly Kurdish palace carpet soaked in the precious jannah colours of a weaver's fondest dreams, and this single item had been deemed sufficient ornamentation. Its walls retained their sombre Jacobean panelling, but as they continued into the hall beyond the deep green paper over the wainscoting sagged with the failure of the underlying plaster and the ceiling began to litter the floor intermittently, revealing the roof’s decay. Rugs lay rolled against the skirtings alongside massive gilt and gesso frames. They detoured into a kitchen tucked behind the front door, originally some capacious form of cloak room; William smiled with perverse pride at the red pearlescent formica and blanc et noir linoleum of its conversion. “People say that on that dark night in fifty-three, thirteen psychotic stenographers took their lives after redecorating.” Her frown turned too quickly toward him. “That’s not actually true... I just like to think it. The wiring’s completely fu... there’s no electricity in here yet, but I’ll run a cable from the garage.” “Are you qualified to do that?” William was not sure how to reply and pressed on into the passage once more. She retrieved her suitcase from the front door but he took it from her, the weight that twisted the handle making no impression on his arm. It was the sweep of staircase at the far end of the entrance hall and its lavish vinous carving that relieved her frown, her hand following the quartersawn balustrade as they ascended. They were confronted on the upper landing by the heroically-mounted head and shoulders of some giant caprine beast, crowned with horns that turned in spirals thicker than her calves. The same deep velvety green darkened the windowless ways leading away in either direction at the head of the stairs. He nodded toward the east. “That end’s mine, Ed’s that way, and that’s technically a room, but the floor drops when you walk on it and I think there might be bees in that wall too...” She glanced into the chamber he discussed as they passed by; footprints had entered and retreated, a portion of the floor lying undisturbed beneath a carpet of dust and windblown leaves. Toward the far wall the structures overhead admitted a view of the scilla-blue sky. “It'll be nice when it’s finished.” she observed. The remark was received in a spirit of polite, if slightly blank, inquiry. "When you’ve done it up. Remodeled... isn't that what they call it here?" She laughed uncertainly. "The rain comes in back there... you'll have to do something." Susan lifted a hand to the strap of her bag. "This is your house, isn't it? You're not... squatting, or anything?" William laughed. "My brother paid cash money for it, croyez-le ou pas." At the end of the central corridor a row of picture windows permitted a broad view of the garden and lit a narrow course of stairs into a gable. He allowed her to precede him into a petite garret apartment, its leaded panes casting storiated blocks of sunlight onto the oak bed. They were repeated in the dusty kitchenette, where a pine rack held a set of homely blue and white. She peered into the bathroom and found it half-filled with the belly of a footed tub; returning to the bedchamber, Susan lay her bag down on the mattress and turned toward her guide again. He had to stoop slightly with the angle of the ceiling; his size, framed in such vicinity, made her uneasy, and she looked down into the grounds. The verdant prospect moved her to a sigh that loosed the tension in her shoulders. “That is such a lovely garden..." He smiled again in unreserved agreement as she reached out to tug a light cord. “Does this have electricity?” To his eye she projected strongly contradictory qualities, youth and sagacity, a self-containment that confused his initial assessment of her age and made him realise how inured he had become to its surgical effacement. His thoughts wandered, unbidden, along a tendril-shaded trail into more private speculation and he sank down in the Morris chair behind him, long white fingers spilling over the edge of its arms. Susan's uniform dug into her flesh along its side seams, loose hair curling on her collar in the heat cast by the window. “Accommodation’s included in my wages so I don’t pay rent, or any electric." she informed him gravely, relieved by his complaisant shrug. “Food is... it's meant to be negotiable..." He shrugged again. "You talked me into it." "We can go over my duties if you like. Where should I start?” William gazed back at her dumbly. “Well then... what would you like me to call you?” “William's fine.” “Are you sure? It’s just that... most people find a formal title m... it would be more... professional...” she informed him, losing track of her spiel as his head tipped back against the wall, watching her lips move with a tranquil, almost somnolent gaze. She squeezed her own closed and began again. “I wouldn’t be offended, in fact I would prefer...” “I would be offended.” he murmured. She shook her head. “Mr Lamb, I...” "William." “Well... if there’s nothing in particular you’d like me to be getting on with, I’ll just start tidying up in here... are you sure there’s nothing else?” “You seem sure there is.” he replied. “I've been over here a while, and everyone seems to know exactly what everyone else should be doing.” she muttered, the observation renewing his smile. “There probably is something, but... I do have a house guest...” he offered. “He’s gone off somewhere but he’ll be back, sometime... so don’t worry too much about... you know... peculiar strangers. I’ll let my brother know you're here. He will absolutely tell you what to do.” Easing himself out of the chair, he offered his hand again in confirmation of her engagement. “You won’t have to cook, we’re... what’s it called? Macrobiotic.” “I’m not paid to, anyway. And I don’t do mouse traps or take out the rubbish. It’s in the contract.” He received the news with the equanimity he had accorded the rest of her pronouncements, leading her to wish she had devised more. “Do you think you'll be okay out here?” he asked. “It’s a long way from anywhere.” “I'll be alright. I’m sort of sick of people.” Susan confessed. He shrugged, and turned toward the door. “If you need anything, demandez juste. Je vis pour servir seulement. Er... parlez-vous français?" William added, gently hopeful. "No, sorry." "Oh well... with my roadkill anglais deal you must. If you need anything, just call down." His bare feet made no sound as he departed, stooping once more at the doorframe and leaving a room that seemed much larger in his absence. She sat on the bed, reaching out to beat a puff of dust into the air around her, and fell to staring at the chair that he’d vacated. C O N T I N U E D N E X T W E E K (To read previous installments just hit 'blackthorn orphans' in the sidebar ARCHIVE links) © Céili O'Keefe. All rights reserved, do no reproduce. B U Y T H E B O O K The Great Cat Moo is wild today, rushing, airily, through the laundry toward freedom and away from the imposition of catmeat, supplied. Enjoyed, yes, but hardly required by such a perfect feline mechanism. In surmounting the helpless plum tree the aviary birds are taken in his mind, bitten quite in half, the stupid creatures. Did they not know? It matters not. The morning itself was fair warning. We are all of us predated. Lol. Well, that explains their uniforms. (Three Ku Klux Klan members arrested in Tishomingo County, Mississippi, September 1871, for the attempted murder of an entire family. (Wikipedia.) Von Trier's incoming Nymphomaniac prompted me to think about his back catalogue and ponder his peculiar genius at some length (fair warning). He provokes such lavish scorn from so many directions and I do know why; the public likes their weirdos humble, charming, unassuming, mannerly, and most of all, grateful. Sort of like Tim Burton, that cheeky little scamp (dry heaves). Personally, I love that Lars will bite virtually any hand that comes at him, flying the black flag with his sulky, spiky, depressive awkwardness, the unblinking refusal to moderate in a world oozing with reptilian accommodation. No offence, lizards. Hissed off the boards at Cannes and execrated by everyone from the expectorating feminist to the moistened evangelical, Antichrist was born to the sound of so much pearl-clutching that I would have walked across a mile of broken glass to see the thing, quite frankly. Inured to cinematic violence and forearmed against Von Trier's visual piquerism I didn't think I had much to fear from its now-infamous mutilation scenes (there's more than one, not that you'd know from the puerile and mischievious coverage that element received) and I was right about that. If you have demurred for this reason, you really needn't be afraid of this film; it is bad, but we hear and see far worse all the time. I've suffered far more tribulation in my attempts to review the fucking thing, splurging and chopping and groaning as I try to empark something of its supermassive wilderness. I apologize for incoherence but I will say that jibbering and salivation are themselves authentic responses in this instance. The film opens with a middle class, middle-aged couple copulating while their infant child wanders, eventually falling from an open window to his death. The woman's thirst for and receipt of pleasure juxtaposed with the demise of her son is captured with the cheesy lyricism and impersonality of a Mercedes ad, complete with tasteful Handel score and monochrome slo-mo. From this loss the Wife descends into sedated despair until her therapist Husband withdraws her from an institutional regime and attempts her treatment himself; they retire to an isolated forest cottage where her ordeal seems to provoke both the surrounding environment and a latent animus between them. Gainsbourg's soft, almost battered-looking face is both window to her struggle and a foil to the ferocity of its extravasating impulses. As the Wife she huddles under the gnawed caul of grief, retaliating with whiplash abandon in the manner of all goaded animals. Her portrayal is breathtakingly adult and neither she nor Lars shies from voicing the compulsive energies lurking under every more nuanced aspect of our personal expression; in despair she is catatonic and in lust she is lacivious and when paired they are a spectacle to challenge the most evolved of spectators. Sex parades our own animal before us, even when we cannot bear another insult to our sense of self and this is a hard slap to those who've never met that truth before in some dark alley. Lars ambushes the unexamined, inducing them to drink their own psychological urine. There's plenty to go around. The suggestion that the Wife allowed and even engineered her child's misfortune is the self-reproach of anyone ever touched by accidental death. The eternal notion that a woman's self interest and pleasure are necessarily depraved or (in sickly modern parlance) inappropriate is tapped by the Wife's regression into the conclusions of her own academic research- that the female is intrinsically evil. And if we are not evil, are we hopelessly weak in our ingestion of this slander, in our slavery to its dictates? Von Trier's concern with the scorched earth still smoking behind institutional misogyny is painful and necessary, and that it earns him so much vitriol from gender sloganeers reveals their morbid preoccupation with the vanity of victimhood. Antichrist arranges its supernatural devices around the idea of the Witch, the land and beasts and elements employed as cryptic heralds, signposting the amorality of existence and the imminence of oblivion. That life is no more than a sequence of random collisions and dissolutions is declared by the fox devouring itself and by the violence both committed and mitigated by the woman in her unanswered despair. No one is allowed to fuck that pain away and there is much to ponder in the absence of this most conventional solace. What does it mean to breed and die? Who the hell are we anyway and when did we last ask ourselves? What do we really have to lose? Though the film's emotional torque rests heavily on Gainbourg's portrayal, Dafoe is also a faithful servant of the material at the reckless expense of vanity and ego. His sanitary distance from his wife's suffering grades into futile involvement in her derangement and this keeps us happy until we begin to suspect his haplessness. His physicality, already so suggestive of the witch's supposed mentor offers a view of the infernal male, an archetype Von Trier has so often presented; the Husband, almost as though freed by the mad sadism of his partner, emerges darkly from passivity like a snake crawling out of its own skin, perhaps revealed as something else altogether. The perfect ambiguity of the conclusion, writ large on Dafoe's enigmatic features, throws everything we've just seen into chaotic uncertainty and still confounds me to this day. Was Antichrist pointing in two directions with that final conjunction, or is it perhaps perfectly clear and I just can't see it? Whatever. I'm happy either way- his metaphors are never cheap. They stare into our secrets and speak our own most primal language. Technically, it is amazingly well executed within the bounds of the money and the depression Lars was battling at the time and he's apparently spoken at some length about his regrets in this department. I wouldn't feel too bad if I were him; the film crouches with its back to us and aggresses so memorably that I'm not sure what else he could have done. Its CGI and conventional visual effects could have gone terribly wrong and taken the entire piece with them, but they were so consistent and coherent, so expertly staged within the dramatic context that I literally didn't know what to think about some of them. Anyone who has ever used a camera creatively quickly learns that darkness is both your friend and mortal enemy; allowing it a single excessive increment in either direction, at any point in your compositions can doom the whole. Consider then the seamless mastery of this factor exhibited in Antichrist, in complex combination with both graphic allegory and simple, unfrilled vérité. The Forest is put to work with more discretion than is initially suggested, its unruly potential cultivated with the same pimp hand Lynch used in his better days, Von Trier surpassing the latter because he walks into the trees, engaging them instead of ogling their feral enormity from across the road. Watching a lot of Von Trier's stuff is like being Hansel or Gretel, except that you are confronted with ocean of breadcrumbs spread across the forest floor in all directions instead of some happy little trail. He has the nerve to make you wander knowing full well you might hate him for it and, even worse, misunderstand. I would never have suspected the degree of courage this required unless I'd written something myself. Antichrist is massively ambiguous and I suspect people were far more enraged by this than any prosthetic clitoridectomy. I defend his use of mutilation as a necessary extreme for a character dismembered by her own excruciating tectonics. (That majority critique was far more concerned with the fate of the character's genitalia than any other portion of her is a bitter modern irony; at any point in our monotheistic past an audience would have applauded her excision as laudable and theraputic and it is of course still practiced in actuality.) Von Trier drops feet-first into the female reality, reminding us again that one of the few people willing to walk into that perilous cinematic territory is a fucking man. I forgive him because he is truthful, so patently the boy who pulls your hair because he fancies you that I wonder why his critics refuse to admit the misogynist who builds his creations around women defines himself out of all practical existence. If he were to declare himself the world's premier skirt-hater tomorrow in all sincerity, I would not believe him- deeds, not words. His men are weak and hellbound, cowardly and unidimensional... everything women are historically accused of. Maybe Lars hates everyone. Shit- look at the time. I could talk Antichrist for twenty pages and I very nearly have. If you hate LvT's stuff, fair enough, but at least be sure that you really do know why. His press is largely the work of cud-munching hacks and the desperately envious, and when you think about it, to be booed at Cannes is to receive a Palme d'Or fashioned from the yellow tears of every mediocre slug who ever wept for themselves in private. It's probably safe to assume that not everyone has subjected themselves to the process of designing and producing a book cover. Some of you might be interested in having a little peep behind those images that eventually stare at you from atop that endless pile of words. I mean... why did they choose that horrible thing? Why wasn't it pink? Why go representational when snappy reductionist graphics and retro type are so now? Why that nasty font? Why is your name so teeny? All perfectly good questions. Putting together a cover made me feel seventeen all over again. Everything sucked; all my ideas were just too sophisticated, oblique and original for an ununderstanding world etc etc. Or like alujha just before the full moon: hostile, itchy, suspicious, sweaty. Even more so than usual. Being a sometime-artist as well as a writer, I thought I'd enjoy it, but how wrong I was. There are seven basic stepping stones into this creative Naraka. 1- Vacancy. Self descriptive, really. That Nothing that's always dogging the need for Something. 2- Conflict. Conflict with your editor/partner/copilot/everyone about exactly which genre you've been writing for the last ten years. Always a pleasure. 3- Concept. You've got it; it's perfect and it was so easy. You pity the fool denied access to the kind of high-carat genius dripping from every orifice of your creative unconscious. 4- Execution. When you're hardcore like me, you don't train for or read up about anything because that shit is for suckas. Instead you front-load with notions of your own spontaneous omniability then take your hand off it just long enough to fire up PhoSho. That distant boom is the sound barrier falling to the speed of your first technical faceplant as you realise you don't really know how to get a raw dufus shot to look... I don't know... expensive. Like someone paid somebody for it, basically. 5- Revelation. No more hovering over the screen like a pterosaur, snarling it's not ready. It's done. Behold. 6- More Conflict. Nobody loves your baby. Philistines squint at it, it's damned with faint praise, greeted with puzzled silence, someone thinks it's an ad for a handbag night at a gay bar, someone else giggles without realizing just how close to death they've come in doing so at this juncture. The drawing board- you're back to that bitch. 7- Screaming Into the Void. Maybe you don't know how to do this after all. You spit on Adobe and all its descendants. Why do you even need a fucking cover? The audience is the enemy of genius! Where did you leave that three year old roach? Why has no one activated my Echelon package? Repeat steps 1-7 10-15 times. I'm not joking about that. Before going any further, I should confess that although I approached this process from a position of operant naivety, I have leisure, free access to a proficient photographer, middlebrow software and five or six years of hissing obscenities at the screen in the pursuit of basic competence. I thought all this would be an advantage, and to some extent it was; I didn't have to pay for anything you see here and was at leisure to tweak until the cows came home. To alter, amend, redact, invert, defocus... increase pro contrast... gaussian blur... decrease pro contrast... and therein lies the rub. I could, and so I did. Ad nauseum. Big mistake. R F T B I floundered for a long time, trying to get to grips with what the hell I was supposed to be doing. You know- artist stuff. Angst, insecurity, overconfidence... and then it struck me, the kind of blinding cthonic revelation so horribly transfigured by tardiness that it's more like chewing fishguts than experiencing the divine- the image is not about you. It just has to be right for the book- RFTB. It took me so long to accept impersonality as part of the Way in this instance because I am a controlling perfectionist freak who can't let go. I was just lucky I could dig myself out with the skills I had to hand and wasn't paying other people to do so. Very lucky. If you are putting the image together yourself and you're happy with your technical ability to do so, here's what someone should have told me right from the start; try keeping The Personage Currently Known as The Artist in your pants, dial back the desire to infuse it with your own godlike pneuma and remember the need to inform as well as astound your potential audience. In short, keep it RFTB. In fact, my advice to any übercontroller struggling with the process is this- don't aspirate as much mud as I did; letting go is not the end of the world. Consider finding an art student and giving them a solid brief because a disinterested pair of eyes is sometimes the only thing for it. T A S T E A cover is important, but only on one level. In the end it doesn't matter that you've gone mad with cyan or punched the black too hard or signed off on the last draft of that prophet-fellating-a-donkey litho triptych. More than content, it's the taste level we're subconsciously assessing when we're scanning those glowing thumbnails looking for something to read. What those shapes and colours say about the level you're operating on. Here I personally came to another fork in the road. The Blackthorn Orphans is a conflicted thing; on one hand it's bulging with questionable taste; the humour is black and the players are dirty boys and girls (and things). On the other hand, it aspires to a certain standard of literacy and serious business does lurk within its (soiled) fabric. I needed to strike a balance between the high+low-brow elements; an implicit balance, preferably. That isn't easy, visually. Fortunately I'd figured out what I wanted by this (very late) point, and I strongly recommend making that your first step. I wanted mystique, some sort of fraternal allusion, disguise, beauty, biology, mythology... and I do think the peacocks get there. They're not precious or pretentious but nor are they busty mutant she-creatures mounted astride some sort of heaving whatever. We still enjoy the image, which is a good sign, and it's gotten passed around quite a bit. What else can you ask for? You might have guessed by now that it wasn't my first choice and that I fucked about endlessly. Bingo. With the book being so extra-genre-tastic I didn't know where to start. Until I came across a tiny piece of frieze from Kathmandu and thought all my xmases had come at once. C O V E R I - T H E N A G A S Only a small portion of this image exists in reality and I built it from there, mirroring and extrapolating. I've always loved the Hindu/Buddhist Naga for their ambiguity and because of my longstanding fondness for serpentes in general; I named my worst witches after them and Sachiin and Kala'amatya don't really mind being called snakefaced bastards. Is it a doorway? A temple? A murti? What? To my mind it does a good job of attracting the peeps that I write for and visually macing the ones I don't. The difficulty was integrating the font with the intricacies of the image and what a bitch that turned out to be. That's another thing every DIYer should know straight up; the less expertise you have, the more you should consider a vacant background to any ABCs you plan to feature. Do try and work the text, too, or you'll end up with generic on toast. Rasterize, customize. I think we eventually settled on Caluna, though it tended to change daily, and this version is Colwell, now my favourite by a long shot. I literally had 20 fonts on the go at once, everything from Kelvinized to Porcelain. They still haunt my dreams. I love this image with every black fibre of my being, but it was eventually rejected (by everyone else) for being too 'horror'. Pussies! C O V E R II - T A N G E R I N E D R A G O N After the Nagas got notice to quit I was in a bit of a panic and thought I'd better go more mainstream. Hey- dragons; Eastern, elemental, symbolic of longevity and everyone knows what the hell they are, which I'm told is important. It's not as though I detest this cover and it's by far the most commercial, offending no one, avoiding fantasy's most heinous cliches, engaging the timid, and I'm sure if it showed up in Amazon's top 100 people would be clicking the everliving shit out of it. I might even test this theory by using it promotionally. But in the end... I just couldn't. This is a fucking bookclub cover; it would have sat quite happily on that screen behind Oprah's big stupid head and that is a fatal mutation. Say what you like about TBO; a bookclub read it is not. Back to the loch with you, Nessie. C O V E R III - B R O N Z Y D R A G O N I really thought I'd nailed it with this image. After faffing around with fonts so long I'd started to look sans serif I was pleased to have settled on something legible and possessing a modicum of dignity. I'm not in love with it now (the fade on my name gives me cat's-bum-face as we speak) but at the time it was the shiz and I slept well. Then the demons of doubt swooped down from Tresul or whever the hell they live and started biting my arse. The beast in its original form was lifted from an aherrmm herm herm, (I know, I know) and though it's unrecognizable now (and therefore probably perfectly legal), there's still that lingering whiff of copyright brimstone. Also, is there something YA about it or is that just me? In the end this one was binned, but not without regret. I may resurrect the dragon for the next book; it is so sinuous and archaic and I think contemporaneous with my oldest characters. I like that association. T H U M B N A I L S A R G H H H . . . The other thing I should have considered from the get-go was the actual dimensions to which my image would be reduced, by and large. Yes, doh. Another conundrum; which is more important- thumbnail or full size? Because most graphics will look like arse on at least one end of that scale. See below. Bronzy dragon fares worst here, another reason why he didn't make it. Tangerine dragon is humping your eyes like a thirsty diva and that's sort of great, but not what I wanted. The Nagas start looking a bit sci-fi, a bit too off-topic and wtf. But the peacocks hang onto their luminous symmetry, neither shrieking at you nor disappointing upon further examination (IMHO). I'll also stick my neck out and say font legibility is pretty redundant at these dimensions so don't throw composition under the bus just so you can read the title at teeny xs microscopic; everything your reader needs to know is in the text block alongside. Part of me wanted to abandon it altogether because of this, and I wonder if the in situ title is a convention that will endure online. These images are less than a third of the also-rans I generated over the course of a few months. But being congenitally resistant to instruction and procedurally myopic made my way the hard way; yours needn't be. DIY is obviously the first choice of the remotely able, if not the only one. Put a leash on The Artist; try to treat it like a cash job, pull back often, be as critical as you would of some other poor shite's work and keep it RFTB. If you're artistically declined, don't despair; you can still communicate your taste and ideas with something as simple as an unretouched photograph. Hit up filmic acquaintances for their work or go for a stock pic; online libraries are suffocating under the weight of excellent, accessible photography of every description. Get on to Flickr and Tumblr and ask some of the many talented peeps there if they would let you use their images; you'll get some hell no's and demands for the money everyone believes everyone else is making, but you'll also strike plenty who'll be happy to help for next to or literally nothing. Just be honest in your dealings with potential collaborators and know your rights and obligations around licensing and ownership. If you choose to go with a pro, you're possibly doing the smart thing. Sight your conceptual objectives directly. Learn to clearly delineate your ideas and desires to anyone you commission; this alone can be more difficult than you expected. If you can't effectively explain them to your partner or your mother or that hunk behind the counter at the bookshop, you need to try harder because failure can quickly become painful and expensive. Above all, we should have enough respect for our own efforts to at least try and get them the cover they deserve. Keep reminding yourself that it's easier than writing the darn thing in the first place. Céili O'Keefe. |
Independent Creativity
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