Four men, their flack helmets and coveralls the same freshly-minted shade of blue, surrounded Josephine's jeep as she pulled up into her slot.  She sat still while they clamped its wheels and ordered her out of the vehicle.  Their gloved hands clutched the flat, press-stamped shapes of their automatic weapons to their breasts; she stood according to their instructions, putting out her arm and rolling back her sleeve, the foremost operative waving a scanner wand across it, confirming her identity and stepping back out of her way.

"Jones, Josephine, proceed to the primary entrance, complete the ID protocol.  You will be assigned a destination once you are entered in the system.  Do not deviate.  All telecommunications." he told her with the flattened affect of intensive repetition, holding out a mesh bag.  Another car rolled cautiously into the lot and they left her to attend it.

In the foyer that customarily channeled staff in two directions she was confronted by a stream of representatives from every grade and designation within the facility; data drones and minor administrators were pushed, clutching bags and boxes, toward the biometrics at the exit station by the same clade of unfamiliar uniform.  The departing mass kept her penned against the entrance until another of the guards grasped her arm, walked her through the stream and left her in the mouth of a broad passage with a milling school of technicians pulled from their laboratories.  She remembered some of them from the contentious symposium; more recognized her than did not, a few of them pushing closer, though visibly reluctant to engage the attention of their armed wardens.

"This can't be what it looks like." she murmured, keeping her head down.  The men beside her assumed the same covert posture, turning to her as Bateman's looming figure, protesting with characteristic acidity, was marched toward them through the ranks of the departing.

"New brooms." one of them replied.
"Shit." another whispered.  "Anyone got a phone?"
"They stripped us coming in." muttered Josephine.  The young man set back the red collar of his coverall, shaking his head, his features paling and taking on shine.  She glanced around herself and turned to find the emergency recess in the wall devoid of its handset.  Their guards looked down as directives were relayed into their helmets and they herded the group together tightly, setting them off along the silver-paneled corridor in apprehensive unison.

Shaw squeezed past the men forced into uncomfortable proximity on either side of him, thankful for being able to see over the heads of those massed inside the overcrowded briefing room.  The spartan, argent chamber was packed so tightly with technicians and operatives that no one escaped physical contact with their peers, creating an atmosphere already loaded by the coded summons that had recalled them.  The door slid back to reveal another group of nameless guards, who filed in and commandeered positions by the narrow, head-high window.  Josephine was compelled along the wall toward Shaw.  Their attention was pulled back to the head of the room by the darkly-suited prefix of another inbound conclave, the homogeneity of its dress and attitude planing its assorted age and gender; they formed a line against the clear wall of the adjacent cell.  

Over their heads a projected banner appeared upon the whiteboard, couched in dark Helvetica, a figure declaring himself inside the space cleared for his compact, polished person, his corporate colours flown in his neat three piece and the colour of his gaze.

"Aaron Mander, Interlaken Services.  We accepted the contract to administer this unit on behalf of the DOD, and as of nine a.m this morning, that's exactly what we've been doing."  The room fell into a silence no more capable of transmitting sound than interstellar space.  "Interlaken delivers innovative biotechnological solutions to an international portfolio of client entities via efficient acquisition, intensive research and aggressive commercial development.  Every process within this facility going forward will be a precursor to those outcomes.  If you are in this room today, congratulations.  You will be as central to that flow as every donor organism we source in the field."  

Through the adjacent window, the corner of Josephine's eye caught the slate-grey silhouettes cast by the afternoon sun inside the barrack cages.  Once again their native personnel stood against the chain link with their hands locked behind their heads while a trio of medical officers in crisp blue scrubs looked them over, at the behest of Interlaken supervison; each man was subjected to some swift distinction that consigned half to high-walled vans idling at each narrow gate.  She tipped back her head in order to follow the trajectory of one such vehicle as it set off, heavily laden, along the stretch of narrow black seal that serviced the rear of the complex.  She turned slowly into a stare from one of the incoming executives, who commanded the guard beside her to close the silver blind over the glass with a short wave of his hand. 

“Do not leave the facility without receiving your new credentials.  Anyone who does will be considered to have absconded and will be red-flagged after twenty-two hundred tonight, along with those who chose not to respond in person to this recall.  We'll move quickly on winding down all sunset projects... some of you will be repurposed immediately, everyone else will be returned to ongoing duty, pending review.  And that's all for today.”  

 Mander returned his attention to those solicitous functionaries once more clustering about him.  His euphemisms, scarcely less candid than the sinister verbs they replaced, left the crowd in a winded paralysis; the room emptied slowly, its contents drifting toward their various stations as though suffering from head wounds, Josephine's lateral removal from the exodus into a service corridor going largely unnoticed.  She watched Shaw amid the tail of the crowd and allowed five minutes for him to clear her position before setting off alone along an eastern passage that hived into intestinal divarication that proved newly and crisply reboant.  Choosing a dog-leg into a row of broadly-spaced doors, she saw they had been cleansed of any titular designation, but the acrid scent of the black grind O’Connor favoured presaged his presence at his desk, where she found him, blowing the heat from his white cup.  

At the sight of her he stood up, offered a wordless smirk, and pushed the door closed in her face.

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

I've always been aware of the influence of black culture on punk and alt. expression via nasty old blues, reggae and rude boys, and I mean, come on- the most nyctalopic gothique has Holiday and Robert Johnson throbbing in its bloodstream, even if most scene babies don't know that today.  Do we all meet in the middle with this shit or is black punk a different place?  

Part of me thinks yes, the other, no.  I've been denied opportunity, kicked out of places and assaulted because of the way that I've looked, and the way that I look is the way that I am.  My intrinsic personality is not something I can scrub off, even to my own advantage, but I know that my white privilege is still not adequately informed.  

Check out Phil Knott's images of the other black experience in Lens.

Because I'm feeling low today, I made myself look through the archives and find three things full of loveliness that bore some visual relationship to each other, to remind me how much we are rewarded just for existing and perceiving.

For being passively extant.  The world requires so little of us and yet returns so much.

Unhappiness is a poor reply to all this generosity.  

Jason Chipman Howlett  /   Anthony Amadeo 

Mens' hands.  And backs.  And shoulders.  
But especially hands.  
Those strangely industrial structures sliding under the skin of a good pair, dense and tight and yet still somehow elegant.  So absorbing and revealing.  So much of a person's inarticulate fundamentals can be read in their hands.  Proportions, routines, compulsions, inheritances, expediencies, preferences... they're all there.  
Have they ever lied to you?  I don't remember them ever lying, in my experience.  But I've made it my business to understand what they're telling me for a long time now.  There should never be too much distance between what the mouth and hands are saying.  

The High Pigment formula contains a pleasant fruit scent, is frost-free (in these shades), beautifully buildable without patchiness and, despite their texture, barely bleeds on me, even in lieu of liner.  If you're sucking on a hot drink (you thought I was going to say something else then, didn't you?) you might incur minor loss and feathering but they're not matte and that's to be expected.  The shine level is sophisticated-medium and I average about three hours between touch ups.  Their colour-delivery surpasses even the very best of MAC's Amplified formula.  There is something just so incredibly clean and vivid about this HP stuff; it projects the colour like cut crystal, so I'm guessing it's down to the quality and clarity of the suspending oils.  Rhubarb offers about 80% opacity while the other two clock in at about 90% due to the nature of the shades.  I should also mention that they're twist-up; no wasteful sharpening required.

Cranberry's a great what the fuck am I going to wear with this dress that's such a weird colour stick, pulling reddish, purplish and pinkish depending on your ensemble.  

Rhubarb is the quiet one of the three, a cool, dusty grey-stained tearose pink, chromatically a sister to MAC Mehr.  It's both pretty and grown-up which is a bonus for everyone over 30, and a great blue-leaning nude for those of us with darker mouths.  When I sheer it out it melts into my natural lip colour for a next-level MLBB effect.  

These swatches are pretty accurate though the gloss and massive saturation made them hell on wheels to photograph.  Never mind.  The nice part of me hopes a few constant readers will discover this range as a result, but the bitch part is happier if you don't  :)

 Modern Grim    Björn Griesbach

Where scent is concerned, beauty sometimes keeps strange company.  It might lie all dewy and recumbent amongst petals- exactly where we might expect to find it- but more often than not it smiles at us from some oblique quarter, all the more welcome for such ambagious disclosure.  Such is Fumerie Turque, a juice that sits so pale and unassuming in the glass that the curious can find themselves chewing on a little more than they expected, in common with other Lutensian lovelies.  There's not much backwards in its forwards, but I'm not complaining; life's too short to tolerate equivocation.  

Turkish smoke implies a single dominating note, even to those with no knowledge of latakia tobacco or any other substance that might contribute to such a thing.  And that's what you get, to some extent; the fumes from a brazier fuelled with fragrant wood and maybe damped with sheaves of anise.  But that's not all, and it doesn't play out in the way you might expect.  Fumerie Turque divides into embellished halves and their expression is inverted away from natural expectation; the smoke is induced to curl up and cleave to the wrist, and it is the hearth's sweet, charred bones that are offered to the distant admirer, by way of scented woods and haunting resins.

My initial impression of the skin scent is that of burning rubber, a elderberry-purple acridity that cracks you in the face right off the wrist.  Don't let this deter you; a moment of force majeure is required to deliver the rest of its hefty payload, including the broken flesh of liquorice, that packet of Camels that breathed at you from his shirt pocket when you put your arm around his neck, and oil-stained, sunwarmed saddle.  Synaesthetic impressions lie a little further south of the Bosphorus than the title implies- I get the deep, inky-stained colours of Moroccan or Tuareg leatherwork, perhaps, or maybe lattice shadow in the alley outside a hammam if one is to draw a more literal inspiration.  Coincidentally it shares these gothic flavours with the subject of my last review, Norne (Slumberhouse), although it is a drier and more tasteful version of that potent nocturne, its laurels resting in cured leaves rather than on a green plant trampled by a must-wracked sasquatch.

As far as the listed notes go, suede and tobacco are plain enough, providing the scuffed matte warmth of leather and the delicious little stink of unborn smoke.  It's sometimes possible to detect dusty old camphor, as when the lid is lifted on a fabric stash; there is even that faintest suggestion of the parched and weary fibres of the silk that's stored within.  If juniper, chamomile, patchouli and currant were bound together and sharply compressed you would doubtlessly end up with the aniseed and liquorice accord, something faintly disturbing and boiled-down into a witchy black compound.  Tonka, styrax and honey align with true vanilla to form a sort of vanille chimérique, so much more brown, like the wizened titular pod, than anything you would scoop from a tub; Medjoul dates might be a bridge too far in regard to this element, but you get the idea.  

As I've already said, don't worry that everyone around you is being subjected to smouldering tyres or bossy sassafras.  FT proffers this lazy, sinuous sweetness to the bystander, my partner identifying aniseedy Smokers lollies and dried cherries in the sillage, going on to mention sweet leaves on a fire or perhaps a room fumigated with scented greenery- all surprisingly divergent from the more proximate experience. 

Emphatic it may be, but not bereft of surprises.  I've been wearing Fumerie Turque for a couple of years now and the other day was I startled by a novel burst of incense, similar to that so boldly expressed in Sonoma Scents Incense Pure; FT let go of its leather and lay back like an opium belle, breathing purring resins for two hours before stepping down again into liquorice and firesides.  Could it have been a change in my personal chemistry?  Bottle ageing?  Who knows, but I had never struck it before.  

FT favours cooler weather and a dry skin, so think twice about dousing yourself if you're likely to sweat.  Nor is it really for the meek and it would behove the uncertain to invest in a sample before going to the effort of sourcing a bottle, now that it's been made a Salon Exclusive (ie. more obscure and expensive.)  On the Lutens strength and projection scale I'd give it a 7.5, a little behind 10-monsters like Chergui.  As far as gender suitability is concerned, it's perfectly, perfectly androgynous.  

Perhaps the thing I enjoy most in Fumerie Turque is its transportive quality.  Unless, by some anomaly in the space-time continuum you are already standing in a somewhat romanticised 19th C bazaar, chewing the butt of a cigar and scowling at a dodgy syce while haggling for a brace of blood mares, FT is pretty much guaranteed to take you there.  If you know what I mean.

Late winter, bedroom mirror, no focus.  

cyanotype/ilford fil

Yes, it's another round of Beauty Week and cemetery flower montage because I need to counteract a depressive episode and like so many before me, I'm doing it with the help of glamour.  That's not to say there won't be anything for the aesthetically-declined and anyway, beauty is for everyone and if you're rolling your eyes at that assertion, chances are you need more fucking lipstick in your life.  So there's that.

For those who just can't with all this frivolity, The Lovely R has finally gotten Tiny Little Dinosaurs (a children's book) together in an e-book and a PDF so we'll be unleashing that on the world in the next week or two along with some more walks around Port Chalmers and some ethnographica- I've started documenting my textile collection.  Otherwise, enjoy the serialisation.  If nothing else.

Though Susan could not perceive the squeal emitted by the wheel of their trolley, William found it insupportably offensive and gave it a swift kick with his boot.  She sat on the soft folds of his black afghan coat in the uppermost shelf of the cart, clutching her mirror bag as though it were bent on escape.  It bulged with rolls of notes and she glanced down at them from staring at his face, flashing the money at him periodically, his patient acknowledgement slowly combating her disbelief.  The midnight supermarket was sparsely populated with a host of nocturnal genera; ravers hung before the wall of caffeinated soda and drifted along the avenue of hypercoloured confectionary with red-rimmed stares, batting at tics, oblivious to furloughed whores, fretful hoarders and the peculiar elderly, the latter piloting their mobility scooters as though negotiating the floor of a sea trench.  Susan waved him to a halt in the first aisle and leant out toward a packet of chocolate biscuits, frowning to herself and then replacing it in favour of a luxurious version usually beyond her resources, climbing up to stand and select two related flavours.  He stood a foot on the cart to balance her weight and lifted a shoulder to rub at his whining ear; when she looked back at him, the sight spliced pieces of the bloody bout into her deliberations, and she murmured something that he missed.

“I am listening, but I’ve been punched in the head fifty times by a chernozhopyi." William admitted.  
“I said... tell your rubbish alter ego not to let a giant idiot batter him like that in future.”
“We only communicate through lawyers and El Resto's always alienating his legal team.”

Susan shook her head, plucking a packet of Scottish shortbread from the shelf and balancing it on top of the baked goods already teetering in her lap.

“Nutella... the big jar..." she urged.  "Did you have to bite him?”
“You probably couldn’t see it, but he was going for my dingaling with his overbite.”
“You were humping his face.” she laughed.
"In self defence." he promised, smiling at her as he swung them around a corner and parked before the sloping banks of produce, standing with his arms slack by his sides in an attitude of almost metaphysical receptivity to the mirrored array of imported and tropical fruit.  
“Is it... fun?”
"Too much like work, but I'm not good at anything else, so, you know... c'est comme ça." he yawned, reaching on her behalf for the best hand of bananas.  "You don't like it, do you?"

She paused as she leant over the cart.

"It's not that I don't appreciate the effort... it's just that I've never had a... a violent boyfriend before." Susan admitted.  He frowned, rolling an orange in his hand, then smiled brightly.
"So I am your boyfriend..."
"Yes." she exclaimed.
"Say Sachiin, you are officially my boyfriend." William urged.
"I'll dump you if you're not careful!" she laughed, gathering lemons in the crook of her elbow; he took them from her and replaced them with Tahitian limes.  Behind them a skinny youth with silver glitter pasted around his eyes and naked plastic action figures dangling in a spangled corsage from his neck hovered as though anxious for some item in the display before them.  When they stepped out of his way he looked up from his heavy, level stare in bright suspicion of their motives, then darted forward, seizing two handfuls of tiny mandarins and stuffing them down his trousers before dashing away in an attitude of frenzied triumph.  "It does explain a few things, you being punched in the head so often." Susan remarked.
"Hey... I was born this way."
"It looks incredibly painful."
"You only really feel the first one.  I had my pain threshold kicked into orbit back in the good old days anyway."  The pineapples attracted William's attention and he rolled half a dozen into the cart.  "The only thing I like about the cage is being up against some fucking huge industrial piece who thinks you're the bitch they’re going to floss with.  You can see it in their faces, when they’ve tried everything and nothing’s working, and they realise there’s something wrong with you... that never really gets old... I don't know why.  I suppose I am related to my brother.”  Susan raised her brows at his interpretation, lifting a waxy purple ball dressed with a strange quatrefoil brooch of leathery remnant petals to her nose and finding herself stumped.  

"What is this?" she demanded.
"Manggustan.  Glad you asked." he replied, lifting the entire box from which she had taken it and setting it down into the trolley, along with two crates of ruby-blushing pomegranates.  Their expense began to trouble her intrinsic parsimony and she glanced down into her purse once more in a visible expression of it.  "I can book some more gigs if you like." he added.
"No." she said swiftly.
"Five grand... that's a shitload of Nutella and manggustans..."
"Don't... not for a while."  The gravity of her expression inspired a small frisson that he allowed through the width of his shoulders.  "What?" she inquired, lowering her voice self-consciously.
"Your caring what happens to me feels like someone licking the back of my neck." he confessed.  

They smiled at one another and studied the vegetables together.

"Is there a special word for what vampyres... do... when they bite people?”
“In alujha, it's dujju la isdr... red into grey.”
“I think Petrouchka dujju la isdr’d someone at the fight.  Why are you friends with her?”
“She’s always liked me... we lend each other money.  She plaits my hair.”
“She drinks blood.”
“I know, but in all honesty, almost no one gets taken by a neckfucker who wasn’t wearing a big dumb eat me sign on their forehead.”  She seemed patently unconvinced.  “Tell me you’d get into the back of a car with Pet or fucking Opal.” he insisted.  “I’m not saying they’re not good at what they do, because they can suck you out a mile before you even know you’re in the water, but vampyres still need you to be stupid.”  Susan wheeled them into the next aisle, its shelves stocked past head height with a hedonic profusion of breakfast cereals; the smell of bleached, sugar-drenched corn and printed cardboard prompted him to commandeer the cart and hurry onward.  “I couldn’t snow you, and I wasn’t even drooling and hanging off your neck.” he added.  
"All that much." she smirked.  "I'd probably still be running if I hadn’t been tackled on the lawn, though.” 
“Poupée, if you’d been running any slower you would have backed right into me.” William laughed, inclining his head to kiss her.  An old lady trundled past with her two-tiered trolley overstuffed with tins of catfood and jelly crystals; Susan leant back from him, grimacing and scuffing her tongue on the back of her hand.
"Don't ever gargle liquid soap again." 
He shook his head resolutely.
"I’d wrestle drunk gorillas for you Christabel, but I’m not putting toothpaste in my fucking mouth any time soon.” William told her as he pressed on.  “You can have mint, or you can have me.”  

Laughing at his strange aversions, she emptied his grasp of the fruit that he was surreptitiously consuming and dropped it into the trolley, climbing back up to her former station and sucking in a sharp breath at the importuning hand that wandered beneath her skirt.  Susan called another halt before a wall of feminine appurtenance and chose hair clips for herself from a bewildering array of configurations, reaching up to sweep his hair behind his ears with a diamanté-studded headband and sitting back to admire the effect.     

"My god, that is absolutely terrifying... wear it to your next fight." she smirked while he picked out a packet of applicator tampons.
"I can't help but think these are a disruptive influence."
"Can you slow down please?" she complained as he wheeled her swiftly past the rows of candy-hued deodorant.
"That stuff makes girls smell like they arrived by UPS and don't have a name yet but are possibly already ribbed for my pleasure.  I am willing to... er... forego all death matches, for as long as you agree to smell as nature intended."
"You're that keen?"  He leant over her, sliding her hair from her nape and inhaling the warmth that rose from the neck of her dress.  Shrugging her assent, she allowed him to steer them away from the meat counter before contesting the measure.  "I just saw you bite half of someone's face off so don't start with your vegan bollocks." Susan scolded as they halted before the display, looking over the various cuts until the shudder passing through his body was transmitted to her vehicle.  "What is so bad about that?" she demanded, gesturing down at the neatly-primped arrangements.
"Il s'ylth nais sa'ama." he murmured, turning his face from the counter.  "Sha'a'inii'tra... everything.  Everything is wrong."  

They stood for a short while in an impasse that grew from the inarticulate nature of his objections; in response to the depth of her own sentiments he placed his hands flat against the protective glazing, absorbing its damp, leaden scent and grim stasis before closing them on her cheeks.  Her gaze fell to the frosted glass, the carnal shapes beneath recanting their blinded and attenuate passivity, becoming limbs and lost effects, the cabinet a shallow morgue, her perception of it rolled almost prismatically toward his own.  She took his hands from her face and warmed them under her arms in silence, and did not contest their removal into an aisle devoted to convenience food.  Still immersed in the implications of his elliptical communique, she chose an item from each category they coasted past and presented it to him, concerning herself closely with his reactions.  

"Mmm, trash barge..." William grimaced to the rustling packet of pot noodles she held to his nose.  
"Are you not worried about Caleb and his mates?"
"No... I love Cay."  Her favourite brand of coffee exacerbated his expression.  "Angry millipedes." he declared.  Peanut butter fared no better.  "Arse grease." he laughed, turning his head from the pottle.  She lifted a brightly-coloured jar of raspberry jam from which he at first leant away as though avoiding some innominate peril, succumbing only as she pressed it on him, clasping it to his cheek and rolling the bottle across his face with his eyes closed.  "Mmm, paradisiaque... savoureux... sssexuel... not as good as yours, though."
"I don't know how I feel about you eating two kilos of sucrose in one sitting.  You don't even know what that is, do you?"
"It's fucking delicious, I can tell you that much.  Take it away... I'll get the jar stuck in my throat."
"You're a bit of an addict, really, aren't you?" she laughed.
“It's low self esteem.” William assured her.  "Just so you know, if at some point you do decide to leave me, my fragile sense of self worth would suffer such a fucking blow that I would probably find it preferable to return to an abusive relationship than to face the world alone.”  She pushed her foot into his groin.
“I would tell you to shut up but since we're on that, how long was your brother actually with this Helaine woman?  And if she was as bad as you say, what was the attraction?”
“Ten long years, and come on... when you’re as likely to perforate someone for queue-jumping as he is, your boo's muti trade is all just part of life’s heavily-soiled tapestry.  They're two evil peas in an evil fucking pod.  Domestic evil peas.  She bought his shoes."
“No...”
“I know.  Things might have been different if it hadn't been the Thirty Years War... but then again, probably not... everyone in Europe was going hard... catholics, lutherans, Swedish freaks, the fucking frogs... crazy Dutch people... Gustaf and Richelieu was paying us to stay home at one point, which was awesome, I have to say.  Helaine's place was never more than a few days ride from whichever bloodbath was paying out, so the oversharing devil on Kala'amātya's shoulder was eight hundred pounds and fused to its fucking chair by the time that shit was over.  When he wasn't depopulating Schwarzburg-Sondershausen, he was home with Helaine practicing facial expressions.  It was a perfect perverted storm, if you were a bloodthirsty pervert."
“When are you going to tell them about all this?”
“When I stand still it sounds like you said something about just letting sleeping logs lie.”
“It's sleeping dogs.”
“The sleeping dog that rips your arm off when you tell it things it doesn’t want to hear."  
"Who is that calling you all the time?" Susan sighed, reaching down and extracting his phone from his pocket.
“Avi'ashān...” he said quietly.  “Bede."  She read a few of his plaintive messages; her expression prompted him to sigh an explanation.  "He fucking knew about Rana being here... they might have even brought her with them."

Her mouth dropped open.

"Why?"
"It's his wife, Nyāti... she’d love nothing more than to padlock me to Rana’s arm because divorce plays havoc with her seating plan.”  
“Are you close?”
William held up two adjacent fingers.
“Like this.  Always... always.  But he knew she was here all along, and I asked him, and he said nothing.” 

They passed through the checkout and walked down through the car park, sitting together in the humming silence, the glowing signs over the bunker's exits painting the mottled slab walls a sickly, dream-like shade of green.  When she looked at him again he was made to wonder if he had ever seen her face more clearly, despite the gloom, her person limned entirely within it as though by the hand of a determined artist.

"So... you're the last to know?"
"Looks like it." he sighed.
"How does it feel?"

William stared up at the concrete ceiling, its ponderous suspension conspiring with the ineluctable nature of her logic.

"It feels like I should be talking to Frost about something important." he conceded.  

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

Do you have a big freaking issue trying to find a neutral that doesn't make you look like you've A: been tonguing either a snowman or a dust bunny, B: are not-so-recently deceased or C: were voted off a reality show?  Sucks arse, doesn't it?  And it's expensive after a while, what with all those beigey-sandy-taupey fails piling up and mocking your presumption.  I just don't do things like MAC Blankety or Peachstock or say, LimeCrime Coquette because the results are zombie-horrendous.  In fact, they're zombie-horrendous on most people so let's wish them back into oblivion where they probably belong.

When I want a check out the eyes dammit lip I have to reach for something at least as dark as my natural mouth but still subdued enough to be considered neutral.  Or risk the abovementioned ABC syndromes, which doesn't leave me with too many options.  Babes of colour will possibly sympathise.  Enter Del Rio.  Heard of this shade before now?  Me either.  I don't know why it took me so long to discover it- possibly due to the lack of decent reviews :p

Do give it a try next time you're at the counter; such disregarded shades often have an LE-type quirkiness about them and to me DR is almost exotic.  Lol.  So yes, gently brown and quite matte, an equation that = retro.  But no one should worry about lingering grunge stigma; then as now, on the right face browns are striking, authoritative, richly flattering and anti-princess. And it's not like Del Rio is going to smack anyone about the head with chocolate drama anyway; it's quite subdued, especially to someone more used to much 'bigger' shades- I'm talking understated without being too basic.  A neutral with just a weeny a bit of dominatrix in its DNA.  Muted, not neutered.

The formula is okay-good, delivering about 80% opacity.  While I find satin to be an acceptable texture generally, this one's on the waxier end of things and sets to a low-sheen long-lived finish.  There's an awareness that you're wearing lipstick but it's a good compromise between endurance and comfort and I personally don't find it drying.  I'll use it alone and to make dirty reds like MAC Studded Kiss and Fixed on Drama (with which it is especially agreeable) more workable since it has a lot in common with them tonally.  Taken as a whole Del Rio is a really nice utile find.

Nettie Harris, 2010
hair stylist: Paul Spartano
half plate tintype

Damn.  This Deco shield brooch (below left) is such a great piece; so elegant and of the period, aping the classic swagged and foliate geometry of Cartier's platinum and diamonds.  Its reverse (right) is almost as nice.  So nice that I decided I was going to convert it into a pendant and chopped the fucking pin mounts off with a pair of pliers a few years back.  I HATE ME TOO.  Punishment will consist of paying to have it soldered back on.  The star brooch is a big contrast to the delicacy of the last piece; it proved difficult to photograph but I love its weirdly prismatic 3D quality.  It's crude, heavy and spiky, so we were made for each other.

Prunus dulcis - Köhler–s Medizinal-Pflanzen (wiki)
Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen - List of Koehler Images

I was long ago treated to a rapturous account of Spanish marzipan boutiques by someone who viewed them as some sort of sacred miracle and humanity's greatest exploit.  He believed implicitly in the goodness and glory of marzipan and when I think about it, there are worse things, aren't there?

(The swatch above 'blows out' on a laptop screen unless it's angled correctly.)  I can't really fault Girl About Town's amplified formula, and yes, I know I've been banging on about it for a while now but I'm a dyed-in-the-wool matte whore so forgive my recent-convert's zeal.  The pigmentation is super smooth; there's no bleeding, only a very slight settling into creases and no mid-lip loss for around 4 hours.  It mixes well with a range of Retro Matte pinks, making them more texturally bearable.  With everything going for it, I will say that maybe anyone over 30 should consider their whole look and ask themselves if they haven't aged out of pinks like this.  Brunettes can possibly rock it for a few years longer than blondes, unless you have a look that is complemented rather than sabotaged by this sort of high-contrast goodness.

Okay, Full Fuchsia.  I hear a sort of high-pitched simian chattering in my head when I think of this shade; that's probably because wearing it can make me look like a baboon's bumcheeks.  FF is a brilliant true fuchsia delivered in divine amplified form, but it's also a first cousin to MAC Show Orchid and a second to Violetta, those other lipstick no-nos that look like arse when applied to a particular kind of pasty physiognomy (ie. mine).  Arse, I tell you.  It's the microglitter and slick mauve-blue sheen lurking over the foundation shade that makes all three dodgy prospects to one degree or another.  These characteristics aren't very visible in these pics, but trust me, they're present in life.  Full Fuchsia is the least garish of the afterforementioned trio by quite a way, and nowhere near as disastrous on the wrong mouth as the dread Violetta.  If you can rock vivid and sparkly you'll enjoy everything it offers the right face- luminous colour, staying power and a versatile 90% opacity.  Just keep in mind that the slight duotone lustre and visible glitter might clash with dark lips and a fourth decade.  Teh.  I wear it anyway.  

The swatch below is warm, unflashed daylight; the two shades in question rendered really well because the yellow-toned light has helped the camera sensor out.

I feel like some good news would be great right now, don't you?  Read this short BBC piece on Kurdish women subverting patriarchal and nationalist structures and enacting change on a local and personal scale.    

Did you know that as we speak, only a quarter of Turkish girls progress to high school?  

The Lovely R and I have believed for some time now that most of what we consider modern democratic process is pretty fundamentally fucked, hijacked by insurmountable vested interests and of little practical use to even informed and active participants.  And women face a double disadvantage, labouring under procedures devised and instituted in our absence that are maladapted at best and directly oppressive at their worst.  But there is a way to get around these moribund macrostructures; by ignoring them.  

We can all walk away from conflict and the requirements imposed by institutions we no longer believe in and move toward enacting our own realities.  Every household is its own state.  Every village and small town is a world unto itself.  Every city is an empire.  After so many generations under the guns of the cock-clutchers surrounding them, these Kurdish women are leading by example.  Xosbext bî!   READ ABOUT IT HERE