I really am that fucking old now.  It's weird, though- I don't feel old.  I feel maybe... twenty five.  Perhaps because we don't have children, we've always had the luxury of not giving a fuck about adulthood in any dreary tangible real-world sense and that makes a difference to one's chronological perception.  There's no brace of haughty spawn informing me of how decrepit and embarrassing I am.  You may be thinking it regularly, but I can't hear you.  

​Nor am I scrabbling on any greasy careerist downslope, battling perky interns etc.  The only real somatic difference between myself now and at twenty five is probably... a much better VO2 max, a more stable mental health situation, minus fifteen kilos and plus a medium set of crows' feet.  It could be a lot worse, and I am very grateful.

So I can't really speak for the shitty bits of getting older and I'm not one to sugarcoat any shit so please do take encouragement from that, especially if you're twenty and despairing.  Indulge me while I ladle some sloppy slow-cooked advice into your unwitting cranial crockery because it is honestly intended and I'm going to do it anyway.  

- The ape-made world has always been crap- it's not just now, and it's not just you.  We are bald monkeys with data plans.  Don't get it twisted.

- The intellect and personal resources that have seen you though adolescence will mature into both viable ark and armoury- if you give them a chance.  Please do.

- Youth is oversold for a wide range of reasons.  A lot of non-youths like spectating other peoples' juvenile phases because their own unacknowledged shortcomings are kicking in and they're telling themselves life was better when the tits were perkier.  Don't buy into their heavily-edited nostalgia.  Grit your teeth, live your twenties out and don't expect too much of them.  Stop trying to predict other peoples' behaviour or societal direction because you can't see enough of the curve to anticipate that shit yet.  No one knows what the fuck they're doing when they're seriously young; some people are just better at wearing adult cosplay and making adult noises.

​- If you're doing life right, you will like yourself more as you get older so don't consider ending it all until you're at least 35, lol.  If your opinion of yourself is declining with every birthday, stop doing the crap that's driving that.  Spend your third decade weeding yourself of your worst habits and poisonous tendencies.  Spend money getting help, if you need it.  Go without everything else to get that help.  I'm still benefiting from the therapy I booked myself in my twenties- best. investment. ever.

- Also- and this is still controversial, I know- avoid going to university or accruing student debt unless you can't reasonably dodge it or are possessed of an utterly exigent passion for something you literally cannot do without those overpriced pieces of paper.  Most degrees are a fucking pyramid scheme and a monetised arms race no one can win.  Everyone will try and frontload your life with anxieties and responsibilities and liabilities while you are still too dumb to know better, and much of that force is hostile, or at least passive-aggressive.  Miserable people on shitty trajectories want company- don't volunteer.  No one I know regrets punking out of university when serious fees were introduced.  If you tend to your intellect you really do get smarter as you get older; I could do a degree in my fucking sleep now.  Personally, I would have gotten a trade instead.

- If you must get into debt, buy a fucking real-world asset.  A house.  Any house.  But don't spend too much all at once because a house won't fix what's fucked about your life- it's just a box to live in.  Buy a shitty house in the shittiest area you can stomach and then be the upgrade.  Fix that shit up.  Inclusively gentrify.  Plant a garden.  Join a community group.  Defend your environment.  Don't be a cunt to your neighbours.  Go about in public as a viable, contented person and you might find people want to join you. 

- Learn to do as much for yourself as you can.  Practical skills are honourable and necessary.  Being useless will make you miserable.  Be able to do at least three things really well.

- Ignore gender roles and expectations.  In every possible context.  

- If you're not cut out for a formal career, don't allow yourself to be shamed by anyone for not shouldering the misery of forced participation.  The workforce is full of catsbumfaces.  We are what we do, not our hourly rate.

- Try to earn enough money to be happy.  You'll know when you come across happiness, so take note of the conditions that produced it and remember them- write if down if you have to.  More money won't make you happier.  You'll just spend more, which signifies nothing.

- Enjoy the happiness you get from a good relationship, (and the conditions for happiness are diagnostic of a good one) but don't expect it to make you happy.  A balanced partnership is the soil and sunlight of contentment, but you have to cough up the seeds yourself.
There is no passive, romantic endless love that happens all picturesquely with white tablecloths and shiny hair and no morning breath, so stop chasing it; that shit is just cuntstrike and dickmatisation.  Everything about your relationship will fade and die unless you make the effort to actively love your partner.  That is a creative process.
Accept that not everyone wants or needs the long game- some people really are happier chasing the nitrous high of initial engagement, so let them go about their business.  If that is you, don't lie to get it, because that is weak dealing.
Never break up out of petulance; eat shit and beg forgiveness because you can be an arsehole like everyone else, so don't be a lonely regretful arsehole for no good reason.
Sometimes you won't be able to stand the fucking sight of your long-term partner.  That is normal; wait forty eight hours before your burn their clothes.
Some people are broken beyond repair, no matter how much you love them.  That is a real thing.  They are often worthy of love, and you might be strong and stubbornly resourceful enough to make up for their intractable deficits- that might even be your most meaningful purpose- but most people are not.  Be careful.    

​- Please do not allow yourself to be pressured or spooked into procreation.  Don't make more half-wanted people out of your uncertainty or cowardice.  It is the worst of all mistakes and one you can never undo.  We do not regret our abstention and that's not vanity talking.

- Don't let anyone shit on your enduring urge to wear black and deviate.  They jelly.  Fuck them.

R and I formulated this theory that you really are who you are when you're about 12, and I like that idea.

Still a bit munted in the brainal region so I don't know what's coming this week.  But here's some Placebo.  When was the last time you heard this song?  Love Brian (in my head I call him petite déjeuner) and his apricot lips.  Still would.

EDIT: The Kermadec region has been declared a marine park yaaay! Shell has confirmed it is withdrawing from its evil Arctic drilling plans!  Fuck oil!  Yaaaaay!

Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.   Igor Kovalenko/EPA

One and Three lifted Susan from the ground together, bruising the crooks of her arms and availing themselves of fumbling manual gratuities while Shaw lifted a scope to his eye and played it once more over the visible ruin.  He muttered to himself as she was dragged past him, glaring at Josephine's back while she stooped to collect the sensor units.

"Called it in yet?" the latter inquired.  His silence prompted her to reach into her shirt and retrieve the locator beacon once more.  "We've got a good window to get the choppers here."

"The snow's done.  We're walking out."  Shaw told her.

"I lived half my life in Telluride, and if this snow's done, then you're exactly the kind of charismatic overachiever we need in a leadership role."  He stuffed the scope into his pack.  Confident she had attracted the conscripts' attention, she blew the moisture from the sensors as she packed them away.  "So today we're going to haul her dead weight through hostiles waiting to burn us with our own gear... I guess, to a town, stacked double-wide with tipsters, off-season mercs, so you can... maybe blow off the pick up and run for the border?  Try and turn her in?  They'll do the flyover, look at your log pics and want to know why you left that shady..."  She nodded up toward the ruin.  "You'll say you just had a feeling it was clear.  They'll promote you and give these guys a ten g bar tab."  

Behind her their subordinates dropped the girl into the snow and devoted themselves to his response, snorting and wiping their noses with their gloved hands.  Their captive's voice issued from within the copse of black-clad legs encircling her, barely loud enough to penetrate them.

"None of us will get anywhere." she observed, examining the blood crusted on her fingers.

"Why's that?" Shaw asked of her, scowling again.

"The other things... the wolves."

"You made contact with them?"

Her laconic delivery did not moderate the impact of its substance on the conscripts; she watched their boots shift in the snow before her while they absorbed it.

"They'll kill everyone.  There's ten of them to every one of you."

Josephine smirked and tightened the straps of her pack, hoisting it onto her shoulder.

"Which is why the two subs are sitting up there, waiting for us to walk into them."

"If they were here, they would have come down the hill with knives and cut your fucking heads off." Susan observed, to which Josephine smiled again, dryly.

"If they were here, that's what I'd say too."  

"They cut you loose." Shaw reminded her.  "Bailed... walked out right over the top of you, and it looks like that total lack of interest in your welfare's gonna work out great for them.  How's that feel?"

The girl seemed to ponder his inquiry.

"Not as bad as letting you go when I should have let them hack you into dogfood." she admitted.  "You fucking weasel knob end."

"She let you go?  I don't remember that in your report." chuckled Josephine, adding another strip of tape to the gauze on her face.

"He was hiding behind a door." the girl informed her, watching the woman extract grim pleasure from the intelligence.  "You're all fucked, alright?  Just let me go."  

"I know dodging contact is a thing for you, but that's not why you won't head up there, is it Nathaniel?" Josephine inquired, both hands on her hips.

Shaw fired his pack so hard at the ground that its lid lapsed open and spilled its contents onto the snow, leaving him to stand with empty hands.  The conscripts backed out of his way around the girl; he dragged her to her feet and held her for a moment, unable to decide on a reprisal, then thrust her once more at them.  

"Two, Three... take the hill, keep a tight line... you see something, you get low." he told them, walking away from the disturbance Susan caused by refusing the climb.  Josephine strode toward her and kneed her hard onto her face.

"Walk or lose a finger."

The pale ground sloughed from under the girl's soles, pitching her into the hillside.  She laboured under a slack, cygnet-hued weight that was almost visible about her head and shoulders; halting their companions, Josephine took the chain from the prisoner's tightly-cuffed hands, assuming her custody while the monastery stood in its eternal remove, neither friend nor conscious obstacle.  They toiled on over the shoulder of the supporting spur, forced into a line that played out loosely until she called to it, wary of the split in their formation.  Scuffed free by the boots of the advance party, a slip of snow sucked mass and pace from the incline, rushing by to the east of both women and breaking like a wave around the stout trunk of a dead pine.  It shook free the white mound that had swamped the surrounding bracken, revealing the slick black rock that formed the edge of the narrow scarp beneath.  The girl sprang from her haunches behind Josephine and threw herself at the drop while the chain between them flew after her and snapped tight, ripping her captor onto her back.  Josephine caught the links and slid toward the defunct tree, boots slammed into the wood by the weight strung out of sight against the rock face.

It shadowed the fugitive's features as two conscripts leant out over the void, dusting her with snow and hauling on the suspending chain.  She made no sound even as her wounded hands were dragged beneath her by their brutal effect of her ascent.  

Flat-faced boulders parted from the ruin's footings and mottled with tea-green lichen bordered the curve of intervening ground that stretched before the walls, the steps up to the postern door terminating at its south end, the north littered with the leavings of the axe.  Slumping where she was shoved, Susan drew her legs into her stomach and leant against the ledge behind her, its low rampart cutting off any view of the monastery.  Splintered waste wood squealed and cracked beneath her, water tapping her shoulder from a trickle dripping off the stone.  She lifted her hand to the cold flow while Josephine payed out a telescopic mirror and scanned the face of the ruin.  

"I want their positions." she told her while Shaw kicked himself a berth into the ground beside her. 

"Susan, we got you.  We had you when you set foot in that compound... it's done.  If you care, then do them right, and if you don't, just give them up." he told her.

The girl had let her head fall back against the stone but glanced toward him, then at the conscripts aligned beside her.  In the face of their concerted expectation she turned away and proffered silence.  Shaw seized her arm and dragged her forward, crushing her face into the shallow burn of melt and wet snow that undercut the brittle debris.  She gasped a breath; he swore and held her down until Josephine looked down, pulled a humming sensor from her pocket and blew the pine dust from its display, Two reaching for his own version of the instrument and squinting at it.

"Decomp." he called, dismissing the reading and tucking it back into his clothing.  Beside him, Four muttered at his chest and struggled with his garments as though something live had fallen into them, pulling back his armoured vest to inspect his belt.

"The fuck?  My loc's lit up..." he cried, his suspicion confirmed by the dull red light that flashed at his waist and prompted him to look up at the sky in pavlovian alarm.  Shaw checked his own, then stared at Josephine, who did not share the sentiments expressed by her companions, as charged as anything that might have emerged from their weapons.  They cursed the activation of their locator beacons hotly, kicking stones and earth down the hillside in a embittered and childlike display of pugnacity.  Their self-styled leader stroked a hand over his cropped head, shaking it to himself.

"What did she do?" Susan murmured, wondering at the fusion of inertia and violence surrounding her as she righted herself.

"In two fuckin hours there'll be airborne out here lighting all this up with fifties... the only things dodging shit'll be your fuckin tricks.  Crazy fuckin bitch." the conscript beside her grunted, careless of whichever woman claimed offence.

"I don't know why you're still here." she admitted, laying her head down onto her knees.  "It's not like they can stop you.  She's mad, and he's a gutless numpty.  I'd have shot them both and gotten it over with."  The words cleaved swiftly to the notions already taking shape inside them.  "You could have been over the river by now."

Shaw's execration was superseded by another advisory from the corps.

"I ah... shit, yeah....got decomp again." said Four, rubbing a hand across his mouth and lifting a furrowed expression from the instrument in his grasp.  He turned his crouch in the direction indicated by the pulsing dial but did not dare to raise his head over the ledge, lifting it instead to mark the sun, a little past its apex in the wool-grey sky.  "Fuck... it can't be rolling, we still got a fuckin tonne of lux..."

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

I love this poem and yes, that is a narcissistic sentiment.  It forms the last of a trio I composed in the midst of some incredibly heavy personal shit a couple of years ago that began with the stellar other and ran on into over the main.  Those two are still too harrowing to me; this one is a salve to them and something of a resolution.  Verse can seem so ordered and watertight but I assure you that its creation can also be deeply cathartic and profoundly therapeutic.  If you are ever dealing with something that won't budge, switch your brain to its most oblique channel and let it all fall out onto the page.  It doesn't have to be good, whatever that means; beyond a certain point verse resists all meaningful measures of quality anyway.  You either relate to it, or you do not.

I put half of sans étoiles together mentally while standing on Back Beach road and watching the full moon rise over the peninsula, grateful for both its private associations and impersonal eternity.  Posting it again in honour of the supermoon and lunar eclipse that falls on my birthday, neither of which I will probably see for clouds and hemispherical cockblocking.  

Thanks, Obama.  

breakfast / dick's garden / oak shadow / gulls / dick's garden detail / camellia / golf course
credits: mostly me 'cept camellia- the lovely R

Hate golf courses*

*except at night

Rossville Reservoir, Sawyers Bay.  About a 4 k walk from our house over the hill separating Port Chalmers from this neighbouring ruralish burb.  These are somewhat mediocre images but I'm all articulated out right now and this is my saying something nice for a fucking change without having to use too many words.

*ruins it by swearing*

Where the Wild Things Are
Limited edition screenprint for Mondo


God I love Nico Delort's work.  It's so hard to get depth and dynamism into heavy monochrome; he lays it on thick but not too thick, know what I'm saying?  See more of his stuff and appreciate him  H E R E

No more snow fell earthward and Susan lay staring up into the vaulted night, its fabric stained, from the gravid hearth-grey of afternoon to a blackness pillared by the birches, their limbs arrayed like charred bones.  Without its stars the sky seemed starved and vacuous, its morbid sable breathing down upon her face while the icy ground beneath conducted her extremities into insensibility, claiming her swollen, leaking hand and block-like feet, on which she had been made to stand until she could no longer do so.  Lying prone replaced shuttered exhaustion with a forest viewed in yawning, supine peripheral, the depths of an unknown ocean, her hopeless flesh confiding to its drifting horrors as though it were blood spilled into the water.

Staring at the sky quieted the flashbulb flickers at the edges of her vision and dimmed their association with the silver-foiled eyes that might have stared back from between the trees.  The prospect of captivity beneath an eidiré with the woman standing guard as her only companion shared its colour with the interstellar spaces.  That no one would come to intervene was something that lay like the snow, anaesthetic once accepted, its principles and mechanism just as spotless and pristine.  When Susan closed her eyes she saw the face that Sachiin turned to her in another kind of darkness, discovering the ease with which those most private of exchanges could serve as a farewell, its tender, down-like irony bending the trees once more as tears beaded between her lashes.  

Josephine shifted in her seat upon a fallen bough.  The girl had turned her face away, rolling into a curve around a cough between the two chains that held her in the mist of the small clearing.  Her hair, still gently blue, retained its close-set braids, the tortuous romanticism of the arrangement skewed by the blind rote of their construction.  Slowly, she returned to lying on her back.  Josephine counted off the hours the hostage had already passed in silence while the prospect of captivity grew protean features and an intent tuned to her darkest spectrum.  She had seen its nightmare aspect rend and gut resolve and knew that it required no assistance, thinking herself privy to one of the small concessions dowering submission when she saw the girl's attention had shifted toward her.

A closer look revealed that it did not solicit or even consider her, but had settled on the darkness over her shoulder.  Reclaiming her weapon, Josephine turned and beheld the shape that had come forth between the branches.  An owl grasped a slender limb at the edge of the clearing, wearing a white far warmer than the snow and as plush as winter ermine, the disquieting schematics of its pallid, annular mask laid round eyes like polished domes of quartz.  It shrugged its pinions before blinking from the way ahead, setting a stare on the girl as she used her arms to rise and sit back on her knees.  Josephine oversaw their exchange with the suspicion she accorded all requited silence, opening her mouth in unformed objection while Susan reached out slowly and took up snow between her fingers, touching it to her brow in deference to the visitor.  The beam from her guard's torch crossed the branches and found the bird's glowing eyes; it clapped its beak, put out its wings and flew on over their heads.  

The same light blanched the girl's face when Josephine turned it on her, studying her for a while.

"Call to them." she instructed, her voice echoing slightly in the quiet.  The captive sat without moving, her saturnine refusal drawing Josephine from the fallen tree.  She unclipped something from her belt as she approached.  "Put your back into it."  Susan let the woman loose the chain from her hands without looking at her.  The ruby binding of her multitool was empurpled by the darkness, like the ends of her own fingers.  "Do it now.  Nice and loud or I will hurt you, just like before."  She felt her cold hand flattened across her knee and pinned fast at the wrist.  When she would not comply, the woman closed the alloy jaws on her bitten index finger and prised the riven nail from its bed.

Susan did not know which of Sachiin's names she screamed into the trees.  One of the conscripts, his skin prickling with its shivering abandon, halted at the northern end of the clearing with his rifle in both hands, his frown hardly distinguishable from his customary expression.

"I gotta relieve you if you can't keep her iced." he called, making a careful study of the surrounding trees as Josephine rose.  In watching him return to his unseen station, she pressed her boot down on the girl's bleeding hand, leaning over as she twisted it slowly into the snow and desisting only when her full weight did not elicit any more audible response.

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

^ The Buller river had come off spate and slunk back down to a more reasonable volume, the whole place waking amongst cloud and sounding sated and a little bored.

Springs Junction is a formulaic little pitstop regardless of your heading through the mountains.
We don't eat there if we can help it.  Just saying.

Frost was turning into hoarfrost (not as sexy as it sounds) or soft rime which happens when... well... cold is
involved.  And clear skies.  Dry air, etc.  We were stopped in one of the shitty ex-coal towns by a
crossing signal infamous for randomly malfunctioning; true to form it went on and on, patently trainless,
 for about 20 minutes.  Then a guy in overalls wandered down and kicked it or something, and everyone
went on their way.  New Zealand Rail #stuntin #represent.

Frost and beech forest.  The trees crowd out the sky and breathe their wet black scent at you when you
open the window, which I am always compelled to do even though it is freezing and my fellow passengers
were ready to shank me for all the stopping and disorganised appreciating.

Oamaru is a slightly larger version of the aforementioned shit-heel conurbations and is furthermore infested with steampunk types.  Well, it was last time I looked too hard.  I give a big black stink-eye to the glib appropriation of punk by people who just seem to wander around in thirsty Victorian cosplay hoping to be noticed, and prefer to call them steamattentionseekers which is a fairly unassailable summation, really.

You can judge a subculture by the fuckability of its adherents.  In this case that's a hard no all round, and the prosecution rests.

Everyone wanks on about the imposing colonial architecture, penguins etc etc but I don't like Oamaru.  It has a swampy, ingrown, decaying-concrete sort of anti-energy that makes me want to stay on the bus whenever I'm passing through.  

I brake for the local Denheath custard squares though, which taste like angels gently fucking your mouth but were clearly devised by Satan to bounce reformed fat hos like myself back on the road to sweaty blimpdom.  Just ask around; you'll strike the odd person who claims not to know what they are or where to find one, but they're fucking lying.  Check their clothes for shredded coconut.  We ate ours before I thought to memorialise the occasion, hence the stock pic.  46535374xs better than the photo which looks fucking delicious to me if somewhat overexposed. 

^  How everyone pictures New Zealand.

^  What they're just as likely to see when they get here.
Have a look at the river levels when you're tooling across a few bridges.  Thanks, big dairy.

On the home stretch now through coastal Otago as the sun starts bottoming out on the horizon.

^ Puketapu hill overlooking Palmerston, about an hour from Port Chalmers where the Lovely R, a stationary couch and a neurotic poodle await me.  Just as we predicted it was fucking frosty on the way down the Waitati hills into Port, making for super-hairy going. Half an hour later and we probably would have had to have found somewhere to stay.

Thank you for flying Blackthorn cattle class; please remove your shoes before leaping from the emergency exits.

Pocket cameras have inferior sensors, generally speaking, to the DSLRs we usually use.  If you're wondering why your should-be-awesome money shots look lacklustre, especially when blown up, this is generally the reason.

You  can make those deficits work for you, though; I enjoy the quality of flatness and tonal limitation little cameras tend to impose on scenes like this.  They mimic what you see when intense sunlight is fucking with your depth perception etc.

Hills and the adjacent Pacific mean our spring clouds are particularly epic.  Which is lucky because it had been raining solidly for a fucking week and I felt like mushrooms were growing in my sinus cavities.

Due to the first half of the first month of spring bringing no appreciable improvement in my personal situation despite its specific contractual obligations, I demand further positive action from the Universe because:

- The world still sucks for most women.  Although it might suck a little bit less for some of us, sometimes.  Whoopdeefuckingdoo.

- Not into Into The River : backwards christian numbnuts - who I'm pleased to say generally have zero sociopolitical traction down here- somehow managed to get a fucking YA book banned for being too realistic, basically.  I mean, the book looks like hopeless shite and is supposed to appeal to 'teenage boys who would otherwise not read at all' which is possibly the funniest thing I have heard in a long time for so many reasons, but still.  That and no one really seems to know how or why it ended up getting banned, including the 1.5 people who bitched about it in the first place and the fucking Film and Literature Board of Review twat who issued the classification.  Good job, political christians, and cheers for reminding the general public why you can't be trusted to participate in the democratic process, such as it is.  It was probably timely.

- Every lucky New Zealander got to pay Warner Bros $50 for the privilege of hosting the filming of the LOTR series. There are a lot of reasons to hate Lord of the Rings.  It is puerile, racist, sexist and causes glacial retreat wherein the underlying mechanism is boredom.  Now it emerges that Peter Jackson's/Warner Bros filming thereof in New Zealand cost the NZ taxpayer 200 fucking million dollars.  That's right- four million people subsidised a Hollywood studio to film that dookiemountain so that one in ten people when specifically cued during questioning could associate our country with that kind of embarrassing bollocks.  Go eat a dick with wiry ginger pubes, Dilbo, or whatever the fuck you call yourself.

- Cauliflower, which I have just reintroduced to our diet after a couple of decades of suspicious exclusion, is a beast seething with fractals ( just fucking bear with me):  
"Cauliflower has been noticed by mathematicians for its distinct fractal dimension, predicted to be about 2.8. One of the fractal properties of cauliflower is that every branch, or "module", is similar to the entire cauliflower. Another quality, also present in other plant species, is that the angle between "modules," as they become more distant from the center, is 360 degrees divided by the golden ratio." (Wiki)  
You didn't know that yesterday and neither did I.  Nothing good can come of being noticed by mathematicians, I abhor and indeed disrelish all fractals and was enjoying cauliflower, so this is like a slap in the face to me.

- Yazidi women are entering the battle against ISIS.  Normally I would deplore anyone getting sucked into combat because it is a disgusting waste of our extremely limited time on this planet, amongst other things, and the political capital women gain in the course of combat so often dissipates once they put down the .50s.  But I'm base enough to admit there is a certain dark savour in the idea that the men blowing up strangers and acquiring sex slaves presumably in their struggle against preferential treatment are radicalising the women they have brutalised into killing them right back.  For most fundy jihadis, to be killed by a woman is haram (profane) and excludes the victim from their promised paradise.  And being in the army means Yazidi girls can smoke all they like.  Lol-  have one for me.  Read about their increasing engagement in the Guardian.

- Also, I cannot find my compilation featuring I Wanna Be Adored which means I will have to rip it again, for fuck's sake.  I did not care for most of the madchester stuff and even typing that word makes me want to plunge scissors into something's sternum because it was oversold shite, basically, and Ian's baroque public mouthbreathing should have earned him far more concerted assaults and/or prison time.  Although I think he did go away once, which pleases me.

IWBA is a fucking great song but I say that as a bass player.

Jungle Boogie  Adrian & Gidi                

Shaw pressed the girl's shoulder to the ground with his knee while he patted his belt for the cuffs he feared lost in his acquisition of her.  Silence settled in the blue shade, the smell of stone and soil flushed from the riven snow beneath them.  She lifted her head to look at him, astonished, then incensed.

“Relax.  The less trouble you give, the less you get.” he muttered, forcing the cuff down over her wrist.

"Let me go.”  

“Can’t do that.”

"Let me go." she hissed, provoked as much by the ease of his refusal as her own predicament.  When he did not reply but sat back to consult his com, she suddenly contracted, planted her feet and threw herself sideways, tipping him onto his rear and scrambling over the top of him.  Wedging her elbows into the snow, she sprang up and ran off along the slope toward the drop, the cuff chain flapping from her arm.  Josephine leapt free from the saplings on the hill overhead and caught the fugitive from behind, seizing her hair and taking her once more to the ground.

“Get off me!” she snarled through bared teeth; in reply her captor smacked a black steel truncheon across her elbow.  The pain left her rolling and coughing snow from the back of her throat while the webbing was strapped around her right arm.  As it compressed the small bones of her wrist the girl's dark eyes flicked open; she snatched the stranger's jacket front and jerked her downward where she bit hard into her cheek, her teeth skidding, then tearing into the smooth skin.  Josephine punched her stomach with a knee until Shaw pared them apart, keeping her assailant pinned where she lay.

The blonde woman pressed a hand to the lush colour smeared across her face.  It bled through the crooks of her fingers while she tore supplies from her pack, the girl spitting its raw taste into the snow.

"I want their location." she hissed, slapping tape across the gauze that had stuck to her wound.  Susan's eyes found Shaw again.  "Where are they?" Josephine shouted down at her, fingers blanching on the handle of the baton.  Her victim's red-stained teeth flashed as she cracked the weapon across her shins; at its impact she stared wildly and gasped for breath, but uttered nothing more.  Shaw turned from her, keeping his remarks confidential.  

"This was too damn easy."

"They're here." Josephine assured him, scorn lowering her voice.

"You don't know that... you think they're just going to sit this out while you go hard on her?"

"Look at her neck.  That's a fatality right there, and there's a bad contact on her arm.  Where do you think she'd be right now if they weren't committed to her survival?"  She waited for him to conclude his incurious survey.  "Take all the time you need."

"That's not what I got at the house." he insisted.

"What you got at the house put us out here.  Now get on her.  I need bloods."  

Josephine's pack yielded a number of discreet kits, each sleeved in a different shade of green from which she slid a selection of tools and appurtenance.  With a small black camera she bent down again, grasping the girl's throat and snapping detailed shots of her face, front and profile, disregarding its expression and the blood around her mouth.  The subject lay so indifferent to the blinking shutter that Josephine began to suspect her acquiescence and stowed the camera; with a plastic bag over her hand she grasped a section of her hair, winding it around her gloved fingers and ripping it free from the braid.  

"The tent lab can get all this." Shaw muttered from his position at her feet.  The girl saw nothing of the collection tube pressed to the skin beneath her ear, its cannula drawing a snaking line of blood into the plastic. 

“She’s a warm ride, she could be holding both their DNA.  If we have to cash her in I want her swabs on file so get her fucking feet.”

Their captive twisted from the hands that grasped the front of her jeans, thrashing hard and catching Shaw in the throat with her boot when he lost control of her legs.  He sat back, struggling with the insult to his airway while Josephine cursed them both, winding the miscreant with the baton and climbing to her feet.

The conscripts negotiated the slope within formation in response to her summons, their thickset, pale-eyed uniformity suggesting them as the product of some failed fascist métier, their defects almost sarcastic.  One by one they took a moment from their slit-eyed vigilance to look the girl over, returning their interest to their surrounds as circumstance dictated the emphasis.  Their leader shrugged while shaking his head in rueful illustration of his misgivings.  Built like a massive bipedal saurian, he sported a white blond crop and eyes that seemed perpetually inflamed by some chemical irritant.

"From point... looks clean." he reported, watching Josephine consult the compass on her wrist.  Shaw shook his head at her ascending glance.

"Set up sensors... I want coverage at thirty metres." she instructed.  "We'll tune her here.  If it moves, get on it."

The conscripts spread away from them, placing laser-sighted units in a perimeter and hunkering down with their weapons to their chests.  Fighting the acquisition of her hands until she was flipped onto her stomach, the girl blew snow and loosed hair from her mouth against the ground.  Shaw stood peeling the plastic from an energy bar and planted a cursory boot on the back of her knees as per instruction; Josephine uncuffed her left fist and prised the thumb from it.  

"You can see where this is going..." the former explained to the subjugated party with his mouth half-full, favouring his bruised throat as he swallowed.  "I can't help you if you won't give back.  Anything you know is good."

Josephine unclipped a multitool from her belt, setting the deeply-cleated plier jaws around base of Susan's thumb nail.  

"Where are they?"

Her silence closed the jaws and crushed the nail frozen white, then concentric blue and red.  The girl almost tore free in the comprehensive violence of her response, writhing behind her arm with the demonic strength of some inviolate possession.  Blood fled the split that buckled open in the half moon of her nail but her expression conferred nothing beyond agony; Josephine released the jaws, knowing circulation would reprise the sanction.  In Susan's stare the looming birches came to sudden life, branches bleeding like veins of watered ink into the sky.

"Last time.  Where are they?"  Josephine's reiteration sounded as though spoken through a wall; she looked out along the slope, then selected another finger, adjusting her grip on the tool.  

The girl's eyes flew open; her teeth appeared behind her lips and Josephine loosed the jaws, then struck her dripping finger a swift blow with the tool.  Susan lapsed slackly onto the snow and away from her hand into a spinning, silvery daze while the conscripts kept their wary eyes on the hillside. 

"Down there." she gasped, spitting out the words along with the saliva that had slid into her airway.

Shaw dispatched himself down the slope and blew hard as he toiled back to them while Josephine unrolled a slim chain from her belt and dragged the girl's dead weight toward a tree, securing her to the trunk.  He took their discussion to a discreet remove.

"Like I said... tracks go right down to the drop." he smirked.  "They cut her loose."  

Around them the corps stood like some crude henge, fists closed tightly on their weapons.  

"Did I tell you to come in?" snapped Josephine, turning her attention back to Shaw's gloating reportage.  "How is it possible for her to have a hand up your ass when she's tied to a tree?  I could do her like that all day and she won't make a sound.  Ask yourself why."  

Snow had began to fall again, drifting between them, and she paused, turning to look through it at the conscripts that had begun to scratch at the edge of her attention like a hatched blur; they cringed hard and doubled over as though her anger had effected it, weapons forgotten at the cold burn of the screaming tone inside their heads.  Shaw's hands retreated to his rifle and Josephine looked down at the split ring hanging from her belt, gaping, misshapen and emptied of its orange fob.  The missing unit almost glowed in Susan's bloodied grasp as she slid her thumb back from the button, sitting on her knees in the half-regarded distance and watching the tormented men recover, her mastery of the effect becoming clear, like something patiently explained.  Looking up at the pistol in Josephine's grasp while the latter strode toward her, she hoisted her swollen elbow onto her knee and used both arms to throw the fob to Shaw.  

The men said nothing to the baton blow that knocked her onto her side.

"Get back out on point!" Josephine shouted over her shoulder.  The command met a thick, shuffling silence.  Shaw nodded toward Susan, stowing the orange unit on his own belt.

"Get her up." he told them.  "We're done wasting time."

Two conscripts lurched forward uncertainly, trudging past Josephine while she blew a dry breath at the sky.

"What now, Nathaniel?" she laughed sourly.  "Slay us with your exit strategy."

"I...  We call this in..."  

“You don’t dial in a jugfuck, man..." A Two volunteered.  "We come up empty, they’ll frag us from the fuckin hawk.  I seen them do that shit three times.” 

"We're not empty... we got her." he reminded them, nodding to the base of the tree where Susan lay on her side.  Taking the small locator unit from her breast pocket, Josephine offered it to Shaw.  

“So call it in.  Thirty to pull pitch, two hours flight time... they'll be here before we lose the light.”  Conscious of the eyes on him, he made slow time in checking his watch and compass, setting his rifle strap across his shoulders and ignoring her demand for a decision.  "Call them." she insisted.  He turned toward his abandoned pack, speaking with her scathing stare still crawling on his profile and muttering in reply.

"I'll make the call tomorrow early.  We pitch here tonight."

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

Nine Fathom Foul, the fucking big anchor that used to snag everyone's shit until it was dredged in the 70s and sat here, overlooking the container port @ around 200m above sea level.
This is the wee Canon pocket camera.

Healing with fire.  
Shaped in Mexico is at the Bargehouse, London until 12 September.  There's some nice images in the G.

Migration. Refugees. Influx thereof into western democracies precipitated by war and economic hardship etc.  Are you sick of hearing about it?  Too bad, bitches!

I don't live in Calais or southern Italy and I don't have to watch thousands of desperate strangers battling local police or washing up with nothing and nowhere else to go, except in the media.  But I think about it as though it is happening next door.  I'll admit to being more moved by the idea of of hundreds of thousands of women and girls having to choose between ISIS/Assad and destitute exile than I am by images of a single drowned child.  But if people need to see that to give a shit, whatever makes it happen.

New Zealand accepts 750 (no, I didn't drop a zero off that) refugees a year, which is a pathetic humanitarian fail and a sleazy shirking of our international responsibilities.  We don't really have a problem participating in the illegal and unethical conflicts that have precipitated the current humanitarian crisis- we just don't want to hear from the victims.  But at least we're not Australia.

What should we think, as people accustomed to protection from the immediate effects of the policies our representatives pursue, with or without popular consensus?  We need to be reflective, empathetic and practical.  Half of my ancestors were refugees, escaping horrific conditions in some of the most brutalised parts of Ireland.  The rest were mostly 'economic migrants' from what was still essentially feudalism and starvation on the European mainland.  These scenarios have been driving people from one place toward another for as long as we have existed.  As a writer of historical shit I tend to think of current events in the context of a pretty extended timeline, leading me to conclude that every single person who's ever lived was both migrant- in the sense that their ancestors probably came from somewhere else- and indigene, including every last arsehole cluttering up my native archipelago, both Maori and misc.  

On that timeline, no one is magically-righteously resident anywhere, so all the exclusivist bullshit falls away and we're all just a herd of shuffling undifferentiated vertebrates, lucky to be drawing breath.

It's human to want to defend the privileges you enjoy, and that's not just down to selfish exclusivity.  But many of our privileges have been purchased at the expense of others, and we need to grow the fuck up and extend them if we really trust in their merit.  Exclusion and deprivation are the oxygen of extremism and violence.
     
Everyone's all fuck foreigners or I heart refugees without bothering to wonder or elucidate why, and it's not enough to just assume either position; in fact, given the scale of the issue, this reactive polarisation has horribly dangerous implications.

I regard myself as a redistribution-minded misanthropic autodidactic ultra-liberal feminist secularist slash anarchist depending on moon phase.  Allow me latitude to argue with my inner jaded arseclown in public, because honest acknowledgement of our own bullshit is the first step out of this perpetual clusterfuck.

TEAM CYNICAL  T R O L L   V   TEAM ASPIRING  A D U L T

- I don't like my own species.  We don't regularly donate to humanitarian orgs like Oxfam outside of natural disasters because humans are a simian pox upon the planet.
- Yeah, but no one asks to be born, especially not into a fucking civil war or systemic collapse.  You're a fucking person too, bitch.

- Detest organised religion and the male privilege ensconced in even mainstream understandings of Islam, not really keen on having to accommodate more conservative societal bullshit.
- Firstly, private beliefs = none of my business. The best way to challenge the retarded medieval aspects of religion is to expose them to the wonders of personal freedom and gender equality as delineated, if not always enacted, by secular societies.  Concerned with their survival?  Learn to share.  Also: your knowledge of the general grass roots awesomeness of the cultures in question + the positive social values within Islam, which you ahem profess to share.

-Yeah, well why aren't all the faithful headed to the likeminded theocracies next door if it's all so fucking awesome?  Isn't it time the Saudis got off their incredibly rich arses and did something positive?
- Syria is surrounded by the sort of active conflicts, poverty, failed states and geographic barriers that make the Mediterranean look like the best option.  Re religious affiliation: the KSA (Saudis) have kept their shit tight with draconian policies of messiness-exclusion and ruthless exploitation despite the social responsibilities explicitly mandated in the Koran; it's 'worked' for them so far.  Everyone in the region knows this.  And they're fundy Wahhabi/Salafi (i.e. OG) Sunnis and the vast majority of Syrians are not; ask your catholic nanna if she'd like to bunk with the pentecostals down the road.

- Cynical collusion or at least tacit acceptance by a sizeable chunk of the general populace is usually a minimum requirement for any successful dictatorship.  A fair number of the people now fleeing Syria would have been fine-to-neutral with Assad's bullshit as long as he wasn't gassing their particular neighbourhood.
- But you hate a lot of the shit that's going down in your own country and are essentially powerless to affect change in a pretend-democracy; how does dissent go down in a regime that's holding your family in an unspecified location?  It usually doesn't, and you probably wouldn't risk it either.

- At least half of NZ is already struggling to house and feed themselves due to grossly unfair distribution of wealth and inadequate social services, and it's not alone in that.
- New Zealand is social justice-poor, not resource-strapped.  A few more thousand cases of hardship isn't going to change shit about anything.  Also, NZ-poor trumps war-poor.  So shut up.

- Know only too well that our current government will abandon and demonise any cohort that struggles to adapt to the cannibalistic requirements of living in a shitty western country already on its way to social failure.
- Fuck the bad people in charge.  They're not the boss of us, anyway.

- Accepting greater refugee quotas will mean trafficking explodes on an unprecedented scale.
Pretty sure that cat's already peeled out of the bag.  I don't accept that wealthy countries are entitled to parsimonious admission policies toward the refugees their violent international fuckery have impoverished and displaced.

- Have already participated in a local support/English language scheme for refugees; have discovered the allocation of resources is largely ineffective and possibly corrupt.
- Well shit, you might have to actually get back to doing something to change that instead of wanking on the internet.

-Have personally emigrated twice and know how difficult and isolating it can be, even within countries sharing a language and basic cultural expectations.
- People tend not to leave everything and everyone they know on a fucking whim.  And you expect to be able to move between western countries yourself for comparatively trivial and entirely selfish reasons, right?  Yeah, I thought so.

- Thousands of desperate, dislocated people will further compromise an already semi-Dickensian labour market and encourage employers to dismantle our few remaining legislative protections. 
- Lol, too late!  Also, NZ is becoming a gross hideout/indentured service culture for stinky rich people absconding from the shit they've done in their countries of origin.  If we're going to import humans, let's welcome the ones trying to dodge bullets, not taxes/audits/warrants.

- Unformed ideas about people staying in their own countries and dealing with their own shit leading to a more comprehensive and lasting resolution.  Ponders the catastrophic intergenerational effect of the mass departure of educated moderates+secularists from Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran.
- Because ignoring and essentially confining people within countries trashed by Western meddling and aggression has worked so well up til now.  If tanks rolled into your town, you'd probably be on the next fucking plane to bunk with your relatives in Australia.  A lot of Syrians will go home when it's safe to do so anyway; we owe them the help they need so that they can return and rebuild their societies.

- This is a bullshit, entirely predictable situation laden with no-win near-immortal systemic toxicity, cynically engineered by a corrupt patriarchal hegemony so fuck everyone, I'm not going to give a toss.
-  The hardest for me to personally plug my ears against.  Old enough to have seen all this before, know it's going to happen again.  But, do as you would be done to.  If we can't do better than the greedy psychopathic dickholes who landed us in this shit, who are we, really?

I make no apologies for boring the pants off you with this extended raving.  Abnormal transmission will resume.

A leopard leaps into a muddy waterhole to catch a fish in the Savuti Channel in Botswana. The fishing leopards of Savuti are known for their unique skills in catching fish – but have rarely been photographed
Greatstock/Barcroft Media

A brown bear licks a tree trunk in the Bear Forest in Ouwehand Zoo in Rhenen, The Netherlands. The bear arrived in the zoo in June, after living in a concrete tank with another brown bear in Bulgaria
Photograph: Koen Van Weel/EPA

These are from a really nice gallery in the Guardian: see the whole thing  H E R E

The cliff beneath her was not nearly as tall or forbidding as she had expected, its steep degree built up by enormous boulders cast from the ridges into a broken but passable grade, the great blocks ignored by the water shouldering past them, as dark as graphite in suspension.  Fine spray settled on the fur as she devised a way over the descent to a point where the river was pinched so tightly between outcropped stone that she might have leapt it; she wiped a drip from her nose, folding her arms and sitting in her hunch until the sun had shifted overhead and tipped her shadow backwards.

Susan looked to the north and south and climbed slowly from the drop on all four limbs, rising to her feet once more where the hill leveled into a broad shelf.  The air glittered with buoyant whits of ice in flues of sunlight drifting down from slim rifts in the cloud.  At first glance the trees seemed placed as though by careful hands at some considerate distance from each other, and that they cultivated sophistry, their slim shade cutting the white with stripes of matte grey, snow lying on their branches like inverted shadow.  Shrugging off her coat, she hung it from a sapling and lay down, first in profile, then on her back, imprinting two versions of herself into the pristine little plain.  Her own small scale annoyed her as it had always done, seeming closer to some minor, nameless scion of her order than the species to which she belonged, though she drew consolation from the adult nature of the impressed proportions.  A brief exam of her surrounds yielded broken wood, pebbles and bracket fungi; knocked from the fir they climbed in velveteen succession, the shapes of each were pressed into service as features on her effigies.  Crouching for a moment at their feet in the grip of a vague dissatisfaction, she leant forward and planted a cigarette in each emblematic mouth.  The effect was so displeasing that she flicked them away along with those remaining in the pack, tasting wet ash on her tongue and noting the narrow slash of red on the back of her finger before the discomfort of the scratch itself, hands almost disembodied by the cold's numbing, insidious empery.  From them she looked up through the curling tendrils that had escaped her braids, glimpsing movement flickering amid a copse of pines recently carbonized by lightning.  

Two birds rendered in black and chatoyant purple stood in heraldic confrontation amongst the ravished trees.  Their feet, scaled and pipe grey, cut runic prints into the snow.  Its crystals sucked a sweet and thickly-staining pink from the small carcass lying between them, of some luckless stoat or ermine; the ravens had hollowed its eyes and stolen the tongue from its mouth before opening its flank with their blade-like beaks.  Their act of disposal was ennobled by hues and textures both stiff and elastic, blue and indelicate crimson, softly furred and dripping.  All was pried apart and swallowed, the birds ignoring her observance, dragging the last secrets from between the ermine's ribs, sacred instruments about their sacred task.  When she looked up from them the ruin had retreated overhead and she could see nothing of the rooftop yard, though she frowned and squinted until the hollow beating of the ravens’ wings turned her back in their direction.  Together the corvids made a concerted ascent and stood amongst the branches, looking toward the south like sombre weathercocks and croaking brusquely.  With her eyes still on the birds she sank down, one hand seeking the strap of the rifle while its absence and the rasp of an unfamiliar tread closed her eyes.  She remained bedded like a stone even as the sounds described the stiff, braced stance the stranger assumed before her.

The sight of Susan Christabel in such incautious isolation seemed illusory to Josephine.  She blinked hard, but made no other move to reassure herself.

“Move slowly, do exactly as I say.” she called as she withdrew a heavy black pistol.  “Lace your fingers behind your head.  Lie face down.”  The girl glanced up toward the ruin.  Josephine covered her carefully as she rose to stand, charged with the bright, self-conscious rigor of refusal.  Her head turned toward the sound of the water; she looked back once at Josephine, then ran.

The dead trees of the clearing were quickly swallowed by the hillside though she did not look behind her, pushing her lead by skidding over a shallow bluff onto the more familiar ground of her previous ascent.  Her boots punched into a cracking tangle of wind-banked branches; tipped forward, she kicked free and stumbled on toward the gorge, bursting through fingerling saplings that whipped back at her face.  While her headlong velocity left Josephine in her distant wake, the latter's voice echoed down the hillside to direct another; the unseen party closed on her as they emerged together onto the level ground, catching her right arm and spinning her hard into the snow. 


Petrouchka suspended her careful ascent toward the yard, lifting her hand to spare her flooded gaze the daylight; though feeble and colourless, it roared and boiled around her, casting the steps in white hot relief and glowing with the infernal hue of crucible steel.  It rippled through the liquid in her eyes, her surface guarded only by clothing and the shadow she had followed from inside the ruin.  Halted by its failure at the floor of the roof she stood, awaiting Sachiin's attention.  He was tying back his returning hair, the handle of the axe propped against his thigh, and formed a pier of scalding brilliance, his eyes rendered in lustreless, infra-red darkness.

"From the way she freaked at me and peeled out, I'm guessing you dropped some epic shit down there." he suggested tersely.  Petrouchka lifted the black cloth from her shoulders over her head.  "I trusted you not to fuck with her, and you went right at it.  I trusted you not to fuck with him."   

"You accuse me?  Of what?"

"Dépravation." he replied, wearily.  "Déshonneur."  The charges carried deeply into her empty chest, the day shuddering around them in agreement; she murmured, and lifted her draped arm as much against his stare as the sky, and he spoke more gently to her.  "Do you not love me, Belyaev?  How have we sinned against you?"

"I am dead, Sachiin." she confessed from underneath her cowl.  "You ask so much of me." 

The haste with which Kala'amātya climbed toward them drew him past her with none of the inquiry her presence might have otherwise inspired.  She watched him confide something to his brother, then catch his arm as the latter broke toward the stairs, wide-eyed and silent, forcing Kala'amātya to exert the whole of his strength in halting him beside the vampyre and pinning his shoulder to the wall.

"What did you tell her?" he demanded of her.  
"Sh'ih in'nai'ama.  If they have her, they can't have you." hissed his detainer.  Their struggle escalated until Petrouchka was sucked into its throes, her two-fisted hold setting her dead weight against him.
"Sachiin!  You think she want this?  Go now, or you won't."

He dragged them from the wall with him into the sunlight, her right side bared by the loss of her shawl; she sank to her knees beside his leg and clawed it back over her head, her cry prompting him to throw his brother off and aid her, though not before the caustic sky raised plumules of flame on the backs of her hands.  Crouching in the shadow, Petrouchka pressed her burnt skin to her dress where it smoked like a brazier of blackened myrrh, uttering advice deeply coloured by the dark purl of her accent. 

"They won't give you a cage with her.  Be free.  You know there is nothing else."  

As she tottered back into the ruin Sachiin dropped onto the step beneath him as though suffering the same malaise. 

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

Ex Machina (2015, Alex Garland) Ex Machina begins with some unspecified dweeb winning some unspecified online competition and getting airlifted to a remote Ikea-type deeply impersonal development facility where Oscar Issac the Unpleasant Genius needs someone to challenge his latest beta AI consciousness.  Or does he?  I'll stop right there because the premise and your ultimate opinion of this yarn are heavily reliant on your unassuming receptivity.  It's enough to say that there are all kinds of timely dick-yanks about Google, R&D culture, device dependancy, gender stuff, human contact deficits etc, and all that is cute and worthy.  Like I said, stop now and go watch the fucking thing if you have even half a mind to. 

Superficially, Ex Machina ticks all the watch-me boxes.  I’ve never really seen anything exactly like it before, and that is an unqualified compliment, but I don’t think I want to see anything like it again and that's down to a number of factors.  It definitely aims to tweak and your specific reaction will hinge on your individual sensitivities; personally I detest the concept of mobile, transactional AI, so there's that no-thanks knee jerk from the start.  Also: misogyny- Ex Machina is misogynistic in that gross, sneaky, half-pseudo post-modern observational way that masquerades as commentary whilst walking and quacking and pandering like an offensive duck.  It could be argued that they were making a point, that I should have allowed myself to relate to a femmebot's plight blah blah but whatever; it is gratuitous, and the effect on my female self is the same.  I didn't fucking appreciate it.  At all.

It's not like I couldn't have gotten past those rather visceral reactions if it had taken me anywhere really new or valuable.  The script is fine and the concept is relatively intelligent.  But while it's perfectly competent technically, EM's neither pretty enough to be visually consuming nor original enough in its promethean/frankenstein do-over to move me beyond yep, see what you did there.  It's a very narrow thing too, droning away with this monotonal hum which coupled with the other distasteful aspects is just fucking annoying, like something buzzing loudly against a window on a sweaty day.  Punchable and unrelatable spring to mind when I contemplate its protagonists, and I don't mean to disparage the performances; Gleeson as the hapless noodle is absolutely fine and Sonoya Mizuno and Alicia Vikander are really great, the latter a study in understated detailing, infusing her frustrated automaton with a sophisticated physicality, exploring her pliant, porous limitations and even answering some of my objections to her depiction.  Issac is... okay, which is disappointing, delivering his twisted, blunted genius like something out of a box marked twisted blunted genius, but it is a wee bit difficult to distinguish between the writer’s failings in this character’s respect, and his projection by such a wily salesman.

You should probably see Ex Machina and I wish I had more of its ilk to bitch about.  But it made my mouth taste bad- even if it was supposed to, I don’t feel like that was a win for Garland, who also penned the script.  In fact I could have saved us both some time and just called it abrasive and icky.  

There's quite a lot of room in my heart for abrasive but icky can sling its fucking hook.

Only Lovers Left Alive (2013, Jim Jarmusch)  Jarmusch is a polarising mofo but love him or hate him, I think we can all agree that there are worse things to be.  He is a greatly beloved slacker mascot and an Ornament of the Other Way, and I for one have enjoyed his shit for most of my adult life.  That’s not to say I’m an unquestioning JJ apologist- I walked out of The Limits of Control, for instance, and sometimes want to drown Down By Law in a puddle- so it’s still safe to consider this an actual critique.  Only Lovers Left Alive took the best part of a decade to crawl out of development hell and Jarmusch has talked at length about the impossibility of getting left-field shit funded these days, so I won’t get into that, despite the fact that films like this are suffocating canaries in a douche-infested coal mine.  Which should give us all a lot of pause.  

From a purely commerciral POV it's not difficult to see why investors might have demurred; Only Lovers Left Alive is a snail-paced, half-stoned shuffle through the glitter, lint and otherness of expert-level boho, a kingdom so sadly eroded by the rapacious requirements of modern living that no one under 40 will probably know what the fuck Jarmusch is eulogising.  This isn't everyone's cup of bananas.  But that's cool.

Adam and Eve are two medium-ancient vampires splitting their endless time between various old-skool points of international interest, the former (Tom Hiddleston) troubled savant consort to Tilda Swinton's eternal, immutable muse.  They spectate the decline of civil standards with varying degrees of concern, pursue their obscure passions and utter a number of trenchant maxims.  If you need more, it is there, but you'll have to dig for it.

Jarmusch's ride-along style and vampirism per se are the perfect vehicle and metaphor for the kind of leisurely creativity that is almost extinct.  Proud custodians of mother-of-toilet-seat guitars and other practitioners will deeply appreciate Jim's loving documentation; rolling through the D, tinkering with vintage amps, sheltering one's genius against popular acclaim, books, evicting arrivistes, inhaling Tangier, competitive disinterest at shitty bars.  Also the futile bitterness of loss, that empty grasp as one's slender cohort of like minds is whittled down by pitiless time.  

Only Lovers Left Alive is beautifully arranged and captured.  I didn’t have a problem with its doodling trajectory nor its obscure preoccupations since such things exist to chasten our priorities.  But let's set all indulgence aside and admit OLLA should have brought a little more to the table, script-wise, for something so long in gestation.  Some of it feels ad-libbed which wasn't really a problem in itself; for me there were occasional performance wobbles, Adam in particular yearning for the greater heft and projection the recused Michael Fassbender would have brought to the role.

Hiddleston's no slouch and he brought a nice bit of subtlety to the table but Tilda munches all the fucking scenery unless robustly directed and counterweighted by another supercommanding presence.  John Hurt shows how that's done in his turn as an ailing Christopher Marlowe, patron saint of reluctant awesomeness, and Mia Wasikowska is precisely the right kind of naughty interloping fluff.  So no real complaints with the personnel.

We both loved Only Lovers Left Alive.  Jarmusch’s films are like affirmations written on your arm with glitter pen for when we wake up the next day.  There will always be Universal scale.  And probably water in Detroit.  Some things are eternal despite our fears for them.  (Great soundtrack too).