School picture day! 7th grade. For real.

You see, we met when I was 13 and she was 11. The setting: a manky teenage boy’s bedroom in the trashiest
trailer in our neighborhood. I was in the middle of having my first kiss with a chubby boy who I agreed to try
making out with on basis of the fact that he had Robert Smith hair (sort of). The soundtrack: The Glove – Blue Sunshine.
With song titles like “Punish Me With Kisses” and “Mouth to Mouth“, it really couldn’t have been much more apt. I was much
more captivated with the album (it took me years to track it down and hear it again! Still a major favorite.) than I was
with the kissing. I think I was a little stoned, and all I could think about was giant pink slugs undulating. ¡El Grosso Maximo!
At the sound of the door creaking open, we wriggled apart, and through a veil of shaggy bangs that I thought hid my awesome
coke-bottle glasses (they totally, uh, didn’t.) I spied a feral wolf-child. A sullen cherub with a nimbus of golden curls that glowed
in the blacklight bulb. She stomped in all tough in plaid skater shorts and monkey boots. We eyed each other, and I think both
realized instantly that we were saved. Literally, in so many ways. We say it all the time, but it doesn’t make it any less true
that if we hadn’t stumbled across each other at that time in our lives, that both of us would have probably ended up dead
or worse. How fate decided to bless us by having our parents find houses right down the street from each other made up
(a bit) for all the other ways she decided to completely fuck us up. Soon, we were spending every free moment together,
hanging out in burned-out, abandoned houses after school and sneaking out of our bedroom windows to smoke pilfered
ciggies and wander around. Eventually we were dressing up like baby hooker vampires and cadging rides to nightclubs
and yet somehow made it back in our beds every night before 4am and go to school in the morning. We were wild, bad
little Lolitas, and it’s a goddamn miracle that we made it out of adolescence so (relatively) unscathed. Amazing, really.

I can’t find the picture of us as baby vampires, so instead here’s us dazed + starry-eyed after modeling in our first fashion show
at the very first New Bohemia, when it was over on Duval. Back in the day, man. We were such babies! Children! What.

Pea on St. Valentine’s Day back in our old place on Royal + Mandeville.
Observe her emu claw diadem and scars from Cupid’s arrows. Heartbreaker!

Sweet valentines. I am grateful to say that this girl was my very first lover, and who better to be initiated into
the mysteries of love than the person you love most in the world, your best friend and partner in crime?
We were lucky. We are lucky. She has taught me so much in these past (holy shit) 19 years…

Queen Marie, still from Pastrisetimania. – “Cake Sits, a fetishistic photo series.”

CYGNUS OLOR
This video is a collaboration between Dana Sherwood and The Black Forest Fancies
An incorrigible collector with an eye for the exotic captures a swan girl and holds her captive in a confectionary cabin

For the past few years, Pandora was working with the Dream Community in Taiwan,
living in rural villages, and working with the inhabitants to build large scale puppets and stage colorful parades.

I’ll let the beautiful Princess of the Puyuma tell you about it in her own words:
In this year overburdened by impossible goodbyes, I’d simply forgotten to miss Taiwan.
I’ve taken the double life summer dive headfirst into color I never can suffer at home.
The electric magenta hibiscus, relentless fuchsia and indigo of tree climbing orchids.
Tropical shades that sear the retina when viewed at midday and emanate neon through
thunderstorm gray. We have such colors in the swamps where I’ve nestled. We’ve the
requisite cruelty of the hot house garrote, anesthetized in narcotic notes of jasmine and datura.
But here these colors throb with mountains’ magic, erupting from black rock and vapour like Boschian
airships suspended in battle – a mesozoic sex display, the glow of which recalls the natal moments when
this magma formed landscape was molten. The timeless beauty of the mountains underlining indignity
of the cinderblock cityscapes, alive with devouring mold. Tree and trellis spangled with giant spiders,
Giger aliens spinning omens, and all we monstrous spinners on display.

Our parade work this year concerns the rediscovery and celebration of Taiwan’s aboriginal cultures.
There are 14 active and politically recognized tribes in Taiwan today, each with their own unique language,
mythology and cultural practices. There are at least a dozen more unrecognized tribes whose organization is
decentralized, as reflected in the death or morbidity of their language and dispersal of their genetic strains.
Archeological research suggests that the ancestors of the current tribes have been living on this island since 8000
years before Chinese immigration began in the 17th century. They have an ethnic identity that is distinct from the
Asian mainland but now comprise only 2 percent of Taiwan’s population, the majority of the population being
ethnically and linguistically Chinese. From the beginning of recorded history the aboriginal peoples have experienced
economic and military conflict with a global menagerie of covetous colonizers: western and northern Europeans,
north and south Americans, the Japanese, who came armed with the anvil of archeology. They staged digs and
opened museums, nailed bare asses into grey woolen writing desks in a thousand thatch roofed classrooms.
Turning practice into history as they systematically laid the – timeless – life of the village to waste.
A clock forever counting circles round the irrevocable bootprints of modernity.

Today as ever looms the ubiquitous spectre of lady China, face-shifting parasite sister to the all-too-proximal north.
These colonial viruses have redefined the island with almost comic regularity, invasions so frequent that they echo the
seasonal tracks of typhoon – violently resurfacing the patterns of life and landscape with language shifts and cultural
(re)assimilation. In keeping with the common plight of indigenous peoples the world over, Taiwanese aboriginals face
steep social barriers rooted in prejudice and exclusion: unemployment, substandard state provision for healthcare and
education, squalid housing and farming conditions, staggering rates of alcoholism and drug addiction. Since the 1980s
efforts have been undertaken on the part of the surviving tribes toward a revival of ethnic identity.
These include incorporating elements of their culture into commercial and artistic endeavors, pop music and pageantry.
That’s where we parade makers figure in. Putting craft through its paces and the spinners on display.

Falling in love with an enameled sewing machine. I mean, wouldn’t you?

The Mudlark Confectionary a cabinet of curious conceptions.

Dolls of The Mudlark Confectionary

Saint Dymphna
These days though, Pandora owns and operates the Mudlark Public Theatre in New Orleans upper Ninth Ward
neighborhood and is the artistic director of that space’s resident company, The Mudlark Puppeteers and co-founder
of the Black Forest Fancies Ltd. She makes puppets, dolls, sets and stories. She is a weaver of magic webs.

A puppet from The Black Wallows Foundling Hospital.

So here’s the deal, in her own words:
In the month of June I had the extreme pleasure of working as a craftswoman on an installation of my dear friend Mark Dion’s
design for a site on a National Tourist Road in Norway. The piece will be located at the top of a mountain, near a glacier
in the incomparably beautiful area of Ardal. A number of world-reknowned artists have been selected by the Norwegian
Tourist Bureau to contribute work to such sites. Notable among these is the last work of the brilliant metal artist Louise Bourgeois,
which is a memorial to the victims of the witch-burnings at Vardo Island, in the North of Norway.

I am constantly at work and seeking future opportunities. I now, a month after completing my contribution to the piece in Norway, still
haven’t even the vaguest clue as to when I will be paid. None of us do. Even Mark, with his esteemed reputation and integrality to the
completion of the project next year, has been given what can only be called ‘the serious, red-tape runaround.’ At first we were told simply
to be patient, that everything was being done in its proper order. The latest word is that all payments are on hold until the end of the
Norwegian Summer holidays – at some time in August. While the bureaucrats summer in sunnier climes, our invoices are evidently on some
Kafka-esque nightmare ride through the gears of a grim machine of the very old garde, and as in Kafka, there is no indication as to where
or when the ride might terminate. In short, I budgeted my life around money I have no access to for the indefinite future.
I have been unavailable for all other work in this period and consequently find myself at a pretty serious financial impasse.
I have had to cancel many plans, the most poignant being a visit to my hometown of Austin, TX to visit my oldest friends and
light candles at my parents’ memorials in honor of my 30th birthday, which is July 22nd.
I am hoping to sell some of my past-works, mostly hand sculpted art-dolls, to offset the deficit.
– Pandora Gastelum

If you’d like to help, please take a look at some of her work over at The Mudlark Confectionary,
and be on the lookout for her handmade art dolls for sale soon on etsy under mudlarkconfectionary
(we’re working on getting her shop up, but in the meantime, let me know if you have any questions
about purchasing pieces!) She has gifted me a new dolly for my every birthday for years, and each
one is perfect and comes intact with their very own soul. I treasure them enormously.

(Photo by Petra Arnold)
Happy birthday, star of the sea, poppy petal princess, peach-pie pea-pod, sweet sister, dearheart!

✸ An Interview With Roxanne Carter by David Hoenigman from Word Riot
I have long admired Roxanne’s work from afar, and this one question interview
only solidifies the notion I have of what an excellent person she is. One day, I hope we shall meet, and have tea!

✸ I’m joining the throngs of devotees who (j’)adore the majestic Catherine Baba!
I don’t have very many living fashion icons, so I’m very happy to have found one to inspire me constantly. What a wonderful woman!
Gala Darling put together a super piece on her for her Style Icons series

✸ Casting Our Favorite Books: The Secret History
Casting characters from beloved books is one of my favorite fantasy games, and I’ve long imagined who I would cast in a film version
of The Secret History. I don’t disagree with most of the picks in the article, though I do think Cillian Murphy is far too pretty and delicate
to be Henry Winter. They needed Nick Cave for that, about 30 years ago. Oh, how I wish they would just finally hurry up and make it, though!

Julie Heffernan, Budding Boy

✸ Q and A: John Seed Interviews Julie Heffernan
“In ‘Self-Portrait Setting Up Camp’ I’m imagining re-making the world where the only people who exist are the Builders,
the Buriers, the Mothers, the Healers, the Story-tellers, the Fishers, the Dreamers and the Growers. The trees are bedecked
with billboard size copies of paintings that have given me wisdom in my life. Others are there for protection from the sun.
The space is constructed as a gigantic spiral. As we end we begin again.”

✸ In Remembrance: Kenneth Grant (1924-2011) from Coilhouse

✸ Show The Monster Guillermo del Toro’s quest to get amazing creatures onscreen –
a fascinating piece on one of my favorite auteurs from the New Yorker.

✸ 8 Beautiful Bioluminescent Creatures From the Sea

✸ At the Core of Traditional Witchcraft from Speculum Celestae

Natural Dark by Lindsey Carr

✸ Carnivorous Plant Feasts on Bat Dung

✸ Fuck Yeah Altars – This is just wonderful. I was very happy to find one of my own included among the beautiful altars there!

Portrait of Madeline von Foerster: An interview with the New York based artist about “The Red Thread” –
the key painting of her 2010 solo show “Reliquaries” at Strychnin Gallery, Berlin. Von Foerster works in “mischtechnik,”
a mixed technique of oil and egg tempera used by the Flemish Renaissance Masters. Her current series is concerned
with endangered/extinct wildlife, and also inspired by the reliquaries of the Ursula church in Cologne, Germany.

✸ Swan on Swan – Black Swan’s Sexy Tropes from the ever enchanting Jiz Lee

✸ Interview with a Female Funeral Director By Susannah Breslin I really need to meet both these women.

✸ The Pale Blue Door, Prinzessinnen Garten, Berlin. Pictures by Manuel Vazquez (Thank you for this, Mlle. Verhext!)

✸ Trouvelot Astronomy from BiblioOdyssey
(Thanks for the tip go to Miss Patience Meliora Blythe – her real name, folks!)

“Frenchman Étienne Léopold Trouvelot (1827–1895) was primarily a portrait artist when he arrived in Massachusetts in 1852.
During the following 30 years that he remained in America his amateur passion for science would ensure a legacy that straddles
both fame and infamy. Trouvelot had a particular love for silkworms and he had a 4 acre plot behind his house where he cultivated
a native variety. To increase production he hoped to crossbreed the regular type with a species from Europe. He brought back Gypsy
Moth eggs from a trip home and so introduced a virulent pest that ravages forests in America to this day. To his (slight) credit, he realized
the enormity of the problem straight away when some of the introduced moths escaped. He made it publically known, but unfortunately local
entomologists did nothing at the time to eradicate them. Trouvelot turned his attention from moths to the stars and began illustrating celestial
phenomena. His drawings were so good that the Director of Harvard College Observatory put Trouvelot on staff where he gained access
to their powerful telescope.”

(Photograph by John-Paul Pietrus)

I am wrung out, but I still have an Mariana Trench worth
of tears – I squeeze dead seahorses and hagfish from
my tear ducts. Blackened crones beat their breasts and
begin the keening that signals the end of the this turning.

(Photograph by Ice)

I stand on the hill, I kneel in the dirt, I find myself flat on
the earth hours later, gasping – reaching frantically for
the moon to take my hand and pull me out of this dark
crevasse. Leafy waterdragons ripple under a glittering
membrane of sky, and the world is alight in blue and violet
prism fire. I am wrenched by their claws, shaking me like
a doll, pulling me up by my guts. The woman with the white
hair is coming with her birch broom to sweep me up, out to
sea. The oaks are alive, and straggle their witchfingers out
to trap tangles of cloud, moon-shadows. The next day I am
calm as glass, humbled, tabula rasa. Let me hold the hands
of those I love, let me look in their eyes and thank them for
all that they do. It’s time to shake awake, rekindle the heat,
dance like a manic child, unabashed. I’m ready for the stars
to swaddle me, to be blanketed in milk and wake in a field
of crystalline frost flowers. Sleeping in the hills and dreaming
for days. Let me come back to town with some wisdom in my
pockets, some release in my bones. Ease the passage of those
travelers, let their journeys be tranquil – but keep the others
close, don’t let any more slip out the back door before their time.
It’s never enough time, I know that – but please help me spend
it with more love. Keep me there, against your breast, my arms
encompassing each of my myriad darlings. Keep us safe, heal
our hearts, wash our eyes so that we might see. Please, please.

(Photograph by Minililimi)

Give us the memory of diving into fountains of petals, the knowing that there
will be green tendrils and rosy afternoons again soon. For now we have fairy lights.

(Photograph by Sofia Ajram)

May all of our brightest wishes be true, may our work be sweet.

(Photograph by Jostein Walengen)

Give us reverence for the night, for the winter, for death.
Remind us of the tiny wonders, mysteries, magic everywhere.

(Photograph by Kate Young)

Breathe in blue, breathe out black.
Whisper goodbye to this hard old year,
and stand tall to receive the tiny seed
that will be our new one. Open hands,
open everything. I wish all this for us.

✶ New Year’s Redux

✶ Stargazer Honey

✶ Blue Moon

✶ Lone Grove New Year

✶ Pink Moons

✶ The New Year

✶ Lucky Stars and Garters

✶ La Nouvelle Année

From the Ephemerata site:
This Museum exhibition is an earthquake that rends the ground to expose the UNDERGROUND.
A hole opens up, and we are walking down into the damp dark unknown. Descend into our show-cave
through normally hidden strata! Beneath our city is a crowded metropolis of graves, pipes, cables, tunnels,
sewers, and landfills, and as we travel down past the aquifer, a glowing lake of magma! The mysterious
corridors of our subterranean journey branch off into political undergrounds, the subconscious, and the
Underworld — lair of monsters, land of the dead. By spelunking through these passages, we come to learn
that humans are strange creatures like earthworms, ceaselessly dedicated to the circulation of vast undergrounds!
The earthquake of industrialized humans has reversed the strata of land and sky such that what was underground
has become our atmosphere. Please watch your head for low-hanging rocks.

The Museum is open Thursdays (4-7pm) and Saturdays (1-4pm).
We are also open for appointments — call 320-0566
or email mnae@mnae.org for availability.
$4 suggested donation

Beware the wasps at the entrance! Behold their marvelous architecture!

A panoply of stone gnomes are there to greet you when you arrive. I think they might bite.

A new addition to the Ephemerata family has been created this year: baby Kai, who is a player piano virtuoso!
We loaned them the piano a while back for their Wondrous Instruments show, and they’ve very kindly kept it
for us. I fear we’re going to have to figure out what to do with it soon! In keeping with the them for the show,
it plays “There’s a Goldmine in the Sky” – “Take your old time mule / I know you’re growing lame /
You’ll pasture in the stars / When we make that claim” Sad songs for desperate miners!

Enter the crystal cavern – but watch out for the troglodytes!

Some excellent mineral specimens – including the “dubious minerals” – Pyrite, Citrine, and Chrysocolla.

Some Civil War relics, old bones and blood-stained dice. Flotsam buried in ancient battlefields.

We also lent a Tailless whip scorpions from our collection, though I have no photo of the actual article,
the beautifully done guidebook illustrates the beastie. I’m not disturbed by spiders at all, but these guys
are actually quite horrifying to behold! They are extremely intelligent, and have developed brain stems.

The plastic descendent of stereoscopic viewers – a 3-D viewmaster depicting Carlsbad Caverns

In the Impermanent Collection you can view this death-defying feat rendered in ceramic!

Ephemerata Gardens out back are lush and overgrown with sunflowers and fig-trees. A bunny lives there.

As well as some very impressive spiders! Arachnophobes, I apologize for the spider-surplus:
they just seem to keep popping up everywhere I look, and I’ve always seen them as very good omens.

I want to go here very badly! I love caves and their beautiful stone formations so much.
We are lucky to have some really excellent ones here in Texas. Imagine how many are
undiscovered, or on private property? It’s our fantasy to have a subterranean nightclub
one day. We have dreams of excavating under our house and digging down. Oddly enough,
a guy in our neighborhood did just that – this 70 year old man dug 30 feet down below
his house, by hand! Just brought out buckets of dirt, one by one until he had created
three underground levels! Pretty impressive. Now the City is filling it all up with concrete.

“The magnificent underground cave system traditionally called Reed Flute Cave
and known today as the Palace of Natural Art lies beneath the city of Guilin, China,
and is over 750 feet (240 meters) long. The first recorded visits to the cave took place
over 1,000 years ago during China’s Tang Dynasty. Artificial lighting is used to enhance
the stunning rock formations in the cave, which has been officially open for visitors since
1962. One of the largest parts of the cave system is the Crystal Palace of the Dragon King,
which can hold up to 1,000 people and was used as an air raid shelter during World War II.
The grotto features a solitary stalagmite that resembles a human being –
it’s said that a visiting poet attempted to write about the beauty that
greeted his eyes but took so long to find the right words he turned to stone.”

The full set of photos from our Underground tour are up on Flickr: have a look…

✸ Amazing photos of the privately owned Natural History
Cabinet of Alfred Russel Wallace, 19th Century
(via Morbid Anatomy)

✸ Holy cats, check out The Frantic Expressionist Art of Josef Fenneker,
a new post from my dear Mlle. S. Elizabeth (aka. Ghoul Next Door) she’s
been writing some exemplary blog posts for Coilhouse. I can always count
on her to turn me on to new and inspiring art and music! Cheers, sweet lady!
Oh man, and now I absolutely must see The Tragedy of Belladonna! Amazement.

Femme avec des fleurs by Romaine Brooks

✸ Portraits from a Romanian Women’s Prison
(via Marina Galperina at ANIMAL New York)

✸ I’ve been hearing a lot about China Miéville’s new book,
“Kraken”, from the enthusiastic tweets of writer Maria
Dahvana Headley and now I’m really itching to read it.
So far, I’ve only read King Rat and Perdido Street Station,
and enjoyed both immensely. The New York Times Book
Review article, Making Squid the Meat of a Story
makes it sound pretty damn tantalizing:
“‘Kraken’ fairly throbs with the fantastical: a squid-worshiping cult,
oppressed magical animals on picket lines, a very bad man who
is actually a tattoo on someone’s back, and a sorcerer who folds
people up like origami and puts them into tiny boxes for easier transport.”
and
“’The book is intended to be kind of a romp,’ Mr. Miéville said.
‘What happens if two apocalypses are scheduled to happen
at the same time? How cosmologically embarrassing!’”

(Photo by myriorama, on Flickr)

✸ You can download a new School of Seven Bells song
over at RCRDLBL right now, and listen to tracks from their
new album. I like them. They are absurdly pretty sisters, an
an also absurdly pretty boy, and they make floaty music.
This is how they got their name, which makes me like them even more:
“While watching PBS at 3am, Alejandra caught a show about
the School of Seven Bells: a mythical South American pickpocket
academy that may or may not have existed in the ‘80s. The idea of
seven minds working as one appealed to her, as did the phrase’s
cryptic musicality, and a creative spark ignited.”

✸ This article from the literary journal Brick is totally fascinating:
The Lizard, the Catacombs, and the Clock:
The Story of Paris’s Most Secret Underground Society
by Sean Michaels (of killer music blog Said the Gramophone)
There’s a few more bits on the secret catacomb theatre here:
In a secret Paris cavern, the real underground cinema
and here:
Places: The Parisian Catacombs — Paris, France

✸ Also brings to mind this mysterious place:
Margate Shell Grotto – replete with mystical designs, all in glued shells

(Photo by Working Rex, on Flickr)

✸ The Reclusive Artitst: Joseph Cornell and Fernando Pessoa
from the great art blog Escape Into Life
(via A Journey Around My Skull)

✸ A shocking map of libraries being dismantled across the US – so, so sad.
(via Miss Emma)

✸ I want to live here: In a Crumbling Estate, Creativity and History Meet
(via Odette O.)

(Source unknown, alas – I think it’s a Russian body-artist’s work, perhaps?)
It’s possible I’ve posted this image at some point before, but it’s one of my
favorites. I want this to be my desk. I want to be jade green, cool and mossy.

I do not know the provenance of this photo, unfortunately. I tried using TinEye,
to no avail. Anyhow, it makes me inordinately happy to see such a tiny snake
(and his giant friend, the berry.) Sometimes we see these guys in the garden.

Mysterious snake appears in painting of Queen Elizabeth I
Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Mlle. Verhext!

The Little Horn Speakers: I require these. No, but really. $1850, though! Hurts.

Child-headed whiplash-tail Blengins, courtesy of Mr. Darger.

Go peer at my tumblr mosaic viewer!
It’s an ingenious Japanese site I discovered through the equally ingenious
Journey Round My Skull. Kind of solves the problem I have with tumblr
regarding organization and searchability. You can click on any image
and jump to it (or re-blog it, if you’re looking at someone else’s mosaic.)
I can play with it endlessly! Thank you to whoever created this tiny wonder.

More delicious tidbits to peruse:

✶ Go check out the art of Nicomi Nix Turner and her store, Specimen Jar why don’t you?

✶ Many thanks to Miss Anya (Clever Nettle) for dazzling me
with Tim Walker’s gorgeous Lady Gray spread from this month’s
Vogue Italia. It it very happy-making indeed.

✶ Edward Gorey collection at the Ransom Center Field trip, anyone? I don’t take advantage of this place enough.
It is a repository for some truly mind-blowing collections. Must to go!

✶ A wonderful International Women’s Day collage from boywhocameback

✶ The Math Behind Geometric Hallucinations – Uncoiling the spiral: Maths and hallucinations

✶ Style Icon: Cayce Pollard from William Gibson’s “Pattern Recognition”
from NOGOODFORME.COM, which is my latest happy discovery.
From the very excellent piece, by Kat Asharya:

“Reading Pattern Recognition is a great experience on many levels.
While it divided some of the Gibson faithful who missed the futuristic setting
and the cyberpunk attitude of his other novels (oh, fanboys!), it’s also one of
the few novels I’ve read that really got into the heart on how technology and
the Internet really shape people’s emotional lives and experience, not to mention
grappled intelligently with a post-9/11 landscape. (It’s also awesome when a dude
in a kind of dudecentric genre like sci-fi writes really incredible female characters
that are defined by their abilities, intellect and emotional lives rather than by their
plot convenience and exploited sexuality. William Gibson, you effin’ rock.”

Hear, hear! This makes me hungry to re-read the book!

Related posts:

✶ Snakes + Leather

✶ Flotsam and Jetsam

(Photo by David Sledge)

It’s incredible what you find on the ground when you take the time to look.
We found beautiful rocks (Lone Grove is rock-hound paradise!)
and treasures buried in the sand. One day, maybe we’ll find
some arrowheads. My Grampy used to find lots out there.

More fodder for my mycological fixations!

We finally managed to bring home this gorgeous stained glass window
that was my mother’s. New Year’s Eve is her birthday, but it feels like
she gave me a present instead this year. I can’t wait to install it in our parlour!

We were treated to three very beautiful sunsets, all very different but each
very spectacular. This was my favorite though, taken while driving the
Willow City Loop! If you get the chance to take that drive, I highly recommend it.

Lovely Miss Amelia joined us for the holiday – always managing to be the
picture of elegance in satin peignoirs and kiss curls around the campfire.

She took this picture of me in front of my favorite blasted tree.
I got these Posture Magnetic star leggings recently, and I wish
I could wear them every day! I don’t know if Brian Erickson is
still making this stuff, but if anyone finds any – please let me know.

It doesn’t get more celestial than star pants + singing bowls, you know?

Colin is the singing bowl master – he made tones come out of that little bowl
that made me laugh with elation and had my eyes streaming tears.
Have you ever played one? They are amazing. I want a really huge one!

Like my antlers? Miss Jolie Holland made ‘em for me!
They are so simple, and so perfect – I love that lady.
I hope that your celebration was marvelous, and that your year is off to
an auspicious start. Any resolutions or goal-makings for you? I have lots!
Hopefully I will do a better job of accomplishing them this time round.
I am being helped a lot by the teuxdeux, an excellent to-do list maker.
(Thanks for turning me on to this, Gala!) I love it. Perfect for the obsessive
list-maker who spends too much time online!

This year I intend to:
✶ cook outside more often –
it’s so fun and satisfying!
✶ dance more!
✶ dress with specific intention every day
✶ write lots of letters and postcards!
✶ be more engaged with my body,
through yoga + exercise – oh yeah!
✶ read more – I have heaps of wonderful
books awaiting me, so delicious and tempting.
✶ make lots of jewelry
✶ re-design this bee-log – soon, soon!
✶ start selling off a lot of my vintage collection,
and keep selling interesting curios
✶ additionally, I would like to be more
patient, serene and positive in general.
✶ oh yes, and I’d like to DJ lots more!
I could keep going, but I think that’s a
pretty good start. Now is the time.

By the way – if you haven’t gotten a copy of the latest issue
of Coilhouse yet, (Issue 04) you had better hustle!
I am so proud to have two articles in this one:
the interview I did with Larkin Grimm, with an
additional piece on the Musicka Mystica Maxima Festival,
and an interview with Christopher Brosius of I Hate Perfume.

One day, I must get to back to Detroit!
I have family there – I visited them by train
when I was very small. Have you ever been?
Check out these incredible photographs
of abandoned buildings – I’d love to explore them!
The Grandiose Decay of Abandoned Detroit

I enjoyed reading this excerpt from a biography
of super-tragic supermodel Gia Carangi and her teenage years as a David Bowie fan.
I’ve always loved thinking about the tidal wave of glam and glitter
and the fever that swept up the restless youth in a sea of glitter polyester!
Can you imagine? What a crazy time to experience, eh?

One last thing – if you still have not seen Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973),
then we need to talk. It’s been on my top ten favorite films of all time list
for many years. Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen are incredible, and
I adore Terrence Malick’s work. I wish the soundtrack was available,
it’s great too. Man, I need to see it again soon! I wish Criterion would
release it – the only copies I’ve seen have been real scrabbly.
Right! With that, I bid you goodnight! I go back to work on the morrow,
and must figure out what the hell I’m doing for my birthday – it’s only
a week away! Ideas? I’m fairly stumped, though I may have just nailed it…
This trip into the wild was pretty inspiring – perhaps the tipi will play a part!

(p.s. I just noticed that the formatting on the
following photos is wonked, but if you click
on the title or comments, you can see them
nice and big and not all squashed, okay?)

Ghosts of Shopping Past
(Photograph by Brian Ulrich)

Driving down the highway recently, we were having
a conversation about the death of the shopping mall,
about our early memories of seeing the first outdated
dinosaurs succumb to desolation, and now the mega-
malls go too. Fluorescent lit juggernauts of excess,
crumbling into disrepair, wishing wells moldering,
atriums and kiosks all abandoned. It’s interesting.

Remember this? I can’t say I’ll be missing the
food court, or the shops – I honestly haven’t really
been in a mall in years, save emergency in-outs
to the Apple store that end in me being hustled out
of Sephora by my fella, who hates being in malls
even more than me. Way more, actually.
So what will become of these hulking behemoths?
Disintegration or re-purposing? It’s hard to say.

(This and the following photograph, both by Palani Mohan)

Mr. Saturnic is always a great source of
incredible photography spreads, I was
swooning over Palani Mohan’s
Vivid – Colours of Asia series he posted over there.

Out of them all, she is my favorite.
I wish I could hop inside the frame,
and be her friend. I would already
speak Tibetan, and be perfectly
acclimated to thin air, and dressed
warmly. Out to milk the mountain
goats and welcome home the
honey hunters! One day.

✷ Stoat uses hypnotic weasel war dance.

✷ Making Ferrofluids work for you!

✷ Jewelled butterflies and cephalopods
from John Coulthart’s Feuilleton

✷ Coilhouse Issue 04 is coming out soon -
I cannot wait! In the meantime though,
check out all the intriguing small businesses
that have taken out ads (especially excellent
if you are still hunting for last minute treats
like I am…) there’s a lot there to pique + delight.

✷ One last thing from the lovely
Joanna Ebenstein at Morbid Anatomy
My New Favorite Magazine : Lapham’s Quarterly
I must get my paws on a copy, soonly!

“Goats milk to drink, from a chipped tin mug; we shall eat the oatcakes
he has baked on the hearthstone. Rattle of the rain on the roof.
The latch clanks on the door; we are shut up inside with one another,
in the brown room crisp with the scent of burning logs that shiver
with tiny flame, and I lie down on the Erl-King’s creaking pallaisse of straw.
His skin is the tint and texture of sour cream, he has stiff, russet nipples
ripe as berries. Like a tree that bears blossom and fruit
on the same bough together, how pleasing, how lovely.”

These odd little bees are pleased about it as well.
This pear tree is loaded down with fat pears, still hard,
and then frosted with starry white! It is so bizarre and beautiful.
The mandarin tree is bedecked with waxy buds, also!

Other items of harvest: these mushrooms that I did not like the taste of.
The man tried to make me eat them in an omelette, and stamped and fussed
when I refused- but their meat was too bitter and astringent to be palatable.
Our pomegranates are much tastier- everyone in the neighborhood is after them!

Evidence of rollerskating birthday parties: fabulously gory tattoos,
temporary of course. I don’t have any tattoos at all! Again, I prefer
to have transitory decoration. I liked having this one, for a day.

These sulphur mushrooms have popped up everywhere!
Little yellow cities sprawled in each garden bed.

“He knows which of the frilled, blotched, rotted
fungi are fit to eat; he understands their eldritch
ways, how they spring up overnight in lightless
places and thrive on dead things. Even the homely
wood blewits, that you cook like tripe, with milk
and onions, and the egg-yolk yellow chanterelle
with its fan vaulting and faint scent of apricots,
all spring up overnight like bubbles of earth,
unsustained by nature, existing in a void. And I
could believe that it has been the same with him;
he came alive from the desire of the woods.”

I had a lovely surprise visitor the other day in the form of
Miss Liza Ferneyhough (aka. stellarbaby) – I am totally
obsessed with her artwork, and have started a wee collection
of her fantastic gocco prints. I was beyond charmed and delighted
to discover that she had done the drawing of me above,
in marionette form, and astride a grackle no less!
We share a deep love and appreciation for these oft-reviled birdies.

Oh yes, and at long last- my haircut! I am so happy with it, and so glad
I followed my instinct to go through with it. Somewhat serious, considering
that a year ago I would have a panic attack even considering cutting bangs.

Change is good. My Saturn return ends this month, and that ritual shifting
seemed very necessary. My friend Chenoh, at Black Orchid Salon did it!
She’s wonderful – I felt very sure, and very calm and trusting, because I knew
that she knew exactly what I was after. Of course, I use dog clippers for upkeep.
Glamour! Strangely enough, it seems to make random people really pleased
as well- and no old ladies have inquired if I’ve had brain surgery recently.

Everyone’s been asking for pictures, and unfortunately I’ve just been too
swamped with deadlines and so much to do that I’ve not been able to
find a moment for an all-out vanity-fest, alas. These weird blurry shots
of me rolling around with my puppy in the backyard will have to do!

Have I mentioned lately that I really love my puppy? It’s true.

The new hair has inspired bouts of listening to Skinny Puppy’s Too Dark Park,
watching Ladyhawke, and wearing really silly sweaters. This weather and
all that makes me think of being 14 and very broody, walking in wet woods
with my headphones on. I’m also having to remember how to layer for
colder weather, starting with leggings and leg warmers with apples.

Now I’m feeling zombiefied.

Nostalgic yes, and slightly lycanthropic. Goodnight!

Jewels from the shop. Sometimes I cannot resist the sparkle.
Okay, I admit that I have a problem- my bijoux collection is getting a bit out of hand!

Also from Uncommon Objects- this man is made of wax.
He looked sad, so I gave him a skunk-skin to wear, and a silver acorn collar.
He seemed more hopeful after I styled him. I think he’s looking for love.

The other day, I came to work only to discover that gremlins had been cavorting
in the night and knocked my shelf down, thus destroying pretty much everything
that could be broken in my booth. Total bricolage carnage. Glass everywhere.
The universe is being a little heavy-handed in hinting to me that maybe I need
to be a little more zen with the material objects. Trying to learn that lesson.
Between the hurricane, the renovation, and the destructo-dog, I think I’m
getting the picture! Breathe, and let it all go. Yes, it has memories and magic.
Yes, it is just stuff. Oh, and by the by- to everyone who recommended a crate
for Grrizelda: You were all totally right, and I wished I listened sooner!

I loved this freaky nekko-cat vase from guess where.
It barfs flowers at you. I find a bouquet brightens a room, don’t you?
Especially when upchucked by a tiny ceramic kitty.

This is just wrong. It’s a chocolate covered Twinkie from Big Top Candy Shop.
You know you want it. I ate half, and I thought I was going to die. Crazy.

My sweetie cleaned out his closet and discovered all these punk shirts he
silkscreened when he was a kid. I’ve been feeling like dressing like I did when
I was 14, so I adopted his handmade Wind Chill Factor shirt. We went to see
Inglourious Basterds that night, so I felt I had dressed very appropriately.
Holy crap, it was so amazing. It affected me much more than I could have
ever predicted. Absolutely Tarantino’s masterpiece. So many good films out
this year! For the first time in forever, I feel like I might actually watch the Oscars.

All of the attention to detail in the film was impeccable. The rhinestones studded
shoes and fabulous hats, and the women all wore the same shade of red lipstick.
Pretty damn certain it was my own favorite, M.A.C.’s Ruby Woo. So perfect!

I love this embroidered flamenca. A gift for one of my favorite ladies!

This is my summer drink of choice lately. Redcurrant + rose syrup + soda.
It’s from Poland. If you ever see another bottle, please send one to me!

There’s been a brutal drought here, and our garden is torched.
The guardian of the succulents is protecting these hardy babies, though.

My beloved Grampa told me recently that he wanted to go shopping for a new
wardrobe. He asked to go to Banana Bay, inexplicably, which is a military supply
store. We found him a new Greek Fisherman’s cap, in dove-gray, very dapper.
He was into the camo, so I picked out this jacket for him. The print was the best,
but I don’t know what it’s camo for, exactly. Night-hunting? My Grampa is 95
years old, and he has mad style. Incidentally, he is also the least military kind of guy
ever, (he’s an intellectual!) so who knows- he said he liked the look! Tough!

Admiral Fox is also sporting the mode de guerre!
Spiked helmets are the new black, didn’t you hear?