…tfw you are found guilty of premeditated dumbness in the extreme and your punishment is knowing that you were so close to being done with your project but now you must account for the crime of having obliterated a pair of knitpicks needles and dropping over 300 stitches in the process, derailing weeks and weeks worth of progress on the most complicated shawl you have ever attempted…
“If I may direct you to exhibit A., an artist’s rendering of the diabolical perpetrator involved in the events of last night.”
*Addresses jury of peers*
“Yes, I can swear to it! This vampire bat ring totally came to life and ate my knitting needles. You can even see the bite marks from his pointy fangs! I absolutely did NOT have over one thousand stitches jammed on a flimsy 8-inch circular needle with known defects. No, ladies and gentleman of the jury, only a madwoman would have attempted such incredibly stupid and dangerous folly.”
These two fabulous creatures are the only thing that is making American Horror Story watchable for me this season. Also: Madison Montgomery in ugly black leather shorts, nonchalantly smoking a cigarette whilst examining a skull is A LOOK and I am here for it.
It would indeed be a difficult matter to find anything which is productive of more marvellous effects than the menstrual discharge. On the approach of a woman in this state, must will become sour, seeds which are touched by her become sterile, grafts wither away, garden plants are parched up, and the fruit will fall from the tree beneath which she sits. Her very look, even, will dim the brightness of mirrors, blunt the edge of steel, and take away the polish from ivory. A swarm of bees, if looked upon by her, will die immediately; brass and iron will instantly become rusty, and emit an offensive odour; while dogs which may have tasted of the matter so discharged are seized with madness, and their bite is venomous and incurable.
-Pliny the Elder
“The copper tang of blood musk, swept by a cloud of dying bees & red poppies of madness, glammed up for fall with a swirl of cozy gourd-enhancing spices.” 🎃
If you’re in the Los Angeles area, on Saturday October 20, stop by Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab at 12120 Sherman Way in North Hollywood, CA 91605 from 4-7PM and help fight “period poverty”. For every tampon/pad donation of $20 value dropped off at the event, you’ll receive one free 5ml bottle of the the above, exclusive fragrance – a seasonal variation on the bloodiest winner of all pumpkin spice scents, Pumpkin Spice Sanguinem Menstruum.
Not local? You can still help the do-gooders at The Lab and be entered for the opportunity to win the limited edition scent, by mailing in donation of a disposable menstrual product donation of $20 or more into the Lab (c/o Beth, at the address listed above). More details on the Haute Macabre blog!
I myself just donated $60 worth of tampons through Amazon, mailed straight to The Lab—it was super easy!
At Haute Macabre today, Sam and I share some of our most useful and beautiful tarot decks. We’ve also got the scoop from a handful of sibyls and seers–luminaries and visionaries whose guidance we trust implicitly– Pam Grossman, Elizabeth Barrial of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, Sarah Faith Gottesdiener, and Mystic Medusa! Do you have a favorite tarot deck?
…and because rules are silly, I also included two decks which I do not yet own, or which technically may not yet exist, but which I plan to get my hands on as soon as I can, and which I know I am going to love! Katie Skelly’s Bad Girl Tarot and The Dark Wood tarot, illustrated by Abigail Larson 🖤
Sometime last month I was scrolling through the instagrams, and I paused, thoroughly enchanted by some photos that my friend Megan had just shared. To give a little backstory, Megan and I met at Orlando’s inaugural Death Cafe, which I was hosting at the time, and, having several interests in common of the morbid and macabre variety, we became fast friends. As a matter of fact, she learned of that Death Cafe event entirely due to the fact that I had posted about it beforehand on instagram…. which, at the time, I thought was maybe a frivolous way to advertise for an event, but, hey, it worked! Megan is a lovely friend and I always looking forward to spending time with her and talking perfumes and jewelry, and Hannibal, and spooky stuff whenever the opportunity presents itself.
At any rate, several weeks back, Megan and her family had begun their annual Halloween decorating party, and, as I believe this was probably in back in August’s sweltering dog days, that makes these seasonal preparations even more delightful (as I’m sure all my rabid weenie weirdo friends would agree!) I suppose I just really adored that idea that she has made a yearly tradition of bringing out all the Halloween-themed goodies and turning the festooning of their home into into a celebration with her children to herald in their favorite season and its high holiday. It reminded me a bit of how I felt when September rolled around when I was a little girl in Ohio. Though I don’t have many memories of my early life there, I definitely recall the eerie cardboard skeleton being hauled out of storage, and once it was affixed to the basement door with lots of scotch tape, I knew magic was soon to be afoot!.
I asked Megan if she would mind sharing a few words with us here at Unquiet Things about the spoopy childhood magics conjured forth via her pre-Halloween festivities, and she happily obliged. Read on for more, and thank you, Megan!
Every year at the end of August, (after weeks of anticipation -i.e. pestering- from my little monsters) we pull down the orange & black storage containers from the dusty attic and commence what I have not-so-creatively titled “The Annual Halloween Decorating Party.” It really isn’t anything too elaborate: I bake cookies, light a Fall-scented candle (go ahead, call me a basic witch!), queue up the Beetlejuice soundtrack, and we all dance around decorating our home with ghosts (both literally & figuratively) of Halloween’s past. The kid’s faces fill with wonder and excitement as they unearth the next decoration from the box, as if discovering treasure for the first time (even though it’s just the same ol’ stuff), or greeting an old friend they haven’t seen in a year. Elaborate or not, a wonderful time is had by all.
This has always been a sort of tradition for me at various stages of my life, drawing from my early childhood experiences centering around the holiday. In those days (you know, the days of yore – AKA the 80’s) I’d watch my mom pull out the terracotta jack-o-lantern
from some seemingly secret cupboard containing all-the-cool-things, and carefully place it in the center of the dining room table. Then we’d hang up the old & worn (now vintage!) paper witch & skeleton & pumpkin and that’s when I knew: HALLOWEEN IS COMING! The very sight of these things would send spooktacular shivers down my spine. Oh, the magick of the season!
Now, decades later, I create these moments with my children in hopes of passing the same magickal feelings on to them. They are intangible but so very real, much like memories themselves. I hope that they will look back on these times with great fondness. Maybe they will continue the tradition someday, excitedly unpacking decoration after decoration from an orange or black box and invoking the magick of their past. Or maybe they will share it with their own little monsters, should they choose to have them.
There are many opportunities throughout the Fall to practice a bit of childhood magick. I love to pick pumpkins at the pumpkin patch, get lost in a corn maze, and of course we are in full-on celebration mode come Halloween night. But for me, it all begins with the decorations. Just like it did all those years ago with one silly little terracotta jack-o-lantern and some worn out paper.
What about you? What sort of special Halloween magick lives on from your childhood? I’d love to hear about it!
I haven’t been able to find much information on Mahyar Kalantari, a fashion and beauty illustrator on Behance, whose digital stylized couture illustrations I fell in love with just last week. (Although I have found him on deviantart, tumblr, and instagram.) So while I’m digging up the deets, please to enjoy some of his fabulous art, below!
Gareth Pugh Spring 2016Givenchy Spring 2016 Ready-to-WearGuinevere Van SeenusIris van HerpenTom Ford Fall 2014 With Maison Martin Margiela Spring 2014 Couture MaskValentino Fall Winter1617
This is probably one of those things that people have YouTube channels for, to air their petty gripes and grievances aloud, for an audience (and perhaps future sponsors). I imagine on some level, that must be cathartic, to give voice to your criticisms and objections. I also imagine sometimes that people are better speakers than writers, and so recording their complaints and contentions is the option they’d prefer. (Although, I gotta tell you, from watching some of these videos, some of these individuals sound as dumb as a bag of hammers, so maybe they were not blessed with gifts of either the oratory or compositional kind.)
Myself, I prefer to write when I’ve got a problem. And the problem I have right now, it’s perfectly petty, I know, I KNOW, but dammit, I’m mad, and I feel that I have to share anyway– even if it makes me sound bitter and hateful: I fucking hate scentbird.
I’m not going to link to them, but you may have heard of them: scentbird is a subscription based designer perfume program that allows you to try a 30-day supply of perfume for something like $14.95 a month. There are about 450 different scents to choose from “top designers” such as Gucci, Tom Ford, and Dolce & Gabbana, (which, if you ask me, sounds a lot like the crappy scents that are included in your Sephora Play box and are really nothing to get excited about.) A cursory peek at the brands they stock tells me that they may have something from Amouage or Etat Libre d’Orange, but other than that, they offer nothing extraordinary, rare, or niche. Which, okay, that’s fine. I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to perfume and fragrance, and I don’t think that scentbird is pretending to offer that kind of service, or cater to those tastes, so I can’t get too mad about that. Conversely, I can’t muster any excitement for it, either.
What really burns my muffins, though, are scentbird’s advertisements, which I am bombarded with every time I watch a youtube video lately. In each and every single one of these ads, the person touting the service looks like a social media beauty “influencer”, and I know that you know exactly what I am talking about. Not just “pretty”, but beautiful in an instantly recognizable, very contemporary sort of way– from their Instagrammable caterpillar eyebrows to the radioactive luminescence of the highlighter on their cheeks, from their impossibly long fringe of false lashes, to their vacuum-device puffed pout. These people and their perfect faces and unattainable levels of beauty have been chosen to represent a perfume service, and I find that absolutely insufferable. Why? Because I believe that the wonderful thing about fragrance it that it makes you feel beautiful in ways that has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with your appearance.
“What is it, exactly, that you are saying, Sarah?” you might be asking. That perfume is the domain of the unsightly, the unattractive, and the straight-up ugly?
YES GODDAMMIT THAT IS WHAT I AM SAYING. CAN’T YOU JUST LET US HAVE THIS ONE THING?
I can’t make my eyeliner match, and it never looks good on my beady eyes anyhow; I’ve got sun spots and broken capillaries that foundation and concealers can never seem to cover; lipstick only draws attention to my snaggletoothed, crooked smile; my hair frizzes and frays in every direction, and every single part of me jiggles when I move…but do you know that when I smell beautiful, none of that bothers me? For while a scent lingers, I can slip through the world in a veil of impeccable elegance or a melancholy cloud of romantic longing; fragrance moves me to beauty in places that powder and glosses can never hope to reach. An extraordinary scent makes me feel that I’ve achieved a beauty far beyond what you can capture on camera in a well-lit studio with an arsenal of face paint and filters at your disposal.
And I guess what I am saying is that I would sure like to see an ad campaign for a thing I that I love very much, like fragrance for example, portrayed by people who also have an intense passion for it…not just by people who look good talking about it.
Also that dumb-ass white lady in the featured photo is a screen shot from a scentbird ad wherein she is actually rapping about the service. I’m not even making that up. What the hell.
And yes, the screen shot is an ad preceding a video about someone eating cheesy noodles. I told you, I’m jiggly.
Spoken word horror on vinyl? Yes please! Take a peek at my interview with Cadabra Records’Jonathan Dennison over at Haute Macabre this week and hasten your eerie October feels with a fearsome tale from their extraordinary catalog of offerings.
See below my ever-expanding collection of Cadabra releases! We had the Dracula album playing (voiced by Tony Todd), as we passed out candy to adorable trick-or-treaters last year. I daresay their parents were not impressed with us.
Sometime last month I was scrolling through the instagrams, and I paused, thoroughly enchanted by some photos that my friend 
