Today I am a little bit weepy. Folks who have been internet-friends with me for a long time may recognize this glamorous dame, whose eerie, enigmatic visage was a substitute avatar for my own face for many years, in many online haunts, because I was too timid to use my own.
I first found the image on Netflix, in 2006. A thumbnail sized mystery upon which I immediately fixated, deeply fascinated. I sought its source for years and had almost given up, when, in 2009 I found her in the @nypl digital archives and discovered her name: Maria Germanova, of the Moscow Art Theatre. This fantastical image is from The Blue Bird, (L’Oiseau bleu ), a 1908 play by Maurice Maeterlinck, in which she portrayed (what I can only assume) is Russia’s most outrageously gorgeous witch. You can read about my discovery over on ye olde tumblr.
When I learned that I could buy a print of my beloved sorceress, I was over the moon, my heart was glad to bursting! But then, friends, at the height of my raptures, tragedy struck, when I realized that I could no longer find her on the website. A melancholy madness took hold. Or, if we’re reigning in the melodrama a bit, I got a case of the mopes for several months. Just last week, though, Jess at bloodmilk came to the rescue and found her for me again (thank you!) and I placed an order for an archival print right away. I wasn’t going to let her get away this time! And now, here she is, and we shall never be parted. Stately and dignified with a bunch of books on top of her. Just like I treat all of my loved ones.
I’m taking the liberty of declaring 2018 the year that we celebrate that we are, indeed, made of starstuff! And as celestial & extraterrestrial beings, why not dress in all the sublime, scintillating colors and textures and spangles of the cosmos– as glittering hosts of heaven, resplendent in our divinity!
And if all of this is too much for you too swallow, please note that I have a miserable head cold and my noggin is aching so much, that I am literally seeing stars. You have to take inspiration where you can find it, you know?
At any rate! Below you will find several ensembles inspired by the stars, the planets, the interstellar wonderland of our luminous night sky …and sometimes this inspiration takes strange forms, such as outfit ideas influenced by avant-garde photography, man-made star projectors, and bioluminescent tides! [EDIT] you can no longer click on the image to find the details for the apparel and accessories for each collection, as the site I used to make them sold itself and the info is no longer there. Hopefully you’ll at least find some inspiration here, if nothing else!
My problem, and I know I have rambled about this before, is that I am really good at acquiring new things, but I am terrible at actually using them–or rather, using them all up.
I’ve got three-quarters to half-full bottles and jars and vials and packets of products all over the place, but I never finish anything because I am suckered in by the idea that there is something newer, better, more *special* just around the corner…and so my stockpile grows, instead of diminishes.
This is kind of problematic. I only have a limited amount of space on shelves, and my funds are, unfortunately, not infinite. So to remedy this, I made it my business this year to try my best when it came to using what I already had, or as some beauty bloggers say, “shop your stash.” Which is not to say I didn’t make any purchases, I won’t try to fool you on that point, but I was very conscious about buying something only when something else was used up. Sometimes this turned into a “use one thing up, buy two more things”, but hey, no one is perfect, heh.
Here is a listing of all of the products I used up and emptied this year. If it was something extra special, I no doubt repurchased it, and I have tried to note when that happened– both to keep a record for myself, and for those who may be curious about such things!
Kusmi Tea sampler; I really loved all of the elegant flavors and I drank all of this in the span of a month because of various bouts of unwellness.
Atelier Vanille Insensée deluxe perfume sample; this is my travel scent, it’s very pretty in a vaguely interesting and comforting and completely non-offensive way… I should just probably buy a full bottle. It’s kinda perfect for what it is.
COMME des GARÇONS Incense Series: Kyoto; repurchase, always. This was my fourth bottle in eight years. My A+, no. 1, five star favorite fragrance. If you never try anything else I recommend, I hope that you will at least have sniffed a sample of this cool, meditative scent.
Chanel No. 19 decant; I need another sample to re-assess. Not sold on it yet.
Iope BB cushion; I liked the ease and novelty and basically everything about this product until my dry, flaky skin rebelled.
August/September Empties
ZenMed cleanser; I liked this until I found something better.
Kat Von D Sinner sample; I purchased the full bottle of Sinner, not because it’s super great – – I actually have something that smells pretty much exactly like it – – but I could not resist that dreamy bottle.
LUSH Olive Branch shower gel; the selection of scents offered by LUSH that I actually like is rapidly dwindling. I settled for this one.
Kat Von D Saint and Sinner perfume samples; neither of these scents are all that interesting or innovative, but oh, those bottles.
Sister Spinster Flora Elixir; a flower essence formula “for connecting to abundant and divine nourishment”, Flora is composed of essences of anemone, wild iris, foxglove, rose, elderflower, lady’s mantle, belladonna lily, apple and olive in a rose and honey infused brandy. I don’t know if it “works”, but I really love this stuff. I will repurchase.
Montale Blue Amber decant; I tried a sample of this a very long time ago, back in 2005, maybe? Around the time I was first exploring my fascination with fragrance. I loved it at that time, this strangely sharp, intensely sweet, then slightly smoky, and all-the-while marvelously powdery masterpiece, and I was delighted to rediscover it when a kind friend sent me a small decant this year. I haven’t yet purchased a full bottle (lordy, those Montale bottles are hideous,) but once I find a good price, it’s going to happen.
So that’s it, then! I didn’t empty as many full size things as I might like, but I am going into 2018 with the same mission, so we shall see how it goes!
Did you keep track of your empties this year? How did you do? Did you uncover any duds, or discover a Holy Grail that you cannot live without? I’d love to hear all about it!
I’ll sum up November quickly: I fretted a lot, I feasted too much, and I miss my sisters desperately, having had them near me for one wonderful week, and now they gone. Other than that, I got, as they say, nothin‘.
Instead I’ll tell you about some of my favorite things this month!
Pumpkin Spice Snake Oil from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab’s Halloween release. I received this one after I’d already written some Weenie reviews over at Haute Macabre, but this would have made top of my list, if I had sniffed it at the time! Snake Oil, a blend of “exotic Indonesian oils sugared with vanilla” is a gorgeous and intoxicating, but fiercely potent brew and– as much as I love it–I have to be careful wearing it around sensitive noses and sometimes it even gives me a fit of sneezes! This pumpkin spice version is tempered by some pumpkin spices that I can’t even really discern, but it definitely makes for a kinder, gentler Snake Oil. I have been wearing it every day for the last week. And…it’s still in stock! I would advise you to grab it while you can.
Graces elixir from Sister Spinster. I own several potions and elixirs from Sister Spinster; I love the concept of encouraging self-care and empowerment through wild blooms and floral abundance. Do they work? Well, I don’t rightly know. I like to think so? I can tell you that a dropperful of Graces, with its mixture of chamomile, skullcap, linden, lemon balm, lavender and violet leaf infused in brandy with local honey, and taken with intent when I am feeling anxious, nervous, stressed or in the dark….well, it makes me feel like I am taking a moment to collect myself. And sometimes I think that’s either all you need, or it’s the first in a series of steps needed to get you beyond your anxiousness.
Lip Balms from Pollux and Key: I have the Cocoa Mallow Balm and the Chamomile Hibiscus Balm. I ordered these on a whim because I loved the unique combination of ingredients they presented (and the fact that these are non-minty lip balms, although if that’s your thing, they have a peppermint one, too.) After using them though, I tell you what–these are utterly lovely. They are slippy and soothing, not at all chalky or waxy, and the fragrances is very, very subtle. I can catch a tiny whiff of it, and whatever it is, it’s pleasant, but it’s barely there at all. And they seem to be flavorless, which I also love. I only wish they they had a version packaged in a tube; the tins are very pretty, and I don’t mind using my fingers, but a tube would work better for travel and I’d really like to throw one of these in every single tote bag I own (and that’s a lot of tote bags.)
The Spellbound leggings from Black Milk, which I nabbed as soon as I saw my stunning friend Maika wearing them, and which have quickly become my favorite things ever. I had a pair of leggings that I’d gotten from Black Milk a few years back and never wore because I thought they were uncomfortable…it turns out I just needed to wear a larger sizer. Who knew!
Speaking of which, isn’t this some marvelous advice with regard to friendship? “…meet those that recognize the wound within the both of you.” Indeed, that is exactly what I try to do! This very excellent suggestion comes courtesy Ask Baba Yaga: Otherworldly Advice for Everyday Troubles by Taisia Kitaiskaia. I cannot recommend this strange little book full of wild, wise, and wonderful counsel highly enough.
In making up for the fact that our mattress is approx. 200 years old, I may have created a monster bed, one that drains my productivity and diminishes my number of waking hours. Between the Ghost and buckwheat pillows and the insanely high thread count sheets and the fluffiest, coziest duvet, I’m really just trapped in here, forever. The crowning glory? The eyeball-searing William Morris “seaweed” linen set. I had a tough time finding a website that would ship to the U.S. but if you are one of the people whose gaze has not yet fallen on this thing and you are interested in napping on it yourself, you can find it, and a few other William Morris patterned designs at Amara.
Lastly, if you like whiskey and you have a spare $70, I have stumbled upon a terrific one for you: Nikka Coffee Grain Whisky. I am definitely not an expert in such matters, but it is described as having “rich oak” and “marmalade” notes. Whatever that means? A lot of reviewers note that it’s a bit on the sweet side, and normally I am not a fan of dessert-y type drinks, but this is delicious.
I gotta tell you, I supported the hell out of some small businesses last night, after vowing earlier in the day that I wasn’t actually going to do any shopping at all. Funny how that works after a glass or two of wine.
I usually do a little bit of Hexmas shopping for myself, it’s true. Receiving gifts is nice, but as I’ve said before, it’s pretty unlikely that (unless you’ve given someone a detailed list, which I think is kind of lame and I refuse to do it) no one is going to get you EXACTLY what you want, so you’d better just take care of it yourself!
We are traveling to DC for the winter holiday this year, which means that whatever shopping I am doing for anyone–including myself!–had better be done way ahead of time, and for me, a month ahead of time actually is pretty early. Now that I’ve got myself covered, I can start thinking about everyone else. Isn’t that what RuPaul says? Close enough.
See below for a list of some vendors that I love and who are running some really lovely sales and discounts right now*. As always, I would never promote anything that I would not spend my own money on, so all of these items are things that I have indeed purchased for myself. Just last night, actually.
I’m having this “In Memory Of” ring from Golden Grove engraved with my mother’s initials. It was not actually on sale, but I am including it anyway, because I bought it yesterday.
I’ve never really been one for being out and about on Black Friday, as I don’t love the crowds (and I’m not certain I can think of anything I’d actually want badly enough to leave the house for!) but I get that sometimes people make a whole day of it, and that it can be a lot of fun. And blah blah, consumerist culture whatever–I get why some people have a problem with the day and all it represents, too, but as I get older I try to be much more mindful of not shitting all over the things that people like to do, so I’m not making judgments one way or the other. For myself, I feel pretty good about supporting trustworthy, talented small businesses and artisans, and that’s never a bad thing to do, right?
Did you go out yesterday? Stay in? Shop all the things? Did you actually by gifts for people other than yourself? Feel free to share in the comments!
A few months ago, by way of an introduction to artist Luciana Lupe Vasconcelos, I mentioned a few pieces of art that my mother owned, when my sisters and I were children/pre-teens and which hung in our dining room area. At the time I only remembered one in particular, and described it thusly:
The poster in question, surrounded by Erté prints, and oversized posters of the major arcana from the Thoth deck (with a occasional B. Kliban thrown into the mix) was…well, I don’t exactly remember. There was a lady. There might have been a goblet, or a cat, or a long, winding strand of pearls. What I do distinctly remember was a scrawling signature at the bottom, utterly illegible except for a swooping “J”. Maybe a crooked “C” that trailed off to a distorted “W”. In my head, I began to refer to the creator of this fantastical art, as “JAW CRAZER” and I was astounded when, earlier today, I sent a text to my sister asking if the name meant anything to her…and she knew exactly which painting I was talking about. And I swear –I never, ever said that name aloud. Crazy. Or CRAZER, as the case may be.
Well. As it happens, I am not the only one who loses sleep over such things. My sisters were both in town for the Thanksgiving holiday and had retired to the guest bedroom area, which doubles as my office and houses a wildly uncomfortable captain’s bed (but it’s super cute). Unbeknownst to me at the time, in an unprecedented act of snoozelessness, Middle Sister lay awake perusing the results of internet queries, seeking out these mysterious works of art from our childhood. The funny thing is, I don’t even recall that we were discussing our memories of them earlier in the evening! But sometimes the sisterwave psychosphere just works that way.
I myself had crawled into bed maybe ten minutes prior, and just as I felt myself lightly slipping into slumber, my cell phone rang! It was my sister, calling me from across the house! How weird. Vaguely irritated, or I would have been if it wasn’t my own sister, I stumbled out of bed to see what the heck she wanted. I stood in the doorway and called into the darkened room to her. Though I could not see her face, her excited response frizzled my hair right to the tips and thrilled my heart to buoyant wakefulness: “I FOUND HER, SARAH! I FOUND JAW CRAZER!”
Dang! That’s some midnight detective work! I’d been looking for years to no avail.
Jane Whiting (J.M.W.) Chrzanoska was born in Germantown, Philadelphia in 1948 (the same year our mother was born!) An ambitious young woman, she painted her first mural, an 8’x12′ depiction of Napoleon at Waterloo on her bedroom wall, and later convinced what must have been a very understanding friend to offer his bedroom wall for her painting of ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ from Wagner’s Ring Cycle. At age 16 she was accepted into the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and also made her first important sale, a study of 50 orchestral musicians, to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y. After a few months at the Academy, Jane unfortunately grew bored with the emphasis on abstract expressionism and she began skipping classes and spending more time at the University of Pennsylvania city campus. She convinced the head of the Archaeology department, to let her practice drawing various artifacts in the collection and as it turns out, this new interest in archaeology would significantly impact her later work.
In 1969 she moved to Ithaca, N.Y. and then to Woodstock where she lived in a cabin with no running water and no electricity but was afforded the opportunity to view a private and well guarded collection of the works of Fra Angelico, owned by the Archdiocese of New York. In 1970 she moved closer to Manhattan and married her first husband, Benjamin Chrzanoski, where she continued to paint for the next ten years, exhibited in the city, and amassed an impressive list of collectors, singer/actress Cher, and and Addams Family creator Charles Addams among the more notable. In 1980 she was approached by Impress Graphics, a fine arts publisher. Her work was sold worldwide and afforded her the opportunity to travel. Over the next several years she traveled extensively throughout Europe and Peru, where her first child was born; but returned to the states five months after her second child was born, when terrorist activities moved too close to her home in Lima. After 20 years as owner/operator of the Mill Street Art Center in Mays Landing, NJ, Jane relocated to Hammonton NJ where she teaches and works in her new studio.
This last painting is one we just found today, and whose moody elegance never graced our walls–however!– oddly enough when, on a whim my sister did an etsy search for art by J.M.W. Chrzanoska, she found a set of three prints, including “The Mask”, just listed yesterday! Yesterday! (Though you can find some prints on Amazon, too.)This was too much of a coincidence to ignore, right? So ignore it I did not. These beauties will soon be making their way to us, and our of cup mysteries, brimming with our mother’s countless secrets and ciphers and coded mementos and memories, will soon be closer to leveling out.
And of course we can’t solve a mystery without a matching ensemble, can we?
{Click image to see details on the items included.}
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It is November and I feel myself curling inward. Wrapping up in several layers of blanket burrito. Cocooning myself from everything in the world while I’m feeling weary, heartsick, vulnerable and, well…Novemberish.
November has always been a tough time for my family. I have awful memories from when I was a teenager of a certain Thanksgiving meltdown involving my mother and a broken freezer. This in itself is probably nothing unusual for families, and I bet everyone has dreadful stories of Thanksgiving meltdown trauma, but hers was fueled by addiction, and after the holiday we were motherless for a month or so while she was in a rehab facility. At least, that’s the way I remember it. My recollection of many, if not all, of my teenage years are hazy because they were just so wretched, and I think I have purposefully forgotten most of the details.
At any rate, a few years after that, my uncle died, and Novembers became a very sad time for my grandmother. I suspect Uncle Fred was her favorite, and she never quite recovered. With the passing of the years, each November would bring a deeper and deeper funk, and I believe that may have cast a pall over the rest of us as well. Then, a few years after that, my Aunt Carla died in November. A few years after that, my mother passed. Not in a November, but an early December. But still.
So…November-December is traditionally rough on my family. Now that both of my grandparents have passed (my grandmother just earlier this year) it is just my sisters and I–and of course our one cousin who is very nice and we aren’t as close as we should be and that is no one’s fault but my own–and while my sisters and are not exactly “lost”, we’re just feeling a little out of our depth sometimes, I think. I mean, everyone’s dead. We’re the “adults” now. Never mind that we’re all in our late thirties/early forties and have been adults for several years…it’s just that now we are literally all that is left. We have no one else to turn to for help or advice, or anything at all any more. Though to be honest, I haven’t needed to do that in a very long time (and my mother never had a lot of help to give anyway) …it’s just…we don’t even have that option now. They are all gone. It’s just us.
So, I guess I have some pre-Thanksgiving jitters. For the past 10-12 years or so, I’ve been doing the majority of the preparations and cooking for Thanksgiving, but my grandfather was around to peel the potatoes, which he always did with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade blaring in the background, as both my grandparents were terribly hard of hearing and neither ever wore their hearing aid. My grandmother would emerge from her bedroom wearing one of those festively seasonal old lady sweaters and a spritz of Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door. She and my mother would hover around me and insist that the dressing/stuffing (Which do you call it? We’re a “dressing” family) needed more broth–no, more broth!–make it soupy!–it’ll dry out in the oven! And answer all of my questions about how much onion or celery or sage do I need, and so on. I’d been making it forever at that point, and I instinctively already knew the answer to these questions, but it was, I realize now, such a comfort and …ugh, I can’t believe I am typing this because I hate this phrase…but a blessing to have them both there with me, at the same time, in my adult life to guide me through the rigors and rituals of Thanksgiving dressing. With and without oysters.
Thanksgiving dinner has always been at my grandparent’s house, for as long as I can remember and no doubt even before that. This year it will be my kitchen that the food is being prepared in. It will be my dining room table (and spilling into the living room, because our dining room table is not actually all that big) that my guests will be sitting at. We can have wine with dinner if we want! We never really did that before, what with all the rampant alcoholism that some people brought to the table. It’s just going to be weird. And different. Growing up, I always thought to myself, “when Ido Thanksgiving dinner, it’ll be different!” I suppose I thought turkey and dressing and mashed potatoes seemed a little homespun, or common or something. I wanted fancy. Or maybe exotic. Like … curry or something? … tamales? Who knows what I wanted. I just wanted …different. And now that it’s all up to me, and I have all the control I could want over this holiday’s menu, I just can’t help but think how nice it would be if we kept it exactly the same. Because things are already different enough as it is.
My youngest sister is in town now, flown in from Indiana on an early morning flight to spend the next week with us. We are both in Orlando, staying at our other sister’s house, for the first part of her trip. She arrived exhausted, and is napping in the guest room, channeling my grandmother with her house-shaking snores.
I think we are all cocooning over this next week. Slowing down, resting quietly together. We are all processing how different this year has been, how different this holiday will be, and trying to get to a place where things feels okay again or figuring out if that place of normalcy even exists. And I know that all of us, in various ways, are currently trying to do the same thing. You get it, I know you do.
So from my blanket burrito to yours, I’m wishing you peace and quiet and a soft place to rest right now. If we don’t hear from each other for a while, we’ll know why. And it’s okay. We will see each other again when we emerge from our cocoons.
In the meantime if you post your Thanksgiving menus in the comments, you will have given me many delicious things to ruminate upon over the next week 💗
Photographer and filmmaker Ashlea Wessel (Ink) has teamed up with award-winning director Kevin Burke (24X36: A Movie About Movie Posters) for a new project they describe as a “live-action horror/sci-fi short exploring North American colonial relations in a post-pandemic age. With Vampires.”
Currently on Kickstarter with a goal of only $15K, TiCK is the “heartbreaking, blood-soaked, pulse pounding story of a young girl finding her strength in the face of shame, fear and adversity”, that takes you through a fractured, post-pandemic society, after vampirism begins to appear in a small subset of the population. We follow one such girl, Nishiime, who lives in hiding from the organization who kidnapped and enslaved her family.
I got a bit of the scoop from Ashlea Wessel with regard to the film’s origins, and story concept…
“I’ve revisited the history of North American Colonization quite a bit of late, and I realized that there was so much that we weren’t taught in school or that was fully whitewashed. I think that because of that (among other things), people don’t understand what a huge problem there is in North America for the indigenous population and how colonialism is till alive and well. I thought of a future North America when many people believe that they are in a post-colonial, egalitarian society, but when a pandemic hits, they realize how wrong they had been. This is the basis for the world in which the story unfolds. I also love the idea that disease is what brings the power shift, much in the opposite way that it did in the early days of North America.”
Ashlea also shares with us some personal revelations with regard to Nishiimee, the main character…
“..her journey is almost a coming-of-age story, albeit a brutal one. Though she looks like a child throughout the film, for much of it, she’s actually an adult. She lives in a suspended state of childhood, afraid and ashamed and not realizing her own power until the end. I have this very weird connection to my childhood full of guilt for things that are absolutely ridiculous, that I had no power over, and I feel like Nishiime is a manifestation of that.”
And finally, she enthusiastically spoke to some of TiCk’s inspirations…
“Blood! When I got the idea for this film, and I realized I wanted it to be a vampire film, I was immediately filled with glee because I had an excuse to do scenes that are just DRENCHED in blood. Beautiful, full-tilt slow-motion, glorious blood. I’m giddy just thinking about it.”
There are some really neat backer rewards offered right now (that pink balacava!) so drop by the TiCK kickstarter site and give generously in exchange for some fantastic perks, and to ensure this sci-fi/horror gem gets made!
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Magical Objects: On The pleasure and longing associated with storied possessions
I gotta tell you, I supported the hell out of some small businesses last night, after vowing earlier in the day that I wasn’t actually going to do any shopping at all. Funny how that works after a glass or two of wine.
It is November and I feel myself curling inward. Wrapping up in several layers of blanket burrito. Cocooning myself from everything in the world while I’m feeling weary, heartsick, vulnerable and, well…Novemberish.
