I have been hibernating a bit, taking it slower, and scrapping all of the to-do lists over the past month or so. I’m sleeping in later in the mornings, spending more time reading, and less time on projects and progress. Typically I might fight this slowing-down, this softening; it might stress me out, thinking that I’m being lazy, that things aren’t moving forward or getting done. I don’t know what’s changed, exactly. I don’t know how or where I might have changed. But it feels natural for the season…which, I know…that’s a big duh. It takes me a while to get on board with things that other people seem to just intuitively know and understand.
I’m watching the leaves from the crepe myrtle tree wither and fall to the ground just outside my office window. A slow, descent, carried by the breeze. It reaches the ground, eventually. The startlingly white ibis appear like magic to dine in our yard every morning, their long bills unhurriedly poking through the grass to find bugs for breakfast. A large crow landed on our barren pumpkin bed the other day and had a leisurely conversation with an even larger crow perched on the lip of a soggy whiskey barrel filled with fragrant lemon balm and hyssop. They’re all taking their time. Me too, friends. Me too.
Giving myself a break, coupled with a few weeks’ worth of work-related and family-related travel, my little blog here has slowed down, too. I can’t remember the last time I’ve gone so long without at least a tiny update, even something silly or just a pretty thing to look at! I didn’t take a single photo while I was away, and I barely checked my social media (which I’m sure my iPhone will be delighted to report in my weekly usage update! It’s an awfully smug thing, and I resent it, sometimes.)
Saffron tassels, Honeycrisp apples, chrysanthemum dazzles: I have so far knit four different versions of this Stoker shawl, above. This one I am keeping for myself. I created the tassels for it two weeks ago and still haven’t attached them. I am supremely unbothered. It’ll happen eventually. The fiery flowers are from my garden, but they were originally a grocery store impulse buy last year! After they had set out for about two weeks and I decided that their time was up, Yvan suggested that we plant them instead of throwing them away or composting them or whatever. They languished for nine months and then as soon as the weather got cooler, they perked up and thrived! Thanks, $9.99 chrysanthemums, for reminding me to do things in my own time as well. Such as getting through this book, The Scent of Lemons and Rosemary: Working Domestic Magick With Hestia, which I started in June, and I am still only two chapters into!
Since we are on the topic of scents and such, here are a few more perfumed thoughts from my ongoing effort to catalog and review every scent that I own. (This, too, is taking a while. But there is no hurry.)
At first sniff, Autumn Vibes from Maison Margiela is an intensely smoky, peppery amber. Somewhat briefly akin to the splendidly smoky amber crackling autumn bonfire of Sonoma Scent Studio’s Ambre Noir. But then, in the span of a split-split-split second, it transforms into a sour, sulky citrus. Ray Bradbury has a quote along the lines of how for some people, fall is the only season, the only weather, and there is no other choice beyond that. These “autumn people” are full of the dust of the grave, with the night wind in their blood, and a whole bunch of other spooky goth stuff about worms and toads and snakes and the frenzy of souls and sinners and the starlit abyss. Thank you for summing us up so beautifully, Ray! So. Imagine you’re a regular denizen of Mr. Bradbury’s Autumn People Cocktail Bar, and there’s a whole menu of delectable October libations to choose from. One day this tourist shows up, and when presented with the option between the house special smoked bourbon old-fashioned with a wedge of spiced pumpkin pie on the rim…and a screwdriver…this guy inexplicably orders the orange juice & vodka. This is the sad story and evolution of Autumn Vibes. Autumn People, be warned–you’ll want to get your creepy cozy, harvest-season, sweater-weather vibes elsewhere. This one’s for the (GASP) Summer People.
I first learned of Hanae Mori on a blog that I was pretty obsessed with, back in the early 2000s. This person wasn’t a perfume enthusiast or fashionista, or even a popular blogger as far as I could tell…she seemed to be a gentle quiet weirdo, like me. She had a goth Betty Page bob and she did something in tech and updated sporadically about her little Seattle apartment. I thought she was the coolest. When I began to really delve into fragrances a few years later, I recall her mentioning this one in passing, and so sought out a sample. I was disappointed at how ordinary it seemed. Twenty years later I quite disagree with past me! Hanae Mori is a really lovely woody vanilla and creamy musk with hints of dusty dried grass and the airy green tang of blackberry leaves. A lot of reviewers mention fruit, but I don’t get any of that at all. If you like the comforting nostalgia whispers of Vanilla Fields or the bitter Miss Havisham melancholia of Fleur Cachee, I’d say this scent falls squarely in the middle, and friends, I am so obsessed.
Someone mentioned that I should try M from Mariah Carey because it smells like marshmallow incense, and though I love marshmallows and incense, I didn’t have high hopes because I think most celebrity fragrances are either boring or kind of awful. But how could I doubt the performer who sings what can only be spoken of as the most splendid and fabulous Christmas song of all time? Mariah’s version of All I Want For Christmas Is You is perfect and excellent and I am taking no questions on that point. This perfume is neither perfect, nor does it smell like marshmallows or incense (at least to my nose it doesn’t but I’m not saying that the commenter didn’t have their own experience.) BUT it’s still pretty decent! More than decent, even. And okay, maybe I was wrong. These are *cereal marshmallows* perfumed with lush, night-blooming flowers, sweetened with rich amber rock sugar, all gone soft and creamy in a bowl of milk. And then left on an altar to smolder lazily in a dish combined with dragon’s blood and pomegranate. Not a summoning. But an offering of thanks. She doesn’t want a lot for Christmas. Because she’s a giver. And she gave us the best holiday-themed song to ever exist in this world or any other. All hail Mariah, the vocal acrobatics of “All Want For Christmas Is You”, and to a lesser extent… this perfume which is actually pretty ok.
Over the past 24 hours, I have had to reframe and rescript all of my internal dialogue about Lady Vengeance from Juliette has a Gun. It is an entirely different creature today than it was yesterday. Almost a Jekyll and Hyde performance, if the good doctor was a sociopath and his alter ego was actually a hapless hero. Let me explain. Yesterday this was a fragrance of soft, cedary woods and ambery musks, a combination which I tend to love… but it was missing something. It was like observing someone with a human mask on, going through the motions of what humans do, but behind their dead, black eyes there was no light, or spark, or soul. Today this scent is the most theatrical, scenery-chewing rose; a rose that sweeps in to save the day with roses embroidered on its cape and a rose between its teeth and some sort of rose-related catchphrase– in case you, you know, forgot it was a rose. On one hand, it’s too little, and on the other, it’s Very A Lot and between the two, this lady has forgotten about whatever she wanted vengeance for in the first place.
I have an evolution of sentiment involving two scents that are nothing alike but which came together as a bit of a story when I wore one on either wrist. I will note a trigger warning here in the form of ruminations on death and our imminent mortality. If that’s something that bothers you, please consider yourself informed. Mojave Ghost from Byredo is a wistful floral. A little milky, a little woody, a little sad. With a gently soapy violet aspect to it, more like laundry soap than handsoap. Something that you might use to clean a dusty Edwardian frock. It first calls to mind the girls in their frothy ivory dresses from the film Picnic at Hanging Rock, and their mysterious disappearances. It makes me think of ruffles and lace period, I suppose, worn by people who’ve yet to encounter loss or grief. A child who one moment has no concept of death, and then in the next second when they learn of their missing sister who will never return, or their terminally ill relative or a grandparent who died in their sleep…and then with that knowledge that none of us will be here forever and eventually we’re all going to shuffle off of this plane of existence… things are just different. Perhaps we’re not going to disappear into a massive and uncanny geological formation, possibly ushered along by unseen forces (like the Hanging Rock girls) but that our lives will one day end is a certainty. Mojave Ghost smells like the moment just after you’ve come by this information, and you know you are never again going to be as happy as you were before you knew it.
Phantasmagoria, on the other hand, a perfume oil collaboration between Haute Macabre and Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, is that young person, twenty years later, after they’ve seen some shit. And they’re soaking in their departed mother’s bathtub, up to their neck in her favorite bubble bath (which in this case is Avon’s Skin So Soft.) They’re smoking a clove cigarette, a myrrh-scented incense stick is softly glowing at the edge of the tub, and there’s a rosewood box of polaroids balanced on their soapy knees. With wet fingers, you flip through til you find the photo you were looking for: you, in your easter dress, ruffles, and lace. The moment your mother told you this day would come.
Imagine you won a contest run by your local radio station, you know the one with the obnoxious sexist pig morning show duo, generically called something like “Big Dude Bro and the Little Vermin.” Yeah, so you–lucky you!–entered this contest where the prize was the privilege of getting to spend the night in a local spot purported to be haunted. Great, right?! Well, turns out it’s just a sketchy vape shop and the “ghost” is like, how someone saw Jesus’s face in a baked potato or something. And that actually happened next door in the crusty diner. The moment you walk in the door you are assaulted by the sickening aroma of maple syrup vape juice, a cloying waft from an empty rum raisin ice cream container crawling with many-legged insects, and the dusty fumes of your meanest ancestor’s cherry pipe tobacco. Was it a haunting or was it Marc Jacobs Decadence? You conclude that while you did not experience anything in the slightest bit supernatural, this vile combination of notes will certainly haunt you for the rest of your days.
Oddity from Rag & Bone was referred to me a few months ago, and a quick search revealed that it had been discontinued. I grabbed an overpriced sample from eBay and promptly fell in love. Would I consider it an “oddity”? Hm. Well, for a perfume to be so beautifully cardamom forward is a rarity, I suppose. But the real peculiarity is that there is no cardamom included in the notes! I’m no chemist or perfumer, so I am not sure which amongst the oud, incense, amber, neroli, bergamot, or rose listed is combining to give it that distinctive that piney-woody-floral cardamom aroma, but it’s absolutely enchanting and I love it. It’s as if someone took a stick of cardamom incense and stirred a cup of cardamom tea with it and then sweetened it with cardamom and brown sugar, and then you breathed in deeply as cardamom-scented smoke and steam rose from the cup. As much as I love this, I am hesitant to purchase a full bottle. It’s again available on the Rag & Bone site and I’m hearing whisperings that this is a reformulation. And I don’t always get sucked into to the nay-sayers and hand-wringers and pearl-clutchers when it comes to reformulations, but… if this doesn’t smell exactly like the strange, smoky cardamom magics emanating from this sample vial I am not interested. Also, do you see this? I literally do not have room for it if it not a thing of utter perfection and beauty.
Tam Dao from Diptyque is a perfect poem of a scent that I love wholeheartedly and which others have most assuredly spoken of more eloquently than I could ever hope to. A dry, woody composition with notes of cedar and cypress, sandalwood, rosewood, and musk, it’s an understated and Introspective fragrance, evoking the meditative shifting light of the afternoon sun as it deepens into the melancholic shadows of evening as daylight dwindles.
It recalls for me the oft-quoted line from beloved poet Mary Oliver’s The Uses of Sorrow:
“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
There’s a decade’s worth of perfume reviews on this blog, but if you’ve missed any this year, have a look at the following links:
– 40 Days Of Perfume Reviews
– Another Month of Perfume Reviews
– More Fragrance Reviews
– Even More Fragrance Reviews
Looking for even more autumnal fragrance reviews? Check back at the end of the week and I will have my thoughts on Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab’s 2021 Weenie collection ready to share!
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Squeaking in an hour before midnight, here I am with the final entry for 31 Days of Horror! It’s mostly going to be photos because I am awfully tired.
Yesterday I visited my sister (which was nice) and we watched Halloween Kills (which was not nice.) I really didn’t have much in the way of expectations, but I am not sure I have ever hated a movie so much. It was a joyless, soulless thing, and I’m resentful of those moments of my life frittered away watching it. It was maybe only 40 minutes, because I found it so terrible that I couldn’t watch any more. But dammit, I want those 40 minutes back! And I want someone to pay for the crime that is this movie!
I decided the only way I could make things right was a palate cleanser so I revisited Suspiria, which I probably haven’t seen in 20 years or so, and I also watched Horror of Dracula, which I had never watched. I’ve not watched most of the Hammer Horror stuff, actually, so if there’s any must-sees, please let me know! Pictured here are two of my favorite scenes from these films.
If you’re curious as to any of my other favorites in this vein, check out A Chilling Chosen Few.
We carved up a pumpkin (see here for inspiration) and roasted up the seeds for a snack. I also made some “marshmallow squares,” as I used generic cereal and that’s what the recipe on the side of the box referred to them as, hee! Mini candy corns were added for extra trashy festivity.
The soup is a carrot pumpkin soup which calls for “parsley root” and I have no idea what that is, and I certainly don’t have any, so it’s not in there! Instead I added ginger which I am sure is in no way the same, but whatever.
And in between every spare second, I was feverishly knitting on this top, on which I bound off the last stitch just as Dracula was being reduced to a ridiculous dusty corpse. It’s too big because of course it is. I never swatch and I will never learn.
The pattern is the Lounging Top by Joji Locatelli and the yarn is from Dragon Hoard yarn, it’s the goblin slub in the “slutty pumpkin” colorway. It’s pretty perfect, right?
And that’s 31 Days of Horror for 2021! Happy Halloween all my witches, weirdies, and wildly wonderful friends.
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I recall hearing whispers about Chapelwaite over the past few months, but I’m a little bit embarrassed to admit I ignored all of them because for some reason I thought it was a series that had to do with Jack the Ripper. I am supremely uninterested in Jack the Ripper and if I never heard him referred to again, that would be just fine with me.
That is not what Chapelwaite is. Le whoopsie. Apparently, it’s based on “Jersusalem’s Lot“, a short story in Stephen King’s Night Shift collection. I feel like I should have known that; I did read Night Shift, but it was a thousand years ago and I do not remember this particular story at all.
So I am giving it a try. I’m about two episodes in, and if I am being honest, I am finding it very uncomfortable viewing. Firstly, Adrian Brody looks seems constipated in every scene. Ooof. And so, there’s this family. Adrian Brody is Charles Boone, a ship’s captain, and he’s got his three kids with him. Their mother died at sea, and they’re new in town, come to claim a house that Adrian Brody inherited from his family. The town’s people have a problem with them because apparently, this Boone family is bad news for whatever reason, and also they’re racist as hell and are giving these multiracial children a hard time. I realize without some sort of conflict a story can’t get interesting or progress, but I have such difficulty with watching people behave shitty toward children. Ugh.
The good thing about this show? Stevie Budd from Schitt’s Creek is in it! She plays Rebecca Morgan, a college graduate and aspiring writer in this small town. With a deadline looming she presents herself to the Boones as a potential governess… for a family that could be cursed, in a mansion that could be haunted, because – as she puts it to her mother – “there’s only one good story in town.” The other good thing about this show is that Stevie/Rebecca wears some truly spectacular ruffled/floral night robes/dressings gowns. I’m not exactly sure what you call this particular garment from this specific era? But they are gorgeous!
Thanks, Ted, for your out-of-the-blue, but thoroughly appreciated email urging me to watch this show! I don’t know if I like it just yet, but I am intrigued enough to keep watching for the time being. Especially if there are more lantern-lit ruffles.
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Sometimes the universe works in funny ways and it will happen that I read/read or read/watch two things that I did not choose with the forethought that they might be similar, and yet there will be some surprising parallels or synchronicities. That always feels a bit magical when that happens and I am always receptive to it and thrilled at the experience.
This… is not one of those times. I chose these two books, The Final Girl Support Group and Survivors’ Club, because they did on the surface sound rather alike, and I thought it might be interesting to read them in tandem.
But you know…while they were both imaginative takes on the idea of “survivors that weird and scary shit happened to and now it’s happening again,” they’re very different stories, taking that core concept to very different places.
The Final Girl Support Group is handled in a decidedly slashery vein, supported by Grady Hendrix’s distinctive humor and his sometimes unexpected emotional insights. I don’t know why I phrase it that way, it’s not like you can’t be both funny and have an aptitude for writerly emotional nuance. I’m sorry to sell you short, Grady Hendrix, you pen some extremely enjoyable and satisfying reads! I tend to think of Hendrix as that really funny guy in class that I always had a crush on but I also suspected that if you scratch the surface of the jokes, there’s not much underneath. That’s not true with this author, and I need to stop thinking that way. In brief, Lynette and a handful of survivors of various massacres and murderous crimes have been meeting for therapy for over a decade–until one of the women misses a meeting and Lynnette’s worst fears are realized—someone knows about the group and is determined to pick them off one by one.
Survivors’ Club is…not that at all. This graphic novel comic series follows another handful of survivors, but these individuals are victims of supernatural/paranormal horrors from the 1980s–killer dolls, haunted houses, and possessions, etc. They meet via the internet and try to figure out what connects them, and why these things occurred, and what is it exactly that’s beginning to happen again? It’s wildly creepy and bizarre and gruesome and I’ll admit, I first grabbed it because I saw that Lauren Beuekes was one of the writers involved with it. I don’t really love how it wrapped up, and overall it felt a little messy…but if I understand correctly, it got canceled, and perhaps they had to rush the ending.
These two stories ended up being quite different! I guess that’s what happens when you think you know better than the universe. I’ll leave it up to fate next time.
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“That sure was a weird movie,” I’ve found myself muttering ever since watching Messiah of Evil a few nights ago. Yvan later remarked, “well, when YOU keep referring to something as weird, that’s how I know it’s REALLY weird.”
A film I’ve been hearing about in passing for a while now, Messiah of Evil was specifically recommended to me last October, and a year later when I saw MondoHeather mention it on twitter just the other day, I knew it was a sign to finally sit down and watch it.
A surreal and unsettling coastal-set tale (my favorite kind!) and an exercise in moody horror, the film follows a very concerned Arletty, who is in search of her missing artist father. She heads to the small, strange beach town of Point Dune where she finds his abandoned beach house. and a diary full of his frightened ravings. Vampiric/cannibalistic madness ensues.
My first thought about Messiah of Evil was “…huh…this isn’t what I thought this was going to be about?” But I also had no idea what it was about, so how could I have had any expectations? My second thought was along the lines of how I would like Lana del Rey to play every character in this movie, or at least write a song and make a music video inspired by it. My third thought was how I wanted to knit a cute version of Arletty’s pumpkin-hued short-sleeved sweater because of course I was going to think that.
Also! Check out this bed! A platform swinging from the ceiling with room not only for one sleeping body, but possibly another, along with the bed linens, pillows, a whole mess of books, three potted plants, and a stuffed armadillo!
Lana look-alikes and oddball aesthetics aside, I actually really loved this strange, striking, and uniquely …weird little film.
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Is anyone else watching the recent version of I Know What You Did Last Summer? It’s trashy as hell and it’s making me feel old as dirt (if I hear that one kid call someone “sus” one more time, I am gonna lose my shit) but you know what? It’s a lot of fun.
I don’t recall the original series of movies very well, but the source material, Lois Duncan’s 1973 book I Know What You Did Last Summer, wasn’t my favorite among her titles, so I’m not too precious about it.
A loose adaptation though the premise remains the same: a group of teenagers/young adults (I can’t tell? Everyone between 15 and 30 looks the same age to me now?) are involved in a hit and run and a year later, they begin receiving threatening messages from someone who doesn’t want to forget and who knows “what they did last summer.” And of course begins stalking them and picking them off one by one. It feels a bit Pretty Little Liars to me, but with more drugs and sluttery. So if that’s your thing, you may enjoy this! It’s definitely my thing. All the delicious drugs and promiscuity, please!
…but this version is set in Hawaii, which feels weird and off. Or rather, that it’s a show steeped in Hawaiian culture, but it’s still centered around a white family--that’s the part that doesn’t feel right at all. I think they are going for something very Twin Peaksian, but it doesn’t work. Still, it’s more gruesome than I expected, it’s genuinely funny in moments, and if I’m being honest, I just like to see “young people horror” …although I don’t know how reflective this is of young people culture? These characters are like 18 going on 40. But what do I know? I feel very out of touch sometimes.
Are you guys watching this? I’d love to know your thoughts!
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House is another one of those horror movies that had intriguingly gruesome cover art that greatly appealed to my 13-year-old brain. Of course, I never got the opportunity to watch it, so 30 some odd years later I was very excited to sit down and take it in this past weekend.
To put it kindly, I was …not…impressed. “This is what everyone is reminiscing so fondly about?” I thought. “But it’s so stupid!”
I was, however, greatly impressed by the bizarre artwork that adorned the fantastically wallpapered walls of the titular house. They looked like marvelously weird Gertrude Abercrombie/Frida Kahlo/Salvador Dali hybrids creations, and I could have watched a whole movie about them alone!
I stopped watching the film about halfway through. I’ve only got so much time allotted to me on this earth, and slogging through this silly film was not how I wanted to spend it. But in zipping through it afterward to grab some stills of these nutty paintings for a blog post, I wondered if maybe…the art wasn’t somehow important to the plot? I mean, if I was going to the trouble of sharing the art, shouldn’t I at least finish the film to get an understanding of how it played into the story? So the next day I revisited the film. And I finished it. For art!
Ok, so maybe it wasn’t THAT bad. I think I just wasn’t in the mood for it, in that initial viewing. If you’ve not seen it, it’s more or less just a haunted house story with some comedy, ridiculous but fun creature effects, and I guess you could say it’s got a lot of heart. The short version of the story is that Roger Cobb is a best-selling author; he and his wife are divorced and they have lost a son, and he’s moved back into his late aunt Elizabeth’s house to focus on writing his war memoirs. Turns out the house is balls-out bonkers haunted. In an interview, the director as described this as “a tongue-in-cheek, Mad magazine-style, effects-heavy hootenanny with goofy neighbors and comical monsters.” Sure, I guess that sums it up
I do have a lot of questions because so much of this is baffling. Why did his elderly aunt kill herself at the beginning of the film? And from the flashbacks, it looks like Roger and his wife and child were living in his aunt’s home at one point? While she was still living there? I mean, he was a famous writer and she was a famous actress, so why didn’t they have their own place? And getting back to the aunt–what was the deal with the paintings? Over the course of the film, you can see how she, as an artist, was no doubt influenced and inspired by the haunted goings-on in the house, and so I think there should have been at least a tiny bit of focus and backstory about her art and practice. And it turns out the paintings were *sort of* important, at least one of them was–but I’ll not give that away, in case you, like me, were one of the handful of people who have not yet seen House.
I was able to find the actual artist behind aunt Elizabeth’s strange canvases, though unfortunately, I can’t find any larger images. Richard Hescox has created a considerable amount of horror and monster movie poster art and seems to be fairly prolific, although his official portfolio seems to mostly showcase his fantasy-inspired works.
Now this all has got me thinking that I need to see House II on the off chance that there’s more of Hescox’s paintings and maybe old aunt Elizabeth gets a bit of story? Hm! Should I continue?
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If I am being honest, I have been fixated on DOLLS ever since I first passed by its lurid half doll/half skull cover art on the shelf in a Blockbuster Video seventy kajillion moons ago. But that was back in the days where between you and your sisters you could only pick ONE movie to take home on a Friday night, and no one could ever agree on anything and certainly, no one else but me wanted to watch this one.
But I am an adult now and I can do whatever I want and no one even has to agree with it!
Six travelers stranded in a sudden thunderstorm– a trio consisting of a shitty father, a wretched stepmother and an imaginative young girl, and another group of two awful (but awesomely attired) hitchhiking punkettes and the well-intentioned but derpy guy who picked them up– seek shelter in a nearby mansion. An elegant old doll-maker and his wife live in this creepy, wonderfully atmospheric place full of gorgeous old dolls, and they offer to put the group up for the evening. The charming elderly couple is very welcoming and hospitable to this group of very rude assholes. Too welcoming, one might say.
Over the course of the evening, all the baddies get what’s coming to them and by the closing credits, the doll-maker’s collection has mysteriously grown. I LOVED THIS MOVIE.
Most of all, I loved this doll in the right-hand corner in its little pig costume! Rabbit costume? I don’t actually know what’s going on there, but I love it more than anything in the world! But I’m fairly certain that no matter what happened over the course of this film, I was going to adore it. I love old dolls. I love any kind of doll. If I had more space and more money, I would totally be an unhinged doll collector, filling every room in my house with their ruffles and lace little staring eyeballs. Here’s a controversial thing: I even love clown dolls! (Heck, I also love clowns!)
The creature effects in this film were a lot of fun (Teddy in an early scene was fantastic!) and the menacing, mischievous stop-motion movements of the dolls, their frowning expressions, and devious grins with those tiny demonic teeth, were wonderful. I would have liked to have seen more of that, but I think it was probably *just* enough.
This is maybe the only time in my life where, upon finishing a movie, I immediately wanted to watch it again. Is it a “good” movie? I don’t know about that. But it was extremely satisfying on a visually appealing level, and its messages of both appreciating the imagination and the stuff that keeps you young at heart really spoke to me. Plus…I loved Ralph. I know he was awkward and weird, but I really want to be friends with that character! So…again. A good movie? Probably not by the standards that a lot of people might measure such things. But I think it is! And even more than that, it’s a “feel good” movie. I never really had a feel good movie in my arsenal, but I think DOLLS has become my go-to.
What other creepy doll movies do I need to watch? I don’t really care about Chucky or Annabelle, I’ll just go ahead and put that out there. I’ve seen Pin and maybe Dead Silence, but I might be getting that mixed up with something else.And I just learned that there’s an Amityville Dollhouse movie! It’s probably awful, right? But…I should watch it anyway, right?
Speaking of dollhouses, one of my favorite books when I was a little girl was The Dollhouse Murders by Betty Ren Wright. I wonder how that holds up? Author of the weird and eerie, Robert Aickman wrote a story about a dollhouse if I recall. Ah, here it is: The Inner Room.
I guess I understand why people are freaked out by their little uncanny, almost-human faces, their imagined movements from the periphery of your vision, and why the creepy doll is a long-standing horror trope. Here’s an interesting article that goes into more of an explanation, with a bit of history as well. But me, well. I’m scared of lots of stuff. I mean…A LOT. But dolls just aren’t one of them.
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Lately, I’ve been meditating on An Offering from dark artist Dylan Garrett Smith’s small batch perfumery, BirthBloomDecay. If you’re not familiar with his art, as it happens, the name Birthbloomdecay perfectly encapsulates its influences of occult lore, memento mori and the nocturnal beauty of the natural world. An Offering is redolent of dry, smoky embers and stiff black leather, the soft eerie rot of autumn leaves, and a shrieking electro-sulfur tang of ozone; it calls to mind a lightning-struck flock of witches tumbling and cackling through the air their burnished brooms now a fizzling and scorched incense amongst the midnight treetops.
Heretic India Ink (maybe discontinued?) So this is my pitch for the next season of American Horror Story. So, here goes. It’s about the spooky goings-on that occur during an Adult Film shoot that takes place in an abandoned dentist’s office, and it features India Ink from Heretic Parfum. This fragrance smells overwhelmingly of a mentholated, latex clad hand slowly descending toward your face as a disembodied voice intones OPEN WIDE. But I’m not sure if it’s some sort of mint or or a disinfectant clove oil, or something more camphorous and herbaceous and sour like tea tree oil or cypress. This empty office is located in a run down strip mall, there’s a discount auto store next door and a deserted gas station nearby and a ghostly miasma of carbon, sulfur, and petrol hangs low in the air in this blighted scene of desolation and both urban decay and tooth decay, ruin porn and actual porn. The BDSM Rubber Man has found the laughing gas, and the faint, sweet scent of nitrous oxide fills the studio. As the investors show up to see what their money’s getting them, they are greeted by a chaotic scene too disturbing and gruesome to script and production is shut down within 48 hours. The lead actor is never seen again, but they say you can still see his reflection in a mouth mirror from the set that is currently being sold on eBay.
November in the Temperate Deciduous Forest from For Strange Women is a scent I have worn for years and years and I am only just now attempting to review it. This is the aroma of a mushroom queen surveying their loamy domain on a cool, rainy morning. A soft green fern tickles your gills as your mycelial threads in turn wave at the worms moving through the rich earth beneath you; the ground mist rises through the dense forest canopy as cool trickles of rainwater drip off the oak and beech and fir trees to dampen the velvet, verdant moss carpeting a cropping of stones nearby. Your reverie is interrupted by the scent of expensive leather hiking boots on the breeze, crunching leaf detritus and tiny woodland creatures beneath its self-important tread. You smell the smoke and steam and artisanal resins and tannins of a gourmet flask of tea, and before you can let out a little spore-filled, mushroomy warning, you hear a shrill, nasally human female voice chirp HEY Y’ALL WELCOME BACK TO MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL. Oh no, you despair, it’s the slow-living mushroom forager YouTube influencers. You sincerely hope they pass you over for your poisonous cousins.
Glossier’s You is a scent I really had no intention of ever buying, but then my curiosity got the best of me. A minor point: I hate this bottle, it’s dreadful. It looks like a small pink lump of quivering flesh. I can, however, get over that, because as it turns out and much to my surprise…I actually really love what’s inside it. It’s possible that I had very low expectations because I don’t like any of Glossier’s other products and also because I am maybe a snob. But I really don’t mind being wrong! Okay, I am a Taurus and I hate being wrong! But I make an exception for perfume. You is wonderful melding of this chilly, ghostly delicate iris musk and a warm, woody, sturdy peachy amber quietly enveloped in a crystalline psychic glow of pink pepper and you kind of wonder how these notes got together but then you think of Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus and it all just makes perfect sense. Yes, this is a queer classic anime power couple of a scent and I absolutely adore it.
Regarding Comptoir Sud Pacifique’s Vanille Abricot, I feel like a clever child- villain has dosed me with some sort of pixie-stick poison and they’re skipping away merrily as I sink to the floor, my lungs disintegrating under the assault of Marshallow Meltdown, a bioweapon based on the classic confectionary formula wherein a foam made up of air suspended in a super-saturated liquid sugar mixture is stabilized by gelatin,but in this version some evil scientists whipped in plastic doll parts and expired cans of Del Monte fruit cocktail instead. The resulting vat of goop undergoes a proprietary crystallization process and the lurid glowing shards are then crushed to a dust, which when viewed under a microscope, resembles tiny Barbie-Pink ninja throwing stars. This is the preferred method of dispatchment used by tiny assassins who whisper BYE BOOMER as they toodle away, engrossed in Animal Crossing or whatever. But I’m GEN X you gasp weakly as you lose consciousness.
Fuegia 1833’s Biblioteca de Babel is a fragrance inspired by Jorge Luis Borge’s story describing the universe in terms of an infinite library in which books contain every possible combination of letters, spaces, and punctuation marks. Everything that has been and will be thought can be found in a forsaken corner of the endless library. Some believe this story is an allegorical meditation on the endeavor to live one’s best possible life in a universe that can seem hopelessly confusing and disordered. I think I had hoped for a bit more mystery with this scent, something reminiscent of clandestine quests for esoteric knowledge, sort of like the film The Ninth Gate bottled as a scent.
But with Biblioteca de Babel, what you get is a lot more straightforward and mundane. A cracked and worn leather chair with a threadbare woven blanket tossed over the back, a handmade cedar chest passed down through several generations, the sort of soap you can buy anywhere for less than a dollar, parchment scrawled not in magical inks but rather in the practical strokes of a no. 2 pencil with directions on how to install a washroom faucet. It’s not even parchment, it’s just a crumpled post-it note, thick with dust, the writing so blurry and faded with time you can barely read it anymore, but you know each word as though time has etched them on your heart. Your grandfather has been gone for twelve years now, and he never saw the faucet you eventually installed and you don’t know if he ever read Borge’s story, but you console yourself by thinking that if you had ever conversed with him about it, it might be recorded in an obscure tome tucked away in one of those imaginary rooms.
It’s true, Biblioteca de Babel is not a really exciting scent, but it’s warm and familiar, sweet and safe in the way a hug is when you need it most, even when the arms are frail, even when you suspect the weight of your body is the only thing keeping the person hugging you on their feet. I would do anything to feel that hug again. And even though this cedary, sweetly vanillic, woodsy musked scent smells absolutely nothing like my grandfather, it somehow conjures the most beautiful ghost of those hugs. I’ll take it.
I’m really conflicted about Delina Exclusif from Parfum de Marly for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with the actual fragrance. But right off the bat, for those people who don’t want to read a whole ass essay, this is a pillowy parfait of jammy roses and dense vanilla cream doused with raspberry liqueur. I am not a fan.
A big part of me believes that if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. You’ll never see me popping up in the comments on someone else’s account to say something like “ugh, I hated that.” when they’re talking about a thing they love. That’s the equivalent of showing up uninvited at a stranger’s house uninvited and taking a shit on their floor. It’s rude and also really uncalled for. However, writing my own review of something I hate? That’s where I give myself leeway to say the not nice things that I might be dying to say. However, in this vein, I struggle with ideas of cleverness at the expense of being kind. To soften the snark I often frame my less-than-glowing reviews in whimsical or imaginative scenarios and language so that no one gets too butthurt that I’m hating on their favorite stink. But sometimes there’s an aspect of a scent that’s so connected with something I dislike in real life, that …I kinda have to go there.
I watch a lot of really basic YouTube lifestyle influencers. I don’t know why. Maybe in some weird way, it makes me feel superior. So many of them use a turn of phrase I have been hearing everywhere over the past year or so and I HATE IT. With regard to a rug or a throw blanket or a coffee table book they just acquired they’ll say something like “don’t you just love it? It’s SO AESTHETIC.” And I get that language is always evolving and I don’t want to be a jerk, but people that is not how you use this word. You admire something for it’s aesthetic qualities. For example, you like the coffee table book’s minimalist aesthetic, you appreciate the rug’s rustic, cottagecore aesthetic, you really dig that blanket’s witchy goth aesthetic, you see where I am going with this? Anyway, so many of these YouTubers seem to love this perfume because, and I quote, ‘it’s so aesthetic.” And they don’t even do a proper review for it, they just say it smells nice and it’s like I get that describing fragrance isn’t easy, but why even mention it at all if that’s all you’re going to say? UGH.
My point is that this $350 bottle of a very generic vanilla-rose scent smells like people who buy coffee table books about bland, boring, beige minimalist home decor and sound really dumb when they are talking about them and furthermore, they probably don’t even read them. So if you’ve made it this far you’ve read me at my most unlikeable and I apologize for that. I say this frequently but mine is just one opinion among millions and it ultimately means nothing, but man I really had to vent about this.
Spell 125 from Papillon Artisan Perfumes is a scent entwined and imbued with deep magic, history, and ancient mystery. If I understand correctly, it is a fragrance inspired by the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and the ritual and ceremony pertaining to the weighing the deceased’s heart against a feather, wherein if one passes this trial, they reach the eternal paradise of the Field of Reeds. If not, well then too bad, I guess. I believe this is meant to be a very atmospheric scent, and while it is, I don’t know that I’m getting what the perfumer intended from it. But who’s to say whether that’s a good or bad thing if one enjoys the result? From Spell 125 I get a strange vanilla salt that’s somehow sweet and savory, bright and dusky, earthy and airy at once, evoking both terrestrial concerns and something lighter and loftier. A sweetly green herbaceous melange conjures imagery of cool aromatic, woodsy marjoram incense, an offering to household gods( such as this scene in a painting by John William Waterhouse) Lit for the afternoon, the smoke cleaning and clearing the domestic spaces, and left to smolder and disperse with the doors open wide, on a cloudless day in early autumn. This is a fragrance which conjures the loveliest peace of mind and sense of well-being, and although I don’t yet know otherwise, I’ll hazard a guess and say it’s splendid to experience such a thing while you’re still above ground
Zdravetz from Bruno Fazzolari. I am not typically someone who likes “crisp” or “fresh” scents. Those concepts and related notes conjure for me ideas of country clubs and corporate culture and sterile, blandly uninteresting environments as well as notions of conformity and impossible standards and expectations. Nope, no thanks. So when I first smell Zdravetz, it does seem like that’s what it’s going for. I believe this is supposed to be a rose scent, but I do not smell any kind of rose here. And Zdravetz is in the geranium family I believe. A sort of aromatic woody herbaceous scent, a little tannic like strong black tea. In the opening, I do smell something vaguely herbal and medicinal and a soft woody floral. But then it gets weird. Imagine fresh but you’ve never smelled what a 21st-century idea of fresh is. You’re just a garden gnome, dirt under your nails, moss behind your ears, sleeping in your earthen burrow, washing your tangled beard every morning in primrose dew. But you want to make your way in the world so you and your brothers spend every cent you have on a nice outfit and you all clean up as best you can with a grain of old-timey laundry powder you’ve been hoarding for 100 years and you interview with some start-up firms but you don’t know what it means to “fungibly innovate leveraged sources” or “synergize team building potentialities.”! And you don’t get any callbacks and you reckon the world of humans isn’t for you anyway and that’s a little depressing but you’d rather be who you’ve always been than three little gnomes standing on each other’s shoulders under a Burberry trenchcoat working on TPS reports.
Stora Skugan’s Moon Milk. The sea, but not the sea. Lemonade and tidepools, bright and brackish, toes digging into the wet sand, palms briefly cupping portions of the sun-warmed infinite and allowing it to sluice through your fingers to wash away because you can’t clutch at moments like that, you have to let the gravity of the tides and tears and the moon take their course. But it’s not the sea. It’s the reflection of the moon in a puddle, a changeling portal to someone else, somewhere else. Another you, another time. The enduring strangeness of where rock meets ocean, viewed through mirrorwater on a stone cavern floor , a finger fluting in soft white calcite and crystalline minerals, a cave painting of the aurora borealis on exposed bedrock, the ghostly carving of footprints that stop suddenly and disappear. There’s a duality in this scent, the soft fall of sunlight tempered by saltwater, earthy cardamom incense, and citrusy floral lime, the bitter chill of petrified moonlight, milky sandalwood, and waxen lily. It’s a strange fragrance that makes me think of encountering countless versions of me across time, and we somehow cross the same path, inevitably make the same choices, wish for the same things under ancient and future stars.
Tom Ford’s Black Orchid, which before you even spray it, like, you just take the cap off, and you get generic ambery miasma wrapped in cloying cotton candy, and not even the thrilling stuff that has the exhilarating tang of the local carnival’s precarious Gravitron. No, this is the stale, sad bottom-shelf cotton candy from Costco. At this stage, it smells exactly like Black Opium, which many folks recommended to me as a “dark, mysterious scent,” and here’s my take on that. Which I hope you will take with a grain of salt. But you know how like…some people think 50 Shades of Gray is sexy erotica? And for them, maybe it is. I’m not here to tell you you’re getting horned up for the wrong things. But it doesn’t do it for me. There’s not enough werewolves or chainsaws or Lament Configurations in that story. 50 Shades of Gray does not even scratch the surface of hot and horny feelings for me. And in this analogy, I suppose, Black Opium feels like putting wet-n-wild eyeliner and a faux leather jacket on a Barbie tutu and calling it dark and mysterious. Good try, I guess? But you gotta work a lot harder to get me on board. But back to Black Orchid, which is what I was actually talking about. Once the pastel goth spun sugar vibe dissipates, it becomes this really understated but perfectly lovely creature of soft velvety musk and dusty woods. I kinda wish this is was the piece of the puzzle they’d focused on, added some other top notes, and connected it via an unexpected heart but I guess that would have been an entirely different scent. If you can sit through the obnoxious opening, you’ll be rewarded with a soft delightful woodland fairytale of a scent, but I don’t know if the journey to get there is worth it
Forest Lungs from The Nue Company is somewhat similar to Dasein’s Winter Nights or Norne from Slumber house in its conjuring of coniferous evergreen midnight splendor. The birch tar and pine sap are present but softer, less sharp and astringent than you might expect, and as a matter of fact, I don’t get any of the camphoraceous herbal medicine chest opening that you find in the other two. It’s the whiff of the woodlands in your hair or clothing after you’re already back inside. It’s expediently atmospheric; you don’t have to brave the forest path to get to the witch’s hut to warm your hands at the softly crackling fire and have a cozy cup of gently spiced cardamom tea. You’re just plopped right at her table, like a witch’s hut holosuite. And then you find out that this person is actually not a witch at all, you’ve made a lot of assumptions based on their haunted cottagecore aesthetic. It’s actually just a local misanthrope fed up with the dumbass yokels in the village so they gathered up their amazing candle collection and moved to a hermitage in the middle of a forest and all of a sudden they’re like,” who even are you and why are you in my house?? GTFO!” And that’s when you realize this wonderful fragrance does not last long at all and the program has ended and you’re back in Quark’s bar and he wants his 2 strips of gold-pressed latinum. I will note that I purchased this from Sephora, and I believe that it is the most interesting fragrance that they are ever likely to carry.
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Sometimes I want to pour my heart out and overshare and talk about every thought that stumbles through my mind over in this little space…and sometimes I just want to present a photo of a thing that I baked or a book that I am reading. This little life update might be more of the latter scenario.
I don’t want to be one of those people who with every breath brings up the book that they’re currently writing (I’m sorry! I get really annoyed about this! But more specifically it’s directed at writer-twitter, where someone is always tweeting about how they should be writing but they’re not. OK? So? You wasted your time typing that out? Sometimes I think I hate writer-twitter. Or course if you made me laugh because you’re a funny writer who is not writing, that’s different. But being boring and wasting my time is unforgivable.) ANYWAY. That was quite an aside. So. I don’t want to be that person, but I am in the midst of trying to finish up the bulk of the text for book number two, tentatively titled The Art of Darkness, so I am just basically spent and drained I don’t have the energy or the words to blamble blargle about blumbs over here on the blorg.
So here’s some pictures of some things and as few words as possible!
I’ve lately been obsessed with making various spreadables for all of the sourdoughs that I have been baking. Pictured above is the vegan cheese spread recipe from Rainbow Plant Life. Made from cashews and fermented for a few days for extra tang, it’s pretty tasty, though I don’t think it tastes anything like cheese. Actually, it tastes primarily of nutritional yeast because I think I went overboard and added too much. Luckily, we like nutritional yeast, so it all works out.
This next one is a recipe all of my own, inspired by the few stubby, impossibly purple eggplants we grew this year. There is no photo because it’s pretty ghastly looking, but trust me–it’s delicious. I don’t have ingredient amounts, but just treat it like it’s a pesto/baba ganoush hybrid and eyeball accordingly. Roast eggplants and tomatoes until they are charred and molten. Fry walnuts til rich and earthen and toasty fragrant. Blitz wildly with a fat clove of garlic, a green fistful of fresh basil, a sour squeeze of lemon, and salt & pepper to taste. Serve room temperature on every damn thing.
This just in: I have two new favorite tee shirts. The first is a Dolly tee which I found through Fine Southern Gentleman (h/t to Angeliska for secretly recommending them to me! They didn’t exactly tell me about them directly, but I saw their post on Instagram with a new shirt and I could tell it was a subliminal message meant just for me!)
The second is a My Neighbor Tortoro tee that I found on eBay. I think it was at one time originally from Hot Topic, so who knows, there may be some more floating around out there on resale sites.
An offering; a heart’s gift (& a bribe) from the dreamer to the do-er. The Face of the Oracle necklace from Atelier Narce via Shop Esqueleto. A treat to myself for completing the bulk of book number two. Or…at least it was meant to be. I thought it would take several weeks to reach me, and by the time it arrived, I will have finished my work and properly earned it. But it showed up a few weeks early. And I am not done.
So…that means that I need another treat, when I actually finish, right? I mentioned this to one of my sisters, and she agrees that this is sound logic.
Current artistic obsession: The disquieting goodnight gazes from these pallid little girls and their uncanny dolls, painted by avant-garde art dandy, Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita.
My entire coffee table is a massive TBR pile! I am particularly looking forward to Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness as well as Lisa Marie Basile’s City Witchery.
Currently watching: all of the Halloween movies before Halloween Kills is released. I didn’t realize I’d ever seen Halloween 3 before; I think I read the book adaptation when I was a kid, and in my memory that somehow became the same thing. I just looked up the book on amazon and holy moly…folks seem to want an awful lot of money for that little paperback. I wish I still had my copy! I also watched The Abyss this weekend and while I kind of wish they’d amped up the horror elements more (without losing any of the more fantastical bits, somehow?) but overall I really enjoyed it and it made me realize that I really go for tense, claustrophobic movies with a sort of eerie pressurized WOMP WOMP WOMP atmospheric droning score: industrial creaks and groans, the monstrous pressure and eerie whistle of wind through airducts. Strange, hollow sounds reverberating and echoing, a deep bass and unnerving thrum of scenes happening in space, or underwater, Aliens, Event Horizon, Pandorum type movies. Anything else along these lines that I should be watching?
Current miscellaneous things: If you missed it, I was on the inaugural episode of the Fear Is The Mindkiller podcast. Bryan and I talked about favorite books and nightmares and the strange fears that we have and it was such a great conversation. This is my fourth podcast this year and I will say that I was definitely less of a nervous wreck for this one! Speaking of fears, I was quoted a bit over in an article over at Bored Panda this week on the topics of what makes for a good creepy story and why it is that people like to be scared. You have to scroll down to about halfway through the piece to find me, but I am there!
And…I guess that is more or less it for now? I will leave you with this image of me trying on some mid-life crisis hair, via a filter. I think I’m gonna go for it in the next few months or so!
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