categories: death and dying
Our middle sister, along with her trusty label-maker, took one of our favorite photos of our mother, paired it with one of the woman’s most notorious utterances, and thus created a masterpiece.
Today is already off to a remarkable start.
The Beauty and Horror of Medusa, an Enduring Symbol of Women’s Power
I didn’t know “dark food photography” was a thing, or had a name, but it is and it does, and here is one of my favorite dark food photography instagram accounts. Thanks to Tanya for sharing the concept and the particulars with me!
Macabre Muse: Arran Shurvinton
✪ My favorite witch, Pam Grossman, has started doing monthly round ups over at phantasmaphile!
✪ The Best Thing About Celebrity Novels Is Scathingly Bad Reviews
✪ Rare Comet Moth Emerges From Cocoon at Notebaert Nature Museum
✪ A Corporeal Garden of Earthly Delights by Agnieszka Nienartowicz
categories: death and dying
A gathering of death related links that I have encountered in the past month or so. From somber to hilarious, from informative to creepy, here’s a snippet of things that have been reported on or journaled about in or related to the Death Industry recently.
This time last year: Links of the Dead {March 2017} | {March 2016} | {March 2014}
💀 The London Necropolis Railway
💀 The Grave Girl on the legacy of traumatic experiences
💀 Thinking About Having a ‘Green’ Funeral? Here’s What to Know
💀 Wearing My Dying Mother’s Clothes
💀 Stuffed in a Bell Jar: A Taxidermy Piece
💀 How the Oscar-winning ‘Coco’ and its fantastical afterlife forced us to talk about death.
💀 Collector, Protector & Keeper: The Art Of Rebecca Reeves
💀 Grieving family reclaims old ways, brings son’s body home to say good-bye
💀 Sex and death in the classical world
💀 The Mysterious Seashell Graves of Comfort Cemetery
💀 My first date was at a wake, on an island off the west coast
💀 Man Says He’s Not Dead. Court Doesn’t Buy It
💀 From Yoga to Movie Nights: How Cemeteries Are Trying to Attract the Living
💀 These Women Make A Living By Singing at People’s Funerals
💀 Saving Face: Death, Necropolitics and the Hiroshima Maidens
💀 Bodies ‘Eat Themselves’ While Researchers Watch and Learn
💀 Claudia Crobatia on morbid fascinations and becoming comfortable with death through engaging with different aspects of it
categories: unquiet things
Our neighbors originally hail from the Narnia province, deep in the glowing heart of Rivendell. They retired to FL in their twilight years but they still dream of the old country.
But lest you think it’s all glimmering midnight fairyland and unicorn disco folktales round these parts, allow me to present the other end of the street, where the rapidly shifting terroir gives rise to a distinctly divergent environs.
{cue up Monster Truck Housewives Of Unincorporated nameless Florida town}
categories: elsewhere, scents & sensibility
At Haute Macabre today we give a glimpse beyond the veil and share a few secrets regarding the hauntingly beautiful fragrances from Seance Perfumes–as well as the collection’s creator, Lacey Walker.
A few mini reviews as well! Did I finally find a rose to love, and which will love me back? Am I late to the love of creamy white florals? Read more to find out, and avail yourself of a discount code to pick up a few of these otherworldly scents for yourself!
categories: unquiet things
Sunday breakfast: Rye sourdough, lightly toasted, dotted with butter, drizzled with honey. I used the rye sourdough starter recipe from Ravenous zine that I posted earlier this week. It has been a long time since I have made fresh bread, and I never had a magic touch with the stuff to begin with…and this time was no different. It didn’t rise very well, and so it’s rather a dense brick doorstop of a loaf. But allow me to offer this: warm, freshly baked bread is a wonder, no matter how perfect (or not) it may be. And I’m enjoying the fruits of my labor, anyhow.
Last weekend, my friend Flannery Grace Good was talking about the idea of a fool’s errand, doing the thing you pretty much know you’re going to fail at. And bread baking has never and probably will never give me passing marks. But you know what? I immensely enjoy the process, the ritual gathering of ingredients, the tactile magics of the sticky dough in your hands, becoming a smooth, elastic orb, the alchemical creation of the crust as it bakes in a steamy oven— all of these things are a special part of the experience to me. So what if I’ve got a doorstop when I’m done? Bread’s a lovely thing even when it’s kind of a dud and I’m pretty sure I’ve never encountered a loaf that didn’t sing with a little bit of toasting, and some creamy, salted butter. Anyway, that’s what I think. *nods sagely, munches loudly*
The above starter is pictured with a pitcher of purple drank that I whipped up last week, and it was pretty good! Iced butterfly pea flower and hibiscus tea, with a swirl of lemon and agave nectar.
Also, you may notice there is a book next to my breakfast plate. Later in life it has come to my attention that some folks frown at reading at the table while you are reading. I cannot imagine this. One of my favorite things to do is to lunch with a book! Or breakfast or supper with a book, too. A book is, in my humble opinion, the perfect date. I can’t imagine anyone thinking otherwise. What about you?
categories: art
During a conversation with my baby sister sometime this past week, I confessed that when this business with my late grandparents’ estate is over, my grand plan was to fake my own death and run away forever. I was only half kidding.
I want to be done with these responsibilities. With obligations. With meetings and phone calls and relaying information back and forth and second-guessing my every decision and feeling like a failure because I’m not doing it right, not doing it timely enough, not doing it the way someone else might have done it. I want to walk away and never look back and never ever have to think about this again. Faking my own death and running away to be a hermit in the mountains, without another human being (or a telephone) for hundreds of miles around, sounds super appealing to me right now. I want to disappear so that they’ll never find me. And maybe then I will finally have a chance to properly mourn.
It was with a head heavy and churning with these sorts of thoughts that I discovered the photography of Rosie Anne Prosser via her flickr account late last night. A photographer and storyteller who describes herself as a “Mountain Goat raised in The Black Mountains”, her melancholic landscapes of lonely cliffs, secluded thickets, and remote paths, the focal point a lone figure, cloaked in mists and shadows with her back to both the camera and the viewer, enigmatically, introspectively, and perhaps even a bit defiantly gazing off to somewhere else, entirely…
Well, I’m having difficulty articulating how it made me feel. It was just one of those serendipitous moments when you find something you needed to see, just when you needed to see it. Each and every image tugged at my heart and seemed to echo back to me everything that I am feeling right now, and my soul whispered to me in a language tinged with both misery and hope, “I want to go to there.” I don’t know that I can say more than that.
For now, though, you can tell them I was last seen climbing into these photos. I will immerse myself in solitude, silence, and still, sunless days. Please don’t try to find me.
You can, however, find Rosie Anne Prosser on: flickr // instagram // facebook // tumblr
If you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
categories: how to wear, not a fashion blog
I have written before–and with much brighter colors–on How To Wear The Vernal Equinox, but I gloomed it up a little for Haute Macabre today, for those of us who derive our powers from mass quantities of black.
My How To Wear sets are mostly wishlist type yearnings–often people say to me, “wow, everything is so expensive! I wish you’d do a budget friendly one!” Well, tough titties, folks. I don’t spend my time wishing away for budget friendly items! Make your own thrift store friendly lists or whatever–that’s not my thing. I like dreaming about posh, luxury items!
HOWEVER, I have included one set (above) that is full of things* I already own, or wear, or are very similar to things I own, or wear. And since I can’t afford those 5K frocks, this is the one concession I will make. So there!
*though all of the things in the above image are listed over at Haute Macabre today, I will tell you the moth necklace from Flannery Grace Good, the bag from Baba Studio, and the scarf from scarf shop are my very favorites!
categories: music
A playlist for sleepwalking into the midnight wood, a forest dream in the dark forever.
Track List: Silhouettes by Lucy Claire | YouTube | In The Dark Woods by Shadow | Fluttering by Zinovia Arvanitidi | Some Limited And Waning Memory by christina vantzou | The Creek by Rhian Sheehan | Black Salt by Alder & Ash | Never return home by Strië | Stems by Poppy Ackroyd Depth of a Glance by Aaron Martin | Breathe by Erik K Skodvin and Rauelsson | My Friend the Forest by Nils Frahm | Dawn by Fabrizio Paterlini | home by nights by hecq
image: Margaretha-Barbara Dietzsch
categories: unquiet things
Have you ever looked at something I’ve rambled on about here on the blog, and thought, “dang, I need a Japanese ear rake to scrape out my glunky ears, too!” Or, “man oh man, I want to give that gnarly foot peel a try!” Or “boy howdy, I want to read that book/watch that movie/hear that album/wear that stinky perfume, too!”
Well, thanks to me frittering away the better part of an afternoon making a little Amazon shop, you can find all of these delightful things collected for you in one place!
Pictured up top: