Unquiet
Things

What happens when you take the aesthetic of stumbling upon mysterious photographs in dust-thick, cobwebbed abandoned attics, combine it with the somewhat eccentric but actually quite sensible wisdom of consulting Magic 8-Balls for creative guidance, and add a stuffed companion who contributes the shadowy elements to this artistic collaboration? You enter the bewitchingly strange artistic universe of Benz and Chang, where watercolor and walnut ink conspire to create “fake vintage photos” that feel like they’ve been haunting antique shop frames since 1923, patiently waiting for someone to discover their secrets.

Each painting operates as a visual puzzle that reveals its supernatural elements only after prolonged viewing – the ghost limbs, the doubled reflections, the figures caught perpetually between looking forward and glancing back over their shoulders like they’re trying to keep track of all their simultaneous lives.

Benz creates work that captures the particular brand of sustained strangeness we all live through at some point – those changes that feel permanent but stubbornly resist normalcy, like psychological double exposures where past and present occupy the same frame. His paintings emerge from a practice that balances intuitive channeling with deliberate misdirection, where seeing something that belongs in a painting means adding it, consequences be damned.

Sometimes the collective unconscious speaks in riddles, and sometimes it speaks through an oracular toy suggesting you add more mysterious doubling to your Gothic tableau, or perhaps another ghost limb hovering at the edge of the frame. This is an artist who listens to both voices with equal attention, creating paintings that feel less like artistic inventions and more like recovered documents from a parallel timeline where the supernatural seeps with subtle mystery into everyday life – proof that make-believe, when rendered with care and conviction, transforms into its own kind of truth.

Unquiet Things: Your partnership with Chang – a stuffed cat who “supplies the dark”- feels like its own kind of evocative narrative. How has this fictional collaboration influenced your approach to duality in your work, particularly in exploring the boundaries between real and imagined?

Benz and Chang: When I started the Benz and Chang paintings, I wanted to make fake vintage photographs. Just like as if you were in an antique shop or the attic of an abandoned house and stumbled across a beautiful and haunting photo in a frame. I wanted to make paintings like that, and this is why I use actual vintage frames from antique shops to frame my work. I decided that, in order to paint make-believe vintage photos, it would help to have a make-believe photography studio partner. I say Mr. Chang supplies the dark because it’s absurd and also maybe true. He has the ability to traverse between the earthly realm and the underworld.

Your work explores deeply personal moments of transformation – fear, grief, mystical encounters, mortality. What draws you to express these profound human transitions through the language of shadow and reverie, the supernatural and surreal? How does the ghostly aesthetic of early 20th-century photography help you capture these moments of the liminal and the ethereal?

I work intuitively, and if I can get anywhere near the collective subconscious, I feel like I’m succeeding. I’m also usually working something out from my own life. To tap into the collective subconscious, I prefer using make-believe, nonsense, and pretend. I think Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland makes a good example of this. We can all relate to falling down a rabbit hole these days.

Or, on a deep emotional level, we can all relate to being too big and too small. I think one of the enduring qualities of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a portrayal of the universal human experience, abstracted by a thick layer of nonsense, make-believe, and pretend. I think that using early 20th Century imagery adds a level of obscurity in that is Other. It’s another time, another place, a culture we like to think we understand, but which is still very foreign. It naturally occults and mythologizes. I also just like old things. I like old things just because they’re old.

The use of a Magic 8-Ball as an artistic oracle is intriguing. Could you elaborate on how this method of inviting chance into your creative process began? In what ways does this approach of randomness and uncertainty shape the dreamlike qualities that permeate your work.

I started working with the Magic 8-Ball and also coin tosses because I had problems making decisions. It was a tool to help prevent me from getting stuck. Now, I think it contributes to the dreamlike quality of the work by helping me restrain the overwhelming presence of my will. I am constantly fighting my own impulses to Make Sense.

Your paintings reveal different layers of meaning through multiple viewings – what begins with the feeling of peeking at a vintage photograph unfolds to glimmers of strangeness and hushed giggles of a dream-logic absurdity. It gives a sense of impossible deja vu, a feeling of ineffable familiarity juxtaposed with a sort of inevitable unreality, veiled with fanciful melancholy.  How intentional is this process of revelation? What interests you about creating works that demand multiple viewings to fully appreciate their complexity?

First off, thank you for being so kind. I feel like you really get the work, and I appreciate that. While I work, my brain does this annoying thing where it’s always racing ahead to build meaning. I’m always intentionally misdirecting and subverting. I like it best if I only have a tenuous hold on what a painting means to me, and very often I’m only chasing a feeling. Most people see my paintings in their very own way, and that’s the way I like it.

Your recent “Changeling” exhibition at Haven Gallery marks an intriguing evolution in your work – especially in your shift from sepia tones to more vivid color. In the show statement, you speak of living multiple lives, both consecutive and simultaneous ones. How did this exploration of multiplicity influence your move toward a more surreal, colorful palette?

I keep being asked about the multiple lives statement, and looking back maybe I should have phrased it differently. I do believe in reincarnation in the Samsara sense, as opposed to the more pop culture speculative sense. But really, I was talking about multiple lives more in the sense of simultaneous lives. When most people talk about leading “multiple lives”, it can get dark. People hiding infidelity, drug use, being sociopaths at work, etc. But in a more normal sense, we all live multiple lives. For me, simultaneously, I am a vaguely successful artist and also a very specific flavor of software architect. I aspire to live a “normal” life, and I am from a different planet. So there is an artist and a technology worker who specializes in creating and maintaining order. There is a person who actually just wants to appear normal in the world, and someone from a different planet.

When I was a little kid, I didn’t look anything like my parents or brother, and people would ask where my copper hair came from. One of my mother’s answers was that they found me in New Mexico, living with a family of rabbits under some bushes. So even in my family mythology, I came from somewhere else. The show title “Changeling” referred to the folk tale sense of a fairy child who has been substituted into a mortal family.

Your “Maybe Not the Norm” exhibition at Riversea Gallery presented such compelling visions of psychological doubling – those conjoined figures on the velvet fainting couch, the figure simultaneously peering around a corner while looking back over their shoulder. How do these moments of divided attention speak to your exploration of permanent change? What drew you to express this contemporary state through these particular Gothic motifs?

More double lives. Double consciousnesses. Making friends with your other lives. There is also a piece in there about reincarnations of Cleopatra, which is one of my favorite things to meditate on, after Mehitabel the cat (from Don Marquis “Archy and Mehitabel”).

Your artist statement mentions early experiences with spirits and hauntings. How has your relationship with supernatural themes evolved alongside your artistic practice?

I’m not sure if I have anything resembling a satisfying answer for this. It’s something I experience, and it’s a part of the way I move through the world. If anything, it’s all only become more mysterious and elusive, instead of making any kind of sense.

Ghost stories seem to transcend cultural boundaries, appearing in narratives worldwide. How does this shared language of the supernatural influence your approach to connecting with viewers? What universal human experiences do you seek to tap into through these spectral imagery?

Ghost stories fascinate us. They are about the persistence of memory. They are a cultural manifestation of our ultimate existential questions. They are a meditation on the relationships between the body, soul, memory, and personality. They haunt, they guide, they instruct, they deliver messages. They are mystery.

Your studio must be such an intriguing space, given the dreamlike nature of your work. What objects, images, or elements surround you while you’re creating? How does your environment influence these haunting images you create?

I have been collecting vintage photos for decades. Mostly I have photos from the early 20th century, but also some from the 1800s. Most of my collection is of people in costumes, photos of mediums, fake ghost photos, and a small collection of silent film celebrities. I particularly collect people in bat and cat costumes.

Also have a really tiny collection of art from various artists. List of artists in the photos:

Jana Seven @rag.and.bone.dolls

Sara Swink @sara.swink.ceramics

Alicia Justus @theamazingjustus

Mister Finch @misterfinchtextiles

Beyond the supernatural elements in your work, what moments or observations in daily life catch your artistic eye?

Old things. I like old things just because they’re old. I like the interiors of old buildings. I like trees and animals (especially cats). I like books to read and also as art objects.

Find Benz and Chang: Website // Instagram

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…because “photo dump” is such a dumb, gross phrase. So what do we call it instead?

Anyhow, we escaped Florida’s end-of-summer heat by flying directly into Seattle’s heat wave, because we’re geniuses at travel planning! We first spent two nights on Vashon Island in a cottage with a composting toilet that came with mysterious instructions (helpful notes about peeing, radio silence about everything else), a yellow lab who appointed himself our personal shadow, roadside blackberries thorny, tangling and trailing in every direction (mostly the direction of our mouths), and our first glimpse of Thomas Dambo’s towering recycled-wood trolls. Also, I posed a question about that toilet over on Threads, and man oh man, some people got mad. Everybody poops! What’s the big deal?

Back in the city, that monstrous betrayer Google Maps, spent three days fibbing to us about “flat” routes that turned out to be brutal mountaineering expeditions, we watched salmon similarly fight their way up the locks while seals lounged nearby, and a seagull skulked around with a big fish hanging out of its beak, stopped by Immortal Perfumes’ charming studio, and afterward discovered the magic of the Aperol spritz slushy, and then spent a perfect temperate evening at the zoo listening to Ginger Root and Japanese Breakfast while sitting on grass with a stupidly expensive blanket we’d bought in the giftshop at the somewhat nearby National Nordic Museum (where we encountered another troll! )

I walked on the Space Needle’s glass floor despite vivid Final Destination-style disaster scenarios playing in my head, and practically next door, Dale Chihuly’s glass installations completely blindsided me—I’d never heard of him and walked in with zero expectations, only to discover that Chihuly had created these vast, glowing environments that felt more like walking through solidified light and color than looking at traditional sculpture.

I encountered one of my own books in the wild at the Frye Museum gift shop where I got to live out every author’s secret fantasy of sneaking bookmarks between its pages, we grabbed coffee at the KEXP coffee shop where Michelle Zauner interview was streaming (possibly live, which felt like perfect timing), and spent one of our final days in Ballard, hunting down bagels and gelato and breweries and pizza and one bookstore in particular where I scored a copy of Kenji López-Alt’s The Food Lab at Book Larder while nurturing the completely unhinged fantasy that my longtime Serious Eats hero – you know, the guy whose recipes saved every home cook’s risotto and chili for an entire decade – had obviously been camping out in this one Seattle bookstore all week, just patiently waiting for me specifically to wander in so he could finally discuss proper recipe development techniques. He wasn’t there, though! Rude.

And of course, we played Magic: The Gathering everywhere we went, because our dorky habits transcend geography. I got sick on my third day there, which was a huge bummer, because there were some folks we were hoping to see…but next time, Seattle! There will definitely be a next time.

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September’s marinade centers on fragrances that transcend literal description—the ones so deeply embedded in memory they work whether you can smell them or not. These are meditations on atmosphere over notes, exploring everything from windswept shores harboring corrupt inns to woodland paths where forest spirits might dwell.

I know I said no more free Patreon posts, but I realized I probably need to give people a taste occasionally, to see what they are missing…

Read more about The September Marinade on Midnight Stinks today.

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You’ll notice this roundup looks different – some reviews are just glimpses, with full versions available on my Midnight Stinks Patreon. I’m experimenting with this format because while this blog draws readers interested in all sorts of weird and strange things, not everyone who follows me here is necessarily obsessed with whether something smells like “the Crypt Keeper’s signature ice cream flavor” or “a vampire with a bizarre sweet tooth stumbled into a Precious Moment gift shop.”

The Patreon is a dedicated space for fragrance obsession – where the actual scent nerds congregate and where I can dive into the more challenging, uncomfortable perfumes that need proper context. It’s become this wonderful community of people who specifically want to geek out about whether a perfume conjures “goth California Raisins” or makes you wonder if “someone fed all their perfect girlfriend material into an AI machine.” The full reviews live there because that’s where my fellow stinkers actually want to explore the full spectrum of olfactory weirdness with me.

 Marissa Zappas Carnival of Souls An involuntary grimace quickly smoothed into polite blankness, a gagging masked by a throat-clearing. “Is everything ok?” “Oh, it’s nothing, I’m fine” and proceeds to throw up in mouth just a little, not too obvious. Honeyed floral cream turning sour, saffron like dried grass mixed into warm milk that’s started to separate. Coconut cream sweet and plasticky with oddly-spiced grave dirt patchouli sediment settling at the bottom. An eerie seriousness that doesn’t land and instead evokes a wobbling, wonky naiveté, dewy-eyed and desperate so much as to be repellent. I’ve found everything I have tried from Marissa Zappas too subtle, too fleeting, stories in which the characters and plots are instantly forgettable, leaving you wondering if anything ever happened at all. Carnival of Souls continues this pointless parade of almost-perfumes.

4160 Tuesdays Rhubarb & Custard No tart fruitiness, no bright rhubarb sharpness but rather waxen vanilla cream, powdery musk, the ghost of an Avon moon pomander. Unctuous citrus-like-but-not sweetness filtered through something fatty and cozy and comforting, maybe cheesecake, maybe childhood. Motion sickness of the soul as memory unlocks behind glass. The queasy pleasure of nostalgia in a bottle. I wrote more about this scent for my Patreon folks!

Arcana Wildcraft The Stars Aldehydes, electric, immediate; sharp brightness dilating your pupils involuntarily in a dark room. Charles Burchfield’s Orion in Winter translated into scent: stars throbbing with impossible light, night sky crackling with energy. Meadow grass electric chorus, alive, buzzing, participating in the same frequency as hyperaware consciousness. Three in the morning and your mind is racing, a thousand moth wings, each drawn to multitudinous flames, darkness reaches its deepest saturation point, clocks hold their breath. Not anxiety, not exhilaration, but a secret third thing that my typo revealed to me just now: axhilirating [axhilirating: adj. the specific exhilaration that contains within it the seeds of its own anxiety; excitement at the precise frequency of existential dread.] Fairy lights threaded around the orange tree, infused with the spirit of the fruit; juiced, bulbs and strands and all; gulped in a single breath, time hiccups, everything shifts and blurs, cold light pooling in your lungs like a chandelier of stars, like the crushed peal of a high, clear bell, like swallowing the click of diamond high heels on marble. Something plasticky, glassine and strange—this entire thrumulent, glintiform experience sealed in a clear envelope, preserved for examination later, when you’ve had proper sleep and can make sense of this crackling complicity with life the universe and everthing, when standing in a winter meadow looking up at burning stars felt less like metaphor and more like a language that you, the only person left in the world awake and alive, can speak.

Chanel Paris – Deauville Iced lemon slices in a cut-glass bowl, encased in ice; fresh, crisp herbs soaking in ice water, subtle as a lacy front or two. The memory of a glass of sweet white wine, a honeyed, floral Gewürztraminer wisp; round, rich, luscious, and strangely absent for all its suggestion. Somewhere between charming and refreshing, gentle with a glint in its eye; Not overly polite yet definitely inoffensive, nothing weird you can put your finger on, but there’s a phantom shimmer, a flickering presence, an impossible-to-name thing, which makes it either perfectly frustrating or frustratingly perfect.

Mark Buxton Wood & Absinth The phrase “fresh and clean” makes my skin crawl, probably because I associate it with people who make cleanliness feel like a personality trait, who turn basic hygiene into aspirational lifestyle content, who kind of make you feel like a slob just by existing. Meanwhile, I hate to shower (I do it, but I don’t like a single second of it!) and generally resent having to participate in hygiene theater; the whole thing is exhausting. Wood and Absinth sidesteps this entire obnoxious charade. Saponified anise, woody-soapiness that hits the sweet spot of ease; herbal bitterness like the toothpaste I’d choose because mint grosses me out, because the sight of someone working gum in their mouth makes me want to puke, because what’s wrong with breath that smells like bagels and lox anyway. This is uncomplicated, which I mean as praise—not complex, not trying to conjure memories or transport you somewhere else, just a reliable background scent for everyday wearing when I don’t want to think about it, but I also want something that smells like me. Wood, water, bitter leaves; simple, straightforward ingredients that coalesce in a scent that is ….what would I call this? An unfussy staple, slightly elevated? A functional fragrance, unembellished but not boring? This is a competent perfume that might benefit from a less clunky summation, but I’m not sure if a fragrance that’s merely competent deserves much more work on my part.

DSH Perfumes Prophecy My immediate reaction to Prophecy: “This is an incense for the GIRLIES.” Not austere or monastic or churchy or smoky-sacred; this is more of a “burn this stuff in the background of your IG reels while Hozier sings something brooding about desire and divinity and you arrange rose quartz crystals on your nightstand” vibe. Pastel tarot deck spirituality. De-saturated dragon’s blood. A dreaming without a dreamer, that ethereal mystical atmosphere floating free, no deep spiritual practice required. An outer light reflected or an inner light unveiled, either way it’s been retouched for social media, aesthetic enlightenment run through a vintage Lightroom filter. Creamy, almost fruity, almost floral incense—except not quite incense; aureate suffusion that smells like how luxe body cream feels. Whipped honey vibe; you could take a juicy bite of this tawny chunk of resin. Baby’s first incense, but I can see how it becomes A Whole Vibe, build an entire aesthetic around it. The DSH site notes that it’s a bestseller, which makes perfect sense…it works well enough for what it’s trying to be, but it’s too sweet, too fluffy for me. My prophecies need a bit more doom and gloom.

Reviews for all three scents from Poesie’s Persephone Uncrowned collection can be read by members over on my Midnight Stinks Patreon. Someone on Reddit yelled at me about these reviews!

Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab Angst Psychic shockwaves of cognitive estrangement – what demented pleasure to recognize beloved scents transformed into their shadow selves. Of the two wolves inside me, this delights the freak who admires a perfumer capable of subverting grapefruit and ginger so thoroughly. Grapefruit distilled to its most accusatory elements; ginger gone a bit septic, medicinal rather than spiced. The feverish chaos of sickness made olfactory, an eerie parade of familiar notes whose expressions now exude subtle paranoia, discomfort, distrust. The landscape of unease settles: coniferous shadows lean too close, fruit-sour brightness concentrated to vinegar and bitter quinine, the delirium and dread of existence seeping through pores like chilled and electric, frantic fever sweat. It dries softer, and tangier and fizzier; a jittery-prickly rose-gold ruby panic shrub.

Orto Parisi Seminalis is another one that can be found as a Midnight Stinks Patreon review. It might be a bit triggering, and just dropping in here if you’re not expecting it feels like a not cool thing to do.

And finally some first impressions of some very kawaii, extremely literal and hyperrealist Asian dessert fragrances from Mochiglow. This, too, can only be found on my Patreon.

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Artists construct worlds and invite us to enter – but not all of these realms exist in the same dimension of possibility. Some paint shimmering aquatic empires where sea-born royalty holds court among coral spires, others sketch ethereal meadowlands where fairy folk conduct their moonlit parliaments or crystalline metropolises that scrape the bellies of alien clouds.

These brush-wielding conjurers birth pocket universes hidden within dewdrops and volcanic paradises, where phoenix-flame gardens might bloom eternally. Whether bound for territories unmapped or realms beyond discovery, these visual doorways help us abandon reason and dive into the secret chambers of wonder we’ve locked away inside ourselves.

Martina Hoffmann charts entirely different territories – the vast inner cosmos where thought transforms into blazing visions and dreams acquire the weight of sinuous reality. Her painted domains throb with otherworldly enigmas that exist beyond telescopes or diving bells, territories where gossamer wing-forms curve through oceanic depths of perception and feminine archetypes emerge from coiling galaxies of living energy.

Here, landscape constructs itself from pure mind – swirling tentacled vortices of cognition, mandala-patterns forged from solidified meditation, and floating forms where undulating wisdom flows through currents of liquid contemplation. Personal awareness expands into cosmic recognition, every painted detail marking waypoints in the infinite terrain of consciousness knowing itself, of perception awakening to its own vastness.

In her painting The Garden, we step through the looking glass into what Hoffmann calls our “secret garden, where your soul unfolds its wings unhindered and freely.” Here, beneath a pale, radiant orb, twisted trees stretch skyward with the fluid grace of dreams gaining substance, their branches curve into the glowing moonlight as if drawing sustenance from pure illumination, while dense foliage creates canopies of emerald contemplation that pulse with ancient rhythms. Even the shadows here are glossy and glowing, transformed by some alchemical process that turns darkness into another form of light.

A pathway of warm, golden radiance winds through this verdant mindscape, inviting exploration deeper into territories where the familiar laws of botany yield to the stranger logic of inner sight. The blues and greens that saturate this realm become the visible frequencies of tranquility and growth, painted reveries where every leaf carries the weight of revelation and every shadow holds the promise of hidden wisdom waiting to unfold. This becomes the inner sanctuary where, as Hoffmann suggests, we can “safely connect with your inner self and consciousness to ‘in-vision’ your life’s path anew daily.”

The same sinuous energies that curve through these moonlit trees flow throughout Hoffmann’s painted territories, manifesting as the biodiversity of consciousness itself – coiling tentacles that undulate through cosmic depths, ethereal appendages that bend like thoughts given substance, and snake-like forms adorned with phosphorescent patterns. Her explorations deliberately echo the planet’s biological richness, bringing forth what she calls “new varieties” of beings that may exist in undiscovered oceanic depths, or perhaps represent “projections of future species” emerging from our collective unconscious.

Her Universal Woman archetype emerges repeatedly from these swirling forms – sometimes crowned with mandala-like radiances, other times merging directly with the undulating wisdom that seems to carry DNA-level knowledge through her painted domains. The oceanic blues and cellular greens that define The Garden resurface across her work, creating underwater atmospheres where otherworldly enigmas pulse with the rhythm of expanded awareness.

Hoffmann approaches these painted explorations with explicit therapeutic intent. “Paintings may function as mirrors reflecting the individual viewer’s consciousness,” she explains, positioning her work as both personal archaeology and collective healing tool. Her stated mission extends beyond individual transformation to planetary awakening, an attempt “to portray spirit as the one universal force beyond the confines of cultural and religious differences.” Growing up between cultures in Cameroon instilled her early understanding that “there’s only one spirit and one humanness,” a conviction that infuses her artistic practice with social purpose alongside spiritual seeking.

Through her brush, Hoffmann offers us passage into territories that sprawl both within and beyond our familiar borders – painted proof that the most exotic domains we might explore are the infinite landscapes of our own awakening perception. Her philosophical uncertainty enriches these explorations: whether her creatures “truly exist, are yet to manifest in nature, are pure projections of future species, or are part of our collective unconscious” remains an open question she cherishes exploring through art.

In this creative freedom, every spiral and serpent carries us deeper into the mystery of what it means to be conscious in a universe where imagination and reality cross-pollinate each other like wandering comets seeding gardens across stellar nurseries, where undiscovered species might emerge from the depths of both ocean and psyche, and where what is and what might be live and breathe and exist fantastically in symbiotic communion.

 

 

 

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I got yelled at on Reddit* today, so this explosion of runway ridiculousness was exactly what I needed.

Kevin Germanier turns haute couture into a glittering trash compactor’s fantasy ball where carnival debris, parade detritus, and party store castoffs become evening wear and rejected plastic bottles metamorphose into sculptural flames shooting from shoulders. This Swiss designer has appointed himself the fashion industry’s most glamorous garbage collector, transforming literal waste into a rainbow-bedazzled ball-pit apocalypse worn by models who look like they’re preparing for Crayola Eurovision end times.

The runway showcased gowns of toilet paper origami meets ice sculpture architecture, Big Bird pom-pom warehouse rave explosions, and lite-brite ninja fantasy attack catsuits (which sounds like a Sailor Moon move – “In the name of sustainable fashion, I’ll punish you!”) Watching a model stride down the runway encased in a phallic riot of colored balloons while Hello Kitty mascots shimmy in the front row feels like witnessing a children’s birthday party but make it DRUGS.

His “Les Joueuses” collection closed Paris Couture Week with the kind of unhinged optimism that comes from one who has perfected the alchemy of turning trash panic into glittering catharsis and sequined salvation.

*Anyway, sorry, Reddit lady, that my experience with and opinion about a totally subjective thing was not expressed to your liking and that I triggered you (despite my multiple content warnings!) Go look at Hello Kitty dressed up in your grandma’s old fiber optic lamp from the ’80s and calm down! Also, someone else patronizingly told me what I write amounts to “perfume fanfic.” Which…okay, that’s fair. 

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This is typically the sort of thing I might write about in my end-of-the-month newsletter (which is a different thing than my blog! Here’s an example of what I sent out in June) but we’re going to be traveling at the end of this month, so this will be the first time in three years that I am skipping a monthly newsletter. The dictator in my brain who holds stubbornly fast to arbitrary rules and deadlines that nobody but me cares about is trying hard to make me feel crappy about it, but I am attempting to resist.

Also…where should we go in Seattle? Coffee shops, tiki bars, nature walks/gardens, museums, please tell me where to find the best of these things! I have been there once before, but that was back in 2017 for a friend’s wedding, and we didn’t have time to do very much.

Anyway! Being off social media since early June has resulted in two noticeable things for me. A massive sense of peaceful unbotheredness, which probably merits getting into more, but all I will say is this: there’s a lot to be concerned and upset about in the world, but at least my time hasn’t been wasted by irritating people on Instagram. I get irritated/annoyed/peeved/infuriated for a lot of reasons, and a lot of them, I realize, are my own damn problems and issues and insecurities…but it has been SO NICE not to have all of these people in my face every day.

And the second nice thing about these people not being in my face every day is that they are not influencing me to buy whatever it is they are selling/shilling/whatever. I have saved so much money in the past two months. I bought a new pair of walking shoes for our upcoming travel (ok, on recommendations from Reddit, but I don’t consider Reddit social media). And one dinky thing from Amazon, and that’s it. I am that much closer to retiring in approximately 100 years!

Speaking of Amazon, the first inexpensive thing I have purchased lately and have a vast, weird fondness for is the little record display stand featured in the photo for this blog. It just makes me so happy. I cannot explain it. The second thing is this Ravi Shankar album that Ývan found for me in a local vintage shop for maybe $5.

But it’s not just the record, it was the whole day. Fans and Stoves is a really cool antique mall in an old Presbyterian church, and the afternoon we spent there was booming with gloomy, thunderous weather and downpours, and afterward we met up with friends for boardgames at a nearby brewery and had such a lovely time chatting and laughing that 3-4 hours had passed and we hadn’t even played a single game!

The Ravi Shankar album was a neat gift, but it was wrapped in the package of a wonderfully memorable day, and I think of it every time I listen.

Pickled onions, how do I love thee? To the depth and breadth and height of your glorious pink stink! This is a batch that I have steeped in strawberry vinegar (when you’re chopping up strawberries, save the tops, cover them with white vinegar overnight and strain into a jar, et voilà! Strawberry vinegar!) I have them in my lunctime salad every day and I can assure you, I smell delightful afterward.

Also on our daily salad are these sourdough discard crackers. It makes me SO MAD to throw away the excess starter after you feed it, so I either save it in the fridge for a rainy day (where a big gluggy vat of it sits forever mouldering) or I try to do something with it immediately.

For these, I spread the discard very thinly onto a silicone baking mat and sprinkle the top with lots of pumpkin seeds, slivered almonds, and hemp seeds. Bake at about 250° for 15-25 minutes, or until they are brown and shattery, break them up into satisfying shards, and store in an airtight container.

Ah, my dear library holds. Invariably, the anticipation of the thing is much more exciting than having the thing in hand. And inevitably, there are titles on this list that I won’t even get a chance to read in the two weeks that I am allotted to finish them. That’s okay. It’s a thrill just to see them all lined up, all the possibilities and stories that might unfold, like a buffet of potential worlds I may or may not have time to visit.  There’s a tantalizing romance in the overly ambitious library haul (which, funny enough, is aggressively and intentionally devoid of romance), the eternal optimism that this time, somehow, I’ll read faster than humanly possible and finish fourteen books in as many days. Please note that I started 157th in line for the Stephen King book. Yikes.

There’s something to be said for the quiet pleasures that emerge when you’re not constantly being told what to want or buy. What small, unexpected things have been making you happy lately when you’re not being sold to or influenced by algorithms? And while we’re chatting, drop your Seattle gems in the comments. I’m collecting recommendations like I collect unread books, hehehe.

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When I write about the artists whose work appears in my books, the focus is usually on showcasing the visual creations themselves. But with Forest Rogers, I find myself equally enchanted by her language. Her words cast spells – quite literally, if we consider Alan Moore’s insight that to spell is to manipulate words, to change consciousness. When Forest writes about “wrestling with devilkins” in her house “like a proper Baba Yaga hut,” or describes a pigeon dancing “a pure call to cast one’s very soul upon the waters,” her prose channels the same otherworldly quality as her sculptures.

Which presents me with a delightful challenge: how do I write about an artist who already expresses herself so beautifully? Forest’s mystical voice feels like incantations emerging from the same mythological realm as her creatures. But we’re going to try anyway, because her sculpture, The Beautiful Crustacean, graces the pages of The Art of Fantasy: A Visual Sourcebook of All That Is Unreal, and her work deserves deeper exploration.

One gets the sense that Forest Rogers is an artist who has experienced first-hand both the joy and despair of mermaids singing, has felt the euphoric, incandescent flutter of angel wings, held the literal hand of the dark night of the soul, and maybe even danced a tango with a prehistoric skeleton or a luminous beam of starlight. How else would this artist instinctively know how to sculpt the ineffable, the transcendent, the staggeringly unbelievable into such a graceful and dynamic reality?

These creatures, marvels of myth and imagination, monstrously beautiful and tinged with melancholy, seem poised at the verge, a frozen moment of fragile movement – as if they may at any moment take flight and disappear with their secrets into the mist, or skitter close and whisper mysterious revelations. Approach them with care, take only what is offered to you, and let the world go on, knowing that you have experienced a bit of the magic that made them.

Forest’s path to these mythological beings wasn’t direct. For 25 years, she created dinosaur sculptures for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, alongside an eclectic array of commercial projects, but her artistic vision was seeded much earlier. As a child, she spent hours sitting on her grandmother’s floor studying volumes illustrated by Rackham, Nielsen, and Dulac – “I think I’m now digging through the universe for my ideas, just as I was looking for treasure in this house,” she reflects on her blog.

Growing up as the daughter of visionary artist Lou Rogers, Forest learned that art could be both wound and healing, a lesson that infuses her current work. Her creative process now begins with morning observations at a coffee shop, watching pigeons dance while she sketches on tracing paper, contemplating the same subjects repeatedly until they reveal their essential nature. From these loose drawings, she builds each sculpture methodically – first the head to establish identity, then an armature wire framework, gradually filling out the creature until it achieves that ineffable moment of transformation.

This gift for capturing transformation reveals itself across her mythological menagerie. Night Bloom captures a creature suspended between violence and grace, its delicate bat ears framing a face of porcelain serenity even as it holds a moth caught mid-flight at its lips – a dainty dinner frozen in breathless moments before consumption.

The being’s coloring whispers of twilight’s most tender palette: cream and pale salmon, the palest of lilacs, like a sunset with the saturation washed out in the inside of a seashell. Yet for all its predatory purpose, the creature has taken root, its lower body flowing into a plant-like stem that suggests it belongs as much to the garden as to the night sky. Here is hunger made beautiful, the hunt transformed into ballet, a reminder that even the most essential acts of survival can be rendered with exquisite tenderness.

In Winter Siren, Forest presents us with a figure draped in the deepest winter’s palette – plum and midnight blue feathers that seem simultaneously cloak and natural plumage, rimed with a scrim of frost that catches light like captured starshine.

Her pale face gazes cool and quiet with devotion as she holds aloft a golden Venetian mask fashioned as a sunburst. “She holds a mask suggesting the Sun, ever eagerly awaited in the longest winter nights,” Forest explains, and in her gesture we witness the entire drama of seasonal faith – winter personified as keeper of summer’s promise, the siren who sings not of shipwreck but of spring’s eventual return.

Octopoid Descending embodies the elemental pull toward oceanic depths, her tentacles streaming upward as if caught in an invisible current. Rendered in cream and the softest coral shadows, she possesses an expression both serene and formidable – a being wholly of the sea drawn toward her natural element.

Her descent carries the weight of ancient purpose, guiding her toward realms where pressure and darkness hold their own terrible beauty. Her tentacles flow with liquid grace, yet carry the weight of inevitability, as if she bears messages meant only for the deepest trenches.

In Goblin Spider, Forest weaves together folktale and ukiyo-e tradition with her own dark humor – the spider perched as elaborate headdress while a mouse dangles from lips that once might have held silk fabric in classical prints. Where courtesans once conveyed coded desire through delicate tissue, the creature offers rodent prey with the same demure poise. T

The wordplay tickles the mischievous itch in my brain that delights in such things: from moth in mouth to mouse in mouth, Forest creates her own language of captured sustenance. The symmetry speaks to that eternal tension she loves – grace balanced against horror, beauty shadowed by predation, the spider maiden who watches with eyes both human and arachnid, equally capable of seduction and consumption.

Night Sphinx embodies the wistful contemplation of desert nights, her gaze turned skyward toward constellations only she can read. Rendered in blues softened by darkness and touched with subtle gold as if moonlight were burnishing her feathers, she perches upon her pedestal with the patient grace of one who has spent centuries watching the wheel of stars. Her expression carries that particular melancholy of nocturnal guardians – beings who know the secrets whispered between dusk and dawn.

A delicate winding stairway spirals around the base of her pedestal, leading to an entrance far too small for sphinx paws but perfectly sized for the tiny magician who dwells below. She stands sentinel not just over the desert night, but over an entire miniature realm where creatures of different scales share the same moonlit world.

Flemish Moth emerges from transformative slumber, her face blank with the serene stasis of a creature suspended between becoming and being. “Hatched from the Northern Renaissance,” she bears wings that crown her head like an elaborate headdress complete with spiral antennae, while additional wings spread where human arms might rest.

Rendered in the softest pinks, yellows, creams and blues, she suggests something that might have fluttered from the detailed margins of an illuminated manuscript, her pale luminosity recalling the lustrous surfaces masters once achieved with patient oil glazes. A bright orange moth rests at her center, vivid against her dreamy palette, as if marking the spot where metamorphosis concentrates its most vital energies. Her form extends downward in a long moth-tail that ends in a delicate tuft, structured like the lepidoptera she channels, poised in that eternal moment between chrysalis and flight.

I gaze at this sculpture and want to sniff it too. What would a Flemish Moth perfume smell like? What is the fragrance of transformative slumber? Maybe dusty parchment, the powdery residue of ancient wings, pressed flowers between gilded vellum pages, the metallic sweetness of metamorphic silk.

“When I am creative, I realize: ‘This is Love,'” Forest has written, and this devotion permeates every carefully sculpted detail. Her creatures emerge from that same loving attention – beings caught in tender moments of transformation, rendered with the kind of patience that only deep affection allows. Each figure seems to hold knowledge born from their suspended state, as if their eternal pause between becoming has given them time to gather wisdom from both sides of transformation. What whispered revelations might they offer?

Perhaps the Winter Siren knows how to hold hope through the darkest months, while the Night Sphinx has memorized the true names of every star. The Goblin Spider might teach us about the duality that exists within us all, and the Flemish Moth could reveal how to sleep through our own metamorphosis without losing ourselves entirely. The Night Bloom understands the delicate balance between survival and grace, while the Octopoid Descending carries knowledge of what treasures wait in the deepest places we fear to explore. Forest’s work echoes ancient wisdom about transformation, a recognition that becoming requires both death and birth, that the spaces between are where magic gathers and essential truths dwell. Her creatures remind us that we, too, might be poised at the verge between what we were and what we might become.

Below waits an assembly of further enchantments, each a testament to Forest’s gift for seeing what mysteries live at the threshold, for coaxing them forth and offering them form.

Find Forest Rogers: Website // Instagram

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I designed a Magic: The Gathering card for a perfume today—Witchly Mixologist, complete with mana cost and flavor text and everything! The full story of how Winter Nights by Dasein became my olfactory black/green deck, is waiting in the Midnight Archives feature for Midnight Stinks Patreon subscribers today.

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Harbingers of doom, vessels of secrets, survivors of catastrophe—rats have worn many historical hats (often that of “carrier”) but now they’re the ones being toted. Copenhagen Fashion Week has given us a metallic disco rat clutch that feels like ancient plague vermin reincarnated as glittering dance floor devotees.

Models prowled runways and lurked in photos with shiny vermin tucked under their arms like tiny, glamorous familiars, creatures whispering of witness to humanity’s cycles of excess and collapse, and which now spread fashion contagion instead of bubonic plague.

These are rats who’d fit right into a Studio 54 revival, complete with glass eyes that have seen civilizations crumble and probably know where to find the best after-party powders and pharmaceuticals. Anne Sofie Madsen and Esben Weile Kjær have created familiars for the disco apocalypse—rodent companions carrying FASHUN FEVER instead of actual fever.

To whoever is going to comment on this, I know, I know, someone else did it first. Probably even someone before that! You’re very smart. You know all the things. I probably should have consulted you before I wrote this. As a matter of fact, you probably should have written this! Wait…where are you going?

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