Artwork by Ray Caesar

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I don't bite.

Artwork by Blackdante

About me:

22 years old. Located in the greenish, beautiful Pacific Northwest. Recently graduated from college, where I majored in English, and in addition to lots and lots of literature courses I studied psychology, sexuality, gender studies, mythology, Classics, history, art history, astrobiology, physiology, social deviance, a bit of creative writing (I am a writer by nature, it's in my blood, or wired into my brain, or something), German cinema, murder, etc.

Obsessions include but are not limited to: dark, surreal, and "disturbing" art; Pop Surrealism; retro-kitschy stuff; indie, arthouse, foreign, classic, and silent films; Old Hollywood; the Roaring '20s; modernism; stream of consciousness; vintage erotica; psychological horror; occult horror; witchy style; black and white lace; Asian horror movies; Chinese fox spirit stories; avant-garde alternative fashion; dramatic, extreme, and transformative makeup; goth and other subcultures; the quaint definitions of obscure words; quotes; myths; fairy tales and modern rewritings; dark psychological horror video games (such as the Silent Hill franchise); Victoriana; historical tidbits and oddities; serial killers and mad aristocrats; mid-century pinups; vintage undergarments; corsetry; latex stockings; dark cabaret; tribal fusion belly-dance; experimental dark electronic/ethereal music; Lolitaism; sexuality; femininity; teacups; whimsical and flower-laden fashion; dead-swan beauty; apothecary jars; supernatural creatures; nifty, creepy arts and crafts; fetish photography with medical and religious imagery; decadence; purity; divine sacrilege; poetry; interesting typography; Dan Clowes' sense of humor; visceral/bodily metaphors and anatomical symbolism; modern and antique architecture and interior decoration; science fiction and cyberpunk aesthetics; cinematic portrayals of dystopias; retro-futurism; Polaroids; highly stark black-and-white images and hyper-saturated, colorful images; blood/milk color contrasts; the macabre and beautifully grisly; abnormal psychology; Gothic literature; the lyrics of Leonard Cohen, Conor Oberst, and many others; circus arts; deer antler headdresses; red, red lips; words, words, words.

Here's a picture of me.

Artwork by Kristamas Klousch

Film Directors: Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, David Lynch, Lars von Trier, Gaspar Noé, Jean-Luc Godard, Takashi Miike, Woody Allen, Michel Gondry, Wong Kar Wai, Guillermo del Toro, Chan-wook Park, Darren Aronofsky, Carl Theodor Dreyer

Movies: Antichrist, Black Snake Moan, Black Swan, Blue Valentine, Deadgirl, Enter the Void, Eraserhead, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Inland Empire, Innocence, Juliet of the Spirits, La Dolce Vita, Last Year at Marienbad, Let the Right One In, Martyrs, Pandora's Box, Requiem for a Dream, Repulsion, Solaris (1972), Strange Circus, Sunshine, The Innocents, The Squid and the Whale, The Tree of Life, Shunji Iwai's Vampire, Vivre Sa Vie, When We Leave, Wings of Desire

Visual Artists: Kristamas Klousch, Nita Collins, Tatiana Susla, Katja Faith, Natalie Shau, Anja Millen, Nicoletta Ceccoli, Gottfried Helnwein, Jenn Violetta, Nomi Chi, Darla Teagarden, Chad Michael Ward, Vania Zouravliov, Takato Yamamoto, Ray Caesar, Brian M. Viveros, Joel-Peter Witkin, Dino Valls, Joanna Chrobak, Isabelle Royet-Journoud, Sam Weber, Joao Ruas, Caryn Drexl, Akif Hakan Celebi

Music Acts: Rasputina, The Dresden Dolls/Amanda Palmer, Switchblade Symphony, Siouxsie and the Banshees/The Creatures, The Birthday Massacre, Nine Inch Nails, Jack Off Jill/Scarling, The Cure, Cocteau Twins, Collide, Kidneythieves, Tapping the Vein, Sopor Aeternus & The Ensemble of Shadows, Joy Division, Nick Cave, HUMANWINE, Ruby Throat, Soap&Skin, Regina Spektor, Fever Ray, Placebo, Depeche Mode, Imogen Heap, Jarboe, Florence + the Machine, Lia Ices, Portishead, Massive Attack, IAMX, Austra, Tori Amos, Black Tape for a Blue Girl

Historical Personalities: Silvia Plath, Oscar Wilde, Marie Antoinette, Joan of Arc, Elizabeth I, Marchesa Luisa Casati, Louise Brooks, Elizabeth Short (the "Black Dahlia"), Emily Dickinson, Howard Hughes, Orson Welles, Marilyn Monroe, Jack the Ripper, Carl von Cosel

Historical Periods: The Ancient World (Greece, Rome, Egypt, etc.), Elizabethan, Louis XVI/Marie Antoinette, Regency/Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian, 1920s, '30s, '40s, '50s, early to mid-'60s, & "THE FUTURE"

Authors (Dead): Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad, Charlotte Brontë, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Edith Wharton, George Orwell, H. G. Wells, Vladimir Nabokov, Anaïs Nin, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, D. H. Lawrence, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe

Authors (Living): Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Safran Foer, Haruki Murakami, Cormac McCarthy, A. M. Homes, Katherine Dunn, Neil Gaiman, Laurie Halse Anderson, Mark Z. Danielewski, China Miéville


"She was breathing deeply, she forgot the cold, the weight of beings, the insane or static life, the long anguish of living or dying. After so many years running from fear, fleeing crazily, uselessly, she was finally coming to a halt. At the same time she seemed to be recovering her roots, and the sap rose anew in her body, which was no longer trembling. Pressing her whole belly against the parapet, leaning toward the wheeling sky, she was only waiting for her pounding heart to settle down, and for the silence to form in her. The last constellations of stars fell in bunches a little lower on the horizon of the desert, and stood motionless. Then, with an unbearable sweetness, the waters of the night began to fill her, submerging the cold, rising gradually to the center of her being, and overflowing wave upon wave to her moaning mouth. A moment later, the whole sky stretched out above her as she lay with her back against the cold earth."
- Albert Camus

Nick tried making us a stuffed rolled omelette with green onions, spinach, mozzarella, soy sauce, chili oil, and maple syrup from a recipe on the animerecipes tumblr this morning (well, afternoon, I guess). Then we sliced it into pieces, and shared it, mmm. It didn't look much like the picture, but it turned out really yummy. <3

I made a list of my favorite movies from 2011 and did a short write-up on each for my blog, so check it out here.

I've been watching a lot of documentaries about black holes, stars, and cosmology. I love it.

Not much to report here. Life troops sludgily along. I'm still depressed sometimes about Persephone; I know some people may not understand it, and I can't explain why I was hurt so much and still am by what happened to her, but she was our baby and we were supposed to take care of her...and her death remains the one thing that has been sort of traumatizing in my life. Seeing any animal suffer upsets me a lot, let alone her. When I think of her being in that kind of pain, I can't stand it. I've tried to "get over" it as people tell me but I keep breaking up against it, that hard wall, the fact of her suffering; nothing can change it. And I can remember so clearly what Persephone used to look like sitting on my lap, it's like she should be right there, I can imagine her, so close, I feel like I should be able to just reach out and touch her, and I'll feel her skin, but she will never again be there, no matter how much we want her to be. And why not? And I can't describe how...frustrating that feeling is. She's just dead, she's just gone. That's what death really means. So now, on days when I'm feeling low, I know that Persephone's there, waiting there with her melancholy weight to haunt me, waiting for me. My life has been emptier since she died.

Would anyone like a postcard for Christmas? It won't be Christmas-themed, but it will be pretty. Each one is different. If you want one, just leave your mailing address in a comment below (comments will be screened). International addresses are fine.

And all the time the lights were aiming their dangerous icy darts at her eyes...she looked at vast empty spaces, strung with diamond chains. Alluring and delicately exotic, the sparkling clusters hung down, crystal fruit of some magic ice-vine, each glistening globe with its palpitating prismatic heart. They fascinated her, she could have loved them...if their shooting beams hadn't been so meteoric, so fierce. Again and again they stabbed her eyes with arrows of burning ice, penetrating the brain behind, till all her sick thoughts swam in their arctic glare. Slow, stately, splendid, aurora borealis opened and shut its gigantic fan, blazing on snow-slopes with rocks outcropping, on summits of rock or cloud, massed citadels, sublime in that glacial brilliance...The shapes were sliding...changing again...becoming a fabric of falling white. Soft as snowbirds, the white flakes were falling, turning as they fell...before her eyes, which had never seen falling snow...(an odd antique figure in a queer pointed hat slipped along the dream's dissolving edge)...falling always more thickly...till the air darkened...and she was somewhere else...
-- Anna Kavan, A Scarcity of Love

I saw this a few weeks ago, so this is kind of late, but here goes anyway. There's "spoilers," just FYI.


Sleeping Beauty (2011) is an Australian movie directed by Julia Leigh, starring Emily Browning and Rachael Blake. It's about a young college student named Lucy who joins a high-end erotic waitressing service that caters to the wealthy, in order to make ends meet, and further agrees to be one of the "sleeping beauties," so to speak, who form a more specialized subset of the girls. For each engagement she is driven to the madam/Clara's house, where she takes a powerful sedative in a cup of tea that induces a very heavy, undisturbable, deathlike sleep for a short period, and while she's out like the eponymous Sleeping Beauty, some client who has paid for the privilege, usually an older man, gets into bed with her and can do whatever they like with her unconscious body, short of actual penetration, for the duration of an hour. She is promised that when she wakes up, she will not remember a single thing, and for her it will be as if it never happened.

I liked this movie, and I'd been looking forward to it for a long time, ever since I saw the amazing trailer. I will have to watch it again sometime to see how I feel about it after a second viewing. But I suspect that it'll only grow on me. I love Emily Browning. She's so gorgeous, and there's a sadness about her, a "vulnerability," though I don't know if that's the right word; her character seems strong and indomitable, but also appears fragile, with her delicate, pale, doe-eyed, diminutive beauty.

Lucy has a perfect, easy grace; she is armored and dainty, utterly unapologetic, independent, very capable...she seems to be a rebel and individualist and vaguely insolent, while always remaining perfectly gracious. And a bit "mysterious," I suppose...many of her actions are unexplained, though they don't necessarily perplex me as things that need to be "figured out" or made sense of. She's opaque without being an enigma. There's something youthful and alive, and slightly fierce or feral, about her, an understated intelligence and sensuality, without an excess of explanation. I don't feel that the movie really tries to explain away Lucy's actions and characteristics too much (just as the rest of the movie is very much veiled), or to victimize her.

One of my favorite moments is near the beginning, a scene where she's sharing a line of cocaine in the bathroom with some Asian woman she's just found in the bar/club, which I find kind of powerful, and I think it has more of a low-simmer sensuousness somehow than the more overt displays of sexuality in other scenes. My other favorite moments are the moments when she shows raw emotion, in which she's more naked, and shows her vulnerability, her tenderness, and gives vent to her sadness, grief, fear, terror, frustration, ragged anger, confusion, etc. One of these is the scene where she's lying with her friend after he's OD'd, and she starts to cry in his arms. Another, and the most obvious, one, of course, is at the end, when she wakes up from her enchanted sleep to discover what's happened during that deathlike slumber.

This movie is very quiet and restrained. At no point is it overwhelming or over-demonstrative. It's like a series of vignettes, each revealing just a little, which is rather obscure and doesn't readily reveal its "meaning," and the whole movie has a certain opaque quality. Visually, it's quite beautiful. It has an austerity but also a gorgeousness...a rare visual elegance that parallels the somber classiness of Clara and her world. The style is extremely precise, crisp, tightly controlled, flawless; just very different from most movies. I feel like there wasn't a single shot that wasn't necessary, that could be considered "excessive," and each shot is perfectly framed and controlled. Its leanness stands in contrast to the trend in modern movies for more highly-wrought, chaotic qualities. It's evocative of vintage cinematic styles, and gives the film its intangible retro vibe. It also has a - I don't know what to call it, a...slightly...frightening?, haunting quality, a sense of foreboding, a hint of something sinister, chilling. The sense that something bad is going to happen - that expectancy is always there, just around the corner, beneath the surface. I'm not sure how it achieves this, but for me it definitely has an undertone of still, sterile, white eeriness, though very low-key. This comes through in the trailer, I think.


The ending:
I see the ending as a kind of total inversion of the traditional story of Sleeping Beauty, where the prince wakes her with the kiss of true love. A repeat client (the first one Lucy had, in fact: a dolorous, cryptic old man who just gently touched and admired her sleep-heavy, milk-pale body, and then lay side by side with her in a semblance of sleep) has requested that he be allowed to die in bed with drugged Lucy. (Presumably the body would be taken away before she comes to, with her being none the wiser.) So at the start of the session Clara doles out for him a lethal dose of the same drug that gives such a total, beautiful sleep to Lucy. Afterwards, Clara is sitting at the foot of the bed, having checked the old man's dead body, and observing that Lucy is still deathly-still and doesn't respond to her touch, she panics, in sudden and uncontrollable fear, thinking that she may have died...and she tries very hard to wake her up...shaking her by the shoulders violently, and even trying to give her mouth-to-mouth respiration (the "kiss"). When Lucy suddenly awakens, disoriented and shocked, coughing and sputtering, she looks around, only to see the old man lying dead in the bed next to her. It's not her prince, but this sick old man who's used her to fulfill his strange macabre-erotic death wish. It's not the prince's kiss, but Clara's breath of blind panic and terror. At this point she breaks down, screaming, sobbing, and pounding her hands against the headboard, in a long, unbroken torrent of pure, vented, naked, piercing emotion.

She was double barreled, like a shotgun, a female bull with an acetylene torch in her womb. In heat she focused on the grand cosmocrator, her eyes rolled back to the whites, her lips a-slaver. In the blind hole of sex she waltzed...her jaws unhinged like a snake's, her skin horripilating in barbed plumes.

The lips were finely parted, smoothed down with a thick paste of dark blood; I watched them open and close with the utmost fascination, whether they hissed a viper's hate or cooed like a turtle dove.

-- Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn



I will love you no matter how many mistakes I make when trying to reduce fractions, and no matter how difficult it is to memorize the periodic table. I will love you as the manatee loves the head of lettuce and as the dark spot loves the leopard, as the leech loves the ankle of a wader and as a corpse loves the beak of the vulture. I will love you as the iceberg loves the ship, and the passengers love the lifeboat and the lifeboat loves the teeth of the sperm whale, and the sperm whale loves the flavor of naval uniforms. I never want to be away from you again, except at work, in the restroom or when one of us is at a movie the other does not want to see.

-- Lemony Snicket, The Beatrice Letters




This live version of Chelsea Wolfe's "Halfsleeper" is so haunting.

When we're spinning out of darkened meadow wind
When we're flying like we're Mary's angels through the shattered glass
When we find that tall dark shadow waiting there with outstretched hands
He has given me a dress of red and you a skin of gray
We'll be twisting here for hours 'til the light will bring us day

i will wade out
till my thighs are steeped in
burning flowers
i will take the sun in my mouth
and leap into the ripe air
alive
with closed eyes
--ee cummings


Issue 06 of Coilhouse Magazine came out the week before last, so you should pick up a copy at your local purveyor of fine magazines and glossy/serial literature or from their online shop, if you have any such interest. I was excited to see my name in the credits section under "Copyeditors." Yay! I hope I get to contribute to future issues, maybe more. I think my favorite part of this issue is "An Open Intergalactic Letter to Klaus Nomi," because it's just so sincere and sweet.

On Wednesday I went to see Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman play music, sing, recite poetry/short stories, talk about various stuff, get into weird creative antics, and tenderly display their wildly sweet and deep love for each other, at the Moore Theatre. If I haven't mentioned this before (I'm sure I've mentioned this before), they're the most amazing couple. An inspiring creative duo. And it's a felicitous, funny twist of fate that they ended up together (for me, so unexpected and so right). We were up in the nosebleeds, the Moore is insanely totteringly steep and you kind of feel vertigo from up there, like you're going to fall down if you lean over the tiniest bit, but it's tiered in a way that every seat affords a pretty okay view of the stage, and it's kind of small and cozy but simultaneously spacious and stately. I love the domed ceiling, and the white-marbled lobby of the place. Neil's so cute! I adore him. His birthday was the next day (the 10th), so Amanda's gift to him was a cover of Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" and a number from Guys and Dolls. I love the way he looks at her when she's playing a song for him. Amanda is...a joy. She's just radiant. Her personality is so big. Like Neil has said, out of all the people in the world, there's no one like her. I'm sure that she'll be a famous personality for posterity.

And last night I went to Jason Webley's special 11/11/11 show, again at the Moore, which Amanda + Neil also made their appearance at (so I got to see them twice!). It was amazing. I like the idea of "Maybe the world isn't dying... Maybe she's heavy with child," in one of his songs, and he played a new song that I loved (something about the sea and the moon, but I honestly can't remember the lyrics because I've only heard it once), and read us a story that he'd written (which I do remember but I'm not going to summarize because it would detract from it, and I don't have a transcript). At the end of the show he exited the theater with his bunch of giant red balloons, or led the way rather (because some people followed him), and I wasn't one of that group, but I'm told that he went down to the water and set off in a boat. He's now taking a break from music and his constant touring (he is an accordion-wielding vagabond and bard, wanderlustful, always traveling around the world and doing his shows; this year he did about 200 shows in 35 countries, and the 11/11 show in Seattle was his last one). It was his 37th birthday. It was glorious but sad, because he seems to be saying goodbye, and trying to tell us that a cloudbank suddenly parting and revealing the moon, which was beaming down at him like the eye of God, boring straight into his soul and leaving clarity behind in the drill-hole, sometime near the end of last year, told him this. I think I know what he's saying.
ETA: I found a recording of the song! Here it is! It's a sweet, powerful song, tentatively titled "Promise to the Moon," I guess. And there's also a recording of the story.

Ugh, the holidays are coming up. I hate the holidays that you have to spend with your family. I like Halloween; everything else is about family or national pride, something of that ilk. A touch of pedantry.

Pour me into a river, please. Toss me away (to the winds, to the sea). Live your life for me. Forget me because you will; do it on your own time, not carelessly but tenderly. Scatter me under an apple blossom tree. Just get in your car and drive and when you reach a nice, sunny spot, nowhere in particular, leave my leavings there. Erect me a plaque inside your heart, I want it to say, "I threw my bunch into the spreading wave. I said, 'Consume me, carry me to the furthest limit'" (Woolf), carve my memorial, your paean to me, on anonymous tree bark, a tree which will bear my scar for some springs. I want to be ashes, the least thing you can reduce me to. I don't want to be an embalmed corpse, living out the last days of my corporeal existence here on earth six feet under dirt, rotting, worms only adoring my bones and living inside my ears. That's horrible to think of. In the end, it doesn't matter much what happens to my body. I'm gone, it's a place that I can never go back to. But I wish right now, while I'm alive, that someone would have me cremated and dump the ashes somewhere (preferably not down the toilet or in a garbage can) when I'm gone.