Monday, May 24, 2010

Topshop Dump

Meadham Kirchhoff paired with Topshop to create an "affordable" collection. What resulted of this pairing, which should have been cosmically amazing, is a little lackluster. There are some standout dresses that are covered in sparkly, lacey detailing, but the six polka dot t-shirt things that make up like a fifth of the whole lot kind of kill the depressed fairy vibe and make me want to do aerobics instead.

What I do love:

Photobucket

Photobucket

Things that fall in the why? category:

Photobucket

Photobucket

The glitter is already falling off! Meadham! Seriously?

Now, Kate Moss SS10, which I really dig. There is quite a bit of variation, yet the whole thing still resembles a coherent collection. For a Spring/Summer collection there is a good amount of black which somehow works well with the nudes and pastels. And then there is the video which accompanies the line, in which Kate Moss will try to seduce you. If the Strange Boys hadn't been used as the shimmy-inducer here, I probably would have stopped watching because you can't even see the clothes that well. It's more a showcase for Kate's squinty/sexy eyes, golden locks, and weird dancing. That being said, I've still watched it three times in the last ten minutes because I love Ryan Sambol's voice and the blinding lights.



Favorites:

Photobucket

Photobucket

Photobucket


Photobucket

I've also had a long-standing love affair with Topshop's shoe department, and these are my recent flings:

Photobucket

Photobucket

I need. And I know everyone is going NUTS over the makeup line, and while I like the packaging, I think it's overpriced and not gasp-worthy.

That's enough, I need to get back to living. Not really.

Sunday, May 23, 2010

Truth is supposed to be what's real,
the highlighted line of solid YES amongst the mess
of images of women I've never met,
lines I've never heard spoken in a fluorescent lit cafeteria,
nor heard uttered by any other hungry diner.
I want to outline my ideals in a bold black felt tip marker,
because I don't know what they are after every daring admittance of mine.
My hands were steady, as they are every time the fleshy beast reaches its
taloned claw out my drawn open rosey lips.
I take it as a sign of truth, that steadiness.
I pried open my own mouth and let it all slide out, every indiscretion
as I saw the disappointment land on my sister's face,
as she saw the family tree sprouting another bulb ripe with carnal-centricity;
I love everyone, and everything a little too much for her taste.

Saturday, May 22, 2010

All the nature, the nature
it just isn't natural anymore.
Who will read a poem written
about the wilderness that is a blade of grass
or the house that is a great oak
a thousand times?
The words, they're stale.
But I'm sure those masters never thought
images of spring would fall limp and gray
as a pile of winter sloughing of dead skin.
And that's sad,
but it's not a shame.
We are the children of nature,
but not this docile,
powdered whore who they call our mother.
I have a window, and right outside it, is a tree.
I can look at it anytime I feel like I need to return to the fold of Earth.
But, I have a double layer of curtains,
because I feel like it.
I think they forget that nature is a brute monkey,
a hyena feasting on discards,
biting cold,
sand storms,
hair growing underneath the arms.
Stealing, that is nature.
Kindness is a corruption of what is natural.
Yet, we have learned from our mother's drunken mistakes.
We are better than her, we don't have to reassure ourselves.
But we still don't own her, we cannot own what gave us, us.
Why then the odes that go on for hours in endless
self-conscious praise of a matriarch,
who left us at ten, snotnosed and dumb?
I don't know, I prefer to keep my curtains drawn.  

Lady Vibes

Photobucket
Photobucket
Photobucket
Photobucket
Photobucket

The only pictures I ever like that haven't been dug out of a decrepit dresser drawer are the ones my friend Michelle takes. It may have something to do with the professional lens, but it's probably because they are usually of/with people I wouldn't mind spending twenty four hours a day with.

ALSO:

Explosive TNT

Nothing seems flat,
in the realms of the unreal
where sound sits beside me
in an act of paternal comfort.
Nothing slides or slithers,
because it doesn't have to;
it just melts.
I gather my teeth and I settle my tongue;
this evening has been a treacherous joy.
Numbness is the deepest sense
I know, and taste is the realest feeling I know.
I am awake with the realization of unbridled
awareness.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Inspiration as of Late





I've been in a Louise Brooks/Egyptian/Seventies/Gypsy sort of mood lately.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Who Needs a Rope When I Have You?

That's a real choke-hold you have there. There's a precision to it; an unexpected strength from such a wobbly character. My trachea is unscathed, because you never really touched it, did you? You didn't have to because the back of my neck is just as susceptible to the suffocating power of touch. There won't be a yellowing bruise there, dotted like day old chicken skin, because that's the only part of my body that isn't allergic to pressure. But I feel you cutting off the oxygen to my head still as I sit alone, naked and battered as a peeled apple. I can feel the mold coming on too, and the gnats are starting to gather around me like I'm some sort of cornucopian Pagan sacrifice. I invited this dastardly play though; an action birthed from my own rottenness. This stinking feeling of confusion as to what I am, and who you are is almost as smothering as your grip on my brain stem, (elegantly coined 'nape of the neck') a few weeks ago. It was a grip not of blood lust, but of mechanical love. That is what the air smelled like anyways, I may have been mistaken. I would have preferred a fingernail cracking through the surface of my skin, breaking microscopic tunnels full of blood and plasma, in a brief and infinite burst of violent passion, to the murderous weight of your sedentary arm. I am choking and yet, I continue, because I know it's my own fucking arm that's twisted around and keeping my neck so heavy.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Meadham Kirchhoff


When I first took the time to really appreciate Ed and Ben's latest collection, and I have to admit (woefully) that it wasn't that long ago, I had a brief cataclysmic mental freak-out. It's dark and covered in lace plus it has a demented Indian princess feel to it, all things I'm naturally attracted to. This collection makes me never want to abandon my dress up box ways.

Chapter 2

Refresher Course: Chapter 1



My hand was outstretched onto this gypsy woman's table. My digits were spread out so taught and strained that it looked like I was trying to make salt water taffy out of my flaky palm skin. When my raven haired mother went to Connecticut every July to visit her staunchly Republican mother and father she would bring me back a crinkled white bag full of chewy bits that sort of tasted like that salted air, but more of food dye and other artificial flavorings probably invented by a white-coated scientist. I wanted some though right then to get caught in my teeth and stretch around my tongue as I felt my hand being fondled by this elaborately dressed con artist.  This wasn't the first place I had thought of running to when I deliberately left behind my friends while were out on our "grand fucking city adventure." But I remembered reading the words of some girl, somewhere, who had run away only to find solitude in being curled up next to a black cat in the back room of an apothecary. I settled for the false mysticism of Madame Havishin and her plastic beads, if only so I could hear Violet later say, "Caleb, we would find you smelling of incense and toting a crystal ball." She would then laugh in the way that I knew was real and put her hand on my back guiding me into the taxi.

-Would you like your palm read, your aura cleansed? What? What do you want?

Le Madame had a lisp.

-Um, just do what you usually do.
-Every soul that crosses that threshold (she made an elaborate and unnecessary motion towards the door) does so with varying intentions. I can predict your future but I will not weed through your indecisiveness. You know what you want. Now tell me.

Violet

-Alright the palm is fine.
-Twenty please. It helps ease-

Con artist. I couldn't help myself. Wouldn't let her keep on with her tainted green prophecies.

-Let me read you.

She looked at me with a startlingly steady gaze. I must not have been the first scraggly haired boy with chapped lips who came in looking for some kind of entertainment.

-My boy, I can smell the alcohol coming out of your pores.
-Really? Above the cat piss?

She laughed.

-Do you want me to read you or not? I have customers seeking divine help out there.

There was no one I could see through the beaded curtain.

-Okay riddle me this turban woman. Who names their daughter Violet if she's not a character in a children's book? And why would this Violet insist on being alone when she knows it makes her miserable? And why, why did I think I could change her when all I have to offer are some dingy introspections? Who would want to love anyone, or anything? Who would love Violet? She’s a terrible person.

The Con Artist was now my Con Artist;  I could see her attentiveness growing. I may have actually turned out to be a money making opportunity in that vulnerable, sharing mood I was in.

-My child, does Violet know that you love her?
-No. I mean yes, but she thinks it’s funny so it hardly counts. I wrote her a five page letter two weeks ago. She hasn’t said anything. All I do is wait. Wait for Violet. All I ever do. Wait. For Violet.
-And does she ever come?

-Sometimes. But I can tell that she’s been somewhere else, with someone else. She likes to rub it in my face without actually saying anything. But I can just tell. Whenever she’s been out with a guy she put’s her hair behind her ears while she’s talking to me. It makes her look so little.

-Do you like to be that person who waits like a dog?

-I hate it. I want to be doing what Violet’s doing. I want her to see, you know? What it feels like to be fucked over. Over and over and over. She slept with me once, I don’t think I told you this.

My Con Artist raised her brows slightly. I don’t know how I noticed, the room was spinning into a hellish kaleidoscope vision. I responded to her silent question.

-Yeah! Oh it was wonderful. She was crying for some fucked up reason and I was there. Like a dog. I thought she finally saw me for what I was, a good guy who had been waiting for her to notice. But no. I was a mercy case. I can see that now.

-This girl, she does not sound like a very good woman. Why don’t we ask the spirits if there is anyone else in store for you?

-Anyone else? And would it cost me twenty dollars to find these faceless women in your crystal ball?

-I have to eat.

-Yeah well fucking tough.

I swept the snot off my face with the already cold and wet sleeve of my sweater and stood up, wobbling but strong. Reaching into my right pocket, I remembered that I had given away my phone to some girl in a grand gesture of wanton disregard which occurred simultaneously with my peak of drunkenness.  I was at least fifteen miles away from my own bed and seventeen miles from Violet’s. I had no money either, the real reason why I couldn’t afford Madame Havishin. There was a small but verdant park directly across the street from where I was standing and from what I could make out, the benches looked incredibly plush and my head was being sawed into eighths. I looked both ways down the black and nearly desolate street (I don’t know why I bothered) and made a twenty foot jaunt to my temporary deciduous bedroom.



(My power has been out and I've been laying here with four little tea lights to keep me company. I was pretending I was a brooding woman of the seventeenth century. Good Thursday fun.)

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Buzz KILL

I'm holding in my hand a half empty tube of face wash, it's the deep cleansing kind, the brand is generic. I'm following the same ritual I do each time I take a shower at 3:00 AM; the lights aren't on so as not to wake up the snoozing normals that have been tucked in for hours. (The only light comes from the upside down night light that casts out a glow just bright enough to make out the outlines of each plastic jelly-filled bottle. I have to keep it upside down because the wires are loose. It's a nuisance) I've already washed my face once I think, I can't remember. My knee caps are coming loose from their places and they are sliding up and down my legs. My hand is shaking violently I realize. I look down at the half empty tube; white and familiar. It seems so far away, just as my hand does. And then with the spine cracking boom of a thousand Texas fireworks, I'm back in the parallel universe of sheer panic I haven't been to in a million Earth years. The knee caps bounce up and down vertically, like they are nodding in agreement with the unhealthy beat of the heart. As hot water falls to the yellow tile, soap scum covers her. She's forgotten how she cleans herself. What's next? Conditioner. Bend over, pick up the bottle. It feels so heavy in her right hand which is still shaking. Open it. Open it. Pressure on the sides, and there. She covers her hair with the thick purple muck, smoothing it in. The wire skeleton of the shower door looks like the barbed wire of a prison for the first time to her, and it looks like it's coming closer so she backs up towards the opposite wall conscious that she looks disturbingly paranoid. I'm not letting this happen. I need to run out of the shower still soapy and naked to rouse everyone up to tell them I've broken again. No. I breathe in so deeply exhaling a breath that smells far too much of hazelnut coffee. That's why. False paranoia and unreality is coming in through my ears and eyes because of coffee. That's so sad, it's funny and she smiles to herself. She breathes in steam and the sense of purposely forgotten perception. Why did I smile? Usually the smell of shampoo causes me to think of things like pop-up books, that thing that made me laugh earlier, the impermeable satisfaction I get from living. Now it's making me cry and I'm smiling? She thinks to herself that she must be back in the thriving nightmare of questioning every move to see whether it is alien or not. For god sakes, it really is not that big of a deal I tell myself. My brain is craving sleep and I tried to slip it some caffeine instead. Clearly my head knows what it wants and I cannot sip it from a straw. She sticks her face under the shower head, turning the heat on further so as to burn away this attack of unfair, shambling anxiety. Pressing hard on her eyes and rubbing her face, she sighs loudly. And then it is over I think to myself, though I'm still trembling like an anxious lap dog. I condition my hair again, this time savoring the way my hair curls at the end as I run a brush through it, kinking out the knots that I left there the first time through. With a brisk rinse, I'm done. I exit the tile chamber and I towel myself off, talking to no one in a tone of disbelief. Really? Seriously? Fuck. I pull on some cotton clothes and hurry my way out of the bathroom back into cold reality.

Sunday, May 2, 2010

i cannot invent something
something that needs to said
it should already be there,
waiting like a patient virtue
on a plastic chair
in a white hall
that is when i tell it i'm there
then take it by the hand
strumming its knuckles,
kneading its wrist,
whispering my words into its little ear
a confident friendship
is what
truth and my words need
truth as the guide and reluctant teacher
bowing to me
coming to me
waiting for me
my words as the ambivalent leech,
the benefiting party in
a state of commensalism
i take her heart sometimes though
(i really shouldn't)
and place it still beating in a jar
while i type out
electronic symbols
clean of blood
clean of life
clean as white
clean as a lie

can i borrow that painkilling drip of yours?

silence

WHY THANK YOU

and i place the needle in my blue vein
running a race in my mind that i know i can't win
i'll type until i've taken all the dope i can from
truth
she'll need it when she comes to.
and i'll need her to see what i can't.