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Shirin Neshat: Untitled (from Women of Allah Series), 1994/2015 (Silver gelatin print and ink, 60 x 42 ¼ inches)

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Écorché of the day

Anatomy sketch after Haincelain (pencil and chalk)

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Literal magic for brown eyes 👁

Fenty Beauty Killawatt Foil Freestyle Highlighter Duo in 7daywknd/Poolside, Urban Decay 24/7 Glide-On Eye Pencil in Roxy

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War & Peace (my review of Lush Tank Battle perfume)

'The Briar Wood' — Edward Burne-Jones (1870-1890)

Lush Tank Battle opens intense and sharp: a disorienting yet strangely alluring mix of syrupy bubblegum, cold metal, and petrichor. As it dries down, the sharpness relents and gives way to a softer, hazy, and hypnotic blend of spices, patchouli, and moss, evocative of a less floral, earthier Sikkim Girls (also by Lush).

Wearing this scent while going for a walk in a densely wooded ravine leading to a cemetery conjured up imagery from Edward Burne-Jones’ painting ‘The Briar Wood’: a frenzied yet tranquil tableau of armoured knights surrendered in sleep, their metal-encased bodies twisted and tangled in a forest overflowing with pink-white flowers and serpentine vines.

For all of its darkness and occasional harshness (even the liquid itself is a deep wine-brown that stains the skin), the scent is more meditative than melancholic or mournful. Tank Battle's seductive murkiness blurs the line between war and peace, finding an ambivalent beauty in both.

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PSL season is upon us 🧡

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Origins of the Cleland "Elvis" lip

Genealogy is so cool... I had no idea there was a bad ass, folkloric origin story involving a fight with the devil behind my inherited facial asymmetry on the Cleland side of my family... Source: Ancient family of Cleland (John Burton Cleland, 1905)

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Flamenco vignette

Josie Sinnadurai 'La Galesa' performing at Drom Taberna in Toronto.

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Chthonic Fantasia (my review of 'Fellini's Casanova')

Enlightenment-era Venice, the actual birthplace of Casanova, serves as the perfect metaphor for Casanova’s life. Man’s lofty ambitions, which aim to elevate him above mere earthly mortals: art, architecture, and social pursuits, float perilously atop unnatural, fragile structures, which will inevitably sink and be consumed by the primordial depths of the lagoon. In Fellini’s adaptation of the notorious libertine’s memoirs, Casanova likewise attempts a failed transcendence of reality through elaborate fantasy and self-aggrandizement, which lead him only back to himself. 

Fellini’s vision for his Casanova biopic was to create a “portrait of nothingness.” The director hated the man, dismissing him as a “facade” and “barren” with a “non-existent life” who lived in a “fog.” This take inspired the look of the character: far from a “Latin lover,” Donald Sutherland’s shaven, bulbous head and prosthetic nose and chin give him the appearance of a worm, faceless and without personality, and as he attempts to gain patronage as a great intellectual, he slithers from court to court, and bed to bed, leaving little to no impression. 

Inside the courts, despite their ornate costumes and luxurious furnishings, almost everyone Casanova encounters looks like a corpse: bloodless with caked on makeup and garishly flamboyant clothing that only highlight their anemic pallor; the living dead entombed by decadence. Desperate for recognition, the worm Casanova parasitically attempts to burrow his way into the diseased and corrupt elite underworld through slimy flattery, pompous boasts, and plagiarized poetry. Indeed, at one point in the film, at an entomologist’s home, he faints at the sight of an insect being stabbed, saying that he could feel the stabs himself, a rare instance of empathy. 

Casanova’s prodigious sex life is rendered as nothing but a repetitive, robotic procedure. To underscore this, whenever he initiates intercourse, he ritualistically turns on a flightless, mechanical, musical bird, that impotently flaps its metal wings and dances to a childlike tune. Despite his impersonal and cold approach to love-making, Casanova insists that he is not just a body, but that his wit and intelligence are what sustain him in the act. He has sex with a potential patron as an alchemical experiment to help her achieve “purification.” For Casanova, sex can’t just be “sex:” what should be the most intimate experience between two people, is an elaborate science experiment in his quest to ascend to greatness. 

When we reach the point of Casanova’s death, he is old and alone, with an unnaturally powdered and rouged face, evocative of Aschenbach in Visconti’s Death in Venice. At the moment of his death, Nino Rota’s childlike and haunting mechanical lullaby plays as Casanova is reunited with his last great sexual conquest, a robotic doll, and they dance on the frozen lagoon. A beautifully sad image, it highlights that what Casanova ultimately dreamed for was death: an impossible frozen crystallization of perfection, rather than revel in the messy sorrows and joys of life on earth.

After rewatching the film, I was reminded of another movie that also depicts a blank man passively pursuing an over-the-top idea of erotic adventure that culminates in a Venetian masked ball: Eyes Wide Shut. After trying to match his wife’s adulterous fantasies with his own, the film ends with a reconciliation: 

Alice Harford: I do love you and you know there is something very important we need to do as soon as possible. Dr. Bill Harford: What's that? Alice Harford: Fuck.

The final word has an oddly romantic ring to it; it reminds them that they need to get out of their heads, strip the erotic of all of its pretentions and politics, and get back down to earth in an act of mutual recognition and sharing. While fantasy is a powerful internal resource from which to draw upon for inspiration and energy, too much escapism and narcissistic indulgence can close you off from the greatest experiences in the material world, including love.

“Fellini’s Casanova” translates Casanova’s memoirs into a tragic tale spoken not by the man, but by the void in Casanova’s heart. While it’s certainly not a film for everyone, and may even disgust and exhaust many, there’s no denying that Fellini’s trademark id-driven direction, indulgence, surrealism, and flashes of childlike sentiment and pathos are well-suited to the subject.

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Rest in Power David Graeber

Other quotes:

"The Future has become a kind of hidden dimension of reality, an immanent presence lying behind the mundane surface of the world, with a constant potential to break out but only in tiny, imperfect flashes. In this sense we are forced to live with two very different futures: that which we suspect will actually come to pass—perhaps humdrum, perhaps catastrophic, certainly not in any sense redemptive—and The Future in the old revolutionary, apocalyptic sense of the term: the fulfillment of time, the unraveling of contradictions. Genuine knowledge of this Future is impossible, but it is only from the perspective of this unknowable Outside that any real knowledge of the present is possible. The Future has become our Dreamtime."

"I actually came to the conclusion that thinking is not something done by a single person. We have a false model of what thinking is. Because you can't really think by yourself, can you? You have to create someone else in your mind to explain things to, and to have an imaginary conversation with. This idea was inspired in part by the philosopher of cybernetics, Andy Clark, who proposed something he calls the extended mind hypothesis. Basically, the argument goes like this: Say you're doing long division on a piece of paper instead of doing it in your head. Clark asks why the piece of paper is not just as much a part of your mind while you're doing that calculation as the part of your brain that's doing the math. He says there's no reason at all. There are a million similar examples that philosophers like to trundle out—you have a bad memory so you write everything down. Is that piece of paper then part of your mind?"

"'Mind' isn't 'brain'— the brain is just an organ; your mind is the dynamic interaction of various moving elements that culminates in thought. Philosophers like Clark are willing to take that argument this far, but the question that never seems to occur to them is this: when you're having a conversation with someone else, is their mind part of your mind? Nowadays, many philosophers of consciousness like to note just how razor-thin this thing we call 'consciousness', that self-aware part of our mental operations, really is. So consciousness is interactive, it's dyadic or triadic. It's a fallacy to imagine that thinking is something you largely do alone. On some level, of course, we already know that. But I don't think we've even begun to explore the full implications."

"Some of the most radical, most revolutionary movements today base themselves in indigenous communities, which are communities that see themselves as traditionalists but think of tradition itself as a potentially radical thing. So the deeper the roots you have, the more challenging things you can do with them."

"Is it possible to become bored with hopelessness? Call it despair fatigue."

"I find the word ‘protest’ problematic. With ‘protest’ it sounds as though you’ve already lost. It’s as though it’s part of a game where the sides recognise each other in fixed positions. It becomes like the Foucauldian disciplinary game where both sides sort of constitute each other. In that sense, Foucault was right: resistance is almost required to have power. Which is why I like the concept of direct action. Direct action is a matter of acting as if you were already free."