Lifting the mask was about the worst thing we could have done, under the circumstances.
He shone. I mean, he was somehow confected…caramelian…slick, sticky, and powdery, with golden sugar dusting his lashes that shook loose into motes as he fluttered awake, fluttered and fixed us with a liquid look.
And we looked back, which was perhaps our second mistake. That shell-chocolate masklet, perched on heated brow, began to wilt, and so, for a moment, did our determination. But we remembered our hunger, and drew strength from it as we chose our knives, and the boy began to struggle.
Your gross negligence in assuming I am ashamed of any of my musical predilections is noted, and will be revenged. There is absolutely no reason to assume, self-righteous pricks that you are, that the carmine creeping up my collar is anything other than stoic pride, a touch of the ol’ toxoplasma gondii, and perhaps a brief spike in my everyday, baseline feelings of discomfort.
Listen you, I was enjoying the Ruski pop nymphets way back, before any hoity-toity English remixes got loose, much less actual American album releases. This shit was edgy and inaccessible. Hell, it still is! I would get home from my live-action Vampire the Masquerade roleplaying session at the local college campus (back when I was a ginger-curled nymphet myself), maybe boot up a game of Fallout 2, invite my BFF Steve over, and we’d watch these videos, on repeat, in silent awe. Why, I thought to myself, did I not have a dark pixie of a partner, an eternal semi-succubus, someone to cling to during the long nights of crippling self-doubt, someone to share my pants and lipgloss, someone to hold my hair while I purged, someone with whom to ghost ride the whip? I mean, someone besides Steve?
Now, emerald-haired, naked in a wooden trunk, chugging Red Bull and typing on a keyboard for which I cannot see the screen, I ask myself: if I had found her, this dark unicorn, would things have turned out better?
My friend in fashion-fecundus, Jilly, once asserted that deconstructed fashion, by and large, is in a positively woeful state; and to be perfectly honest I am apt to agree. Chopping out the neck of a t-shirt, ironing on a few patches, and sewing ribbon in a few places to effect a gathered look does not an item of deconstructed couture make.
Further, visible stitches in old olive cloth, safety pins, and runs in haphazardly stacked stockings also does not an item of deconstructed couture make. Yet otherwise observant people seem convinced that this is the way these fashions are meant to be executed, applying their incorrect opinions to work that more often than not results in something awful.
Gibbous Fashions is the antithesis to those that can not understand, creating perfect (a word I refuse to use lightly) understated, deconstructed fashions. Do the models all look like hobos? You’re god damn right they do; impeccably dressed hobos with whom I want to while away my days in ivy covered gardens drinking weak tea from chipped sets and looking fabulous in the process.
The photography of her pieces may be a bit dark, making a good gander at the high level of detail that’s gone into each piece difficult, but the items in the shop (yes, there are in fact pieces for sale that don’t cost your first born) speak for themselves. Have a look, and if you have the means snatch up any items that remain. Not to do so lands you squarely in “remiss in Ectomo Fashion Brigade duties” territory, and the penalties for that, dear reader, are high.
No one is taking the future envisioned by 99% percent of anime a step closer to reality than Dubai, who recently revealed their selection for their newest “Look how much money we have, motherfuckers!” building project, the 6th Crossing:
FXFOWLE INTERNATIONAL’s proposal for the architectural design of a 1.7km (1 mile) and 205m (615 feet) bridge in Dubai was selected by the country’s Roads & Transport Authority in a major international design competition. The firm’s winning bridge design further advances the infrastructure and transportation initiatives in Dubai. FXFOWLE’s design makes the 6th Crossing the largest and tallest spanning arch bridge in the world.
My father and I have long maintained a correspondence of epic intellectual proportions. Usually these take the form of discussions on science and science fiction, Rick Gauger being an award-winning science fiction author, and all-around life of the party.
Recently I sent him a link to a collection of cartoons on the fashion wars of the early 1800s, which were as vicious as they were short-lived. Men and women abandoned the stiff, straight-laced wardrobes of the 1700s and briefly adopted a more modern, flowy, comfortable look. This was the famous Regency era, in which Jane Austen lived and wrote. Unfortunately for fashion, it was quickly destroyed by the severe repression of the Victorian age’s corsets, high heels, and silly hats. Dad, armchair fashion historian, elaborates [with my notes appended, thusly]:
Yes, I’ve always thought it odd that women went out of, and back into corsets in the early 19th Century. In our own time, the 60s got over in a hurry, as women went back to makeup and hairdos in the early 70s. In my century [Dad is 64], I think that the corporations panicked as they saw hair styles, makeup and tailored clothing apparently becoming obsolete, and they put on a major propaganda offensive. The majority of people (including women) never understood the 60s anyway, so they were ready to buy into it. We had a last hurrah of big cars, just at the moment when we should’ve been changing our ways.
Another reason for the quick loss of those styles was that a woman really has to be very good-looking [such as my mother, 54, who to this day refuses to learn how to use an eyelash curler, probably because she’s too busy beating men away from her door with a stout stick] to be able to go without makeup and tailoring. There were a couple of girls among the grad students of 1965 that made me froth at the mouth; most others, however smart and sweet they might be, just didn’t have what it took. One of them was the girl who welcomed me back from my first tour in Vietnam. She came out in a nightie that made her look like a joke. I would have rather died than hurt her feelings at that moment.
Very few of the parties I host at the Junta end up with us stripping down to our pastel-colored underpants and drunkenly prancing around the room with a constabulary of rugged, cocoa-colored Africans. Something about the Byronic air of the place — the textured, wine-colored wall paper; the oak golems staring out of the mantles; the dress code of fezzes, moustaches, pince-nezzes and smoking jackets; the imminently respectable personage of our man Jittimer arching an eyebrow at any display of youthful frivolity in the corner; the gigantic, Sunday-large skull of Eliza filling the room like a brutal sun — does not lend itself to sucking a jello shot out of an African-American’s navel. More the shame. I would give a chunk of flesh to attend this party, resurrected — immortal — from the dusts of time thanks to a handful of flea market Polaroids and the revivication power of the Internet.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
