consumerism wow: smelly stuff

At some point in my early 20s, I decided that some girly things -- such as the color pink (especially on Xbox controllers), glitter (especially on stickers that you put on Xbox controllers), and froofy bath products (entirely unrelated to Xbox controllers) -- actually are awesome. This decision extended to perfume once I discovered that some perfumes don't smell like old ladies and won't ever be forcibly applied to my eyeballs by helpful saleswomen in department stores. Soon after, I discovered that some perfumes are made by geeks, for geeks, and I was done for. Guys, I have a perfume stash. And I want more. Right now, specifically:


The limited edition perfume oil Smut 2010 by Elizabeth Barrial at the goth/dork-chic Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab (BPAL). Beth puts out several sets of limited edition scents every year, in addition to the several hundred general catalog scents she sells at BPAL (and Twilight Alchemy Lab, Dark Delicacies, the CBLDF, and etc.). Smut is from her Lupercalia line, which will be available until March 31st this year. She does a Lupercalia line every year, but hasn't put out a version of Smut for the past two or three, and I was starting to panic that she'd gotten bored with it and wasn't going to bring it back. Because it smells like sugar & musk and everything nice naughty, and I need it for life. Though it's way too powerful for day wear, it's my favorite scent to wear at night with something slinky if I'm heading to a bar or out dancing. A 5 ml bottle runs $17.50 and should be used so, so sparingly that it'll last for years. (Though BPAL does offer samples -- imp's ears -- of its general catalog for $3.50 apiece or 6 for $19.50, no such thing is available for limited edition scents. But you can find fan-decanted samples on ebay & etc., and if you're in the Atlanta or LA/Burbank areas, you can sniff & sample everything at monthly Will Calls, on or near the full moon, of course. [Hint: The next full moon is this weekend, folks.]) Ordering from the website will garner a couple random imp's ears per bottle purchased, and shipping (via USPS) will run you a flat $6.50 and may take a few weeks, as they hand-blend everything fresh and always have orders in queue.


Okay, I sorta cheated the concept of Consumerism Wow with that last one 'cause I've sampled previous versions of Smut, but here's a thing I've been properly admiring from afar: the entire line of Brooke's Villainess scents, though perhaps particularly Blood, Villainess, Shanghaied, Ginger Snapped, Dulces en Fuego, Jai Mahal, Pearl Diver, and Silk & Cyanide. Also falling under the category of goth/dork-chic, the inspirations for the Villainess line are a wee bit less esoteric than BPAL's tend to be, but, y'know, I'm not always looking for my perfumes to challenge my vocabulary and reading level. And they offer a good bit of their general catalog not only as $16-a-pop perfume oils in holy-whoa-kickass apothecary bottles, but also as bars of soap (hiIhaveasoapfetish), and jars of soft soap, body scrub, lotion, and masque. They also do limited edition thingies, and offer samples of their scents in soap format for a buck apiece (and two come free with every order). Shipping (via USPS) should run you the actual cost of shipping an item of the weight of your order to the address where you want to receive it.


My third, incongruously ungothy scent desire is a great deal of what Christopher Brosius creates for his CB I Hate Perfume line (mostly Russian Caravan Tea, Memory of Kindness, and November, but really I want to sniff them all). Brosius is also the dude responsible for my-favorite-person-ever-Alan Cumming's tongue-so-much-in-cheek-it-looks-like-a-rude-gesture scent line, Cumming [video link to hilarious adorable commercial], which is how I heard of CB I Hate Perfume a couple years back. (Cumming seems to be out of scent-print now, though is still available if you poke around for it.) And THAT is how I came to spend perhaps a few hours obsessively clicking through every scent note on the CB site. If I had a time-traveling pogo stick and whole moneypile sitting around that I had nothing in particular planned for, I'd so totally pogo up to New York and buy myself a custom-blended scent as of a couple years ago, and it'd smell like cookies baking + scotch + earl grey tea + sexylady. But lacking such a moneypile (and the skills necessary to pogo 878 miles and through time), I'll merely consider ordering one each (over the course of, say, the next 50 years) of his 2-ml "travel size" perfume samples, which run $12-$21 and ship via UPS.

review: Dead Men's Boots

Just finished Dead Men's Boots, which is the third book in Mike Carey's Felix Castor series, which is turning out to be an upstanding addition to the supernatural noir thriller trend. I was a little dubious about the first book, The Devil You Know -- although I'd enjoyed most of Carey's run of Hellblazer, upon discovering that he'd written a novel set in London about a hard-boiled blue-collar magician-for-hire who hailed from Liverpool, wore a trenchcoat, chain smoked, had a tragic history of getting his friends well and truly fucked, was so rakish that he still got along well with The Ladies despite maybe not laundering his clothes ever, and was not supposed to be John Constantine, well. Like I said, dubious.

It turned out that I enjoy portrayals of John Constantine so much (he's my inappropriate comic book boyfriend) that I don't mind when he's not called John Constantine. Castor is everything you want in an antihero -- cocky and fallible, the sort of too-clever-for-his-own-good that gets him both into trouble and out of it again. And Carey's non-Hellblazer-related, alternate-reality setting of a modern world in which the undead are widely rising and exorcists are part of the workforce struck me as deliciously uncomfortable and unpleasant. (I think that I like supernatural noir so much because it's so unpleasant. It's a sort of escapism in which you get to set down the book and think, "Well, sure my life sucks, but I haven't had any extensive bodily damage, death threats, or demon uprisings to cope with today. Win!")

I found the first two books (with Vicious Circle following The Devil You Know) fun but a bit clumsy, as though Carey hadn't quite gained his novel-legs yet. Dead Men's Boots is better (oh I didn't mean for this to be a pun) executed. The plotline has more frays but a tighter wind -- it kept me guessing but drew everything in neatly (if messily, entrails-wise) at the end. The sex & violence are more purposeful -- sleaze and shock value are important elements in noir, but I didn't find those elements to be exploitive in Dead Men's Boots. (That is, the violence is graphic but not lovingly detailed, and I think Castor, as the first-person narrator, has grown up a bit since the first book and become more self-aware about sex & sexuality. Importantly for sometimes-angry-feminist-me, Carey portrays the male and female rapes that occur as violent acts rather than sexual ones.) And the characters in the book, both men and women, are more sympathetic and whole. The language in Dead Men's Boots is well-wrought, intelligent, extensively British (kudos to the US publisher for not noticeably Americanizing Castor's vocabulary), and dense with pop culture references both modern and classic, literary and musical, dorky and mainstream. It's campy and silly, but it does what it sets out to do -- entertain, darkly -- very well.

What I'm really hoping is that someone turns Dead Men's Boots into a film or premium cable series -- as dark, sexy, funny, and thrilling as it is, it seems made for motion picture. With the right person working the musical score (Castor's method of doing magic constitutes playing a tin whistle), a creature/effects department with the requisite amount of latex and unwillingness to pull punches, and a lead actor who is in no way Keanu Reeves, it could be glorious.

If you're an unsqueamish fan of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files books or Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse series but think you'd appreciate something a little bit chewier in the supernatural noir genre, you should pick up something from the Felix Castor series. Start at the beginning for maximum backstory or dive right into the third book -- Carey catches you up quick. Or try a volume of Hellblazer -- Original Sins is the beginning of the series, but my favorite bits are the ones written by Garth Ennis, starting with Dangerous Habits.

adventures while not moving

I was in a bad mood last week so I reread Ellen Kushner's The Privilege of the Sword, which is double chocolate chip cookies in book form if you like 18th century social commentary, pretty dresses, awkward teenagers bein' awkward, swordplay, and characters who aren't straight. It's self-indulgent, but delicious things often are. (It's a sequel of sorts to Swordspoint, which is also delicious and recommended for people who like politics, swordplay, and gay dudes. And that's only a double entendre when Kushner wants it to be.) My only criticism of it is that, in jumping between first- and third-person narration, it occasionally stumbles. But I mean, like, twice. So that's okay. If you think you'd enjoy a period story about a practical teenage girl who both learns to fight and loves romance novels, you should mosey over to Small Beer Press and get yourself a copy. (And maybe buy some of their other books because they're running a remainder sale for a good cause, and read them, and tell me what you think. I've got Generation Loss and Meet Me in the Moon Room on my reading list, so I'll return the favor soonish.)

Now I'm going through Neil Gaiman's collection of shorts and poetry, Fragile Things. Except I'm skipping the poetry. (I expect this indicates that I'm a horrific sociopath of a poet, and/or that I made a good choice when I didn't try to apply for any MFA poetry programs. I am comfortable with both of these.) So far I think I enjoy Gaiman more when he's writing novels or graphic novels (or blogposts), but his turns of phrase and pieces of atmosphere are nonetheless delightful. And/or creepy. And/or delightfully creepy.

Ubi es Caelum has a new blogthing where she's writing very openly about herself and her life and her brain. This is something that I do not have the guts to do, in a metaphorically literal sort of way. I do not have the kind of guts that would stand up to public self-evisceration and display, the skin pinned back, however prettily, like an anatomist's cadaver. But it's wonderful when a really good writer does, so I encourage you to go read her stuff.

film: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Got out to see Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus last weekend -- y'know, the last flick that Heath Ledger, dreamboat of bad Shakespeare remakes and inappropriately sexy terror of Gotham, worked on? Which Gilliam got three of Ledger's actor friends (Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell, a telescoping progression of talent and yum) to finish in Ledger's stead?

Gilliam is my very favorite director whose films I frequently fall asleep during, and I would've wanted to see Imaginarium for any and all of the actors attached, so, y'know, it would've had to have been something just shockingly terrible for me to have disliked it -- but really and truly, I loved it. It was the most terrifically Pythonesque thing I've seen from Gilliam since possibly Baron von Munchausen, surreal and dead-serious silly, with his signature rambling narrative and cartoonishly dreamlike landscapes, inhabitants, and objects. It's not altogether a pleasant dream -- in parts it's quite upsetting, especially on reflection of Ledger's death -- but I love it all the more for its deep, dark ripples. Because it's a film about people -- about their desires and deeds and efforts and beliefs and souls -- and you can't do that without a good measure of darkness. And, like all my favorite stories, in its chewy center it's all about storytelling.

Also, it's got my absolute favorite casting of the Devil ever. And a heart-lockingly lovely heroine wearing costumes that I would fight you for.

If you have three hours (plus maybe a couple for mental recovery) and you want to be transported, you should go see it. And you should avoid reading anything about the plot if you can. Letting Gilliam unhurriedly unfurl the story for you is half the fun.