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Carbonized Forest

The eye that was open on Friday.
The portent and the portent’s flensed hide. Ribbons of flesh
swarming downward. Like a school of leeches
deserting some unlit cataclysm.
And a briary phantom there, Stygian, erect.
Saying, here is the untranslation of the world.
Mounted on a spire of form.
The disembarkation of abyss. Fragmentary sputtering.
And what you thought were dark whiptails of illumination
were bristles from a shaved bear
being milked for bile in a rusting cage. Nested
among the mesh of soft translucent sounds
fallen from your lips, the
vestiges of someone’s breathing.

{by Forrest Gander}

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Sigil Studio

Sigil, the rawly beautiful jewelry brand of Seattle-based designer Anita Arora, is inspired by primal, powerful landscapes. Rare minerals sourced in faraway, desolate, and magnificent places such as Tibet, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands are fused with hand-forged metals which seem to have grown into the mineral structure. Ghostly, smoky stones vary with strikingly colorful stones reminiscent of the Northern Lights and black volcanic rock. Rugged and talismanic, they have a wonderfully organic feel.

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I built a self outside my self because a child needs shelter

{She gave me a birdcage for my bird, I think
I might have loved her a basket
full of beautiful poison berries}

Gala Mukomolova’s Without Protection is a heady draught: it is disjointed hallucinatory image, weaving mythology of the fearsome Baba Yaga with vignettes of chaotic frenetic modern life. Mukomolova uses the English language in an unpredictable, splendid way, bending it to her will, her witchlike power. This compact collection is infused with strange color, both violent and tender. It reaches deep into me. Sometimes almost ugly, not always delicate or shrinking by any means, it is a censer of potent fragrances to my overfastidious brain.

Excerpts after the cut.

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Crafting the Hierophanies: Moon and Serpent Jewelry

Handcrafted by Istanbul-based artist Göksu Şimşek, the delightfully whimsical and spooky offerings of Moon and Serpent Jewelry Design draw inspiration from her diverse interests in the occult, witchcraft, alchemy, esoterica, mythology, museology, antiquity, and the 16th through 19th centuries. Gnarled, earthy, fantastical, enchanting and lovely, these pieces speak of poisonous flowers, mandrakes, the mythical chicken-legged house of Baba Yaga, Victorian mourning, sigils and talismans, old woodcuts and engravings, and a myriad of other spiritual and historical artifacts. They remind one of the power of raw pagan religions as well as the highly ornamented and enameled affectations of the 18th and 19th century. The macabre beauty of her creations is also wonderfully wearable, not seeming cumbersome at all.

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The Lost Surrealism of Remedios Varo

The beautiful, rich, luminous, and everlastingly mysterious paintings of Remedios Varo, one of the major female surrealists of the first half of the 20th century, have an almost precious precision and an effect of miniaturism. Enigmatic, sometimes comical, with an incredible depth of color, her symbolic imagery reveals a hidden world which is hauntingly lovely, an internal labyrinth, landscapes that gently unsettle and lure with their indefinable melancholy and sense of strangeness. Inspired by mysticism and alchemy, she also evoked a sense of claustrophobia, of cloistered and hushed, shadowy existence, of entrapment.

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For Whom Were You Anointed?

Suspiria is a stunning remake of a 1977 cult favorite by Luca Guadagnino, who also directed 2017’s achingly lovely Call Me By Your Name. Loosely based on Dario Argento’s colorful and visually inspiring original, this film far surpasses its predecessor in my opinion. It borrows the intriguing bones, the atmosphere, the incoherent narrative of the first movie and transforms the concept into a taut, thrilling, and haunting piece of cinema with glorious visuals and a solidly compelling story.

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