Thank you for all your concern, yes, we found our mother. She seemed off-put that we would be so concerned. We will remind her of this when we fall off the radar for a few hours one midnight.

Please, mark on your calendars, although we completely mistimed the full moon - and we should of known as we are all in sync with it - next Thursday, August 28th as we will be performing the new play written by Alice, One Final Midnight. It’s a real ripper with innuendo, murder, intrigue, witty banter and, for the enjoyment of the adults, we are going to hang our cousin Walter. The spectacularness of this feat has diminished slightly as we were not allowed to build a trap door in our attic floor. Also the arrival of the ghost in act four will just be Elizabeth in a sheet, unable as we were to pull off the Professor Pepper Ghost Effect. But we will do our best. I wish we could invite you all, we are planning a bracing round of gin and sage cocktails (recipe to follow*) a vegan feast on the front lawn (with the best china) and much champagne (sorry, Cava) to put everyone in the proper mood.

Alice is quite proud of this one; perhaps we should post the script so everyone can enjoy it, or perform it yourselves.

Remember we mentioned that our parents went to Paris without us, kissing us on the heads and saying something about us being old enough to have lives of our own? Well, one thing they came back with, along with a stuffed humming bird and a glass eye was the most heart-stopping, knee weakeningly beautiful parasol - which they would not tell us the price of. As they only bought one and told us to share, we dared not ask. We often open it and just sigh, none of us have the nerve to leave the house with it (okay, save for our jobs, we rarely leave the house anyway - but you know what we mean…). The umbrella came from Alexandra Sojfer (write that down).

Needless to say we instantly leapt to the website only to find that it was entirely in French (not really a problem for us) but catered only to people in France - which we are not. There was a small note saying the ‘international store’ was opening soon, and to leave our email address, they would let us know. Well, last night, they let us know. Good lord, everyone! Go now, it’s parasol porn! There are even movies! Next to handkerchiefs and pincushions we love parasols the most. We spend far too much time here just daydreaming. And now, this!

It’s sad to think that parasols are considered superfluous to those who live in the vast wastelands of mall culture of our great land. Here at the House of Pomegranates and all our House of Pomegranate embassies near and far, parasols and handkerchiefs and pincushions are just fine. Here at the House of Pomegranates, we make our own rules.

*The Basilique Martini

You will need:
- crushed ice
- 5 basil leaves
- 3 oz grapefruit juice
- 3 oz vodka
- 1/2 oz simple syrup, which is 2 parts sugar to 1 part boiling water

Basil goes in bottom of cocktail shaker, add 1/2 oz of grapefruit juice to wet the leaves and muddle with a muddler or back of a wooden spoon to just bruise the leaves. Don’t mash them. Add other ingredients. Shake well and strain into martini glass.

Serve under a full moon before a play featuring the hanging of a cousin named Walter (or equiv.)

Today feels like summer is ending. For the first time in days it hasn’t rained and it’s Sunday. We’ve got our balcony door open and the breeze is redolent with that melancholic end of summer smell accompanied by cicadas and crickets. (and a thousand lawn mowers)

We’ve been listening all day to Salyu singing Joni Mitchell’s River in broken English. It’s like a soundtrack to the film where we drive away, leaving everything behind.

“I wish I had a river
I could skate away on
I wish I had a river so long
I would teach my feet to fly
Oh I wish I had a river
I could skate away on”

We know so little about Salyu. When we search we mostly hear words from her producer. We know Salyu isn’t her name. She was the voice of Lily Chou-Chou in the disturbing and utterly beautiful film All About Lily Chou-Chou by Shunji Iwai. You can see videos of her on YouTube, we love this one.

But it’s this song, River, that moves us. This is one of those YouTube postings where there isn’t a video, just a song, but it’s still so beautiful. Here’s to summer’s end.

Although, as you know, we’re stuck in summer jobs and rarely leave the house anyway, if someone would like to take us to New York next month we wouldn’t say no. Why you ask? The Museum at FIT of course. They are staging the Gothic: Dark Glamour exhibition. Now we do tend to avoid anything with the words ‘Gothic’ in it, unless ‘revival in the Victorian age’ follows (or ‘and Lolita’ naturally), but goodness, 75 dresses from heroes such as Rodarte, , Comme des Garçons and Alexander McQueen, count us in. I fear we will have to content ourselves with the illustrated catalogue.

I have a confession to make – after my years in Fashion school, on my list of things to do before I die, just below ‘turn the world vegan’ is ‘touch the seams of an Alexander McQueen’.

Sorry, it’s true.

Our father gets angry when people email him while they’re on vacation. He cannot understand why anyone would go away, and yet still be in touch. “Be unavailable for at least two hours every day” is one of his many mottos, “leave an air of mystery.” Keeping that in mind, we are trying to be cool about the fact that we haven’t heard from our mother since last week. She istraipsing through some boreal forest looking for an ancient strain of mushroom so perhaps there is no phone.

And here we sit watching the summer pass through thick panes of air-conditioned glass wasting away in our stupid summer jobs. What’s been keeping our spirits up is hearing from you. Thank you, all, for writing us. Also, we’ve been watching way too many movies.

Our studio has a dangerously comfortable couch and a huge TV (but no cable). Mr. Flowers upgraded to a flat-screen TV and (bless him) he gave us his previous one. We’re such shut-ins; really, there’s nothing we like better than making a lot of food and hiding out in our studio, on said couch, watching movies. We have our favourite genres and our favourite directors however this summer Asian cinema is on heavy rotation.

There is the oft-quoted three act rule of conventional Hollywood movie making.

Act one - establish.
Act two - complicate.
Act Three - resolve.

Or more often than not, establish, product placement, shoot everyone! In Asian cinema these rules seem to not apply - some resolve, establish and then complicate, or, complicate, establish, complicate or in the case of director Hou Hsiao-Hsien (who we worship) the working rule is to just establish! For three hours.

Two filmmakers who do not follow rules are The Quay Brothers. We love the Quay Brothers, and yes, heading this article is a letter from them addressed to our father suggesting he read the novel Locus Solus (of which there is only one copy available in the city of Toronto). We have been bewitched by their films and actually got to see them once at the Toronto International Film Festival. (we thought we would faint)

The Quay Brothers are identical twins with, we swear, different accents. Born in Pennsylvania in 1947, they studied illustration there before going on to the Royal College of Art in London, and began, in 1970 to make animated shorts. They still live and work in London under their company name Koninck Studios.

Their magical work is very much influenced by Eastern European animation and animators such as Jan Švankmajer. Along with films, and set designs for opera have made music videos for such people as His Name is Alive, Michael Penn, Sparklehorse, 16 Horsepower, and Peter Gabriel (they contributed but were not happy with the results)

For Pomegranate Cinema we present, Are We Still Married, the short film they made for His Name Is Alive. We held our breathe while watching this, it was just so beautiful. Enjoy.

Let’s talk about naughty books shall we. My sisters and I have had a love of Victorian naughtiness, especially read aloud, since our early teens. It is just so much fun and just so naughty. Our first introduction to lascivious literature was the classic My Secret Life by Anonymous. I found this weighty and quite punctiliously pornographic tome in our father’s library, not hidden away at all, but right there, between Fifth Business and Eminent Victorians.

As I am the oldest, I thought it my duty to introduce my sisters in to the sordid underbelly of Victorian England, a world where one can use expressions like randy-arsed or standing like a crocus or mossy grotto and be proud of it. This book was published privately and has never gone out of print. Our father’s 1966 Grove Press edition weighs in at 697 abridged but unexpurgated pages and I swear to you, one can open to any page and find something to make you blush. Needless to say, when our father heard me proclaiming loudly -

“Afterwards adjourning to her bedroom, we passed the evening in voluptuous amusements - we had then but few scruples in satisfying our erotic wishes - soon after none - how she enjoyed my gamahuching, and after a time abandoning herself she’d cry out…”

- the book was taken away from us, shielding our precious ears. I was 13 at the time and my love of this magical underworld was born like lice upon a… well, you know what I mean.

I thought then I would give you a brief introduction to our library of naughty Victorian fictions. Almost all of these books are available as e-books in the Project Gutenberg, but I really do recommend you buying and proudly displaying them on your bookshelf, better still, leave them lying about your house to be found by cocktail or garden party guests.

The House of Pomegranate’s Compendium of Naughty Victorian Fiction (with a few exceptions) 

The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde

We believe the best place to start is Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. It is certainly not a naughty book per se, but it is oh so disturbing, magical, powerful and well written. In our minds a sublime masterpiece in the purplest sense. This provides an introduction to the world we are about to enter (arrived to near midnight, by the dockside, in disguise)

The Pearl, A Magazine of Facetiae and Voluptuous Reading
Anonymous 

The Pearl was “a self-proclaimed journal of unblushing erotica for everyone’s taste” issued for 18 months in 1879-1880 with two Christmas supplements. There is not one page in the collection that isn’t naughty, wicked and an absolute hoot to read. Breathlessly written one senses with one hand on the fountain pen and the other, well, at work elsewhere. It will astonish you just what Victorian’s got up to, or wished they were getting up to in country houses on the weekend. With expanded our vocabulary three-fold with this book. Meant to be read aloud.

My Secret Life
Anonymous

This has been called “the most important document of its kind about Victorian England…a real secret social life was being conducted, the secret life of sexuality.” We found it almost too much to take; it’s best in small doses, and do not read it commuting to work! Pages and pages and pages of shagging. Daily. This was purported to be a gentleman’s journal of his erotic life, and my goodness, it is graphic and thorough. A companion to this book would be The Erotomaniac: The Secret Life of Henry Spencer Ashbee by Ian Gibson, about Henry Spencer Ashbee, a prosperous and respectable Victorian gentleman. A family man who counted among his many friends the celebrated adventurer Sir Richard Francis Burton, however, he was a gentleman with a secret-one so naughty that he rented a separate apartment to contain it. Within the well-appointed chambers of Gray’s Inn, Ashbee concealed an astonishingly vast collection of erotica and pornography, thousands of volumes strong. Gibson speculates that My Secret Life was in fact written by Spencer, you will have to decide for yourself.

La Bas
J.K Huysmans

La Bas (Down There) is a novel whose subject matter is demonology, Satanism, the black arts, and The Black Mass, and is considered a prime example of Huysmans’ love of decadent prose. Written in 1891 it is basically the story of a gentleman, Durtal, who is consumed with his research on Gilles de Rais, a fifteenth century French marshal. de Rais was appointed protector to Joan of Arc, and having failed her, it is said, gave over his immense wealth to Satan, sensuality and ghastly pleasure. He was later arrested, convicted, and executed for committing grisly child murders, while performing said Satanic rites. It is a rich and quite naughty book. And he has a pet cat.

Les Fleur du mal
Charles Baudelaire

Les Fleur du mal is a series of seriously lurid and decadent poetry collected in one volume as Les Fleurs du mal. The title was suggested by his friend Hippolypte Babou.

Les Fleurs du mal appeared in Paris in June 1857 with a print run of Eleven hundred copies and an additional twenty copies hors commerce printed on fine paper. Within a month, the French government accused the author and the publisher of outrages to public morality. In August of that year, a French court ruled that there was literary merit to the book, as a whole but demanded that six poems be deleted on moral grounds. The trial only served to create a sensation, and by the following summer the initial printing of Les Fleurs du mal was sold out.

This book inspired oh so many a poet and it is said, Oscar Wilde to write The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The Torture Garden
Octave Mirbeau

The Torture Garden (Le Jardin des supplices) was first published in 1899, was described as “the most sickening work of art in the nineteenth-century.” It contains detailed descriptions of sexual euphoria and “exquisite” torture. It is also a political critique of the corrupt and bureaucratic government of the time. We had to take long breaks while reading this book, it really is a challenge, but it certainly made us hot and sweaty at times.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde was published as a novella in 1886. We all know the story, the London lawyer who investigates strange occurrences between his old friend, Dr Henry Jekyll, and the misanthropic Edward Hyde. The work was an immediate success and one of Stevenson’s best-selling works. I bought this book when I was in grade seven and totally did not understand it, but fell in love with the wonderful crisp and dark prose. To us it makes real the split personality of Victorian society.

Murders in the Rue Morgue
Edgar Allan Poe

There are so many ‘decadent lifestyle’ books and stories from this time that we could choose, Huysmans Against Nature or Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel, but to us the most accessible and also the most perfect snapshot of that lifestyle is Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue was first published in Graham’s Magazine in 1841, and along with its macabre setting and gothic heavy-on-the-sauce delicious prose it is also considered the first true detective story. The story is that of C. Auguste Dupin is a fallen aristocrat who, living in a decrepit and very goth house with the narrator decides to solve the mysterious brutal murder of two women in that city after a suspect has been arrested. The murder is grisly, the writing is purple, you simply cannot put it down. Interestingly it also documents society’s absolute and almost pornographic love of the suffering of others as reported in the media and heard through gossip.

By now I suspect you will need a break to light a candle, drink a glass of absinthe and rest by the window to watch the rain fall. To end our little trip through naughtiness I’ve pulled two books off our bookshelf no true literary decadent Gothic and Lolita girl should be without. They are both from the 20th century, but none the less in keeping with our theme. First, the decadent.

Story of the Eye
George Bataille

Written in 1928, this book caused the author to be called a “metaphysician of evil,” specializing in blasphemy, profanation, and horror. The novel, his best known, is surrealistic, disgusting and fascinating. It’s something of an underground classic, rediscovered by each new generation. Even Björk cites it as a major inspiration, alluding to Bataille’s erotic uses of eggs in a video. Because of its graphic sexuality (yes, be warned) Mr. Bataille first published Story of the Eye under a pseudonym. Today it is considered a classic of pornographic literature, featuring three young friends, two girls and a boy and just what they can get up to given the freedom and the will.

And for dessert, our most favourite “pornographic work.”

The Curious Sofa
Edward Gorey (published with a wink as Ogdred Weary)

What can we say about this book? Published in 1961, The Curious Sofa is a pornographic romp resplended in all it’s Edward Gorey-ness. It is shocking in all that it does not say! It is a “pornographic illustrated story about furniture” It is just so much fun, and so, so naughty. You MUST buy this right away.

Oh my, was it good for you? Do you need a glass of water?

Love,

Alice

p.s. for further reading you might pay a visit here.

Today is an admin day which started off quite late-summer sunny and then, suddenly turned gray and began to thunder and rain. Mr. Flowers came in the morning intending on having a business meeting, but it turned in to iced coffee with vanilla soymilk and yoga - he is an excellent teacher. We had to tell our father, who was working in his studio one floor below to turn his stereo down. He was listening to some band called the Contortions who sound like someone dropping a screwdriver in to a lawnmower, making it difficult to concentrate let alone do a mountain pose.

Alice is busy writing; Elizabeth is working on her Gothic & Lolita sports line - stripy bathing costumes and croquet outfits (Croquet is the official sport of The House of Pomegranates) - and I am sitting here, still drinking coffee, procrastinating, spending too much time looking at the pictures of the Gothloli of the Week girls on La Carmina’s Gothic & Lolita blog. Today I start illustration a new vampire book by Nancy Baker, it is my first commission and I’m totally nervous.

In the news, we were devastated to hear that Deyrolle’s burned down. Our parents visited the shop a number of years ago when they went to Paris (and didn’t take us). They brought us back a little humming bird and a petrified bee. Whenever a magical place such as that is lost, we feel it deeply. There are so few magical places left.

Our mother is away again, and our father, aside from playing his music too loud, is being overindulgent with us. Yesterday we came home to a package on the kitchen table from America. We greedily tore it open finding a Pullip Doll inside! Apparently our father had seen us obsessing over them on-line and went ahead and bought us the Cornice Doll as he said it looked like Elizabeth. Her picture is at the beginning of this post - you can just make out one of father’s coffin-shaped mantle clocks behind her. We are finding - though we always sort of knew - that there is a whole world that exists around the dolls, it’s fascinating. Pullip in Korean means ‘leaf’, what does Cornice mean? We’re not that crazy about the name, but cannot mutually agree on one. We thought we would have a contest and ask you? So:

Name our doll contest! Send us your suggestions.

The person who’s suggested name we use will receive a magical House of Pomegranates present.

Another crash of thunder. I guess I should work.

Today’s the day Sarah’s painting was due at the Square Foot show. We all went after work to deliver it.

This is the label she designed for the back. We’re very proud.

Sadly our great city runs on greed. Glorious and noble buildings are torn down, trees are knocked asunder, bicycles stolen and money men override logic and public good - especially where beauty is concerned - for personal gain. I’m sure this is the same of all great cities, sigh, save perhaps in Scandinavia. At least we are not erecting temples to the rich who’ve declared themselves divine or sacrificing peacocks to appease angry gods as the Romans once did. Or, maybe we still are.

We don’t deny it; we acknowledge this ugliness. Toronto, my friends, is a museum of bad architecture. Architects, civil/social planners, fashion stylists should all come and marvel at this city and just what the power of ham-fisted greed can do.

However, we sigh and do what we can to intervene. When we are out, we take on ambassadorial roles – we are The House of Pomegranates abroad. We hold doors, we frown at people being vulgar, and we know the secret haunts (the magical vine encrusted alleyways, the secret streets) and give directions - sometimes even correct ones - because to us Toronto will always also be our very own city of mystery. Laugh if you want but this is a city of buried lakes and hidden subways, haunted colleges and designated goth clubs (a sure sign of civilization); we even have a reference library for accredited magicians.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to write all that. I was going to talk about the play we’re writing. Now the most important aspect of our play (spoiler alert) is the appearance of our ghost in act III.

Ghosts in theatre go back to the beginning of time. Theatrical ghosts became increasingly popular in the late 1800’s along with the rise of spiritualism; people craved thrills and special effects with their theatre. Magic lanterns became quite popular entertainment. In 1852 Dion Boucicault invented the Boucicault’s Corsican Trap, created for the play The Corsican Brothers, which featured a tragic duel. The twin brother of the shot man sees the shadowy bloodied body of his brother appear before him as a ghost. This trick involved a hole being cut in the stage, and a moving section that follows the actor as he rolls across the stage.

We prefer a stage trick invented by a civil engineer, Henry Dircks, in 1850 called the Dircksian Phantasmagoria. It was perfected in 1852 by artist Pierre Seguin and made practical by a Professor Pepper. The trick involved the building of an exact replica of the stage below the audience, carpeted and draped in black material. Positioned across the main stage was a sheet of glass angled at 45 degrees. The stage lights were dimmed to prepare the audience for a ghost. Below the audience, in the duplicate stage, the lights were turned up. An actor, dressed in white would walk across the second stage and be ghostly reflected in the glass, seeming to float there on the main stage as if a ghost.

We’ve submitted the plans for a second stage to be built (by knocking out floorboards) to our father. He didn’t seem too enthusiastic.