Yesterday was a moonday for me. I know, unromantically we can blame it on PMS, but I like to think of days like yesterday as moondays. Lunatic, the state of being struck by the moon. And I don’t mean being a buff first nation’s teen defending the chastity of some dull girl that smells odd to shimmering yet just as dull vampires. I mean diving in to the waters deep and swimming out in to a night black sea. I mean setting sail in a silver ship, just you, an owl, a bottle of wine, your journal, a fountain pen and a photograph or two. I mean those days when you write poem after really bad poem, and you think them … brilliant. Earth shattering, in fact. In fact, you’d read them aloud if you had anyone to read them to. Because lets face it, people suck sometimes.
So yes, yesterday was a moonday. Welcome to my world.
In my blood many countries swarm much like parasites. I have a skill which I call ploughing, the ability to just sit in a chair and do the same thing over and over and over and over and over again. 98% of hand book binding is this, so much of pure craft is just tedium and repetition. The English in me gives me that stoicism, Stay Calm, Carry On. I admire the English and their carrying on, the stories of during the air raids of the second world war, “That was close. How about some fish and chips?” But on days like yesterday, when I am struck by the moon, my mellow turns dramatic and my quiet bubbles over in to a kind of rage and some other country in me takes hold.
And what can I tell you my brother, my killer
What can I possibly say?
I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you
I’m glad that you stood in my way.
Mr. Cohen, you just know, was having a moonday, standing as he was in the cold New York rain, wearing what was left of his heart on his sleeve.
In 1971, the top 5 song was One Bad Apple recorded by the Osmonds, Donny Osmond sang -
One bad apple don’t spoil the whole bunch, girl.
Oh, give it one more try before you give up on love.
One bad apple don’t spoil the whole bunch girl.
Oh, I don’t care what they say, I don’t care what you heard.
On Sunday night singer Lhasa de Sela died of breast cancer, she was only 37. I never met her and missed seeing her when she played in Toronto, but her CDs always transported myself and my sisters to other worlds with silver seas. Her voice spoke of moondays. Of swimming in the dangerous waters out to sea to be free. Wherever she is right now, floating high above us, shower down your stars, we will catch the fire in our skirts to light our way.
Sorry, this posting doesn’t make much sense. I’m sitting here in Paris, alone in this cold now empty apartment waiting for Elizabeth to come home. All of Aunt Charlotte’s things have gone, there’s nothing left but my two bags, my laptop and Mr. Murakami’s daughter’s piano. Even Albert the cat has a new home. Today is my last day in this haunted apartment. Elizabeth is moving to her own flat and I’ve decided to travel a while and then return to Canada.
So for a month I will be away. I will try to post when I find an internet café and I know Alice will be posting. In February we’ve decided to redesign the blog. Alice will have her own and I will focus this on my art, it will be more like a gallery um, blog. Elizabeth isn’t sure what she wants to do, she is so busy being an apprentice bee.
Thank you for being so magical and travelling this distance with us. Thank you for your kind letters and emails and photos. Thank you for coming to Paris with me and making me feel safe. I promise to not disappear like everyone else seems to. Let’s all set sail now, you and I, and see what we can see. Thank you for everything. Thank you to Deane Hughes and Gillian Holmes who helped so much with designing this site originally, thank you to all the amazing, wonderful and fascinating people who answered our questionnaire, thank you to our parents, Mr. Flowers and all the fashion designers, artists, bands, rogues, vegans and vagabonds who inspired so much of this world of wonders and thank you so much to you. I promise to be back soon.
Before I boxed Aunt Charlotte’s apartment away I photographed as much as I could. I took thousands of pictures, but could not capture what it felt like to be here, the odd warmth from the old iron radiators, and the damp cold that creeps in when they are off. The smells of incense that is permanently here, plus the wet, rot smell of a very old building, yesterdays cabbage seeping under the door, the smell of warm bread from the bakery below, not to mention Elisabeth’s scent (patchoulie) which comes and goes like a ghost. With this there is also the sounds of Paris, the morning sounds of people starting their day, the traffic, the shuffle, the whir of bicycles, the low buzz of scooters, churchbells and horns. The nighttime sounds of tires on wet pavement, echoing footsteps, hints of conversation. The ticking clock. The floorboards creaking.
I thought I could capture it all, but it’s just impossible. So here are but a few of the pictures for us to walk through if you’d like, I will be your guide, put your boots there by the door … follow me.
This is Aunt Charlotte’s study, this is where she sat writing her novels and letters listening to old jazz and opera records. It’s a magical suffocating room (in the colour of pomegranate!), there is a molting stuffed peacock and a zillion books and pillows.
Aunt Charlotte called this her art deco cabinet. Inside are hundreds of books on magic, witchcraft and, oddly, Victorian fiction. There are also stacks of playing cards and her Viewmaster collection.
Aunt Charlotte’s main decorating themes were twigs, tiny lights and drapery. This is the view above her bed.
This is our favourite corner of the living area. I will miss that couch. You can see just some of her vast book collection, also, faintly, her vampire deterrent kit which alas, we never had cause to use. Two mallets from one of seven croquet sets rests in the corner.
No surface was left uncluttered.
This is a view to the dining room. Aunt Charlotte had 76 obelisks. You can also see a number of cases which contained a trombone, a child’s accordion and a glass bell piano.
Open any drawer, you never know what you will find. Not one was empty.
Aunt Charlotte loved the work of our friend, artist Magda Trzaski. Here are two heads (you can only see one) by her that she suspended in the door way - very practical.
There is nothing like the festive season to make one think of the dead. Or as our father often says as a toast, “To friends no longer with us.” Here is a very haunting video of our parents dear departed friend Mr. Keyes’ song Misfits shot in his apartment in 2002 by Annie Smidt and edited by Gillian Holmes. It’s hard to believe he lived in such a place.
To friends no longer with us and happy festive what have you, love,
Sitting in the bathroom watching him shave is a religious experience. His ritual. He is thin, skeletal, and wears only a towel tightly wrapped around his waist. His skin is a constellation map of scars. I touch them and he makes a slight hiss, pulls the straight edge razor from his face, “Not while I’m holding something so sharp,” he says.
“Where did you get these?” I’ve never asked him before.
“Lead type.”
“What?”
“In another life I was a typositer, then I operated the lead type machine. It was volatile, it exploded sending slivers of molten lead type in to me. It was an article about shirt collars. It’s imbedded in me. You can ink me and roll me on paper if you’d like to read it.” He goes back to shaving. We are in the hotel bathroom, sitting in a cloud of steam. He stands before the fogged-over mirror with his eyes closed and continues. It sounds like buttering toast, his chorographed movements.
“Would you like to go to Antwerp today?” he asks.
“What’s there?”
“Diamonds, prostitutes, a friend I’d like you to meet and my most favourite painting.”
“Of course,” I say, and step in to the bath.
There is a long hall bisected with edges, the edges of galleries. One looks down and sees a thousand possibilities. Gallery after gallery, the edge of a gilded frame, the shoulder of a guard, a tourist, a bizarre play of spatiality and light. At the very end of the hall, facing you is her. He suddenly puts his hands over my eyes, “wait” he says, “you have to prepare.” He is warm for once and smells of the lemons of his shaving soap. He presses his body to me. I am conscious of being in the middle of a public gallery, being held by this skeletal man. We are trailing our winter coats, his long black and white striped scarf dragging on the ground. “Agnes Sorel. Every story is different,” he begins in a whisper, “she was twenty, she was fourteen. She was the mistress of France, the mistress of Charles VII, the weak chinned, opportunist dauphine. Joan of Arc crowned him, and he betrayed her to the English. Her beauty is legendary. She rallied the troupes. And, as she had three children and was expecting her fourth, she rallied the king. She was hated at court for being too smart, too pretty, having too much the ear of the king. Expecting her fouth child, she died on her way to see him. Only recently it was discovered she was poisoned.’ He takes away his hands. ‘Focus and walk towards her.”
La vierge a l’enfant entoures d’anges by Jean Fouquet, painted in 1452. A very young, long dead Agnes Sorel, with an exposed, unsinkable, perfectly symmetrical breast surrounded by terrifying seemingly made of plastic blue and red baby angels. And the Christ child looking about to die of lung cancer. Agnes looks down, lost in thoughts eternal.
We have tea in a café which smells of roasted coffee beans and cigarettes. Little sugar cubes wrapped in paper. The floor is littered with paper. Tiny cookies on the plate. He looks at me, “what did you think?”
“I love how modern art here starts hundreds of years ago.”
“That’s not really true, but really, do you have anything but modern art in Canada?”
Sound of lottery machines plinking and cars driving by.
We stand in the middle of two intersecting cobblestone streets. “We could ask someone.” I say.
“I don’t know the address, and its not that I’m lost, it’s that I only know my way at night. For some reason I am always here at night and my direction is based on street lights and shadows.” He pauses, “I know that lamp” and moves forward.
We come to a huge, gray, splintered, wooden door, so large it could let a carriage in. A smaller door has been cut in to the side with ancient rusted hinges and lock as complicated as an aorta. There is a rope which comes out of a hole drilled near the top. He pulls it and somewhere a bell rings. Two heads pop out of the window above, “oh my god!” they shout and a key falls to the wet pavement.
“I should warn you,” he says, unlocking the door, “we were lovers once, they are Siamese twins.”
I fear I’ve spent far too much time alone and have started talking to myself and giving inanimate objects names like Mr. Kettle when it whistles or Mr. Broom when I need to sweep. I’ve made friends with the widower down the hall Monsieur Murakami, who has loaned me his daughter Sophie’s upright piano insisting I use it as she only hated it. Monsieur Murakami was in love with my aunt, I found all of the letters he wrote to her and slipped under her door.
We will soon be leaving. I’m almost done doing what I have to do here and slowly a wall of boxes is rising along the far wall. My lovely Aunt and her things. There is only so much we can take, and only so much we are allowed to have. We will have to sell most things, but I want to take it all. I want to recreate this magical apartment somewhere and live within it. I know I must go back and press the play button again, but part of me, a huge part of me wants to just run like Alice, and start again, give myself a new name, a new identity, a clean slate. It would be such a romantic and fabulous mistake and it so appeals to me.
I drew this yesterday for Monsieur Murakami, me holding his dog Tiki with ookpik and monster. I send it to you with love.
Although I know how ill he really is, I hated admitting that his gauntness made him all the more attractive. His fragility is so alluring to me, his wrists are my undoing. His hands move like a magician’s would, practiced and with pleasure. Everything he did, from removing a card from his wallet to opening a door and letting me pass was a sinewy ballet. My first instinct upon seeing him was to throw myself shameless at him. The longing in me was so great it was almost unbearable. I kissed whatever part of him that was in front of me. I kissed his hands and face. I buried myself in my hair. I think I may have bit him. He stiffened and then letting go of his fear of public spectacle, of drawing attention to himself, wrapped his arms around me. He arched his head back then and broke in to a laugh.
It felt so good to be back on European trains. In the compartment he stared out the window pensively, tensing his jaw, silent to me. He was wearing the same charcoal gray coat that he had when I left, but the missing middle button had been replaced and I loved him that much more, thinking of him alone in his hotel room sewing on a button. Common gestures endear him more to me. Watching him make tea, spooning out the bag and putting it in the hotel ashtray, carrying the cup over to me, placing it beside me make me swoon. He was so uncommon so to see him do something commonplace seemed extraordinary, beautiful, poetic. Like a woman opening a fan. An elephant in snow.
We left Brussels in the late afternoon, travelling through Gent, Bruges and ending in Oostende. The train station is an ornamental gray and glass structure that made me think of India. Outside, without calling a shiny black taxi slowed to a stop in front of us and he opened the door, guiding me in. He said,
“Hotel Polaris.” And to me, “Why are you smiling?”
“It’s just funny.”
“What is?”
“That we’re here, of all places.”
“I always come here, I like the sea off season, it’s depressing, it makes me think of suicide.”
“I guess you haven’t seen the movie”
“Movie? There is a movie set in Oostende?”
I took his hand, “It’s right up your alley, I will have to find it and show it to you sometime.” He looked at me, giving me his I don’t understand her, but I’ve never been happier look and then tuned his gaze to the traffic.
The city is ugly, despite the sea. There is a new casino. It was raining. The taxi drivers name was Karl. The radio was playing Radiohead.
It felt like midnight in the lobby of the hotel. A thousand midnights trapped inside. It smelled of cleaner and coffee and wood. The walls are white. There is funky furniture and a boutique restaurant filled with elegant Belgians all in black and white and gray. It was warm, self-conscious. “I like that we came through a red door,” I said. He looked at me, decided to not comment then (in Flemish) asked the serious woman behind the reception desk for a room.
(He spoke Flemish, another mystery my man of clouds)
We were given a pass card, a book was signed. What did he say I was? Did he? Was he asked? He put the card in his pocket and said, “The top floor, we look at the square, we’re blocks from the sea, we can walk there when we’re settled, we can sing sad songs and write postcards.” He sounded tired. And when he is tired, I can hear how sick he really is. When he is tired he is no longer acting. He kissed me on the top of my head and I said,
Bless Lula and AnOther magazine for showing up and being magical as always.
You know what I found in Aunt Charlotte’s closet? Seven unfinished manuscripts. All written by her, all starting with the same sentence,
‘She left the party then, crossing the wet grass and entering the forest by the darkened path that she knew so well..’
I haven’t been writing, there is almost too much happening and I’m not sure where to start. And every day it rains. I shuffle my Halloween Tarot deck and draw randomly a card, the Six of Imps; success, the pleasure of recognition gained through creative hard work. Stability in action. Optimism, triumph, advancement. You can’t get better than that.
There is a rumbling that we may be working with a very cool fashion house on a men’s line which excites us greatly. It’s time for the dandy in goth, the well dressed vampire, Gomez Addams at Oxford. We can’t say much, but that has made us so happy and excited about the future we can’t even put it in to words.
And in the gray and the cold and the rain comes word from Alice, who posted the other night a journal entry from Belgium. She didn’t contact our parents, she didn’t contact us, she just posted. We took it down as we wanted our parents to see it first, to know she is okay, but I guess we will put it up. It is, as always, heart wrenching and so beautifully written.
In the market today I bought edible flowers.
Elizabeth and I have been talking a lot about what we leave behind. Certainly shuffling through the apartment here cataloguing Aunt Charlotte’s world has made me think more and more of this. I have a trunk of letters and journals that I now want to go home to Canada and burn. Elizabeth wants to destroy her old sketchbooks. We’ve done so little though, our mark is so insignificant.
I’ve been thinking about places that have become museums. I remember we three jumping out of the car in front of the Viper Room and bursting in to tears. Who remembers now the death of River Phoenix, that Vegan saint? What a horrible moment.
Edward Gorey passed away and left his magical house and cats. His home, Elephant House has now become a shrine of sorts and headquarters to a museum dedicated to him. I have been slowly photographing Aunt Charlotte’s apartment inspired totally by a haunting book by Kevin McDermott a friend of Mr. Gorey’s, who was allowed in to his house soon after his death and photographed it as it was left, haunting.
What else is there? What other places are haunted by what’s left behind? I am being morbid tonight, perhaps a(nother) cocktail.
The curtains in our Aunt Charlotte’s study came from a Victorian funeral parlour, I kid you not, they smell of dust and incense and lilies. Her apartment has taken on a permanent chill now that winter is setting in, and we keep the dusty curtains drawn most of the time just to try and keep in the heat.
Elizabeth and I still sleep in the one spare bed as neither of us will sleep in our Aunt’s room. We dress each night in clean white cotton Secret Garden night dresses that we found in the wardrobe and curl up like orphans for warmth. We’ve taken to reading to each other until we fall asleep.
I’ve been thinking a lot, as I go through Aunt Charlotte’s things, about ghost voices. As Elizabeth and I read aloud, we become the voices of long dead authors. In my aunts writing, her thoughts are there, and when I read them aloud I become a spectral phonograph conjuring up the electric dead. Funny how each time I re-read a book it seems different, and yet it hasn’t changed, I have. How wonderful and exciting it is to have all these voices, years of thought and ink and paper, bound and shelved and sleeping all around us.
Aunt Charlotte has a lot of books.
I have become addicted to listening to audio books while I am painting, but am so picky about which ones I can listen to. I love the way Elizabeth reads, so delicate, like she is sharing a secret, and with audio books I tend to gravitate towards voices, twoards readers with plummy English voices or people with magical accents. I don’t know why but I can’t seem to listen to pragmatic Canadian or American accents. I also have trouble if the reader sounds nothing like how I imagine the book to be.
There are so many, and I’ve left out autobiography, save one (talk about listening to ghosts!) but here are a few that I’ve worn out from overuse:
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
Read by Peter Egan
This is simply the best audio book in our minds, and thusly, out of print. If you can find it, buy it (it will probably be in cassette form) I have been thinking of trying to find who has the rights to it and seeing if we can release it ourselves. Peter Egan not only played Oscar Wilde in a mini-series, he embodies the absolute purple decadence that drips from Mr. Wilde’s prose. Lord when Mr. Egan reads -
“The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame like as theirs”
This sprawling and unabridged version simply drags you in, literally, to the bottom of the sea and fills you with that awesome Victorian wonder that made men travel to the four corners of the earth to kill, plunder and generally make a mess all in the name of god/king or curiosity. Mr. Molina does the poopiest spot on French accent for hours and hours and hours. So worth it just for the lists of rare fish that they marvel at, then kill, then eat.
I will admit having a total weakness for our Mr. Grant and so will forgive his histrionic vocalizing of Lucy and Mena and horrific Texan accent. Once however, you are past that, this is damn good stuff. The novel flies by and Mr. Grant’s accent is better than pudding.
Ah, Mr. Callow. Simon Callow. Simply the best cameo actor on the planet, the plumiest of plumy accents. Scholar, thespian, wit and writer. This is his book. He does a kick ass Orson Welles.
I could listen to Mr. Ondaatje read the phone book. These three are pure magic. He whispers and drifts. His voice, his prose, his poetry. Sigh. It is almost too much, but what is too much?
If I could listen to Mr. Ondaatje read the phone book, I could listen to Jeremy Irons read a grocery list, a bus ticket, honestly it doesn’t get any better than this. This, gentle reader, is the book to be lost in. This is English-afile-atio, this is sonorial pornography. Afterwards one craves a cigarette, feels oddly depressed then pads to the kitchen in ones underwear to eat cold leftovers by refrigerator light.
Another late night (though I see so many apartments with their lights on and so many cars still moving about in the street), we are working our way through Aunt Charlotte’s liquor cabinet concocting concoctions, smoking her stale clove cigarettes (don’t try this at home) and listening to her scratchy, mostly bought in the 1950s record collection. Right now, a lush almost film noir version of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé with Edo de Waart conducting the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. This morning while walking in the gray, cold, rainy rues near rue d’Avron, on our way to Père Lachaise to say hello to a few friends John Galliano jogged by. Elizabeth squeaked causing him to nearly fall on the wet pavement. Regaining his balance he smiled, winked and jogged on. Elizabeth couldn’t speak for the rest of the day. The record is over. Another concoction or bed?
Please meet our friend Taeden Hall, actually I’m sure you know her already. She is the very cool and very lovely proprietor of Gloomth, which I’m sure you know well. We’ve known Taeden for years and have always admired her (and her husband Derek’s) style and super-coolness. We’ve been writing to each other a lot lately, and I thought she’d be perfect for the next installment of Questions with Inspiring People. As she so is.
A little bio first.
Taeden has been designing & creating clothing many years. A passion for creative apparel & well-constructed garments led her to creating Gloomth one cold winter’s night. Taeden has a B.A. of design, and worked as an illustrator before starting Gloomth. She lives in Oshawa, Ontario with her husband (who conveniently is the official photographer for Gloomth) and two charming felines. She believes that well-made, lasting clothing shouldn’t be overpriced. She also hates sandwiches.
The Pomegranate Questionnaire
1. Can you tell us a little about what you do? I run a clothing label called Gloomth the Cult of Melancholy. I do pretty much everything from designing clothing to advertising and shipping items.
2. Why that? I have always had a passion for clothing and design, truly unique apparel is hard to come by so I decided to create the sort of styles I would like to be wearing. I started by making one of a kind pieces and selling them on Ebay and before long we had a small following and the items sold faster than I could make them. Gloomth evolved from those humble roots into what it is now.
3. Does it pay the bills? Does it matter? Yes, Gloomth pays my bills as well as employs about 10 staff at any given time. The financial results of this business were never my first priority, I would still be running this label and designing clothing even if it was not fully successful- I truly love what I do and what we stand for.
5. What is your idea of perfect happiness? Being able to create whatever I want whenever I like without limitation by market tastes or finances. Access to many interesting books and people as well as good wine and chocolate.
6. What achievement are you most happy about so far? The achievement I am most happy with so far is probably Gloomth itself. Being able to employ others in my dream and to watch it blossom over the last three years has been truly fulfilling.
7. What is your most treasured possession? I am legally obligated to say my husband, but my two cats come a close second. After that it would probably be the cream colored lace shirt from the 1970’s which I made out of an ugly dress from Goodwill, it just goes with everything and it’s appearance belies the $3 I spent on it.
8. Have you swooned in the cinema? Not recently, it seems they’ve all but stopped making anything but new versions of crappy movies from the past or even worse new stuff.
9. Do you have a hero? Tom Ford is my ultimate hero. I really admire his career and success. His work has always had a really unique flair to it- despite being mainstream- and he has delved into everything from suits to furniture. I would like to apply that sense of versatility and strong design to my own work, and strive to do so on a daily basis. I have clippings of his designs and De Sole tearouts pinned up in my studio.
10. What is your motto or favourite expression or both? Hmm. I find myself telling myself “You’re in charge here” a lot, I suppose that’s a motto to some degree heh.
