#also moma is so shaped hes so fun to draw

[its-coda]

Making out won’t solve their issues but it won’t make them worse either. Probably.

[witchqueenofthemoon]

BODY AND SOUL Part 24 (Duncan Shepherd/Mackenzie Stone Millory AU)

BODY AND SOUL MASTERPOST

Author’s Note: I suspected the Gala would be at least two parts, and I was right--this is ostensibly the first half of it, 25 will be the second half. I don’t think it’ll go longer than that, but who knows, I never know until I sit down and write the chapter. Here are some higher quality pics of Kenzie’s dress. Her hair looks like this, but with tiny dark red rose buds rather than those little white flowers in it. Her makeup is similar to this look for Billie’s Bello magazine shoot, but her lipstick is like mine here. Here are her shoes. Kenzie is beginning to be able to see herself the way other people do--as something truly divine, her “Supremeness”, as it were--but she has no ego in those moments. The perception is an accurate one. The album Duncan puts on is Prince’s self-titled, the first track is I WANNA BE YOUR LOVER. Duncan’s hair in this part is similar to Cody’s hair here, which is more or less always how Duncan’s hair looks, just particularly well-coiffed on this night, I guess. His makeup is like Cody’s here. With Hannah and Georgio, I wanted to juxtapose the different reactions Duckenzie invoke in people--for some they are divinely inspiring, and for others with darker auras, they invoke carnal lust. Hannah’s jumpsuit looks like this, her hair like this. I based her vaguely on my friend Aly, who has a very dusty sunset aura to me and a beautiful soul. Here’s Annette’s Gala dress. Her hair looks like this. The necklace she gives Kenzie is vintage Cartier, and it looks like this. A special shout out to Luna (@misslunarayne/@officialcodysfallenangels) who inspired Anchaly reading Hawthorne’s THE NEW ADAM AND EVE; she’s the one who told me about the Millory parallels in that book. Momby’s dress, her rose pin, her scarf. Here’s Jimi Hendrix’s PURPLE HAZE (he and I have the same birthday, November 27th). STOP AND BE FRIENDLY is a reference to CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, one of my favorite films (so I made it one of Kenzie’s favorites, too). I couldn’t find a logo for Shepherd Unlimited, and have no idea if the HOUSE OF CARDS showrunners ever created one, so I made one up. Here’s Gretchen Friedrichs’ absolute monstrosity of a dress. Sissy Conners’ dress looks like this. The “very famous actor” can be whoever you want it to be--I dunno, Colin Firth or Ryan Gosling or somebody. Here are the Pre-Raphaelite works I reference in this part: VENUS VERTICORDIA, VANITY, THE FIELD OF THE SLAIN, THE GOLDEN STAIRS, OPHELIA. Here are the angels from Waterhouse’s ST. CECELIA who remind Kenzie of Lindy and Gabby. To me, Lindy and Gabby represent the Millory fans; the lovely people I’ve met online who ship Michael x Mallory, without whom I would not have been inspired to write this story. The Millory fans are by and large extremely beautiful souls who have touched my heart immensely--in most cases, young women (many of you bi/pan, like me) who want to believe in love and redemption and beauty, and my fic, in many ways, is for young (and young at heart) women and nonbinary people who want these things in their lives. I still believe in the healing, transcendent power of love, despite all the terrible things in this world, and I ALWAYS will, and this is and will continue to be an unabashed love story. Here’s Marissa Montague’s dress. Her hair is like Emma’s here. She was fun to write. My Marissa is a very superficial, sad person, and Kenzie sees through her right away. The Ducatis are a wealthy family I made up who Duncan used to hang out with when he was younger, partying all the time with superficial socialites like Marissa. I wanted to note that Duncan did go through a phase where he was doing coke all the time and sleeping around, because he is indeed a spoiled rich boy in some ways, and he wasn’t always a great person. Kenzie has given him purpose and an active desire to be better, because love always inspires one to be better. Kenzie is waking to powers she didn’t know she had as she and Duncan get closer to learning about their true natures. If anyone would like to make a Gala moodboard/edit for this part of the story, I’d be OVERJOYED. And as ever, if you’re reading along, your comments, likes, reblogs, asks and edits mean everything to me. Please take a second to like the fic if you’re reading, thank you!

Kenzie broke their kiss reluctantly, her head cloudy with the scent of him (the woods of you, your ache for me, I feel the wildness of your high desire for me, baby, impatient for later), aware of Claire and Morgan’s eyes on them in the bright studio. Duncan made a soft sound as she pulled away from him, one of regret at her absence--his lips came up to her temple, his hands pulling her into him; those hands on the silky gold of her dress made her heart drop down to float in her stomach, spread warm tendrils to her sex. She could feel his thoughts still, aching against her.

Kenzie. My beloved. Everyone will bow to you tonight. But I swear I am your most devoted. And I swear I will worship you best.

“Wow, it got really hot in here,” Claire murmured, fluttering her hand against her cheek, breathing out in a long stream. “Fuck, you two look amazing. Wait until they do her hair and makeup, Duncan. They’ll want to hang pictures of her in the MOMA.”

“Clairebear, stoppit.”

“I am not fucking joking around, Kenzie Lou. You two look like a drawing in a mythology book. Like a fairy tale.” Kenzie could see the tears glittering around the edges of Claire’s eyes; her friend looked away, clearly overwhelmed in her emotions.

“My darlings,” Morgan said, coming up to them, reaching for their hands. Kenzie took one, Duncan the other, his arm still dipped around her waist, trailing up and down the softness of the gold there, against the waves of her hair. “Likes Hades and his bright queen Persephone.”

“They really are like that,” Kenzie heard Claire say as Morgan moved toward her assistant, agreeing delightedly, grasping Claire’s hand now. She felt her cheeks flush.

“That’s how I always think of her,” Kenzie heard Duncan say to Morgan. “Surrounded by flowers, bringing spring. Healing me.” Kenzie’s heart twinged. Everyone can see it. How he’s been healed. And I supposed it has been because of me in some ways. But I know he had it in him, in his dear heart, all along. And despite what he knows about Annette now, he’ll defy that too. He’ll transcend whatever was holding him back. Duncan had turned his head back down to her, and his hands tightened on her, the gold bracelet brushing along her bare shoulder blade.

I will, baby. With you here, I can do anything. As long as you’re here I know nothing can really hurt me. My constant moon. My flower of the universe. She was nodding, overwhelmed in the weight of his touch, his hand drifting to cradle her head at the nape of her neck.

“Erik’s going to be bringing the stylists to the penthouse soon,” he said down to her, his eyes intensely bright on her (so blue so blue blue like the blessed daylight, blue like sapphire), his thoughts bursts of brilliant desire, like tiny electric shocks cascading over her. “He’s going to lose his mind when he sees you--”

“I’m losing my mind over you--” Kenzie gripped at the velvet lapels of his gold-kissed jacket, lifting her hand up to the soft waves of his hair, the diamond and gold at her wrist reminding her again of her daydreams of the circlet of a crown around his head. Duncan. You worship me but my love, I worship you also. I am moved, body and soul, by you. Prince of stars.

The gold is your hands on me, he whispered into the corners of her mind. How it feels to be touched by you. How it feels to be looked at by you. How it feels to be loved by you. The gold is you and tonight everything is for you, and everyone will see you and know.

“Duncan, look at her shoes,” Claire was coming over to them, having found some semblance of composure, carefully holding Kenzie’s elbow as she leaned to the hem of the cascading gold dress, lifting it so Kenzie’s feet were exposed--her shoes were shimmering gold platform sandals with ribbons that wrapped around her ankles, tying at the back.

“They remind me of the shoes she was wearing the night we met,” Duncan was saying to Claire, his hand trailing down Kenzie’s arm, sending a shiver down her back. “I remember I looked at her feet and I thought oh, she ties her shoes in double knots, like I do. And in that moment, I was a goner.”

“Everything you ever wanted,” Kenzie grinned at him. “A girl who ties her shoes like you.”

“She looked like a fucking angel, Claire. You look like a fucking goddess right now, Kenzie. Like a queen. I love you.” Duncan was pressing against her again, his mouth on her cheek, his hands falling down the dress, and Kenzie’s heart was in her mouth, the shape and scent of him the only thing, the greatest of all things, the center of her soul intoxicated in him.

“He ain’t kidding, Kenz. I can’t wait to see BPF tomorrow, honestly. That website is becoming one of my favorite pastimes nowadays, they’re as obsessed with my best friend as I am.” Claire’s eyes had tears in them again, and Kenzie felt her own eyes go misty.

“I fucking love you, Clairebear. Thank you for everything. I can’t tell you how fucking happy I am about you and Harris.”

When Claire had been helping Kenzie dress in the side-room, her friend had told her how shyly and sweetly Harris had called her after Kenzie had passed along her phone number; how he’d asked her if she’d be open to “stepping out” with him, and had told her that he’d been immediately moved by how lovely she was. “I know he’s like ten years older than me, but I feel like--” Claire had blushed deeply, and Kenzie had clutched her hands (oh Claire, I love you and your sweet spirit so much)--”I just--Kenzie Lou, I just feel like he has a lovely soul. I feel like he’s been mostly happy--like me--for a long time, but also lonely, like me, for a long time--” Tears had welled up in Claire’s eyes, and half-dressed, Kenzie had clutched her, burying her face in Claire’s flowery shoulder (she always smells like sunlight on grass and fresh lavender to me), knowing what Claire had meant, knowing Claire didn’t need to say anything else. To have someone to understand you, someone who can truly hold you in the hollow of their heart. I know, Clairebear. More than a friend. A lover. She had pushed a wave of gold into Claire--Claire had quieted and gone back to helping with her dress, wrapping the train carefully over Kenzie’s shoulder, straightening its cascade over her shoulder blade, pulling her hair free from where it’d tucked under the bodice and pulling her fingers through the waves. “Princess Kenzie,” she had whispered, and it had struck a long chord through Kenzie’s heart, reminded her of Duncan--Princess, moon princess, my little moonbeam--and the worship of his words and his lips and his hands in the darkness in their bed, and Kenzie had shivered to behold the way she seemed to transform in the gown, the way the woman who had stared at her in the slender mirror of the dressing room truly began to seem like a princess--like some golden queen, some other Kenzie who fears nothing. And so I will resolve to be her tonight. I will be fearless, regal, that Kenzie who is a queen, Persephone on her throne in the Underworld. I will pretend I’m her tonight, and hold my head high. Duncan told me I belong in this world--and I think I do, because I belong where he is. So I’ll pretend I’m not afraid. I’ll be the one who protects him tonight, because his heart has been wounded and his spirit needs me.

Even looking at him in the splendor of the gold-dipped blazer and the regal gold collar, she could still see the pain behind his gaze, the melancholy ache of yesterday still lingering around his mouth. My Hades, trapped in the Underworld. You felt lost; you still do. Even in the certainty of our love, you are questioning who you are. But together we’re going to find out. We’re going to find the secrets of ourselves together. Duncan was thanking Morgan, kissing her gloved hand, making Morgan laugh with delight--Kenzie’s heart pounded fiercely as she watched him, the fall of his hair, his height, the brightness of his eyes, the curve of his mouth, his angelic beauty, compounded by the elegant clothes. Beloved. Tonight we’ll show everyone how bright we shine together--tomorrow, we’ll retreat into the woods, to whisper our love into each other without needing to speak, to hide and heal in each other’s embrace, and gaze at the stars, and find each other’s secret places. To find the secrets that are so close to us, that we cannot see but have begun to feel, to sense in each other. They are so near. They are the shadow that stands beside us, and soon we’ll be able to see them, Duncan, baby.

He was looking over at her, and she saw in his eyes the recognition of her thoughts. I feel them too. Like they are waiting just around the corner for us. Like we’re seeing them in the mirror today, not ourselves. The echo of them.

They left Morgan’s studio with their hands grasped tightly together, Kenzie’s train carefully draped over Duncan’s arm as he led her down the stairs, easily supporting her petite frame as she blushed down at her feet, trying not to fall in the golden heels, trying not to fall into him the way she was longing to, dying to, remembering the way she’d pushed him into the wall in the stairwell that first night, impossibly hungry for him, the most beautiful boy I have ever fucking seen, and now, somehow, ever more beautiful, almost impossibly so. She could feel the tiny tremors under her skin, the dancing bursts of nervousness, the nerves borne of how lovely he was right now, how staggeringly beautiful to look at. We’ve fucked like crazy, we live together, and god, I still feel so fucking shy of you right now.

“Baby, are you kidding,” he whispered against her as she hovered on the stair above him, leaning his mouth up into her chin, hands falling back and forth over the golden cascade that covered her body. “You’re shy of me? I’m so fucking nervous right now--you’re so fucking beautiful and I can’t even think straight. You can’t possibly be mine. I can’t possibly deserve you. You’re a fucking angel.”

And he was pressing her against the wall of the stairwell now, ever so gently, the chilly cement of it against the bareness of her shoulders above the lame of the dress, her train still tucked into the crook of his elbow, and his mouth down at her collarbone, keeping her tethered to him, his lips drifting to her neck and below her ear, his breath whispering there, his eyelashes brushing the tiny space at the corner of her eye, tasting at her, murmuring further and further into her mind with taut insistence as his hands trembled and shivered down her arms, I can’t wait to get home so you can push that ring onto my cock, can’t wait to push that plug inside you while we stare into each other in the eyes of the Mirror that’s drifting into our dreams now, can’t wait to keep you close to me all night, anticipating the moment where we’re truly alone, can’t wait for everyone to behold you and the thrill of the secret knowledge that despite their longing you are mine alone, and that you chose me among all, that you blessed me, beloved, most fair among all, as your lover, I can’t wait to be so close to you again that we don’t know where part from each other, so close the sweat on our skin mingles on our skin flushed against each other, so close I can feel the clutch of your cunt gripping onto me, claiming me, fucking me, devouring me, can’t wait for you to fuck me, angel--and the insistence of his mouth under her hair was pushing her eyes to the metal underside of the staircase above, her mouth falling open in a gasp of absolute need that drive sharp knives of longing through her whole body.

Fuck, Duncan, I want you so much, I want you all to myself, Prince Duncan, I want your need to be the only thing you can think of, your need for me, I’m the golden gift just for you, the Pandora’s box full not of darkness, but exquisite loveliness, all for you, but you have to be patient today, Erik and the stylists are waiting for us, everyone is waiting for us tonight, waiting to see you, beautiful exalted Prince--

No, they’re waiting for YOU, my golden Persephone, it’s your golden beauty they are waiting for--his mouth was hovering over hers, not touching it, not quite, but begging to, sweetly open, aching to take hers, tilting his head, impossibly blue eyes rising and falling down the curve of her face, the gold waterfall of her dress--

“Let’s go, baby,” she gasped, gently pushing his arms away from her, gently turning from his mouth despite the soft, imploring sounds he made, his curls and the bridge of his nose brushing against her cheek. I can’t hold out when you’re touching me that way, I can’t stand it, Dunny, you have to stop, I can’t, I want you so much--

She grasped his hand as he stepped back on shaking feet, the gold of their bracelets clinking together softly, and he carefully gripped the train as she stepped ahead of him, down the last flight of stairs to the palm-lined foyer of Morgan’s studio building, and they were out in the oppressive, flushed heat of the day, but it felt good on Kenzie’s skin, it was a relief to be enveloped in the heat that was coursing through her body already. The world has been set on fire with our love, she thought, looking up at Duncan as he came through the door beside her, towards where Samuel was parked on the corner. He dipped his head to her, his mouth set to stave off his longing, and he was pushing his Yves sunglasses over his (ethereal blue like the heavens) eyes, but before he did she could see the patterned geometry of his soul there, which saw hers utterly, and wanted her, utterly, loved her, entirely. The world has turned, changed for us, become ours, and now it sees us, and it bows and encircles us in its desire, its heat is its kisses of worship on our skin, and it knows who we are. Soulmates.

---------

Samuel was looking at them with moon-bright eyes as Duncan helped Kenzie into the deeply cool interior of the car, and Kenzie smiled back at him shyly as he turned the stereo dial up--with a thrill she realized it was Jimi Hendrix, and his wild guitar crashed against her. Summer music. 

Purple haze all in my brain, lately things don’t seem the same, actin’ funny but I don’t know why, ‘scuse me while I kiss the sky...

“My dear Duncan and Mackenzie,” he said, foot on the gas, “you look like you stepped down from heaven a moment ago, off a falling star.”

“I feel like I’m in heaven, Samuel,” Kenzie replied, as Duncan’s hand slipped into hers. “I can’t come down, and I don’t want to.”

“You know it’s the full moon tonight,” Duncan’s chauffeur said, slipping dark sunglasses on to shield his eyes from the sunlight that streamed through the window. “The juju that comes on nights such as these is quite special. It’s fortuitous that the Gala is on such a night--tonight will be the night the world will see the true brightness of your love.”

Kenzie puzzled for a moment over Samuel’s words--what does that mean? She looked up at Duncan, who seemed to be openly staring at her behind his dark sunglasses, his lips parted, his hand dry and warm, his thumb drifting over her palm. She lifted a finger to pull them down at the rim, exposing his eyes to her--yep, staring. Blue like the clear shore of a bright ocean.

“What does that mean?” She mouthed to him, smiling at him, her cheeks flushed. Oddly, Samuel lifted the partition after that, somehow content not to explain himself further.

Duncan shrugged, and his fingers tightened in hers. He shook his head. Baby, I don’t know. But I have a strange feeling about tonight. I had a strange feeling about yesterday, too--I know you felt that. But today doesn’t have that mean feeling like yesterday, does it? It has some other kind of feeling. It’s heavy, but it’s not a bad feeling. It’s like--a giant wheel turning. Like a huge clock tower chiming the hour. Like lifting your face to the sun after you’ve been indoors for a long time.

Yeah. Like that, she thought, nodding, her other hand drifting against his thigh, and then she spoke, in the cocoon of their privacy. “Duncan...I feel like I swallowed the sun and every bit of light is shooting from my eyes and my mouth and the tips of my hair and everyone it touches, they feel it too, they feel bright and healed. I feel like it’s my destiny to do that--touch people with the sunlight I can feel inside me.”

“You always make me feel that way. Like nothing bad can happen to me when you’re here. Like you’re the sun in the day and the moon at night, and you bring light where there would be darkness without you. Kenzie,” and he pressed his hand into her waist, his eyes fluttering at the softness of the gown, his breath gasping. “God, I want to just run away with you.”

“Away from everyone and everything to a secret place where no one can find us,” she whispered against him. Kenzie’s body felt flushed with overwhelming heat despite the coolness of the car. “Soon, baby, soon, we’ll eat fruit under the trees and swim in the lake and fuck so fucking much--” and she drifted her hand against his throat, thumb on the fullness of his lips, pulling him down against her, Duncan pulling his glasses off and dropping them unceremoniously on the car’s floor, gathering her in his arms, his mouth flushing into hers with her fingers still pressed under his jaw, tightening to hold him steady against her, and he whispered into her mouth, “baby, fuck, Kenzie--” and she could feel the rapid, frenzied drifting of his mind, the Bacchanalian chaotic need that was building in the center of him. To love you is holy madness, Mackenzie Stone. I fucking worship you. His mouth was in her hair, his fingers pulling it to his nose to breathe in the scent of her, and his expression was one of angelic beauty, an aching supplication to her, his finely chiseled features, his long straight nose, his full lips, his sharp jaw utterly divine in the purity of his love. It took her breath away to see him this way--it took her senses and rattled them apart, leaving her feeling spread like the particles of stardust in the night sky.

“Tonight,” she whispered against him, and she made herself look into his eyes, despite the shaking in her own soul, despite her fear of his beauty, because despite our closeness, my love, I still fear how lovely you are, I still fear your devotion because it shakes my fucking soul, and I fear you because your beauty seems impossible, and I see the inhuman in you, I fear the loss of you, for I’d die without you now-- “you’re gonna be aching for me all night, aren’t you, baby, you’re not gonna touch yourself at all, either, are you, baby, even though you’re gonna want to, I know,” and his tongue was pressing out onto her bottom lip, his tiny moans like sweet music in her ears, “you’re gonna want to but you aren’t going to, because only I get to touch you, only I get to take that ring off your poor aching cock, my poor baby--”

Duncan’s hands tightened at the back of her hair, twisting and forcefully pressing so her mouth crashed against his, and the need in it crushing against her heart with a possessive hand. I won’t baby, I won’t, but fuck, I want you now, how can I wait so long. His mouth was like the musky juice of some unearthly fruit. He must be what ambrosia tastes like. Like fucking sex. Like the pinnacle of all my desires. Like the highest part of my hope and the wildest release of the most intense orgasm I’ve ever had. There’s nothing like it I’ve ever felt anywhere. Him.

Kenzie’s hands were clutched to the gold-kissed lapels of his velvety jacket as they arrived at the penthouse all too soon, her fingers drifting against the intricate cages of the collar tips.

“I feel like you should be wearing a crown,” she whispered to him. Duncan’s hands were coming around to clutch hers at his throat, his mouth kissing at her fingertips.

“I keep imagining flowers in your hair,” he replied. “Flowers would be your crown, my beautiful Kenzie. So many flowers.”

Samuel was lowering the partition and Kenzie moaned against him, her heart crushed that they had so much longer to go before they’d be alone together again. It’s never enough, she thought to him. Whatever time we have alone, it’s never enough, it’s not even close to being enough.

I know baby, I know angel, I know, it’s never enough, kiss me, kiss me-- and they crushed their mouths together again, not caring that Samuel could see them now, his bright-moon gaze skirting over them then politely away, though Kenzie knew that it was difficult for him, knew he thought they were bright as stars, beautiful beyond words, though she couldn’t have said how she knew, only that Samuel’s emotion towards them in this moment was starkly bright, as if he were speaking it out loud, and then Duncan was pulling her out of the car and she felt dazed, dazed as Jerry opened the door for them, his expression one of utter amazement, until Anchaly let out a barking laugh of complete joy towards them that startled her so she clutched at Duncan’s hand, suddenly shy and apprehensive of the small man.

“And the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters,” Anchaly said, and Kenzie saw Duncan’s puzzled look as they walked past. His eyes were glittering.

“I feel like you speak in riddles sometimes, Anchaly,” Duncan was saying as he pressed the button of the elevator. He had gathered her train up in his hand again, holding it gently over his arm, and Kenzie blushed, suddenly feeling deeply self-conscious, as if she were being led up to an opulent throne where she’d be crowned a queen of some unknown kingdom. She kept looking down to examine the dress, unconvinced it was real, its golden sheen seeping into the corners of her vision.

“Some glories require the words of someone more skilled than I,” Anchaly replied. “You two seem to render me speechless to express my astonishment without some help.”

“Is that from Proverbs, Anchaly? From the Bible?” Kenzie remembered a Moby song that had a similar name to the words Anchaly had spoken.

“Indeed. God creating the waters when he made the world.”

The elevator dinged open.

“You two seem to be creating something, too. The beauty of your love seems to be growing.”

Duncan didn’t reply--he seemed unsure of what to say. Kenzie could see the blush around his eyes.

“Anchaly, Annette’s going to be dropping something off for me soon,” Kenzie called out to him as Duncan pulled her inside. “Please call up to the penthouse when she’s here, will you?”

She saw Anchaly’s nod, the glittering quality of his eyes flashing at her again, and then Duncan was clutching her against him again in the gold interior of the elevator, his fingers achingly delicate on the gold of her dress, and she was lost inside his attentions, lost, and it was everything she could do not to grind against his thigh pressing her into the elevator’s mirror, not to stare in wonder at the loveliness of the picture they cast there, she blushed to be so struck with wonder at her own beauty, blushed to be overcome so often by the rightness of how they looked together. We really do look like royalty, like Pilar said. The moment was gone too soon as the elevator seemed to climb 30 stories in no time at all, and Duncan gently pulled away from her, grasping the train and urging her out as she giggled at him, dragging her softly to the penthouse door, through with they could already hear the voices of Erik and the stylists inside. Rather than using his keycard Duncan knocked twice, lazily, on the door, then in a moment of abandon, grabbed hold of her waist and lifted her up into his mouth again, the taste of him dizzying her wildly, the half-hardness of his crotch pressing into her stomach. Then he was hurriedly bringing her back to earth, grinning at her as the door swung open and they broke apart to Erik’s judging gaze, his mouth pursed at them in their breathless state, his expression one of hidden delight masked by facetious scandal.

“Heeeeeeaven, I’m in heaven,” he sang, fluttering his eyelashes--they were very long with pink rhinestones today. “Just look at you two. As soon as you mentioned Morgan I knew she’d do both of you justice, Mackenzie. I can already see the headlines tomorrow: ‘DUCKENZIE STUNS IN GOLD, WE ALL HAVE TO WIPE OURSELVES OFF THE FLOOR’. Duncan, I brought Hannah and Georgio today. You remember them--they did you for the App release party. They’re going to lose their shit over her.” He extended his hand, beckoning to them languidly, moving back inside the penthouse, the long black cashmere poncho he wore drifting behind him. Duncan’s warm, large hand was on the skin just above the back of the dress, and Kenzie stepped away from his touch, feeling too overwhelmed by it to let it continue for now--I want you terribly, my love. I want you alone.

In the kitchen there was an array of picturesque snacks from the always well-stocked silver fridge and cupboards spread out; round rice crackers and two bricks of artisan swiss and gouda, salami rolled around tiny toothpicks, cubed mango, sliced green apple, bunches of grapes, organic hummus and pesto, bite-sized chopped purple cauliflower and celery sticks, and multiple open bottles of wine.

“We had to get the party started the right way, of course,” Erik simpered to Duncan, and Duncan smiled at him (that smile, kiss me, baby), unbothered, then at the two people seated at the obsidian island with recognition. Kenzie suddenly felt wildly shy again, fighting the urge to hide behind him, but he was pushing bright, warm blue feelings against her, circling her heart. “Hey, Hannah.” Hannah had very long, vaguely wavy hair that was a sort of lavender-grey, the kind of color that could only be achieved by a master hairstylist, one that usually only existed in superhero comics, and chopped bangs. She was ambiguously aged, perhaps in her early 30’s, with bright pink eyeshadow and an expertly contoured, round face. She wore a very long boho bronze-red jumpsuit with curling indigo detailing, and an array of long necklaces with varying crystals. Her skin was the color of milky coffee. The man beside her had long chocolatey hair streaked with natural gray, tied back into a bun at the back of his head, sharp, dark eyes, and an beard that was so well-cropped it seemed almost fake. He had silver rings on his fingers in the shapes of animal skulls, and wore a black denim jacket and black skinny jeans on his very thin frame. He had been talking to the woman in a very quiet, even voice, but she had begun to laugh loudly at something he said. “Hi Georgio, lovely to see you both again. This is Mackenzie Stone.”

“Oh my fucking god, I can’t believe Duckenzie are finally here!” The woman called Hannah immediately stopped laughing, dropping the morsel of gouda she’d been clutching in long coral-colored fingernails. Kenzie gawked at her. God, the Duckenzie thing is a trip. The woman got up from Duncan’s island and came around to her, her hands flitting down to Kenzie’s shoulders--she was at least six inches taller, and in bare feet. She smells really nice, like patchouli incense.

“God, you’re a little jewel,” and Hannah was pulling her into a hug, much to Kenzie’s surprise. “You smell like a rose bush. It’s obscene.”

“Hannah, I fucking told you,” Erik said. “Imagine the possibilities. An absolute babydoll.”

“Georgio,” the other man came up to her, grasping her fingers, leaning over them. “A pleasure to finally meet you in person, dear.” His voice remained very quiet and very even, removed from Hannah’s immediate enthusiasm.

“I do hair, Georgio does makeup,” Hannah was saying down to her. “This dress, Jesus fucking Christ, you’re like a Klimt painting, and Duncan, god, you always look incredible but this is next-level, nobody will be able to talk about anything else tomorrow, fuck, Georgio, we have to really outdo ourselves with this one.”

“I fucking agree.” Georgio was looking between Duncan and Kenzie with a hungry glint in his eye, as though he were a vulture about to swoop down onto a carcass. Kenzie shivered a little--I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the way some people look at us when we’re together, she thought. It’s as though some people want to leave us candles and fruit and gold coins on an altar, and other people want to somehow consume us--rip out our hearts and gnaw on them with their teeth. Hannah is one of the former. This man Georgio is one of the latter. She watched his hungry, dark eyes float up and down on Duncan, and she was made conscious again, removed from her lover’s touch for the moment, of how incredibly beautiful Duncan was, how singularly, objectively handsome.

Back off honey, he’s mine. Kenzie couldn’t help it, she snorted into her hand suddenly at the force of her thought, the certainty of it, and Hannah looked down at her, puzzled.

“I was just thinking about how crazy all of this has been,” Kenzie murmured.

“I bet, honey. Your Instagrams are like the only thing anyone talks about anymore. You must have gotten like, a hundred endorsement offers by now.”

Duncan shrugged at her. “I don’t think we’ll be doing stuff like that, Hannah. Kenzie’s a writer.”

“I forgot, you’re a fucking billionaire,” Hannah rolled her eyes at him. “No pressing need to make more money.” I like this woman, Kenzie thought. We can be friends. “Little golden peach, come sit with me, I’m wild to start on you.” Hannah led Kenzie to the living room, where they’d set up two styling chairs with portable standing mirrors.  

“Dunny, bring me some of those grapes, please? I’m fucking starving.” Kenzie called across to him. Duncan was watching her with a dazed expression, as if he’d forgotten where he was. Georgio continued watching him with the same hungry eyes. Duncan went to the island as Erik said something to him that Kenzie couldn’t hear--she was turning back to Hannah, who already had two flat pastel-colored styling clips in her fingers. Kenzie sat, looking up at the woman, angling her chin up.

“What do you think your hair should look like tonight, baby doll?”

Kenzie smiled at her. I really like her.

“Sometimes he calls me Persephone,” she said to Hannah in a low voice, as if she were telling the gray-haired woman a secret. Hannah was leaning down to her, listening eagerly. The woman seemed to have an almost rosy aura around her, like the pink blush of a desert sunrise.

“Goddess of spring,” Hannah nodded. “Which would make him Hades, God of the Underworld. That seems right to me. And you brought your flowers down to him in the darkness, didn’t you, sweetness.” Hannah’s hand brushed through the wave of hair that fell over Kenzie’s shoulder. “I think we should put flowers in your hair. And then everyone will see who you really are. Not just your gold, but the way love is blooming all around you.”

Duncan was coming over to them with a bunch of grapes and some of the cheese and round crackers on a little plate and one of his Waterford glasses full of a dry rose, leaning the plate down to Kenzie’s lap, dipping his face to kiss her (thanks baby, she whispered into his mind) as he handed her the wine, then he straightened and said “I’m putting on some music for us, any requests?”

“Something sexy,” Erik said, holding up his wine glass, full of dark red. “I need some mood music to look at you two.”

Duncan smirked at him and turned away, into his study.

“Hannah, have you seen The Youth of Bacchus?” Kenzie spoke to the woman from a mouth of grapes. “It’s in Duncan’s study there, it’s so amazing, it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. I just wanted to die the first time I saw it.”

“I saw it the last time I was here, we styled Duncan for an event a few months ago,” Hannah had already busily begun to slide clips into Kenzie’s long tawny hair, clearly used to working around people eating. “It’s really extraordinary. I can’t imagine how crazy everything has been for you lately, honey.”

“It’s--” Hannah was dividing her hair into segments now with a thin comb, turning to a set of portable drawers near the standing mirror. “It’s been so surreal, honestly. It feels like I’ve been walking around in a dream for the past few weeks. But most people have been so lovely.”

“I bet Annette’s a fucking handful.” Kenzie heard a funky electronic beat come over the hidden speakers as Hannah’s quick hands worked at her hair, spraying primer through it, brushing it out. I ain’t got no money, I’m not like those other guys you hang around, it’s kinda funny, but they always seem to let you down…

“Yes.” Kenzie didn’t even try to hide her frustration. “Yes, she fucking is.”

Hannah snorted, grinning at her as Duncan reemerged from the study.

“Yes, honey, yes indeed,” Erik was saying to him as Duncan sat in the other styling chair beside Kenzie, Georgio immediately attacking his stubbled cheeks with moisturizer, then primer. “Prince’s self-titled is his most underrated creation, I do believe. Pure sex from beginning to end.”

“Erik, I hope this isn’t too great for a favor for someone as important as you, but could you bring me the wine glass I left over there?” Duncan glanced up at Erik with a long, languid gaze, and Kenzie giggled. Laying it on thick, baby. I like to watch you do that, she realized. Because I know you’re always mine now, and all they can do is pine after you.

Erik gave him a pleased look and brought the wine to him. “Anything for Prince Duncan,” he cooed. I feel the same way, and Kenzie’s thought flashed to his eyes staring at her in the MIrror as he fucked her, her arms tied in velvet ribbon, flashed to his mouth between her legs with her arms tied to the headboard with his belt, to her back against the cherrywood table as he kneeled to her, her body arching into his elegant, strong fingers in the dark, the white-blue glow of his eyes. Anything for you, beloved. Anything.

“I’m gonna need fresh rosebuds for Kenzie’s hair, Duncan,” Hannah said, glancing at him.

Duncan made a little sound of longing in the back of his throat that made Kenzie’s stomach flip. Oh my fucking god, baby, I’ll get you roses to wear in your hair every day. And your peonies are starting to wilt, too. Kenzie glanced at the coffee table, noticing with a twinge of sadness that he was right. Prince wailed over their heads as Duncan pulled his phone out of his back pocket and sent a few quick text messages to Anchaly for the concierge. “Hannah, what do you need?” I wanna be your lover, I wanna be the only one that makes you come, running...Georgio’s hand was on his cheek as though it were made of delicate glass, holding Duncan’s head steady as he worked around his blue eyes with a tiny eyeshadow brush.

Hannah reached for his phone with an insistent hand and typed out a text, handing it back to him. “As young as they have would be best. And the darkest red. Fit for a queen.”

“Roses for Kenzie’s hair, roses for Kenzie, check.” Duncan glanced over at her, his eyes (the sky of you, the storm of you building for me) falling from hers down her gown, then back up. His tongue slowly came out to lick against his top lip, and the gesture seemed to be involuntary, so open to her, so desirous of her, as he sometimes was in the sanctity of their bed. Our bed, our room, my favorite place on earth now when you’re there, she could hear him, knew his thoughts drifted into the same place hers did, needy with the weight of their nights.

“Georgio, did you hear what Mackenzie told me a minute ago? Duncan calls her Persephone sometimes. Hence the roses.”

“Way ahead of you, Hannah,” Georgio said, then, “Close your eyes, please, Duncan,” and Kenzie watched him swirl the brush in a palette behind him, then begin to darken Duncan’s eyelids to deep black. My Hades. Gold in the darkness. It’s not just me, baby. It’s us together. My gold kisses your darkness, your darkness holds my gold. One without the other is not enough. One without the other is not whole.

“God, I love it,” Hannah was murmuring as she began to whirl Kenzie’s hair around a ceramic curling iron, from its soft natural waves into more carefully constructed ones. She began to switch between curling strands of Kenzie’s chestnut-blonde hair and weaving a very loose french braid down Kenzie’s back, until her hair seemed to be a very intricate web of falling braids and artfully arranged loose waves, though Kenzie couldn’t see it from the back yet. Duncan’s already luminously handsome face was now darkly striking in the shadow around his eyes, the gold of the jacket juxtaposing with the black and the blue of his corneas to an effect that took Kenzie’s breath away. God of riches, shadows, and my heart.

“God, baby, you look so good. So fucking good.”

“I agree,” Hannah was grinning between them, still fussing over Kenzie’s hair. At the back she’d created a slight bump and long waves fell around Kenzie’s face. The doorbell chimed through the penthouse and Erik went to the door from where he’d been lazily eating apple slices and downing glass after glass of wine. A delivery man stood there with a long white box--Erik took it from him and brought it over to the low leather couch, lifting the lid. Within were a dozen sprigs of burgundy-dark rose buds, and a bouquet of a two-dozen full-stem roses in the same color.

“Oh sugar, I wish a billionaire who looks like an angel would buy me flowers every day,” Erik said longingly. 

“Gimme, please,” Kenzie begged, reaching her arms out. Erik brought them to her from where Hannah was holding her captive, and Kenzie lifted the bouquet to her face in their softness, feeling tears welling up. “Dunny, I love them so much.” Duncan was smiling at her with a dreamy expression around his darkly shadowed eyes. We’ll take them with us to the cabin. We’ll put them beside our bed. I love you, Kenzie.

I love you, too, Duncan. I’ll save so many wildflowers while we’re there to hang over our bed here. We’ll bring the roses with us, and bring the forest back with us, Kenzie’s eyes rested in his, her hand stretching out to him, almost involuntarily. Duncan stood and came to her, Georgio having finished his work, leaning against the standing mirror, observing with a sharp, dark gaze. Duncn crouched down beside her chair, bringing his face up to press his nose into the roses she held, then up to her cheek and against her lips, and Kenzie’s body tingled with the softness and sweetness of him, the darkly beautiful dramatic cast of his face in the eyeshadow. He drew back from her, eyes lifting up to the others behind her--neither of them had realized for the beat of the moments that Erik, Hannah and Georgio were all staring at the two of them with observant, rapt expressions, Hannah’s almost pious, Erik’s joyous, Georgio’s openly desirous. The first side of Prince had ended, and the quiet had settled around them.

“God, you two are lovely,” Hannah breathed, breaking the spell. “I could watch you all day. I’ve never seen a couple so beautiful. It’s like you’re communicating without words.”

At that moment the downstairs buzzer beside the penthouse door trilled, making Kenzie jump. We are, Hannah. But no one knows that but us. And we want to keep it that way. It belongs to us. Duncan stepped away from Kenzie, clutching her hand for a moment. I bet that’s Annette, Kenzie thought, biting into her lip. Annette’s text had been strange, a frantic tone underneath her overly-polite request to see Kenzie. Please accept this gift as a token of my blessing, she’d said, and Kenzie had known Annette distress was coming solely from Duncan’s silence to her, but nevertheless, the prospect of actually gaining Annette’s approval by any means was tempting, especially since she’d softened to Kenzie at the Rose Garden. Duncan went to the door, hitting a button below the panel and speaking into it.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Shepherd, Annette is here.”

Duncan looked over at Kenzie, a pained expression immediately falling over his face. Baby, it’s okay, Kenzie thought to him. I’ll go downstairs. I won’t take long. I’m not afraid of her.

“Anchaly, Kenzie’s coming down,” he said, turning back to the speaker. “Do not send up her up.”

“Very well, Mr. Shepherd.” Anchaly’s voice sounded strained.

Kenzie rose, carefully tucking the cascade of the gold train over her arm, setting the roses in her seat gently. “Hannah, Georgio, I won’t be long, this should only take a few minutes.” Be brave, for him, even if you don’t feel it, because Duncan needs you to be. She walked carefully past Erik, who was giving her a dark look, a don’t let her fuck with you look, to Duncan, whose eyes were clouded behind the dark eyeshadow, suddenly lost inside the turmoil of his emotions.

“Baby, look at me,” she whispered to him, reaching for his hands. As she grasped them Kenzie could feel that he was shaking; feel the immediate change in his mood, the dark shadow that had settled on him, the one that had made him cry in her arms yesterday, the one that had sent his sadness out to her over miles. “We’re going to get through tonight, then we’re going to go away together, just me and you. Okay? And you won’t have to see her, okay? Not until you’re ready. Forget about everyone else.” And Kenzie, in that moment, resolved to do the same herself. Forget about them. About the paps, about Annette’s judgement, about the eyes watching us now, and anyone else who will try to hurt us tonight. When I have you, I’m fearless, invincible, you are my armor of blue flames, I am your armor of weightless gold. And they can’t hurt us.

Duncan brought his mouth down to her, and his lips trembled too, though with the tumult of his emotions or his desire she couldn’t decipher, so jumbled were the two strains of feeling in him. Kenzie gently brought her hand up to his hair and his arms came around her back, lifting her into him, and Kenzie couldn’t help but hear the sighs that came from Erik and Hannah behind her, the sighs that sounded to her like the wings of angels rustling in some holy silent hall, and she soothed him with paper-thin gold, feeling his heart settling down to a steadier rhythm, feeling the trembling in him drift out, into the ether.

“I’ll be right back,” she whispered, and let go of him, staring at him for another moment, seeing the way her energy had calmed him, his eyes bright again amid the gold-and-dark sheen of his shape, and Kenzie snapped the door open and walked, determined, to the elevator.

-------

Annette was standing in the foyer when Kenzie arrived downstairs, her expression strained and softly troubled, the usual anger in her eyes towards Kenzie missing. She was nervously fidgeting with something in her hands--a squarish, flat velvet box. 

As Kenzie’s eyes drifted over Duncan’s mother, she was struck by the other woman yet again: Annette’s coppery-dark hair was pulled back in an elegantly distressed bun, a few strands arranged artfully around her slender cheekbones, her naturally beautiful face made more exquisite with soft makeup tones, a roseate sheen on her cheeks and mouth, a pale olive around her eyes, reminding Kenzie of the blossoms and vines of some pink flower in bloom, of a cheek pressed against a garden wall. Annette’s dress was flowing saffron-colored satin, falling to the ground and shrouding her feet, long sleeves to her wrists (she was wearing one ring, a gold band on her left index finger with a round, yellow-colored topaz stone), a deep V exposing the dip between her small breasts, a string of tiny, perfectly-shaped (and likely priceless) iridescent pearls around her slender throat. As Kenzie stepped closer she could see there were small golden flowers falling throughout the dress, like bursts of pollen reflected in a sunrise. Annette turned her head down for a moment, her eyes closing, and Kenzie noticed there were pearls stranded through her hair as well. She is so beautiful. This woman who adopted Duncan so many years ago. Where did she find him? Who did she claim him from? Who is this woman really, this woman who has kept the truth of him from him for his entire life? I can see her loveliness that has been hidden beneath her shadow, like I could see his right away. It took longer to see hers. But I’ve begun to see it. But her shadow is strong. It’s consumed her for many years.

Anchaly had, somehow, blessedly, vacated the front desk, and Jerry was standing outside the glass doors in the balmy summer night, smoking a cigarette, staring down at his phone. There was no one else in the foyer, and no sound except soft classical music pumping from the speakers, the gold-embossed chairs and couch, lush persian rugs and expensive potted plants their only company.

“Annette,” Kenzie said, reaching her, remaining a few steps away. Annette was looking at her with a pained expression now--an expression Kenzie had never seen. Now that she was closer, she could see there were lines under Annette’s eyes, of tiredness and distress. I don’t think she slept at all last night, Kenzie realized. Because of Duncan. Because she knows how devastated he is.

“Oh, Mackenzie.” Kenzie’s nerves shattered as she saw the tears in Annette’s eyes, saw the girl within Duncan’s mother again, and was moved by her. “You...you are so lovely. I--I’m--”

Annette trailed off, raising the box in her hands out to Kenzie. She seemed to steel something within herself for a moment, force her tears back, force them back into the secret place where Annette Shepherd had been storing pain for decades, and her eyes fluttered closed again, then opened to Kenzie’s--Kenzie felt for a moment that she could almost see her own eyes reflected there, see the green and russet and the gold of herself, see how Annette could see her in this moment. Like an effigy of the Holy Mother, Annette was thinking, and it shook Kenzie to the core of her body to know that. But before she was a mother--when she was young and wild, and free, and the most beloved of all in the eyes of God. There is no wonder that he loves her. My Duncan. My darling boy. I’m sorry.

“I found this a few days ago while I was going through some of the remainders of Adelaide’s--my mother’s--possessions,” and Annette now used the voice of her outward self again, even, carefully measured. “I knew when I saw it that it was meant to be yours. I’d be--I’d--if you would accept it, Mackenzie...I’d be grateful.” Annette closed her mouth, as if by the action she could close off the tide of her emotions rising again with it. Kenzie stepped closer, watching Annette’s eyes rove up and down the exquisite gold of her dress, into her eyes, skirting away. She reached her hands out and Duncan’s mother (for she is Duncan’s mother after all--she loves him with her life, and she didn’t tell him because she couldn’t bear the thought that he isn’t hers, because she loves him as strongly as if he is--her love is true and blinding for him) lowered the box carefully into them, and their hands touched, and Kenzie looked up at her again, then opened it.  

Within was a circlet band of braided gold, its strands leading down to a matte red ruby surrounded by an oval of almost two dozen tiny, perfect diamonds. On either side of the oval were three gold leaves, each set with two diamonds each. I can’t imagine how much this is worth, Kenzie thought, her breath trapped in her lungs. This must be priceless.

“I--I can’t--” Kenzie struggled to speak. How can I accept this?

“Please, Mackenzie. I’ve been--I know I’ve been--” Annette seemed to be losing the strands of her composure, her hands fidgeting in front of her, clutching at the pearls around her neck. “I know I’ve been terrible to you. I have no right to ask you for anything. But please, Duncan--Duncan won’t speak to me, and I--”

Be the golden goddess Duncan sees in you, Kenzie. Be fearless and kind.

“He needs time.”

Kenzie evened her gaze on Annette; lowered the necklace in its velvet box in her hands, but brought it closer to her body, accepting. She lifted her chin.

“He’s very hurt. Keeping the truth from him for so long--it’s wounded him deeply. And I don’t know how long he’s going to need. But I know he needs time.” Kenzie watched Annette’s face, the subtle shift of the pain there. “After tonight, we’re going away for awhile--maybe a few days, maybe a week. And when we get back, I think he’ll be ready to talk to you. But until then, I don’t think he wants to. I don’t think he can. Annette, I will accept this from you...if you can accept that.”

Annette’s lip trembled, almost imperceptibly, and she seemed on the edge of tears again. She dipped her head, eyes closing again, the lengthening afternoon light spilling across her face--despite everything, Kenzie thought, I love her still.

“Please tell him I’m--how sorry I am.  And that I love him. More than anything. More than my own life. And I--I love you also, Mackenzie. I do. I’m sorry to you, too.”

Annette reached out one shaking hand, pressing it gently to the side of Kenzie’s arm, her other hand coming up to hover near Kenzie’s cheek--but that hand continue to hover rather than touch, as if afraid. Then Annette turned without another word, and left the foyer. Jerry held the door out for her, and Kenzie could see a Mercedes parked on the curb, the tall, imposing form of Becket coming out to open the door of the car for her, and Annette slipped inside, and the car drove away.

I guess it’s a good thing Georgio didn’t do my makeup yet, Kenzie thought. Tears, hot and aching and bitter, coursed down her cheeks as she stepped toward the elevator, and they continued to fall all the way back up to the penthouse, the velvet box clutched in her trembling fingers.

------

She immediately saw the pall that fell over Duncan’s face as she came back into the penthouse--strains of Beethoven played quietly now, Duncan’s cheerful mood clearly affected by Annette’s arrival. He knew she’d been crying. He was sitting in the styling chair again, Hannah pressing product through his waves of dark-copper hair, and he launched himself from her fingers as Kenzie closed the door with one hand, the box clutched in the other, running up to her, clutching her against him. Kenzie closed her eyes, immediately soothed in the enveloping weight of his embrace--there’s nothing else on earth as wonderful as this, baby, as wonderful as being held by you. This is the only thing.

“Baby, what happened? What did she do?” Duncan pulled her away, turning her chin up to him, his hand drifting back to cradle around her ear, his eyes full of clouded anger at Annette’s perceived ills.

“She just--she’s sorry. She loves you. She wants to talk to you. I told her we’re going away for a few days. I told her you’re not ready to talk to her yet but--but maybe you will be when we get back. And she gave me this.” Kenzie felt more tears fall down her cheeks as she lifted the box up to him. Duncan took it with fingers that were shaking again--his eyes roved over the necklace with recognition as he opened the box.

“This was Adelaide’s, wasn’t it,” he whispered. “I remember it. I would touch it when she pulled me into her lap when I was little. I wanted to eat the ruby, you know--how you want to eat everything when you’re little--” and Kenzie knew the steady stream of words was to keep himself from crying, from becoming overwhelmed.

“Shhhh, baby,” she soothed. “Will you help me put it on?”

Duncan quieted and nodded to her, his eyes glittering (like sapphire). He lifted the necklace from the velvet box, setting the latter aside on the island, and Kenzie turned, lifting her chin so he could clasp it around her neck--his fingers were warm, almost hot, and her eyes fluttered open and closed at the feeling of them brushing against her (your touch is heaven to me, heaven) and then he gripped at her shoulders, his mouth coming down to kiss her ear, turning her easily, her weight nothing in his arms, and his gaze fell over her neck and his lips drifted open, his eyes opening and closing (nebulas), and Kenzie could see a kind of peace fall over him, as if she and Adelaide were somehow able to meet now, after all.

“It’s perfect,” he whispered, and she nodded, her chin turned up to him. “Adelaide would have loved for you to have it.”

Kenzie felt desperate to be close to him, desperate for him to hold her, suddenly, in a dark place where no eyes could reach them, where they could be naked and taste each other with abandon, with only the moon to see. My One. I want to comfort you in the privacy of our room so very much. She pulled his face down to hers carefully, pressing her forehead to his, and pushed golden waves down into him, pushed with all her strength, all her love, all her longing, and she felt his body relax against hers, like a sigh, though he was silent. She closed her eyes, knowing his were closed too, knowing they could see each other without needing to look--she could see the blue waves of him melting behind the darkness of her lids, could see the iridescent gold she had given him. All good things come in time. We just have to get through tonight. Then we’ll be able to comfort each other, my love. Comfort each other for days. He nodded against her skin, and Kenzie knew he heard.

They broke apart, and she looked over to Hannah, Erik and Georgio, watching her and Duncan with mouths agape again, not speaking to each other. She made eye contact with Erik, who drank off the rest of the wine in his glass, giving her a good-natured eyeroll.

“You two make me wanna get drunk,” he said, waving a hand toward them. “I’m raging with jealousy and arousal.” Kenzie noticed someone had put her roses in another of Duncan’s gold vases in the center of the kitchen island, and she looked at them gratefully.

“Mackenzie, come sit, we have a lot to do still,” Hannah said, tapping the styling chair, and Kenzie glanced back at Duncan (baby, come sit with me, please?) and he nodded to her, going back to the kitchen island and pouring himself another glass of wine as Kenzie sat before Hannah and Georgio, who both attacked her with new gusto--Hannah began to rapidly pin the rosebuds through the back of her hair, while Georgio began to rub different substances into her face with cool hands, his eyes intent on her, making her immediately shy.

“Where did you two meet, anyway?” Hannah asked, using a slender, long pair of blunt tweezers to pull the buds into the braids and strands she’d created at the back of Kenzie’s head.

Kenzie was quiet for a moment, glancing at Duncan who was bringing another glass of wine around to her, nestling it gently into her hand.

“It was a Republican party for PAC donors.”

He gave Kenzie a mischievous smirk, then settled into the chair beside her, but not before dragging it closer to her, veering around Georgio and Hannah with abandon, dipping his long legs under her gold platform heels and propping her feet up under him, his hand coming around to her knee. Kenzie knew he was craving her touch desperately--she could feel the need coming off him toward her, the ache in him for the comfort only her touch brought him (only you, his thoughts were whirling in circles, just you, your hands, your skin, you, I need you and they’ll have to deal with it) and she wanted to press her hand against his throat and taste him with her eager mouth, straddle him and tease him until he was begging for her, and she pressed her hand down onto his, sending the tendrils of these thoughts to him as he spoke again to Hannah, glancing at her with burning eyes.

“She was undercover, recording tidbits of juicy conversation for her article--of course, I didn’t know that until later. Not that I think it would have mattered to me. I was wishing I was literally anywhere else, out on the balcony, hiding from everyone, and she appeared. I thought I’d been knocked into a dream. She was wearing this tiny black velvet dress and these golden sandals that tied up her ankle, and had this necklace, and her hair--”

“Ugh, Duncan, stop--”

“Duncan, do not stop,” Hannah grinned at her, soothing her hands against Kenzie’s temples to hold her head still as Kenzie jerked it towards Duncan, then resumed rapidly dipping the tweezers through the back of her hair. Kenzie could see her face through the mirror, how Georgio was applying dark russet liner to her brows, and a heavy black eyeliner to her upper lids, giving her gaze a high drama.

“Hannah, I would have done literally anything to get her to go home with me. I mean--fucking anything.”

“And all you had to do was buy me a drink. I’m a cheap date,” Kenzie smiled up at Hannah, who laughed a little.

“I can imagine it didn’t take much convincing for either of you,” she said, stepping back from Kenzie’s hair to examine her handiwork. “You’re both--well. At the risk of embarrassing myself by using an antiquated standard, separately, you’re both 10s. Together? Fuck. The scale is fucking broken. Most people would claw each other’s eyes out if it meant they got to stand in your orbit, and I’m not one for flattery. Miss Mackenzie Stone, I do believe you’re ready for the Gala.”

Georgio had stepped back at well, in his silent, appraising way, a round brush still in his hand from applying light, rosy matte blush to Kenzie’s cheeks. He’d made her lips dark red, not quite as burgundy as the roses in her hair, but a deep claret that made her mouth look like a ripe fruit. Kenzie couldn’t stop herself; her breath caught as she gazed at herself, the dramatic angle the light threw on her face, the ruby and diamonds glittering right in the dip of her throat, the gold shimmer of her dress wrapped around her like a second skin.

“Turn around, baby, look,” Duncan urged her, his hand softly drifting against hers, Hannah bringing a little handheld mirror down into her hands to see the back of her hair, which was now a breathtaking array of dancing burgundy red buds, falling in a drifting, wild cascade from the artful arrangement Hannah had created.

“God, you really do look like a painting,” Hannah breathed and Erik was standing back in a pose of admiration, another glass of wine dangling at the end of one arm. He laughed in delight.

“Forget everyone else, darlings, I’ll be following you two around all night.”

Duncan groaned. “Please, no. I want her all to myself.” His hand was drifting up from her thigh to where she had turned towards the study to see her back in the mirror, his fingers falling against the buds, and his thoughts were dark red too, dark red with need for her, and Kenzie could feel the fall of them, almost see herself in his gaze for a moment, feel the pulse of his arousal, the memory in him of the feeling of her clit on his tongue, the ache in him to taste her again, his body shivering to remember the sensitive cavity between her legs, the tightness of her ass--Kenzie tried to swallow, tried to breathe, felt her heart pounding insanely at his touch and the intensity of his need against her in this moment, turning from the mirror to look into his burning gaze, and Hannah and Georgio seemed to somehow sense that their time together was ending; Georgio was gathering his makeup with clipped order, Hannah wrapping the curling iron up, tossing pins into the drawers. Erik was languidly pressing a finger to his phone, calling a private Uber.

“I want you so much,” Duncan had dipped his head to her, his mouth shivering against her ear, kissing down under it as he quieted, as if he deigned to think it rather than speak it aloud, as if he wanted to speak it, needed to, had to or he’d scream instead, and his hands were at her waist, feeling with insistent strength, damning the others, ignoring them. Kenzie’s skin tingled with flushed, radiant heat, her thoughts hazy, suddenly, the cool gold of the necklace pressing into her throat and making her cunt twinge, Duncan’s drifting hands making it twinge again, making her breath catch and burst out in a gasp. Make them go away, baby, she thought, and said aloud to Hannah and Georgio, turning away from him, “Thank you so much--both of you--I can’t say how wonderful--”

“Miss Mackenzie Stone, it was my honor,” Hannah said, her smile lit with warmth that shattered into Kenzie’s heart like an arrow. This woman has a beautiful soul. It gave her as much joy to do this for us as I have now to see the masterpiece she’s created for me. “Hoo boy. I think I’m a Duckenzie now too. Better sign up on that website. Did you two see that? Duckenzie Fans, or whatever it’s called?”

Duncan was laughing, nodding a little, dipping his chin down against the palm of his hand, crooked on his knee, his other hand still on Kenzie’s thigh. “Yeah. It’s something. We met the girls who run it, they can’t be out of high school yet. Kenzie was so lovely to them, it was all over the tabloids. She’s so lovely to people. Makes it easy for me to just stand there and say nothing.”

He was smiling at Kenzie again, his hand drifting, his fingers tightening on her, his thoughts clashing through her like the warm rain that had soaked them a few days ago--I wanna be alone with you now baby love, goddess from heaven, I wanna press that plug into you and whisper into your skin all the things I’m going to do to you later, I want you to force that ring onto me and fuck I’m already getting hard for you, my cock is already aching for you, angel--

Georgio was giving them a glittering look again, that wanton desire still blatant.

“If you two ever wanna think outside the box, I have this group I meet with sometimes in Prince William Forest,” he said evenly.

What the fuck does that mean, Kenzie balked. Like an orgy?

Yes, Kenz, that’s what he means. Duncan had half-rolled his eyes at Georgio’s statement, his thumb drifting soothingly over Kenzie’s knuckles.

“I don’t think so, Georgio, thank you.”

“Suit yourselves. You’d certainly be the center of attention.”

“No, thanks, Georgio.”

Erik was pressing a hand into Georgio’s black-clad back, smiling down at him serenely, batting his eyelashes, ushering the thin man towards the door. Hannah dipped down to Kenzie and hugged her around the neck, gently, careful not to muss the flowers in her hair.

“You look so fucking beautiful,” she whispered into Kenzie’s ear. “I hope to see you again sometime, Miss Stone.”

“Call me Kenzie, please?”

“Kenzie. It was an absolute delight. I can’t wait to see your photos literally everywhere tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Hannah,” Kenzie grasped the gray-haired woman’s hand and steadied her mind, whisking her psyche away from Duncan--and pressed gold tendrils down into Hannah, morsels of light, drifts of her good will. She watched a serene, doleful expression come into Hannah’s brown eyes, then she let go, and Hannah drifted away from her, still staring at her for a long moment. Erik was pushing Georgio out the door, and called out behind him, “I’ll see you in an hour or so, darlings, I can’t wait to meet the infamous Madeline Stone!” Hannah hesitated for the span of a few seconds, she and Kenzie still staring at each other across the room, pulling her portable drawers behind her on the little wheels attached to the bottom.

Hannah, bright blessings to you. Today, and for the days to come, for you.

Kenzie watched the other woman’s face, watched what seemed to be the glitter of a tear on her cheek--then Hannah waved a little to both of them, and pulled the big black door to the penthouse shut as she left.

Suddenly, the penthouse was quiet, and it was only the two of them. The light had begun to fade--it was almost 7 now, and night was beginning to fall. Kenzie glanced over at the Bouguereau prints on the wall, feeling Duncan’s eyes on her, feeling the blue of his thoughts kissing against her mind. The evening mood, she thought, and turned to him again.

Yes, my Kenzie. The evening mood is here. Come to the bedroom with me. He was standing, gently twining his fingers into hers, grasping onto her train and bringing it over his arm with supine grace, the melted gold of his jacket glowing in the twilight that had suddenly surrounded them. The energy inside her was humming now, building to a kind of frenzied rhythm, and Kenzie could see the full moon beginning to rise as they passed the picture window, see its corn-yellow face from last night had not faded, rather sharpened into a bewitching visage, like a sleeping maiden in a field of night-lit grasses.

“I feel like a princess,” she whispered to him as they entered the bedroom, and Duncan was closing the door behind them, closing it to the world--and then he was pressing against her, pressing her into their Mirror with an aching softness that made her mind leap into a static of feeling, thoughts bleeding out into nothing but his mouth on hers, nothing but his hands on the gold braid at her neck, then his fingers along her collarbones, then clutching at her shoulders, the smooth gold cups at her breasts.

“You are a princess,” he was whispering between their kisses, and Kenzie fought to breathe, “you’re my fucking Princess, you’re my fucking Goddess, you’re mine, aren’t you, my angel on earth, you’ll give yourself to me, baby, won’t you--”

“Fuck, yes, you know I will, baby,” she moaned into him, the tips of his hot fingers refusing to press more harshly into her, his blue gaze heavy-lidded, looking down on her from the dark shadow around them now, waiting teasingly for her answer. “Fuck, get my plug for me, please, baby--”

“Shhh, Kenzie, go get your coconut oil, okay?”

“Uh huh,” she murmured, and turned away from him, the tiny hairs on her arms standing up, flush with goosebumps. Kenzie pressed a hand between her breasts as she stepped carefully to the bathroom, serenely quiet and spotlessly clean, feeling her heart racing--she could see her jar of coconut oil on the edge of the sink, and took it with trembling hands. She tried to imagine telling Kenzie from a year ago about this night--you’ll be going to a Gala attended by the richest people in DC, and you’ll look like an angel, and your boyfriend is Duncan Shepherd, and he’s going to push your plug into your ass beforehand and you’re going to make him wear a cock ring and you’re going to edge each other to death all night and then, hopefully, you’re going to fuck each other into tomorrow morning, Kenzie, and you can hear each other’s thoughts, see the depth of his love for you like the swirling center of a fire--

Kenzie swallowed, stared at herself in the darkened mirror of the bathroom for a moment, almost not recognizing herself for a moment--I really do look like a goddess, she thought. I really fucking do. Be that fearless goddess tonight, Kenzie Lou. Just pretend she is you. For tonight, you are her. You’re a goddess.

Kenzie brought the oil out in hands she willed not to shake, and Duncan was standing by the Mirror, looking at himself curiously, appraisingly, the ring clutched in one hand, her plug in the other. He turned to her, and his smile melted her heart into sweet butter.

“Me first,” she whispered. “I want you to do me first, baby.”

Duncan’s eyes darkened (your storm, my sweet god of shadows) and beckoned to her with one elegantly crooked finger.

“Come here, angel.” Whatever Hannah had done to his hair, she’d made it so his beautiful curls were now even more striking than usual, the fall of them seeming impossible to her eyes in this light, their loveliness ethereal, and she saw him as inhuman again for a moment as she fell into his arms--saw him as as a god made of stars and ink-dark sky. You are the god to my goddess tonight, aren’t you, and their mouths came together in another aching kiss, his tongue brushing down into her, and then he was turning her to face the Mirror, turning her so his stomach pressed insistently into her back. He pressed the cock ring into her fingers, taking the oil away, and she gripped its smooth silicone surface, her heart bursting. Give me all your need, baby, make me feel it, remind me that I belong to you. He opened the oil, dipping his fingers into it, eyes focused on her--Kenzie could see her mouth hung open, her breath coming out in ragged bursts, her face glowing with the lovely makeup--I am going to be so gentle with you, baby, but you won’t get to come yet and no one will know your ache for me, no one will know your secret tonight but me, his eyes said, and then he was dipping the plug into it too, and Kenzie’s cunt and ass twinged sharply, and she sucked her breath in, unable to stop the whimper of the moan that fell out of her. But you’ll be thinking of it all night, as I’ll be thinking of my ache for you.

“Please,” she said, and pressed her hands against the Mirror, leaning just a little, ever so little, to give herself to him. Duncan leaned to set the oil on the dark wood--then, he carefully pressed the hem of Kenzie’s golden dress up with a twisting motion, so it fell up and over her hips, exposing the black lace of the panties she wore underneath the opulent gown. Kenzie could feel the damp, cool pressure of his finger tips at the line of her panties now, and with another quick motion Duncan pulled them down so they hovered around her thighs above her knees--he leaned down over her so his face came up beside her ear, and Kenzie cried out to him as she felt his fingers dip into her ass, first his index, then his middle finger beside it, stretching her.

“Kenzie, babydoll,” he whispered into her ear, and Kenzie leaned back, her mind needy, into his fingers, longing for him to press against her clit, knowing with anguished disappointment that he wouldn’t, not yet, not now. “My sweet baby, my angel of roses. Mine. You can’t take this out until I say you can. Promise me you won’t.”

Kenzie felt his fingers leave her and she was desperate for the loss--”Unng, baby, please, I won’t, I promise I won’t--” she whined, biting into her lip, unafraid in this moment with him, unafraid to show him the desperation of her want for him. “Please put it inside me.”

She sighed with relief as his hand came around her throat, gripping so his fingers pressed possessive divots into her skin, then a long, keening cry melted out of her and his fingers tightened at her neck as she felt the plug’s bulbous head, slick with oil, rest for a long, terrible second against the pucker of her ass, then slide with aching pressure and his strong insistence inside her, guided by his pliant fingers. His hand lingered, fingers pressing around the dip of her ass below where the plug was now snugly tethered, as if to ensure that it was tightly in place, and Kenzie was gasping, gasping at the terrible twinging need of her cunt, the throbbing of her clit, aching to be touched by him there, aching for him alone to give her release, her hands still pressed into the Mirror, his dark-shadowed eyes piercing her with their expectant lust. O Hades, my Hades, kiss me, then let me cage you, and in your cage, think only of me, your Queen of Roses, caged for you by your hand.

“My turn, baby,” he whispered, and crouched down to pull her panties back up snugly to her waist, his fingers drifting over her hips, cupping her ass cheeks, then carefully pulling her golden gown back over her legs, using the hand that hadn’t probed into her--he’s so careful, Kenzie thought, I know how much you want me in this moment, and yet still you’re so careful, so neat, afraid to ruin my gown, my Prince. As Kenzie shifted she could feel the twinge of the plug’s weight against the sensitive cavity of her ass, and she felt her knees buckle for a moment, her thighs tingling, her neck longing for the press of his hand again. Want it there always, my Prince, my sweet Hades, your scent like the wild wood of night. She pulled him down to her mouth, laving her tongue out into him, and Duncan moaned with piteous need, and Kenzie felt the long tendriled gold of her need reach out for him in turn, demanding.

“Put your hands at your sides, baby. You’re not allowed to move them.”

Duncan immediately did as she said, his eyes smoldering in the darkening bedroom, his mouth open to her, his thoughts afire with her. God, baby, I am fucking dying for you, you’re so fucking beautiful, not touching you is like torture, I’m yours, I beg you, please, touch me, baby.

You are truly the most beautiful boy I have ever seen, Kenzie thought. And you are fucking mine. You’re mine, baby. Your beautiful cock belongs to me.

“I know this is going to make you ache terribly tonight,” Kenzie said, evening her tone just above a whisper. “But you have to be good. You can’t touch yourself, you can’t take it off.” She knelt very slowly in the opulent gown, her back to the Mirror now, dipping her head so he could see the way she was prostrate for him, her head looking up at him, the cascade of her rosebud-brindled hair arrayed for him in its loveliness. Duncan closed his eyes, and she felt how overcome he was, how lost in the sight of her, and it thrilled her--that’s fucking right, Prince Duncan, your Persephone kneels before you now, and you will promise her you will allay your pleasure until she has need of it, and Kenzie could see the dip of his crotch had grown in the low light--she lifted her hands up and undid the button at his groin carefully, unzipping his pants, pulling down the waistband of his body-tight briefs to bring one of her slender hands against the bottom of the shaft of his growing cock, pulling it out decisively, and Duncan’s breath hitched, his head falling back, his adam’s apple bobbing in the light, making Kenzie want to pull him down to her so she could press her mouth against him there. She focused, instead, on his thick length, the veins of his sex suddenly beautiful to her, the head of his cock a roundness that she longed to dip into her mouth, a sliding droplet of precum glittering there. Instead, Kenzie lifted her hand away--Duncan moaned, dejected with the loss of her, and she could see his hands shaking at his sides--then she picked up the ring from where she’d carefully laid it by her knee, dipping her fingertips into the oil, slathering them along the circular interior of the toy.

Then, Kenzie dipped one of her hands into the oil again, and quickly brought it up, before Duncan could prepare himself, to the low hardness of his cock--she slathered the oil along him from head to base and Kenzie watched with satisfaction, feeling the plug pressing into her from her spread thighs where she knelt to him, as his mouth dipped open again and his shoulders shuddered minutely at her touch. Kenzie didn’t wait again--she gripped the ring and carefully, but with deep, concentrated insistence, pushed it onto his cock to the base, watching with a burst of intense heat into the bottom of her belly how it twinged with redness, immediately constricted.

“Ung, Kenzie, fuck me, holy fuck,” Duncan murmured, his hands drifting dangerously close to the ring, to his length, his eyes furiously bright, and Kenzie shook her head.

“No, baby. You can’t. Only I can take it off.”

“Fuck, baby, angel, I can’t--”

Kenzie stood, grasping his cock again, making him shudder and cry out, his throat convulsing, and she pushed him back down into the tight briefs he wore, zipping the closely tailored slacks and buttoning them, her fingers hooking over the waistline, my tall Prince, her face hovering at his heart, her dark red lips falling against the melting gold and velvet of his jacket to kiss it. The heat that fell away from him over her was blinding--he seemed to be burning, the blue flame of him almost visible to her naked eyes.

“You can, Dunny. It’s for me. My plug is so tight, baby, when I sit down it’s going to make me fucking writhe for you--” and Duncan went to grasp her but Kenzie said “wash your hands first, baby,” and he stepped back, nodding, turning as Kenzie followed him to the bathroom--she dipped her hands into the sink with his, the soap mingling between them, the Cartier bracelets falling down their wrists and clinking together, Duncan’s face leaning close to her hair, and Kenzie knew he was breathing her scent in. She reached for the hand towel and dipped her hands into it, then Duncan’s hands were pulling it insistently away, gripping her hips and pushing her into the wall, knowing it was okay, knowing he had her permission to hold her, now that both of them were carefully, insistently claimed by the other, both driven to the edge of their desire and now, with terrible need, held there for an undetermined amount of time, and knowing that to touch each other for a moment, a few moments, would be the only relief for hours. His lips fell against hers, her arms dipping up to reach for him, but he grasped her wrists and forced them against the wall, holding her there.

“I’m in fucking agony, baby,” he murmured, and Kenzie shivered, delighted by the strength coiled in his fingers, the strain in his voice. She struggled a little, facetiously, against his grip, and he tightened it as she giggled.

“Good,” she whispered, and she felt the burst of heat fall onto her from him at that. Duncan bit his lip, his eyes falling down her face to the tailored shape of the dress against her breasts, the dip of her throat with the gold braid, diamonds, and the ruby, the diamonds on her wrist she couldn’t take off unless he unlocked it.

“I wanna fucking fuck you, Kenzie.”

“You will, baby. Later. We have a Gala to go to.”

“I don’t fucking care about the Gala.”

“I know. But we have to.”

Duncan whined into her neck, and Kenzie turned her head, the better to feel his lips on her there, turning her head up, lifting her thigh up so it pressed into his crotch, and Duncan groaned, the sound bleeding into a strangled, tiny sob in the back of his throat. His grip loosened on her wrists, enough for her to release one of them, and Kenzie slipped out of his grasp, bringing her hand around to press into his darkly stubbled cheek, smooth with the dusting of concealer Georgio had put there. Not that he needs it. His skin is already so smooth and beautiful.

Kenzie tapped his cheek with an insistent little snap. “Bad boy is gonna fuck me so good later, aren’t you. My Prince is gonna fucking fuck my brains out.”

“Uh huh. I fucking am. I wanna do it right fucking now--”

She brought her hand up and let it come down again, this time with a more insistent little tap into his cheekbone. Duncan’s breath hitched.

“Kenzie, do it again. Harder. Tell me to calm the fuck down. I’m too hard and I can’t think straight. Fuck, baby, please. Slap me.”

Kenzie nodded and brought her hand up, Duncan still clutching her other wrist to the wall--she made sure her palm was very flat this time, and brought it down with a swift snap. This time Duncan’s face pitched to the side and his eyes fluttered closed with the low pain of it, and he stepped back from her, releasing her other wrist. Kenzie brought her hands around him, steadying him at the waist, and he blew out a low breath, eyes earthwards.

“Let’s go to this fucking party, baby,” Kenzie whispered. “I wanna show them how fucking beautiful we are.”

Duncan lifted his eyes, and the wildfire in them stopped her heart again.

“I’m ready, my Queen of Roses.” And Kenzie grinned, bouncing up against him in her platform heels, shaking out her rose-laden hair, leading her dark prince out of their rooms, his hand gripping her train possessively. Kenzie snatched up the little golden clutch Morgan had made for her, and pulled him, between insistent, coaxing kisses, out of the penthouse and into the elevator. Kenzie was absolutely struck by their reflection now, highlighted by brighter lights of the elevator’s interior--Duncan was pulling his phone out of his pocket. We have to, he thought, and Kenzie nodded. Time to show everyone.

Kenzie pressed against him, clutching her hand to his lapels under her chin, turning her head so the roses in her hair were visible in the mirror, her dress pressed to the side, partially enveloped and hidden by Duncan’s dark arm around her waist, but the back of the golden train shimmering in the light. Duncan’s darkly-shadowed eyes glanced into the reflection, his expression defiant and knowing, the dripping gold of his jacket striking, the golden, intricate tips at his collar scintillating under his sharp jawline, the fall of his hair just-so. He lifted his phone, capturing the reflection, bringing it down for her appraisal. Kenzie nodded, looking up at him. Yes, baby. Good. So fucking good.

She watched as he typed a caption. Hades and Persephone ascend to Earth for a party. #weheardyoulikeus #andifyoudontohwell #duckenziesayshiworld

Kenzie giggled and nodded. “Fuck yes, baby.” He continued to hold her against him as he posted the photo, his hand drifting against her shoulder as he bit his lip, squinting at his phone in concentration in the bright light. I love him. I love how earnest he is in our quiet moments together like this.

“Baby, send it to me okay? I want it.”

Duncan nodded into her cheek as the elevator door dinged open to the foyer, and Kenzie could feel the vague pressure of the silicone ring pressing into her hip from where he leaned his crotch against her. His hand drifted down, quickly brushing over her ass, down to the curve above her thighs, where he knew the plug was--Kenzie let out a little cry and slid away from him, hot lines of want coursing down through her belly at his touch, trying to straighten her expression when she saw Anchaly had returned to his desk. Duncan followed behind her, eyes burning on her, his hand still possessively grasping her train in his fist.

“I see you’ve come down to bless the mortals, Mr. Shepherd, Miss Stone,” Anchaly grinned. He had a new book, The New Adam and Eve, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Whatever strain he’d felt over Annette’s visit was now gone from his face, and his eyes were glittering at them again, his posture immediately leaning towards them, as if drawn by a lure. “I’m stunned, Miss Mackenzie, your hair, like the garden of Eden.”

Kenzie twirled for him, smiling at him coyly. Anchaly laughed, delighted, gazing raptly. The way people look at us now, she thought to Duncan. It’s a little bit spooky.

I agree, but who wouldn’t look at you that way, angel.

“Have a wonderful evening. I have no doubt you will, how could you not? As blessed as you are.”

Kenzie watched Duncan’s eyes turn on Anchaly, his dawning expression of recognition.

“Anchaly, we truly are blessed. I’m blessed. I’m grateful. To whatever’s out there. The Fates or...destiny. God. The gods. I’m grateful.” Duncan’s hand went to his hair, slid down his chin, rubbing there, thumb drifting to his lip. Kenzie stepped to him and grasped his hand, felt the immediate cooling contentment of his mind at her touch. Anchaly said nothing, merely continued to look at them admiringly.

“I’m sure your gratitude has not gone unnoticed, Mr. Shepherd. It’s apparent in you now. The change in you is breathtaking. You will do great work together. I can see it like a clear path stretching out ahead. Enjoy yourselves and be happy.”

Kenzie smiled. The smile seemed to extend through all of her body, down to her toes, through the tips of her fingers, into the skin of her cheeks and coursing through the back of her mind and her neck to her spine, shaking through the ends of her hair. She pushed the gold tendrils through herself; I’m so happy I could fucking die, she thought, and she felt the tendrils extend out of her in that moment, stronger than they’d ever been before except in the dream where she’d made the fire grow, and she felt them touch Duncan with deep, abiding strength, and brush against Anchaly with affection, and they both looked at her with expressions that reminded her of effigies in a church, faces turned with fervent eyes--and Duncan’s filled her with conciliation, with the knowledge that with his eyes on her this way, she was truly seen, that he saw beyond the flowers in her hair, the blush on her cheeks, the darkness at her lips, to the secret soul she had long hidden, the one that belonged to him because he had promised to love it with abandon.

Duncan seemed to surface from the vision she had pressed around them; he turned to Anchaly and thanked him, and then he pulled Kenzie out the door (Jerry said nothing, merely beamed at them and stared, his eyes wide) to where Samuel waited, and a sweet summer wind was blowing, cool and soft, and it smelled like long grass and the sun-kissed residue of day, it smelled like the full moon that hovered above them, a scent like small flowers in shadows and the heady musk of damp earth and, wildly, the aching crash of the sea, Kenzie’s eyes glancing to its perfect roundness--it seemed impossibly huge tonight, the sun kissing Her, pressed into an ardent embrace; it’s for us, she thought wildly, stopping Duncan breathlessly, bringing him against her under it, his arms lifting her into his mouth achingly, his tall body so right as it enveloped hers utterly, Kenzie, I’ll love you until the end of time, he was thinking, I’ll love you until time means nothing, and it was as if she could feel the moonlight holding them, feel it pressing soft, cool hands into their hair, smiling on them with serene affection, hoping for their love to find its secret holding place later tonight, urging them to the time when they’d be alone again, tangled in the sheets of the black bed, irrevocably entwined, like Her, held by the Sun, now a part of Her, the source of her light, and Her his most beloved. Duncan, I love you so much the words in my heart have not yet been written in any language. The gold of me is all for you. And the moon saw them, and knew it to be true.

---------

It was five before 8 when Madeline slid carefully into the front seat beside Samuel, who was playing Billie Holiday (I’ll find you in the morning sun, and when the night is new, I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you) quietly. Momby was wearing one of her gold scarves draped over her shoulders with a brocade Calvin Klein dress, as promised, and she had a lovely rose-gold pin clasping the scarf against her--it was in the shape of a rose, and Kenzie puzzled at it.

“Oh Kenzie Lou, you look beautiful,” her Momby breathed, and Kenzie was reaching her hand through the partition, her emotions bubbling up, threatening to overflow. Her mother’s hand was warm and comforting, deeply familiar. “You too, Duncan. I mean, really. Fucking beautiful.”

Duncan was smiling at her through the window. “Thank you, Madeline. So do you.”

“Momby, where did you get that pin? I’ve never seen it before.”

“I had other admirers besides your father when I was young, baby,” was all Madeline said, turning to glance at Samuel. “Why hello, most delightful specimen on God’s green earth.”

Samuel laughed at her, his very white teeth shining out of his mouth in the shadows and dim neon lights of the car’s interior. “Miss Madeline, to see you again is truly a blessing to me. And may I say, you look absolutely stunning tonight.”

“Go on, go on,” Madeline took her hand out of Kenzie’s and pressed it to Samuel’s arm. Kenzie balked. Momby. Kenzie pulled her phone out, sending Clairebear a quick text, remembering.

Good luck on your date with Harris tonight!!!! I love you so much. We couldn’t help it, we jumped the gun and posted a picture on Instagram, but here it is again. She attached the photo Duncan had taken of them in the elevator to the text, hit Send, then typed again.

Clairebear, thank you for always being there for me. I don’t know who I would be without you. I’m so emotional tonight, it’s like my body is on fire. Duncan and I are going away for a few days after this, his family has a cabin by Deep Creek Lake, it’s a few hours away. He found out he’s adopted and no one ever told him until now, so it’s been really difficult for him. I don’t know how the phone service is out there, and I’ll still have my phone, but I think we’re going to try to go off the grid a little bit.

She hit Send, then typed again, Duncan’s hand drifting to her leg. “I’m texting Claire,” she murmured to him, and he nodded, his eyes closed, his mouth in her hair, blue waves tenderly brushing against her body.

Duncan and I have been having some really strange experiences with each other lately. It’s hard to describe. Strange dreams and other things that should just be impossible. I’ll tell you more about it when we get back. I think we need to figure out what it means and I feel really strongly that if we go off to the woods we’ll find the thing we’re looking for. Not sure why, but that’s what it feels like. When we get back, I think we’ll know more about all of it.

Claire, I love you forever.

They were already pulling up to the Shepherd mansion’s gate, and the moment, the reality of the Gala, which had seemed so far away, had finally arrived. Kenzie slipped her phone back into her clutch, turning to gaze out the window--around the gate were at least two hundred people, some non-credentialed press, some clearly fans. Kenzie noticed with a jolt of recognition that Lindy and Gabby were among them--Gabby was holding a sign that said DUCKENZIE WE LOVE YOU STOP AND BE FRIENDLY, her curly red hair shimmering in the street lamps that lined the tall, impenetrable white fence that stretched around the property. Kenzie grinned--referencing one of my favorite movies is a good way to get my attention, she thought, and leaned to Samuel.

“Samuel, stop here for a minute,” and Duncan balked, trying to grab her hand.

“No, Kenzie, Harris isn’t here--”

“It’s okay, baby, I promise. It’s okay.” She looked steadily into his eyes. I can do this. Watch me.

Kenzie pressed the door open and stepped out onto the curb, and immediately a swarm of press gathered around her--Duncan was getting out of the car behind her, his expression deeply creased with concern. Kenzie took a deep breath and pushed outward--for a moment her body tingled wildly, her mind compressing and her head feeling impossibly heavy, pushing her chin down--and then the air around her seemed to calm, the summer wind that had been blowing seemed to stop, and the frantic shouting of the press around her lowered as if someone had turned a dial on stereo, their pressing dispersing, like leaves scattering, caught in a tiny tornado that spread them back. There, that’s better, she thought, and reached for Duncan’s hand. His expression was stunned now, gazing at her in bewildered wonder, and Kenzie smiled at him earnestly. I told you, Dunny, it’s okay. Come on.

She stepped up to Gabby and Lindy, who hadn’t seemed to notice anything unusual, somehow; they were hopping excitedly, squealing and reaching out to her.

“Kenzie, Kenzie, we made you something!” Lindy held out a large squarish object that turned out to be a handmade scrapbook full of fan messages--Kenzie held it gently and nodded. “You look like a goddess tonight,” Lindy said, then unceremoniously the small girl burst into tears.

“Oh, Lindy, it’s okay--don’t cry,” Kenzie was pulling the girl against her gently, and Gabby was biting her lip, clearly hovering near tears as well. “Thank you so much, Duncan and I looked at the website, it’s absolutely beautiful. You two definitely have a career in web design. Maybe we can hire you for Shepherd Unlimited someday.” Gabby rocked back on her heels (both girls were wearing long flowery dresses, and their earnest loveliness pressed on Kenzie’s heart), her eyes fluttering in disbelief. “Oh, Kenzie, really? Thank you so much for looking at it, we’ve been working so hard, so, so hard.” Kenzie let go of Lindy, opening her clutch and handing the girl a tissue from it.

“Girls, we have to go, but it was so nice to see you again,” Duncan murmured to them, taking the scrapbook from Kenzie’s hands, grasping her with tight fingers. Kenzie quickly leaned and kissed Lindy’s tear-stained cheek, then Gabby’s, blushing and hot, pushing gold tendrils into them, watching Lindy’s face calm and soften. There. No more tears, sweet. I see you. She gave them both a little wave as she stepped back, then turned to the other people gathered around them, gazing at Kenzie and her interactions with the two girls with awed expressions. Suddenly the night was strangely quiet; the moon looked down on the scene, and everyone stared at Kenzie, a hush falling over the hubbub of the crowd.

“Next time,” she said, nodding, turning to the press, and then Duncan pulled her insistently back into the car, Samuel whipping the BMW around to the open gate, where several security guards were keeping the fans and other press back, ushering cars through to the mansion entrance. Kenzie heard the sounds of the crowd resume as the car drove on; that was really strange.

“Kenzie, why in the world would you do that?” Madeline was scolding her, looking back at her with an exasperated expression. “Your bodyguard is off duty and Duncan went as white as a sheet. He still is, look.”

“It’s important to be to be kind to people, Momby,” was all Kenzie said. Duncan didn’t say anything, putting the scrapbook from the girls down at his feet, still holding her hand tightly. Kenzie could see that he was a little pale under the dark eyeshadow, but his thoughts were even now. I know why you did it, baby. I love how brave you are, even if I’m not. Even when you do--whatever it is you do. I’m still afraid for your safety, my sweet Kenzie.

I know, baby, it’s okay. I’m sorry if I scared you. I just feel like I--I really feel like I need to be kind to those girls. Like I WANT to be kind to them. They can see our love and they’re moved by it. I want them to know we see them, too, and how earnest they are. How lovely.

Samuel had made it to the entrance, which Kenzie could see was heralded tonight with huge banners running from the edge of the sidewalk to the entrance, the doors thrown wide tonight to expose the opulent foyer of Annette Shepherd’s mansion. Some of the banners had the Shepherd Unlimited logo (an SU in white Verdana script with cobalt blue fleur de lis on either side) and opulent, swirling gold text on a black background that read 4TH ANNUAL SHEPHERD FREEDOM FOUNDATION GALA: GOLD IN THE DARKNESS and in smaller script The Juxtaposition of Light and Shadow in the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. Between the script banners were picture banners printed stunningly with major Pre-Raphaelite works: Kenzie could make out Rossetti’s Venus Verticordia, Cowper’s Vanity, and Evelyn de Morgan’s The Field of the Slain, alongside others obscured from her seat. The glowing feeling she’d felt with Gabby and Lindy faded out into nervous excitement now, and she felt her throat clench, her hands going cold as blood rushed to her head. She shifted, feeling the press of the plug inside her, sending sharp pricks of intensity up her spine and through her thighs. Duncan clutched her hand more tightly, and she knew he was thinking about the clenching weight of the ring at his cock, could feel the intensity of his desire for her, like lightning bolts of needling sensation, infiltrating the corners of her mind. Hang in there, baby, and she turned to him, smiling nervously, his eyes intent on her as he bit his lip. We have a long way to go.

“Earth to Kenzie and Duncan,” Madeline called into the backseat, her voice impatient. “Your mother is fucking starving!”

Kenzie glanced out the window again--between the rows of banners on either side of the entranceway was a lush black carpet, stretching into the mansion and beyond her eyesight. There were at least a hundred people milling around on it now--the press was confined to the sidelines by gold ropes, photographers to a stretch around the middle of the walkway, a black backdrop visible with the Shepherd logo and various sponsor logos printed along it. Kenzie recognized several Senators and Congresspeople, as well as the Mayor and Vice President Usher, and also recognized several well-known celebrities with a little burst of shyness--get it together Kenz, you’re a celebrity now too, in your own right.

You’re the most important person here, she heard Duncan’s thought to her. I mean it, Kenz.You are. Don’t fucking worry about any of them. Tonight, this is for you. It’s about you. They’re going to see. Kenzie felt a rush of nerves, an aching affection for him, full of gratitude and desire and love, and she quickly dipped her mouth up to his and brought her hand to his hair, then she pulled away before he could deepen it--and pushed the door open, stepping out onto the carpet.

Kenzie’s eyes widened as the collective eyes of the press and photo pools drifted over to the BMW--as one, they seemed to shift all their energy and attention onto her and her alone, giving her the acute feeling of a deer trapped in the headlights of an oncoming semi-truck. Duncan was exiting behind her, and then a short-haired valet hurrying up to them, a flushed look on his face, pulling the front passenger’s open for Madeline, who gave him an appraising stare over her glasses as Kenzie felt the eyes of the guests now turning onto them as well--she locked eyes with Mark Usher for a moment, her blood going cold, and his expression was indecipherable to her, but Kenzie knew he knew who she was, which made her feel as though someone had usurped her body and put a mask on it. The Vice President can’t possibly know me, little ol’ Mackenzie Stone. How the fuck? Life makes no fucking sense anymore.

“Darlings, please, distract them from me,” Madeline turned her head to Duncan, who was holding his hand reassuringly at the small of Kenzie’s back as she stood stock-still, frozen and trapped in her thoughts. “I need to get to the refreshment table post-haste. Kiss or something.”

“You know I’m going to kiss her, Madeline,” Duncan smiled. “As often as possible and as long as she’ll let me.”

“That’s my boy.”

Madeline set out ahead of them before Kenzie could stop her, pausing to made a snide comment to a woman with platinum blonde hair and a monstrous dress that seemed to be made of the tinselly tassels of cheerleader pompoms in gold and white towards the front of the press area. The woman’s face pinched into a mask of dislike at Kenzie’s mother, and Kenzie fought the urge to laugh.

“Who’s that?” She whispered to Duncan, unable to look away from the horrible dress the woman wore. Kenzie felt acutely that she recognized her from somewhere, but couldn’t decipher where.

“It’s Gretchen Friedrichs,” Duncan answered in a dark tone. “She has a popular conservative web series called Patriot Watch. And she’s absolutely awful. I hope Madeline just told her to fuck off into a black hole. She’s going to try to talk to you. Ignore her.”

Duncan twined his fingers through Kenzie’s, his other hand coming down to her train to drape it over his arm, and he stepped forward, pulling her gently. Time to go, sweet Kenzie. You look as beautiful as a falling star. I know how brave you are. This is nothing for you. A piece of cake. They were nearing the press pool, the whole of which had turned their attention utterly on Kenzie and Duncan, making the hairs on Kenzie’s arms rise with the intensity of their stares. The energy was suddenly dense, suffocating, almost savage, and it made Kenzie want to turn and run back to the BMW--but the BMW wasn’t there anymore, Samuel had driven away. Too late, Kenz, you’re in it now. Kenzie glanced at Duncan, feeling her heart clench, feeling as though there was water in her ears, blocking her hearing, and she felt horribly dizzy for a moment. He’s so beautiful, all in gold and black, as beautiful as the evening, as divine as an angel with dark wings, Prince Duncan from high in his opulent tower, and who am I, but little Mackenzie Stone, tripping over her own feet, crying over every little thing, with her shitty little apartment and her shitty little tchotkes, her shitty little plants and her little goofy button face--

Kenzie. Remember when you had the nightmare? Breathe like that. Just breathe, baby. I love you more than anything on this earth. You know how extraordinary you are--but I’ll tell you again. You’ve felt it when our minds come together this way--you’ve felt it in our bed, how you’ve made me needy for you beyond all desire I’ve ever experienced, and you’ve felt it in the way you can bring comfort to others just by willing it into them. Mackenzie Stone. You are not a little of anything. You are a gold ocean of impossible depth. Now breathe. I love you. Show them. Duncan’s eyes were twin pools of sapphiric water--they knew her, and saw her, and accepted her utterly, worshipped her, and she knew it.

Kenzie breathed in through her nose, held it, and breathed out through her mouth. Then she went up to Gary Spencer and Sissy Conners, past Gretchen Friedrichs who shouted “Mackenzie, Mackenzie, does this mean you’re a Republican now?” and smiled at them--and when she smiled, rather than pressing the gold outward, Kenzie swirled it, stirred it, in the pit of her body, stirred it high into herself, and moved it through her mind. Mackenzie. You truly are that brave person Duncan believes you to be. Think of everything that’s happened. This is really nothing. You’re together. You are the sceptre, he is the sword. Eternal and unshaking.

The last of the thought came unbidden, a jarring, nonsensical certainty that she didn’t understand, and Kenzie blinked, moving it away from herself, refocusing on the high, heady boldness she could feel building in herself now. She shifted, resurfacing to reality, feeling the plug pressing into her again, pressing hot fingers into the sensitivity of her muscles and senses. Our secret, baby, here among all these people.

“Mackenzie, how are you feeling tonight?” Sissy was holding a microphone out to her, her smile too wide and too white, her dress a blinding, extremely tight bodycon in dark gold snakeskin. “You look absolutely exquisite, an absolute vision, I know you mentioned yesterday that Morgan Winthrop designed your look for tonight, but what’s the concept here, beyond the theme?”

“I’m the concept,” Kenzie was tilting her head down, batting her eyelashes slowly, giving her best Kenzie-wants-something-from-Momby look--one she’d perfected over a lifetime--aware the camera on Ricky’s shoulder behind them was zeroed on her. She glanced to the side--Duncan was saying something to Gretchen in a low voice, still clutching the end of Kenzie’s train, his expression dark. Gretchen looked like she’d swallowed something sour, and Kenzie looked back at the BPF reporters, a satisfied twinge floating through her mind. “Duncan was inspired by me. By our relationship. We both love mythology and we’re drawn to the myth of Hades and Persephone, so we kind of went with something along those lines, but--I feel wonderful, I can’t wait to see the set-up inside, I just love the banners already. I know everyone’s been working so hard. I love the romanticism of all of it, and I’m so happy Duncan and I are finally getting a chance to step out publically together, so, yeah--I’m just really happy to be here. And to show off Morgan’s extraordinary talents.” She grinned at Sissy, who was gaping at her with surprise. Duncan finally appeared at her elbow; he’d set her train down behind them, and Kenzie turned her head over her shoulder to glance down at it, fanning like a gold river over a black landscape, then turned her face up to him, her smile still wide. I fucking love you, baby. She grasped his hand and Sissy switched the microphone to Duncan now, her expression one of wonder, speaking rapidly.

“Duncan, wow--the look. The eyeshadow, the gold jacket, the collar--you two are just so incredibly beautiful together, there’s now an internet shorthand for your relationship, “Duckenzie”, which I’m sure you’re both aware of, I’ve heard you have a fan club now and your Instagrams are the most popular on the internet lately--I saw you already posted a shot of your looks for tonight and it’s racked up a quarter of a million likes already--is there anything you would say to your fans around the world? They seem to be growing by the hour, and tonight is sure to bring you more.”

“We think everyone is wonderful,” Kenzie said, and turned to Duncan, drifting gold against him. Everyone can see, baby. I feel it. He nodded, smiling down at her, his dark look shivering against her heart again, his thumb pressing into her palm, suggestive, hidden. “And good things are coming,” he said.

“Duncan, can you elaborate on that?” Gary said, his eyes switching back and forth between them, puzzled, rapt.

“It’ll be clearer in time,” Kenzie said to him, staring at him steadily for a long moment. Gary seemed utterly shaken by them; Kenzie could see sweat had broken out on his brow, and he looked away from her after a moment, nervously. “Thanks, Sissy, Gary. Thanks.”

“Have...a wonderful time.”

Sissy’s voice suddenly seemed tiny, far different from the boisterous tone she usually used. Kenzie could see the confusion in the other woman’s eyes--as if she’d seen something she couldn’t explain, something that had shaken her to the core. It’s us, Kenzie knew. Sissy saw us for a moment. Not me and Duncan, not really--she saw those other selves. The ones we see in our dreams sometimes. The ones that cannot be described in words. She saw us, just the tiniest bit, reflected from us like a mirror held up to another time and place. She felt us. Kenzie pulled Duncan away from the press pool, and to the black backdrop, turning towards where fifty photographers crouched on specially designed pews--their flashes immediately blinded her, made her suck her breath in, their voices rising in a cacophony so she could barely decipher one from the next.

“You got this, baby,” Duncan was whispering down into her ear, his hand snaking around her waist again. “Duncan! Mackenzie! Over here! Mackenzie, you look gorgeous! Mackenzie! You look beautiful Mackenzie! Duncan, this way, thank you! We love you, over here! You’re so lovely together! Duckenzie, look this way! Thank you! Duckenzie forever!” And Kenzie couldn’t help but laugh, dipping her head to showcase the dark rosebuds in her hair, Duncan turning his face down to her temple, his smile making her laugh again as he clutched her against him, their Cartier bracelets visibly crossed at their wrists for the onlookers, the shattering rhythm of the cameras rising higher, frenzied to capture the moment between them, the voices of the photographers clashing again and again against each other, and Kenzie felt absolutely drunk to be in his arms this way, suddenly forgetting the dozens of cameras facing them, feeling the pressure of the hidden ring at his groin pressing against the dip of her abdomen, making her shudder in his arms with tiny, almost imperceptible tension, and she could hear a kind of rising sigh from the photographers, a murmuring admiration that seemed to be making Duncan flushed, seemed to be kindling his boldness--he turned his face down to her, opening his mouth just so, kissing her in a rapturous, fluid movement that caused an audible gasp from the rows of cameras, a collective exclamation of gratification that elated her.

His lips bruised against her for a tender, tiny eon--Kenzie lost herself against him for the span of it, her eyes closing to the intensity of the camera flashes, the sound of the shouting mob floating away from her ears, her mind drifting to them alone in their bed in the blessed darkness, his strong, elegant hands tying her to the chain with velvet ribbon, that first kiss, that night on the balcony covered in roses, god, my life changing forever in your arms in an instant, beloved, the unbearable softness with which he’d first touched her, his hands falling to the sides of her face, the urgency of his mouth then, the venerate devotion in his mouth now--and then Duncan was breaking away from her, as if remembering himself, remembering that they were caught in the gaze of at least two hundred people in this moment, and they resurfaced to reality, both of them trembling against each other, longing for the moment where Kenzie knew, and could feel that Duncan knew, they could finally be alone. Alone together, the only thing I ever want now, ever.

There was another audible, collective sigh from the photographers as Duncan gently pulled Kenzie beyond the backdrop--this one of disappointment at the moment ending, Kenzie knew, frustration that they were leaving. They adore us, Kenzie thought. And she knew it was absolutely true; knew it, without ego or pretense, as she knew the full moon was hanging over them, watching the night unfold. They see it too.

Duncan was pulling her away from the frenzied press of the carpet--Kenzie could now see that almost everyone around them was watching them, but everyone seemed to be afraid to speak to them, eyes flitting over Duncan’s dripping-gold jacket, the striking shadow around his eyes, over the fall of her hair and the Cartier diamonds at her throat and on her wrist, falling down the shimmering gold of her bodice and the gentle dip of the sleeves, the train drifting behind her. No one dared to tread on her--Kenzie recognized a very famous actor, watched him carefully avoid the train, his eyes roving up over her form hungrily, and she met his gaze with a tiny smile. He looked away, sheepishly, blushing. I suppose one doesn’t dare mess with the Shepherds, generally speaking. Not for the first time, and she suspected, not the last, Kenzie remembered that Duncan was part of a very, very wealthy family, and that likely, he would soon be the inheritor of that immense wealth.

And then we’ll change the world, baby.

Kenzie gazed raptly at the foyer as Duncan helped her up the steps and through the double-doors, looping her hand into the crook of his arm, pressing her fingers into the muscles there, feeling him clench them at her touch. More baby, touch me more. There were dozens more of the banners here, Hughes’ Ophelia, Burne-Jones’ The Golden Stairs, but the angels of Waterhouse’s St. Cecilia caught her eye immediately--their sweet faces calm and reticent, watching the saint in her slumber, their innocence and sincerity clamoring into her heart. They look like Gabby and Lindy, Kenzie thought, remembering Lindy’s tears. My two little angels. Duncan looked back at her, noticing the emotion in her. She shook her head a little.

“It’s all just so beautiful, Dunny,” she whispered, and he was nodding to her, the dark beauty of him in the chandeliers moving her further still, moving her beyond words again. He brought his arm around her to drift down her back, pulling her beside the staircase, out of the way of the people around them, sliding his fingers down to the beginning of the incline of her ass, and she drifted back from him, shaking her head. No, baby, don’t. It’s too much. There are too many people. You need to be patient. She saw the terrible longing floating behind his eyes, saw the blue flames licking around her from him, and she smiled. Poor, poor baby. Is that ring making you ache and ache for me?

Yes, Kenzie, fuck. So fucking much. It’s almost unbearable. I feel like I’m about to pass out.

My poor, sweet baby. Kenzie went back to him, letting him grip her under her bare arms with his hot fingers, letting him press his mouth against her cheek, onlookers be damned. Let them look. Annette was nowhere to be seen here--Kenzie’s eyes skirted across the room as Duncan continued to kiss down to her ear, pressing into her. She must be in the room beyond. I don’t know how we’re going to avoid her, but we’re going to.

“We should probably find Momby, make sure she hasn’t fallen into a fondue fountain somewhere.”

“God, I just want you alone,” Duncan’s mouth was shivering into the dip of her ear, bringing the delicate hairs at the back of her neck up, his hands drifting at the smooth gold under her breasts. “I just want you all to myself, angel.” Kenzie could see people staring at them, eyes hungry; god, I don’t know who a lot of these people are, but they look fucking important.

“Shhh, really baby, we should find Momby, okay? Please?”

At that moment Kenzie’s eyes zeroed on a figure making a determined beeline for them from the other side of the foyer--Duncan was still pressing his mouth into her ear, sucking and biting there with urgency, his whispers having quieted to now drift secretly in her mind, and he hadn’t noticed the figure yet. It was a woman, and she was petite, like Kenzie, and beautiful, with wide, long-lashed eyes, full lips and a button nose, but rail-thin, her chin jutting towards them as though she were being pulled by an invisible force. She had long, artfully styled platinum hair, falling over her shoulder in expertly arranged waves, and her dress was a sculptured black bodice decorated with intricate gold embroidery, accentuating her minute waist, which fell into a voluptuous cascade of black tulle that seemed to buoy her across the room. At her throat was a huge yellow diamond, so large Kenzie wondered for a moment how she was holding her head up. Her fists were clenched at her sides as if she were bitterly angry, but a wide smile was plastered across her face, exposing all her teeth (like a crocodile, Kenzie thought). Her dark eyes were staring, eerily unblinking, at the back of Duncan’s head, and at Kenzie.

Marissa Montague.

“Duncan,” Kenzie whispered, trying to pull back from him, but he continued to kiss at her, lost for a moment, “Duncan, it’s--”

“Duncan Shepherd! Duncan, oh my god, I’ve been so busy lately, it’s been so hard to call you!” Marissa had reached them, and her voice pitched high, dipping towards uneven, though her smile remained plastered on her face, stretching her cheeks to what looked like an almost painful degree to Kenzie. Duncan stopped kissing Kenzie’s neck, but his mouth still hovered close to her, his arms still clutched tightly around her. Kenzie looked over his shoulder into Marissa’s eyes; she could see the coiled snake that rested behind them, the wanton need, now that Marissa was this close. But not for Duncan, not really, Kenzie knew. What she wants is attention--fame, attention everlasting from the multitude, and to be showered in riches, but her thirst for them is insatiable. There’s a hole inside her that gnaws with hungry teeth, and it has never had its fill, not once. So she searches for more food for it.

Duncan turned his head slowly to look at Marissa, and Kenzie saw the cast of a dark storm inside his eyes, felt the blue flame of him, shimmering, flare up with discomfort. Oh, no FUCKING way, she heard his thought, and slid her fingers down his arm, soothing him with her touch. It doesn’t matter, baby, I’m here. We’re together. Let them try to get between us. Let her try. Let anyone.

“Why would you be calling me anyway, Marissa?” Duncan was gazing at her evenly, still holding Kenzie close, his hand drifting in her hair, over the rosebuds. Kenzie could feel the wave of anger in him, feel the drifting measure of dislike. She’s lovely on the outside, Kenzie thought, but inside there is something gone, like it was ripped out of her and only the ragged void remains, a void she longs to fill but cannot. Poor Marissa. She instantly felt empathy for the other woman, seeing her so closely, felt embarrassed for her, as if Marissa were suddenly naked. As lovely as the actress was, Kenzie could immediately see how deeply discontent she was, how full of voracious need.

“Well, we never really finished what we started, now did we?” Marissa stepped forward, the smile that had been plastered faltering a little, her eyes skirting to Kenzie with annoyance, her hand snatching out, attempting to grasp his velvety arm. Duncan stepped out of her reach, pulling Kenzie to the side with him, his mouth curling up ever-so-slightly.

“And we never will. Marissa, this is my girlfriend--my partner--Mackenzie Stone. I’m sure you’ve read about her. Kenzie, this is Marissa Montague.”

“Of course,” and Kenzie forced herself to smile politely, bringing out a hand, Duncan’s cheek pressing against her hair, refusing to let go of her or let Marissa near him. “It’s lovely to meet you.” Marissa ignored the hand, crossing her arms now, barking out a little laugh.

“Partner,” she mimicked. “Since when have you ever had a partner, Duncan? We all know your reputation. You used to bring a different fuck buddy home every night, I was there back then, when we were all hanging around with the Ducatis and doing a mountain of cocaine every day.” Marissa plastered the grin back on her face. “I can see why you’re stringing this one along, though, what a scrumptious little pussy cat.” Marissa brought her hands up to her face and pressed them in a V against her mouth, flicking her tongue out.

This woman has no interest in sex, Kenzie knew, despite Marissa’s lewd gesture. Marissa’s eyes flicked over to her again with a measure of loathing, and Kenzie caught her gaze this time, trapping Marissa’s dark, intense eyes. In fact, it disgusts and bores her. But she is practiced at the art of pretending. She’ll fake interest in anything if she thinks it can move her to where she thinks she wants to be. Sometimes, though, she’s disillusioned by the reality versus her expectation. And she always wants more. Like a wind that howls endlessly.

“Marissa. What do you want?” Duncan’s tone dipped, and Kenzie could feel his anger beginning to stir, his frustration and lust for her pressing against the anger, kindling it further, his sorrow and disillusionment with his mother pressing there too, and his energy became ragged and chaotic, the turmoil in him suddenly like water boiling over. She concentrated, conjuring wave after wave of translucent gold in her mind, staring at Marissa evenly as she pressed them down over him in his arms. I have no animosity in my heart for you, she thought to the other woman. In fact, I feel acute sympathy for you. I’m sorry you’re trapped in a world where you cannot possibly be yourself.

“I want you to ditch this penniless, raggedy bitch, Duncan. What are you doing? I mean, who even is she? Do you realize what you’re doing to your reputation? Really, it’s embarrassing.” Marissa was rolling her eyes, fingers toying with the huge diamond at her neck, another mirthless laugh barking out of her. “I’m gonna go do a line in the bathroom, and you should join me. I mean, it’s silly that we stopped seeing each other. I’m willing to forgive you if you’ll just get rid of her.”

“Marissa. You’re embarrassing yourself right now. Please, go away. Immediately.” Duncan’s tone was quiet and very low. “Go away or I’ll have you escorted off the premises.”

Marissa scoffed. “Duncan Shepherd, you can’t fucking do that.”

“Marissa.”

Kenzie had been watching from the cocoon of Duncan’s arms, but a hot, blinding energy had been building behind her temples for the last few minutes, one that seemed to want to burst from her mouth and her eyes and the corners of her fingertips; seemed alive and impatient, shot through with sunlight, and the power of the energy, the feeling in the center of her belly, was immense, like the dream where she’d made the fire grow. The energy, Kenzie knew, could do whatever she willed it to do--could move objects, could stop them, could distort the air, could freeze it, could move unseeable things, reverse them, rewind them. The knowledge of the immensity of the energy overwhelmed her for a moment--and Kenzie felt sure that though this woman had some strange power of her own (it was like indigo, the color of her, like indigo that ached, and the thing Marissa ached for was a thing she couldn’t find, like a lost portion of her heart that had tumbled down a dark well, never to be retrieved from the depths again), Kenzie was calm in the certainty that hers was greater, because it was lighter, it was the gold that could move all things, the gold that could heal, and the gold that could shield from all darkness.

“Marissa,” Kenzie said again, focusing her eyes inside the other woman’s. “It’s over. You will not be able to move him again. You must stop now. It’s futile.” The world has shifted, she thought now, into Marissa’s wide brown eyes, the words clear in her mind, as if she’d read them in an ancient book. The path is set. Yours goes somewhere else. To attempt to alter our destiny--the High Destiny--will result in your personal destruction. Stop now, little one.

The air seemed to cool, to thin. The three of them were inside the energy now; the energy that had come from the center of Kenzie, that she had somehow pressed out, controlled, to only the cocoon of their circle. The other guests seemed to drift past them as if in a dream, not glancing at them, as if they didn’t see the cocoon at all, as if she, Duncan and Marissa were suddenly invisible--it’s working, Kenzie thought. Let’s see if I can move her away from us now.

Marissa’s expression had fallen from the obscene, mocking smile to one of confusion and apprehension--her eyes widened, her head whipping back and forth inside the cocoon Kenzie had created around them, and she seemed utterly bewildered.

“What the fuck,” she murmured, her voice cracking. “What the fuck are you doing to me?”

“Marissa, I’m sorry. I can see how cold you’ve felt, and for so long. Good luck on your path. Look for something that won’t harm others. Look for something to protect. I promise, if you can find that, you will be happy someday. Go now. Forget about Duncan. That’s all over. He is not yours, not at this time, and not in any time.”

And with those words spoken, Kenzie pushed Marissa out of the cocoon she had built, and Marissa turned, as if in a dream, and walked away from them, not looking back, her blonde hair and tulle skirt retreating until she had turned the corner of the vast parlor beyond, and they could no longer see her. Kenzie breathed in through her nose, held it, counted. As she did, she could hear her heart beating frantically, feel the tiny shaking in Duncan’s arms as he held her, His face had pressed against her temple again, his eyes closed, and he looked almost meditative, but Kenzie could feel the confusion inside him; he doesn’t understand what I did, either. But he trusts me. He trusts me now. He knows I’d never hurt him, never, never in this world. He knows I will always protect him. And I will, baby. I always will.

Then she breathed out, and the spell broke; the cocoon dissipated, and they were back in the foyer of the Shepherd mansion, the sounds of clinking glasses, lilting piano music, and blue-blooded voices speaking in polite cadences bleeding back into the background. Duncan opened his eyes to stare into hers, and the storms there had dissipated--their blue was calm now, like the sky bleeding into a summer evening, like the moon’s reflection on a pool of water.

“Kenzie, baby, what was that?”

[baetoul]

i remade

i wanna use this blog to like track project and art ideas and progress and gain aesthetic inspiration! that’s the goal

i’m currently working on making mini dioramas out of clay to display in little geometric glass lantern thingies. i made the characters for the scene i want, but i need to make the prayer clothes for the little mama model i made. i found a white fabric that will work but i need a white lace to edge it with. after that i can paint the figurines, which is the part im most nervous for as i am not a skilled painter and have a horrible understanding of colour. i need to decide on a direction for the painting too, like am i going for realistic (i.e. setting myself up to fail) or a more abstract unfinished look? might be able to pull that off. like am i painting the mama figure’s face peach colour or leaving the white of the clay? not sure. 

mini dioramas are a great little exploration for me, they combine my love for miniature cute things and allow me to make everything from scratch and have a lot of creative expression. it’s also felt a lot more accessible to me to sculpt clay figures than to paint or draw, for which i lack fundamental art skills. it’s also greatly nostalgic and allows me to create alters to the mundane beauty of life and memory and recollection. also it’s an item that can be displayed and has a purpose in being displayed which is nice, because i hate making non-functional stuff that just gets shoved into a drawer. I have more geometric lanterns thingies so i will probs create more scenes for those. i also have a wooden box shaped like a hardcover book for which i plan to sculpt a book scene, but i have no idea what scene yet! i feel like i want to choose something that means something to me but is also recognizable? 

i also made some flat rectangular blocks of clay with holes at the top to make earrings from. i’m going to try painting them as queen of hearts playing cards and write one of my favourite lyrics on top. i was going to carve certain details of the cards into the clay as grooves but i totally forgot and baked them plain. so we’ll see i guess lol. 

i handbound a journal for zahraa which was amazing. it was a little loose so i definitely need to work on my technique, but it was a fun and exciting process and for my first one i think it turned out really well. purple velvet covers with this gorgeous italian tissue paper from my letter kit as the inside cover. finally my paper and fabric scrap hoarding can be used to good affect lol. we’ll see what my next hand binding project will be. 

hmm what else. i saw a lot of gorgeous art in NYC at both the moma and the guggenheim. i was really intrigued by the oil painted pieces and i get this instinctive feel that oil paints would suit me as a medium much more than watercolour has been and i really want to try it. it seems expensive to get into though, maybe ill be on the lookout for kits at homesense/winners to get my first little taste. even if oils do suit me better i know im completely missing the fundamentals of art like shading, perspective, colour theory, etc so i feel like i should start doing those step by step drawing tutorials on youtube to get some sense of things. 

I also want to do more with beads, textiles, fabric, crocheting/knitting. 

ALSO i bought a blender from goodwill to try and make paper with but i havent even attempted it yet!! i think making my own paper by hand with my pressed flowers would be so gorgeous. i need to hurry up and get my dad to make me a frame before he leaves, or else i’ll either have to buy one or go to home depot and try to finagle my own. i also really wanted to try screen printing but again, everything costs money bro. maybe ill save screen printing for summer. 

[alysemeadfad]

Creative drawing home investigation

The Pencil Bra

the task was to create something that attaches to your body that you can draw with, or in other words a kinetic drawing body extension, i began to jot down ideas and do rough sketches, i thought of a shoe covered in pens and dipping the foot in to paint also, i thought of a dress with paint bottles attached to the bottom of the dress and moving around by spinning jumping and other movements to create markings, my final idea was the bra, i thought it was really out of the box and nobody else had thought of it, i enjoy making my work weird and unexpected, so thats what i did. i acquired a bra that i had bought that did not fit me, and used some cheap HB pencils and hot glued them to my bra in no particular pattern. 

once all 28 pencils were attached to the bra 14 on each cup, i taped a make shift a2 paper to the wall, as i only had A3 paper i taped 2 sheets together, it looked a bit botched but the same result came out, i dragged my boobs across the page and began to make marks.

i jumped, spun, swayed, stabbed, and many other movements to create creative and interesting marks on the page, unfortunately because the pencils were HB and i could not apply much pressure as it was  difficult to do so and move.

The Pen Pants

after creating The Pencil Bra i wanted to create another drawing body extension and what goes with a bra? pants go with a bra. so i got some cheap marker pens in ASSorted colours (pun intended) ,i used hot glue  to attach them also and once all stuck to the ass of the pants i put them on and stuck paper to the wall again.

i jumped, swayed, stabbed, spun, wiggled and other movements to also create fun and interesting markings, i was much happier with this out come as  i could actually see the markings clearly and the colours just looked more interesting that the pencil, as the process was fun you could see that it was now fun through the coloured markings.

Rebecca Horn

the pencil mask by rebecca horn

DIMENSIONS

 Object within display case: 650 × 520 × 400mm

Black box: 135 × 360 × 225mm

Framed photograph: 255 × 312 × 33mm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eh9JH7daSbg

Strapped around the face, the mask transforms the wearer’s head into an instrument for drawing. Horn has described wearing it: ‘All pencils are about two inches long and produce the profile of my face in three dimensions...I move my body rhythmically from left to right in front of a white wall. The pencils make marks on the wall the image of which corresponds to the rhythm of my movements.’ The spike-like pencils make this one of Horn’s more threatening works. However, it is linked to the feather masks, as feather quills were also once used for writing.

Drawing Practical 1

starting on a 6x6cm square section on an A1 sheet hanging in front of a window i began to listen to kiwi by Harry styles.the lines i created were very dark and ridged at the song was quite rocky and was more shouting than singing a melody.i used 9B graphite on all

my next drawing was to Heather by Conan Grey, this song is a lot calmer and has more melody so my markings on my page were much softer and more flowing and you could tell there was less pressure being used on the graphite as the markings were less tonal.on this section i had a longer rectangle area to use up so there was more space for freedom and i could use the length to go from the start of the song to the end of the song.

the third section was 6cm longer than the second section giving even more space to draw, this time we all listened to the same song on a record player from the 60s, we had no emotional connection to this song as none of us knew it, it was very 40s 50s vibes

to break out of the conventional form of drawing with pencil in a controlled manner on pencil we made drawing sticks, this caused us to be out of our comfort zone and lose some physical control of the graphite stick.

to get even more creative we changed our medium to charcoal and attached pieces to my hand, while listening to music i created markings with my hand on the page these markings were very fluid and exciting as there was more than one piece of charcoal making a mark so it created an over all more intersting drawing.

Wassily Kandinsky

Painter, printmaker, watercolorist, pioneering theorist of abstraction. Abandoning an academic law career in Russia, moved to Munich in 1896 at age of thirty to study art. Founded several progressive art groups in Munich, most notably the Blaue Reiter, in 1911, with Franz Marc. Developed artistic philosophy based on the psychology of colors and shapes. Rejected objective representation and materialism in his art and theoretical writings, favoring spiritual approach of “inner necessity,” which culminated in his breakthrough to abstraction, around 1913

.Marc gave an emotional meaning or purpose to the colors he used in his work: blue was used to portray masculinity and spirituality, yellow represented feminine joy, and red encased the sound of violence. After the National Socialists took power, they suppressed modern art; in 1936 and 1937, the Nazis condemned the late Marc as an entarteter Künstler (degenerate artist) and ordered approximately 130 of his works removed from exhibition in German museums.

Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) was a group of artists united in rejection of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München in Munich, Germany. The group was founded by a number of Russian emigrants, including Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, and native German artists, such as Franz Marc, Paul Klee, August Macke and Gabriele Münter. They considered that the principles of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München, a group Kandinsky had founded in 1909, had become too strict and traditional.

Der Blaue Reiter was an art movement lasting from 1911 to 1914, fundamental to Expressionism, along with Die Brücke which was founded in 1905.

“A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his art.”

These are words from the renowned painter Wassily Kandinsky that describe the influence of music on his work throughout his life – music appears everywhere in his paintings. Kandinsky believed that music could be brought to the canvas in the way it can be brought to paper in the form of notes and ultimately to melodious sound that captures almost any living being.

Kandinsky continues to perfect his theory: Abstract art creates a new inner world that, when viewed from the outside, has nothing to do with reality. It follows the general laws of the cosmic world. Kandinsky did not doubt his ‘inner world’ throughout his life from the very early ages until his death.

The sophistication and amalgamation of music and painted or written art became ever more prevalent as human artistry and creativity developed over time. If you take a moment to study this phenomenon, you will encounter famous names like Johann Wolfgang Goethe who once declared that architecture was “frozen music” or as Paul Klee famously once said, “One day I must be able to improvise freely on the keyboard of colors: the row of watercolors in my paintbox”.

Jackson Pollock Practical

 the practical started on a4 paper with black and white acrylic paint, i had little to no idea on pollocks technique, thought behind his work, or him other than the fact i knew of his work and had seen some in person on my trip to new york city. the task was to replicate one of pollocks paintings, which is physically impossible as the physics behind each splatter of paint is going to be different to the next and will never ever be exactly the same as pollocks. so we interpreted our own by looking at the markings that he had made and trying to make similar markings with black and white acrylic, the lines of his work are quite long and stringy, the consistency of acrylic wouldn’t create those lines on its own, so i mixed the paint with a decent amount of pva glue to create a more runny yet tacky consistency to create the lines as close to what pollock was making.

we were then given the correct paint that pollock would of used which was house hold paint, used for things like skirting boards, banisters and wooden doors. this paint has a more stringy and controlled consistency than the acrylic allowing the lines to be thinner and you have more choice on where the paint goes unlike acrylic just lands wherever gravity pulls it and is way to thick.

once we had had some fun creating some abstract pollock like paintings with the house hold paint , the paintings had no figurative meaning, so we were tasked to create something figurative yet hold the style of pollock at the same time so i chose to create a sun flower as it was the first thing that popped in to my mind, i used acrylic and house paint as i wanted colour but we had no house paintsin any colour but white and black so i mixed my acrylic with a lot of glue to get a similar consistency as the house paint.

i then created a bee with yellow acrylic and glue and the black house paint, the proportions were a bit big for the paper as i couldn’t fit the wings in which was a bummer as the wings of a bee are what make the buzzing sound and the way the markings of the paint fall almost look like the bee is vibrating.

Jackson Pollock

picture i took at the MoMa in nyc

Pollock’s work had many other influences. For example, he liked a group of Mexican painters who made murals. Murals are large images that the artists paint directly onto a wall. Some of these painters were working in New York City in the nineteen thirties, so Pollock was able to see them work. Pollock borrowed several methods and ideas from these artists. They included the use of large canvases, the method of freely applying paint and honoring old and new traditions.

Also, when he was in his late twenties, Pollock suffered a mental breakdown. It was caused in part by depression and dependence on alcohol. As a result, he was treated by a Jungian psychoanalyst. This is a special kind of expert in emotional health who works to understand the unconscious mind, dreams, and emotions. Pollock was influenced by this kind of investigation of human relations and emotions. This “inside world” would become the subject of his paintings.

During these years Jackson Pollock started to paint in a completely new way. He created art that was very physical. In fact, his method is sometimes called “action painting”. Most artists painted on a surface that stood upright or vertical. But Pollock put his large canvases on the floor so that he could move around all four sides of his work. He also used very liquid paints so that he could easily drop the paint onto his canvases. This “dripping” method allowed him to make energetic works. His paintings are explosions of curving lines, shapes and colors. In his art you can see every movement that his arm made. You can see how he had to move his body around the canvas. Videos of Pollock painting show this process, which looks like a painterly dance.

Pollock invented a new kind of painting that changed the way the world looked at art. … When he first began painting, Jackson Pollock painted representational objects such as people and animals. However, he is famous for helping to create a whole new art movement called Abstract Expressionism.

[warholiana]

The art world's first souperstar; This monumental biography of Andy Warhol is extremely fun - but fails to crack the enigma.

Daily Telegraph (London, England)

By Mick Brown

WARHOL: A LIFE AS ART by Blake Gopnik 976pp, Allen Lane

At the end of this monumental trawl through Andy Warhol's life and times, Blake Gopnik concludes that he has "overtaken Picasso as the most important and influential artist of the 20th century. Or at least the two of them share a spot on the top peak of Parnassus beside Michelangelo and Rembrandt and their fellow geniuses."

Warhol would have loved that. As a college student, Picasso was a favourite of his, and at the height of his pop art fame he made the rivalry explicit by wearing the Breton striped T-shirts Picasso was famous for - part tribute, part self-

promotion. Andy Warhol was the artist as brand, avant la lettre: as the title of this book suggests, his greatest creation was himself. So who was he exactly? Warhol's parents were immigrants from what is now Slovakia, who settled in the industrial nowhere land of Pittsburgh. His father was a labourer, the family poor.

Warhol was a sickly child who suffered from the shakes and chronic skin problems. His summers were spent lying in bed, listening to the radio with "cut-out paper dolls all over the spread and under the pillow". It was an upbringing he disowned as quickly as he could. When he arrived in New York in 1949, as an art-school graduate in search of work as an illustrator, he told a magazine editor who asked for a potted biography: "My life wouldn't fill a penny postcard."

The young Warhol was "very shy and cuddly, very much like a bunny", according to one friend, "an angel in the sky" according to another. He was also gay - a fact that, as Gopnik, an American art critic, sets out to demonstrate, would be crucial in shaping his "outsider" relationship to art and the milieu he moved in, and ultimately the milieu he created; crucial, too, in the way that public attitudes towards his work shifted from rejection to celebration.

In the late Forties, when two Pittsburgh judges had referred to homosexuals as "society's greatest menace" and police were drawing up lists of "known perverts", Warhol - then a window dresser in a Pittsburgh department store - favoured a pink corduroy suit, a tie dipped in paint and brightly coloured fingernails. Yet the notion of Warhol as "a feeble, androgynous waif ", says Gopnik, is "a mirage". As a young man, he lifted weights at the YMCA two or three times a week, and Lou Reed described him as being "like a demon, his strength is incredible" - at least until 1968, when an assassination attempt by a disturbed woman, Valerie Solanas, left him chronically debilitated.

Like Robert Mapplethorpe, he had an obsession with penises. Friends, acquaintances - total strangers - would be asked to drop their pants, according to one friend, and "Andy would make a drawing. That was it. And then he'd say, 'Thank you'." Sometimes "there'd be a little heart on them or tied with a little ribbon ..." An unrequited romantic, throughout his life he would fall in love with a succession of younger men, usually unhappily. But he seems to have had little enthusiasm for sexual relations. One partner, the photographer Carl Willers, recalls that he was "more passionate about food and eating".

It was a gay aesthetic, Gopnik argues, that informed what Warhol described as the "fairy style" curlicue illustrations of shoes with which he first made his name as an artist, and the camp taste for "lowly pop culture", which he would elevate to the realm of fine art. In characteristically faux-naif fashion, he traced the origins of his pop art to the time he spent working as a window dresser at Bonwits in New York, when he used comics and advertisements as a backdrop to his displays of dresses and handbags. "Then a gallery saw them and I just began taking windows and putting them in galleries."

This would lead to what Gopnik calls Warhol's "eureka moment - one of the greatest in the history of art", the Campbell soup can, and the notion that mass-produced commercial goods could be art - and, eventually, that art could be profitably mass-produced. His first Los Angeles exhibition in 1962 showed 32 soup cans, which were bought by the gallery owner Irving Blum for $1,000. In 1996, Blum sold them to Moma for $15million. "They might be worth half a billion now," Gopnik observes.

What Warhol was selling, as one friend put it, was "not so much art as milieu", a milieu "dripping with edge and irony". In 1964, he moved into a former hat factory in midtown Manhattan, where he produced the silk-screen prints of Marilyn, Elvis, electric chairs and suicide leaps, attended by a coterie of acolytes, and disciples - junkies, hustlers, transvestites and chronic narcissists, whom Warhol turned into his "superstars".

There was Ondine, "the Factory's favourite gay speed freak"; Warhol's principal muse, the bruised and beautiful heiress Edie Sedgwick, whose "charming incapacities" and decline into addiction and chaos Warhol chronicled with clinical indifference; and the flame-haired, honking-voiced Viva - "Warhol's Garbo", as the newspapers had it: a reference that had everything to do with her gaunt, porcelain features and nothing to do with reticence. Viva's "verbal diarrhoea", as Gopnik puts it, "left her no time for social niceties. Any thought that could cross her lips did."

Then there were the drag queens Jackie Curtis, Cindy Darling and Holly Woodlawn - a reflection of Warhol's fascination with gender. At college, for one self-portrait assignment, he shocked his class by depicting himself as a girl with Shirley Temple ringlets, explaining: "I always want to know what I would look like if I was a girl." Many years later, when asked what "famous person" he would most like to be, he replied "Christine Jorgensen" - America's first famous transsexual.

"Andy was like the Statue of Liberty," one friend tells Gopnik. "'Give me your tired, your hungry - your drag queens, your junkies.' He was the saint of misfits." But Warhol's friend, the critic and art curator Henry Geldzahler, put it more acutely when he described Warhol as "a voyeur-sadist" who needed "exhibitionist masochists in order to fulfil both halves of his destiny". Like a priest, Warhol could offer absolution for the perverse, but no promise of an afterlife. Most left his circle - or were ejected - feeling used, embittered and betrayed.

One comes to the conclusion that there was an emotional vacancy in Warhol. He didn't know how to feel. A lover, John Giorno, recalls watching the news of Kennedy's assassination unfold on television. "I started crying and Andy started crying. Hugging each other, weeping big fat tears and kissing. It was exhilarating, like when you get kicked in the head and see stars. Andy kept saying, 'I don't know what it means.'" But what did he believe? Like Bob Dylan, he deliberately cultivated the art of the put-on and concealment. Typical was this exchange with a journalist: "How close is pop art to 'Happenings'?" "I don't know." "What is pop art trying to say?" "I don't know."

When I interviewed Viva over lunch some years ago, she described how Warhol "would just want to gossip, like a woman would gossip basically - or his idea of what a woman would think gossip was. What Andy really liked to talk about was men's penises." (At this point a deathly silence fell over the crowded restaurant, all heads turning to hear what Viva would say next.) Henry Geldzahler wrote that Warhol "plays dumb just as his paintings do, but neither deceives us", adding that he was "incredibly analytical, intellectual, and perceptive". And, he might have added, incredibly shrewd.

In 1972, after Richard Nixon's historic visit to China, Warhol asked a friend, "Since fashion is art now and Chinese is in fashion, should I do some Mao portraits?" The idea spawned some 2,700 images, transforming a man who, as one critic pointed out, had "murdered about 60million Chinese and caused poverty and starvation in all China" into an icon.

But by then, Warhol had long since made the transition from underground artist to darling of the establishment, turning out portraits to order for Italian industrialists, wealthy socialites and the Shah of Iran, combining a Stakhanovite work ethic with manic socialising: a typical evening would take him from a Broadway opening to a fancy dinner, a rock star's birthday, and, always, Studio 54. "It's work," he explained.

Gopnik's rollicking book is a formidable achievement, but for all its dense accumulation of detail, scholarship and unabashed gossip, Warhol remains, as he doubtless would have wished, essentially, brilliantly, unknowable.

[ask-the-celestials]

slight break from the planets so i can bring in the main moons of the system and some of Earth’s ‘children’

Charon: A super sweet and inosent child who somehow has an ever bigger heart than Pluto, she always and i mean always has that small milkyway shaped dole by her slide no matter what(rumor has it that it actually holds a chunk of Milky’s soul, like the other dwarfs she has a scythe but its it more down to scale

Luna: Earth's companion and best friend to the end!she often thinks highly of herself and commonly boasts about how she helps keep earth alive and  stuff, if you want someone to meme along with, she is the moon to go to, she is overly happy and it all was rearing to go and run around and do stuff. Her weapon of choice is a barbed whip. Did i mention she has a wolf form?

Triton: even though he may look like a ball of edge and emo he is quite the opposite, happy and carefree, he skips around and humming songs! you can find him hanging around Neptune and Luna (we swear he has a small crush on her) or sitting under one of the trees in the Venus grounds drawing his heart out or in the kuiper belt jumping from rock to rock. his weapon? well whatever he draws he can summon to life!

Ganymede: this poor thing has not slept in  Y E A R S (by years i mean a pluto year.....twelve of them) he is an extremely laid back person and is slow to react, you mention weed? he’ll come blasting through your door demanding for it. rather gay for Titon, though he sometimes forgets his own strength. His weapon of choice is purely smashing things into dust.

Titon: ONE MASSIVE BALL OF GAY AND HE WILL SHOW IT, he tents to keep to the back and in the shadows until you actually talk to him, then he is a rather flamboyant person and is rather fun to have around! Weapon of choice? Rings like his big oll moma

Titana: quite literally the female version of Triton but with singing However the only thing sets her apart from him is the fact that she gets often nervous when other planets/moon show to much skin/crust, she asks them politely if they can cover up and if they dont, well she just deals with it and tries to be brave, we dont really know why but we think it might be because she has actualy picked up a religion from Earth. Weapon of choice? two daggers hidden in her sleeves

ISS (aka Izzy): if you want something that earth will literally give her own life for, Izzy is the thing to go for. They are rather kind despite earth watching over them like a hawk and is always looking for ways to talk to Curiosity, when the two are together they are inseparable, Izzy has no gender but they respond to he/his pronouns if need be. Weapon of choice? ya see those big ass claw/scythe things? yah that also the wings are good from slapping things away. He has the ability to blend in with his surroundings, like a chameleon but on steroids and colour enhancements. 

Curiosity:  exactly what his name states, just one hell of a curious george he is! Give him a rock? you will be his best friend forever! Mares is also overly protective oh him so dont hurt the kangaroo/mouse/penguin thing! He also has this rock that he loves and if he hands it to you, he trusts you with his life, so dont break that bind by throwing the rock away or you will be kicked, go on ask Mars about that. Weapons of choice? His speed plus his ability to leap rather high and fast and his prostion aim will equal a bad time for you, plus that horn on his head can be used to stab.

[chicagopdlover]

27 inspiring examples of vintage posters

27 inspiring examples of vintage posters

These vintage posters prove that we still have plenty to learn from the poster design of decades gone by. The idea of creating posters to advertise products harks back to the 1870s, thanks to the development of the stone lithographic printing process by French artist Jules Chéret. Prior to this, it was only possible to print black and white text. The new process meant brands all over the world could turn their marketing ideas into striking, colourful vintage posters. The new approach shot to popularity, and was soon being used to promote everything from movies to drinks. Here we round up the best vintage posters that have stood the test of time. Click the icon in the top right of each image to enlarge it 01. Sarah Bernhardt Alphonse Mucha had a long-standing professional relationship with Sarah Bernhardt Alphonse Mucha began his artistic career painting theatre sets, before eventually trying his hand at advertising illustration after relocating to Paris in 1887. In 1894, he was visiting a print shop that urgently needed a poster to advertise a new play starring the famous Sarah Bernhardt. Mucha's lithograph design attracted much praise and attention, and Berhardt was so impressed she began a six-year contract with the artist. The above vintage poster was one of many created during this time. 02. Kaffee Hag If you thought decaf was a modern horror, think again Lucian Bernhard was the full design package – graphic designer, type designer, interior designer and artist. He was also the main force behind the Plakatstil ('poster style') design style, which used reductive imagery, flat colour and bold typography to convey a message simply and quickly. His 1914 poster for Kaffee Hag is a brilliant example, instantly selling the notion of decaf as a cup of coffee that won't turn around and bite you with side-effects. 03. Dubonnet Cassandre’s Dubonnet poster was designed to be seen by motorists The advent of the motor car in the early 20th century provided new opportunities for poster designers in the form of roadside advertising hoardings, as well as new challenges: how do you get your idea across to people in fast-moving vehicles? Ukrainian-French painter and poster artist Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron (known as Cassandre) rose to the challenge with this 1932 poster for Dubonnet, designed to be read and understood from cars whizzing past at high speed. Cassandre also introduced the idea of serial posters; a set of posters placed to be seen in quick succession, in order to convey the full message. 04. Le Chat Noir Le Chat Noir’s iconic poster design has inspired over 100 years of poster design Perhaps one of the most well known vintage posters of all time, this iconic advertisement for the Parisian entertainment establishment Le Chat Noir was created by Swiss-born French Art Nouveau painter and printmaker Théophile Steinlen. It epitomises the Bohemian, Art Nouveau style and cabaret culture of late 19th century Paris that stemmed from the legendary venue, which in its heyday served as an artists' salon, music hall and busy nightclub. Buy a Chat Noir fine art print here 05. Braniff Airways Braniff’s simple poster design injects some fun into air travel Back in 1967, leading Central and South American airline Braniff International Airways underwent an image overhaul, along with new brand colours and aeroplane designs. Following its redesign, the company merged with Panagra Airways and released a series of fun, whimsical posters advertising its destinations. This poster for Argentina features an Argentinian gaucho. A cultural icon, these country people lived off the land north of Patagonia, and were the South American equivalent of the North Western Cowboy. 06. Max Huber Max Huber lent his typographic graphic design style to record covers, music magazines and more Swiss graphic designer Max Huber worked with numerous advertising agencies throughout his prolific career. However, he is perhaps best known for his seminal poster for the Autodromo Nazionale di Monza 1948 Grand Prix. His typographic style relied on grid theory and is committed to a clear, bold and rational aesthetic. Many of Huber's logo designs are still in use today. 07. We Can Do It! This vintage poster has spawned many copycat designs Perhaps one of the most iconic images of the 20th century, American graphic designer J Howard Miller's beloved Rosie the Riveter was designed to boost morale during WW2. This vintage poster is still used today, and has been re-modelled for use on everything from modern feminist texts to tattoos, as well as spawning numerous parodies. Miller's bold illustrative style mirrors the comic books popular at the time and defined an era of advertising. Buy a We Can Do It retro tin sign here 08. Vers Le Mont Blanc A minimalist design with an Art Deco twist These gorgeous travel poster designs were created by artist Geo Dorival in 1928. The minimalist design features a silhouetted countryside, through which a single road leads your eye to the big, beautiful mountain in the French Alps that it's promoting. Dorival created three different versions – day, night and dusk – and all are equally striking. 09. TWA Artist David Klein used bright colours and abstract styles in many of his poster designs for TWA American artist David Klein designed and illustrated dozens of posters for Howard Hughes’ Trans World Airlines (TWA) during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1957, this stunning TWA poster of New York City became part of the permanent collection of the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York. In many of his designs, Klein used bright colours and shapes in an abstract style to depict famous landmarks and scenes of cities around the world. Best known for his influential work in the field of travel advertising, Klein's iconic images are much imitated. 10. Biere Allary Original French advertising by artist Jean d’Ylen Jean d'Ylen created this beautiful vintage poster in 1928. The design draws inspiration from the work of Italian poster art designer Leonetto Cappiello. Much of d'Ylen's work features large, colourful images on a contrasting background – this striking beer poster being a prime example. 11. Rouge Baiser Blindfold Illustrator Rene Gruau was a firm favourite in the haute couture world Renowned fashion illustrator Rene Gruau's artistic career began in the 1920s and continued right until his death in 2004. Gruau created a vast library of chic fashion illustrations, including pieces for Miss Dior, Vogue and Elle. His distinctive aesthetic, with strong lines and stark contrast, made him a favourite in the haute couture world. 12. Harper's One of 75 poster designs that Edward Penfield created for Harper’s magazine It's impossible to talk about American poster design without mentioning Edward Penfield . Often referred to as a master of graphic design, it was during a school exhibition that Penfield's work was first noticed by the art editor of Harper's Magazine. The artist would go on to create no less than 75 posters for the magazine . 13. Austria Kosel’s distinctive travel posters are instantly recognisable Born in 1896, Hermann Kosel studied at Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and began his artistic career as a portrait painter at the age of 24. For a while, his work was focused around creating commercial travel posters for various companies. This one highlights the beauty and culture of Austria. 14. Absinthe Robette This beautiful Art Nouveau print for absinthe was created 1896 In the late 19th century, the popularity of absinthe coincided with the increase of large lithographic advertising posters as a commercial and artistic medium. Some of the greatest artists of that period created vintage posters for the alcoholic beverage, including Belgian poster artist Henri Privat-Livemont, who illustrated this iconic Art Nouveau Absinthe Robette image in 1895. Buy Absinthe Robette as a fine art print now 15. Parapluie-Revel Leonetto Cappiello created nearly 1000 pieces in the early 1900s Poster artist Leonetto Cappiello became a household name in the early 1900s after producing nearly 1000 eye-catching advertisements for various campaigns. Probably his most famous is this beautiful Parapluie-Revel poster. The design features three figures blown about by a storm while the Revel umbrellas stand firm. Buy Parapluie-Revel as a fine art print here Next page: 11 more inspiring vintage posters 16. Monaco 75 This poster was created by artist Michael Turner for the 1975 Monaco Grand Prix This striking vintage poster for the 1975 Monaco Grand Prix was created by talented artist Michael Turner. Turner let his illustration do all the talking, opting for minimal type and a strong image. The vibrant and eye-catching colour palette puts the car centre-stage, accompanied by a beautiful illustration of Monaco in the background. 17. Tomorrowland This Space-Station X-1 silk-screen poster graced the walls of Disneyland in the late 1950s Disneyland has been using silk-screen posters since 1956 to give visitors a taste of the attractions inside. The theme park area that inspired the most brilliant designs was sci-fi-focused Tomorrowland. This Space Station X-1 graced the park's walls in the late 1950s. It promoted a ride that took visitors to view a large painted panorama of the continent via a rotating platform. 18. Normandie Cassandre’s image of ocean liner Normandie has become iconic in 20th century Art Deco design Cassandre created this image to promote travel on the famous ocean liner Normandie. The design has since become an icon of 20th century Art Deco and Modernist poster design. A worm's eye view emphasises the ship's size, as well as creating some drama within the poster. The original design features the name of the ship underneath it, however, a few rare variants can be found with the type replaced with 'New York'. Amazon has a giclee print here . 19. Austin Reed British designer Tom Purvis created many posters for clothing store Austin Reed Regarded by many as one of the finest commercial artists of the 20th century, British artist Tom Purvis created countless poster designs during the 1930s, one of the most famous being his campaign for retailer Austin Reed. The above design was created for the store in Leeds, Yorkshire. 20. Canadian Pacific Railway Peter Ewart created 24 posters during his 17-year working relationship with Canadian Pacific This iconic design was part of a campaign for Canadian Pacific Railway during the 1940s and 50s. The series was created by Canadian artist Peter Ewart , whose commercial career was inspired by the likes of Cassandre and Tom Purvis. Ewart's dynamic designs and illustrations caught the eye of many, and led to a 17-year relationship with Canadian Pacific, during which time the artist designed 24 posters and two serigraphic prints for the company. 21. New York's World Fair Joseph Binder created this stylised version of a better world of tomorrow Austria-born Joseph Binder is the designer behind this beautiful vintage poster for the 1939 New York World's Fair. Titled 'Building the World of Tomorrow', the fair's main purpose was to try to lift the spirits of the US following the peak of the Great Depression, and drive business to New York City. During this period a renewed belief in science and technology provided hope and a much-needed antidote to the general feeling of hopelessness and confusion. Binder's brilliant design offered a stylised version of that better world of tomorrow. 22. Artistide Bruant French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec uses simple outlines and solid blocks of colour Aristide Bruant's was a well-known cabaret singer, comedian, and nightclub owner in late 19th Century Paris. Famous French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec created this poster to promote his café-cabaret at the Ambassador's in 1866. Several years later, the design would be flipped to created a new poster promoting a different show by the performer. The eye-catching illustration makes an impact with simple outlines and a pared-back colour palette comprised of solid blocks of colour. 23. A Willette exposition This is just one of hundreds of vintage posters from French artist Jules Chéret Jules Chéret was a French poster illustrator and graphic designer often celebrated as the father of the modern poster. During his career, he created hundreds of posters for cabarets, theatres, well-known brands and expositions, including this one for artist A Willette. Chéret's composition shows careful consideration, drawing the eye to the dominating central figure, and also using prominent hand-lettered titles, areas of glowing colour and a simple background. 24. Orangina Graphic artist Bernard Villemot is known for his humorous poster designs for Orangina This humorous Orangina poster was created by graphic artist Bernard Villemot, who created equally memorable designs for Bally and Perrier. Villemot used simple, elegant lines and bold colours to produce his light-hearted, contemporary designs. Since his death, his iconic images have become increasingly sought-after by vintage poster collectors. 25. La Goulue Toulouse-Lautrec captured the decadence of the Moulin Rouge perfectly This poster design for the Moulin Rouge is another by French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. When the cabaret opened, Toulouse-Lautrec was commissioned to create a series of posters, with this design being one of his most well known. The piece captures Moulin Rouge dancer La Goulue ('the Glutton') in a provocative pose, with the lanky frame of partner Valentin le Desosse silhouetted in the foreground. The scene captures the decadence of the Parisian nightclub perfectly. Buy a print of this poster here 26. Bitter Campari Leonetto Cappiello used bold figures against black backgrounds in many of his campaigns Italian painter and art designer Leonetto Cappiello designed this beautiful Bitter Campari poster in 1921. Cappiello's work caught people's attention immediately, with many of his creations featuring bold figures popping out of black backgrounds – a startling contrast to the posters seen up until that point. He is now often referred to as the father of modern advertising because of his innovation in poster design. 27. Tintin Orange Tintin and Snowy share a refreshing bottle of Orange Soad in this vibrant vintage poster In 1962, illustrator of the Tintin comics, Georges Remi (aka Hergé), collaborated with French graphic artist Raymond Savignac on this vibrant print advertising the Tintin Orange Soda soft drink. This is just one of many striking posters by Savignac – the talented artist also created various designs for Pepsi and Perrier during his career. Related articles: Are movie posters in a design crisis? 4 classic movie poster designs making a comeback 10 killer examples of illustrated ad campaigns

from Christian David Biz https://ift.tt/2JjDb56 via Article Source

[newssplashy]

Entertainment: Adrian Piper: The thinking canvas

NEW YORK — “Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965-2016” at the Museum of Modern Art is a clarifying and complicating 50-year view of a major U.S. artist’s career.

Despite the show’s retrospective cast, we find fiery issues of the present — racism, misogyny, xenophobia — burning in MoMA’s pristine galleries.

The reality that art and its institutions are political to the core — both for what they do and do not say — comes through. And the museum, for once, seems intent on asserting this.

For the first time, it has given over all of its sixth floor special exhibition space to a single living artist.

The artist so honored is a woman, who has focused on, among many other things, the hard fact of racism and the fiction of race.

Piper was born in New York City in 1948 to parents of mixed racial background. (Her father held two official birth certificates. In one, he was designated white; in the other, octoroon, one-eighth black.) Raised in a cosmopolitan environment, she studied at the Art Students League in her teens, and in 1966 enrolled at the School of Visual Arts. The MoMA show opens with a salon-style hanging of figurative paintings, including self-portraits, from that time, influenced by 1960 psychedelic graphics and by her youthful experiences with LSD.

The idea of consciousness altering — and raising — would remain essential to Piper’s thinking. While at art school she immersed herself in the practice of yoga, a lifelong pursuit that would lead to an intensive study of Hindu thought. In 1967, she dropped out of the School of Visual Arts and enrolled in the City College of New York, where she majored in philosophy. (In 1981 she completed a doctorate in the field at Harvard.) More or less simultaneously, she shifted from figurative to minimalist-style abstract painting and sculpture. Then, attracted to conceptualism’s privileging of ideas over conventional forms, she began using arrangements of words, sometimes as instructions for actions, as a medium.

But abstraction, in several varieties, proved to be double-edged. On the one hand, it seemed to offer a new, expansive utopian dimension for art, beyond social, racial and aesthetic particularities. At the same time, it was inadequate to deal with undeniable realities of life in the Vietnam era. Traumatized by political events of 1970 — the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, the killing of students at Kent State and Jackson State — she began to come to grips with her own identity as an African-American in a violent, racist society.

The initial work that resulted from this awakening wasn’t overtly topical, but it was about as far from being abstract as she could get. She used her own body as a primary image in a series of unannounced public performances. For one, she walked New York streets soaked in wet paint; for another she rode the subway wearing odoriferous clothing; for a third she broke into spontaneous dance — in bank lines and libraries — to the internalized sound of Aretha Franklin singing “Respect.” She turned herself into a disruptive alien, an outsider, a disturber.

A few years later, she gave the alien a racial identity and a name. Wearing an Afro wig, a fake mustache and mirrored sunglasses, she enacted the stereotype of an aggressive young African-American male whom she called the Mythic Being. Sometimes, he showed up in public, and verbally confronted passers-by. He also existed in hand-altered photographs. In one such picture, published as a paid-for insertion in The Village Voice, he is made to think the words: “I embody everything you most hate and fear.”

Almost inevitably, Piper has become best known over the years for her art about racism, and for good reason: it’s powerful work, brilliantly varied in form.

Some of it draws on her considerable graphic skills. In a series of 1980s charcoal drawings called “Vanilla Nightmares,” she inserts scowling, sexualized black-skinned figures into news stories and upscale advertisements from The New York Times.

In a 1991 installation called “What It’s Like, What It Is, #3,” she continues to explore direct-address performance. Here, in what might be considered a Mythic Being update, an African-American man, seen on a video monitor surrounded by bleacherlike seating, slowly recites, and rejects, a long list of racial slurs: “I’m not pushy. I’m not lazy. I’m not noisy. I’m not shiftless. I’m not crazy. I’m not servile. I’m not stupid.”

Piper has also, over the decades, consistently used her own image in inventive, distanced, self-mocking ways, as in two well-known self likenesses done several years apart, one, a pencil drawing titled “Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features” (1981) the other, a crayon-enhanced photograph called “Self-Portrait as a Nice White Lady” (1985). In these images, as in all of her work, her aim is not to assert racial identity but to destabilize the very concept of it.

And she has fun playing with it. In her exhilaratingly witty 1983 film “Funk Lessons,” she coaches a class of mostly white graduate students in the how-tos of soul dancing (shake your head, lift your leg), as if blackness were a personal style that could be learned by instruction. And in a quietly scathing 1988 video installation, “Cornered,” she treats racial identity as both a delusion and an entrapment.

Playing a role, as she usually does — very little of her work is directly autobiographical — she speaks directly to us, a very likely white art world audience, with the measured tone of a newscaster. She informs us that, despite her light complexion, she is black, and that chances are good, given the U.S. history of racial mixing, that we are black too. This reality has negative fallout in two directions. It means that white listeners lose their politically privileged identity, and she — now a self-declared “black artist” — is trapped in hers.

Because race has often been her subject, a frequent and career-shaping assumption is that it is her only one, a misperception that this retrospective makes a serious and successful effort to correct. It devotes considerable space to her early, abstract work. It reminds us that the references in her subsequent topical work has been broad-based, ranging from the war in Vietnam to poverty in America. We are reminded that the images of difference generated by the performances were images not defined by ethnicity, and that the original Mythic Being series was as much about gender as it was about race.

Misogyny has always been one of Piper’s targets. In 1986, she designed a business card intended to be passed out at opportune moments to defuse instances of sexual aggression. The card read: “Dear Friend, I’m not here to pick anyone up, or to be picked up. I am here alone because I want to be here, ALONE.”

The show also reminds us of the multidisciplinary texture of Piper’s career. Professionally, she is both, and equally, a visual artist and an academic scholar. (She taught philosophy for decades in U.S. colleges and universities and teaches it now in her new permanent home in Germany.) Walking through the show you can see thinking happening right before your eyes. And certain strands of her more recent work have a meditative, existentialist cast — a reminder of Piper’s initial hopes for the transcendent potential of abstraction.

A decade-spanning project called “Everything” (2003-2013) has three parts. One is a series of informal photographic portraits in which the faces have been obliterated and replaced by the words “Everything will be taken away.” Another is a set of images of U.S. political martyrs (Medgar Evers, Robert F. Kennedy, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.) accompanied by the same phrase. A third is an installation of four schoolroom blackboards on which that phrase is repeatedly written in chalk, like a lesson meant to be drilled into memory.

The mortality-redolent words also form an essential tenet of Hindu philosophy: Everything — lives, eras, identities, art — will change.

The great emblem of change is Shiva, the divine yogi, dancing his circular dance of life and death. His image appears repeatedly in Piper’s recent art, most notably in a 2004 film documenting a spectacular iteration of “Funk Lessons.” And at the end of the MoMA show, just outside the final gallery, we see a projected 2007 video of Piper soul-dancing in a public plaza in Berlin, alone except for pedestrians on their way from here to there.

The image brings the retrospective full circle, back to Piper’s solo performances of outsiderness of many decades ago. It’s to the credit of the show’s organizers — Christophe Cherix, chief curator of the drawings and prints department at MoMA; David Platzker, a former curator in that department; Cornelia H. Butler, chief curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; and Tessa Ferreyros, a curatorial assistant at MoMA — that they’ve been careful to make such links, and by doing so point up the fierce, steady logic of this artist’s career.

It’s even more to their credit — and a boon to the future — that they’ve kept that career’s difficulty, and toughness, and nowness to the fore. Historically, institutionally, MoMA has favored smoothness and symmetry, whiteness. It has tended to shave off the awkward corners of art, sand its sharpest edges down. In this case, the corners and edges stand firm in an art and a career that is entirely about them.

source https://www.newssplashy.com/2018/04/entertainment-adrian-piper-thinking.html

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Your Concise New York Art Guide for Fall 2017

Soda_Jerk, still from “Astro Black: We are the Robots” (2010), two-channel video installation with four episodes, 25:24 min (image courtesy apexart)

Overwhelmed by all the art to see this fall? Us too. To make it all slightly more manageable, we’ve compiled a list of fun, insightful, and very New York art exhibitions and events in our yearly fall guide. In addition to perusing this online version, you can look out for print copies of our guide in bookstores, coffee shops, galleries, museums, and nonprofit art spaces around the city.

*   *  *

September

Sanford Biggers: Selah

When: September 7–October 21 Where: Boesky East (507 W 24th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan)

Whether working in textile, video, sculpture, or performance, Sanford Biggers unflinchingly tackles issues of race and representation in American culture. The centerpiece of this show, “Seated Warrior,” continues his series of bronze sculptures based on traditional African statues, which he collects and then dips in wax or pierces with gunshots. It will be framed by textile works assembled from fragments of antique quilts.

Fellow Travelers

When: September 7–October 21 Where: apexart (291 Church Street, Tribeca, Manhattan)

Space is the place — where we stage allegories of earthly drama. This exhibition, curated by Katherine Rochester, gathers works by seven artists and collectives that project humans onto sci-fi frontiers in order to imagine solutions for seemingly unsolvable problems. Some of the astronauts are interstellar refugees in search of new home bases; others are defiant occupiers who refuse to leave their beloved planets.

Vaginal Davis & Louise Nevelson: Chimera

When: September 8–October 22 Where: Invisible-Exports (89 Eldridge Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan)

Vaginal Davis met Louise Nevelson at a party in the 1980s; the theme was “come as your favorite dead artist.” “I came as Frida Kahlo with mono brow mustache and instead of a monkey in my hair I used a Cabbage Patch doll,” Davis recalls. “No one, including Andy Warhol, knew who I was except the divine Ms. Nevelson—who raved over me.” This exhibition pairs Davis’s paintings executed with makeup and beauty products with two all-black assemblages by Nevelson.

“Jeweled Cover of the Lindau Gospels” (ca. 875), France, manuscript on vellum, gold repoussé, crucifixion and 10 mourning figures, including personifications of the sun and moon; workshop of Charles the Bald, grandson of Charlemagne; on the Lindau Gospels, in Latin; Switzerland, Abbey of St. Gall, between 880 and 899 (purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan, 1901; MS M.1, front cover, © the Morgan Library & Museum, photo by Graham S. Haber)

Magnificent Gems: Medieval Treasure Bindings

When: September 8, 2017–January 7, 2018 Where: Morgan Library & Museum (225 Madison Avenue, Midtown East, Manhattan)

Today, books are a luxury because reading them feels like a rare activity; in the Middle Ages, luxury meant diamonds and sapphires encrusted in your book covers. Some of the glorious few that survive are owned by the Morgan Library, which will display them alongside illuminated manuscripts. The exhibition will connect the treasure bindings to their wealthy patrons and religious contexts, and highlight one of the world’s most impressive examples, the 9th-century Lindau Gospels.

Azikiwe Mohammed: Jimmy’s Thrift of New Davonhaime

When: September 9–October 29 Where: Knockdown Center (52-19 Flushing Avenue, Maspeth, Queens)

Thrift stores offer a glimpse of strangers’ lifestyles, tastes, and pasts. Azikiwe Mohammed portrays the thrift store as a kind of memory bank in Jimmy’s Thrift, which is set in a made-up location, New Davonhaime—a mash-up of the names of the most densely populated black cities in the US. Filled with objects both found and made by the artist, this installation honoring African American lives will grow as visitors contribute to photo albums and record their memories.

McDermott & McGough: The Oscar Wilde Temple

When: September 11–December 2 Where: The Church of the Village (201 W 13th Street, West Village, Manhattan)

Artists Davis McDermott and Peter McGough are building a temple to Oscar Wilde in an unlikely but somehow perfect setting: the Church of the Village. The installation, which includes an altar constructed around a four-foot-tall sculpture of Wilde, will celebrate the writer’s courage in refusing to conceal his homosexuality — and going to prison for it. Two decades in the making, the work will focus on Wilde’s visit to the US in 1882–83, using Catholic iconography as an inspiration.

Alighiero Boetti, “Mappa” (Map, 1988), embroidery on linen on stretcher, 121 x 221 x 3 cm / 47 5/8 x 87 x 1 1/8 in (© 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome; courtesy Kunstmuseum Basel and Sammlung Goetz, München; photo by Wilfried Petzi, Munich)

Arte Povera

When: September 12–October 28 Where: Hauser & Wirth (548 W 22nd Street, Chelsea, Manhattan)

Arte Povera is having a moment. First came Magazzino, a private museum that opened with a show devoted to a champion of the movement; now Hauser & Wirth is giving over its Chelsea space to Ingvild Goetz, a longtime Arte Povera collector. Maybe it’s because the movement, which was anti-commercial and advocated the use of everyday materials in art, emerged during a time of radical political upheaval in Italy — conditions not so unlike our own in the US today.

Ruth Asawa in her studio in 1957 (photo by Imogen Cunningham, © 2017 Imogen Cunningham Trust, courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London)

Ruth Asawa

When: September 13–October 21 Where: David Zwirner (537 W 20th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan)

Ruth Asawa was one of the 120,000 Japanese Americans interned following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Living in a camp with her family between 1942–43, she turned to art, which she continued to pursue for the rest of her life, including enrolling in Black Mountain College. This exhibition gathers her net-like sculptures, paintings, and drawings, as well as photos of her and her work taken by Imogen Cunningham.

Adrian Piper

When: September 14–October 21 Where: Lévy Gorvy (909 Madison Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan)

In this exhibition, the rigorously inquisitive artist Adrian Piper will show “Here,” first conceived in 2008 but executed for the first time, well, here. It consists of three phrases engraved in three languages as a reminder that words aren’t neutral. Alongside it will be The Mythic Being (1973–75), for which Piper took on the persona of a macho man from a blaxploitation film, and “It’s Just Art” (1980), which questions our anesthetization to human suffering.

Sonic Arcade: Shaping Space with Sound

When: September 14, 2017–February 25, 2018 Where: Museum of Arts and Design (2 Columbus Circle, Columbus Circle, Manhattan)

Sound may be invisible and ephemeral, but it’s also palpable and physical. This exhibition explores sound’s “material” qualities: how it travels via waves, is conducted through wires, and bounces off other objects. Visual artists, performers, and designers, including Studio PSK, Make Noise, and others, have created interactive environments to induce visitors to reflect on how their bodies respond to sound.

Rodin at The Met

When: September 16, 2017–January 15, 2018 Where: Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan)

Auguste Rodin, “Orpheus and Eurydice” (modeled probably before 1887, carved 1893), overall 48 3/4 × 31 1/8 × 25 3/8 in. (image courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Thomas F. Ryan, 1910)

So you think you know Auguste Rodin? The French artist was much more versatile than “The Thinker” or his imposing portrait of Balzac. This exhibition of almost 50 works in bronze, marble, terracotta, and plaster — all drawn from the Met’s holdings — brings together some of his greatest hits and some obscure chef d’oeuvres. A selection of paintings by Rodin’s contemporaries, including Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Claude Monet, complements the array.

Never Built New York

When: September 17, 2017–February 18, 2018 Where: Queens Museum (New York City Building, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Corona, Queens)

We take most of New York’s landmarks for granted, but they weren’t fated to look the way they do; things could have been different. Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell explore the city’s unrealized histories in Never Built New York, which began as a book and continues as an exhibition. Models, prints, drawings, and other objects offer a glimpse of these forgotten visions, like a National American Indian Memorial in New York Harbor or a Buckminster Fuller dome over Manhattan.

Generation Wealth by Lauren Greenfield

When: September 20, 2017–January 7, 2018 Where: ICP Museum (250 Bowery, Lower East Side, Manhattan)

Versace bags, golf clubs, flutes of champagne, and $100 bills — these are some of the accessories you’ll spot in Lauren Greenfield’s photographs of the ultra-rich. Since the late 1990s, Greenfield has documented wealthy (and highly unsustainable) lifestyles, interviewing the people she meets along the way. Nearly 200 of these photographs will be on display at ICP, along with film footage and quotes from her subjects, whose backgrounds range from banking to fashion.

Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair

When: September 22–24 Where: MoMA PS1 (22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens)

Events devoted to independent publishing are a dime a dozen these days, but Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair was one of the first of this new wave. Going strong in its 12th year, the fair will once again pack MoMA PS1 with established indie presses, artists selling stapled zines, galleries hawking limited editions, and much more. The beauty of the fair is that it truly has something for everyone, whether a rare 1950s mag, a monograph on your favorite artist, or a surprise.

Bushwick Open Studios

When: September 22–24 Where: Various locations (Bushwick, Brooklyn)

Last year, New York City’s biggest open studios event shifted from early summer to early fall and felt a lot less like an industrial chic bar hop. This year, it’s happening slightly earlier, which will hopefully mean studio-goers can catch some lingering summer warmth as they traipse from East Williamsburg to north Bed-Stuy, south Ridgewood, and many points in between points. Be sure to pack snacks and plan strategic caffeine stops as you choose between hundreds of studios.

Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait

When: September 24, 2017–January 28, 2018 Where: Museum of Modern Art (11 W 53rd Street, Midtown West, Manhattan)

Beloved for her spider sculptures and enigmatic cell installations, Louise Bourgeois also produced a vast body of works on paper. Her prints and books, many of which are in MoMA’s collection, often revolve around the same symbols and images as her sculptural works, from mother figures to the body. With a focus on printed material, this show comprises roughly 220 works, some of which will be displayed in a special installation in the museum’s atrium.

Christina Quarles, “Butt Hidden in Lacy Groves (Hell Must Be a Pretty Place, Fire n’ Brimestone Allright…)” (2017), acrylic on canvas, 50 × 40 in (image courtesy the artist and David Castillo Gallery, Miami)

Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon

When: September 27, 2017–January 21, 2018 Where: New Museum (235 Bowery, Lower East Side, Manhattan)

This group show aims to complicate the terms we use to discuss gender, via the work of more than 40 artists who examine at it in concert with issues of sexuality, race, class, and ability. Their tactics take many forms, from artists who rework archival materials, like Mickalene Thomas, to others who embrace media formerly dismissed as craft, like Diamond Stingily—whose commissioned braided sculpture will snake from the lobby all the way up to the fourth floor.

José Leonilson: Empty Man

When: September 27, 2017–February 3, 2018 Where: Americas Society (680 Park Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan)

This is the first US solo exhibition for José Leonilson Bezerra Dias, a Brazilian artist who returned to painting in the 1980s, during the last years of the dictatorship. The show will display around 50 of his bright, figurative paintings and drawings, as well as the embroideries he made toward the end of his life, when he was diagnosed with AIDS. Those works in particular are deeply personal, exploring his gay sexuality, Catholic upbringing, and illness.

October

Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World

When: October 6, 2017–January 7, 2018 Where: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1071 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan)

This major exhibition focuses on two decades — 1989 to 2008 — that the Guggenheim calls “arguably the most transformative period of modern Chinese and recent world history.” That may sound lofty, but the show aims high, seeking to reposition Chinese art as essential to what we consider contemporary (an inevitably Eurocentric premise). Taking over most of the museum, it features some 150 works, including Huang Yong Ping’s cage full of reptiles and insects that will eat each other.

Alberto Savinio

When: October 6, 2017–June 23, 2018 Where: Center for Italian Modern Art (421 Broome Street, Soho, Manhattan)

Alberto Savinio, “L’annunciazione (The Annunciation)” (1932) (Private Collection, © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS) / SIAE, Rome)

Alberto Savinio is not a familiar name outside of Italy, but at home he enjoys the reputation of a Renaissance man and painter of surrealist scenes. The younger brother of Giorgio de Chirico, Savinio was greatly influenced by the Parisian avant-garde art scene of the late 1920s, which is the period this exhibition focuses on. Twenty-five of his paintings will be complemented by sculptures by Louise Bourgeois, who similarly probed childhood and familial memories.

Barbara Hammer: Evidentiary Bodies

When: October 7, 2017–January 28, 2018 Where: Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art (26 Wooster Street, Soho, Manhattan)

Barbara Hammer, an artist who’s been portraying lesbian life and sexuality since the 1970s, has directed more than 80 films. This exhibition will cull both known and previously unseen ones, as well as her works in other media and objects from her archive. From performance art to documentaries on queer women, including Elizabeth Bishop and Hannah Höch, Hammer has a gift for intimate, nuanced, and visually striking storytelling.

Self Storage

When: October 7– 28 Where: Various storage facilities (Long Island City, Queens)

In New York City, having access to storage seems relegated to subway ads rather than lived experience. Flux Factory is drawing attention to this conundrum by accepting the “first month free” promotional offers of various storage facilities in Long Island City and offering them as temporary gallery spaces to artists and organizations. The resulting mini-shows will aptly revolve around “gentrification, consumption, community, resilience, displacement — and storage.”

Modernism on the Ganges: Raghubir Singh Photographs

When: October 11, 2017–January 2, 2018 Where: Met Breuer (945 Madison Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan)

From his beginnings as a photojournalist in the 1960s, Raghubir Singh’s eye was always focused on the streets of India. His photos have the fragmented energy of collages, enhanced by the color slide film he used. This survey will illustrate the artist’s assertion that his work was “on the Ganges side of modernism” and pair his photos with the miniature paintings of the Mughal period that inspired him.

Jane Schneiderman holds a sign reading “Are Politics Dirty? Then Call in the Cleaning Woman” at a parade on Fifth Avenue, November 1, 1915 (image courtesy the Museum of the City of New York)

Beyond Suffrage: 100 Years of Women & Politics in New York

When: October 11, 2017–Summer 2018 Where: Museum of the City of New York (1220 Fifth Avenue, East Harlem, Manhattan)

In 1917, women in New York state gained the right to vote—three years before the passage of the 19th Amendment. This exhibition marks the centennial of that victory by spotlighting the women who’ve shaped New York City’s politics. Beginning with the battle for suffrage and moving through 20th- and 21st-century struggles, the show will use artifacts, documents, clothing, and multimedia materials to tell the ongoing story of women’s political activism.

Ai Weiwei: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

When: October 12, 2017–February 11, 2018 Where: Various locations (New York City)

Using a fence as a symbol for division and the migration crisis isn’t the most imaginative choice, but what Ai Weiwei sometimes lacks in creative thinking he makes up for in aesthetic execution and scale. For this project, the artist will install fences in roughly 300 spots around New York City. All will be site-specific variations on the standard metal wire security fence, making them both attuned to their locations and purposefully out of place.

Judith Bernstein, “Seal of Disbelief” (2017), mixed media on paper, 96 x 96 inches (image courtesy the artist)

Judith Bernstein: Cabinet of Horrors

When: October 13, 2017–February 4, 2018 Where: Drawing Center (35 Wooster Street, Soho, Manhattan)

If there’s any artist whose tone and aesthetic are perfectly suited to the cycles of political outrage and shame in which we’re currently trapped, it’s Judith Bernstein, the sketcher of suggestive screws and exploding anatomies. This show marries a body of work made in response to the Trump presidency — including four large murals and free campaign pins — with a group of apt allegorical drawings from 1995.

Open House New York

When: October 14–15 Where: Various locations (New York City)

Is there a fascinating but off-limits New York City site you’ve been dying to visit for years? This is your weekend to make it happen, although you should make reservations the second they’re available, as popular destinations reach capacity quickly. From glitzy locales like the abandoned City Hall subway station to grimier facilities like the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant and the East Harlem Trash Museum, there’s something for every taste in every borough.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Gates of Paradise

When: October 20, 2017–January 7, 2018 Where: Japan Society (333 E 47th Street, Midtown East, Manhattan)

In the late 16th century, four Japanese boys were sent to Europe for eight years to learn about Western Christianity. Considered one of the earliest exchanges between Japan and the West, this story is the inspiration for Hiroshi Sugimoto’s new black-and-white photographs, which document sites the boys visited, from the Tower of Pisa to papal courts. The images will be paired with traditional Japanese artworks to illustrate the convergence of two worlds.

Roots of “The Dinner Party”: History in the Making

When: October 20, 2017–March 4, 2018 Where: Brooklyn Museum (200 Eastern Parkway, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn)

If you’ve ever visited the Brooklyn Museum, chances are you’ve stopped by the Sackler Center for Feminist Art, where a dark gallery houses a triangular table elaborately set for 39 guests: Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party” (1974–79), an iconic work of feminist art. This exhibition will delve into the making of it, tracking Chicago’s research and creation process through notebooks, preparatory drawings, test plates, and more. One for the art history nerds.

Gowanus Open Studios

When: October 21–22 Where: Various locations (Gowanus, Brooklyn)

Every fall, Gowanus Open Studios brings droves of adventurous art-lovers to the typically desolate blocks adjacent to the toxic canal to explore hundreds of studios. And whereas Bushwick can feel more like a social scene built around art rather than an area where working artists make a living, the professionalism and eclecticism of the Gowanus community are consistently impressive.

Carolee Schneemann, “Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera” (1963), 18 gelatin silver prints, 24 x 20 inches each (the Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of the artist, © 2017 Carolee Schneemann)

Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting

When: October 22, 2017–March 11, 2018 Where: MoMA PS1 (22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens)

If you were seeking a sign that sexism is alive and well, look no further than the fact that Carolee Schneemann is only now having her first comprehensive retrospective. At 77, Schneemann is still known largely for her landmark performance “Interior Scroll” (1975), but has been making unabashedly feminist work for decades. This show will ground her oeuvre in painting, even as it traces her development in assemblage, performance, and film.

The Sculpture of Gonzalo Fonseca

When: October 25, 2017–February 12, 2018 Where: Noguchi Museum (9-01 33rd Road, Astoria, Queens)

The stone works of Uruguayan sculptor Gonzalo Fonseca look like mini-buildings, archaeological remnants, or toys. Fonseca, who trained under modernist Joaquin Torres-Garcia in the 1940s, saw abstraction as a universal language and was fascinated by Pre-Columbian ruins. This exhibition celebrates his friendship with Noguchi later in life, and includes around 40 objects, from Fonseca’s geometric fountains to his sketchbooks.

November

Françoise Grossen

When: November 2–December 23 Where: Blum & Poe (19 E 66th Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan)

Two years after giving the Swiss-born, New York–based artist her first US survey, Blum & Poe is unspooling more of Françoise Grossen’s startling rope sculptures from the 1960s onward, some of which she recently modified. The abstract but evocative works — formed from thick Manila, cotton, linen, and polyester rope — either hang from the walls or lie on the floor, suggesting human forms at rest or strange animals preparing to pounce.

Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World

When: November 3, 2017–January 28, 2018 Where: Whitney Museum of American Art (99 Gansevoort Street, Meatpacking District, Manhattan)

As it arrives in New York, this retrospective carries with it major controversy over Jimmie Durham’s identity: the artist claims to be Cherokee but is not recognized by any of the Cherokee nations. The questions at the heart of the debate are essential ones: When does appropriation go too far? What are the responsibilities of art institutions? Whose voices are valued? New Yorkers will have the chance to see the show and grapple it in person this fall.

Gordon Matta-Clark and Gerry Hovagimyan working on Conical Intersect (1975) (photo by Harry Gruyaert, © 2017 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and David Zwirner, New York)

Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect

When: November 8, 2017–April 8, 2018 Where: Bronx Museum (1040 Grand Concourse, Concourse, the Bronx)

In the 1970s, Gordon Matta-Clark ventured into abandoned tenements in the Bronx and made cuts in the floors, creating disorienting spaces. These acts, which were documented in photographs, led him to carve up other deteriorating buildings in the city. It’s only appropriate, then, that this exhibition take place in the borough that greatly informed his political art. Highlights include his hand-painted photos of graffiti and rare materials from his archive.

Nina Chanel Abney

When: November 9–December 20 Where: Jack Shainman Gallery (513 W 20th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan)

Nina Chanel Abney’s paintings are sort of like puzzles: jam-packed with figures, shapes, and symbols and difficult to decipher. Her themes are clear — racism, the frenetic pace of 21st-century life — but Abney’s approach is never didactic. Instead, she organizes her canvases to appear chaotic and often comedic, yet they’re always controlled. Her first solo show at Jack Shainman Gallery will feature new works in her trademark style.

Transformer: Native Art in Light and Sound

When: November 10, 2017–January 6, 2019 Where: National Museum of the American Indian (1 Bowling Green, Financial District, Manhattan)

While contemporary Native art practices are often characterized in terms of their traditional antecedents, the 10 artists featured here explore indigenous issues via new media. Through video projections, sound art, digital installations, and more, the artists — including Raven Chacon (Diné), Marcella Ernest (Ojibwe), Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit), and Keli Mashburn (Osage) — offer a view of the plurality of Native American experiences in the 21st century.

Doreen Garner and Kenya (Robinson): White Man On a Pedestal (WMOAP)

When: November 10–December 17 Where: Pioneer Works (159 Pioneer Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn)

Doreen Garner and Kenya (Robinson), “Dr. James Marion Sims,” White Man On a Pedestal, Pioneer Works (2017) (image © Allyson Lupovich)

In this show, Doreen Garner and Kenya (Robinson) will dissect the dominant figure for much of Western history: the straight, white male. Through her research on Dr. J. Marion Sims, the “father of modern gynecology,” Garner gives form to the exploitation of black women’s bodies in the name of science. (Robinson) will turn a sculpture of a white-collar white dude she’s been carrying in her pocket since 2013 into an army of 10,000 figures she plans to bury at the show’s end.

Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer

When: November 13, 2017–February 12, 2018 Where: Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan)

Of the four Renaissance masters who went on to become Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, none wields quite as much ass-kicking art-historical might as Michelangelo. Yet at the core of his delicate “David,” complex Sistine Chapel frescoes, and exquisite “Piéta” are the same refined draughtsmanship and sharp design. This exhibition’s 150 drawings, three marble sculptures, wooden architectural model, and very first painting by Michelangelo aim to give a fuller sense of his foundations.

Erwin Redl: Whiteout

When: November 13, 2017–April 15, 2018 Where: Madison Square Park (between Fifth & Madison Avenues, E 23rd & 26th Streets, Flatiron District, Manhattan)

One of the joys of winter in New York is when the parks are blanketed in luminous snow, which often melts away too quickly. Erwin Redl’s installation in Madison Square Park might seemingly prolong this experience. The artist, who generally works on the façades of buildings, will install hundreds of spheres filled with white LED lights over the park’s Oval Lawn so that they float and sway in the wind.

Obdurate Space: Architecture of Donald Judd

When: November 14, 2017–March 5, 2018 Where: Center for Architecture (536 LaGuardia Place, Greenwich Village, Manhattan)

For those who have visited Donald Judd’s home, it’s clear the man had opinions about architecture and space. In addition to designing monumental minimalist sculpture, he also developed architectural projects and proposals, some of which were never published. This exhibition will share five of the designs he created between 1984 and 1994, including his proposal for a downtown lakefront in Cleveland and his concrete structures at Marfa, Texas.

Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed

When: November 15, 2017–February 4, 2018 Where: Met Breuer (945 Madison Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan)

This ambitious exhibition attempts to reassess Edvard Munch’s oeuvre through the lens of one of his haunting late paintings, “Self-Portrait: Between the Clock and the Bed” (1940–43). The show includes 16 works that haven’t been seen in the US before, alongside dozens of others, all arranged thematically. The goal is to demonstrate that Munch was as essential to art in the 20th century as he was in the 19th, when he first painted “The Scream” (which, notably, is not in the show).

The Estate of General Idea

When: November 30, 2017–January 13, 2018 Where: Mitchell-Innes & Nash (534 W 26th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan)

We’re pretty excited about this one, as it’s General Idea’s first solo show in New York City since an exhibition at MoMA in 1996. Founded by AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal in Toronto in 1969, the collective has consistently tackled taboo subjects, especially pertaining to sexuality. This exhibition will focus on the group’s tamer but still visually grabbing Ziggurat Paintings, which were made between 1968–86 and play with the ancient Mesopotamian form.

December

Shinji Murakami, “Sunset” (in collaboration with Rachel Monosov and CTG Collective) (2017), LED, two-way mirror, computer, digital animated image, aluminium, metal frame and electric (© Catinca Tabacaru Gallery)

Shinji Murakami

When: December 8, 2017–January 14, 2018 Where: Catinca Tabacaru Gallery (250 Broome Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan)

Chances are you know about the Nintendo Game Boy but not its inventor, Gunpei Yokoi. The artist Shinji Murakami uses Yokoi’s video game designs as inspiration, particularly the latter’s belief that playfulness and fun are more important than sophisticated technology. Be prepared to be enveloped by Murakami’s pixelated, LED world, which has its roots in 1990s game culture.

Endless Editions

When: December 15, 2017–January 28, 2018 Where: Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space (120 Essex Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan)

In his short story “The Library of Babel,” Jorge Luis Borges imagines a universe made entirely of books. Inspired by this image of endless tomes, writer and programmer Jonathan Basile will host a printmaking workshop in the gallery; visitors will be able to create their own books, which will join a library there. Authors will also have the chance to take a computer programming seminar and participate in public readings.

With contributions by Jillian Steinhauer, Benjamin Sutton, and Elisa Wouk Almino.

The post Your Concise New York Art Guide for Fall 2017 appeared first on Hyperallergic.

from Hyperallergic http://ift.tt/2wF2c4g via IFTTT