Top Shelf #4

Fire of Love, a long read + a book read, and lip tints.

Top Shelf is a titular series in which I show off the very best things I’ve come across lately. One per category, so you know each is truly Top Shelf.

📺 TV

Fire Inside, Disney+

This Academy Award-nominated documentary tells the story of Katia and Maurice Krafft. They loved each other, and the volcanoes they studied and worshipped. As Maurice said, “Me, Katia, and volcanoes: it is a love story.” One, Japan’s Mount Unzen, would ultimately kill them.

The footage they left behind, which forms the bulk of the documentary (illustrative animations and diagrams complement it beautifully), is extraordinary. The Kraffts focus first on ‘red’ volcanoes, whose spit resembles confetti, blood spatters, thick, gooey rivers. Maurice has a dream to row a canoe along one, because, “I prefer an intense, short life to a monotonous, long one.” The lava is juicy, oozy, mesmerising. And then it hardens like Ice Magic into igneous rock. Katia strokes one formation that looks like a cauliflower.

The Kraffts turned to volcanoes because humanity disappointed them. The two volcanologists wanted to be close to something much bigger, to learn “the secrets of the planet”. Maurice says if he could eat rocks, he’d never come down from the volcanoes. They went where eruptions took them, travelling the world and filming their discoveries, walking towards infernos cloaked in silver costumes that looked like a cross between armour and astronaut (pictured in the poster above). They look tiny, silhouetted against a monstrosity pumping the earth’s blood into the air and along the ground. “Our lives are just a blink compared to the life of a volcano,” Maurice remarks.

Then, they shift to ‘grey’ volcanoes, the ‘killer volcanoes’. Those that erupt with plumes of black and grey. Those like Mount Unzen. And Mount Vesuvius, which my husband and I climbed last year. It was part of a day-long tour to Pompeii, the ancient city Vesuvius smothered and snuffed in 79AD.

On the bus from Pompeii to its destroyer, I looked up the hike. One blog warned, “It is steep and quite uneven. There are no benches to sit nor there is any shade.” Another recommended hiking boots and sticks given that steepness.

It was 40 degrees. I have had a knee reconstruction. I was worried. We paid a few euros for tall hiking sticks at the beginning of the hike. With one hand, I gripped the stick and attempted to ground it, step by step, beneath the rocky surface. With the other, I hoisted myself up with a rope strung along the edge for as long as I could. Even with both tools, it often felt impossible to gain purchase on the slippery, tumbly rocks. Uphill, we were attempting to fight the gravity of the uneven slope. Downhill, we were treacherously clenching our quads and pushing our feet down firmly so as not to slip and slide.

The rocky incline and rope fence

The view, stretching down to the Bay of Naples

The crater

I hadn’t thought about whether it was a ‘red’ or a ‘grey’ volcano. I’d never been on a volcano before, only seen one from afar. On a cruise around the Hawaiian islands in 2009, the boat glided past an erupting Mauna Loa, off the coast of the Big Island of Hawai’i, in the middle of the night. Dad and I set an alarm, and headed out to the deck to watch the orange and red lightshow. It was otherworldly. On land, we walked across black, fossilised lava that had hardened into volcanic rock. At Vesuvius, it was less clear we were atop a breathing volcano - the mountain melted down into green trees, houses, a bay. No frozen black lava flows in sight.

After returning from that trip to Vesuvius, I watched the Netflix documentary The Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari (another excellent doco), about New Zealand’s 2019 Whakaari eruption, which killed 22 people. The volcano was shaped differently, but its surface looked similar to that of Vesuvius: a sparse, rocky wasteland. I read about how Vesuvius is apparently overdue for an eruption. I read that if it erupts, it would swallow the city of Naples. And I’ve since read about Luigi Palmieri, an Italian volcanologist who inexplicably survived three of Vesuvius’ eruptions, and recent convulsions from Vesuvius’ neighbour Campi Flegrei. I thought about the sheer terror those people on that volcano in New Zealand, on that day in 2019, must have felt. What it must be like to live with third degree burns and know you’re one of the ‘lucky’ ones. I thought about how stupid we were, how I’ll never climb another volcano again.

I wonder what Katia and Maurice thought when Mount Unzen erupted in 1991, at what moment they knew ‘this is it’. They knew the riskiness of their work. Their life’s work. Their bodies were found next to each other.

Fire of Love’s soft, poetic narration contrasts against the hulking mercilessness of the volcanoes. The story stretched my imagination (I can’t fathom the steely resolve it must take to stand underneath an erupting volcano, or the utter craziness of wishing to sail along a coursing current of lava) and is woven together thoughtfully and cinematically. How could it not be cinematic? It’s about volcanoes. It is spectacular. Watch it.

💄 Beauty

Romand Lip Tints

I’ve seen more and more beauty influencers raving about these K-Beauty lip stains. For the past couple of months, I’ve been wearing one every day; I have the Juicy Lasting Tints in Fig Fig, Nucadamia, and Almond Rose, and the Glasting Water Tint in Rose Stream. The tints are even, the colours I picked are dialled in and the perfect dusty roses (especially the first three), and they’re very well priced at the ~$17 mark.

I can’t tell much of a difference between the Juicy Lasting Tint and the Glasting Water Tint formulas; I was guided by colour after going down a rabbit hole of swatch images and YouTube reviews.

They’re available at a few outlets in Australia, including Amazon and Stylevana. And while they’re not as long-lasting/the tint is not as strong as the Rare Beauty versions I recommended here, for the price and colour selection, you can’t go wrong. Highly recommend.

📰 Article

I’m cheating this week by sneaking in two pieces, but here’s:

A longform read: The Grift, the Prince, and the Twist, Air Mail

Split into two parts, ‘The Writer’s Story’ and ‘The Editor’s Story’, this is a gripping tale of identity, deception, and manipulation. Its twists and turns feature:

“threats, abuse, theft, accusations of coercion, non-disclosure agreements, secretively recorded audio, cease-and-desist letters from real lawyers, cease-and-desist letters from fake lawyers, spoof e-mails, fake receipts, impersonation, intimidation, multiple retractions, and a serious attempt to manipulate the press in a quest for personal revenge. By the end of my research, I had twice been offered bribes to stop writing Amar’s story.”

A book-related read: The Rise Of The New ‘Lit Girls’, Primer

Diana Reid, herself one of Australia’s most successful ‘Lit Girls’ in recent years, digs into the Australian women releasing books about their lives and activism. Why has this run of books been published now? And what do they mean for women who have historically been conditioned to mine their trauma to crack into the media and publishing industries?

“It could sometimes seem like sharing dark, deeply intimate personal experiences was a prerequisite to being published. In answer to the question: why you? it was not enough for female memoirists to say: because I write well, or because I have a big audience. Instead, the answer had to be: because I have suffered.”

Anything you’ve seen, heard or read recently that you’ve loved, and think I would too? Pop it in a comment:

Until next time,

Britt