Month: December 2004

because, dear lord, it’s only been three mintues since I last heard a christmas carol

It’s been a long day, starting into action as soon as I opened my eyes and streaming onward until now, when I finally have a pause. Kyle was over first thing, calling from a block away just as I was to step into the shower. Dominique temporarily joined us minutes after his arrival, but we parted ways at the bus-stop as Kyle had a package to pick up at Metrotown. The service at the shop was poor and sloppy due to an unfortunate choice by the management to choose hipster looks over practical ability. We were left waiting for hours, surrounded by shoppers and christmas coated consumerism. Our eyes died, breathing false light for too many hours. Nicole came and joined us, stepping in with suggestions and acerbic wit. We left in time to see a shoplifter escape, running faster than the security women in their ill-chosen clunky heels and tight black suits.

Tonight there’s tree trimming at Alicia’s place and I’m trying to talk myself into going back out into the cold. I called my mother back, always a lengthy process, and the time on my bus transfer ran out. I have laundry I should do, though I could always do it on the weekend, and my room needs another hour of tidy. I’m vacillating. It would be good for me to go out, but I’m fighting against rather a lot of training that says I shouldn’t.

The police outside my building aren’t helping.

I’ll miss you

, , she  left today. Now she’s far away, train bound for a cold place where everything’s better, where everything’s safe. I wish I were on the train with her, heading farther east. I miss my people there and I’ve gathered new ones. I’m sure I could find somewhere to stay. Nothing like her home, her welcome back to the family. It’s like walking on water, this step out into nothing. I think she’s brave for doing it, but that’s not quite the word. I’m looking for a different description, one that involves more acceptance of fate, of the workings of the general world. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to give her a proper goodbye. I sat in the doctors chair, a machine in front of my face, elaborate workings of lens catchment and vision, as she walked away and then gone. My mother drove her to the train station and I felt a little like there was a detachment. A piece of me feels I’m failing, that I don’t know what to give people. I thought to send her off with music, I thought to send her off with blue sparkle-made rain, but I didn’t send her off with anything. I didn’t know what to do. A part of life stepping away that I might never see again. I suppose it’s what flesh is made of, “it’s harder than I thought.”

She wrote me a poem, she read it to my mother as she left. I’ve been wanting to write her something, but didn’t know what. I suppose this is it. I miss her, but she’s on the road to where she needs to be. What will she do there? I don’t know. Write, I suppose, learn what a new city is like. The two of us are still running parallel on-line, though I’m starting to feel like a I’ve got a high-rise view. My internet kingdom spreading before me, who needs T.V.?  This is sponsored by you, my lovelies, and we are beginning to create.

Alastair‘s caught the bug finally. The reason why we call this place a web. We’re building a radio station. Streaming noise with pieces of as much of everything as I can collect. We’ve got listeners, he’s going to taste what I’m always talking about. Media networking, it’s not a waste of time, eradicate the silence. My bang-on daily bread, sweetened with honey friends like driving in a fast, fast car. There’s always so much to learn. I want to be filled until I fly, it’s nice to try and give something back. It’s not culture, but it’s related, a thought balloon from the character in a panel that was thrown away.

I’m gullible, yeah

As my prescription has only grown trickier over the years to implement, the shop is requiring a full week in which to properly grind my lenses. I pick up two pairs of glasses on Monday or Tuesday. One is urban black, a witchy thing with a cocktail edge, and the other is shiny fushsia, thin rimmed with a corporate glitter. Both are sweet discoveries and welcome. I hope to throw out a lot of collected things which I have no more use for. Clothing what doesn’t fit anymore mostly, either my shape or personality. Time to go sleek, velvet catch up breath and jewel-tone with a touch of pinstripe.

Ray’s reaction: Hooray! Now we can go to movies that have poorly executed subtitles! On the other hand, I will no longer have even the slightest chance of convincing you that there is picture of Elvis on the wall of the Madame Butterfly set…

My defense is only that it was a dress rehearsal. It is a poor blind to hide behind, (excuse the pun), when seen against the sheer volume of times that I have followed along a ridiculous trail with seriousness when I really should have given the source a pinch. I can only blame the fact that I’m rather trusting.

More media manipulation. Joy.

explosion in my head

Today I get my new glasses.

I’ll be able to see for the first time in I don’t know how many years. This is big for me. This is special.

I owe it all to the birthday conspiracy.

Thanks you beyond imagining to James, Sophie, Gavin, Ethan, Jeff, Dominique, Vicky, Ray , and especially Adrian.

 

 

  • take note: tentative party plans for friday the 17th

*sighs* my mother made me promise that I would tell everyone that she wants to see if anyone wants to pool money to get me a camera, so here. Her addy is vgibson at vix.ca. I wash my hands of this.

radio silence

I had an evening awhile back with someone that really cemented my self-worth back into my being and I don’t think I’ve had a chance to tell them that. I don’t know how I properly could without explaining the tortuous process of how I lost myself in the first place and it’s not my place to do so. The groundwork isn’t there for my unleashing of torrential emotional explanation. We’re not lovers and we’re not going to be. It’s enough that I have it back, my assumption of self. It’s enough that I know I still have what I used to, that I can be full again.

I’ve been trying to think of the positive. My life is taking off again. I’m stepping back into being a person of dancing shoes and social understanding. I need to leave my house more, facetime in the cold of winter. I have reasons now, I’ve been collecting invitations and friends again to meet in flesh. There’s books to return and people to stomp the stores with. I need to play catch-up with a few friends. Tell them I’m going back to California, to live just outside of L.A. for a month. Tell them everything. How I want to meet people there this time. Meet people and keep them. Drown myself in the ocean of humanity. How I’m planning on running away with the circus. Drafting myself into a pyromania outfit of dancers and sparking machines, explosions of sound, grace, and coloured smoke. I want to tell them about my boy, my darling Alastair, whom I’ve never had time to know and how it hasn’t mattered. How the rapport thing is clicking back into my life. How he’s clever and sweet. More intelligent than I am, but likes my random lessons on biology and social science. How he gets self-conscious when I point a camera at him and makes me laugh. How important that is. How I’m full of joy and soul again. I want to spill all of this on people, sprinkle it on them like a baptism of friendship, but I don’t know if I can.

It feels selfish, but his week I’ve been crying myself to sleep a little. A song will come on my playlist and suddenly I realize there’s this weight hanging upon me. It’s hard to carry, it’s shapeless and I don’t know what to do with it. I miss someone. I found a letter when going through my in-box the other day and it caught in my throat. I couldn’t believe the date on it. It was from so long ago. The last thing they’d sent me. Searching for a picture, I found I’d clicked on their name. The date was from too long ago. I miss them more than I ever thought I would. It was something I hadn’t been thinking about, something that was important but I’d been laying aside. I can’t sleep now. They’re in my head. Granted there are worse things, but this is slightly more persistent than feverdreams with murderous intent. By slightly, I mean my blood is singing with it like the note has been found to make it vibrate and it carries their name. I miss them and it’s heavy. It feels like a death in the family, but I know they could pick up the phone.

I’m young and I hate it. I’m foolish and female and it hurts, but don’t tell anyone.

It’s a secret.

Told to find an outlet, I tried and I think I failed. One day I should read a romance novel.

She holds her tongue between her teeth. Her fingers will speak for her. Keys depressed to send sooty desire in his general direction. It’s been a hard and dangerous hiatus of communication. He gets lost easily, it’s only a tenuous thread what binds him, what reels him in. An invisible hair that must be wound and wound again, tightly, lest he escape and see what’s been done to him. Enough of this and he will crave her like the sting of the needle he never knew, he’ll shake for his hit. The wound will bleed nuances and he’ll lick it up.

With a little click, she signs in.

He’s there, in front of her. Witty t-shirt and long close jeans. His voice is distorted a little through memory, his face caught clear like a photograph. Anything for her, he claims. She’ll hold him and keep him. This one is special, this one is dear. She reaches out to slip off his shirt, he’s motionless, body bending little in the process. It falls to the floor to his bare feet, ignored from then on.
It’s smut – just smut. Go away – it’s embarrassing.

found via superflow

F*ck Big Media:
Rolling Your Own Network

Mark Pesce
Lecturer, Interactive Media, AFTRS
markp@aftrs.edu.au
www.playfulworld.com

Preamble

The worldwide consolidation of media industries has led to a consequent closure of the public airwaves with respect to matters of public interest.  As control of this public resource becomes more centralized, the messages transmitted by global media purveyors become progressively less relevant, less diverse, and less reflective of ground truth.

At present, individuals and organizations work to break the stranglehold of these anti-market-media-mega-corporations through the application of the courts and the law.  However, because of the inherent monopoly that anti-market media maintain on the public mindset, legislators have been understandably reluctant to make moves toward media diversification.  We are thus confronted with a situation where many people have interesting things to say, but there are progressively fewer outlets where these views can be shared. 

The public airwaves, because they are a limited resource, are managed by public bodies for the public interest.  While honorable, the net effect of this philosophy of resource management has been negative: a public resource has become the equivalent of a beachfront property, its sale generating enormous license revenues, but its transfer to the private domain denying the community access to the sea of ideas.

If a well-informed public is the necessary prerequisite to the democratic process, then we must frankly admit that any private ownership of public airwaves represents a potential threat to the free exchange of ideas.  Now that private property has mostly collectivized the electromagnetic spectrum, and with little hope that this will soon change, we must look elsewhere to find a common ground for the public discourse.

We are fortunate that such ground already exists.

Part One: Refugee Status

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.” – George Orwell, 1984

I’m not from around here.  You can probably hear it in my voice, that I’m North American.  Not only North American but from the United States, not only from the United States but from California, not only from California but from Los Angeles, not only from Los Angeles, but from Hollywood, and not only from Hollywood, but from Laurel Canyon, the cozy bush-in-the-city neighborhood that played host to the likes of Jim Morrison, Frank Zappa and Joni Mitchell – 30 years ago.

Those days are over.  For the last twenty years, ever since the military industrial complex fled Los Angeles for cheaper digs in the American South, Los Angeles has been a company town, home to an ever-dwindling number of media megacorporations.  These corporations produce 92% of what Australians see on the movie screen, at least 50% of what you watch on the telly, and about 80% of the music that you hear.   These megacorps have an ever-growing array of subdivisions invading every area of the mediasphere.

But we’ll come to that in a moment.  fascinating to the last word

singing at the sunset

You bring out the man in me. I stand with my feet apart, my hips don’t swing when I walk. You think like a girl, we know that both. Properly put, this is a lesbian relationship though you’re the one packing. A little unfair, really, since when was life any different?

You’re in the city made of concrete, but I’m in a place with the gray coloured sidewalks and the sky to match. Our bridge a bridge of air, it’s too far to leap the stream without getting our feet wet. A high tune, a sprightly tune what pays the cabmans fees. Charon holier than thou today, Demeter standing with a riding cane.