n: vb: the spice of imagination
Alright, let’s try to figure this out.
Friday, July 15th, is Amanda‘s birthday party, a huge thing planned at Patti, Simon, Tyler, and Karen’s house.
Saturday, July 16th, is Quicky Culture Night downtown at Jervis & Davie.
Monday, July 18th., Korean Movie Monday, where we’ll be watching Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring.
Saturday, July 23rd, is Illuminares, the lantern festival at Trout Lake.
Is there anything else of note?
Beth wove my hair into french braids last night, two of them culminating on either side of the nape of my neck. I left them in overnight, the feeling of no hair around my head a novel one, and I wore them in the shower. I’m at work now and trying to imagine how one takes these things out. I imagine being kissed might do it. As if tipping my head forward into a warm chest would let the touch of lips on the crown of my head unravel every twist into tiny curls.
Please give me resolution, bring me a damned child who knows what’s right and a blind man who can see through time. Bring me these things and other things and let me make a court of law where love herself may be judged. It is time to right these wrongs, bless the heathens free. Her face, we know, is red with need, but it can be signed on the warrant just the same. Bring me the blood of a marigold, a pansy, and a rose. Bring me a song that the first person sang when they invented loneliness as a minor chord. We’ll beat drums like hearts, like daffodil candy, like the gun shot that brought down the first born daughter who wasn’t wanted, and she’ll come to us, she’ll dream for us, and then we can take down her name.
Tuesday again, a count-down day, one of many, one of few. No word yet from far away, and I wonder how long it will take. There wasn’t even a “I have arrived” or an “I am alive” let alone an “I miss you.” This is the way such things go, I presume, when things are dying. It begins with less and ends with nothing. Too much sublimation of self to pay for another’s way again and the debt isn’t being paid back. Part of me knew this would happen, just as part of me doesn’t know what will happen next.
Work today is counting minutes, watching the digital white letters in the right hand corner of the screen and wondering to myself, “When do I get to leave?” whenever a plane goes by or a train. We’re close to tracks and the trains here are frequent, loud thunderous things with bells and hard whistles, every metal car grumbling about it’s own particular rain weather clickity clack. It’s on the edge of chilly here, like the temperature is a lake the city is walking beside at night. The calendar claims it’s summer, but it’s a man made construct and too rigid to contain reality this year. Each day has been something new, another volatile shade of unlikely weather.
The plan is: A display of short visual pieces found or created by everybody. This means music videos, short films, weird art things, motion graphics, a short scene from a full length film etc. Not imposing hard time limits or anything, just use your best judgment.
There will be a projector with which to put things on the wall and the hardware to feed it anything in digital or DVD form. If it’s VHS you’ll need to bring a player with you (there’s plenty of cables though), find someone who can, or tell us in advance and we’ll try to dig one up. Drop James a line at jameseverett(at)gmail.com to let him know if you’re coming and if you’re bringing more people with you. This is just so we have a rough idea of how many bodies to expect and can provide the complete address.
Downtown at Davie & Jervis, starting around 9pm this Saturday, July 16th.
Also, there’s talk of watching a Night With Kevin Smith tonight at my place. Go bother Andrew for details. I’m assuming it’s an early-ish start, around seven.
Atticus has kindly donated us an mp3 of The Kinks – The Village Green Preservation Society.
Tonight is Korean Movie Night. Meet at 8:30 at the psychic lady building. Come now, before it gets too popular. Then you can tell everyone that you were before there the night the universe imploded because there were too many people in one room.
The man I love these days he’s gone so far away that I can’t look outside and point the way, it’s around the curvature of the earth. I want to describe what velvet words I remember, what clawfoot tub memories I have to offer, but I have no music here and am too hurt for silence. Instead I’m caught in lines that I wrote for a poet friend that he’s never heard. ‘you stand, and you look at me, and poems pour out. They slip under my skin and try to take me, licking like letters in envelopes closed.‘ Maybe because there are no letters except in reply to those I send. Maybe because I want to touch him again, feel his breath in his sleep and let him wake up to me, willing and waking, soft and inviting. ‘because when you stand and berate me, when you orate and confiscate the words of a thousand angels, I consider and weight the worth.‘ There’s so many complexities involved, simple ones, which is irritating. Neglect and side swiping kernels of something so close to lying that they’re on more than a first name basis, they kiss. They press lips together and gasp and their hands catch like rough farm hands on the silk of our love letters. Not that I get any, but still. Cliche are cliche for a reason.
A group of Social Elite out for a rousing spot of entertainment at The Banshee, Cedar Estates, Smegma-Upon-The-Rise, England
(L, Red) Sir Geoffrey Dupont-Beevers, OBE: A part-time druid and ex-Dundee callboy, Sir Dupont-Beevers received his OBE from Her Majesty in 1995 after successfully buggering a sasquatch. Now has plans to go in search of the Loch Ness monster with a specially outfitted rowboat. Much loved by the Welsh People.
(L, in Gray) Amorus Pye: American born and bred; educated at Eton, expelled for an unfortunate misunderstanding about the concept of ‘fagging.’ Now runs a highly successful chain of bordellos in Prague. Goes through fifteen polo ponies a month as a result of his rampant taste for virgin horseflesh. Thankfully Single.
(L, Back, Hiding) Adm. Gregory Japiro (retd): Achieved high honours in Her Majesty’s Navy of Sodomy; has retired from public service due to painful canker sores and burn marks on scrotum. Now spends his days hiding in bathing houses at Bexhill-Upon-Sea and groping eighty year old pensioners in striped bathing suits.
(Center, blonde hair, holding Mallet) Lord Ffredricton Ghastly-Finch: The only person in this group who is listed in DeBrett’s Peerage, Lord Ghastly-Finch is the current owner of the Banshee, Cedar Estates, and is the only person in the history of the United Kingdom to be expelled from a seating of the House of Lords for performing Unseemly Acts while the House was in session. Currently married to Lady Ghastly-Finch (nee Twatillary), Lord Ghastly-Finch has also been linked romantically with everybody else in the picture.
Lord Ghastly-Finch is seen here with his famous mallet, Gooley-Swatter. Normally kept under glass in Bath, the mallet is not in fact used for playing croquet, but rather is designed for Impacting against the Butler’s Testicles.
(Center, back, hiding, wearing spectacles) Lord Ghastly-Finch’s manservant, Armadillo. Amongst the many, various and depraved services that he performs for his lordship, Armadillo is charged with breaking up the pustules on his lordship’s buttocks with a small hammer every evening after dinner.
(right, black hat) Lady Ghastly-Finch: prior to marriage to his Lordship, Lady Ghastly-Finch was primarily known for eating an Australian opera singer. When interviewed by the press, she said that she found him fatty and unpleasant, and that in any case she didn’t think that she could finish a full one again. Her current project is said to involve hunting down, killing, and then smoking, Mick Jagger.
(right, red hair, fan): Ms. Serpentia Hackorypunk: in close competition with J. K. Rowling as Britain’s best-selling author after her debut novel, “Buttocks In Flames”, won ninety-five literary awards, sold over 5.9 million copies, and was heralded by The Guardian as “… a sick, degraded, wretched horror of a novel, and besides which, most of the things the people do in this book are impossible anyway.”
Likes ponies. Really likes ponies. Recently broke up with Seamus O’Seamus, her lover of five years and the man voted as Ireland’s least eligible bachelor, after he complained to the press that she had broken his anal sphincter into at least three pieces.
(far right, dreadlocks): Clarisse (nee Claude) Dubois, Britain’s best loved transsexual singer. Following a successful gender reassignment surgery, Clarisse launched a multi-platinum record career after achieving media fame for ripping out Victoria Beckham’s uterus and forcing her to eat her now disused genitals at a nightclub in Soho. In this picture, Ms. Dubois is wearing a pair of stockings dating back to at least 1440, and reportedly ejaculated into by a pubescent Charles II during the reign of James I. Reportedly dating Boy George.
(bottom) Sir Tyler Reginald-Mountsworthy: tonight’s entertainment. But he doesn’t know it yet.
— excerpt from “Who’s Who in Amoral Perversion”, 2005 Edition
copyright Nicholas mad_and_crazy
It’s not like I don’t love him, but when I see his picture, I don’t catch my breath in my throat. I don’t automatically grin at our lives existing side by side. There are symptoms that it’s possible to checklist. I think that we might have been kissed out of the same womb on some other plane, and sometimes he’s older than me and sometimes he’s not, but I think too that good friends are hard to find, no matter how often they cry, no matter how often they misunderstand you because they see a little so much through their own filters of Not Good Enough and Wars to Win. It’s an old story, maybe the oldest one we know how to tell. Boy Meets Girl and It Changes Everything. Feelings that never pass easily, emotions that claim us as theirs no matter what we think we want. Once In A Land Far Away is next door and yesterday, a gray pleated skirt in a coffeeshop talking on Russian History.
He wanted to be in this narrative since the first time he read it. I don’t know why it took until today, but perhaps a program grinding in the background has finally finished processing and a card punched full of holes has slipped out of my tongue to the black plastic keys in front of me. It might be that in my pictures, I can see him smiling at me. I understand that urge, to smile at the glass lens into someone’s eyes. Inside me are the same instinctual reactions, the same chemical manifestations of an infatuated membrane broken heart. These twisted hieroglyphics, yes, I speak a similar language. It’s as immortal as a virus and as tenacious as a lonely child. On an elemental level, the only way I know to explain is to say that we dip into the same river to pray.
Yesterday there was rain. Thrumming fat drops that sliced through the sunshine and soaked me as thoroughly as a shower. It was delightful and I held my head up to see. The light was ethereal, sunshine rainbows shattering up from the pavement, it was that hard. It came from a little bit of nowhere and left just the same. Twenty minutes of glory. I wanted there to be someone with me so I could take pictures. It was like the world had turned up the saturation.
Cross processing the streets ahead of time.
Vancouver as been keeping me busy lately, a nice change I approve of. Today there’s two fancy dress events, Meghan’s birthday croquet in a Rose Garden and a rather darker themed High Tea. The disphoria between the two vastly different social circles will be a welcome exercise in mercurial adaptation, something I’ve been missing lately. I have a habit of forgetting to contact other people when I’ve fallen in with a particular social group, but I’m beginning to successfully tear myself out of that cocoon a little. Last night I was handed a furtive slip of paper, BY INVITATION ONLY, twice.
