Day: December 14, 2005

over a year ago, do you remember?


Heaven’s in the backseat
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Here there are no weeds growing, there are no patches of green grass to startle the eyes through the snow and hard packed side-walk ice. The reality is fiercely burning ears, tips of noses too numb to feel, and lips slurring inexpansively from cold. It gets dark quickly with no ocean to snare the sun. Walking down the street is noticing the flash of neon signs reflecting off eye-glass lenses, is watching black trends in coats and scarfs, is wishing for someone beautiful to step out from the crowd to ask your name. I’m feeling like I’m failing at being at peace. I could find something here to capture me, but I’m lost for a direction. There’s so much to explore that all I’ve accomplished is walking. I’m not clicking into place like a missing computer chip, instead I’ve barely scratching a surface I’m not even sure I’ve been allowed to see.

Why aren’t you here beside me? When I’m running on so few hours of sleep, my dreams are always just on the edge of sleep, as if hallucinations are forcing me down into the bed instead of the insistent hand of gravity. Around the screaming edges of my tired lids are dark curls bleeding into my field of vision, the institutional brushes of a fingertip along the inside of my arm, the certainty that a tongue has just shaped the sounds required to speak my name. I flinch away, turning my head into my pillow, and sink into sleep, haunted by subliminal echoes of another bed, the one I would rather be in, wherever that is. I’m not even sure right now. People make fools of places, expose them for the space occupied that they are no longer living in. My memory lies to me, tells me that if I put my hand out, the right hand will take it, swing it to the softest lips my needs spill into and take my heart from it to cradle gently and let me rest. Sleeping lately hasn’t been rest. My heart is soul searching without me, leaving me always on the edge of exhaustion. I’m finding it difficult to follow simple conversation and the native language isn’t sticking to me at all. Instead, I’m shoving off, wandering on-line, trying to find somewhere within walking distance that would be interesting to be at two a.m.

I slipped out of the apartment earlier to try and look at the wonder that is the sky. (A pregnant woman survived a fall from it earlier, though elsewhere.) There’s an easily accessible rooftop deck on the twenty-first and a half floor. Through the tiny gaps in the clouds, the stars are a seemingly endless metaphor for a patternless universe. I’m considering finding some of my most solid underwear and going back up. The other part of the roof encloses a heated pool. If I can’t find freedom, I might as well splash my toes around and read a good book. Last night I stayed up reading comic books that James had chosen for me from his prodigious collection. Fast fiction snacks, I thought. Strange little things, not solid enough to take a full bite of. It felt odd to be reading dedications written by people I know in the front covers, like I was deconstructing reality just the tiniest bit. Enough so that maybe when I looked up from the last page, it would be perfectly in time to see an unexpected explosion through the window, chunks of building spinning orange and black into the sky twenty blocks away.

Well, one can hope.

I have a media request of the internet audience again. You folk were so utterly amazing the last time that I figure this particular search should be a breeze. James introduced me to a music video, (download), a few months ago at Quickie Culture Night, DJ Krush – Truthspeaking, (linked here as an mp3). He’s in love with the singer, I fell in love with the DJ. However, his work is easy to find. DJ Krush is high in the hierarchy of wicked hip-hop fusion gods to come out of Japan in the last ten years, but Angelina Esparza’s a bit of an enigma. James has been unable to find anything else of hers in spite of a rather intensive search. If anyone’s got anything, could you toss it our way? Personally, I find her a little generic. Instead of finding her enchanting, I’m left craving more video with this man in it. The depth of personality he’s got engraved in his motion is simply breathtaking.

also, we had dinner in a power outage

Walking into a building draped with a giant inflatable orange octopus to discover that it’s a venue converted from a swimming pool carries a vestige of the same satisfaction as reading the line, “Deep Mix is a nice IDM/minimal internet radio station out of Moscow.” There’s just something inherently beautiful about the context, the message, no matter what the medium is discovered to be. “Scientists announced they’ve created mice with amounts of human brain cells.” Same thing.

The white tile basin was scattered with inflatable red cloth couches and various forms of francophone hipsters in black clothing and striped retro boots. A table was in one corner of what used to be the deep end, flanked by lava lamps full of silver glitter and loaded down with copies of the trendy magazine the event was supposedly celebrating. Michel found his friend there, a dyke with pretty hair and a nice taste in shirts. She’s an SFX designer, makes amputated limbs for film and T.V. I didn’t catch her name, Veronique, until she gave me her card. It was hard to hear over the the two musician types on stage. Higher than us, even with the walkway where signs might have said PLEASE DON’T RUN, they stood wrapped in christmas lights. One was a good beat boxer with respectably solid work, the other insisted on crooning into a snorkel for the microphone over and over, occasionally dipping the end into a glass of water for atmosphere. The entirety felt like a film, like the two were too improbable to ever be expected to play music anywhere real, and especially not together. I tried saying as much to Yanick Paquette, but I think I was drowned out by the blurry sound.

Once I was alone, I stood in the dead middle of the drained pool and practically sang “No known human has ever received an injection of embryonic stem cells because so little is known about how those cells will mature once inside the body.” I was loud enough that people standing at the edges looked at me as if I was insane, but I didn’t care. It was just the proper thing to do. These are the sounds that make my world continue spinning.

Downstairs, found through a hole in side of the pool, was a tiny art gallery lined with pieces that I would have expected to be new in a very cutting edge 1986 or an evenly matched 1993. One wall was photoshopped photographs clumsily layered with pictures of women and digital scribbles, reminiscent of the pages of a wannabe Mondo 2000 magazine. Another was lined with mannequins with baby blue and brown corderouy dress suits appliqued with white flowers. To be fair, the smallest wall had interesting illustration examples in blue gesso, but they were badly mounted. The shine off them was blinding and made the art impossible to see unless you stood at an acute angle to the piece you were trying to examine. I gave up quickly on the basement, though it was quieter there, and went back upstairs to examine the space more. The possibilities of such a venue seem almost endless. If you could properly EQ a swimming pool…

Damn me for finally leaving my camera at home.