Month: May 2006

you could have told me less casually


naiad
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

When you say, you in the plural, in the too many of you, “I’m not telling my wife,” I have a perception shift as a tense block of knowledge creaks suddenly into place. You are partitioning me away, removing my reality. You are creating a space for me, which has nothing to do with your solid life, that is to abandoned as soon as primary characters arrive. I’ve done this before, had to live as my role is reshaped around me into the idea of my body and grace, I know what you’re doing before you do. When I look down into my lap with resignation, what else is there to do, it is with this understanding. From there on in, your honesty diminishes every time you kiss me. You might not even see it. Every time my hand is held, every time I am told that I am loved or treasured, our light dims, laced with the knowledge that I am an eradicable betrayal that you will want later to erase.

And then we playfully kiss like sticky children outside a door, we share a glance and giggle at something improbable. I carve lines in the air around your body with my breath like prayer. You hold my hand and trace the lines there, as if you could grant me immortality with the poetry of your smile. But there never is any poetry. As soon as I am out of the room, you can reattribute your actions, decide after the fact what you meant and how you meant it. It burns, your plausible explanations, how you write all the rules, how you’ll still be cruel enough to pretend that I have any say in the matter, as if I had any power except to leave.

Yesterday the line, “cradling my hips like a warm cup of tea,” popped into my head. When I was younger, I imagined that’s what I wanted. Someone who would hold my body canted to their lips as if I was a chalice of some sort to be poured. It might have even been the word canted that gave me such a fancy. Now that I’ve found a few of those people, I’ve discovered that I was right. It’s comforting to know that not everything I thought would be nice turned out to be wrong. There’s a not a lot else that I still have, not in the long run. I had a golden summer once that taught me how to smile. I cried when it was time to leave and when my then partner held me in the cloak of his obscene hair and comforted me, “Life is long, you will fall in love again, many times,” through my wracking body, I knew he was right. What he failed to explain was how few people would bother face the fear of falling in love, how they would hold back and hold back and hold back until finally, in cowardice, lose their mind and flee to be free.

edit: p.s. Finland won?? whiskey tango fff?

too out of it for spelling


Jhayne’s Black Halo
Originally uploaded by Dalkhu.

Finally available: Episode 4 of Nina Paley’s animated feature-in-progress, Sita Sings the Blues.
Rama, Hanuman and the Monkey army have crossed the sea to Lanka to rescue the captive Sita from the demon king Ravana and his Rakshasas.

Neglected, rejected, thrown away, attacked by dogs, then poisoned. My week is starting to look a lot like last year. Waking up with Cyndi Lauper hair, hysterical strands in every direction, in the middle of a messy room I can’t care enough about to clean, I throw myself like a puppet at various brushes and paint normalcy on my skin from the inside out with strokes of a pen in morning crossword boxes. Mindless filling in, mindless fitting in, making my name a six letter word that means superficially charming. I feel flimsy, as if my voice has been stretched thin for the radio. The other people on the bus don’t look at me, I’m doing my job so well. Black ink, tiny lines. I don’t cry. Colouring in my eyes with an acronym, Best Linear Unbiased Estimator. Science and engineering, the last chromosome in human genome sequenced, that’s where I’ll do my best to find a smile.

To be fair, I don’t.

Finally available: A truly definitive moment of Fry & Laurie.
A patriotic piano player sings about America and the States in possibly one of the most satisfying moments of television.

A group of us are going to the 9:50 showing of HARD CANDY at Empire Granville 7, (855 Granville St.) You are invited. Yes, you, who are reading this. Meet up out front fifteen minutes prior to show.

typical


I am almost too sick to move today, though I’m not as bad as I was last night. It started on my way over to Korean Movie Night after work, just something suddenly wrong with my stomach that doubled me over in the street and left me choking into the gutter at Broadway and Commercial. Surprised and thinking I was far closer to Christopher’s than I was to my own home, and knowing that if I went home, I would be alone, I decided the best thing would be to continue to movie night. If nothing else, if I was going to be a little out of it, there would be people to make sure I was safe. This proved to be the best idea, as eventually my illness surpassed all expectations and left me doing my best impression of wretchedly dying in the bathroom. Today I can keep water down and hobble around with some semblance of remaining upright, but my fever is still ridiculously bake-breakfast-on-my-forehead high.

I’m trying to get a ride home somehow, because otherwise I’m stuck here, is anyone available?

Course, this seems to fit my week fairly well, the pattern of a nice day ending in misery. Like, as if to off-set the fact that I was attacked by police dogs after SinCity, the nice mild hero who came in to mend the internet last week, (name of Robin), kept me company at work yesterday and bought me a darling little cactus from the florist next door to replace the one I accidentally neglected to death. I don’t think this one flowers, nor are the spikes soft like my last one, but it has sharp prickly little spikes, which is pretty neat. I’m rather pleased about it, actually. My new little cactus. It never would have occurred to me to buy one for myself, I felt a little too wretched over the death of my windowsill garden to replace any, so it’s good to have a second chance. No longer shall I feel a drifting pang of guilt when I walk into the neighboring florist.

Canadian content: Evelyn, The cutest little dead girl.

Kitsilano is an uninhabited kingdom at three in the morning. There are no cars and certainly no pedestrians, so when I walked into a pitch dark alley and heard someone running up the street I’d just turned off of, I turned around to mark how they passed, figuring it’s only safe to keep tabs on one’s surroundings. A jogger, I thought, running their dogs. Wrong. A large serious man with large black dogs burst into the alley mouth with an unexpected ricochet of violent barking and ran at me. Stunned, I stood my ground and braced myself. One of the dogs jumped at me, the one not on a leash, and grabbed onto my arm, trying to pull me down, which is perhaps the only thing that saved it’s eyes. Police, it had to be police. Sure enough, as I was dragged down to one knee, the man pulled out a flashlight and shone it directly into my eyes and tried to shout over the barking, “VPD! What are you doing in this alley?!” In a flash of anti-clever, I yelled, “What?!?” because what else could I do? Miss Manners doesn’t talk about these things. Half wrestling with what I think was a Doberman, I was not very capable of wit.

He called the dogs off, though they continued barking loud enough that house lights were clicking on up and down the lane, and asked me again.
“I’m going home!”
“Are you sure?”
“What, yes! Of course I’m sure!”
“Why are you in the alley?”

I shook the dog off and stood up, incredulous, resisting the urge to kick it.

“I’m going home. I go in the back door. What are you doing here?”
“Strangely enough, there was a report of a woman in someone’s back yard.”
“What? Strangely enough!? You attacked me with dogs because someone was in a back yard?”

At this, he had the decency to begin pulling the dogs back, though he wouldn’t take the flashlight off my face.

“Just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, ma’am. I would recommend in future that you only walk on designated pathways.”

Then he took off, leaving me blinking blindly in the alley, wondering what the hell just happened. My immediate urge was to drag poor Sam out of bed and go cop hunting. It was just too outrageous to parse on my own. Instead, as I woke him quietly blathering about big black dogs and barking, “It was all BARK BARK BARK, you don’t understand,” unable to understand how he’d managed to sleep through the noise, he calmed me down and put me to bed. I was still incredulous the next day, but it was easier to feel less persecuted in the morning.

ontological

1. This is not a love letter.
2. I am tired of self sacrifice.
3. Every snowflake, however unique, is still made of water.
4. Beauty is becoming a stranger because of people like you.
5. Wounded sparrow tongues do not fly.
6. There are no mitigating circumstances.
7. Infidelity is still infedelity.
8. Make up your mind beforehand.
9. I am my own bloody Cassandra.
10. Happy unwanted birthday to matching little me.

Who, if I screamed, would hear me among the angels?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,
which we are still just able to endure,
as it threatens to annihilate us.

every angel is terrifying.

~ rilke ~

ficlet: not the man you think he’s for

The door opens and a man walks in. (The beginning of a thousand stories.) Tall in a brown suit and tan shirt, his tawny eyes scan the room, glancing off strangers, trying to pick out a face. Dark shoes, no cufflinks, a tie close enough to straight to count. His fingers snag a drink off a passing tray and an intelligent smile slowly finds his face. A girl is animatedly talking at a small table crowded with people, a bundle of personality traits he’d always wanted to meet. He can tell from her coloured hair.

she’s staring up at the building, not certain how she came to be there, because she should have called, but it would have been awkward to say hello in front of people because she is shy of their so called intimate relationship and so she decided she would call as soon as she was alone, but then the bus was there and it would be another twenty minute wait if she didn’t get on as it pulled up to her feet, and then it was her stop out front of his building, and her heart feeling heavy and

At his apartment, she is quieter, tired. Taking her shoes off, she pulls without any of her previous grace. “How many times are we going to do this?” He takes off his jacket, sits down in front of his computer. “As many as it takes.”

A nightclub, dim lights and a red fish-tank behind the bar. The crowd is helplessly young. Older than they are, the man walks in wearing the same long suit, the same discovering smile. He carelessly pays for a drink with stolen quarters from a laundromat. A girl is dancing to the thunder, clever porcelain hands trying to grasp the sound around her, everything he wants to change about himself. He can tell from her painted nails.

she’s arrived, so it’s pointless to think of calling, and it’s always like this, indecision making her decisions, but she could go across the street to the public telephone, but then she would have to walk past the building to the corner and then she would have to backtrack and that would feel so stupidly inexperienced because of course it’s okay that she’s arrived and why is she calling from the corner, come up, come up

Damp from a shower, she drops to the couch, a towel wrapped around her head. “How did this even start?” He offers her another towel, “You’re dripping on the carpet.” She looks to her pale feet, looks back up and slowly accepts the second towel. “I remember when I loved you.”

Surrounded by pigeons, a girl is sitting on a bench by the water. From a paper bag, she is scattering birdseed. Her friends are laughing at her attempts to have them eat from her hand. Every time they laugh, the birds startle and flit farther away. She does not care, the sun is warm. The girl laughs too. Under a tree, the man in the suit waits with a box camera, the carapace of an enthusiastic black insect. He raises the instrument like a hammer. It chitters when the shutter snaps. With her, he would not have to sleep to dream. He can tell from the shape of her name.

living in the wrong part of the world for what sustains me


sultans elephant
Originally uploaded by nickestamp.

The Secret Machines didn’t really kick in until a third through their set, but when they kick in, they’re kicking in more than just the front door, they’re kicking in your entire cellular system. They sure do love their lights. It’s a first class show, only a little below Metric or the Arcade Fire with Wolf Parade. Duncan took a great little video of glasses dancing off a table from the thump and pull of the music. I was farther forward, in the front against the stage. It was both a tragedy and a shame that there weren’t more people, but it meant that I could move back and forth in front of the stage as much as I wanted, trying to get the perfect angle for my fan-slavish photography.


Sultans Elephant 12
Originally uploaded by Mr Hyde.

Two found ads that taste great together: Campari & Choco.

And here I am, glad to be on-line again because a friend is building a spaceship that’s going to fly with NASA and a 43-tonne wooden elephant took over London and Burrow has a new boy and they’ve discovered the oceans on Titan are actually sand. I felt horribly cut off without my pretty little window screen into the rest of the world. Trapped in my own head, unable to push out my miseries with keeping busy, is a wretched place indeed. I don’t recommend visiting. As I said to a friend earlier today, my posts this week have been the written equivilant of my computer catching me in the middle of a crying jag. I would apologize if what I had written wasn’t also true, however, so that’s that.

Especially the awesome bit about the elephant.

mihi cura futuri (but my concern is the future)

LiveJournal Haiku!
Your name: porphyre
Your haiku: in less perilous
times it was dedicated
to musique concrete
Username:
Created by Grahame

The preacher called me martyr as he finally found his name, (it’s good to have a name, I cannot write without a name, oh my tarnished scientist, oh my bleeding star), because I give in to the emptiness biting at my heart, because I strive to believe it better to drink the dreadful rain than to be proud and drown in it. I walk out alone, looking at the smoke that passes for a sky in our city and wonder why I’m never good enough company to keep. I have no pure fey and giddy anticipation, it’s threaded through with hard-earned dread. Crumbs from a table. Semantics twisting in. And I’m still terrified to talk to you, still too tired to cry. When everything changed, when the worst happened, it was the supports I never questioned that gave way, that turned from stone to sand beneath my feet. The cement is the same colour as the rain and as the water runs, I feel it must match my eyes. I lost the charm to fly, the meaning. Sometimes I only laugh to let a cold wind out. When I can’t casually say your name without feeling like I’m lying, what can I help but dream you’ll dream of me? My answering machine is silent, except when asking me what I want to do. Press two. Press three or four. I hesitate and hang up.

Original letters sent by Frank Zappa and the PMRC to various instances during and after the ’85 PMRC hearings on music and censorship.

I dream you will come with me to the station when it comes time for me to leave. That you will reason with me the night before, try to hold me as if I would crack, like the light of a candle dimly holding the darkness back. In the morning, you’ll kiss me goodbye and wave, knowing I’ll come back for you. I dream I’m enough to fight for, an ideal with flesh surrounding, not a shell with soft hurt inside. That’s I’m real instead of filler. That there is music to my madness, that it’s not a lost cause again. Another reason to be myself, another reason to stand my ground against the cynic’s world. I dream and think sadly that I’m too young to feel this bitter, but there is no one to cradle my hands and draw my poisons from me. Not in this city. Not in this place. My time here has already been drawn as dry as glass burned back to sand.

Every single Playboy centerfold ever published, (in order).

The weather the past few days has been beautiful, sun and wind. I have been keeping busy. Friday was beach visiting then Jacques birthday, Saturday was dinner out with Duello-folk, then the TV on the Radio concert, Sunday was Sunset Rubdown and Frog Eyes, Monday was Korean Movie Night, Tuesday will be the Secret Machines concert, Wednesday is dinner with Nicole and Matt, Thursday is dinner and archiving vintage family-photographique with Silva, and then, as true as the trees let me be, Friday-I-do-not-know. I work this weekend, Raphealla having something else she’s doing, so I will only be available outside of shop hours. If you want to claim some of them, do so now or hold your peace. I have no internet at work, however, so you’ll have to use the telephonic device made so popular by the previous century, TOLL FREE: 1-888-HYPATIA. Handy, no? Yes. Minus the lack of net at work, which leaves my employment stupefyingly dull.

“these could be from your future husband. you could have three kids together”

Hit the ground, keep on running. Take this braille ink and trace it. Don’t stop doing what you’re doing.

I still haven’t. Instead I’ve arranged for dinner with Silva. Red, gold, her house is such a treasure. I leaned over and pulled a antique hunting horn out of the rubble of my room. Something to keep, something to throw away. He sat on the bed and looked around in wonder. The word trove. I leaned over and pulled on his curiosity, showed him the horn. Silva’s house is all silver and glittering crystal. Mirrors and shiny things. Cat haven, dinner at the table, fur at the feet. He took the ring from my keychain in the restaurant. It fit, but the price was impossible. Montreal. Could I fit in the luggage? Possibly. Cramped over in darkness, x-rayed and vulnerable to deprivation. The hallways at the hospital, plastic, granulated, we walk them, one pathway. Go left, go right now. Either way the answer is the same. The bed with buttons waits at the end, uninviting, unwelcome, too cold.

Katie‘s finally selling prints. I’m listed on her site as a “writer, among other things,” though I can’t say I’ve been feeling like it. I was published, but outside of that, I haven’t been doing very much lately. Nothing I come back to. I think it’s because I’m so rarely home. It’s difficult to concentrate at work. I’m interrupted too often to construct a coherent thread of thought.

I received another anonymous myth-letter arrived in the mail last night. I read it to Francois, and he wasn’t sure how to handle it. “No way,” he said. “There’s a stack of them.” “And you don’t know who wrote them?” “Not a clue. I thought I’d guessed, but I was told I was wrong.”

we have blue eyes too

Dearest Jhayne,

Once upon a tomorrow, before the
applause fades away, a little boy sits
in a park, holding a fistful of feathers.
“I know where your wings are,” says
a voice from behind him, and he turns
around to see a little girl standing
there. “Don’t be stupid,” the little boy
says. “I don’t have any wings.”
“I’m sorry I told you that,” says
the little girl. “But it’s your fault for not
believing stronger.” The little boy just
looks at his feathers. “Nobody has wings,”
he says at last. “People can’t fly!”
“Don’t listen to the pigeons, they don’t
know anything,” she responds. For
his sake, she turns into
a swan before
she flies away.

X

Love.

Previous letters: one & two, three, four & five & six, seven.

It’s comforting. It solidifies my impression of message-based narrative and adds credence to the assumption that I am The Girl.

Hello letter-author. Thank you. You’re appreciated.

“A willow deeply scarred, and somebody’s broken heart”

IMG_2000

After Rick was a no show yesterday after work, I tagged along with Sam to a game of pool. A friend of his leaving town. Let’s get together. Celebrate. Yaletown, home of the tax-bracket enabled. Thread count, thread count and pool halls with clean floors and flat tables. Prettier people, better teeth, nicer shirts. Barefoot, I walked in and looked around. I made a three, not enough for another set. I looked around and wondered. I should be at the hospital. I should be finding busses, climbing hills, breathing sterilized air. Pressing twelve, the elevator button lighting red under the pressure of my finger.

Massive Attack – Teardrop

Matthew, Sam’s actor friend from L.A., was paired with Francois, a SFX make-up artist from Montreal. They were the cats. Graceful, fun, the polished easy flirts. In this situation, the social strata lattice-work puts them on top. I barely exchanged words with them, but species calls to species. When it was time to leave, I railed a little at Sam, as if by sheer force of will I could change his community DNA into something that would be helpful to me, some sort of chaperone who was in on the game, but he was left behind. A secondary player, uninvolved in the double-meaning conversation of glances and inconsequentialities. When it was time to go, I railed and gave up. I gave in. Francois left first and I followed, confident I would find him on the corner. We drifted out like smoke. Matthew would follow. This is all part of the scene. Leaving behind everyone else in such a way they don’t think there’s more of a party. Tag, you’re it crowd.

Media Banned from Red Light District.

Now I’m in the clothes Francois’ was wearing yesterday, low slung dark blue jeans and a long sleeve black shirt with ZERO written on the front, (my mind is now pronouncing it “zehro”), that I stole from the hotel room floor while he was sleeping because mine had been too spattered with chocolate and strawberry juice to wear to work, wondering how to create a break in my chemical fall-out refusal to go back to the hospital. I know I went playing pool out of avoidance. I agreed to hang out after out of avoidance. It’s clinging Monday depression like a wall, thick and cloying, turning my thoughts away, making me think twice. I went in Monday needing to feel cared for and walked out feeling like I’d been shot. Not his fault, I didn’t say anything. I never can. It’s not my place.

That’s part of the problem, same as it always has been. It’s like the business card that Atticus threatens me with. Jhayne Holmes: Awesome Mistress.

all men are sailors until the sea


Sea Of White
Originally uploaded by JMaloney.

As with the beginning of every May, people have begun asking me what I want for my birthday. Keeping in mind the sorts of gifts that have found me in previous years, I’ve begun creating answers out of self-defense. (The maternity size Dagoli dress springs almost immediately to mind). I’ve come up with a list of three.

I would like my name legally changed to my name already, a clean house, and any suggestions or help at all with my masquerade costume.

Which, admittedly, is more like two and a half, but that’s the best I can do.

Today I’ve been puttering through the BoingBoing coverage of the media fallout from yesterday’s American Day Without An Immigrant, a 24 hour period where immigrants and friends boycott their workplaces and notify their employers that the absence is due to the upcoming immigration reform. It’s been fascinating to see how many people were involved. Apparently thousands of businesses closed for the day simply because they had no workers. The largest rallies were in Tampa, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Tijuana, Portland, and Chicago. There are photographs that show no end to the crowds, they simply continue on for blocks.

Also yesterday, a not-to-be-missed video of Stephen Colbert’s viciously attacking the Bush administration during a White House Press Corps annual meeting went live on-line. [thank you stephen colbert] [youtube video mirror] [boingboing article]

Colbert, who spoke in the guise of his talk show character, who ostensibly supports the president strongly, urged the Bush to ignore his low approval ratings, saying they were based on reality, “and reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

He attacked those in the press who claim that the shake-up at the White House was merely re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. “This administration is soaring, not sinking,” he said. “They are re-arranging the deck chairs–on the Hindenburg.”

P.S. Alastair needs some film extras, (any age/size/weight), for the film: Casting Couch and How to Use it. Your pay will be love and hugs, but it looks to be fun. People are needed to be part of an audience watching a presentation. The shoot will at 4:30 at Vancouver Film School Main Auditorium this Thursday, May 4th and should take about 20-30 mins. If you’re interested, contact him at al at glasgowkiss dot com.