n: vb: the spice of imagination
As a part of this years Nuit Blanche, an all-night arts celebration, there’s going to be a 2 a.m. presentation of a life-size chocolate elk to eat!!
I was so happy in Toronto! Why, oh WHY did I ever move away? I cannot tell anymore. I no longer know.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’d know by now that Myanmar (or Burma) is in the midst of a violent crackdown against peaceful demonstrations by monks and other citizens.
via neat-o-rama: Because of tight control of information, news from the capital city of Yangoon trickle out too slowly through regular media channels.
Here’s where the Internet and blogs step in to fill the void. For instance, take a blogger named Ko Htike, whose website has become one of the main outlets of information:
Armed with a laptop, a blogger named Ko Htike has thrust himself into the middle of the violent crackdown against monks and other peaceful demonstrators in his homeland of Myanmar.
From more than 5,500 miles away, he’s one of the few people getting much needed information out to the world.
He runs the blog out of his London apartment, waking up at 3 a.m. every day to review the latest digitally smuggled photos, video and information that’s sent in to him.
With few Western journalists allowed in Myanmar, Htike’s blog is one of the main information outlets. He said he has as many as 40 people in Myanmar sending him photos or calling him with information. They often take the photos from windows from their homes, he said.
Myanmar’s military junta has forbidden such images, and anyone who sends them is risking their lives.
Links: CNN Article | Ko Htike’s blog [in Burmese and English] | An Overview by bOINGbOING
jason0x21 says:
They’ve shut off the Internets and cracked down on the press, but the cell network is presumably still up (at least, it’s not mentioned in the article). What appears to be common in “unwired” countries is a dense, effective cellular network infrastructure. Why? It’s way easier and cheaper to deploy, and makes more sense that wiring your country for POTS (plain old telephone service). I’m guessing that the government can’t afford to shut down the cellular network.
It’s clear that that’s a big liability, because with the cellular network still up, stuff still gets to the Internet. It packs a punch, and easily bests shitty propaganda.
So many of my friends are beautiful (in ways that don’t necessarily show to the eye) that I can only be thankful. They are painters and philosophers, musicians, parents, scientists and actors, directors of film, photographers, doctors – creators of modern faith. Because I can’t sleep, I follow the future, I talk on-line to Israel and Chili, and feel loved and warm, though I am alone in my apartment but for cats asleep in another room and the cold of fall coming in. It is enough, and more than enough. They are my new morning, my complicated comfort.
However, sometimes they send me things. You know the sort, an innocuous looking link tossed over messenger, like, that turns out to be pure, unadulterated evil.
So – Sam Dulmage is awesome, but sometimes for all the wrong reasons.
Also:
To this week’s most popular queries, “Who?” and “What?”
My quick answer:
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After being stunned by the man who managed to create explicitly pretty music from a jacked-in cowboy boot, (seriously, what?), it was time to find a way to say hello. So, blood still ringing, I did the only proper thing to do – I offered to haul gear. “Hey, do you need a roadie?” For those not familiar, the Railway Club has stairs where high heels come to die, or at least twist some serious ankle. Thin, narrow, legendary killer stairs. (On rainy days, they’re a toss-up between murder and suicide). Stairs unfriendly to performers with large, heavy cases, for example. Like someone I could mention. So after helping tear-down, carrying said cases through the line-up of drunks shoving their way in to the next show, and guarding the gear on the sketchy street below, my help was more than appreciated – introductions were made and kept. I was In.
Which, to be honest, was the entire point.
The van was loaded, the blinkers tossed on, and plans for dinner bravely made, then we went back inside. I wandered about while he was sucked in by fans, trying to find friends who hadn’t fled the mediocre following band. (No worries on being left behind by this point, carrying cases that heavy awards Honorarily With-The-Band.) On the porch, I found my luck. And more besides. Shane was out there, as was Jessica and River and Michael Campbell, a few other folk, and a thin, blonde woman I’d never seen before. She gasped when she saw me, her entire face going blank. “Are you Jhayne Holmes?!” I blinked, startled, but not terribly surprised. So I said, “Yes.” I assumed she was from the internet, a reader maybe, or someone following Heart of the World. It happens. But then she started crying, looking as if she’d been struck by stones.
“I was a friend of Jon Gaasenbeek.”
This, to me, meant a thousand unsung emotions stopping my heart, but, I’m sure, tells very little to you. Let me fill you in: Jon, dear heart, was my boyfriend who hanged himself a few years ago. It’s not something I generally discuss, and his name isn’t one I’ve heard anyone speak in years. When he died, it was a strangely isolated event. In spite of knowing each other for years, we were taking things as slow as humanly possible. The few people we had in common were mostly not speaking to us, hardly any of my other friends had met him, and I hadn’t been introduced yet to any of his. It’s been one of the strangest traumas I’ve carried, this solitary and unspoken lance through my heart. To have a stranger suddenly drop his name on me, let alone claim some sort of kinship, was tremendous.
So we had a bit of a Moment, out there on the smoker’s porch, us crying and people edging away, trying to give us space in the crowded din. Turns out her name is Stephanie and her long-term ex, John, was Jon’s best friend. Twenty years, they grew up together. She has contact info for his family and his old bicycle, the black one I helped him build five years ago, the one that came up to my solar plexus. She asked me if I wanted it. I asked her how on earth she came to know I was connected with Jon. And this is where it blossoms past merely improbable into a full fledged soap-opera list of associations, as if my night hadn’t been ridiculous enough. (Remember, this is the same evening that started with a transit stabbing.)
Stephanie found my post about visiting Mackenzie, who lives on the block Jon did, through the blog of the woman who used to roomie with the love of my life, the one who slept with him as soon as I went out of town.
Right. Now that’s over with, let’s get on with the rest of the night. I’m not even up to midnight yet.
END OF PART TWO
For those who have been aware:
I received news this grey afternoon from Alvin, currently in Bangkok, confirming our worst fears.
Larisa Fayad, a friend and colleague, unfortunately did not survive the fatal plane crash last Sunday in Phuket, Thailand.
“… the National Mime Workers Association has asked Americans to observe a moment of noise tomorrow at noon in honor of French mime Marcel Marceau.”
Impossible, this last weekend, mythology in my bed, history approaching me blind, yet wonderful. L’shana tova! Ketiva v’chatima tova.
These are my Days of Awe:
The original Friday plan was a very loosely defined, “Go To Concert”, that began with stepping out from my apartment in time for a bus that would get me to the Railway Club at nine. Easy enough. Half way to the venue, however, a man was stabbed stepping off the bus. Right in the ribs. Welcome to the poorest postal code in Canada. The assailant ran off. No way to see who it was, no way to ever find out.
This being an insulated part of the world, no one else knew what to do with violence, and so sat uselessly back, looking too shocked to move, but Crackton is my old neighborhood. This sort of thing happens practically bi-weekly. Abandoning my things to the back of the bus, I began giving orders. “Who has a cell-phone? Did anyone see what happened? Call this in.” I got a pair of sterile plastic gloves from the driver and set in staunching the blood with a bunched strip of shirt torn from the wounded man and tried to keep him awake. Paramedics arrived twenty minutes later, (slower than pizza delivery), tell me he’ll be fine, and drop me off, late and shaky, outside the Railway Club.
Not the most auspicious beginning to a night out.
Shane‘s was the first table I found in the crowd. I saved a seat with them, tried to explain what I’d been doing, found myself suddenly in the middle of a conversation about trying to look professional in a miniskirt, gave up, and went looking to see who else had showed up. (Not that it isn’t possible, they seemed very sure). There was a row by the bar, another table in the very back, and a group out on the smoking deck. It was comforting, I’d only given people a day’s warning, and – yet here they were, a little bit of everywhere. One darling friend told me she hadn’t even checked what was playing, but merely came on my invitation. After my stressful transit adventure, her comment was a cliche ray of light in the murky pub darkness.
The concert, thankfully, was phenomenal. I parked myself up right against the stage and watched rapt for the entire show. That 1 Guy plays with an exuberant precision, like a holy embodiment of joyful, theatrical grace. It washed the entire medical emergency right out of my system. I’ve never seen anything like it. I don’t think there is anything like it. His instrument is an intrepid midi-wired double-necked upright bass made out of pipe and studded with triggers, but not really. And while he sings and enthusiastically plays this poetic contraption, building intense, complex sample loops, he’s mucking elegantly about with three kick pedals, a snare drum, and a saw. It’s almost overwhelming, like watching a sound-cultivating conjurer with as much energy as a coke-high David Byrne. {check if he’s playing near you}
END OF PART ONE.
Saturday, September 22nd
12 noon to 12 midnight at The Chapel
(304 Dunlevy St. Vancouver)
THE BAD BOYS OF CANADIAN ART BRING LOUD LOWBROW TO FUNERAL CHAPEL
    Count on Canada’s crowned kings of Lowbrow art to choose The CHAPEL, a converted Downtown-Eastside funeral home as the location to mount the show that is destined to breathe new life into the corpse of Vancouver’s modern art scene.
THE ART!
    It is in these grand environs that I, Braineater and 12 Midnite will present an 8000 square foot show of the art that has kept these two at the front of the rat pack for the last two decades. From Braineater’s classic blockhead paintings or his buxom devil-girls and Midnite’s graffiti imagery and neon art to the newest work that’ll be so fresh it’ll still be sticky, fans old and new will get a chance to see Lowbrow as it was intended: really big and a little scary.
THE CARS!
    Of course, hot rods have always been a key ingredient in the Lowbrow culture and this show’s got them in spades. “One-man-hot-rod-gang” 12 Midnite will very fittingly, considering the venue, be unveiling his in-progress hot rod 1963 Pontiac “Boneville” Hearse along with a slew of his other cars in all their battle-worn and flat black glory, while not to be left in anyone’s exhaust cloud, “Lowbrow lout” Braineater will revive his 54 Desoto custom, “Draconia” for the occasion.
THE MUSIC!
    Both I,Braineater and 12 Midnite have always included musical performances in their art shows, and this one will certainly continue that tradition.
    I, Braineater is a musical chameleon so we can only guess at what form his music will take this time, be in sweaty glam-punk or cool electronica, it’ll be Braineater through and through.
    12 MIDNITE will be debuting songs off his soon to be released CD “Sweet Turns Sour” which will be available as a limited-edition pre-release at the show. This will also mark the professional debut of Midnite’s son, Harley Slade who will be playing guitar and keyboard in the band which will also include Pointed Stick Tony Bardach on bass and drummer Marc L’esperance.
Though the day-long show is free to attend and all ages are welcome, the evening performance will have a $5 cover charge from 8PM on and tickets will be available at the door.
Who lives in L.A.?
Your mission is as follows:
Obtain entry to the The Hollywood Knitting Factory this upcoming Sunday, September 23rd, for 7:30 pm.
Rock out.
(Tickets will be the most worthwhile $10 you’ve spent this year.)
